Industrial sociologists and psychologists have often paid little more than scant attention to the actual work of the people they have been studying. The literature is full of brief comments about the work situation which lack both data and an analytical framework. This deficiency is surprising. Work content has been shown to have a significant impact on behaviour, morale, and productivity in the workplace. The purpose of job design research is to seek to understand this relationship more clearly and then to use research‐based insights to create jobs which are more satisfying to perform, and more efficient in performance. As such this body of knowledge should be a subject of particular relevance for personnel specialists since job content considerations should affect recruitment, training, placement and effort‐reward policies. However, although job content has very wide repercussions for the personnel area, job design is frequently left by default to the technical and engineering specialists, who seek to make their work system function effectively in production rather than human terms.