Arne L. Kalleberg

Arne L. Kalleberg
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | UNC · Department of Sociology

PhD

About

273
Publications
113,433
Reads
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26,197
Citations
Additional affiliations
July 1986 - present
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Position
  • Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology

Publications

Publications (273)
Article
Large and rising earnings and employment inequalities in countries such as the USA and the UK pose fundamental questions for social scientists and challenges for policymakers. Mainstream economists have explained these outcomes mainly in terms of competitive market forces, particularly the mismatch between technology-driven demands for skills and t...
Article
Does working in a low-wage job lead to increased opportunities for upward mobility, or is it a dead-end that traps workers? In this article, we examine whether low-wage jobs are “stepping-stones” that enable workers to move to higher-paid jobs that are linked by institutional mobility ladders and skill transferability. To identify occupational link...
Article
Full-text available
Precarious work is universal, though its forms and consequences vary across countries due to institutional, cultural, and historical differences. This article reviews recent research on precarious work from a global perspective, emphasizing the comparative and interdisciplinary research needed for a comprehensive understanding of the structural tra...
Article
The prevalence of nonstandard jobs is a matter of concern if, as many assume, such jobs are bad. We examine the relationship between nonstandard employment (on-call work and day labor, temporary-help agency employment, employment with contract companies, independent contracting, other self-employment, and part-time employment in “conventional” jobs...
Article
Social Forces is the second oldest sociological journal in the United States that has been published continuously under the same name. Founded in 1922, it has been housed since then in the Sociology Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Social Forces focused on the South early on, was affiliated with a regional sociol...
Article
The hundredth anniversary of Social Forces is an opportune time to look back and reflect on its history. During the past 100 years, Social Forces evolved from a journal focused on Sociology and Social Work—providing information on these disciplines and their activities, containing news and personal narratives and taking stands on controversial issu...
Article
The issue of inequalities in job quality, and their trends over time, has been at the centre of theory and research in the sociology of work since its inception. In the first three decades of the post-war period the focus was primarily upon class inequality. In more recent decades, inequalities of gender and contract type have also become central c...
Article
This Handbook offers an interdisciplinary and international benchmark text for anyone wanting to understand job quality. Job quality matters and has long done so. Debate about the future of work today centres on the impact of the new digital technologies, compounding existing concerns about the restructuring of employment and, importantly, prolifer...
Article
Full-text available
We examined the differences among seventeen European countries regarding the extent to which several key institutional and labor market characteristics affect the degrees of insecurity that people feel about their jobs and employment prospects, as well as their well-being (economic security and subjective well-being). We estimate how macrostructura...
Chapter
Organisations and their establishments are often said to ‘act’ as if they were people, but to what extent does this analogy hold true? Do they act as collective actors? How does that work? Who plays what role in this respect? Can corporate actors be held to account? These philosophical questions have practical relevance in the context of firms and...
Chapter
Workers in precarious jobs are more likely to be poor. Inequality between regular and nonregular workers and for informal workers remains high even when the social wage, including benefits and social protections, is considered. The relationship between nonregular work arrangements and labor market outcomes such as wages, inequalities, and poverty i...
Chapter
Chapter 4 documents the growth in nonregular work arrangements in Japan and South Korea and the salience of the informal economy in Indonesia. These trends are discussed in terms of dualisms: nonregular versus regular work especially in Japan and South Korea, and informal versus formal work in Indonesia. For Japan a key trend is the expansion of no...
Book
This book assesses the role of global and domestic factors in shaping precarious work and its outcomes in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia as they represent a range of Asian political democracies and capitalist economies: Japan and South Korea are now developed and mature economies, while Indonesia remains a lower-middle income country. The author...
Chapter
Chapter 3 discusses the ways in which global and domestic factors have intersected to produce the growth of precarious work and inequality in these three countries. The discussion identifies how exogenous factors—neoliberalization and the dynamics of global capitalism, and the processes of hyperglobalization, production, and investment—and endogeno...
Chapter
Chapter 6 discusses labor politics in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. The emphasis is on responses by labor, civil society, and governments to precarious work, inequality, and poverty. In Japan the political dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party and a union focus on regular workers has made it difficult for unions to press for labor laws and...
Chapter
This chapter summarizes our conclusions about precarious work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia and indicates their implications for current and emergent issues, such as automation and the platform economy. It also considers possible changes resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The need for comprehensive social protections to help people cope w...
Chapter
The chapter presents our conceptualization of precarious work, which includes nonregular work, informal economy work, and self-employment. Precarious work results from the interplay between the dynamics of global and regional capitalism and the relations between the state, business, and labor in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. Who works in preca...
Chapter
Chapter 2 offers an overview of the three countries included in this study: Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. The patterns of economic development, political dynamics, and relationships with the global division of labor are summarized for the three countries up to the early 1990s. The three countries industrialized at different times, and such dif...
Article
This paper discusses the evolution of the sociology of work in the United States in the post-World War II period. We conceptualize the sociology of work broadly, as the study of jobs and organizations as well as its links to social stratification and inequality, political economy, and worker power, among other topics. We identify eight major enduri...
Article
Labor market uncertainties have plagued all countries in recent years, but young workers have borne the brunt of these uncertainties. Liberalization of labor markets has transformed work, creating a variety of nonstandard employment relations as well as increasing the number of people who do not have traditional employers. Macro social, political,...
Chapter
In January 2018, about 17 percent of the workforce in the United States had a part-time job. Part-time employment increased between 1955 and the 1980s as large numbers of women entered the workforce. Since then it has fluctuated in response to rising and falling unemployment. The majority of part-time workers are between 24 and 60 and about two-thi...
Article
This book brings together leading international authors from a number of fields to provide an up to date understanding of part-time work at national, sector, industry and workplace levels. The contributors critically examine part-time employment in different institutional settings across Europe, the USA, Australia and Korea. This analysis serves as...
Article
This article examines how processes of aging, generational shifts, and changes over historical time periods shape differences in work values in the United States. Our analyses of data from the General Social Survey and the International Social Survey Program show that changes over historical time periods are most consistently responsible for differ...
Article
Retaining the most valuable employees is a core priority of professional service firms (PSFs). Our study addresses turnover (quit) among employees in a PSF that hires lawyers, auditors, and management consultants. We examine the extent to which the decision to quit varies by professions, skills, and job satisfaction in a PSF in Norway. The analyses...
Article
Precarious work (i.e., work that is insecure and uncertain, often low-paying, and in which the risks of work are shifted from employers and the government to workers) has emerged as a serious concern for individuals and families and underlies many of the insecurities that have fuelled recent populist political movements. The impacts of precarious w...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter assesses the global evidence on major factors influencing the future of work.
Article
Intragenerational mobility - persistent or secular upward or downward changes in individuals' economic positions or occupational standing over their working lives - is intimately related both to intergenerational mobility and inequality as well as to labor market theories and behaviors. Careers are job sequences or patterns of mobility/immobility w...
Article
Using General Social Survey data from Japan and the US (N = 5101), we examine the effect of non-standard or non-regular work status on men’s fertility. We employ a cross-national comparative approach to explore how this relationship differs both within and across the two countries. Consistent with features of the Japanese context which make it chal...
Chapter
An organizational survey assembles data on the characteristics or attributes of a large number of organizational entities by administering interviews or questionnaires to organizational informants or participants. Data collected may pertain to entities ranging from teams or departments to entire establishments, multi‐establishment firms, or interor...
Article
Full-text available
The evolution of community colleges from their origins as junior colleges to institutions with dual missions to provide both academic and workforce preparation raises questions about the impact of a college’s mission focus on their students’ labor market success. We examine this question using the 58 colleges in the North Carolina Community College...
Article
Employees of professional service firms (PSFs) have attachments to multiple groups, which may be either compatible or conflicting: their employer, their clients and their profession. We analyse the antecedents of commitment to these three foci based on a survey of 510 employees in a large PSF in Norway. The main findings are as follows: (1) low qua...
Article
Employment has become increasingly precarious in developed countries, meaning that, for many young adults, jobs provide neither benefits nor security, more work is part time, and employers are increasingly hiring workers from temporary help agencies and contract companies rather than as employees of their own company. These changes in employment re...
Article
Objective The labor market success of community college students depends on both the attributes of individual students and the characteristics of the community colleges they attend. In this article, we examine the impact of community college characteristics on the earnings of first-time college students who enrolled in the North Carolina Community...
Chapter
Employment relations are implicit or explicit contractual arrangements that specify the reciprocal expectations and obligations linking employers and employees. They encompass a wide range of phenomena, including work organization, governance, evaluation, and rewards. During the past quarter century, the standard employment relationship that was no...
Article
Private equity (PE) firms are a key actor in the increasing financialization of the economy since the 1980s and have had profound effects on the nature and consequences of work. Private Equity at Work by Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt provides a timely and comprehensive overview of what PE is, how it makes money, and how it affects the companie...
Article
In this article we examine job quality and job satisfaction among employees of temporary help agencies (THAs) in Norway. Temporary workers are subject to triadic employment relations as they are employed by the THA but directed by the client organization; characteristics of both of these organizations may affect job satisfaction directly and indire...
Article
Full-text available
Frontline healthcare worker jobs are among the fastest growing occupations in the USA. While many of these are 'bad jobs' with low pay and few benefits, the intrinsic nature of frontline work can also be very rewarding. This article examines the influence of extrinsic job characteristics (e.g. wages and benefits) versus intrinsic characteristics (e...
Article
This article briefly recapitulates the social, economic, and political factors that led to the rise and consolidation of precarious work in various countries in Asia and the definition of “precarious work.” The article then considers the utility of precarious work for describing the growth of work that is uncertain and insecure and in which risks a...
Article
Full-text available
Job quality is a timely issue because of its potential impact on individual, firm and national well-being. This renewed interest underscores the need for robust conceptualization of job quality. This article provides background to the renewed interest in job quality and, drawing on the contributions to the Special Issue, starts to map the dimension...
Article
This article examines changes in workers' work values for the period 1973-2006 using General Social Survey data. We assess the relative importance that workers assign to high income, as opposed to security, advancement, short hours and "importance and sense of accomplishment." The latter ranked highest throughout this period, but the relative prior...
Article
This article discusses the social, economic, and political factors that led to the rise and consolidation of precarious work in various countries in Asia. We first define what we mean by “precarious work” and its utility for describing the growth of work that is uncertain and insecure and in which risks are shifted from employers to workers. We the...
Article
In this article, the author engages with the authors of the articles in this Special Issue by clarifying some aspects of the arguments in Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s; addressing selected matters of controversy; and highlighting central policy challenges raised by...
Chapter
This chapter considers subjective well-being at work—both perceived security and job satisfaction. Recent changes in U.S. economic organization have made employment more precarious. Jobs are viewed as less secure than in past decades, after adjusting for cyclical variations in unemployment. Insecurity appears to have grown fastest among the upper s...
Article
This book assembles a team of leading researchers to provide unparalleled insight into how American social attitudes and behaviors have changed since the 1970s. Drawing on the General Social Survey—a social science project that has tracked demographic and attitudinal trends in the United States since 1972—it offers a window into diverse facets of A...
Article
This volume of Social Forces marks the 90th anniversary since it was founded in 1922 by sociologist Howard W. Odum. He served as editor until 1954; a full list of editors is provided in the front matter of this and every issue of Social Forces. The first article to appear in the journal was by Franklin H. Giddings, on the topic of “The Measurement...
Article
This volume of Social Forces marks the beginning of our new publishing relationship with Oxford University Press. Until recently, the University of North Carolina Press had published Social Forces since it was founded in 1922 by pioneering sociologist and social activist Howard Odum. We are grateful to the UNC Press for their support over these man...
Book
Good Jobs, Bad Jobs provides an insightful analysis of how and why precarious employment is gaining ground in the labor market and the role these developments have played in the decline of the middle class. Kalleberg shows that by the 1970s, government deregulation, global competition, and the rise of the service sector gained traction, while insti...
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Full-text available
This article examines cross-national differences and trends in perceived job quality, defined in terms of five dimensions — extrinsic rewards, intrinsic rewards, work intensity, working conditions and interpersonal relationships — as well as overall job satisfaction. We analyse country differences in 1989, 1997 and 2005, using data for four countri...
Article
To what extent did the increase in wage inequality among men in the United States over the past three decades result from job loss and/or employment instability? We propose a simple method for decomposing the change in wage inequality into components due to upward and downward between-employer mobility and within-employer wage changes using data on...
Article
Full-text available
Occupations are central to the stratification systems of industrial countries, but they have played little role in empirical attempts to explain the well-documented increase in wage inequality that occurred in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. We address this deficiency by assessing occupation-level effects on wage inequality using data fro...
Article
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