Labour Market Disadvantages of Second‐Generation Turks and Moroccans in the Netherlands: Before and during the Great Recession

This study uses two waves of panel data to examine the labour market integration of children of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands. The data show a persisting educational attainment gap in terms of high school completion and post‐secondary attendance. The analyses of prime working‐age respondents indicate substantial ethnic penalties that accrue from the hiring process: controlling for educational background and demographics, the youngest cohort of the second generation is less likely to have employment than the native Dutch. We improve on earlier research on ethnic penalties in the Dutch labour market by including measures of precarious work – the chance of avoiding of non‐contracted work – and by comparing minorities’ standing in a pre‐recession (2009) and a peak‐recession (2013) labour market. The results indicate increasing employment disadvantages for both second‐generation groups at a time of labour surplus.     

Marginal movements and minority struggles? The case of the Japanese minority social and labour movements

In Japan, some of the socially, economically and politically marginalised have developed robust social and labour movements that engage with mainstream society. These movements have developed strategies challenging the conditions of the excluded, while also highlighting pathways to establish, or enhance, individual and collective participation in the labour market and the wider society. Two distinct though related, social and organisational forms of these movements are elaborated – firm‐centred and community centred respectively. The former especially has a combative past in the labour struggles of the 1950s in what are known as sa'ha shōsū‐ha kumiai (left wing Minority union, or, Minority‐faction union). However, this does not mean Minorities are inherently leftist in orientation. In the 1940s and 1950s, during a period of radical union hegemony, a collaborative form of second unions developed assisting the purge of radical leaderships. Our focus here is on a contemporary radical democratic current. While articulating concerns of those in full time employment outside the political mainstream they may also represent ethnically and otherwise socially marginalised workers. The community unions, a form of what are known as ‘new‐type union’, shingata kumiai (this term will be used here to describe the community unions) articulate the concerns of those socially and economically marginalized in the community and the wider labour market. Controversially, the term ‘Minority union’ is used to depict the different forms of oppositional social movement union in a broader sense than is typically understood in the literature. This is because they share a common concern with the articulation of Minority social and political interests in the context of the employment relationship and the local community. In considering the character of these social movement unions the article seeks to add to what Price (1997 ) describes as ‘bottom up history’ which we term ‘sociology from below’.     

Sisters (can’t) unite! Wages as macro‐political and the gendered power orders of corporatism

In addition to political parties and the government, trade union confederations and employer organizations are major power players in the Finnish labour market, policymaking and the wider society. This article analyses the significant role of the Finnish corporatist regime in creating and maintaining the gendered hierarchies of the labour market, including the gender pay gap. Using the case of the Finnish nurses’ industrial action in 2007, our analysis highlights the capacity of the corporatist regime to resist change in current wage relativities and effectively block attempts made to challenge the status quo. This article describes how wages are macro‐political, shaped by political processes, negotiations, power relations and vested interests of central stakeholders within the Finnish corporatist regime. The analysis focuses on the problem representations through which the actors articulate either their attempt to increase wages or to maintain the status quo, which makes their vested interests, as well as politics, visible.     

Corporate social responsibility and conflicts of interest in the alcohol and gambling industries: a post‐political discourse?

The corporate pursuit of social goals – known as Corporate Social Responsibility or ‘CSR’ – has been subject to critique on a number of grounds. However, a hitherto underexplored potential consequence of CSR has been suggested in a recent paper by C. Garsten and K. Jacobsson (‘Post‐Political Regulation: Soft Power and Post‐political Visions in Global Governance’ (2013), Critical Sociology 39: 421–37). They suggest that CSR is part of an international trend towards ‘post‐political’ governance discourses, where an emphasis on different actors’ common goals obscures conflicts of interest, subverting the open political conflict necessary for a well‐functioning democracy. This paper examines whether such post‐political discourses – including an outright denial of conflict of interest – can be found within the alcohol and gambling industries, where conflicts of interest are likely to be particularly acute given the addictive nature of the goods/services in question. Based on interviews with CSR professionals in these industries in Italy, the UK, and at EU‐level, we do indeed find evidence of a post‐political discourse. In these discourses, alcohol/gambling industry staff deny potential conflicts of interest on the basis that any small benefits from sales to a small number of addicts are seen to be outweighed by the reputational damage that addicts cause. Crucially, however, this coexists with another, less post‐political discourse, where addictions CSR professionals emphasize ‘common ground’ as a basis for CSR, while accepting some instances of possible conflict of interest. Here interviewees make considerable efforts to differentiate good (sustainable) from bad (short‐term) self‐interest in order to stress the genuineness of their own actions. We conclude the paper by considering whether CSR embedded within a ‘common ground’ discourse still hides conflicts of interests and subverts democratic debate, or overcomes the problems identified by Garsten and Jacobsson.     

Education and occupational status in 14 countries: the role of educational institutions and labour market coordination

This article explores the role of national institutional factors – more specifically, the level of skill transparency of the education system and labour market coordination – in accounting for cross‐national differences in the relationship between education and occupational status. Consistent with previous research, our findings suggest that skill transparency is the primary moderator. Countries with a highly transparent educational system (i.e., extensive tracking, strong vocational orientation, limited tertiary enrolment) tend to be characterized by a strong relationship between education and occupational status. These findings hold even after controlling for the level of labour market coordination. Nevertheless, we also find that labour market coordination plays an independent role by dampening the effect of education on occupational status. Taken together, these results suggest two quite different policy implications: (1) strengthening the skill transparency of the education system by increasing secondary and tertiary‐level differentiation may strengthen the relationship between education and occupation, regardless of the level of coordination, and (2) increasing labour market coordination could lead to improved social inclusion and a reduction in inequalities related to educational attainment.     

Sport and globalization: transnational dimensions

Abstract The aims of this special issue are to both raise the social scientific status of sport and to advance understanding of transnational processes through the role of sport in global change. The Introduction argues that sport, like globalization, can be understood in transdisciplinary terms, and the papers included contributions informed by sociology, anthropology, political sciences and history. As well as placing the issue in the context of recent studies of sport and globalization, the Introduction outlines the seven papers. Placed together they move from analyses of broader globalizing and multi‐sport issues towards consideration of how transnational processes impact upon individual sports – with examples from cricket, baseball and association football – ending with regional and national dimensions.     

Collective Action,Everyday Protest,and Lived Religion

The conflict in 2001 at the Kukdong (now Mexmode) maquila garment factory is one of the rare cases of success in the wider struggle for independent unionism in Mexico. The success of the struggle, which has attracted scholars interested in the campaigns against sweatshop labour conditions and on behalf of labour internationalism, has been attributed chiefly to the role played by transnational advocacy networks in mobilizing pressure on the global sportswear giant Nike, whose brand-name, collegiate apparel was being produced in the plant. In this paper we seek not to explain why the struggle was successful, but to examine the trajectory it took over a protracted period of about nine months. We draw on McAdam et al.'s reformulation of the analysis of contentious, transgressive politics to identify three mechanisms that were particularly salient in shaping the course taken by the conflict: scale shift, actor decomposition, and brokerage. Scale shift occurred as the workers quickly escalated the conflict by broadening their demands from the resolution of particular concrete grievances to a demand for freedom of association that made the existing corporatist union, the FROC-CROC, which had a signed a protection contract with the plant's management, the principal target of opposition and challenge. Actor decomposition occurred as the workers' strategy locally and transnationally sought to isolate the FROC-CROC by detaching it from other members of the corporate–state bloc (Kukdong management, Nike, and the local political authorities). Brokerage, finally, occurred as Nike in particular was used to mediate pressure from the workers' transnational supporters (principally labour rights NGOs and the anti-sweatshop movement) on Kukdong and the local political authorities to respect the workers' right to freedom of association, which resulted in the ouster of the FROC-CROC as the legally certified union at the factory and its replacement with an independent union (SITEMEX) formed by the workers themselves.     

Local Labour Markets,Organizations and the Distribution of Family‐responsive Benefits in the USA

Family‐responsive benefits have important consequences for workers balancing work–family demands. Previous research on the distribution of family‐responsive benefits has focused on intra‐organizational determinants or general labour market characteristics, at the expense of local labour market factors. We address this deficiency by analysing a unique random sample of US work establishments nested in their local labour markets. Specifically, we ask whether, net of establishment and local labour market characteristics, women's local labour market standing influences the prevalence of family‐responsive benefits. The results indicate that women's labour market status, measured with a composite of occupational gender integration, aggregate educational attainment and percentage of women in managerial roles, has a strong positive net effect on the prevalence of family‐responsive workplace benefits. However, no significant interaction between women's status and establishment‐level characteristics was found. Our findings highlight the importance of local labour markets in the distribution of family‐responsive benefits across organizations.     

Doing gender in segregated and assimilative organizations: Ultra‐Orthodox Jewish women in the Israeli high‐tech labour market

Ultra‐Orthodox Jewish (haredi) women in Israel, who are traditionally expected to be both mothers and breadwinners so as to allow their husbands to immerse themselves in religious studies, are recently entering the high‐tech labour market in both segregated and assimilate organizations. This segmented labour market allows the constructed and intersectional character of doing gender in organizations to be examined, which in turn may also effect the ways in which such labour segmentation continues to develop. In 2014–2015, we administered a questionnaire to 119 haredi women working as computer programmers in assimilative and segregated organizations, and interviewed 42 of them as well as 16 of their managers. We describe the emergence of a dual pattern of employment with its benefits and disadvantages regarding pay, satisfaction, commitment and burnout. Findings are presented concerning the balancing of work and family as well as the professional/social conflict that is accentuated by working in an assimilative organization. Our findings show how the intersection of work, religiosity, class and gender is central to women's labour trajectories and identities, highlighting both the boundaries of gendered arrangements and their negotiability. We conclude by discussing how specific strategies of doing gender in segmented labour markets play out in/against ‘global’ norms of work and professionalism.     

The TUC,foreign labour and the labour government 1945–1951

In the early period of the Labour Government of 1945–1951, the British economy underwent a serious crisis, one dimension of which was a severe labour shortage in sectors identified as essential to national economic recovery. In an attempt to resolve this problem, the Labour Government recruited foreign labour from a number of different European sources, but was also required to gain the consent and co‐operation of the trade union movement for this initiative. This paper documents and explains the evolution of the policy of the Trades Union Congress towards this initiative, and the opposition that this stimulated within the trade union movement.     

Hip‐hop cultures and political agency in Brazil and South Africa

It is assumed in the article that the contemporary urban condition is marked by an increased pluralistic intensity in cities. Coupled to this shift in the nature of the urban context, one can also observe a proliferation of sites of political engagement and agency, some of which are formally tied to the various institutional forums of the state, and many that are defined by their insistence to stand apart from the state, asserting autonomy and clamouring for a self‐defined terms of recognition and agency. This article draws attention to the significance of one category of urban actors – hip‐hoppers – that can be said to occupy a ‘marginal’ location in relation to the state, but one uniquely relevant to the marginalised existence of most poor black youth in cities of the global South, particularly Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town. The article demonstrates that hip‐hop cultures offer a powerful framework of interpretation and response for poor black youth who are systemically caught at the receiving end of extremely violent and exploitative urban forces. The basis of hip‐hop's power is its complex aesthetical sensibility that fuses affective registers, such as rage, passion, lust, critique, pleasure and desire, which, in turn, translates into political identities, and sometimes agency (i.e. positionality), for its participants. In the final instance, the article tries to link conclusions about the potential of hip‐hop cultural politics to larger themes in urban studies, such as participation, public space, citizenship and security.     

Transnational political action and ‘global civil society’ in practice: the case of Oxfam

The term ‘global civil society’ has taken on increasing significance within scholarly debate over the past decade. In this article we seek to understand transnational political agency via the study of a particular transnational actor, Oxfam. We argue that various schools of thought surrounding the global civil society concept, in particular the prevailing liberal‐cosmopolitan approach, are unable to conceptualize transnational political action in practice – due largely, in the case of liberal‐cosmopolitanism, to a shared normative agenda. We also assess what contribution literature on development and civil society has made to the analysis of groups such as Oxfam. In investigating Oxfam's own perceptions of its context and the meanings of its agency, we discover an anti‐political perspective derived from an encounter between Oxfam's longstanding commitment to liberal internationalism and globalization discourse. Existing scholarship has insufficiently identified the local or parochial nature of the identities of global civil society actors.     

Everyday politics,social practices and movement networks: daily life in Barcelona's social centres

The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals. Exceptions have explored collective identity, ‘free spaces’ and prefigurative politics, but such processes are framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence. This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and politicizing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres. Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The variety of political forms – adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non‐activists. An approach which focuses on practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive.     

Cross‐border,cross‐ethnic,and transnational networks of a trapped minority: Israeli Arab citizens in Tel Aviv‐Jaffa

In this article, I provide a framework for studying the transnational networks of minority members as a political phenomenon. I make two claims. First, it is necessary to take into account the state and its capacity to limit transnational networks if one is to capture, analytically, the full range of such networks. Second, it is important to extend the theoretical framework of transnationalism to include populations other than migrants and to account for networks established by national minority members whose loyalty to the state can be challanged. I offer a typology of networks organized along two major axes – the state in‐border–cross‐border axis and the ethnic or religious identity axis. These two axes yield different types of in‐border and cross‐border, intranational and transnational networks. I base these claims on an analysis of four case studies of cross‐border and cross‐ethnic networks maintained by Israeli Palestinian citizens in Tel Aviv‐Jaffa.     

Rethinking the governance of labour standards in South–South regional value chains

The growth of intra‐regional trade in the Global South begs the question of whether frameworks developed for the study of North–South global value chains can be used to study labour standards in emerging South–South networks. Critical of the structuralist approaches characterizing the literature, in this article I tackle the question of how formal and informal institutions interact to shape labour standards in South–South regional value chains. This is achieved in two stages. In the first part of the article, I build on Habermas's theory of communicative action to frame labour standards as the outcome of agents’ interactions within and across firms, politico‐administrative institutions and workers’ private and public spheres. Drawing on this framework, in the second part of the article I compare labour standards across the Kenya handbag and footwear sectors. While, in the former, interaction across informal institutions favoured an inclusive and consensual debate between workers and employers; in the latter, an overwhelming process of marketization and bureaucratization failed to provide an interactive space for workers’ concerns to be voiced and negotiated.     

Firefighters across frontiers: two fire brigades cooperating in the Dutch–German borderland

This article focuses on boundaries as symbolic constructs to overcome structural impediments to cooperation in a borderland constituted by two nation states – Germany and the Netherlands – that, from a global perspective, may be regarded as close cultural neighbours. Empirically, the vicissitudes of cross‐border cooperation are analysed at the level of a Dutch and a German fire brigade in adjacent borderland villages. The diminishing visibility of borders does not necessarily lead to more openness, but gives rise to the emergence of socially constructed symbolical boundaries, which has major effects on issues of national identity and loyalty within organizations operating in trans‐border spaces. Cultural differences can complicate processes of transnational coordination, harmonization, and negotiation. However, cooperation and trust, based on an affinity with a local culture in borderlands, may provide a more stable fundament for successful common ventures than do regulations enacted by state authorities. Addressing the question of how processes of transnationalization affect inter‐organizational cooperation, this article describes and analyses the ways in which European integration, national bureaucracies and cultural similarities and differences form partly converging and partly conflicting forces in cooperative efforts in the Dutch–German borderland.     

A multidimensional employment quality index for Brazil, 2002–11

In countries where informal, insecure jobs are widespread, traditional labour market indicators – such as the unemployment rate, labour force participation rate and wages – are not necessarily the most meaningful. The authors use a multidimensional employment quality index to analyse the Brazilian labour market over the period 2002–11, across three dimensions: earnings, formality (measured by the existence of an employment contract and social security contributions) and job tenure. The results show a significant increase in employment quality overall, especially in the years 2009–11, but with considerable differences between wage employees and self‐employed workers, and between industries.     

Changing family structures of Nepalese transmigrants in Japan: split‐households and dual‐wage earners

Abstract Based on surveys and interviews conducted in Japan and Nepal, this study of Nepalese labour migration to Japan examines the changing patterns of family responses to international migration, the increasing participation of married women in the global labour force, and the implications of these changes for households, communities and the Nepalese economy. The split‐household family has long supported sojourning males of Tibeto–Burman linguistic groups as Gurkha soldiers in Indian and British Armies before returning to Nepal upon retirement. As women have increasingly left Nepal to take advantage of overseas employment, a pattern of husband–wife migration has emerged, with children being left in the hands of relatives – the dual‐wage earner family. Thus, Nepal has recently witnessed the development of transnational families and individuals whose work, residence and life trajectories extend beyond the nation‐state.