Market, Class, and Employment

McGovern, Patrick; Hill, Stephen; Mills, Colin; White, Michael

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199213375.001.0001

Cited by 137 publications

(134 citation statements)

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“…On the other hand, however, (other or the same research?) other research has also highlighted how, conversely, cost, delivery and quality pressures can more indirectly lead suppliers to marketise (McGovern, et al, 2007) their employment conditions through worsening working time arrangements, increased casualisation, intensified workloads, and reduced staffing levels, pay and other employment conditions.…”

Section: Inter-organisational Relations In the Scottish Social Care Mmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Service Outsourcing and its Employment Implications in an Era of Austerity: The Case of British Social Care

Cunningham

James

2014

Competition & Change

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Utilising an institutional, inter-organisational and inter-personal framework, longitudinal qualitative data are used to examine the changing nature of statevoluntary sector relationships in the area of social care outsourcing and its implications for the terms and conditions of those employed by Scottish voluntary organisations. Over the period 2002 to 2008/09, against the background of funders seeking to pass on efficiencies to voluntary organisations, these relationships have become increasingly cost-based and 'arms-length'. This has been accompanied by downward pressures on staff terms and conditions, which are intensifying because of more draconian public expenditure cuts. Consequently, voluntary sector employers are increasingly converging on an employment model based on low pay and more limited access to sickness, pension and other benefits that is informed strongly by narrow financial logics.

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Section: Inter-organisational Relations In the Scottish Social Care Mmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Service Outsourcing and its Employment Implications in an Era of Austerity: The Case of British Social Care

Cunningham

James

2014

Competition & Change

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“…With respect to the former, financialization has undermined the conditions for stability and investment by non-financial corporations, leading to employers not being able to 'keep their side of the bargain' (Thompson 2003) and 'breaches of trust' with stakeholders (Appelbaum, Batt and Clark 2013). In this context, high performance from employees is more likely to be the result of compliance deriving from the disciplinary effects of market conditions than engagement 13 and discretionary effort (McGovern et al 2007). Within large organisations, the tendency for HR initiatives to be framed as values-led organisations has made discrepancies with actual corporate practices more visible (Cushen and Thompson 2012).…”

Section: Dis/engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contemporary work: Its meanings and demands

Findlay

Thompson

2017

Journal of Industrial Relations

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The questions that social scientists ask concerning the meaning of work can be initially separated into what work wants from us and what we want from it. The former relies on identifying recurrent objective trends in how we are managed and rewarded, the kinds of jobs that are being created and the challenges they do or do not offer, and how secure or precarious they are. The latter tends to focus on subjective measures of satisfaction, (dis)engagement, attachment and identity. Both are highly contested in academic research and public discourse.Not so long ago there was considerable optimism about emergent work trends in post-industrial service or knowledge economies, with its symbolic analysts, self-programmable workers, creative class and immaterial labour. At the same time, we hear repeatedly about the growth of zero hour contracts, stagnant or declining real wages, rising levels of work stress and punitive performance regimes. Tech giants such as Amazon are embarrassed by exposures of 'bruising' work cultures at its offices and warehouses. Meanwhile, pessimistic discourses of a 'crisis of work' are predicated not just on gloomy forecast about a new wave of automation, but of a generalised precariousness and proliferation of 'bullshit jobs ' (Srnicek and Williams 2015;Mason 2015).What about the subjective side? As we illustrate in a later section, there seems to be some support for prognoses in reports of falling employee engagement levels and rising cynicism at work.However, survey research still picks up high levels of employee self-reported satisfaction with their work. For all the talk of the end of work society or identity, employees, even in routine jobs, draw satisfaction from aspects of their work such as social interaction with customers and workmates (Kalleberg 2009;Doherty 2009). Female workers' satisfaction levels are higher than men's despite unequal treatment (Bolton and Houlihan 2009), with Hochschild (1997) reporting that some employees, especially women, are choosing longer hours because they 'love their work'. 2How do we explain these apparent paradoxes? Research questions are not random. We have to choose what, who and where to study. One distorting factor is that social theory frames our understanding of work trends, yet such theorising frequently gains prominence through the promotion of novelty or binary opposition between the old or new rather than more grounded, qualified accounts. One aspect of this is the identification of 'exemplary' industries -in the recent period web design or games -that supposedly lead economic and workplace change. There are indeed some very interesting developments, but there is a certain amount of digital delusion in the view that they tell us much about typical trends. Though games is a multi-billion dollar industry, it employs fewer than 10,000 people in development in the UK. Glasgow City Council alone has 20,000 employees. Supermarkets and care services, with their mostly female, low paid workforces, are amongst the largest job growth sectors in many cou...

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“…1 The NS-SEC categories along with the underlying job characteristics emphasised by the model and resulting employment relationships are summarised in Table 1. [ Previous research has demonstrated the NS-SEC schema and precursor models have had strong construct validity in terms of various job characteristics such as difficulty of monitoring and asset specificity strongly predicting membership to schema categories (Evans and Mills 1998;Evans and Mills 2000;McGovern et al 2007). Additionally, previous research has also demonstrated class categories show considerable criterion validity in terms of being predictive of various aspects of employment relations such as earnings, the provision of fringe benefits, unemployment risks, and control over work processes (Evans 1992;Evans and Mills 1998;Goldthorpe and McKnight 2006;McGovern et al 2007;Rose and Pevalin 2003).…”

Section: The Theoretical Basis Of the Goldthorpe Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

An old model of social class? Job characteristics and the NS-SEC schema

Williams

2016

Work, Employment and Society

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This article explores the relationship between the job characteristics underlying the Goldthorpe model of social class (work monitoring difficulty and human asset specificity) and those underlying theories of technological change (routine and analytical tasks) highlighted as key drivers for growing inequality. Analysis of the 2012 British Skills and Employment Survey demonstrate monitoring difficulty and asset specificity predict National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) membership and employment relations in ways expected by the Goldthorpe model, but the role of asset specificity is partially confounded by analytical tasks. It concludes that while the Goldthorpe model continues to provide a useful descriptive tool of inequality-producing processes and employment relations in the labour market, examining underlying job characteristics directly is a promising avenue for future research in explaining dynamics in the evolution of occupational inequalities over time.

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Market, Class, and Employment

Cited by 137 publications

References 0 publications

Public Service Outsourcing and its Employment Implications in an Era of Austerity: The Case of British Social Care

Public Service Outsourcing and its Employment Implications in an Era of Austerity: The Case of British Social Care

Contemporary work: Its meanings and demands

An old model of social class? Job characteristics and the NS-SEC schema

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