What is it about?
Who feels they have autonomy in the modern workplace? Remarkably, it is not the old who have high job autonomy. It is actually individuals towards the end of their 30s. After that point in life, people feel more and more hemmed in -- and systematically lose their senior job titles. The typical worker gets demoted after midlife. This is not widely realized. That is probably because people deliberately keep quiet about it when it happens to them.
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Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Humans care intensely about autonomy.
Perspectives
I was truly surprised by our findings. Initially we thought we must have made a fundamental mistake in the coding.
Andrew Oswald
Warwick University UK
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The growth and collapse of autonomy at work, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2504419122.
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