The Construction and Mobilization of Unemployed Interests: The Case of Sweden in the 1990s

In this paper, using a case of unemployed mobilization in Sweden in the 1990s, we examine the interpretive process by which unemployment interests emerge and evolve in public interactions with other political actors, especially unions, and argue that unemployed mobilization episodes cannot be fully understood without attention to interpretive processes. More specifically, we show how unemployed interests during the unemployment crisis in the 1990s initially were aligned with the labor movement at large, later became aligned with unions against the Social Democrats, and eventually gave rise to an independent federation of unemployed groups, which subsequently collapsed.     

Privileging work not sex: flexibility and employment in the sexual services industry

We present findings from a study of sex workers recruited in indoor licensed premises in Victoria. While the study addressed regulation, enforcement and working conditions, we focus on the value of flexible well‐paid work for two particular groups of female workers (parents and students). We link this issue of flexibility to broader gendered employment conditions in Australia, arguing the lack of comparable employment is crucial to understanding worker decisions about sex work. Debates and regulation focus on gendered inequalities related to heterosexuality much more than they recognize gendered inequalities related to labour market conditions. The focus on criminalization, harm, exploitation and stigma obscures the centrality of work flexibility and conditions to women's decision‐making. A more direct focus on the broader employment context may produce better recognition of why women do sex work.     

Low-status work consequences on immigrant workers' organization: the cases of five immigrant groups in Athens

The article centres on the repercussions low-prestige work has on the collective organization and representation of immigrant workers. This micro-sociological analysis focuses on the cases of Egyptian, Albanian, Bangladeshi, Palestinian, and Philippine immigrants in Athens and how the frame of their work and their employment affects their participation in their immigrant work associations. Evidence from in-depth interviews proves that the majority of immigrants do not claim established workers' rights and do not seek membership in any unions. On the contrary, they rely on a network of friends and relatives for support and develop individual behaviours and alternative solutions to achieve survival and protection.     

Network Canvas: Key decisions in the design of an interviewer-assisted network data collection software suite

Self-reported social network analysis studies are often complex and burdensome, both during the interview process itself, and when conducting data management following the interview. Through funding obtained from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA/NIH), our team developed the Network Canvas suite of software – a set of complementary tools that are designed to simplify the collection and storage of complex social network data, with an emphasis on usability and accessibility across platforms and devices, and guided by the practical needs of researchers. The suite consists of three applications: Architect: an application for researchers to design and export interview protocols; Interviewer: a touch-optimized application for loading and administering interview protocols to study participants; and Server: an application for researchers to manage the interview deployment process and export their data for analysis. Together, they enable researchers with minimal technological expertise to access a complete research workflow, by building their own network interview protocols, deploying these protocols widely within a variety of contexts, and immediately attaining the resulting data from a secure central location. In this paper, we outline the critical decisions taken in developing this suite of tools for the network research community. We also describe the work which guides our decision-making, including prior experiences and key discovery events. We focus on key design choices, taken for theoretical, philosophical, and pragmatic reasons, and outline their strengths and limitations.     

The Interpretative Dimension of Transformative Events: Outrage Management and Collective Action Framing After the 2001 Anti-G8 Summit in Genoa

By focusing on the aftermath of the 2001 G8 counter-summit in Genoa, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive insight into the interpretative dimension of transformative events leading to backfire. First, in line with the existing literature on transformative events, the study shows that after the violent events, Italian authorities employed all possible strategies to inhibit public outrage (i.e., cover-ups of the situation, stigmatizations of targets to legitimate repressive action, reinterpretations of police violence as different from direct attacks, presence of authoritative assessments and intimidation of participants and witnesses). Second, a multidimensional scaling of symbolic devices from 70 social forum websites shows that after 2001, Italian social movement actors used the narrative of the Genoa events in deliberative (i.e., bridging, extension) or negotiating (i.e., punctuation, articulation) framing processes to build new collective action frames.     

Working on the edge: the meaning of work for people recovering from severe mental distress in Norway

Most citizens with long‐term mental distress want a real job, and both Norway and European policies agree that work is a crucial part of social inclusion goals. Yet we know little about the actual impact of work on the recovery process for people with severe and often enduring mental distress. This article reports findings from a qualitative study which used an everyday life orientation to explore what it means to have a job and be an employee in regular work settings and ways of integrating work into daily life. Thirteen Norwegian men and women with experience of long‐term mental distress were interviewed. The findings indicate some ways in which work supports the recovery process: having an active working role, being in ordinary work settings, balancing rest and activity and having a sympathetic work environment. Often what may seem trivial to others is crucial to individuals in recovery from mental distress, yet is turned into models and system level solutions, where the uniqueness of everyday life and ‘common sense’ approaches remain unrecognised.     

Explaining the Gender Gap in Help to Parents: The Importance of Employment

Although it is well established that adult daughters spend more time giving assistance to their parents than do sons, the sources of this gender gap are not well understood. This paper asks: To what extent can this gap be explained by structural variation, especially the different rates of employment and kinds of jobs that women and men tend to hold? Using data from the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 7,350), the paper shows that both employment status and job characteristics, especially wages and self‐employment, are important factors in explaining the gender gap in the help given to parents, and that these operate similarly for women and men.     

(Un)becoming Dayak: Intermarriage and the Dynamics of Identity and Belonging in East Kalimantan

Much of the ethnographic literature on East Kalimantan has assumed relatively stable group identities. Intermarriage between different Dayak groups has been frequent, but is usually perceived as leading to swift cultural assimilation of the in-marrying party. Similarly, Dayak-Malay intermarriages have been understood in terms of socio-religious assimilation (masuk Islam). This article suggests that a number of socio-historical developments, including Christian mission work, the spread of formal education and recent advances in regional political autonomy, have resulted in high cultural adaptability among East Kalimantan's ‘Dayaks’, leading to hybrid identity formation. Simultaneously, people of mixed ancestry are confronted with ethno-nationalist revitalisation and often face a problematic lack of belonging, challenging them to become—or un-become—‘Dayak’. This article explores the marital histories and social networks of two extended families in the urban and semi-urban centres of the province. It suggests that children of mixed parentage have cultivated various modes of adaptation to the expectations of Dayak indigenism, often involving the strategic invocation of essentialised ethnic labels (suku).     

Challenging the Rhetoric of Choice in Maternal Labour‐Force Participation: Preferred Versus Contracted Work Hours

The notion of choice in maternal labour‐force participation (LFP) is a contentious one, with assertions that LFP is a direct result of either personal inclinations, such as employment commitment or external factors, such as historically available opportunities. This article suggests an alternative framework for understanding and testing choice in LFP using preferred versus contracted work hours. It explores these constructs quantitatively in a group of working mothers (N = 275) with dependent children and investigates qualitatively the underlying reasons for discrepant preferred versus contracted work hours in a sub‐sample of these women with under‐school‐aged children (N = 20). The results show that nearly two‐thirds of women working full time would prefer to work part time and the major reasons for not acting on their preferences is because of the nature of the job and the lack of career opportunities available for part‐time employees.     

Feeling well while chronically ill or impaired: a multilevel study on the moderating role of employment and volunteering in Europe

People with a chronic condition tend to report poorer subjective well-being than people without. This article examines the dependence of the relationship on doing paid and voluntary work, and on macro-level labour market exclusion of people with and without chronic conditions. Data from the European Quality of Life Survey (2011–2012) of people aged between 25 and 65 are analysed using multilevel regression techniques. A chronic condition has a stronger negative effect on subjective well-being for persons who are economically inactive or who never engage in voluntary work. The importance of paid work, however, varies with national levels of labour exclusion.     

Institutionalizing the Network Form: How Life Scientists Legitimate Work in the Biotechnology Industry

This study combines insights from economic sociology on recent structural changes in the knowledge economy with neoinstitutionalist analyses of cultural change in organizations. Because a network form of organization relies on interorganizational ties, new models of legitimacy emerge alongside of old ones, rather than replacing them, so that seemingly contradictory institutions coexist in the network form. This article explores how life scientists legitimate working in the biotechnology industry—a new option that nevertheless fails to delegitimate the old academic path. The data are based on qualitative observations of a young biotechnology firm. These are supplemented by observations at a university laboratory and interviews with 41 life scientists.     

Classroom and Advocacy: A Project on the Working Poor in St. Louis

A social work seminar on employment issues was devoted to a research-based advocacy project on the working poor. All class members participated in data gathering, interviewing, and report writing. The report included national, state, and local data describing the working poor population. Particular attention was given to single mothers, the homeless, and health care issues. The project resulted in a published report by a major social welfare ad     

Cisgendered Organizations: Trans Women and Inequality in the Workplace

This article responds to calls to better understand how intersecting “inequality regimes” operate in organizations. Through in‐depth interviews with 25 white trans women about their workplace experiences, my analyses highlight how trans women navigate relational practices that are simultaneously gendered and cisgendered—that is, practices that maintain cultural connections between sex and gender and maintain gender as immutable. Findings demarcate three distinct mechanisms by which cisgenderism, a system that devalues women and trans people, operates and strengthens hierarchical privileges at work: (1) double‐bind constraints; (2) fluid biases of cissexism and sexism; and (3) group practices of privilege and subordination. In the first regard, analyses reveal unique double binds that trans women face—binds that dictate contradictory feminine and masculine ideal worker expectations but also expectations of gender authenticity. Second, I find that trans women often hover between two subordinate statuses (i.e., gender and transgender status) in a given workday, a fact that prods a more fluid conception of cisgenderism. Finally, this study highlights how cis men collectively mobilize through group practices to repair cisgender system breaches. All three dimensions are critical for understanding the production of workplace inequality between not only trans women and cis men, but all feminine‐identified workers.     

From Experiments to Network Building: Trends in the Use of Research for Reconstructing Working Life

Many efforts to use the social sciences for the purpose of change and reconstruction have their roots in the idea of the field experiment. In various forms, the field experiment played a dominant role in the period 1930-1970. In more recent years, new patterns have emerged, such as complementary research roles in network building. In this contribution, focus is on the links between the early experiments and today's approaches, to see the latter in terms of responses to the challenges posed by the processes that were triggered off by the field experiments.     

Objects,Meanings, and Role Identities: The Practices that Establish Association in the Case of Home‐Based Employment1

Contemporary social theory suggests that the meaning of any object differs by how we, as social actors, respond and relate to it. The challenge for sociology lies in exploring the different strategies and practices recursively and productively embedded in these relationships. In this article, I present data from in‐depth interviews with 20 home‐based employees to illustrate how these individuals interact with familiar objects in their surroundings to form anchor points for diverse lines of conduct. Although I draw from a number of sociological theories in my analyses, I further utilize cognitive theory to outline three micro‐psychological practices (i.e., routinization, goal targeting, and emotional alignment) that respondents apply in their attempt to establish the desired association between objects and identities. In this way, the article both extends previous lines of inquiry into the relationship between objects and actors, and makes a new contribution to the growing literature on culture and cognition.     

Essential yet excluded: COVID-19 and the decent work deficit among domestic workers in Brazil

This article presents data from a survey conducted with the National Federation of Domestic Workers of Brazil on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on domestic workers, also considering emergency policies and the Federation's main actions in the first year of the crisis. Focusing on employment and income, occupational health and safety, and violations of rights, it shows the extreme polarization between those who lost their livelihoods and those obliged to continue working at the expense of their health and basic human rights. Although the circumstances were exceptional, the authors argue that this situation was made possible by pre-existing conditions of legal exclusion and precarity.     

The effect of labour market polarization on university students’ job market‐related outcomes in the Republic of Korea: Implications for youth unemployment

This article aims to assess the effect of the labour market environment on university students’ labour market‐related behaviour in the Republic of Korea. Using data from the country's Graduates Occupational Mobility Survey for 2005–13, the author estimates the effect of macroeconomic variables on university students’ job market‐related outcomes. Results indicate that labour market polarization, as measured by the labour market polarization index developed by Chung and Jung (2016), has a significant effect on both the nominal and masked (through extension of university enrolment and university transfers) unemployment of university students. These findings imply that the labour market structure is a key element in understanding youth unemployment.     

The executive committee of the Greek Professional Association of Social Work in an age of austerity: examining its response

This paper explores the response by the Greek Association of Social Workers (SKLE) to Greece's current economic crisis. Socioeconomic conditions in Greece have deteriorated rapidly since the imposition of a Structural Adjustment Programme as a condition of the loan Troika provided to Greece to address its class-based public debt crisis. Interviews were conducted with SKLE Executive Committee members to examine SKLE's response in the context of newly raised inequalities. Research results show that SKLE recognised the negative consequences to both service users and its members. However, SKLE continues to reformulate its strategy mostly as a social partner. SKLE's previous strategy entailed amongst other things the analysis of policy proposals and participation in welfare related government committees. This strategy is no longer relevant because decision-making powers have been transferred to transnational bodies. This paper elaborates on these findings and discusses the barriers that prohibit SKLE from differentiation of its strategy. Although the research is country specific, it has implications for the broader global debate because professional associations must reformulate their strategies for better serving of both their constituents and the collective good based on the social justice mandate of the profession.