Work,Employment and Society

It has been argued that people's engagement with work is becoming more like a series of encounters than an enduring relationship. In this article we address the question of whether this fragmentation is characteristic of people in the early stages of their working lives by drawing on a study of young adults in Bristol. We conclude that there is a core of young adults who are employed in a relatively stable pattern, along with a sizable minority, mostly of low paid workers, whose working lives can be described as discontinuous and fragmented. The study suggests that employment fragmentation is concentrated among young adults with less education, and in lower status, lower paid occupations and does not support a generalized picture of uncertainty and discontinuity.These employment patterns among younger people tend to highlight the continuing significance of long-standing social divisions of socio-economic advantage and gender-related disadvantage.

This article considers data from a qualitative study of discipline and misconduct in nursing. It outlines the ways in which the study can inform our understanding of changes in the control of nursing work. Specifically it considers evidence for work intensification in nursing and contrasts this with policy pronouncements, which have proclaimed that nurses have been empowered by recent changes. The study found that empowerment often implied increased responsibility accompanied by tightened control. Some nurses described their managers as ‘seagull’ managers and the article elaborates what was meant by that term. The four key features of seagull management were: distance, distrust, destructive criticism, and a defensive culture.

Based on semi-structured interviews with 47 present and former professional footballers, this article explores the uncertainty that is a central feature of the professional footballer's workplace experiences, contributing to sociological understanding of insecurities stemming from the social relations of this type of work.The professional football industry has always been marked by a competitive labour market, and players quickly grasp the limited tenure of contracts, the constant surplus of talented labour, and their vulnerability to injury and ageing.To deal with the feelings of insecurity that arise from these working conditions, players develop networks of a) friends to whom they can turn if they perceive their status to be under threat, and b) dramaturgical selves(Collinson, 2003) in order to maintain stable, masculine workplace identities. Addressing feelings of uncertainty is an everpresent dimension of their working lives.

Surprisingly perhaps, knowledge about occupational groups within academia is relatively scant, with an almost exclusive concentration upon teaching staff. The research upon which this article is based aims to fill this gap by focusing upon one specific group, which, to date, has been under-researched: research administrators. Utilizing primarily symbolic interactionist analyses, and based upon qualitative interviews, the project sought to investigate the occupational life-worlds of research administrators.The wide range of roles and divergent responsibilities covered by the title of ‘research administrator’ emerged as salient features, together with the boundary-crossing, ambiguous nature of much research administrative work.The article examines in particular the ‘identity work’ (Prus, 1996) undertaken by research administrators as they seek to resist categorization as ‘mere nonacademics’, and to counteract social invisibility. Administrative–academic relations were also found to constitute a core element within administrators' occupational life-worlds, and the article considers how the putative administrative/academic boundary is often problematized by research administrators.

The article examines the workplace sources of sex-based and gendered pay differentials in professional labour markets. Solicitors are among the highest paying professionals, yet women solicitors receive on average only 58 percent of the earnings received by men solicitors, well below an 82 percent average for all British employees in 1999. From survey data we find that women solicitors have fewer prospects of promotion, and receive lower rewards than men for both promotion and experience. From interview data we find that sex-differences in access to reputation-building activities generate qualitative differences in participation (specifically, in carrying out legal work not chargeable to a client) which are consistent with differential outcomes found in the survey data.

Policy makers place increasing emphasis on the importance of lifelong learning in enabling more people, not just the registered unemployed, who are out of the labour force to move back into employment, or even into employment for the first time. However, there is very little reliable evidence on the economic effects of formal learning undertaken by adults. This article reports research on a cohort of British women in their 30s who initially were not in employment, using event history analysis to examine the factors which influenced transitions into employment between 1991 and 2000.The key finding is that, in the presence of a full range of controls, lifelong learning, defined in terms of obtaining qualifications as an adult, substantially increases the likelihood that labour-market inactive women will make a transition to paid employment.

There is a strong effect of childbirth on female labour supply.This effect, however, is changing over time.This article uses panel data on the last two decades on three European countries (the Netherlands, Germany, the UK) to study changes in female labour force behaviour around childbirth and tries to find an explanation for these changes by looking at differences between the three countries.We conclude that there are substantial differences in participation patterns between the three countries in our study and that policy measures and institutions such as childcare that make the costs of combining work and family lower relative to being a full-time mother seem to increase female participation rates.

Australians work comparatively long hours and, in recent years, most of the growth in per capita working hours has come from workers already employed full time.Yet, despite the problems long working hours can cause, this trend has not attracted political attention. Increasingly, the Australian working time regime is a weak regulator of working hours and promotes only limited equality between the working hours of men and women. This article uses responses from the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003 to investigate whether workers' preferences are in accord with regime institutions. We find that people who work long hours are no less inclined than those who work standard hours or part time to see working hours as a choice and they do this despite more often reporting that their work interferes with family life and that employers expect long hours from them. We contend that seeing long working hours as a choice may be the product of the ‘liberal’ working time regime itself. Multivariate analysis of the responses suggest that structural pressures work to strengthen perceptions that there is a problem with long working hours and prompt the belief that long hours are not freely chosen. Implications of these findings tell us something about possible future regulation.

In recent years the ore-rich region known as the Pilbara, in north-western Australia, has been the site of intense struggles over the regulation of labour.Two of the world's biggest resource companies have been pitted against an oftendivided local labour force, but they have not had things all their own way. Drawing on the work of a number of geographers, the article shows how these disputes can be understood more richly than simply as another bout of union recognition disputes. If physical geography – rich ore bodies and isolation from metropolitan centres – or the contest between global capital and local labour are important, they are only the starting points for a textured,‘spatialized’ understanding of capital-labour relationships.The article argues that space is made and argued over in many ways and that there are many scales in addition to the local and the global at which conflicts are constructed and resolved.