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This article analyses the relationship between law and class formation through the case of migrant care and domestic work, and puts sociological class theory into conversation with critical migration research. It contributes to class theory by analysing how law helps produce class relations in the Finnish context. The Finnish state channels migrants into cleaning and domestic work through policy measures, and migration law ties them to the reproductive sector, making law a central social relation that defines migrants' relation to production. The analysis draws on interviews with migrant care and domestic workers (N = 30) holding temporary work permits and examines their structural and affective descriptions of a position restricted by law. The article argues that the way migrant domestic work is formalised in the legislation produces a class relation for migrants, in which they lack full ownership over their labour power. The findings demonstrate how migrant domestic workers express gratitude for their employment despite experiencing it as devalued, indicating labour as repayment of the 'gift' of the residence permit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores internal border controls in 1980s Britain, examining how they were conceptualised and resisted by a group of activists, the No Pass Laws Here! Group. Drawing on archival research conducted at the Hull History Centre and the Institute of Race Relations and focusing analysis on the Group's public-facing information leaflets and bulletins, this article explores how internal border controls created differentiated access to employment and the welfare state, targeting migrant and racialised residents and citizens. The No Pass Laws Here! Group's framing and analysis, in particular their use of pass laws as a frame through which to apprehend the spread of internal border controls, this article argues, allows us to draw out the continuities between policies developed to maintain colonial rule and those present in the metropole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unequal gender outcomes in occupational success unravel through different channels in higher education. Using the AlmaLaurea dataset comprised of 80% of Italian graduates and 98 fields of study, this article investigates whether men and women receive similar returns on employment and earnings when choosing the same field of study. Two complementary perspectives are applied – Kanter's theory of relative numbers and the status theory of gender – to examine the quantitative and qualitative differences between fields. The results show that the most gender 'balanced' fields of study are the most gender unequal in terms of earnings and employment. Separate analyses demonstrate that the status of a field interacts with its gender composition, and gender gaps in female-intensive nurturing fields shrink faster with an increasing proportion of women, albeit at higher absolute levels compared with non-nurturing fields. Therefore, nurturing fields of study should not necessarily be considered as levelling gender inequality in the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article emerges from a project that examines the relationship between forms of labour, in the context of managerially directed organisational and cultural change, in a light engineering firm on Tyneside. This material is situated within contemporary and historical accounts of workplace interaction. The paper will address the new emphasis on culture and its manipulation, that is increasingly forming a locus of interest in current literature. Whilst stressing that there is much in these accounts that was common in earlier writing the paper draws out what is distinctive about contemporary concerns. These issues are developed in the empirical account through an analysis of the manipulation of difference along the axes of gender, age and skill. The findings are located within a wider framework of the shift from post figurative to cofigurative culture. In this view there is a reworking of both the substantive relations between generations and in the form of relationships of age and gender. The result of this analysis is an account which, whilst stressing the radical change that has taken place nevertheless recognises that even the 'cleansed culture' is subject to contradictions stemming from the employment relationship. Further, that within the context of the social reproduction of the workplace, shopfloor experience is chronically implicated in the construction of autonomous cultures. As such the analysis provides a more positive interpretation of resistance to such change than that available in many recent accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I use three concepts -- the hedging of risk, the transfer of risk and recommodification -- to examine recent changes in the distribution of market risk. Mechanisms that formerly hedged risk -- such as the welfare state and the nuclear family -- have declined in effectiveness and popularity and the result has been the recommodification of individuals and their life chances. These themes are illustrated by an examination of change in the nature of employment relationships and its likely impact on the service class. The future of the service class remains linked to the informational asymmetry problem that underlies the service relationship, and this limits the degree to which employers can claim an option over the labour supply of service class workers. The paper ends by discussing some more general issues in the relationship between risk, stratification and recommodification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways in which 'between partners' forms of the domestic division of labour within dual career households are influenced by the employment of waged domestic labour. The paper is divided into three main sections. In the first a typology of domestic divisions of labour relating to the employment of waged domestic labour is developed. In the second we consider the forms of domestic division of labour within dual career households in Northeast and Southeast Britain, focusing on how particular forms of the 'between partners' domestic division are transformed, modified and replicated with the employment of certain categories of waged domestic labour. In a final section we offer some explanations for the observed patterns, and stress the importance of the categories of waged domestic labour employed, the 'between partners' form of the domestic division of labour and specific 'trigger situations' to understanding the resultant form of the domestic division of labour. We conclude by offering some more general observations on debate over the contemporary renegotiation of the domestic division of labour and the place of waged domestic labour within this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on research carried out in Hartlepool, based on data from three groups of male respondents: (I) those employed for at least the last twelve months; (2) those recently recruited to employment, (i.e. within the last twelve months); (3) those currently employed and having held the same job for the last twelve months. By comparing the work histories and characterising features of these three groupings the paper sets out to explore the theoretical and empirical validity of the notion of the underclass, focusing specifically on two competing definitions: non- participation in the labour market, and systematic disadvantage in the labour market. The data reveal a distinctive pattern of broken employment for the second of the three groups identified above. Those affected are thus located between the two contrasting positions of long-term unemployment, and relatively secure employment. The existence of such a grouping is argued to undermine a definition of an underclass purely in terms of unemployment. However, the characteristics of the `under- employed', despite indicating a clear pattern of disadvantage, are too heterogeneous to constitute a distinctive class position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses on ethnographer Martyn Hammersley. It provides a discussion of description, theory and explanation in ethnographic research and writing raises a number of key epistemological problems. At three points in his discussion Martyn Hammersley provides readers with elements of an ideal typical representation of what ethnography is. These are placed one after the other at the outset of the paper and powerfully fix a highly particular view of the nature and claims of ethnography in the reader's mind. Thus the structure or form of his paper is crucially related to its argumentative content. Almost invariably sociological research, whether in surveys, interviews, ethnographies and theories, analyses description as a resource, which provides information, about whatever is the sociological topic in hand. In relation to analyses of class, for instance, people are asked about their income, educational attainments, employment, their father's and perhaps mother's occupation, and many other matters; and variant theoretical sociological perspectives on class and occupation result.

This paper tests the hypothesis of a `discouraged worker' effect, whereby local unemployment discourages 16 year-olds from leaving school, among a recent sample of young people in Scotland. The analysis supports the hypothesis: ceteris paribus young people were more likely to stay on at school, the higher the local unemployment rate. Local unemployment was also associated with lower school attainment: its positive direct effect on staying on may have been partly offset by a negative indirect effect mediated by attainment, although the direct effect was stronger and the evidence for the indirect effect was more tentative. The discouraged worker effect applied to staying on at school but not to college, whose courses (in Scotland) tend to be vocationally specific. The discouraged worker effect was similar for girls and boys; it was strongest for 16 year-olds with attainments slightly above the average, who were typically on the margins of the decision to stay on or leave. Staying on tended also to be encouraged by high proportions of local employment in service industries and in higher-level occupations; controlling for these factors increased the observed discouraged worker effect. The paper suggests that the design of most area-based studies of education and the youth labour market is inadequate to explain area differences, given the multi-dimensionality of the effects revealed by the Scottish data. Given the economic `need' for higher levels of educational participation, the paper provides further evidence of the distorted market signals generated by the labour- market context' of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the school background of leaders in eight occupational groups: the civil service, foreign service, judiciary, Royal Navy, army, Royal Air Force, Church of England, and clearing banks. These elite groups were studied at four time intervals: 1939, 1950, 1960, and 1971. With the exception of the civil service, no significant change was discernible in the proportion of men who had attended public school. The paper also examines the university background of leaden in five of the groups: the civil service, foreign service, judiciary, Church of England, and clearing banks. Except for the Church of England, no significant change was recorded in the proportion of men who had attended Oxbridge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of male workers spend full-time hours in the labour market while part-time employment is heavily female dominated. A decade of economic unrest in the UK following the recession of 2008–2009 was accompanied by a considerable expansion in the numbers of men working part-time. Growing male part-time employment is a significant phenomenon, with potential for narrowing gender inequalities in ways of working, inside and outside the home. Applying a gendered lens to men's working lives, the article focuses upon the ramifications of this growing male work-time diversity. Unsettled times can create the circumstances for opening up acceptable behaviours, for 'undoing' gender roles. The financial circumstances of male part- and full-timers, and men's engagement in unpaid domestic work, are compared. Part-time jobs are associated with more financial hardship than are full-time, but they offer up the potential for narrowing gender inequality in the sharing of core domestic work tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognising the importance of food preparation in divisions of domestic labour, this paper discusses influential literature on the gendering of domestic food preparation. It argues that findings from research on food preparation and food choice carried out in the late 1970s and early 1980s must be seen in their historical context, and outlines major structural changes since then which impact on women's roles. It also argues that the tendency of sociology of food research to focus on the cultural norm of the nuclear family with dependent children ignores more common household structures in Britain today. This is particularly inappropriate since there are a number of reasons why we should not expect men and women at this stage in the life course to be typical, in terms of food preparation and choice, of those at other stages in the life course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recruiting the cumulative advantage mechanism, this study explores how earnings inequality between dominant and minority groups in the same society unfolds over the life course. Jews and Palestinian Israeli Arabs in Israel's economy provide the context for this study. We find that the earnings gap between the groups has widened over time, particularly among men. This trend is hardly mediated by education, since returns to education have increased at similar rates for both. This finding leaves discrimination a plausible explanation, as the net group membership effect is positive and growing in strength with time. Among women, by contrast, the entire earnings gap is explained by self-selection out of employment, particularly among the less-educated. The consequences of these findings for changes in earnings inequality between dominant and minority groups in divided societies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classic research on unemployment and mental health has focused on the functions of employment. These functions are considered to be of equal importance for all unemployed. A critique of this perspective has been that it views the unemployed as passive and homogeneous. Instead, an agency approach has been suggested, which focuses on the individual goals of the unemployed. This paper develops and tests a model for understanding the differentiated mental consequences of unemployment, which on a theoretical level integrates both the structural restrictions of the unemployment situation and the agency of the individual. The model is based on previous findings which indicate that mental well-being is dependent on the economic need for employment, on the one hand, and on the psychosocial need for employment, on the other hand. The model integrates both these aspects and the results show that the combined effect is of centred importance for the differentiated mental well-being of the unemployed. The analysis is based on a longitudinal survey of 3,500 randomly selected, unemployed Swedes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses longitudinal, retrospective data from the SCELI surveys to examine changes in employment behaviour and occupation over childbirth for British women over the period 1956-86. It demonstrates that for most women on first re-entry to the labour market increased qualifications and earlier return do not lead to improvement in their occupational status, as Hope-Goldthorpe value, or hourly pay rates. Main findings are that women are returning to the labour market earlier; return between first and second births is increasing; decline in status is frequent, but most mothers do not show a decline; those of previous service-class occupation but without higher qualifications are most at risk; higher qualifications, full-time employment and short breaks are associated with maintenance of status; part-time employment is even more damaging to pay rates than to status; part-time returners may be becoming less likely ever to change to full-time employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Equality with men in the world of paid work has been a major feminist objective. Given that work in the 'public' sphere has historically been shaped on the assumption that the 'worker' will be male, then national employment systems which facilitate masculine employment patterns (i.e. full-time work and unbroken employment careers) might be expected to be more likely to generate gender equality. This paper compares women's employment in France (where 'masculine' careers for women are common) and Britain (where part-time work and broken employment careers are more likely) at the macro, meso (occupational), and micro (individual) levels. The two occupations studied are finance and pharmacy. The evidence presented suggests that there are considerable similarities between women in the two countries at the occupational and individual level, despite national variations. In the light of this evidence, structural and individual explanations of women's employment behaviour are examined, and the continuing significance of structural constraint on the patterning of gender relations is emphasised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's labour force participation rate declines steeply in the 15 years preceding their state pensionable age, in spite of their generally lacking childcare responsibilities during this stage of the life course. Employment of women in the years following childrearing is important in enabling women to obtain a significant improvement in their pension entitlements. There has been little research on the factors influencing mid-life women's employment participation and especially on why fewer women in their fifties than in their forties are in paid work. This paper uses data from the 1988-90 General Household Survey to explore the employment participation of women in their forties and fifties. We examine the supply side factors likely to influence older married and cohabiting women's employment participation, comparing the importance of their own 'human capital' (in terms of age, health, occupational class and qualifications) and the characteristics of their household (husbands' employment, class and earnings, the presence of children and tenure). For women in their forties, household circumstances had a greater effect than human capital, but in their fifties women's own attributes were the major influence on employment participation. Financial necessity was a major reason why mid-life women remained in employment. For women in their fifties, increasing age had a residual effect in reducing employment participation after all other factors considered had been controlled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In virtually all advanced capitalist industrial societies, transitions from compulsory education into employment have been prolonged since the 1970s. The basic reasons are the same everywhere, but there have been contrasting interpretations of youth's new social condition by different countries' social scientists. Here a particularly sharp contrast is between Britain and Germany. In the former country most researchers have taken a negative view of the trends, whereas German scholars have stressed the spread of flexibility, individualisation, and opportunities for self-directed growth. This paper discusses the similarities and differences between transitions into employment in Britain and Germany using evidence from matched samples of 16-22 year olds. It is argued that there are fundamental, systemic differences between the organisation of entering the labour forces in Britain and Germany. In Germany transitions take longer, are more structured, and are rooted in a training culture. However, each country's young people are made to feel that they themselves make significant choices, and their transitions have become individualised. Simultaneously, individuals' opportunities in each country continue to be governed by the familiar predictors -- family background, sex, place of residence, and attainments in secondary education. It is argued that in each country young people are prototypical cases of broader trends towards structured individualisation and the fragmentation of formerly more homogeneous social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers recent debates around patriarchy and gender segregation in paid employment. I argue that there are significant problems concerning a lack of attention to the forms of mobilization of patriarchal forces. Most analyses using the concept of patriarchy to explain gender segregation have used those empirical examples where men are organized in trade unions or professional associations. They have no way of explaining segregation in those cases where such organizations are absent. Using a case study of the hotel and catering industry between 1951 and 1981, I show that it is necessary to distinguish functional, hierarchical and industrial forms of segregation, rather than simply horizontal and vertical forms. I also develop concepts of the different organizational resources that patriarchal mobilization may draw upon in order to explain those cases where unions and professional organizations are absent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was originally delivered as a British Sociological Association Presidential Address at the end of the Annual Conference at the University of Surrey in April 1990. In the style of Presidential Addresses it was written as a lecture that would cover a range of issues and themes. In revising it for publication I have tried to keep much of the style of the lecture as well as the range of contemporary themes that were covered: training for `practising' sociologists, employment questions, and the role of the British Sociological Association in debates about research training. It is intended to illustrate some of the major concerns of British sociologists at the start of the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privatisation policies, pursued by a government informed by neoclassical economic theory and intent on `rolling back the frontiers of the welfare state', have been widely criticised as turning the tide against both the `welfare state' and `welfare' more broadly. The policy to privatise public industries and services is, in effect, both an employment and wage policy: the intention is to govern, not simply the general type of service provision but also, the method of wage determination itself. The argument in this paper is that the privatisation strategy is the culmination of, rather than a digression from, post-war policies in the public sector concerning wage determination. In arguing that privatisation represents the culmination of public sector wage policies in the post-war period, it is being suggested that privatisation denotes the most categorical statement and extension of successive policy developments promoting the salience of so-called `market' principles in the determination of wages. It is contended, furthermore, that the legitimacy of and increasing emphasis given to criteria such as efficiency and productivity in the name of `economic necessity', has been cultivated as a result of the power given to economic, as against social explanations, rather than emanating from any intrinsic `economic' logic. Political and social research concerning the privatisation of public services, though often highly critical of the Government's philosophical and economic beliefs, nevertheless has perpetuated and ultimately reinforced these beliefs by failing to challenge fully the principles underlying the privatisation agenda. The privatisation debate is premised upon the assumption that `the logic of the market' provides a salient description of the overall process occurring. I would suggest that this needs to be reconsidered and an alternative conception established to further our practical and analytical understanding of the processes observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of technological change is now well established. However, much of the sociological work in this area has been concerned with the identification of international/national general trends or tendencies towards either deskilling or enskilling. As yet relatively little attention has been devoted to the detailed ethnography of the effects of technological change as experienced by those directly involved. Where such work has been undertaken it tends to point towards a more complex reality than is commonly acknowledged by the more quantitative or general theories. Using data from a qualitative study of employment relations in the general printing industry this paper seeks to set detailed micro-level analysis within this wider context of technological change, thereby drawing attention to those areas of diversity and complexity which may be overlooked by more general theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the post-redundancy labour-market experience of forty redundant steel workers. The data presented suggest that poor conditions of employment, associated with a relative increase in the use of contractors by large scale enterprise has encouraged an increase in informal means of recruitment, minimizing cost to the employer and maximizing co-operation from the workforce. The effects of special provisions for redundants are discussed with reference to: (a) the restructuring of employment opportunities following from the increased use of contractors. (b) informal economic activity. Three contrasting patterns of social activity are identified and evidence presented to indicate that these different patterns will channel people towards different kinds of employment. The suggestion is that where there is high competition for employment then an individual's labour market experience will be conditioned by patterns of social contact as much as by any conscious strategy of job search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article elaborates on the role of deservingness discourses in regulating membership of non-citizen groups in Germany. Specifically, it focuses on Hungarians working or volunteering in institutions of refugee accommodation in Germany. It asks how personal migration experience and migrant statuses and identities of Hungarian workers are mobilised when recreating discourses of refugee-deservingness. Performance expectations on refugees related to education and employment evoked references to similarities of migration experience, strengthening an empathetic perspective towards refugee clients and students. Deservingness frameworks related to culture were more ambiguous. A 'mission civilisatrice', that is educating Muslim Others to European, non-Muslim ways of behaving and thinking, often tied to gender relations, was paralleled by a continuous attempt to challenge and dismantle such discourses of difference and disciplining. These ambivalences of empathetic identification and disciplinary racialisation draw the contours of a characteristic place of (Hungarian) migrant workers in the governance of refugee accommodation in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores narratives of boredom among young lower middle class women employed in the bourgeoning services sector in India, across cafes, call centres, malls and offices. These young women cite boredom from 'sitting at home' as a reason to seek employment. Adopting Bourdieu's understanding of temporal relations as informed by 'subjective expectations' and 'objective chances', I place young women's temporal narratives in the context of post-1990 socio-economic change in India. I show that there is a shift in young lower middle class women's expectations, particularly on the basis of acquisition of higher education. By rendering the space of home – characterised by compulsion to participate in housework, pressure to get married and restrictions on mobility and friendships – as temporally insignificant, young women resist gender norms. Their narratives contribute to gendering scholarship on temporal disruptions in the context of socio-economic change, which is currently overdetermined by young men's experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volunteering is routinely advocated in British policy as a key mechanism for young people to gain employment, but with little evidence of its viability as a strategy. Indeed, the limited research in this area suggests the link is weak and that access to good quality volunteering is differentiated along class lines. This article draws on a mixed methods approach, using survey data from the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Survey and qualitative interviews, to analyse the relationship between youth volunteering and employment. It finds that volunteering is not unequivocally beneficial for employment, particularly if it does not offer career-related experience or is imposed rather than self-initiated. It can even have a negative effect on employment. Furthermore, social class mediates access to volunteering opportunities most likely to convert into employment. We conclude there is little evidence to support policy assumptions that, in the short term, volunteering has a positive relationship to paid employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the conditions that facilitate mothers' employment and fathers' involvement in childcare and housework is important for achieving gender equity in paid and unpaid work. Using Sen's capabilities framework, the article explores the effect of paternal involvement in childcare on mothers' employment resumption nine months and three years' post-childbirth. Logistic regression is used on the UK's Millennium Cohort Study. Results show that the probability of mothers resuming employment increase at both time points if the father is more involved in childcare nine months post-birth – and in some cases, this is more important for her employment resumption than her occupational class and the number of hours the father spends in paid work. However, attitudes have an even stronger effect, and appear to drive behaviour, as the probability of mothers resuming employment increase significantly three years post-birth if either parent endorses more gender egalitarian roles in the first year of parenthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networks play an important role in helping people find employment, yet extant studies have argued that unemployed 'job-seekers' rarely engage in 'networking' behaviours. Previous explanations of this inactivity have typically focused on individual factors such as personality, knowledge and attitude, or suggested that isolation occurs because individuals lose access to the latent benefits of employment. Social stigma has been obscured in these debates, even as they have perpetuated stereotypes regarding individual responsibility for unemployment and the inherent value of paid work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 80 unemployed Australians, this article argues that stigma-related shame is an important factor in networking decisions. First, it demonstrates that stigma is ubiquitous in the lives of the unemployed. Second, it identifies withdrawal from social networks and disassociation from 'the unemployed' as two key strategies that unemployed people use to manage stigma-related shame, and shows how these strategies reduce networking activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The understanding of social reproduction, from a Bourdieusian perspective, is that the dominant typically reproduce their position in social space through various apparatus, such as the education system, to the detriment of the dominated group, who are unable to leave their own position, characterised by inequality and suffering. A key tool in achieving social reproduction is the process of symbolic violence; however, this article considers the effects of inverted symbolic violence. By following the trajectories of two middle class university graduates, this article will demonstrate the detrimental effect inverted symbolic violence has on their graduate employment trajectories. Respondents are depicted as having inflated subjective expectations incompatible with current objective realities within the labour market, resulting in a relatively downward, or unsuccessful, trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers changes in the association between educational attainment and occupational prestige in Germany over time. We argue that the link between attainment and occupational prestige has become weaker over time because of compositional changes in graduate occupational destinations. Prior to higher education expansion, the small elite group of graduates tended to access the occupationally closed and thus more prestigious professions on graduation. As higher education participation expanded, however, an increasing proportion of graduates found employment in less prestigious and more diverse graduate jobs. The results confirm our theoretical expectations. The association between educational attainment and occupational prestige has decreased over time as graduates entered a broader range of jobs and their relative advantage over those with lower levels of qualifications decreased. This can, in fact, be attributed to a merely compositional change among graduates’ occupational destinations from prestigious professions towards less prestigious free-market graduate occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on data from qualitative interviews with ethnic enclave and ethnic economy business entrepreneurs from Chinese, Bangladeshi and Turkish-speaking communities in London. Routes into business and worker recruitment practices are explored, demonstrating the centrality of social capital in the form of family and other social networks within these processes. The article investigates what employers consider the desirable characteristics of workers: trust, kinship, gender, social networks, language compatibility and the needs of the business intersect with racialised notions of workers’ strengths and characteristics. Finally, we consider changing practices in relation to the employment of undocumented migrants, in the context of an increasingly punitive legislative regime. The complex and variable impact of policy alongside the ways in which other obligations and positions outweigh the fear and risks of sanctions associated with non-compliance is revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contributes a global perspective to the emerging literature on girlhood in western contexts by examining the changing shape of transitions to adulthood amongst working-class young women in St. Petersburg, Russia. As in many western countries, new forms of service sector employment and an increasingly accessible higher education system appear to offer young women new prospects for social mobility. In contrast to the increasingly impoverished and denigrated traditional pathways into work, the young women in the study derive significant value from these new opportunities, constructing narratives of self-actualisation and approximating notions of respectable femininity. Nevertheless, actual social mobility is elusive, as familiar patterns of classed and gendered stratification limit their prospects. Despite its specificity, the case thus further illustrates the limited nature of the transformations available to young women through the new forms of education and work characteristic of global neoliberal contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses issues of class-based collective action. Through an ethnographic case study examining migrant workers’ political engagements, the article discusses the current relevance of class politics and the role that culture, identity and intersectionality seem to play in it. By focusing on the collective political practices observed among Latin American migrant workers in London, it seeks to contribute to the ‘new sociology of class’, an emerging strand within the discipline which has begun to explore the identity and cultural dimension of class. In particular, it aims to broaden the scope of this strand beyond the individual so as to include the collective and contentious dimension of class and to enhance its sensitivity to new migrants and to the ‘super-diverse’ nature of contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the disjuncture between the theory of international refugee protection, human rights and citizenship rights and their practice. Drawing on data from a sub-sample of 500 Zimbabwean migrants taken from a larger survey of 1000 Zimbabweans in South Africa and the UK, it explores the labour market and transnational lives of undocumented migrants and compares them with migrants with other immigration statuses. The article demonstrates that while the protection and rights frameworks exist, in reality undocumented migrants cannot access protection and/or rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour process analysis (LPA) is a well-established approach to the sociological study of work which attends to the instabilities of capitalism and, more specifically, to the volatile and contested nature of social relations at work. However, an unreflexive 'neo-orthodoxy' has emerged in recent years that is constrained by a series of dualistic and (critical) realist assumptions which inhibit the development of this distinctive sociology of work. This article contends that the potential of LPA can best be fulfilled through a renewal of critical reflection upon the foundational assumptions of LPA that can open up an acknowledgement and appreciation of the embroilment of subjectivity in the reproduction and transformation of production relations. This development is consistent with the central analytical importance ascribed to the 'indeterminacy of labour' in LPA but invites the adoption of a negative ontology in order to advance a less narrow conception of its meaning and significance. Studies of the new media and creative industries are engaged to indicate how a revitalized labour process analysis might embrace this ontology as a way of exploring and explaining the radical contingency of organization in contemporary social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to the Special Issue call for sociologists' individual perspectives on developments in the sociology of work. In this article I reflect on my own approach to studying work, the intellectual resources I draw on, and how I see the sociology of work developing at the present time. I have located my own very modest contribution within the traditions of gender studies, highlighting thereby the longstanding links between the sociology of work and other substantive fields of inquiry. I take a relatively personal approach. This is because, while there is nothing notable about my personal life, like many feminists I see my ideas as having evolved in the interstices of the professional and personal and the values and divisions of labour that underpin them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactive service occupations, requiring face-to-face contact, are rapidly growing in the US as they are typically not susceptible to larger trends of off-shoring and computerization. Yet conventional paradigms of understanding the nature of that work, and in particular the skill demands, are often ill equipped to deal with the 'interactive' aspects of these gendered and racialized occupations. As a result, discussions of lower-end service occupations have typically grouped together a variety of jobs that require little or no higher education, without examining the actual skill content and job requirements of these occupations. In this article we delve more deeply into the rapidly growing non-professional service occupations in the US and the level of skills these jobs require, with the intention of creating a framework that will reorient future sociological research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The division of labour, an enduring concept of the sociology of work, has yet to receive fundamental critical re-evaluation. The need for this is exposed especially by developments in global work and employment, and the ensuing complexity and variety of contemporary connections and divisions of labour. The aim of this article is to initiate a process of conceptual renewal. Having reviewed classical and 20th-century formulations of the concept, I propose a broader and multidimensional framework. Here, overall socio-economic formations of labour are viewed as constituted through the interplay between three forms of integration and differentiation: the technical division and allocation of labour, interdependencies between work across socio-economic modes, and across overall instituted processes of labour in production, distribution, exchange and consumption. The framework may be used to explore connections and divisions of labour at different scales and levels of generality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article charts the historical and contemporary absences in the sociology of service work. Although studies of service work have now become the empirical mainstream in the sociology of work, there have been few attempts to conceptualize broad patterns of worker--customer relations in service work. This neglect is to be regretted because whether the customer is an alienating figure for service workers constitutes a key unasked question in contemporary sociology of work. The article highlights three factors that are likely to have a key influence on workers' sense of alienation vis-a-vis the customer. It highlights divergent literature in each of these areas and hence ends with a call for research on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of home health care workers is an increasingly important trend in many contemporary societies, and its impact on the division of labour and the social meaning of care work is complex. In this article, these issues are analysed in relation to a new programme of domiciliary postnatal care in Australia. Coupled with early discharge from hospital, the programme is part of a reconfiguration that disrupts existing logics of care. The insertion of paid carers into the division of labour between 'functionally diffuse', informal care and the 'functional specificity' of professionals' work renders their status liminal, and their spatial location within the home transgresses symbolically important boundaries. Birthing women's responses include unease and a rejection of the workers based on the construction of them as 'strangers'. It is argued that these responses demonstrate the lack of a 'typification' based on contextual and spatialized knowledge of home health care workers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Durkheim and subsequent commentators have argued for the 'benign' influence of work and employment in modern life. Contemporary patterns of work and employment are thought to be fragmented and precarious and thus alienating and demoralizing -- and this runs largely, but not wholly, counter to Durkheim's prognosis. If employment may be integrative or demoralizing, this raises the question of 'are employment factors key determinants of life satisfaction?' We explore data on 1100 young adults to test the relationship between employment variables, non-employment variables and life satisfaction. Employment-related variables are significantly related to Life Satisfaction (LS) as are non-employment variables (social relations, home satisfaction). Crucially, the influence of all variables on LS is mediated by 'sense of life control', and patterns for young men and women differ significantly, suggesting divergent valuation of work and home. Regression models uncover, with some precision, direct and indirect relationships between independent variables and Life Satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]