“This Is My Exit Sign”: Job Control Deficit, Role Strain and Turnover in Mexican Journalism

ABSTRACT

The objective of this article is to analyze the relationship between job control, role strain and turnover in Mexican journalism. Understood as the workers’ capacity to influence decision-making at an organizational level, job control is a concept that can help us predict turnover in this country’s newspapers. The analysis is based on 64 in-depth interviews with journalists and former journalists from three northern Mexican states: Baja California, Nuevo Leon and Sonora. The main finding is that this region’s news workers perceive and experience a deficit of job control as they feel that they cannot influence the definition of their own labor in terms of methods, tasks, quality, quantity, pace, schedules, supervision and salaries. As their job demands are high, this produces role strain, turnover intentions and turnover. By replacing the notion of professional autonomy with job control, this article examines how journalists respond to a perceived shortage of capacity to influence decision-making to try to improve our understanding of the changing nature of job continuity in the newspaper industry.

KEYWORDS:

• Job control
• journalism
• Mexico
• role strain
• turnover
• work

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The literature review carried out for this article only found one article regarding job control in journalism: TV news: the control of work and construction ofreality (Tuchman 1975). Other studies have used concepts such as social control (Breed 1955), occupational control (Örnebring 2009) or organizational control (Andersson and Wiik 2013), but not Braverman’s (1998) or Karasek’s (1979) notions of labor and job control.

2 In México, huachicolero is a term used to describe people that steal and sell illicit motor fuel.