This article revisits a central tenet of the welfare state paradox, also known as the inclusion-equality trade-off. Using large-scale survey data for 31 European countries and the United States, co...

This article explores possible subversions of heteronormativity through transgender performativity in the workplace. Drawing on insights from Judith Butler we focus on how employees construct (un)i...

Neo-Weberian occupational class schemas, rooted in industrial-age employment relations, are a standard socio-economic position measure in social stratification. Previous research highlighted Erikso...

Scholarship on the graduate labour market, preoccupied by structure, agency, and power, has largely focused on the market’s discursive composition. It has not yet paid significant attention to the ...

This article seeks to advance the understanding of how human and material agency enmesh in human-robotic workplaces. By means of a qualitative study, the practical use of robots is investigated wit...

A relatively recent development in the field of work and employment is organisational provisions around employee fertility – notably policies and benefits related to assisted reproductive technolog...

Organisational fit represents a crucial criterion in the hiring process. This article aims to understand how employers and external recruitment consultants define and apply organisational fit in pr...

Gig work – accessing job opportunities through an app – has brought renewed attention to precarious non-standard labour arrangements. Scholars have begun to consider the intermediary role that plat...

Forging solidarity among seemingly privileged white-collar professionals has been seen as a challenging process. However, many banking employees in Pakistan feel marginalized and lack formal collec...

In examining the collective mobilisation of migrant workers, scholars have explored the emergence of community organisations as alternative forms of worker representation. However, community unioni...

Union communication and framing are important for how union members, as well as how unions as organizations, are represented. In the context of declining union density and therefore fewer direct un...

This article explores the application to Italy of Goldin’s hypothesis that the unexplained gender pay gap is crucially linked to firms’ incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who work l...

The literature on flexibilization documents the decline of the standard employment relationships, resulting in greater job insecurity. Consequently, the stability of career trajectories is expected...

In a context of growing dualisation of the workforce that in France takes the form of a ‘contractual dualism’, this article analyses the mechanisms supporting the resort to contract observed in the...

Temporary migrants comprise a substantial component of the Australian workforce. Evidence of the tensions and contradictions in Australia’s reliance on temporary migrant workers was spotlighted dur...

This article seeks to show, taking the example of delivery drivers, how inter-firm relations affect worker precarity. It is based on an in-depth field study carried out in the Paris region and back...

Labour process approaches have extensively documented the impact of digitalisation and remote work on managerial control, though the role of managers has been less explored. This article fills that...

Existing workplace bullying literature suggests that ethno-racial minorities and women are more likely to be bullied in relation to their ethnicity, race or gender. However, very few studies apply ...

A persistent problem in trade unions is the discrepancy/tension that exists between their progressive national equality-seeking agenda and the translation of equality principles into workplace acti...

This article offers a scoping review and thematic synthesis of qualitative research on the relationship between precarious employment and mental health. Systematic searches of primary qualitative r...

The present study investigates education-to-occupation linkage by race/ethnicity in the increasingly diverse educated workforce of the United States. We use a recently introduced linkage approach a...

Gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work are well documented, but patterns of advantage or disadvantage in further job-related training have been less explored. Previous cross-sectional studies ...

This article examines ‘work therapy’ in the US, a sprawling but overlooked realm of work in which people are put to work—usually without pay and employment rights—in the name of ‘therapy’. For whom...

In many countries, unions, with conflicting political identities, compete for works council positions. However, inter-union solidaristic forms of cooperation can occur within these same institution...

Since both ‘conflict and co-operation are at the heart of employment relations’, unions need to strike a balance between mobilizing workers against employers and ‘social dialogue’ when communicatin...

The workplace challenges faced by neuro-diverse employees are currently under-researched. This article considers how such employees experience the world of work, focusing on the demands they face t...

Occupational prestige is an important yet understudied factor in gender labour market inequality. This study examines the relationship between the gender composition of occupations and the prestige...

This conceptual article develops a framework based on the ‘total social organization of labour’ for analysing the implications precarious work in the public sphere has for the reorganization of the...

This article investigates the association between UK higher education institutions (HEIs) long- and short-term performance measures, and the pay of vice-chancellors/principals (VCs) in an era of in...

‘Disconnected capitalism’ is a thesis defined and developed in Work, Employment and Society. This article contributes to the sociology of work by further developing the thesis both theoretically an...

This article examines how experience with precarious work influences the notions of control and empowerment among female migrant workers. Instead of focusing on migrant workers as victims of a cont...

Despite sustained focus in recent years on understanding the experiences of underrepresented groups in construction, there has been a paucity of work that has explored the experiences of lesbian, g...

This article examines the internationalisation of professions in a qualitative study of migrant academics, drawing on social closure theory to understand how professions respond to the growing numb...

This article investigates the effect of hiring temporary workers on the voluntary turnover of permanent employees. It argues that inflows of temporary workers erode the working conditions of perman...

Finding limited representation in established unions, a growing number of precarious and migrant workers of the gig economy have been turning to self-organization. Yet little is known about how the...

Based on interviews with 49 visual artists, graphic designers and illustrators working on two leading global digital labour platforms, this article examines how creative workers perform relational ...

Fee-charging recruitment industries in Asia have become gatekeepers to temporary employment in low-wage occupations for millions of migrant workers. One of these jobs is live-in domestic work in pr...

This article explores migrant workers’ experiences of organisational control while undertaking temporary agency work. This study is based on a ‘covert’ ethnographic study set at a temporary employm...

Using the UK Household Longitudinal Study we examine how flexible working is associated with the division of housework and childcare among dual-earner heterosexual couples with young children. Alth...

University students are increasingly required to undertake lengthy unpaid placements, and for many students this needs to be balanced with the paid work they already do. The literature about internships has focused on whether internships help students get jobs post-graduation, or if placements are exploitative, given pay is minimal or non-existent. This article contributes to this literature by examining

The article identifies how tensions between different levels of worker solidarity helped shape the possibilities of collective action in automobile and related sector trade unions in Argentina. It advances the framework proposed by Morgan and Pulignano in two ways. First, it highlights the interrelation of both the complementarities and the tensions between different solidarity practices. Second, it

This article aims to understand how social and gender norms affect child labour in India, which is mainly defined by a work-hours threshold. It develops a regression model using two datasets – the Indian Human Development Survey 2011/2012 and the World Value Survey India 2012 – to predict child-labour risks based on such norms. The gender and development approach provides a theoretical foundation for

Power resources are embedded in societal ties. Using qualitative network analysis, our fieldwork in Quebec (Canada), based on 30 interviews and three focus groups, explored union-societal ties, their resource properties and the extent to which unions weave them into a network. We identified five different types of union-societal ties: instrumental, civil society organizations, identity-based, satellite

In urban gig economies around the world, platform labour is predominantly migrant labour, yet research on the intersection of the gig economy and labour migration remains scant. Our experience with two action research projects, spanning six cities on four continents, has taught us how platform work impacts the structural vulnerability of migrant workers. This leads us to two claims that should recalibrate

Over the last decade southern European labour markets have been transformed in a common neoliberal direction, as a consequence of the reforms enacted after the 2008 financial crisis. In our research we investigate to what extent these labour market reforms, aimed at promoting a radical decentralisation of collective bargaining, have actually led to such change. For that purpose, we developed a comparative

Outsourced room attendants have been described as invisible to both guests and management. However, room attendants in Spain have managed to create a movement called Las Kellys, which has raised their visibility and earned them respect in society. The article questions how outsourcing leads to the invisibility of room attendants in Spain and how Las Kellys renders them visible. Based on a study conducted

Rising self-employment may indicate growing precarity. This article investigates poverty in self-employment in the UK using a large-scale official household survey for 2010 to 2019 through a focus on material deprivation. The principal finding is that, after controlling for the selective nature of self-employment, self-employed households may experience higher levels of material deprivation than employed

Increasingly, work and employment take place within network firms, value chains, and other organisational forms extending control beyond the firm’s legal boundaries. This article proposes a model rooted in sociological concepts (work organisation, control, and risk) to analyse how social relations of work and employment are structured, and how inequalities are manufactured, in these organisational

India presents a rich context for research on work and employment, epitomising the paradox of an ‘emerging economy’ but one where 92.4% of the workforce is informal – insecure, unprotected, poor – and women and disadvantaged groups most vulnerable. It displays a wide range of production relations in its formal/informal economy, embedded in diverse social relations, and the related forms of exploitation

Employment rates in England for disabled people are persistently lower than for non-disabled people. Support from a Workplace Personal Assistant is one way of narrowing this gap. Personal assistance is an empowerment-driven model in which the disabled person controls their support: who provides it, when, how and where. Previous research has focused on the personal assistant role in the home setting

Although male employees are increasingly making use of parental leave, gender differences in both usage and duration of parental leave are still prevalent. Based on signalling theory and the masculinities concept, the article explores the role of gender in the relationship between the incidence/duration of parental leave and wages/compensation after returning to a job. It is shown that pay gaps associated

This study addresses the dearth of gender analysis within debates about technological innovation and workplace change. Qualitative analysis of 12 focus groups conducted with women in ‘frontline’ and ‘professional’ roles discussing their use and engagement with digital technologies at work reveals contrasting narratives of ‘digital frustration’ and ‘digital invigoration’. To explain these distinct narratives

Longitudinal evidence on whether, and under what conditions, working from home is good or bad for family life is largely absent. Using 15 waves of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, this study investigates the association between working from home and work–family conflict among parents. Fixed-effects structural equation models reveal that more hours worked at home

Scholarship on invisible work highlights how volunteers’ labour is devalued and obfuscated because it is framed as something ‘noneconomic’. This article shows how volunteers’ labour is invisible and noneconomic when it is reframed as aid. Drawing upon a case of refugee volunteers in Jordan’s humanitarian aid sector highlights how framing work as aid transforms their labour into objects they ‘receive’

This article centres on emotions within the Swedish rescue services in terms of the concepts of emotional regime and emotional pasts, partly with a focus on the role of emotional pasts in emotional regimes, partly on how the (re)construction of emotional pasts relates to the organisation of the workplace. The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with five female and 13 male firefighters

Previous studies found contradictory results on whether women benefit in terms of earnings from having a female manager. This mixed-method study draws on survey data from the Netherlands to determine whether female employees have higher wages if they work under a female manager and combines these with data from interviews with Dutch female managers to interpret and contextualize its findings. The survey

Gender and work are important social determinants of health, yet studies of health inequities related to the gendered and emotional intricacies of work are rare. Occupations high in emotional labour – a known job stressor – are associated with ill-health and typically dominated by women. Little is known about the mechanisms linking health with these emotional components of work. Using physiological

This article explores variations in job quality for young workers by analysing six employers across three industrial sectors of Greater Manchester, an English city-region. Four aspects of job quality are examined because of their centrality in shaping how youth labour-power is deployed in the labour process: technological utilisation, work-rate, autonomy and discretion, and opportunities for training

Owing to the rapid ageing of societies, studying the labour market consequences of caring for ill, disabled or frail old-age partners, parents and/or other family members (hereafter: ‘family care’) is of urgent concern. Previous research has mainly concentrated on examining the impact of differing family care situations on women’s employment. Building on household decision-making approaches, this study

This article explores the phenomenon of recurrent internal redeployment, through a case study of restructuring at a UK based steel firm. While redeployment reflected one of the key functions of the traditional internal labour market at SteelCo, frequent restructuring events meant some workers experienced redeployment on a recurrent basis. For these workers the experience of repeated redeployment was