Precarity,gender and care in the neoliberal academy

This article examines the rise in precarious academic employment in Ireland as an outcome of the higher education restructuring following OECD (Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development), government initiatives and post‐crisis austerity. Presenting the narratives of academic women at different career stages, we claim that a focus on care sheds new light on the debate on precarity. A more complete understanding of precarity should take account not only of the contractual security but also affective relational security in the lives of employees. The intersectionality of paid work and care work lives was a dominant theme in our interviews among academic women. In a globalized academic market, premised on the care‐free masculinized ideals of competitive performance, 24/7 work and geographical mobility, women who opt out of these norms, suffer labour‐led contractual precarity and are over‐represented in part‐time and fixed‐term positions. Women who comply with these organizational commands need to peripheralize their relational lives and experience care‐led affective precarity.     

The Reproduction of Gender Inequality in Sweden: A Causal Mechanism Approach

In many respects, Sweden is maybe the country where public policies to increase the equality between men and women have been most prolonged and advanced. In 1996 the UN declared Sweden to be the most gender‐equal country in the world. However, women still take much more responsibility for children and domestic work than men do, leading to the reproduction of gender inequality in the labour market and in society at large. A causal mechanism is used to analyse this phenomenon, starting from the observation that men are on average three years older than women and thus already have a stronger position on the labour market when a heterosexual couple is formed. This increases the risk that the woman will lose the first negotiations on how to divide household and wage labour when they have children. This will in turn lead to increasing returns for the man, increasing the risk that she will lose subsequent negotiations about the division of labour. What seems to be a rational arrangement for both (increasing the total income for the family) results in the reproduction of gender inequality. The analysis shows that gender inequality in a country like Sweden is reproduced behind the backs of the agents.     

Operationalizing Intersectionality: an Approach to Uncovering the Complexity of the Migrant Job Search in Australia

This paper explores the complexities surrounding the lived experiences of skilled migrant women and men from non‐English speaking backgrounds (NESBs) who arrive in Australia and attempt to seek work. The paper will analyze the migrants' experiences using intersectionality theory as a framework. Drawing on Anthias's social relations framework, this research will contribute to the field by demonstrating how intersectionality theory can be operationalized to understand the complex lived experiences of disadvantaged groups. The research will reveal how being a new migrant in Australia, unfamiliar with local job search processes, complicates jobseeking. The paper will show how gender and family roles impact this process, especially when young families are involved. Both genders suffer downward occupational mobility, with men seeking any type of work to get by, and women gravitating towards insecure forms of employment, or exiting the labour force, in order to manage the family unit.     

Disabled people, the reserve army of labour and welfare reform

This paper is concerned with explaining why in contemporary society there has been a number of changes to income maintenance and labour market policy for disabled people. Taking a regulation approach theoretical framework it engages with the debate about whether disabled people can be considered to be part of the reserve army of labour. Rejecting previous broad-brush approaches that seem to suggest that all disabled people are part of the reserve army, it argues that the policy changes have been aimed at reconstructing non-employed disabled people as an important part of the reserve army in a period when labour markets are becoming tighter. In this sense disabled people are crucial to New Labour's regulation of neo-liberal accumulation that is structured through a contradiction between economic stability and increasing participation in paid employment.     

The wide-meshed safety net. Decision-making on social assistance eligibility in Sweden

This article explores and analyses, with the help of both client and social worker data on 423 applications for social assistance in Sweden, (i) the extent to which social assistance benefits and labour market strengthening measures are granted and (ii) factors concerning clients as well as social workers that are associated with the granting of benefits. Considering (i), the results show that social assistance is granted in about 74% of cases while only 6% of applicants are granted additional labour market strengthening measures. With regard to (ii), the results indicate that the granting of benefits seems to depend on a broad spectrum of factors at both the client and the social worker levels. For example, more experienced social workers are less willing to grant social assistance while chances increase when an applicant is already registered at the local public employment service and/or social insurance office. Moreover, the granting of benefits also co-varies with more or less invariable factors at the client level: social workers are in general more generous towards women and people born outside Sweden, but rather less generous vis-à-vis single parents. The findings are discussed in terms of workfare and professionalization among social workers.     

Exploring Social and Geographical Trajectories of Latin Americans in Sweden

Close to 20 percent of the Swedish population are of immigrant origin; one in eight is foreign‐born. About 45 percent of all immigrants originate from outside Europe and most of these have entered the country as refugees or relatives of refugees. Issues connected to immigration, including the number of immigrants, settlement patterns and level of social integration of ethnic minorities, have been much discussed in Sweden in recent decades. This paper focuses on the integration of Latin American immigrants in Sweden. It compares the level of integration – measured as educational achievement, labour market participation, income and housing – experienced by first and second generation migrants. I use register information allowing me to include all 1^st and 2^nd generation Latin Americans that have lived in Sweden between 1990 and 2006 (in total 127,000 individuals). Data are longitudinal, which means that individuals can be followed over time. I make use of the longitudinal material in order to study changes in residential patterns and in attempts to explain educational and employment outcomes for second generation Latin Americans. The general conclusion of the paper is that in terms of integration, LAC immigrants have an intermediate position compared to other immigrant categories; they are often better off than people from Africa and the Middle East but clearly below the level experienced by some other migrants, especially those from Western Europe. This cannot be explained by level of education. The average level of education is high for first generation immigrants from LA countries. For many people, the level of labour market participation and income increase over time but one important result of this analysis is that second generation Latin Americans seem to do less well in Sweden compared to many other second generation migrants.     

‘A frog in a well’: the exclusion of disabled people from work in Cambodia

Based on ethnographic research conducted in north‐west Cambodia in 2000–2001, this paper examines why disabled people experience systematic marginalisation in the labour market. Although there are no official data on the relationship between disability and employment status in Cambodia, this research suggests that disabled people are more likely than their able‐bodied counterparts to be unemployed, in low status occupations, earn less or be out of the labour market altogether. Consequently, disabled people are more likely to live in poverty, experience social isolation and poor mental health. I argue that disabled people’s social status effectively shapes their work patterns through (mis)conceptions that associate ‘disability’ with ‘inability’ to work and to be employable. This paper illustrates how geographical processes fix disabled people in their socio‐spatial place, which together with ideological and structural inequalities distinguish and entrench their poverty from that of other social groups.     

Inequalities in social capital and their longitudinal effects on the labour market entry

This study investigates socio-economic and ethnic inequalities in social capital and their effects on the process of the labour market entry. We use longitudinal data about the transition from school to work of lower- and middle educated young people in Belgium. Social capital is measured with three robust position generator measures. In line with previous studies, there are substantial socioeconomic and ethnic inequalities in the access to social capital. Ethnic differences in social capital are, however, due to the socio-economic deprivation of ethnic minority groups in Belgium. Among the specific population of lower- and middle educated youth, knowing more people from the working class leads to a higher likelihood of entering the labour market versus continuing in education, whereas knowing more people from the higher service class results in a lower likelihood of entering the labour market. Especially the resources of strong ties such as relatives and friends are important for these decisions. In addition, once entered the labour market, social capital has an impact on the likelihood of getting a job. Lower- and middle educated labour market entrants who know more people from the working class are more likely to find work, whereas knowing people from the lower service class decreases the job chances. However, there is no evidence for social capital effects on the occupational status of the job among our population.     

‘They are harsher to me than to my friend who is blonde’. Police critique among ethnic minority youth in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Young people belonging to categories and living in areas that are targeted by the police find more arguments for detailed police critique than others. When they narrate their assessments there is a series of experiential references being made, which can be used to sort out their police critique. This article draws on 20 interviews with ethnic minority youth in so-called vulnerable neighborhoods in Sweden. It shows how young people portray the police as sometimes profiling and racist, sometimes just and legitimate, and how they do so by comparisons and identifications. Comparisons within Sweden and identifications with police targets tend to result in more negative assessments whereas comparisons with countries of origin and identifications with non-targeted categories may result in more positive or mixed assessments. These young people also evaluate the police with reference to the stigmatization of their neighborhoods. To be stopped because you are associated with a residential area is described as deeply unfair, even if the police are polite, and observations of how the police change behavior in different areas promote critique. Our findings point to the importance of extending a criteria-based model of how today’s young people assess the police with a more social and ethnographic understanding.     

The social order of transnational migration markets

The ‘infrastructural turn’ in labour migration studies has shifted attention away from the experiences of migrants to the role of public authorities and private actors in facilitating migrant mobilities. As part of a broader turn towards studying transnational mobilities rather than immigration and settlement, this research shows that the formalization of transnational labour migration has made mobility both freer and more difficult. In this article, I reinterpret mobility infrastructures from a market sociological perspective. Transnational labour migration, I argue, is more clearly conceptualized as the organized ‘making’ of cross‐border labour markets. Moreover, from a market sociological perspective the construction of cross‐border labour exchanges is at the same time a question of how the uncertainties inherent in market exchanges are coordinated by market actors. In its focus on how exchanges across borders are possible at all, a market sociological perspective makes note of the conflicting interests, power imbalances and uncertainties that must be handled for a social order of transnational migration markets to emerge. An important question concerns whether alternatives to the less regulated neo‐liberal market order that is evident in most migration corridors are possible and under what conditions. With reference to the challenges facing the regulation of cross‐border labour markets, in my conclusion, I map an agenda for future research.     

Transnational involvement and social integration

Abstract In this article we offer a quantitative examination of the extent to which migrants from various countries are involved in transnational activities and have transnational identifications. The study is based on a survey of 300 immigrants (from the USA, Japan, Iraq, former‐Yugoslavia, Morocco and the Dutch Antilles) living in the Netherlands. The respondents are deliberately chosen to include different categories of immigrants. Transnational activities constitute a substantial part of their lives and are to a large extent socio‐cultural. Many migrants also transfer money abroad. Professional economic activities were rare and mainly limited to the American group. As a whole, our respondents identify more with other compatriots living in the Netherlands than with people living outside the Netherlands. The research also found that transnational involvement in general does not impede ‘immigrant integration’. Migrant groups that are known as poorly integrated into Dutch society are not more involved in transnational activities and have no stronger identifications with the country of origin than other groups. However, within the Moroccan and Antillean groups those respondents with the weakest labour market position identify more strongly with the country of origin than others. Strong identifications with compatriots living elsewhere and withdrawal from Dutch society may reinforce their poor labour market integration     

Nurses' Pay Formation in Swedish Health Call Centres

This article analyses the pay formation process for nurses in the new organizational form of health call centres (HCCs) in Sweden. It finds that HCC tele‐nurses have gained a better labour market position than both the average call centre employees in other sectors and some other nurses. This specialization of the nursing occupation may thus have importance for gendered pay formation in public healthcare. In evaluating pay formation, the article draws on case studies carried out by the author. It analyses the shift from centralized bargaining towards more decentralized and individualized pay formation and the importance of union organization, economic and professional factors that have contributed to relatively higher pay for these workers. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this process for the gender pay gap in the state sector and limitations to future gains.     

A Critical Evaluation of the Contradictions for Disabled Workers Arising from the Emergence of the Flexible Labour Market in Britain

In Britain, as in all industrialised countries 'paid work' or employment is central to the economy of the state. This perspective raises important implications for theories of disability and work, and for further research in this area. This paper attempts to provide a critical evaluation of the contradictions arising from the flexible labour market for disabled workers and how the concept of the Disabled State has been eroded along with notions of disabled people as the 'deserving poor'. Policies now demonstrate a commitment to a labour market free from restrictive practices and regulation. It appears that new technologies and specific personal communication skills, initiative, flexibility and adaptability will play an increasing part in new labour working trends. In short, theories of disability and work must change focus from 'production' to 'process'.     

Labour market integration of FRY refugees in Sweden vs. Denmark

We compare the long-run labour market integration of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) refugees who arrived in the 1990s to the Scandinavian countries in the settings of Sweden and Denmark, respectively. These otherwise similar countries faced different economic conditions at the time of arrival and over the observation period. They also differed in terms of the restrictiveness of asylum policies and in attitudes towards immigration. Using register data from Statistics Sweden and Statistics Denmark, we show that FRY refugees, in both child and adult generations at arrival, are better integrated 12–15 years later in Sweden than in Denmark, even though Sweden experienced a higher level of unemployment than Denmark throughout the period. Our findings suggest that asylum policies promoting early labour market entry and early exposure to a host country's schooling system, as well as access to disability pension and social assistance, are important factors affecting refugee labour market integration.     

Labour market regulations and high quality employment in EU-15 countries

The elements that we usually include under the concept of “labour market institutions” exert a clear influence on the workings of the labour market. However, the assessment of labour market policies and institutions remains mostly focused on their impact on the quantity of jobs, while people’s well-being depends crucially on how good their jobs are. This paper is a modest attempt to contribute some evidence and insight to the debate on the effects that particular institutional configurations have on the generation of high-quality employment.     

The problem of intersectionality as an approach to digital activism: the Women’s March on Washington’s attempt to unite all women

ABSTRACT

This study examined the convergence of activism and intersectionality to understand how communicators create messages about social justice issues using social media. This is particularly relevant for public relations today, as digital activism almost ubiquitously involves bringing together conflicting publics who are active and social media-savvy, meanwhile maintaining an organizational brand/mission. Using the 2017 Women’s March on Washington (WMW) as an object of study, we explored how campaign messages reflected principles of intersectionality, consensus- and dissensus-based communication, and organizational self-reflection. We conducted a thematic analysis of posts from the WMW’s social media accounts as well as media quotes by the organizational leaders to get at the leaders’ intentions in their message design. Data suggested that messages of inclusivity as well as of necessary discord were employed to enact political change for WMW’s publics. We argue that although the WMW was not wholly intersectional, particularly in determining its political agenda, the efforts toward intersectionality are notable for theory-building and reflective practice, particularly for social mediated campaigns. The study proposes a theory for digital intersectional communication to guide future research and advocacy work.     

Self-employed immigrants and their employees: evidence from Swedish employer-employee data

We present a study of the employees of self-employed immigrants with unincorporated firms in Sweden using matched employer-employee data from 2014. Non-European immigrants are more likely than natives to have employees in their firms. Furthermore, immigrants, especially non-European immigrants, are more likely than natives to employ immigrants in their firms, and non-European immigrants are most likely to employ recently arrived non-European immigrants with low education in their firms. Males are more likely than females to have employees in their firms, but self-employed females are more likely than self-employed males to have female employees. This is the case for all immigrant groups as well as for natives. We conclude that self-employed immigrants play a role in the labour market integration process since they create employment opportunities for immigrant groups that have difficulty entering the labour market.

     

Young subjectivities and affective labour in the service economy

Post-Fordist employment is characterised by the demand for new forms of labour in which workers are expected to make personal investments in their work and to mobilise their embodied subjectivities in the practice of labour. Whilst employment insecurity is well documented in the sociology of youth, theoretical development in this area has yet to contend with the role of changes in the nature of labour itself in the production of youth. This paper draws on theories of labour under post-Fordism to explore the practice of ‘affective labour’ amongst young people performing ‘front of house’ bar work in a large metropolitan service economy. The paper theorises the role of youth subjectivities – including capacities for relationality and leisure, gendered embodiment, and tastes – in the practice of contemporary labour. The paper describes how young people doing bar work contribute to the production of affective atmospheres, or sensations of ease, pleasure and enjoyment that are offered to clientele of boutique bars. In this, we suggest that affective labour mobilises young subjectivities at work in ways that are currently unrecognised within youth studies. The paper concludes by suggesting a new research agenda that goes beyond the existing focus on youth transitions through employment to explore how youth is produced as part of the social dynamics of post-Fordist labour.     

Privileges and penalties in the legal profession: an intersectional analysis of career progression

Intersectionality theory is concerned with integrating social characteristics to better understanding complex human relations and inequalities in organizations and societies (McCall 2005). Recently, intersectionality research has taken a categorical and quantitative turn as scholars critically adopt but retain existing social categories to explain differences in labour market outcomes. A key contention is that social categories carry penalties or privileges and their intersection promotes or hinders the life chances of particular groups and individuals. An emergent debate is whether the intersection of disadvantaged characteristics (such as female gender or minority ethnic status) produce penalties that are additive, multiplicative or ameliorative. Research is inconclusive and as yet pays little attention to moderating factors such as employer type, size, geographic location or work profile. Drawing on administrative records for individuals qualified as solicitors in England and Wales, collected by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), combined with aggregated workforce data and firm characteristics of their law firms, we undertake a statistical analysis of the intersection of gender and ethnicity in the profession with a degree of precision and nuance not previously possible. In response to calls to broaden studies of inequalities and intersectionality beyond their effect on pay or income (Castilla 2008) we focus on career progression to partnership as our key measure of success. The original contribution of our study is twofold. First, we establish statistically different profiles of law firms, showing how the solicitors’ profession is stratified by gender, ethnicity and socio‐economic background, as well as the type of legal work undertaken by developing a model of socio‐economic stratification in the profession. Second, we demonstrate that while penalties tend to be additive (i.e. the sum of the individual ethnic and gender penalties) this varies significantly by law firm profile and in some situations the effect is ameliorative.     

The Paradox of the Quality of Life of Adults with Learning Difficulties

This paper is based on an empirical survey conducted in 1995 in Hungary. Data came from a stratified random sample of about 1300 adults with learning difficulties from all over the country. The author combines qualitative and quantitative methods in analysing the quality of life of people with learning difficulties and takes into consideration that their quality of life is as much determined by sociological factors as by the biologically and educationally understood level of difficulties. The paper shows that success in education and in the labour market does not equate to successful social integration. The quality of life of adults with learning difficulties is sometimes better in social circumstances which are less favourable for high achievement in education and in the labour market. Though the people from more privileged backgrounds may seem to lead a more active and social everyday life than those with working class origins they are still considerably less integrated in their social environments.