Working with dignity is a foundation for a fully realized life. Despite many denials of dignity faced daily in the workplace, people still strive to do their best, to take pride in their work, and to defend themselves against indignities from employers, and sometimes from coworkers. New challenges are constantly being created for working with dignity by the inexorable process of technological and organizational change and by the unrelenting drive of market systems for profit maximization.

In spite of the centrality of the quest for dignity at work by billions of workers around the world, the pursuit of dignity is rarely a central focus of scholarly writings on the workplace. The challenges to workers' well-being posed by technological, organizational, and market forces are sometimes a focus. However, rarely do we consider the very serious business of how workers respond to these challenges on a daily basis in the office suite and on the shop floor. The creative and purposive activities of employees to achieve dignity at work are the central focus of this book. I hope that by considering these activities we can gain a better understanding of the daily struggle for dignity at work and the central place it occupies in workers' lives.

I rely on data from a systematic analysis of the population of organizational ethnographies. These data provide an empirical base for studying the quest for dignity.