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Whether stereotypical perceptions of part-time workers’ commitment to work are accurate is a matter of contention. Commentators such as Hakim (1996 ) suggest that full- and part-time workers have qualitatively different orientations to work, while others ( Fagan 2001 ) argue that, as most women work full- and part-time over the life course, such a view is overly static. This paper investigates firms’ structuring of part-time work, focusing specifically upon the processes through which part-time work becomes marginalized. It is argued here that the organisational context and use of part-time work mediate managers’ and full-time workers’ perceptions of part-time workers’ commitment to work and together, these factors structure part-time workers’ selection for career development. The paper argues for making conceptual distinctions between legislation, organisational policies and workplace practices in understanding patterns of change and, more importantly, continuity in the use and structuring of part-time work. Furthermore it is argued that the stratification of part-time work can be explained through processes of informal occupational closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of a new IT system on the knowledge claims and occupational boundaries made by professional groups within a hospital laboratory setting. Within organizational settings professional groups enjoy considerable power and status through the specialised knowledge claims they make, deploying a variety of material and discursive resources to secure these. However, when organizations introduce new technologies to manage information needs, professional boundaries and claims to expertise may be threatened. This paper examines the strategies deployed by two key professional groups -- Medical Laboratory Scientific Officers and medics -- to secure their knowledge claims and statuses within the new organizational context shaped in part by an IT system. Though medics were more successful here, they had to accommodate to new demands within the organization. The professional identity and organizational space of the MLSOs were also redefined but, in contrast, by being narrowed. The different experiences and strategies of the two groups reflect their unequal holding of cultural capital and their differential capacity to define their status relative to the organization itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the existing sociological literature on the learned professions and on scientific occupations has developed in ways that are now theoretically unproductive. One symptom of this dead-end is the failure of sociologists of the professions to include research on scientists in their discussions and vice versa. A second symptom is the lack of attention to the implications of the work of Jamous, Peloille, and Bourdieu in both the sociology of scientists and of professions. The third symptom of the malaise is the failure to generate sociologically plausible explanations for the marginalisation of female entrants to science and the professions. The paper argues that a novel direction for sociological argument can be derived by remedying the three symptoms simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to illustrate the utility of regarding the census more as a 'narrative source'[10] than as a statistical one. Attention is paid to the character of the classificatory devices employed, not for the ambiguities contained in them and consequent levels of error, but for their substantive character and what they reveal about the contemporary social setting. The paper starts from the assumption that the census is a social product, both arising from and reflecting the social concerns of an era. As such it may be said to mirror the dominant values of the time, among which will be values concerning occupations, their legitimacy, their boundaries and their social worth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the ideologies which surround one form of property ownership--the ownership of agricultural land. Least attention will be devoted to the extent to which owning land is to hold an economic power resource--in rural areas, where the range of occupational choice is almost by definition restricted, this may be treated as 'given'.[1] More specifically, this paper will be concerned with data on landed property collected in East Anglia.[2] The central concern will be to illustrate how justificatory theories concerned with the legitimacy and the domain of the distribution of property, once they have entered our stock of knowledge and vocabulary of understanding, retain their essence and are transmitted down the generations and across classes, to reappear as unthinking common-sense 'statements of fact' decontexmalised from the initial situation in which they originated, and to which they were originally addressed. For example, those who have never heard of Hume and never paid heed to the writings of Locke, nevertheless pay such philosophers tribute when unknowingly they. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine differences in political engagement among an elite segment of the British population: GBCS respondents who are college-educated, non-routine workers making over £100,000 a year. I show that even though everyone in this group ought to have more than sufficient skills and resources for political engagement, there are still substantial differences by social position. Specifically, postgraduate degrees and higher incomes still differentiate political engagement, and cultural and social capital (as indicated by cultural activities practised, and the occupations people report knowing) differentiate elite political engagement even more strongly. This indicates that social position qua social position - that is, connection to dominant and legitimated ways of being - contributes to a sense of the 'right to speak' that matters as much as or more than costs and resources for facilitating political involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use the unusually large sample size of the Great British Class Survey to compare rates of social mobility into different elite occupations. We find a distinction between 'traditional' professions, such as law, medicine and finance, which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals, and technical or emerging high-status occupations, particularly those related to IT, that appear to recruit more widely. Second, we find that even when the upwardly mobile are successful in entering elite occupations they invariably fail to accumulate the same economic, cultural and social capital as those from privileged backgrounds. While many such differences may be explained by inheritance, we also find that the mobile tend to have considerably lower incomes. Investigating this further we demonstrate that even when controlling for important variables such as schooling, education, location, age, and cultural and social capital, the upwardly mobile in eight occupations - located largely in the business sector - have considerably lower incomes than their higher-origin colleagues. These findings underline the value of analyses of mobility into specific high-status occupations as well as illustrating how, beyond entry, the mobile often face considerable disadvantage within occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines technological curricula in terms of their potential to be realized in occupational roles. The more the curriculum is oriented towards roles (as opposed to skills or pure knowledge), the greater the probability that it will be articulated in the labour market and the greater its efficacy and legitimacy.
The concept of role has been analytically divided into six components: value commitment, normative, communicative, interactive, role intelligence and proficiency components.
Theoretically, the more components are present in a given curriculum, the higher the probability that a given occupational role will be effectively articulated. However, their presence is a necessary but insufficient condition for effective role performance; their integration is of equal, if not greater importance, and the latter is meaningful only when the social context of the articulation is taken into account.
It was found that the role components do not appear in a balanced manner in technological curricula investigated in Israel, and some hardly receive any attention. Those that are present are weakly linked to actual economic contexts. Thus, it appears that students in technological education, are socialized to minimal role articulation; ie, they are more likely to implement decontextualized tasks than to assume integral occupational roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most curious omissions in the sociology of work and occupations is what would seem to be one of the most basic questions: When is an occupation an occupation? While there have been recent attempt to explore the issue by examining the history of census categories,[1] these represent the end-point of the process at which new occupations receive official recognition and legitimation. My purpose in this paper is to discuss how occupations form and come to be recognized as such. The creation of health visiting between 1850 and 1919 will be taken as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critique of the tradition of sociological writing which has emphasized the ability of occupations organized on the professional principle to gain for their members an occupational monopoly and a position in the division of labour which provides them with autonomy to determine occupational tasks and functions. It is argued that theories which seek to account for the conditions which provide the framework for successful resistance to rationalization and codification in professional work have not adequately articulated the concept of power. The theoretical discourse on professional and managerial power has therefore tended, with few exceptions, to locate the determination and exercise of power as though it were a zero sum commodity deriving from social relations or organizations. Theories predicting the emergence of professional rather than mangerial forms of control therefore have little explanatory ability other than for a particular mode of rationality within a limiting theoretical framework. This analysis represents an attempt to propose a mediation between structuralist theories of power and organization and those theoretical reflections on the professions which locate the determination of occupational authority in a broader matrix of social processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social inequality has been overwhelmingly studied from the perspective of those who are deprived and disadvantaged. The emphasis, accordingly, has been on lack of wealth, status and power. However, social inequality equally implies privilege and this has received little serious attention. Indeed, in the literature of sociology there are relatively few extended references to it.[1] With few exceptions those that exist tend to treat it unproblematically and often pejoratively. Thus the possessors of privilege are frequently cast as the villains of the piece and, even where the underdog has privileges in the sense of legal rights, these are commonly exposed as illusory or detrimental to his interests.[2] In order to contribute to the understanding of privilege in general, and thereby social inequality, this paper will consider the privileges of the professions.[3] This is because professions are examples of privilege not only in the sense of being privileged occupations, but also in the sense that the elites of professions are an integral part of the dominant elites of society.[4]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those people who constitute the subject matter of sociological research are rarely in the position of being able publicly to comment on or criticise the research findings. In a society characterized by divisions based on class, education and occupation, such a reaction is in the main only likely to spring from the academic world itself. People living in a working-class community, or fixing speedometers to dashboards, or leading sporadic attacks on rival supporters on the way to the match do not generally have an opportunity to articulate through published material their feelings regarding what a sociologist has written about them. No Bethnal Greener has published an article entitled, say 'Family and Kinship in East London: Some Comments from a Resident'; no Luton assembly line worker has entered into a polemic with Goldthorpe and Co. via a book on 'Working for Vauxhall'; and no adolescent Oxford United supporter has written a critical review of Marsh's books for New Society.
This situation can, apart from anything else, serve to protect the research from direct criticism. We might speculate that in some instances the research findings would suffer more from a direct attack by one of the observed than by all the sociological critiques combined (though I do not wish to suggest that the examples referred to above are in this category). This paper is an attempt marginally to redress the balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of redundancy has in the past mainly concentrated on the way in which redundants have fared in the labour market after they have been dismissed.[1] There has also been an overemphasis on male manual workers. Consequently, there is a tendency to abstract individual redundancy from other means of coping with job redundancy, such as natural wastage and early retirements;[5] to stress large-scale redundancies and closures;[6] to neglect the process and management of redundancy; to ignore the repercussions of redundancies within the enterprises making them, and in certain cases, to treat redundancy as inevitable, albeit as a response to crisis situations.
The bulk of this paper reports a case study which is especially interesting in the light of these past failings. It concerns a division of a large multi-national company in which managerial job redundancies were handled largely through an early retirement scheme, and concentrates largely on the reactions of personnel who had not at the time of the research been asked to leave the firm. Prior to presenting this research I shall briefly discuss some of the literature specifically concerned with managerial staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the conspicuous trends in the sociology of professions is an increasing stress on relating professions broadly to their social context and, more specifically, to their state connection. This has led to a growing disquiet with the traditional view of a professional continuum, i.e. from 'established' professions to non-professions. Our own originally independent researches into two occupations which have undergone processes of professionalization, namely college of education lecturers and ophthalmic opticians,[1] led us to appreciate the significance of this trend. It became apparent to us that the state could be regarded as the key variable in any contemporary analysis of professions in Britain. Thus the main objective of this paper is to examine more closely the profession-state relationship, using an elaboration and re-definition of the concept of bureaucratic profession. Our contention is that such an analysis will not simply deny several aspects of the traditional view of a professional continuum but will instead suggest a new perspective on typologies of professions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I shall pursue a rather different line of argument in an attempt to establish the theoretical and substantive interest of a sociological analysis of the detective thriller. More particularly, I want to suggest that the work of at least one writer who exerted an important influence on the development of the genre, Dashiell Hammett, can be read as supplying a salutary corrective to current sociological discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]