Search

Network perspectives in organizational research have focused primarily on how the embeddedness of actors shapes individual, or nodal, outcomes. Against this backdrop, a growing number of researchers have begun to adopt a wider lens on organizational networks, shifting the focus to collective, or whole network, performance. Yet, efforts to understand the relationship between whole network structure and whole network performance have produced conflicting findings, which suggests that a different approach may be needed. Drawing on macrostructural sociology, we propose a "whole network morphology" framework, which argues the whole network structure-performance relationship is contingent on other fundamental—relational and cultural—whole network dimensions. Subsequently, we undertake an application of our framework, through which we demonstrate how a morphological view helps address conflicting findings on the structure-performance relationship. Leveraging data on 350 million physician relationships, we study 250 whole networks known as Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). Consistent with previous work, we do not find a clear association between structural connectedness and performance. However, we find that a more disconnected network structure is associated with negative ACO performance when the relational strength of network ties is high. We also find evidence of better ACO performance in the presence of a physician cultural orientation when the whole network is more connected.

Background and objectives: To extend work careers, it is important to focus on all working-aged people, including young adults. However, there is little knowledge about the stability of early careers and its life course social and health-related determinants. The aim of this study is to identify what kind of typical patterns of work participation and transitions between different statuses can be identified among young adults after their first entry into the labour market, and to examine whether the timing of entry together with parental and own socioeconomic position and health predict early work participation patterns.Methods: We used the Finnish Birth Cohort 1987 including data from several registers from all 59,476 children born in 1987 as well as their parents, followed until the end of 2015. We created sequences of monthly work participation statuses starting from the calendar month when a cohort member had their first at least six-month long spell in employment or entrepreneurship. Work participation statuses (8 categories) were collected for 60 months or until the end of the follow-up. We included altogether 51,871 individuals with an entry into paid employment, who could be followed for at least 12 subsequent months. Parental social and health-related covariates were included from national registers. We used first sequence analysis and cluster analysis to identify latent groups ofindividuals with similar work participation patterns. Next, we estimated a mixture Markov model that allows for identification of latent classes of labour market attachment, estimation of labour market transitions within classes, and prediction of class membership using childhood social and healthrelated determinants.Results: We observed that entry into the labour market as measured by six months in continuous employment was not a permanent entry for many, not only due to unemployment and health-related exits but also due to studies and parental leave. During the first five years, we observed a fairly linear relationship between the age at entry and early work participation pattern: individuals entering the labour market at a later age were more likely to be in continuous employment thereafter (all else equal). Regarding both own and parental social- and health-related childhood factors, latent classes show clear patterns of accumulated advantage and disadvantage: more advantaged background predicted exits due to studies or – when following a late entry – stable employment, while disadvantaged background factors predicted more unstable work and long-term exits from the labour market.Conclusions: There are varied work participation patterns and transitions between employment statuses among young employees. More in-depth understanding of these patterns and their determinants is important to plan targeted interventions and to promote more stable work participation among young adults.

This paper argues that a normative frame of reference is necessary to redefine the notion of value from a more-than-human societal perspective, differentiating between ‘fetish value’ and ‘true value.’ The former is a product of capital, while the latter is capital's prey but also its antidote. The paper emphasizes the importance of a normative frame of reference that considers the economic, ethical, and political dimensions of value production, and calls for a shift in focus from a purely analytical understanding of capitalism as a social and economic system to a more integrated (analytical-normative) approach. This approach would require a more nuanced understanding of how value is created and distributed, and how it impacts different social groups and the environment. The paper argues that this new approach would enable us to imagine alternative economic systems that prioritize social and environmental well-being over profit maximization and shift the focus from merely challenging existing power relations and economic structures to creating alternative forms of value creation and exchange based on normative principles of social justice and ecological sustainability. The paper highlights the importance of perceiving capital as the product of the perversion of commons that are vital for the creation of true value.

This paper proposes a commonist value theory of labor by examining the relationship between human creativity and labor under capitalist relations. It argues that the innate (more than ) human creative power constitutes a vital commons that generates ‘true value’ in a commonist state of living. However, under capitalist relations, this creative force is transformed into labor through the process of primary abstraction, resulting in the loss of subjectivity of labor and its transformation into a material cause of capitalist (fetish) value. The paper distinguishes primary abstraction from secondary abstraction, which is the abstraction process in Marxian labor theory, and argues that a new commonist value theory must reflect the primacy of the original commoning nature of labor in generating value. It also highlights the need for a radical restructuring of labor relations to achieve a truly post-capitalist society. The contents of the paper include unpacking Marx’s notion of labor, exploring the true value of (more than) human creative power as an essential commons, going beyond reductionist notions of commons and commoning, understanding the alienation rooted in the loss of casual power and commoning nature of human creativity, examining the unheeded primary abstraction, and explaining how the secondary abstraction is the primary abstraction by other means.

Occupational structure is commonly viewed as either hierarchical or organized around stable classes. Yet, recent studies have proposed to describe occupational structure as a network, where the mobility of workers demarcates boundaries. Moving beyond boundary detection, this article develops occupational network as a dynamic system in which between-occupation exchange is shaped by occupational similarities, and occupational attributes are in turn responsive to mobility patterns. We illustrate this perspective with the exchange networks of detailed occupations. Our analysis shows that the U.S. occupational structure has become more fragmented. The division was in part associated with the emerging importance of age composition, as well as those of quantitative, creative, and social tasks. The fragmentation reduced wage contagion and therefore contributed to a greater between-occupation wage dispersion. These results indicate that occupational attributes and mobility are co-constitutive, and that a network perspective provides a unifying framework for the study of stratification and mobility.

The intricacies of urban–rural relations surface with rare detail from the records of Italian field wardens (campari) from the late thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century. Focusing on the region of Piedmont, in the peninsula’s north-west, this article traces the policing of numerous sites and species by the campari as part of an urban bio- and agropolitical project. The office reflects the growing desire of towns to control their surrounding countryside, not only for military defence, but also as an essential source of calorific and hydraulic energy, a sink for waste and a stage on which to showcase their power before internal and external audiences. Reconstructing the remits, norms and actions of field wardens thus illuminates power negotiations that were shaped by a range of environmental factors and the era’s thinking about hygiene. Yet analysing the activities and responsibilities of the campari also reveals the tactics that rural dwellers devised to contest urban discipline, for instance through self-help, concealment and the embellishment of charges made against them. From the perspective of the area’s historiography, the dynamics captured by these records challenge the centrality of landed aristocracies in narratives of political centralisation. And from a broader perspective, the granular view they afford of middling officials at work invites historians to explore what urbanisation meant at the ground level, on either side of the city walls.

This article develops the concept of racialized burdens as a means of examining the role of race in administrative practice. Racialized burdens are the experience of learning, compliance and psychological costs that serve as inequality reproducing mechanisms. To develop this concept, we examine administrative burdens in the US state from the theoretical perspective of racialized organizations. Using examples from attempts to access citizenship rights—via immigration, voting and the social safety net—we illustrate some key points. First, racialized burdens combine control of access to resources and ideas about racial groups in ways that typically disadvantage racially marginalized groups. Second, while still promising fair and equal treatment, racially disproportionate burdens can be laundered through facially neutral rules and via claims that burdens are necessary for unrelated reasons. Third, racialized burdens emerge when more explicit forms of racial bias in policies or administrative practices become illegal, politically untenable or culturally unacceptable. Racialized burdens neatly carry out the “how” in the production of racial inequality while concealing, or providing an alibi for, the “why.”

The article analyzes the realpolitik strategic offensive behavior of PRC’s centralized banking after joining the GATT and WTO. With the Bretton Woods and issuance of USD anchored to gold, the PRC State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration (SASAC) of the import-export control regime enabled the “double-circulation” operations of the RMB and offshore RMB, with quantitative restriction distributed to the commercial banking in private dealership in currency exchanges and banning on bona fide private dealership. The gold and oil hedging on the free market further enabled the Chinese central bank’s “monetary conduction mechanism” in issuing money according to USD for strategic offense with the currency price market. With Brexit and Trade War, PRC currently has blocked almost all international settlement channels in the controlled market in maintaining offshore RMB value evaluations. With the background of cryptocurrency and PRC’s approach in digitization of economic control, the article analyzes possible resolutions for economic justice.

International audience; This article argues that medieval urban authorities developed nodal spatial strategies to mitigate various risks—from accidents, floods, and military vulnerability to sickness and scarcity. Using digital methods (Geographic Information System [GIS]) to map public works during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in one large city (Ghent), it offers a fuller understanding of urban governance in dialogue with a city’s topography and environmental and sociopolitical challenges. Ghent’s authorities invested in gates, bridges, markets, thoroughfares, key buildings, and waterworks. Tracing their interventions reveals the city as an interconnected, moving system, an economy of movement. Attention concentrated on these points because several types of interests related to communal well-being converged there. The city was thus capable of absorbing shocks (war, floods) through regular maintenance and monitoring. Tracing public works that promoted mobility can therefore tell us much about power dynamics and how communities functioned in practice.

Sustainable finance has received increasing attention over the last years. Nonetheless, the meaning of the term remains ambiguous. This article approaches this ambiguity by understanding sustainable finance as a contested concept, whose meaning has been subject to varying interpretations by different actors. To map these interpretations, the article offers an inductive analysis of the network of actors that concern themselves with sustainable finance. Inside of this network actors offer competing interpretations of sustainable finance which can be conceptualised as frames. Using network analysis and interviews I identify five frames that are present in three periods between 1998 and 2018. Distinct communities advance a Socially Responsible Investment frame, a risks and opportunities frame, a climate finance frame, a critical frame and an integrated frame that tries to bring the different actors together. Describing the emergence of these frames, their position in the network and their relations to each other can add to our understanding of sustainable finance as it complements existing authoritative classifications and histories of the topic.

This chapter reviews the quality of life in European societies, drawing on sociological theories of the quality of life, and specifically touching upon the areas of housing, the environment, health, and time use. One major theme is the social stratification of quality of life, both within and between European societies. The chapter was published in Steffen Mau and Roland Verwiebe, European Societies. Mapping Structure and Change, Policy Press 2010. A Stata replication file that recreates all the Figures in the chapter is available.

In March 2020, the Dutch government defined a set of occupations that were designated as crucial for maintaining the basic functioning of society during the Covid-19 pandemic. A central question in the current public debate on work and pay is whether workers in crucial occupations have been sufficiently remunerated for their work over the past years. Using a combination of the Dutch labor force survey and register data during the period 2006-2019, we find that the wages of workers in crucial occupations have on average improved over time relative to the wages of workers in other occupations, although this development has stalled in recent years. At the same time, workers in crucial occupations earn less relative to comparable workers in other occupations within several industries, while they often earn more within major occupational groups. The analysis also reveals substantial heterogeneity in wage gaps and their trends across industries. We conclude by formulating some preliminary thoughts on the potential long-term consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic on the relationship between occupations and wages.

This report is based on a 2016 survey of members and affiliates of three institutes of data science at major U.S. research universities, focusing on career paths for data scientists within academia. After considering how our respondents define data science, we identify various activities, priorities, resources, and concerns around data science in academia, especially with respect to data science careers. We end by providing recommendations about how universities can better support an emerging set of roles and responsibilities around data and computation within and across academic fields.

This report is a high-level summary analysis of the 2017 GitHub Open Source Survey dataset, presenting frequency counts, proportions, and frequency or proportion bar plots for every question asked in the survey., Comment: 58 pages

The archived documents were created for a digital translation project that began in summer 2021 and continued through spring 2022. A small team of medievalist scholars translated Goro Dati’s La Sfera, primarily using the transcription of BnF. Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. Ms-8536 created during The International La Sfera Challenge and an 1865 printed edition.

Humans invest in fantastic stories—mythologies. Recent evolutionary theories suggest that cultural selection may favour moralising stories that motivate prosocial behaviours. A key challenge is to explain the emergence of mythologies that lack explicit moral exemplars or directives. Here, we resolve this puzzle with an evolutionary model in which arbitrary mythologies transform a collection of egoistic individuals into a cooperative. We show how these otherwise puzzling amoral, nonsensical, and fictional narratives act as exquisitely functional coordination devices and facilitate the emergence of trust and cooperativeness in both large and small populations. Especially, in small populations, reflecting earlier hunter-gatherers communities, relative to our contemporary community sizes, the model is robust to the cognitive costs in adopting fictions.

Social scientists have increasingly used asset‐based wealth scores, like the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) wealth index, to assess economic disparities. However, current indices primarily capture wealth in globalized market economies, thus ignoring other forms of prosperity, such as success in agricultural activities. Using a simple extension to the standard estimation of the DHS wealth index, we describe procedures for estimating an agricultural wealth index (AWI) that complements market‐based wealth indices by capturing household success in agricultural activities. We apply this procedure to household data from 129 DHS surveys from over 40 countries with sufficient land and livestock data to estimate a reliable and consistent AWI. We assess the construct validity of the AWI using benchmarks of growth in both adults and children. This alternative measure of wealth provides new opportunities for understanding the causes and consequences of wealth inequality, and how success along different dimensions of wealth creates different social opportunities and constraints for health and well‐being.

Unpaid or ‘free’ labour is an important element of how precarity has been theorized. It is also an issue that is often seen as endemic to cultural and creative work, rightly attracting a range of criticism. Questions as to the role of unpaid work, for example internships, have become central to understanding the social exclusiveness of many cultural and creative jobs. This paper develops this existing analysis by comparing and contrasting the meaning of 'free' work over the life course of a range of creative occupations, historicising the impact of unpaid labour on the creative sector and showing how it has been stratified by social class, age and career stage. The paper uses two datasets drawn from the Panic! What happened to social mobility in the arts? project, to outline the differing experiences of unpaid labour in cultural and creative occupations. By demonstrating the stratification of unpaid work as a form of precariousness in cultural jobs, along with the social distribution of benign narratives of unpaid work, the paper aims to offer new empirical evidence for those seeking to resist precarious forms of labour.

Activation is an efficacious policy paradigm in modern welfare states. Taking the case of Germany, we study the relationship between the embeddedness of benefit recipients in activating labor market institutions and individual labor supply. Using panel data, we estimate the effects of transitions between key institutional states with different degrees of activation on reservation wages (RWs). We show that RWs react to activation: the transition from gainful employment to unemployment benefit receipt leads to an average decrease of 3.1% in RWs. The transition from gainful employment to welfare benefit receipt—an institutional state with far more rigorous activation—leads to a stronger decrease of 4.9%. Mediation analyses show that the income associated with different institutional states is the predominant mechanism that drives the effect on RWs. However, subjective social status also partly mediates the effect. Implications of these findings for active labor market policies are discussed.

We disentangle two social structural views of fame: whether social structure influences fame directly or through the mechanism of creativity. We test these views in a significant empirical context: 90 pioneers of the early 20th century (1910–25) abstract art movement. Across two different types of ties, we find that social structure shapes fame directly rather than through the mechanism of enhanced creativity. Within the social structure of informal ties, an artist with greater structural and compositional diversity among her peers is likely to be more famous. Within the social structure of co-exhibition ties, an artist who is a part of a tight-knit clique is likely to be more famous. Across both types of ties, the effect of social structure is not associated with the artist’s creativity, which we measured using both subjective expert evaluations and an objective machine learning method. Rather, we argue that an artist with more nationally diverse peers had a creative identity that garnered more fame.

Organizational researchers use a variety of methods to obtain sampling frames. The utility of these methods, however, is constrained by access restrictions, limited coverage, prohibitive costs, and cumbersome formats. This article presents a new method for generating sampling frames for any type of organization that is cost-effective, uses publicly available data, and produces near-comprehensive sampling frames for any geographic area in the U.S. The Python-based program we developed systematically scans the Google Maps platform to identify organizations of interest and retrieve their contact information. We demonstrate the program’s utility by generating a sampling frame of religious congregations in the U.S. To assess Google Maps’ coverage and representativeness of such congregations, we examined two nationally representative samples of congregations and a census of every congregation in Indianapolis. We found that Google Maps contains approximately 98% of those congregations––near-complete coverage that ensures a near-perfect degree of representativeness. Using Google Maps to generate sampling frames promises to significantly improve the process for obtaining representative samples for organizational studies by reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and providing greater coverage and representativeness.

Objective: This study uses time diaries to examine how work arrangements shaped mothers’ and fathers’ time use at home and work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Background: The pandemic transformed home and work life for parents, disrupting employment and childcare. The shift to work from home offered more flexibility than the workplace to manage increased care burdens, but the lack of separation between work and family also likely contributed to more challenging work environments, especially among mothers. Method: This study relies on representative data from the 2017-2020 American Time Use Survey and matching to estimate changes in time use among parents working from home and the workplace in the pandemic relative to equivalent pre-pandemic parents. Results: Data showed no increase among working parents in activities in which childcare was the primary focus. Parents working from home during the pandemic, however, spent substantially more time on supervisory childcare, particularly in combination with paid work, and housework. Mothers working from home also changed their paid work schedules. Conclusion: Parents working from home responded to childcare demands through multitasking and schedule changes, especially mothers, with potential negative effects on work quality and stress. Parents in the workplace during the pandemic experienced smaller changes in time use, suggesting little flexibility to accommodate changes in family life. Implications: The pandemic has generated new inequalities between those with and without the flexibility to work from home, and potentially exacerbated gender inequalities among those working from home.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed most countries to an unexpected crisis, with unclear consequences for citizens’ trust in others and in public authorities. This study shed lights on how social and political trust changed during the pandemic. We conducted a longitudinal survey in the US of about 1000 respondents at three points in time during the pandemic. We elicited respondents’ trust towards other people and towards different institutional authorities, along with attribution of responsibility for the current situation. Results show that institutional trust fell, while interpersonal trust slightly increased, especially during the peak of the first pandemic wave. This dynamic was mainly driven by Republicans, whose institutional trust decreased, especially when exposed to COVID-19, along with growth in social trust. Considering that Republicans attributed, at the time, more responsibilities to their political leader, we argue that institutional trust was crowded out by social trust. Disappointed voters felt unprotected by institutions and looked for support elsewhere in society. Consistent with this, though, in the reverse direction, experimental results from the third wave show that Republicans increased institutional trust. However, social trust fell when primed with positive information about the pandemic. Overall, these findings suggest that societal shocks may induce people to exchange formal with informal institutions as a coping strategy, with social and political trust moving in opposite directions.

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 indicate gender differences in further training, with lower participation rates and shorter training sessions for women, especially mothers. Based on the National Educational Panel Study for Germany (adult cohort, 2008–2020), this study is the first to examine gendered parenthood effects on participation in non-formal further job-related training using panel analyses. The results from fixed-effects regressions provide evidence of parenthood training penalties that are particularly pronounced for mothers and in the first years after childbirth. While fatherhood training penalties are mostly explained, motherhood gaps remain robust when accounting for a large number of time-varying characteristics. The results point towards further relevant changes in mothers’ aspirations or employer support. Thus, they underline the importance of training opportunities for reducing childbirth-related inequalities later in life.

School research has been dominated by perspectives focused on human capital and program effects; what has receded is the organizational perspective highlighting the school bureaucracy, teaching profession, conflicting actors, and socialization of students. However, this loss of an organizational perspective runs the risk of studies that are deterministic, individualistic, and ahistoric. Highlighting the “organization” as both entity and process, this essay integrates concepts for an organizational sociology of education. First, I synthesize theoretically dispersed studies on school leadership, policies, and processes with the concept of school structures as the organization of relationships, resources, and information—consequential for instructional effectiveness, support, and change. Next, I suggest that networks actualize these structures through interpretation and interaction, and through leveraging social and cultural capital. Then, I argue how ecologies of schools, educational bureaucracies, and school improvement industries drive inequalities, innovations, and institutionalized practices. I conclude with how this integrated perspective provides synthesized schemas for key topics in the sociology of education and reveals gaps for further research.

The language used in job advertisements contains explicit and implicit cues, which signal employers’ preferences for candidates of certain ascribed characteristics, such as gender and ethnicity/race. To capture such biases in language use, existing word inventories have focused predominantly on gender and are based on general perceptions of the ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ orientations of specific words and socio-psychological understandings of ‘agentic’ and ‘communal’ traits. Nevertheless, these approaches are limited to gender and they do not consider the specific contexts in which the language is used. To address these limitations, we have developed the first comprehensive word inventory for work and employment diversity, (in)equality, and inclusivity that builds on a number of conceptual and methodological innovations. The BIAS Word Inventory was developed as part of our work in an international, interdisciplinary project – BIAS: Responsible AI for Labour Market Equality – in Canada and the United Kingdom (UK). Conceptually, we rely on a sociological approach that is attuned to various documented causes and correlates of inequalities related to gender, sexuality, ethnicity/race, immigration and family statuses in the labour market context. Methodologically, we rely on ‘expert’ coding of actual job advertisements in Canada and the UK, as well as iterative cycles of inter-rater verification. Our inventory is particularly suited for studying labour market inequalities, as it reflects the language used to describe job postings, and the inventory takes account of cues at various dimensions, including explicit and implicit cues associated with gender, ethnicity, citizenship and immigration statuses, role specifications, equality, equity and inclusivity policies and pledges, work-family policies, and workplace context.

Social networks play a predominant role in determining how information spreads between individuals. Previous works suggest that long ties, which connect people who do not share any mutual contact, provide access to valuable information on economic opportunities. However, no population-scale study has determined how long ties relate to economic outcomes and how such ties are formed. Using a novel dataset from Facebook, we reconstruct the network of interactions between users and we uncover a strong relationship between the share of long ties and economic outcomes at the local level in the United States and in Mexico. Administrative units with a higher proportion of long ties have higher incomes, higher economic mobility, lower unemployment rates and higher wealth, even after adjusting for potential confounders of these outcomes. In contrast to the weak tie theory, we find that having stronger long ties is associated with better economic outcomes. Furthermore, we discover that users with a higher proportion of long ties are more likely to have migrated between US states, to have transferred to a different high school, and to have attended college outside of their home state. Taken together, these results suggest that long ties contribute to economic prosperity and highlight the role played by disruptive life events in the formation of these ties.

How much it matters for your income development what generation you happen to be born? We answer this question by using registers of the total population, we study generational income inequality during 1970–2018 and, for men and women in Finland. We follow the income trajectories of the cohorts born in 1920–1983 over their adult life course and observed, how certain structural factors explain differences in income trajectories. Our study expands state-of-the-art knowledge, as previous research has often bypassed the question of how much generational income differences explains of populations total income inequalities and what factors may explain the different generational income trajectories. Results show that overall generational income differences explained quarter for women and 6 percent for men total income inequality. Each successive cohort until 1980s had a higher average income trajectory. However, generation born in the 1980s has been falling behind. For both men and women, age structure and education were the most important factors associated with income inequality. On contrary to previous findings on Nordic welfare state, our results also indicate that, generational income trajectories are affected by economic shocks.

Reputation systems are commonplace in online markets, such as on peer-to-peer sharing platforms. These systems have been argued to be a solution to (ethnic) discrimination on such platforms. This argument is based on empirical studies showing that ethnic disadvantages are smaller for users with ratings than for users without ratings. We argue that this conclusion may be premature, because minorities have a harder time accumulating ratings. The greater benefit of ratings to minorities may be offset by their troubles acquiring any, thereby diminishing the potential for reputation systems to reduce discrimination. We tested this counterargument using a unique data set that contains information on all interactions on a peer-to-peer motorcycle rental platform. We find that the reputation system does not reduce initial inequalities between otherwise comparable renters of different ethnicity. Platforms that wish to reduce discrimination should not only make their reputation system more effective, but also help users collect ratings.

Sociologicial analyses of artistic practice have long drawn on theoretical traditions grounded in binaries and dualisms. Such analytical strategies, exemplified here by field theoretical approaches, center art objects and their movements in and across markets, where binaristic visions of art worlds do offer significant leverage. But when the analyst moves away from markets for art objects and looks to artistic practices the binaristic lens provides, at best, a blurred image with meaningful blind spots. This article suggests an alternative vision of artistic practice —one based on gravity rather than polarity—that captures the ways individuals and their actions make sense in a specific universe of meaning without forcing them into fundamentally competitive and economistic relationships. It leverages findings enabled by a unique sampling strategy in a four year study of visual artists in the United States to illuminate some limitations of binary theoretical frameworks, and outlines a generative alternative to dualism that promotes new analytical and theoretical directions for sociological analyses of artists and artistic practice. This alternative model provides new leverage on four persistent issues in analyses of artistic work: cultural change in occupational fields; actors’ attempts to manage overlapping but incommensurate forms of recognition, reputation, attention, and success; the persistent hegemony of markets for objects in both vernacular and sociological understandings of artistic practice; and questions of visibility and legitimacy central to understanding boundary formation and boundary work in creative fields. The gravitational metaphor promotes a distict set of strategies for the study of artistic work as well as other nontraditional occupations.

• Objective: This study assesses changes in parents’ divisions of housework and childcare over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. • Background: Assessing the long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for gender equality requires understanding how and why labor arrangements shifted as the pandemic progressed. Yet, we know little about US parents’ domestic arrangements beyond the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic or how simultaneous changes in men’s and women’s employment, earnings, telework, gender ideologies, and access to care supports may have altered domestic labor arrangements. • Method: This study assesses change in parents’ domestic labor using fixed-effects regression on data from a longitudinal panel of 700 different-sex partnered US parents collected at three time points: March 2020, April 2020, and November 2020. • Results: Partnered parents’ divisions of housework and childcare became more equal in the early days of the pandemic, but reverted toward pre-pandemic levels by the fall of 2020. Changes in parents’ divisions of domestic labor were largely driven by changes in parents’ labor force conditions, and especially by fathers’ labor force conditions. Decreases in fathers’ labor force participation and increases in telecommuting in April portended increases in partnered fathers’ shares of domestic tasks. As fathers increased time in paid work and returned to in-person work by fall, their shares of domestic labor fell. • Conclusion: Overall, results suggest that promoting full-time employment among mothers and greater time at home for fathers are key in facilitating a more equal division of domestic labor within families post-pandemic.

The 21st century global city is in the midst of a new urban crisis: while it holds an increasing monopoly on employment opportunities, it has become harder to access. In this article, I argue that young urban aspirants are still accessing the global city in crisis through the practice of co-living. Co-living can be understood as an emergent collection of residential commoning practices employed by in-bound urbanites to access in-demand parts of the city and attain employment, housing and community. Through a relational ethnographic case study of the PodShare co-living space in the global city of Los Angeles, I argue that co-living is as an urbanism arising to stabilize the new urban crisis on both the level of the individual and the city, guiding individuals to grin at their condition and be increasingly mobile between multiple global cities in an attempt to maximize their chances of securing longer-term residency.

Occupations have long been central to the study of inequality and mobility. However, the occupational categories typical in most U.S. survey data conceal potentially important patterns within occupations. This project uses a novel data source that has not previously been released for analysis: the verbatim text responses provided by respondents to the General Social Survey from 1972 to 2018 when asked about their occupation. These text data allow for an investigation of variation within occupations, in terms of job titles and task descriptions, and the occupation-level factors associated with this variation. I construct an index of occupational similarity based on the average pairwise cosine similarity between job titles and between task descriptions within occupations. Findings indicate substantial variation in the level of similarity across occupations. Occupational prestige, education, and income are associated with less heterogeneity in terms of job titles but slightly more heterogeneity in terms of task descriptions. Gender diversity is associated with more internal heterogeneity in terms of both job titles and task descriptions. In addition, I use the case of gender segregation to demonstrate how occupational categories can conceal the depth and form of stratification.

Across European countries, immigrants are disadvantaged in labor market attainment relative to natives: foreign-born individuals are less likely to be employed and more likely to be unemployed. Previous research indicates that immigrants’ employment chances are better when the share of low-skill jobs in the labor market is large. Upgrading of the job structure, which has taken place in many countries over recent decades, might therefore have hurt immigrants’ employment prospects. However, an exclusive focus on skill demand neglects another important development in the skill structure of advanced economies: educational expansion. The rapid rise in skill supply has tended to outpace the decline in the low-skill job share with increasing over-education as a consequence, potentially leading to crowding-out of immigrant workers from employment. Based on data from the European Union Labour Force Surveys (EU-LFS) 2004-2016, we perform analyses that jointly consider the demand and supply sides of labor markets. Our results indicate that the size of the low-skill job sector is positively related to immigrants’ employment if and only if those employed in the low-skill sector have low qualifications. In economies with high rates of over-education, where many well-educated natives occupy low-skill jobs, the labor market prospects of immigrants deteriorate.

We examine how creative industry workers engage with diversity, absent a formal organizational mandate to do so. Through in-depth interviews with independent music industry personnel (N=50), we find that marquee quotas -- racially diverse representation on rosters and festival bills -- guide how diversity is sought and implemented. Such quotas are justified via four distinct valuations of diversity: aesthetic, economic, reputational, and moral. Both racialized and white participants justify the importance of diversity on moralistic grounds. By contrast, white participants more often justify the value of diversity by making claims about the aesthetic, economic and reputational benefits of marquee quotas. The deployment of these more self-serving valuations has consequences for the extent to which people of colour can be authentically included. Our analysis contributes to critiques of the socio-economic role and consequences of diversity initiatives, within the context of a creative industry.

According to the general understanding, the link between physical appearance and social inequalities is well-known: attractiveness is considered an asset and plainness a hindrance in life. However, research on the subject paints a far more complex picture. The economic outcomes of attractiveness for men and for women appear to vary depending on the occupational field and cultural context studied. Previous studies show, for example that attractive women may be penalized in male-dominated occupational fields. To clarify the picture of the relation between attractiveness and economic inequalities, we conducted a systematic review focusing on the relation between attractiveness and gendered economic benefits and disadvantages in working life. Earlier reviews on the subject provide contradictory results and plenty of new research have been published since, which invites to a novel revision of the existing literature. After wading through five databases and filtering all the matching articles, we included a total of 58 articles for review. The preliminary results support the lay knowledge that, in general, more attractive individuals are economically favoured in working life. However, while the economic outcomes are somewhat consistent for men, the outcomes for women appear more inconsistent: only women get both rewarded and penalized for being attractive. We interpret the results more in-depth by reviewing the occupation-, culture-, time- and method -specific results in order to elucidate the mechanisms behind attractiveness-based inequalities in working life. We conclude that contextual factors matter in attractiveness-related outcomes, i.e. to what extent attractiveness brings positive and/or negative returns, especially for women.

Cognitive diversity is often assumed to catalyze creativity and innovation by promoting social learning. Yet the learning benefits of cognitive diversity often fail to materialize. Why does cognitive diversity promote social learning in some contexts but not in others? We propose that the answer partly lies in the complex interplay between cognitive diversity and cognitive homophily: The likelihood of individuals learning from one another, and thus changing their views about a substantive issue, depends crucially on whether they are aware of the cognitive similarities and differences that exist between them. When social identities and cognitive associations about concepts related to a focal issue are obscured, we theorize that cognitive diversity will promote social learning by exposing people to novel ideas. When cognitive diversity is instead made salient, we anticipate that a cognitive homophily response is activated that extinguishes cognitive diversity’s learning benefits---even when social identity cues and other categorical distinctions are suppressed. To evaluate these ideas, we introduce a novel experimental paradigm and report the results of four pre-registered studies (N=1,325) that lend support to our theory. We discuss implications for research on social influence, collective intelligence, and cognitive diversity in groups.

In the fall of 2020, school districts across the country reopened under a variety of instructional modes. Some districts returned to in-person instruction and some operated remotely. Others reopened under hybrid models, wherein students alternated times, days, or weeks of in-person instruction. To capture this variation, we developed the Elementary School Operating Status (ESOS) database. ESOS provides data on elementary school districts' primary operating status in the first grading period of the 2020–2021 school year, covering 24 million students in more than 9,000 school districts in all states. In this research note, we introduce these data and offer two analytical examples. We show that school districts with greater representation of Black and Hispanic students were less likely to offer in-person instruction than were districts with greater representation of White students. These racial disparities remained after accounting for geographic locale and COVID-19 prevalence. We also show that the number of in-person elementary school instruction days was associated with mothers' labor force participation relative to fathers and to women without children—that is, the fewer days of instruction, the less likely that mothers were employed. ESOS is a critical data source for evaluating the mid- and long-term implications for students who experienced reduced in-person learning and for mothers who exited employment in the absence of in-person instruction and care.

This study analyzes the influence of mental and physical health, coping abilities, cooperativeness, and work commitment on the transition from apprenticeship training to a first job. In doing so, we first investigate transitions to regular employment within six months post-graduation. Second, we analyze gapless transitions from training to a first job. Third, we investigate transitions to a decent first job. This study draws on a unique dataset of 1,061 individuals from Germany that combines rich survey and register data. The baseline survey takes place during the last year of training for these individuals and contains information on their schooling, health, personality disorders andwork attitudes. The register data measure the training environment and labor market outcomes. The results from linear probability models reveal that only physical health is associated with finding a first job within six months. Physical and mental health are associated with gapless transitions. Overall health, coping abilities and work commitment are important in terms of finding decent employment. However, when conditioning on individual and training firm characteristics, these associations are weakened and become statistically insignificant. Thus, the constructs under study might drive school graduates into certain training firms and occupations leading to decent first jobs. Fourth, our results indicate that the effect of overall health on gapless transitions is largest for individuals with higher levels of education, while the overall health effect is almost zero for those who are least educated. Thus, this study provides evidence of a cumulative disadvantage of the least educated in the school-to-work transition., Die vorliegende Studie analysiert den Zusammenhang zwischen mentaler und physischer Gesundheit, Coping-Fähigkeiten, Kooperationsfähigkeit und Work Commitment und dem Übergang von der Ausbildung in den Arbeitsmarkt. Dafür analysieren wir zunächst den Übergang in sozialversicherungspflichtige Beschäftigung innerhalb der ersten sechs Monate nach Ausbildungsabschluss. Zudem betrachten wir den lückenlosen Übergang von Ausbildung in Beschäftigung sowie die Qualität der ersten Beschäftigung. Dafür greifen wir auf einen Datensatz zurück, der Survey- und Registerdaten kombiniert, und Informationen über 1,061 Auszubildende in Deutschland enthält. Die erstmalige Befragung fand im letzten Jahr der Ausbildung statt und umfasst Angaben zur Bildung, Gesundheit, Persönlichkeitsstörungen und Arbeitseinstellungen. Die Registerdaten liefern Informationen über die Ausbildungsumgebung und Beschäftigungsmerkmale. Die Ergebnisse linearer Wahrscheinlichkeitsmodelle zeigen, dass einzig die physische Gesundheit mit Übergängen in eine erste Beschäftigung innerhalb von sechs Monaten nach Beendigung der Ausbildung korreliert. Hinsichtlich lückenloser Übergänge ist ebenfalls die mentale Gesundheit von Bedeutung. Für den Übergang in eine qualitativ hochwertige erste Tätigkeit werden der allgemeine Gesundheitszustand, Coping-Fähigkeiten sowie Work Commitment als signifikante Faktoren identifiziert. Unter Kontrolle individueller und arbeitgeberspezifischer Eigenschaften werden diese Zusammenhänge jedoch schwächer und statistisch insignifikant. Dieser Befund verweist auf die vermittelnde Rolle IAB-Discussion Paper 2|2022 6 von Individual- sowie Betriebsmerkmalen. Somit scheinen die betrachteten Konstrukte insbesondere den Zugang zu hochwertigen Ausbildungsfirmen und -berufen zu beeinflussen. Darüber hinaus finden wir, dass der Effekt des allgemeinen Gesundheitszustands für Individuen mit höherer Bildung (d.h. mit Realschul- oder Gymnasialabschluss) beim lückenlosen Übergang in den Arbeitsmarkt am ausgeprägtesten ist. Für Personen mit Hauptschulabschluss beträgt dieser hingegen fast null. Insgesamt verweisen die empirischen Befunde auf einen kumulativen Nachteil für Personen mit Hauptschulabschluss im Übergang von der Ausbildung in den Arbeitsmarkt., IAB-Discussion Paper

Where do visionary ideas come from? Although the products of vision as manifested in technical innovation are readily observed, the ideas that eventually change the world are often obscured. Here we develop a novel method that uses deep learning to identify visionary ideas from the language used by individuals and groups. Quantifying vision this way unearths prescient ideas, individuals, and documents that prevailing methods would fail to detect. Applying our model to corpora spanning the disparate worlds of politics, law, and business, we demonstrate that it reliably detects vision in each domain. Moreover, counter to many prevailing intuitions, vision emanates from each domain’s periphery rather than its center. These findings suggest that vision may be as much as property of contexts as of individuals.

Studies of the political power of economic knowledge have tended to foreground the role of causal claims in the form of grand theories or more narrow findings produced by experimental methods. In contrast, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the role of economic experts' descriptions. This article highlights one category of influential, quantitative descriptive claim: stylized facts. Stylized facts are simple empirical regularities in need of explanation. Focusing on the example of the gender wage gap in the United States, this article showcases how stylized facts travel into political debates, and how the choices made in characterizing an aspect of economic life (such as controlling for full-time work, but little else) interact with social movement activism, and folk understandings of economic life shaped by legal consciousness. The gender wage gap was first calculated in the 1950s, but did not take on special importance until the 1960s-1970s when feminists rallied around the statistic as a useful aggregate measure of women's economic disempowerment. Academics soon followed, and sociologists and economists began to publish studies documenting trends in the gap and trying to account for its sources. The comparable worth movement of the 1980s explicitly argued that the wage gap resulted from occupational segregation and the devaluation of women's work. As that movement faltered in the late 1980s, the gender wage gap became increasingly understood through the lens of women's choices and tradeoffs between work and family, and occupational segregation dropped out of the narrative, even as academics documented the persistent importance of segregation in explaining the remaining gap. Throughout this period, the gap was frequently misunderstood or misrepresented as reflecting the narrow sort of same-job, different-pay discrimination made illegal by the 1963 Equal Pay Act, adding confusion to the public debate over women's economic position. These dynamics showcase how technical choices made in the identification of stylized facts, such as statistical controls, are simultaneously deeply political choices.

This study is an explorative analysis of labor union representatives’ assessment of digital transformation in the postal and logistics sector and the consequences for union activities in different regions of the world. It consists of two parts: Part I is a review of existing research on the topic of digitalization and labor relations in the postal and logistics sector. Part II represents the core of the study, consisting of a qualitative survey of union representatives from that sector regarding their stance towards digitalization and respective union strategies. The sample consists of 29 detailed written statements of union representatives from all continents, answering to a set of open questions. The study shows that in almost all of the regions, digital technologies are the basic technological infrastructure that enables postal work. There is a set of specific technology bundles which are consistently used in all of these regions. The surveyed union representatives consistently report a net job loss as a consequence of digitalization, although it also has created some new jobs. They also indicate an increase in precarious forms of employment, such as subcontracting, temporary work or bogus self-employment. In terms of working conditions, respondents refer to work facilitation through automation and digital assistance. However, they also underline that especially algorithmic work control leads to increased surveillance and work intensification. This intensification of work is perceived in turn as a factor in increased stress and thus as a risk for workers’ health. Yet, respondents also see the potential for digital systems to prevent accidents. Overall, the surveyed union representatives see digitalization as inevitable. Yet, they consistently argue that new regulations are needed because older standards often times do not address the specific problems of digitalized work.

This paper provides a comparative historical account of a contemporary phenomenon: the tendency to equate “ethical” goods with aesthetic quality. Studies of moral markets suggest that this equation of ethics and quality would reveal a process whereby these pre-existing moral sensibilities are conveyed through and fought over in the market. Yet this paper argues that we should also examine how markets forms can condition moral sensibilities in the process, not just convey or host them. Drawing on primary source archival materials from late eighteenth century abolitionists and turn-of-the-twentieth-century consumer activists, the author demonstrates that these activists participated in a recurring purity politics of consumption conditioned by the commodity form. This manifests in activists’ equation of: 1) the treatment of the laborers and 2) the quality of the labor with 3) the quality of the goods. To claim that goods were pure, in many instances, was also to claim that the laborers and the labor conditions behind those goods were as well. This purity politics, further, entails both public and private ways of arguing for the equation of ethics and quality, as well as distinct civic visions of ethical labor. It also opens up ways to explore certain racialized dimensions of the commodity form.

We analyse whether gender differences in individual job tasks explain part of the gender pay gap between and within occupations. Theoretically, we combine the economic task-based approach with sociological considerations of gender essentialism and male primacy to discuss systematic variation in the demand for and remuneration of job tasks. Results of hybrid models and Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions reveal that women perform lower-paid job tasks more often than men do, which contributes to the gender pay gap between and within occupations. However, not all tasks performed by women pay less, pointing towards an interdependence between skill-biased technological change and gender-essentialist task selection.

Earnings inequalities in the US have steadily grown in the last decades, and between-class inequalities have been a central component of this process. However, while research has highlighted the strengthening relationship between occupational social classes and earnings, less attention has been paid to what factors have altered the market returns of different social classes. The present article investigates the contribution of two of the most widely recognized drivers of wage inequalities – de-unionization and technological change – to the growth of between-class inequalities. Using direct measures for computerization and union density at the industry level, this article analyses their relationship to the earnings growth of employees in different social classes from 1984 to 2019. Descriptive results underline the diverging earnings growth of manual and non-manual workers. Furthermore, minor support is found for the claim that computerization at the industry level was associated with the earnings growth of salariat and non-manual workers. In contrast, de-unionization is related to the diverging fortunes of manual and service classes in two ways. First, unionization is positively associated with the earnings of all social classes but more strongly with those of the lower classes. Second, manual workers were employed in much greater numbers in industries that experienced severe declines in union density and have thus been majorly affected by its decay. Finally, the growth in educational levels for non-manual classes emerges as a crucial determinant of their faster earnings growth. Overall, results support recent sociological literature suggesting that institutional factors, rather than technological change, are primarily responsible for rising inequalities in the US.

Crises hamper entrepreneurship by eroding the entrepreneurs’ resource bases and causing psychological distress. Entrepreneurial resilience, the act of taking advantage of opportunities during adverse circumstances, requires using resources to counteract crisis-related disruptions. Building on these ideas, we develop theory as to how entrepreneurs operating in poverty settings, who are susceptible to instability and resource erosion, may behave resiliently when confronted with losses.Through a grounded-theoretical analysis of entrepreneurship in South-West Cameroon, we identify three behaviours local entrepreneurs enact in reaction to losses: non-resilience, urgency-driven resilience, and synergy-driven resilience. Then, we build theory as to how the mechanisms of resource erosion and psychological distress interact in determining post-crisis reactions. The study generates novel insights on the antecedents of entrepreneurial resilience with implications for theory and practice.

The housing market is replete with intermediaries—individuals whose work constructs, maintains, or expands a market. A sociology of housing requires analytic attention to these myriad housing market intermediaries since they affect whether and under what conditions individuals and households can access and maintain access to housing as well as help determine the affordability and quality of that housing. In this chapter we aim to show the utility of intermediaries as a wide category of analysis, particularly for understanding how housing inequality interacts with other forms of social stratification across axes such as gender, class, and race and ethnicity. We summarize recent research and unpack how the work of public and private-sector intermediaries—such as housing developers, building inspectors, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, appraisers, landlords, housing authority case workers, mobile home park operators, and property managers—leads to more or less stratification in the housing market.

Migration processes, especially the migration of young people and labor resources, are among the important factors that affect the socio-economic situation both in the country as a whole and in its regions.The State pays considerable attention to migration issues. First of all, to neutralize the negative consequences and enhance the positive effect obtained as a result of migration processes, a broad system of national and interstate regulation has been created. However, the analysis shows that mechanisms for regulating youth migration, approaches to regulating educational and labor migration, and in general, migration processes in Kazakhstan need to be refined and improved.

This article discusses how Brazilian platform workers experience and respond to platform scams through three case studies. Drawing from digital ethnographic research, vlogs/interviews of workers, and literature review, we argue for a conceptualization of “platform scam” that focuses on multiple forms of platform dishonesty and uncertainty. We characterize scam as a structuring element of the algorithmic management enacted by platform labor. The first case engages with when platforms scam workers by discussing Uber drivers’ experiences with the illusive surge pricing. The second case discusses when workers (have to) scam platforms by focusing on Amazon Mechanical Turk microworkers’ experiences with faking their identities. The third case presents when platforms lead workers to scam third parties, by engaging with how Brazilian click farm platforms’ workers use bots/fake accounts to engage with social media. Our focus on “platform scams” thus highlights the particular dimensions of faking, fraud, and deception operating in platform labor. This notion of platform scam expands and complexifies the understanding of scam within platform labor studies. Departing from workers’ experiences, we engage with the asymmetries and unequal power relations present in the algorithmic management of labor.

Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts. They have studied multiple femininities in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and be enacted by the same individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capital at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Furthermore, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, I explain the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work.