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This article explores why some dismissed workers adapt successfully to the changing structure of an economy, while others remain trapped in low-quality jobs and experience deskilling. The associated case study relies on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 50 former employees of four bankrupt radio-electronics factories in Lithuania. It is found that workers with 'inherited' skills that are deep and technical are able to enter high-quality jobs when new firms emerge, recombining the physical, financial and human assets of destitute factories for new productive uses. However, if such economic opportunities are scarce, workers with inherited broad skill sets are relatively more successful in transitioning to services from manufacturing. Further, in line with the literature of the sociology of work, women and older workers are found to face more acute challenges in adapting to the economic shock associated with dismissal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out the testimony of Paolo, an Italian entrepreneur who worked under the control of an 'Ndrangheta clan for years, and finally rebelled against that criminal organization. Paolo operated on a crucial front line, as he managed the relations between his company and the dominant criminal organization in his area. This story constitutes a 'wake-up call' for more research on the intrusion of organized crime in the labour market. Paolo's story reveals how strongly organized crime can penetrate decision-making processes and control key people's management practices. Such control is decisive not only while under the direct influence of organized crime, but also after rebelling against it. Overall, this article provides insights into how organized crime affects employment relations and it calls for more attention to be paid to this topic in the sociology of work and employment relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future of work and employment sociology has been a subject of concern for a number of authors in recent years. Halford and Strangleman, among others, have suggested that work and employment sociology is on the decline, in that it has been disconnected from wider sociology and co-opted by management and business schools. In this article we unpack the debate and look at how it relates to gender and work scholarship. In doing so, we propose that the decline thesis might be overstated. While gender and work sociology has been implicated in the demise of labour process theory, it has also embraced change and strengthened and diversified work and employment sociology. Nevertheless, in this article, we treat the perceived threat as an opportunity to rethink work and employment sociology. We propose a four-themed, interdisciplinary, gender-inspired research paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work performed under cash-for-care programmes is based on a relationship between several parties, including, at a minimum, the workers providing the services, the care recipients and the public authorities that manage and fund these programmes. Labour law studies have pointed out that the labour relations regulation is not adapted to this type of non-standard employment relationship since it has been founded on the norm of the integrated firm and bilateral employer–employee relations. Based on a case study of a cash-for-care programme in Quebec, Canada (i.e. the Service Employment Paycheque plan), our socio-legal analysis confirms the weak protection of collective labour rights provided to Service Employment Paycheque plan workers. It also describes how the application of the legal regulation of labour relations to this organizational model fails to take into account the power exercised by the public authorities and demonstrates the impact of this failure in terms of precarization of work and its gendered devaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critically reviews the reasons for the decline in the engagement with the state in the sociology of work after the 1970s, and for its resurgence after the financial crisis of 2008. It assesses three separate streams of literature (sociology of work, political sociology and welfare state sociology), and argues for the benefits of their integration. Articles in this special section of Work, employment and society provide examples of the mutual utility of such integration. This introduction concludes by identifying some important avenues for future research on the state and work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the concept of immaterial labor is dialectically related to the cycle of material labor in the production and reproduction of capital and bourgeois society. The article reflects on how this affects the dynamics of social classes and their struggles in contemporary capitalist society. Immaterial labor, like its manual counterpart, is also subject to capitalism’s essential contradictions as well as its processes and tendencies. Various authors, including Latin American Marxists, are drawn upon to explore further this historical process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customers play a key part in the working experience of a significant proportion of the working class in contemporary service work. This e-special issue features articles selected from previous issues of Work, Employment and Society which have made significant contributions to our understanding of the role of the customer within the social relations of interactive service work. This introduction argues that the literature in this area is implicitly comprised of three approaches: an approach which sees worker–customer relations merely as an additional dimension; an approach which sees the customer’s role as having knock-on implications for a limited number of dimensions of work organization; and an approach which sees implications of the customer across the whole of work organization. The contributions of the e-special articles are brought out by positioning them within these approaches. This introduction ends with a consideration of strengths and weaknesses in the three approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists of work have been drawn into a conversation over work’s significance as a source of identity and social affiliation – ‘needs’ which, according to late modern theorists, are increasingly fulfilled in multiple other realms. This article enters this exchange by foregrounding the epistemological puzzle of how we can ‘know’ identity and social affiliation in narratives. As a provisional solution, Jenkins’s concepts of identification and categorization are brought into contact with Marks and Thompson’s emphasis on interests and identities and operationalized through Somers’s concepts of narrative identity, emplotment and categorization in an analysis of qualitative interviews with 52 working people and former workers in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the public-private partnership (PPP) programme, private sector finance, management expertise and innovation are used in ‘partnership’ to modernize public services. However, advocates fail to account for the differing aims and responsibilities of the public and private sectors, in that private companies plan to make a profit out of non-profit public sector organizations. There is a paucity of critical empirical research into new ‘partnership’ forms of privatization and the implications that these have for employment and work. This article will examine the PPP of National Savings and Investments (NS&I) and some of the initiatives introduced and problems encountered, which resulted in the creation of a multi-tier workforce, together with the insourcing, outsourcing and the first ever offshoring of UK Government work to India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is often implied in academic and public debate that non-immigrants and immigrants of various origin harbour different attitudes towards work To examine whether these differences relate to men and women's origin, labour market status, and length of time living at the place of settlement, an interview survey of 509 individuals was conducted in a predominantly Chinese-speaking neighbourhood, a Punjabi-speaking area and an English-speaking neighbourhood in Vancouver, Canada. The results of the survey are critically interpreted in light of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus. Although the study reveals origin-based differences in work attitudes, the article rejects the cultural essentialism that could be used to explain differences in economic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that people's engagement with work is becoming more like a series of encounters than an enduring relationship. In this article we address the question of whether this fragmentation is characteristic of people in the early stages of their working lives by drawing on a study of young adults in Bristol. We conclude that there is a core of young adults who are employed in a relatively stable pattern, along with a sizable minority, mostly of low paid workers, whose working lives can be described as discontinuous and fragmented. The study suggests that employment fragmentation is concentrated among young adults with less education, and in lower status, lower paid occupations and does not support a generalized picture of uncertainty and discontinuity. These employment patterns among younger people tend to highlight the continuing significance of long-standing social divisions of socio-economic advantage and gender-related disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

abstract: What we do when we get home is influenced by what we do at work. In this article I analyse the relationship between market work and domestic activities from the perspectives of economic theories of time use, i.e. the work-leisure model (compares income work versus other activities) and the household production model (compares income work and household work), and sociological theory treating the issue of how leisure activities compensate for work strains. The empirical analysis of time use is based on the Norwegian time-use survey from 2000-2001. Estimates on working conditions are based on the Norwegian level of living surveys from 1996 and 2000 for 100 occupations found in both surveys. The analyses indicate that both physical strains and low autonomy at the place of employment lead to an allocation of time away from paid work towards unpaid work and leisure, but with considerable differences for men and women. The findings indicate that working conditions are part of the trade-off between paid and unpaid work, and that leisure activities may compensate for human needs being neglected in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paid care work has traditionally been marginalised within the sociology of work. This paper argues that this absence needs to be addressed and redressed as paid care is an increasingly important source of employment for women in Britain. Ethnographic material from a study of the labour of auxiliaries in a nursing home is used to illustrate how paid care is affected by factors similar to those which are salient in other forms of work. Like workers in non-care occupations, paid carers use resistance as an everyday strategy to get through their work. This paper argues that ethnographic approaches, favoured by sociologists who studied factory labour in the 1970s and 1980s, may prove to be crucial in revealing that care work is real work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]