Work and Occupations

Contemporary youth typically experience considerable floundering and uncertainty in their transition from school to work. This paper examines patterns of schooling and working during adolescence and the transition to adulthood that hasten or delay an important subjective marker of transition to adulthood: acquiring a job that is recognized as a "career." We use Youth Development Study data, obtained from a prospective longitudinal study of 9(th) graders. Estimation of discrete-time logit models shows that adolescent work patterns during high school, as well as the cumulative investments they make in work and schooling in the years following, significantly influence this milestone. Time-varying predictors, including job characteristics and parenthood, also affect the process of movement into "careers".

This study revisits the relationship between adolescent judgments about work and later job characteristics, tackling the twin temporal dimensions of age and history. Drawing on 15 consecutive cohorts of high school seniors, we examine 1) whether adolescents' judgments about work become more strongly predictive of the characteristics of their jobs as they move through their twenties, and 2) whether the relationship between adolescents' judgments about work and their later job characteristics has weakened across cohorts of high school seniors between 1976 and 1990. Findings indicate a limited role of history; the larger life course story of these findings is tied to age. Adolescent judgments about work, measured in the senior year of high school, became more predictive of earnings with age during this period of the life course. They were also most predictive of the level of intrinsic job characteristics at the oldest age we examined, but the pattern was not one of progressive strengthening with age as it was for earnings.

Using in-depth interviews with 74 men across different ranks in biology and physics at prestigious US universities, we ask to what extent changing norms of fatherhood and a flexible workplace affect men working in a highly male-dominated profession and what variation exists in family forms. We conceptualize four typologies of men: those forgoing children, egalitarian partners, neo-traditional dual-earners, and traditional breadwinners. Findings suggest male scientists hold strong work devotions yet a growing number seek egalitarian relationships, which they frame as reducing their devotion to work. The majority of men find the all-consuming nature of academic science conflicts with changing fatherhood norms.

Since the 1980s, major U.S. corporations have embraced diversity as a management strategy to increase the number of women in top jobs. Diversity management programs include targeted recruitment, hiring, and promotions policies; mentoring programs; affinity groups; and diversity training. Few of these programs have proven effective in achieving gender diversity in the corporate world, despite their widespread popularity. To explore the reasons for this, the authors investigate the experiences of women scientists in the oil and gas industry who are targeted by these programs. In-depth interviews reveal possible reasons why these programs fail to achieve their intended goals. The authors find that these programs can paradoxically reinforce gender inequality and male dominance in the industry. The authors discuss alternative approaches for addressing gender inequality in work organizations and conclude with implications of their findings for corporate approaches to promoting diversity and for future research.

A compelling, but unsubstantiated, argument for paid sick leave legislation is that workers with leave are better able to address own and family member health needs without risking a voluntary or involuntary job separation. This study tests that claim using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and regression models controlling for a large set of worker and job characteristics, as well as with propensity score techniques. Results suggest that paid sick leave decreases the probability of job separation by at least 2.5 percentage points, or 25%. The association is strongest for workers without paid vacation leave and for mothers.

Migration and occupational change in the contemporary United States are often explained as reflecting an impersonal market process whereby geographic differences in wages and salaries motivate persons to overcome a reluctance to change both jobs and place of residence. Little is known about job-related migration in which employers directly control this process by linking employment and opportunity structures at origin and destination locations. Based on the 1973 to 1977 Annual Housing Surveys of the United States, about 800,000 household heads were relocated annually by their employers. This suggests that the rate of relocations has doubled since the early 1960s. The income and education levels associated with relocated household heads indicated that job transfers are most likely to occur among the higher socioeconomic status occupations but nonetheless appear to be frequent at all levels. The increasing frequency of job transfers suggests the increasing use of direct labor allocation and corporate management through socialization and selection. Further research on corporate relocation practices and policies is suggested.

Studies of immigrant labor market incorporation in the unregulated sector of the US economy either assume that immigrant workers are trapped in low-wage jobs because of low human capital, or paint a picture of blocked mobility because of exploitation and discrimination. In this paper we offer a third sociological alternative to understand processes of occupational mobility and skill learning. Drawing on work histories of 111 immigrant construction workers, we find that many immigrants are skilled, having come to their jobs with technical skill sets acquired in their home communities and their previous U.S. jobs. We further find that these less-educated immigrants, who rank low on traditional human capital attributes but high on work experience may circumvent exploitation and build mobility pathways through skill transference, on- the- job reskilling, and brincando (job jumping).

How are professionals responding to the time strains brought on by the stress of their higher status jobs? Qualitative data from professionals reveal (a) general acceptance of the emerging temporal organization of professional work, including rising time demands and blurred boundaries around work/ nonwork times and places, and (b) time work as strategic responses to work intensification, overloads, and boundarylessness. We detected four time-work strategies: prioritizing time, scaling back obligations, blocking out time, and time shifting of obligations. These strategies are often more work-friendly than family-friendly, but "blocking out time" and "time shifting" suggest promising avenues for work-time policy and practice.

We document changes in the gender composition of jobs in a large American bank. This change was occasioned by a restructuring initiative that created new positions. Through interviews with employees and direct observation of work in four geographic regions, we identify five factors that underlie the process of resegregation: managers built gendered assumptions into the new jobs; managers framed employees' choices based on these assumptions; employees responded to these cues and to the characteristics of the jobs; management made job assignments that were consistent with both their assumptions and employees' choices; and both managers and employees developed shared gender norms associated with the new positions.

This article uses a nine-year period of work-life history data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991-1999) to examine married/cohabiting women's work trajectories. In particular, it tests some major contentions of Hakim's (2000) preference theory. Both supportive and opposing evidence for the theory has been found. First, concurring with Hakim's arguments, women who have followed a home-career path hold consistently more home-centred attitudes over time than women who have been committed to their employment careers. Moreover, it is found that presence of dependent children has little or no negative effect on a work-centred woman's chance of being engaged in full-time work. But the findings could not rule out the possibility that women's employment careers are still constrained. The most work-centred women (as revealed in their gender role attitudes in the nine-year period), despite having been committed mostly to a full-time work, still have displayed a certain degree of discontinuity in their career pursuits. Finally, contrary to corollary of the preference theory, the relationship between gender role attitudes and women's participation in labour market work is reciprocal rather than unidirectional. That is, women's work orientation is endogenous to their labour market experiences.

Although new mothers are more likely than ever to be in the labour force, the time around childbirth is a dynamic one, with women quitting work altogether or changing jobs to accommodate the demands of their infants. The passage of Family and Medical Leave legislation during the 1980s and early 1990s may have altered incentives for employment among mothers of young children. This paper will examine whether the FMLA or prior state-legislated leave packages were associated with changes in the continuity of employment for mothers following childbirth, changes in return to their previous employer, and changes in their post-return versus pre-return earnings. Data come from the 1984-1997 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its 1997 Child Development Supplement. Women who had a child post-FMLA return to work more quickly than those whose child was born prior to the FMLA, controlling for demographic factors and the state economic situation. Women who return are also more likely ... Les mères qui viennent d’avoir un enfant sont plus que jamais susceptibles d’occuper un emploi, mais la période qui précède et qui suit cette naissance est une période d’évolution, certaines femmes arrêtant de travailler ou changeant d’emploi pour mieux concilier leurs obligations professionnelles et maternelles. Il se peut que la promulgation de la législation sur les congés de maladie et les congés pour raison familiale (Family and Medical Leave Act, FMLA) pendant les années 1980 et au début des années 1990 ait eu une incidence sur les incitations à travailler des mères de jeunes enfants. Ce document s’efforce de determiner si la FMLA ou les dispositions relatives aux congés adoptées antérieurement par les Etats ont induit des changements dans la continuité de l’emploi des mères après une naissance, leur retour auprès de leur précédent employeur et leur rémunération avant et après leur retour au travail. Les données sont tirées d

The year 1974 marked a rupture in the study of labor. It was the year in which Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital was published, making a break with a moribund industrial sociology. It was a rupture inspired by the resurgence of Marxism, critical of the euphoric sociology of the 1950s. Since 1974, labor studies have undergone a mutation, shifting their focus from the examination of the labor process to an engagement with the labor movement. What explains this in light of the continuing assault on labor and the decline of overall union density? The answer lies with the transformation of the labor movement itself—the demise of the old industrial, business unionism and the growing strength of New Labor with its orientation to the service sector, to immigrant and vulnerable workers, and its invention of novel organizing strategies. In New Labor, sociologists have found a new public.

This study examines certain changes taking place within the occupational world of commercial fishermen in the United States. An ethnographic description of fishing in Bristol Bay, Alaska, is provided. This fishery is regarded as an exemplar of “modern” fishing and is shown to contrast sharply with “traditional” fishing. Some of the more critical social and economic features of fishing as an occupation are translated into analytic variables for comparative purposes. Finally, some consequences of observed variations within the occupation are discussed with attention directed to the prospective future faced by fishermen.

Three theoretical perspectives have been identified: the Intrinsic Satisfaction model, the Instrumental Satisfaction model, and the Extrinsic Satisfaction model. These perspectives were compared in a study of 218 employees in an employee-owned company. Results indicate the greatest support for the Instrumental Satisfaction perspective, in which ownership affects employee attitudes primarily through providing greater perceived influence and control. Additional support was found for the Extrinsic Satisfaction perspective, with employee attitudes affected by the financial value of ownership. No support was found for the Intrinsic Satisfaction perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Analyzed male–female differences on general job satisfaction, work role centrality, and work place preference by administering a questionnaire to 96 male and 79 female Israeli industrial workers (primarily 20–56 yrs old). Findings show that when personal and technological factors were controlled, females did not differ from males in their job satisfaction. Females had lower work role centrality; this difference occurred predominantly for younger, unmarried, and Middle-Eastern females. All Ss reacted similarly in their work role centrality to differences in the technological setting, but males did so more strongly. Job satisfaction and work role centrality were correlated in all Ss. Work role centrality was more responsive to personal characteristics and to technological conditions than was job satisfaction in all Ss. The least satisfied and work-centered females had no work place preference; this response differed in males. Findings are discussed in relation to a socialization to industrial work "thesis and for situational variables." (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Outlines some of the synergies that can occur between the concepts and concerns of criminological and workplace studies. The authors identify promising lines of integration by examining some specific examples of research that integrate the study of crime and the study of workplace issues and elaborate on some of the macro-, meso-, and microlevel concepts and perspectives in the study of work and organizations that can inform the study of crime. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

This paper assesses the association between migration (both international and internal) and the employment status and earnings of young noncollege-educated native white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and immigrant white-collar and blue-collar workers in the United States during the decade from 1980 to 1990. We seek to determine (1) whether internal and/or international migration contributed to the increased joblessness observed for blacks, Asians, and Hispanics in the 1980s, particularly among males, and (2) whether migration contributed to the decline in the hourly wages of both native and immigrant workers in the 1980s. We present results which only partly support the claim that internal migrants and immigrants are substitutes for native workers. On the one hand, we find that migration (flow) was not a major factor associated with the increased joblessness and decreased wages experienced by some native groups during the 1980s, particularly among blue-collar workers. On the other hand, we d...

Examined the extent to which men and women look for different things from their work, measured by intrinsic and extrinsic work orientations, and the degree to which they exhibit different levels of job satisfaction. Three explanations for gender differences in work orientation, focusing on job, family, and social characteristics, are evaluated using multivariate analysis of closely comparable national data collected in nine Western European countries in the early 1980s. Findings indicate that the extent to which men and women differ on job satisfaction and work value is limited and thus suggest that models that attempt to explain gender differences in work orientation may be in need of revision. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Sociologists and historians of medicine have documented the under representation of women as physicians in the United States during the critical period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and have speculated on the barriers to women’s greater access to the profession. To date, however, there has been no quantitative analysis of factors that may have hindered or facilitated women’s efforts to become physicians. Using data on 48 U.S. states from 1880 to 1920, this article explores the relative effects on women’s share of physicians of conservative gender culture, male physicians’ opposition to women as colleagues, and nursing as an alternative occupation. These analyses demonstrate that women were less common in states with conservative gender cultures, male physicians’ actions in opposition to women had little impact (net of other factors), and nursing was not an alternative occupation that attracted women who might otherwise have considered medicine as a career.

This article addresses two questions: First, why is Black unemployment persistently higher than White unemployment? Second, how can this fact be reconciled with narrowing Black/White differentials in educational attainment, occupational position, and earnings? We show that the persistent racial gap in unemployment is due to differential access to employment opportunities by region, occupational placement, labor market segmentation by race, and labor market discrimination. Our findings showing that the racial gap in unemployment is greatest for college-educated men and are consistent with the view that Blacks still encounter barriers to employment in the labor market.

Benefits that enable employees to manage better their work and personal lives are an important form of compensation offered by some but by no means all organizations. Using data from the 1996 National Organizations Study, the authors test three theoretical perspectives (internal economic, external economic, and institutional pressures) on the existence of four family-friendly benefits in U.S. establishments. These theories are not opposing, and the authors find support for each: Different benefits are provided in response to different pressures. Furthermore, although most organizations had one familyfriendly benefit in 1996, these benefits have not been universally adopted.

The relationship between American working women and the U.S. labor movement can neither be easily described nor categorized. In part, this is because women’s participation and experience in the labor movement differ so greatly across industry, region, union, occupation, and ethnic background. But mostly, it is a consequence of the inevitable contradictions that arise when the proportion of women in the labor movement continues to grow at an escalating pace, whereas for most unions and labor federations, the proportion of women in top leadership and staff positions has increased incrementally at best, even in unions where women predominate.

In recent years, a number of academic papers have argued that over the last couple of decades, technical change has had a polarizing impact on the employment structure of advanced capitalist economies with a relative expansion of jobs occupying the top and bottom of the wage/skills hierarchy and the middle shrinking. In this article, we present alternative evidence on the nature of change in European employment structures between 1995 and 2007, arguing that rather than a pervasive process of polarization there was a plurality of patterns of structural employment change across Europe. The broader theoretical implications of such findings are discussed.

In Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, Arne Kalleberg examines the institutional changes in the United States that led to a polarization of income and job quality, a rising share of poor quality jobs, and the increasing precariousness of work across the educational spectrum. He proposes reversing these developments through a new social contract that builds on the design principles that underlie flexicurity policies in the Netherlands and Denmark—flexicurity with an American face. This article discusses the roots and promise of flexicurity to address the problems Kalleberg has identified. It also examines the limits to flexicurity and proposes additional policies to fulfill this promise.

This study partially tests the argument that in occupations where internalized altruistic values dominate performance considerations, employee dissatisfaction at work may not necessarily lead to withdrawal behavior. The Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) was used to measure satisfaction with both intrinsic and extrinsic facets of work in a sample of 139 social workers. Data on duration and frequency of absence were obtained from personnel files. The absence of a relationship between satisfaction and absenteeism supported the research hypothesis. Avenues for further investigation on professional commitment are suggested.

This article reports a study of aggregate unit salary levels, within a major research university. We analyze these salary levels, as they are influenced by unit sex composition, and modified by unit attainment levels—where unit refers to the departments, colleges and schools, and other academic divisions of the university. We investigate three central issues of sex and salary, previously overlooked in salary studies of academic employees: Do high proportions of women depress men's unit salary levels ("competition" hypothesis)? Are women's salary levels higher in male-dominated, and lower in female-dominated, units ("concentration" hypothesis)? Are men salary-compensated for working with women ("compensation" hypothesis)? The findings support none of these hypotheses. Rather, the relationship between unit sex composition and salary rests upon the connection between units' composition and attainment levels. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69126/2/10.1177_073088848100800103.pdf

In contrast to previous work, our study considers both meaning and mediation factors in the achievement-aspiration relationship. In a sample of graduate students ("academic-career aspirants"), we examine sex differences in the achievement- aspiration relationship as they vary with type of academic achievement and professional aspirations, and as it is mediated by individuals' perceptions of their professional roles and their faculty's support. We find: (1) Women's achievement-aspiration conversion is different from, but not necessarily lower than, men's. Rather, the strength and direction of the relationship vary with aspiration type (traditional versus alternative) and, to some extent, with specific types of academic achievement (e.g., paper publication and GPA). (2) The mediators of the achievement-aspiration relationship also vary by sex and aspiration type. Notably, women's aspirations for traditional career rewards are largely a function of their perceptions of the structural availability of job opportunity.

This study focuses upon the effect of intra-university location as it influences the salaries of academics, as it differs for men and women, and as it relates to sex-typing of university locations. The findings indicate the greater importance of intra-university location in determining the salaries of academic men compared to women. However, certain patterns do emerge for both sexes. Namely, for some types of locations, the salary returns are dependent primarily upon attainment levels; for others, they are not; and in almost all cases these effects are more marked for men. Moreover, we discern a particular pattern of salary returns to sex-typed location. That is, for both sexes, certain same sex-typed locations are advantageous, and opposite sex-typed locations are generally disadvantageous, although again the effects are stronger for men than women. In conclusion, the article discusses implications that these observed patterns have for the operation of sex-disparity in salaries within the academic institution. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69108/2/10.1177_0730888485012002004.pdf

This study, based on data from a large nationally representative sample of Canadian workers with disabilities, examines the relationship between employment arrangements and the accommodation of disability in the workplace. We address whether workers with disabilities in nonstandard arrangements are more likely to have unmet accommodation needs and if other key dimensions of precarious employment mediate the relationship between nonstandard work and accommodation. Results from multivariate models suggest that despite disability legislation, practices of workplace disability accommodation parallel the unequal distribution of other labor market protections, with workers in more precarious arrangements (i.e. those in nonpermanent, low-wage, and nonunion jobs) at greater risk of having unmet needs.

This report describes the educational, occupational, and familial behavior a panel of sixty-four women exhibited during the first seven yearsfollowing their college gradua tion. Their career patterns are compared with the aspirations they held as seniors in college. The findings reveal high consistency between senior aspirations and actual behavior on some items, e.g., mariage and graduate school, but less consistency on others, including occupational choice. Generally the women worked more often and had children less frequently than they had anticipated. The actual life style patterns of these women and their aspirations for the future result from the fact that women pursue a contingency strategy in organizing their adult lives.

The public and nonprofit sectors are known for providing enhanced employment opportunity to women, persons of color, and parents. The authors ask whether the same is true for workers without college degrees, examining sectoral differences in access to jobs offering fringe benefits, full-time hours, and schedule flexibility. The authors find that the influence of sector and union representation on job quality varies by type of benefit. For example, among public and for-profit employees, union representation is positively associated with benefits availability. Nonprofit employees of either union status have less access to full-time hours, and schedule flexibility is comparably available to all but unionized for-profit workers.

This article examines the need for and use of leaves designated by the Family and Medical Leave Act. Using national data, we show that women, parents, those with little income, and African Americans are particularly likely to perceive a need for job leaves. However, it is married—not single—women and Whites who are particularly likely to take such leaves. The authors suggest that this disjunction between need and use is a consequence of the construction of leave policy—that it provides for only short, unpaid leaves for a narrow slice of workers and those politically constructed as “family”—and the unresponsiveness of workplaces. These limits likely reinforce inequality based on gender, race, and family status.

According to Bronfenbrenner (1979, 1986), each individual simultaneously participates in several “microsystems” that influence development, for example, the family, school, peer group, and workplace. Of central concern here is how the increasing prevalence of “youth work” may affect parent-adolescent relationships. The findings of a 3-year study of adolescents (n = 1,000) and their parents (925 mothers, 650 fathers) indicate that youth work has some significant effects on familial relationships. The findings also suggest gender differences in the linkage of youth work and family life.

Researchers and policy makers have treated adolescent work experience as a unidimensional phenomenon and have ignored possible differences among jobs along the very dimensions of working posited as developmentally significant: opportunities for learning, initiative and autonomy, and interaction with others. Behavioral observations support the hypothesis that different work settings expose adolescent workers to substantially different experiences. The six job types differ on all indices of opportunity for initiative and autonomy and half the indices of opportunity for social interaction. But, work settings differ little in opportunities for learining and provide few such opportunities. The implications of the place of work experience in the socialization and education of youth are discussed.

This article studies how participation norms affect workers’ willingness to strike. A factor analysis on the responses of 468 Dutch union members about appropriate behavior during a strike produces two factors. The first factor reflects a “solidarity norm” favoring group solidarity; the second factor reflects a norm about the treatment of defecting colleagues, which we call the “free-rider-punishment” norm. Using OLS regression, we show that adherence to these norms significantly affects union members’ willingness to strike, controlling for group identification, and past participation in strikes. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of how solidarity and free-rider-punishment affect future participation.

We draw on a two-wave panel survey and a third wave of in-depth interviews to study how 78 dual-earner couples prepared for job loss and the implications of preparation for resilience. We find personal and social resources predict preparation: those displaced workers who prepared had higher energy and higher incomes prior to job loss and also worked for employers who provided advance notification. Couples’ egalitarian career strategies are associated with lower levels of preparation as well as limited options in the face of displacement. Less preparation is associated with less favorable career adjustments following job loss as well as more severe health and emotional challenges.

Ample scholarship suggests that unauthorized immigrants are more likely to face occupational hazards because their lack of legal status makes them more vulnerable to workplace abuse. Despite much research documenting how legal status affects wages, employment, and job stability, few studies have empirically analyzed impacts of legal status on the employment conditions of hired farmworkers. In this article we examine whether unauthorized farmworkers are more likely to handle pesticides and receive pesticide training. We use the National Agricultural Workers Survey, a data set that distinguishes between unauthorized, authorized, and citizen workers. Results from descriptive statistics and multivariate analyses suggest, contrary to expectation, that unauthorized legal status is associated with a reduced likelihood of handling pesticides or receiving training for pesticides. This finding is bolstered by results for control variables associated with unauthorized status, such as age and U.S. agricultural employment experience. Taken together, the results are consistent with labor market segmentation theory that suggests jobs encompassing occupational hazards are allocated to or held by more experienced workers who are better compensated for the risks they undertake.

Existing theories of the effects of relative numbers, and especially tokenism, on worker behaviors and attitudes are reviewed. Despite the absence of specific reference in the literature to worker alienation as an outcome of token status, an argument is presented drawing upon this research tradition and discussions of marginality to link this dependent variable to tokenism. In addition, often neglected status considerations are included to predict directionality in that linkage. Findings suggest that relative numbers play a minimal role in worker alienation. Some limited support for the relevance of status concerns is found, but only in sex tokenism. Absolute size appears to have negligible effects. It is suggested that theories of tokenism may need to define more narrowly the occupations to which they apply and also delineate other, more social psychological variables that may intervene between numbers and attitudes.

As well as hiring workers who are members of the kibbutz and who, therefore, are owners of the means of production, some kibbutz factories have hired workers who are not kibbutz members. Our hypotheses, drawn from the writings of Marx and others, suggest both “individual” and “contextual effects” of ownership on alienation. At the individual level, hired workers will feel more alienated than kibbutz workers. Similarly, at the contextual level, persons in factories where some workers are hired will feel more alienated than will persons in factories that do not include hired workers whether or not the persons are themselves hired workers. These hypotheses imply intervening variables such as influence by workers that are examined through a path analysis. The analysis indicates only individual effects of ownership on feeling of alienation although ownership does have a contextual effect on aspects of the participativeness of the factor. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68436/2/10.1177_0730888487014002003.pdf

Social movement scholars have increasingly focused on the importance of the cultural-symbolic dimensions of collective contention. Conceptual and empirical studies of mobilization (and countermobilization) employing a framing perspective have become a growth industry. In this article, the author expands our purview of the symbolic-representational repertoire employed in collective contention and conceptually distinguishes between counterframing, counternarrating, and counterimagining as strategic forms of symbolic characterization employed by oppositions against social movements. The author illustrates these ideas by focusing on the countercontention against labor during the Gilded Age. All three symbolic countering strategies—framing, narrating, and imaging— were employed by business and cultural elites against labor as it was becoming a national-level movement during the last several decades of the 19th century. However, extended narratives (e.g., novels and partisan quasi-histories) and pictorial art produced an intelligibility distinct from, if not unrelated to, frames because they have the capacity to feature (a) movement or active presentation over time; (b) detailed characterization of actors; and (c) collective representation in allegorical-political terms that specified the evils of important emergent categories, like the transformation of “the good worker” into “the bad worker.” The author concludes that students of the labor movement (and social movements more generally) would benefit by augmenting analyses of frames to include allegorical-political uses of narrative and pictorial art forms as well.

Training has long been of considerable interest to both policy makers and to researchers. This collection addresses future skill and competency demands and then takes up specific topics regarding program strategies and target groups. Each chapter is well done but the book invites larger questions about the nature of the American employment and training system. In answering this question, we need to go beyond the topics emphasized in the book because important issues, such as immigration or the role of community colleges, are given inadequate attention. In addition, although a major theme running throughout the book is the need for a more coherent and comprehensive system, the fact is that this complaint is very long-standing yet very little has happened in response. Why the U.S. system has its particular characteristics is a key question requiring deeper analysis.

The industrialization of developing countries has fundamentally transformed work, employment, and labor for millions. Despite the industrialization of most of the developing world, we present evidence that Latin America has experienced stagnating industrial employment in the past few decades. Benefiting from recently available data on industrial employment as a percentage of total employment from 1980 through 2006, we analyze fixed-effects models for 20 Latin American countries. Specifically, we examine three theoretical explanations: productivity/comparative advantage, institutionalism, and dependency/world-systems. Our analyses demonstrate that the prevailing productivity/comparative advantage explanation has limited value. By contrast, we find supportive evidence for a combination of institutional and dependency/world-systems variables. In particular, the stagnating industrial employment share in Latin American countries has been driven by the negative effects of (in order of magnitude) the Mercosur trade agreement, mineral and ore exports (as a percentage of total exports), the duration of the current political regime, military spending (as a percentage of GDP), and inward foreign direct investment flows (as a percentage of GDP).

This article explains the reemergence of North American midwifery in terms of the role of ideology. An ideology is a set of beliefs by which a social group makes sense of its environment and which those groups manipulate in order to project images of themselves. I analyze the ways that two particular ideologies-science and feminism-have been used by midwives and their supporters in their struggles to legitimate midwifery in the health care systems of Canada and the United States. The rhetoric of science has been used in establishing the safety of home birth and natural childbirth, and feminist principles and rhetoric often underlie claims about midwifery made by midwives and their advocates. Although both nurse midwives and independent midwives have used these ideologies to legitimate their occupational boundary claims, they have been more important to independent midwives' struggles for occupational legitimacy.

This essay uses the book Agitate! Educate! Organize! American Labor Posters to explore the changing ways the American labor movement has expressed itself culturally. These representations tell us a great deal about how unions saw themselves, their tactics, and their place in American society.

U.S.-born Asian Americans are unique among American minority groups in that they lack earnings disadvantages relative to Whites with similar education levels. Controlling for education and age, there is little difference in the earnings of U.S.-born Asian and White men, but Asian women have higher earnings than comparable White women. Using data from SESTAT, this study tests the hypothesis that Asian American women’s high earnings may result from adjusting their labor supply less than White women in response to parenthood, leading to greater work experience over time. Findings show that Asian American women are less likely than White women to reduce labor supply in response to parenthood and that their resulting greater work experience explains their high rate of earnings growth.

Building on agency and power theories, this study addresses the relationship between bonuses and promotions. The author tests whether these incentives are traded off, reflecting a balance between insurance and incentive provisions in employment contracts. Analyses of data for 8,549 employees of a financial firm support no trade-off: Individuals' who earn bonuses are more likely to be promoted than those paid on a salary-only basis, after controlling for performance. This finding holds across different occupations and is especially strong for managers. Because employees in higher levels benefit most from multiple rewards, power explanations best describe the incentive mix observed here.

This article examines the relationships among extensive interaction with others on the job, occupational status, and the experience and expression of anger in the workplace using data from the 1996 General Social Survey and occupational characteristic measures from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. The findings indicate that individuals who spend much of their time interacting with others at work report experiencing workplace anger more frequently than other workers. The expression of anger was found to be associated with interacting with people at work, occupational status, and relative status. Individuals who deal with people at work are likely to discuss their experienced anger with someone other than the anger target, whereas individuals working in highly esteemed occupations are more likely than lower status workers to confront the target of their anger directly.

This article revisits Hunter’s (1991) culture wars thesis and applies it to an institutional arena that has received comparatively little attention in the culture wars debate—the contemporary American workplace. The authors ask to what extent cultural divisions originating in four broad cultural domains (i.e., social equality, social freedom, multiculturalism, and gender equity) permeate the workplace and impact workers’views of the property rights of jobs. That is, do cultural values originating in the larger society affect workers’evaluations of managerial prerogative to make unilateral decisions in the best interests of the firm without regard to workers’ claims to their jobs? Or, conversely, do such cultural values shape workers’sense of job entitlement that jobs should be protected in times of changing technology, declining demand for a firm’s product, or other organizational and market imperatives? The authors use data from the Indiana Quality of Employment Survey to examine several hypotheses surrounding this debate. The results suggest that the relationship between cultural values and specific, work-based ideologies are more complicated than Hunter’s original formulation might suggest; that is, there are complex and nonobvious relationships between these four domains of American cultural life and workers’ views concerning job entitlement. These relationships are not significantly mediated by organizational and occupational characteristics normally associated with workplace attitudes. The results speak to broader debates about the role of structure and culture in the sociology of work and the complexity of the ideological landscape of American working life.

Two sets of variables (affective reactions to attributes of the hospital nurse's job and attributes of the nurse) were predicted to be related to organizational commitment. Regression analysis was applied to the statistically significant correlates (satisfaction with work itself, supervision, promotional opportunities, and coworkers; and age, basic nursing education, adherence to Protestant work ethic ideals, and a gauge of family responsibilities) found in a sample of 131 registered hospital nurses. The model was cross-validated in a second sample of 130 nurses; 42% of the variance in commitment was explained by the model. The theoretical and practical significance of the findings is discussed.

Arlie Hochschild is one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her many contributions include her research on emotion and emotion work, the gender division of labor in the household, work–family relations, and the global dimensions of carework. A less visible aspect of Hochschild’s career involves her efforts to nurture, encourage, and engage those inspired by her work. This essay examines Hochschild’s influence as revealed in a new book on work and family life edited by two of her former students. The book offers a look at “Hochschildian sociology” as practiced by those who have expanded and built on her ideas.