This article provides an overview of approaches to the definition of the concept of “quality of working life” and specifies its content. The quality of working life plays a special part in shaping the overall quality of human life by determining its financial position, psychological and physiological well-being, the comfort of family life, the social position, and it also affects the type and development of social and labor relations and fidelity of personnel to the company. The purpose of the study is to analyze the main approaches to the interpretation of the concept of “quality of working life” in order to propose its operational definition. To achieve the goal, a critical analysis of domestic and foreign works concerning the quality of working life and related categories is carried out, the author's position on its content is substantiated, and the combined approach to understanding the quality of working life is reasoned. The research is based on the application of general scientific methods of obtaining knowledge (logical analysis, synthesis, generalization and classification). The original theoretical and methodological foundations of the study of the quality of working life are revealed in the writings of Galbraith J., Lawler E., and others; Walton R., Taylor J., Heckman J., Levine M., etc. contributed significantly to the development of the conceptual foundations of the quality of working life. The study of theoretical and practical aspects of the quality of working life, with regard to the specific features of the Russian economy, was carried out by Bobkov V.N., Genkin B.M., Gorelov N.A., Slezinger G.E., whose ideas were developed in the works of Potudanskaya V.F., Tuchkova N.A., Tsygankov V.A., and others. The paper shows that in the foreign science the “human factor” and the idea of providing “humanistic” labor act as the central components, whereas for Russian researchers the “human factor” is of secondary importance, and the priority is given to the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of labor process. At the same time, most scientists agree that the quality of working life is a multidimensional concept, its set of components is determined by the research objectives and practical tasks of management, taking into account the influence of specific features of an economic sector, the content of labor, cultural traditions, and other subjective and objective factors. On the basis of generalization of the results of the analyzed works, the article sets out several classification approaches to the interpretation of the quality of working life, such as structural, subject-objective, functional, combined classifications. It is substantiated that the combined approach, being the optimal one for understanding the quality of working life, proposes the best authors’ definition of the category "quality of working life", which is distinguished by a comprehensive view of the research subject and allows to make its operationalization, and on its basis it is expected in the future to develop and test the evaluation the methodology for assessing the quality of working life of the population of the region
Keywords
quality of working life, operationalization, combined approach, hierarchy