ABSTRACT
“It is a critical time for the concept of burnout. Will burnout prove to be a concept of enduring value, useful in understanding and treating a class of work-related symptoms? Or will the concept itself ‘burn out’ from overuse, overex-tension, and lack of new direction?” (Farber, 1983b, pp. 17–18). It has been a decade since this “critical time” and in the intervening years there has been an extraordinary amount of work on this topic. In their recent bibliography, Kleiber and Enzmann (1990) listed nearly 1,500 publications that were published in the 7 years following Farber’s 1983 statement. This is even more than in the previous decade 1974–1983, when 1,000 books, journal articles, and dissertations on burnout were written. Although the early work on burnout was almost exclusively American in origin, the current contributions are truly international in scope.
