The middling mobile: finding place in the liquid city

The middling mobile, differentiated by their modest and unsure mobility, are a vast of bulk of people who intend or expect to move on. As they travel, they tread differing intensities of rhythm and social embeddedness felt to be chaotic, constraining, liberating, or comforting. Owing to their aspirations to ‘get out’ of a rhythmic life, or to move somewhere familiar, the middling mobile use movement and rootedness to navigate and manage everyday life in the liquid city. My analysis offers a holistic exposition of a life that flows between mobility/immobility and rhythmic/arrhythmic forms, and the transitions between them.     

基层公务员职业认同特征及其对工作绩效与离职倾向的影响研究

基层公务员的职业认同对公务员队伍建设和推进国家治理能力现代化有着重要的意义。本文通过对760名基层公务员的问卷调查发现：基层公务员职业认同包括职业行为投入、职业发展认同和职业价值认同三个维度，呈现出以价值认同为核心、行为投入为外层、发展认同居中的圈层结构；基层公务员职业认同接近较高水平，但职业发展认同较低；不同类型基层公务员职业认同呈现出一定差异，其中青年公务员的职业认同显著低于中老年公务员，低职级公务员较高职级公务员职业认同更低。进一步分析发现，基层公务员职业认同能正向预测工作绩效，职业认同能负向预测离职倾向。在此基础上，本研究提出提升基层公务员职业认同的相关对策建议。     

Non-government organization study awards: enhancing successful completion of social work qualification

ABSTRACT

The current study used a sequential, exploratory mixed-method design to explore how a social work study scholarship implemented in Aotearoa New Zealand impacted on recipients’ qualification completion and their professional and practice competence. Phase one involved 13 individual interviews with past award recipients which described how the study award impacted on their qualification completion. Thematic analysis was used to extract themes. These themes were examined in the second phase through a quantitative battery completed by 107 past recipients to examine their professional and practice competence. The findings from interviews showed the award enabled recipients to complete their studies and improve their social work practice without causing undue stress or financial pressure on the recipient and their family. Quantitative analysis corroborated and extended these findings to demonstrate that the award contributed to lifting the level of social work knowledge, competence, and skills in the recipients. Accompanying the successful qualification completion, these qualified social workers were equipped with essential skills, promoting social work values and competence to contribute and safeguard the benefit of children, families, and communities. The awards offered a ‘wrap around’ support and was not limited by age or ethnicity but provided a support system to achieve qualification completion.     

Coping with Vulnerabilities in Old Age and Retirement: Cross-border Mobility,Family Relations and Social Networks of German Retirees in Alanya

ABSTRACT

Reduced income upon retirement is a vulnerability threat, which increases dependency on public provisions, familial, and/or social (community) support. Many German retirees, in addition to lifestyle motivations, move to low-cost destinations in order to maintain an autonomous and independent life while minimizing the risks of financial worsening. In this article, I discuss the vulnerability patterns of German retirees in the Mediterranean coastal town of Alanya, Turkey, and the role of social networks, with a particular focus on intergenerational family relations. I argue that, despite increased life satisfaction, relocation to a new destination abroad results in new emerging threats. German retirees in Alanya experience difficulties in terms of a lack of intergenerational family support and the double jeopardy of being framed by the legal regulations of two nation states. Based on the findings of the empirical research conducted in Alanya in 2017, I will demonstrate new threats emerged after relocation and how retirees respond to those with new coping strategies.     

Call centres and job satisfaction in Italy: employment conditions and socio-biographical patterns

ABSTRACT

The article examines job satisfaction in 21 Italian call centres. The results of research carried out on 1715 handlers indicate how dissatisfaction prevails among call centre representatives (CCRs) and how it is influenced by aspects related to some organisational characteristics (service delivered, size and organisational typology), on one side, and to different aspects of working conditions (contract, wage and tenure) and participants’ biographical and working profiles of CCRs (gender, age, educational attainment), on the others. However, the most interesting finding emerges by distinguishing different dimensions of job satisfaction (extrinsic and intrinsic-relational). In particular, the relationship between type of contract and job satisfaction is rather interesting. For non-permanent workers, in fact, the probability of being dissatisfied is decidedly greater if we consider the extrinsic dimension of job satisfaction. Instead, when the intrinsic-relational dimension is taking into account, atypical workers are no more dissatisfied than the permanent ones. Job insecurity and limited perspectives in terms of work alternatives, safeguards and rewards, seem to be the source of greatest dissatisfaction for Italian CCRs. This certainly does not surprise considering the Italian development model and its dualistic labour market, highly segmented between insiders and outsiders.     

Job satisfaction and mental health of temporary agency workers in Europe: a systematic review and research agenda

ABSTRACT

The current systematic literature review aimed to analyse the associations between temporary agency work (TAW), job satisfaction, and mental health in Europe, as well as to outline a future research agenda. Twenty-eight scientific articles were identified by searching different data bases (i.e. PSYNDEX, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Web of Science) for the time span from January 2000 to December 2016. Our review reveals first that TAW is not consistently negatively related to job satisfaction. However, job insecurity and working conditions are important mediators in the relation of TAW and lowered job satisfaction. Second, TAW is not consistently related to all investigated types of mental health impairments. However, when focusing on specific outcomes and comparing temporary agency workers to permanent employees, we still find consistent evidence regarding higher levels of depression and fatigue among temporary agency workers. Inconsistent associations between TAW, job satisfaction and mental health can partly be attributed to unfavourable methodological aspects of the included primary studies. To address these aspects, future research should consider applying a standard measurement of TAW, including a minimum of meaningful confounding variables, improving the operationalisation of outcome variables and the study design.     

Investigating the differential mobility experiences of Chinese cross-border students

Recent migration studies have adopted the lens of mobility to examine the stratifying effects of border policies, but few investigate the differential mobility of migrant families and children. This paper aims to contribute to the migration literature by considering the interplay between border policies, family configurations, and differential mobility. We apply the lens of differential mobility to the experiences of Chinese cross-border pupils – young child migrants with Hong Kong permanent residency who reside in Shenzhen, China, and cross the border to attend school. We begin by describing shifts in Hong Kong’s border and immigration policies since 1997, which have created a typology of families differentiated by mixed status, citizenship rights, and mobility. We then turn to four case studies of students with unequal border-crossing experiences to elucidate how border control constrains or promotes family mobility and perpetuates inequalities.     

Producing mobility: visual narratives of the rural migrant worker in Chinese television

This paper employs literatures of mobility to explore the ways which rural migrant workers in China are represented publicly via television drama. Through an analysis of the popular serial Mingong, the paper examines the underlying politics of contemporary migration in China through three themes: the territorialisation of rural and urban spaces; the embodiment of boundaries via corporeal practices and subjectivities; and the politicisation of rural migrant desires. This analysis demonstrates the significance of television in crafting discursive understandings of mobility and migrants that are suffused with contemporary governmentalities of generating but also managing and excluding migration.     

Gender gaps in STEM in Japanese academia: The impact of research productivity,outside offers,and home life on pay

To understand differences in labor market outcomes between genders, economists must examine a complex array of potentially significant factors, such as institutional context, productivity differences, child-bearing and home production, and bargaining behavior. Many of these factors are not well captured by standard data sources. We use a new survey of academics in Japan to better understand the sources of gender pay differences. We find a 6% pay gap which persists when we control for research productivity, despite an institutional context shaped by explicit salary tables. We do not find a motherhood wage penalty, and the gender salary we document is not affected by differences in outside job offers.     

Women’s mobility and ‘transport-related social exclusion’ in Bishkek

This paper analyses gendered mobilities in Bishkek in the space of the most popular form of public transport: the minibus, or ‘marshrutka’. As the means by which women often access various important sites of daily life, the marshrutka itself is a site of negotiation and interaction. Utilizing theories of mobility and empirical data, we argue that marshrutkas are spaces that can give rise to two dichotomous conditions: positive marshrutka experiences may increase the social mobility of female passengers and subsequently increase social empowerment and influence, while negative ones can provide the grounds for social exclusion and gender inequality.