CHINA PRODUCTIVITY PROJECT - GENERAL DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS OF PRODUCTIVITY

The amount of work that people do is a focal point of human life, an o utcome with extraordinarily complex roots. The physical task itself, t he natural setting, biological work capacity, and behavioral patterns presumably condition productivity. This paper presents a model by whic h work output of Chinese cycle haulers was investigated, and outlines investigative techniques including work physiology, health assessment, cold response, and ethnography of the workplace and home. The objecti ve is to explain variation in work done on a daily, monthly, and seaso nal basis. This paper also quantifies work output, or productivity, us ing long-term pay records as measures of productivity. While pay recor ds, which show statistically normal distributions, serve as the primar y dependent variable in the analysis, field observations and experimen ts offer supplementary data on the behaviors that produce work output. In a sample of 48 men, various measures of biological capacity and be haviors, such as motivation, predict overall productivity regardless o f season. Since mean daily pay and monthly pay have different predicto rs, there is much individual choice in how many days per month one wor ks. (C) 1995 Wiley-Liss, Inc.