{"title":"Between Status and Stigma: Ethnographies of Emergency Medical Services","authors":"Matthew Joseph Brannan","doi":"10.1177/09500170231206084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170231206084","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136381185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Isabell Kathrin Stamm, Lena Schürmann, Katharina Scheidgen
{"title":"Market Dependence as a Boundary Construction for Work Solidarity with the Solo Self-employed","authors":"Isabell Kathrin Stamm, Lena Schürmann, Katharina Scheidgen","doi":"10.1177/09500170231206083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170231206083","url":null,"abstract":"As more people work outside standard employment, the foundations of work solidarity are contested. How does work solidarity arise in atypical forms of work that are characterised by flexible, autonomous and self-dependent organisation, such as in solo self-employment? Drawing on a discursive approach to work solidarity, this article emphasises how market dependence can serve as a boundary construction to create work solidarity. Empirically, this study engages in a discourse analysis on Soforthilfe, a policy measure introduced by the German government to financially assist solo self-employed people during the Covid-19 lockdown. In this discourse, market dependence serves to identify this social group’s need (social boundary) and to set out the corresponding policies for financial assistance (substantive boundary). Four solidarity norms – relief, equality, preservation and quasi-equivalence – support this boundary construction. The article contributes to the current discourse on work solidarity by identifying an additional boundary construction.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136381776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bounded Well-Being: Designing Technologies for Workers’ Well-Being in Corporate Programmes","authors":"Lia Tirabeni","doi":"10.1177/09500170231203113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170231203113","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the relationship between workers’ well-being and digitalisation at work. It is based on the findings of a qualitative study carried out in a manufacturing company, and it focuses on the development of a wearable device for well-being. Using the analytical concepts of ‘translation’ and ‘inscription’ taken from Actor-Network Theory, it explores how digital technologies for well-being are designed in corporate programmes and shows how the final technology results from processes of inscription and translation performed by the actors involved in the design phase. The end device embodies a concept of well-being that has been called ‘bounded’ to emphasise how well-being at work is limited by organisational constraints. The article invites a rethinking of hedonic well-being at work as a precondition for eudaimonic well-being so that the human being is understood as a psychophysical unit that is part of a rich social context.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135778790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Vera Trappmann, Charles Umney, Christopher J McLachlan, Alexandra Seehaus, Laura Cartwright
{"title":"How Do Young Workers Perceive Job Insecurity? Legitimising Frames for Precarious Work in England and Germany","authors":"Vera Trappmann, Charles Umney, Christopher J McLachlan, Alexandra Seehaus, Laura Cartwright","doi":"10.1177/09500170231187821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170231187821","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the legitimising frames young workers in England and Germany apply to precarious work. Through 63 qualitative biographical interviews, the article shows that most young precarious workers saw work insecurity as an unavoidable fact of life whose legitimacy could not realistically be challenged. Four frames are identified that led to precarious work being seen as legitimate: precarious work as a driver of entrepreneurialism; as inevitable due to repeated exposure; as a stage within the life course; and as the price paid for the pursuit of autonomy and meaningful work. The article advances the literature on precarious workers’ subjectivity by identifying the frames through which it is legitimised, and by underlining the importance of frames that are currently underexamined. The prevalence of the pursuit of meaningful, non-alienating work as a frame is a particularly striking finding.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134975256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Chloe Maclean, Zara Brodie, Roxanne Hawkins, Jack Cameron McKinlay
{"title":"‘At Times it’s Too Difficult, it is Too Traumatic, it’s Too Much’: The Emotion Work of Domestic Abuse Helpline Staff During Covid-19","authors":"Chloe Maclean, Zara Brodie, Roxanne Hawkins, Jack Cameron McKinlay","doi":"10.1177/09500170231200080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170231200080","url":null,"abstract":"During the Covid-19 lockdowns, domestic abuse helpline staff (DAHS) in the UK faced both a shift from working in an office to working-from-home and an increased demand for their services. This meant that during Covid-19, DAHS faced an increase in traumatic calls, and all within their own homes. This article explores the emotions work of DAHS to manage and work through their work-related emotions during Covid-19. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 11 UK-based DAHS, this article suggests that working-from-home during the Covid-19 lockdowns amplified emotions of anxiety, helplessness and guilt for DAHS alongside an evaporating emotional distance between work and home life. Engaging in leisure activities and increased online meetings with colleagues were emotion work practices that DAHS used to emotionally cope. This article demonstrates that emotion work fills in for, and masks, the structural insufficiencies of employer worker-wellbeing practices.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135591325","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book review: Stephen Ackroyd and Paul Thompson, Organisational Misbehaviour","authors":"A. Wood","doi":"10.1177/09500170231167083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170231167083","url":null,"abstract":"so doing become a significant drama of dignity. The other main drama – relationships with co-workers and managers, and with clients and other ‘upperworld’ individuals – is analysed in Chapter 3. The cleaners are shown to eschew occupational solidarity in favour of social differentiation based on continual ‘othering’, a process of categorising that positions others as different and inferior (pp. 83–84). However, cleaners share the shame of being underclass members, and with few exceptions, openly practise racial discrimination against co-workers, a combination that warranted more discussion. Although cleaners mainly work outside of normal business hours and occupy spaces below ground level, they clean the ‘upperworld’ and occasionally interact with clients and other workers. Chapter 4 examines the strategies cleaners use to maintain their dignity against expectations of invisibility and assumptions of social inferiority. These include taking advantage by obtaining special access to events such as film festivals, debunking artefacts and art in the city complex, and practising ‘ressentiment’, a deeply felt hostility to the powerful (p. 108). In particular, client complaints about their work offend cleaners’ dignity but ‘talking back’ is risky. Management do not offer support and co-workers are rarely helpful, as they too feel unjustly treated and liable to vent their anger on their colleagues (p. 124). So, with few exceptions, cleaner encounters with the ‘upperworld’ are part and parcel of the drama of dignity. Chapter 6 turns the spotlight on how the cleaners respond to their superiors, including consequences for human dignity. However, instead of a comprehensive analysis of the management system, we learn how cleaners use different strategies to counter security guard camera surveillance, thereby maintaining their autonomy and sense of dignity. In the concluding chapter, Costas argues that the cleaners do find dignity from their work, but this is constantly challenged by their experiences at work as described earlier. Although other types of low status service workers are mentioned, there is no attempt to broaden the analysis. Neither is there any theory development employing such relevant concepts as shame, resentment, respect, autonomy, self-esteem and dignity. Instead, there is a discussion of how cleaners’ consciousness expresses both aspiration and desperation as depicted by two photographs (reproduced on pp. 154–155), which exist on a wall in the ‘minus area’ of Potsdamer Platz. Notwithstanding the above-mentioned limitations, Dramas of Dignity is a lucid and engaging close-up study of cleaners that deserves attention by sociologists and social psychologists of work. It will also animate discussion in advanced undergraduate and graduate student classes.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47501821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Juliet B Schor, Christopher Tirrell, Steven Peter Vallas
{"title":"Consent and Contestation: How Platform Workers Reckon with the Risks of Gig Labor","authors":"Juliet B Schor, Christopher Tirrell, Steven Peter Vallas","doi":"10.1177/09500170231199404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170231199404","url":null,"abstract":"How do gig workers respond to the various financial, physical, and legal risks their work entails? Answers to this question have remained unclear, largely because previous studies have overlooked structurally induced variations in the experience of platform work. In this article, we develop a theory of differential embeddedness to explain why workers’ orientations toward the risks of gig work vary. We argue further that because platforms define themselves merely as mediators of exchanges between workers and customers, they systematically expose workers to various forms of customer malfeasance, ranging from fraud and tip baiting to harassment and assault. We develop this perspective using interviews with 70 workers in the ride-hail, grocery shopping, and food delivery sectors. The structure of labor platforms indirectly invites workers to exhibit distinct normative orientations toward the risks that gig work entails while also multiplying the sources of these risks.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135425822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reproducing a White Elite: The Chief Officers’ ‘Club’ in the London Metropolitan Police Service","authors":"Andre Clarke, Chris Smith","doi":"10.1177/09500170231199415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170231199415","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the London Metropolitan Police Service, an organization charged with being institutionally racist. It asks why the percentage of black officers in senior positions remains so low, despite explicit formal attempts to change this situation. Rather than concentrating on the factors holding back the recruitment and promotion of black officers, the article examines how senior white officers managed their career journey. Through in-depth interviews with senior officers, the authors develop the notion of ‘social network volition’, linking to sociological literatures on race, social networks and elites in work and organizations. The agency of a ‘club’, composed of white senior officers, performs social network volition, defined as an invisible guiding hand that identifies, pursues, advises and sponsors white officers who fit the existing leadership composition. The implications of the article underline the need to make explicit the informal supports that reproduce whiteness while upholding the myth of merit.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135816110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Makeshift Careers of Women in Malawi: Neither Traditional Nor Flexible","authors":"Tiyesere Mercy Chikapa, Jill Rubery, Isabel Távora","doi":"10.1177/09500170231198736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170231198736","url":null,"abstract":"Through qualitative research into the career experiences of two groups of Malawian professional women, this article reveals the value of expanding research into women’s careers to the global south. Although displaying elements of western-focused traditional and new career models, these women’s careers did not conform to either. Instead, due to heavy family responsibilities for both care and breadwinning, including for the extended family, and faced with inflexible human resource practices, their careers were mostly characterised by serial compromises necessary to maintain full-time continuous employment while dealing with life events and workplace setbacks. These accommodations to the realities of their complicated lives often resulted in second-best, far-from-ideal solutions. This career form, conceptualised here as a makeshift career, extends career models to fit the Malawian context and the global south but also expands conceptual understandings of women’s careers in ways also applicable to the north.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136308710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Daniel Wheatley, Matthew R. Broome, Tony Dobbins, Benjamin Hopkins, Owen Powell
{"title":"Navigating Choppy Water: Flexibility Ripple Effects in the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Future of Remote and Hybrid Working","authors":"Daniel Wheatley, Matthew R. Broome, Tony Dobbins, Benjamin Hopkins, Owen Powell","doi":"10.1177/09500170231195230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170231195230","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the challenges of navigating the adoption of remote and hybrid working for large organizations with diverse functions. Focus groups with employees of the UK business of a multinational organization identify conceptual contributions to the sociology of work and employment and empirical findings in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that inform future policy and practice. Location-based flexible working has a potential unintended ‘ripple’ effect wherein application of individual-level flexibility has wider-reaching consequences throughout the organization. Findings emphasize that organizations need to recognize and respond to new realities of location-based flexibility. Management must navigate potential ‘ripples’ in the development of flexible working policies and practice, shaped by various tensions, including an overarching autonomy–control paradox. This requires a coordinated approach centred on ‘inclusive flexibility’ and ‘responsible autonomy’ that involves moving away from one-size-fits-all strategies towards a tailored approach offering employees choice, agency and voice in decision-making, while accommodating different stakeholder needs.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135011402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}