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Chinese construction worker alacrity toward mobility
Abstract
In this study, job mobility refers to situations wherein Chinese migrant construction workers frequently change employers, plausibly a principal cause of quality defects, work-safety hazards and poor performance, within the construction-business reality. The study examines job mobility in terms of migrant construction worker willingness to change employers. Gleaned from a field survey and by using a logistic-regression model, a total of 531 questionnaires are assessed, revealing how work tenure, education, daily wages, job-hunting channels, number of workmates, and employment contracts might relate to construction worker alacrity to change jobs. Daily wages and work tenure appear to make the greatest contribution to migrant worker willingness to change jobs, while the effects of employment contract and education seem to be minimal. Despite its limitations, the study offers future research directions and policymaking recommendations toward relieving the informal termination of migrant construction workers in China.
... Nevertheless, the old generation of migrant workers in China did not attach enough importance to family (Liu et al., 2013;Gao et al., 2018;Siu and Unger, 2020). Wang and Liu (2019) studied the impact of psychological contracts on job mobility in the construction industry, especially for migrant construction workers in China. Zhao stated that psychological contracts reflect "individual beliefs, shaped by the organization regarding terms of an exchange agreement between individuals and their organization". ...
The employment psychology of young migrant workers in China has changed drastically in past decades. In particular, the construction industry has been facing labor shortages and aging workforces for years, and the eruption of coronavirus disease 2019 has exacerbated the problem. In contrast, the food delivery business has grown rapidly during the pandemic with a surge in the number of food delivery knights. It is vitally important to understand the employment psychology of the young migrant workers, the main component of the workforce for both industries. The presented study conducted a comparative analysis between construction workers and food delivery knights using data from face-to-face interviews, online social media, and World Value Survey. Results showed that the two groups of young migrant workers have different employment psychology during their job selection, construction workers cared more about income, and food delivery knights paid more attention to autonomy, working environment, and family.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the correction mechanism of resilient safety culture on new generation of construction workers (NGCWs)' unsafe behavior and test the multiple mediation effects of job crafting and perceived work meaningfulness based on the context of Chinese construction industry in order to find a new way to effectively correct the NGCWs' unsafe behavior.
Design/methodology/approach
A theoretical model of correction mechanism was established based on literature research and theoretical deduction. An empirical study was employed based on confirmatory factor analysis and regression analysis with a sample of 404 NGCWs in China.
Findings
The results indicated that resilient safety culture can effectively correct NGCWs' unsafe behavior through job crafting and perceived work meaningfulness. Job crafting and perceived work meaningfulness can play independent and serial mediating roles between resilient safety culture and unsafe behavior.
Research limitations/implications
Research results only represent a short-term law about the correction mechanism of NGCWs' unsafe behavior based on a questionnaire study from China's construction industry. It is necessary to continue to implement a longitudinal study to test it in a relatively long period in future research. The findings also need to be verified based on the young construction workers in other countries.
Practical implications
This study provides a theoretical basis and feasible management reference for construction enterprises in China to correct NGCWs' unsafe behavior from the perspective of resilient safety culture. Furthermore, the construction of resilient safety culture in construction enterprises can help NGCWs better carry out job crafting and perceive the meaning of work.
Originality/value
This paper clarifies the correction mechanism of resilient safety culture on unsafe behavior of NGCWs, and further tests the independent mediating roles and a serial mediating role of job crafting and perceived work meaningfulness between resilient safety culture and unsafe behavior, which fills the research gap about the influence mechanism of resilient safety culture on young construction workers' unsafe behavior and enriches the theoretical system of unsafe behavior correction of construction workers.
China’s construction industry is facing serious problems of aging construction workers and labor shortages. Improving the job satisfaction of construction workers is a key point for retaining existing construction workers and for attracting younger generations into the construction field in China. At present, the new generation of construction workers (NGCW) born after 1980 has been the main force on construction sites in China. Therefore, it is very important to study and explore the influencing factors of the job satisfaction of the NGCW. This paper aims to determine the influencing factors of job satisfaction of the NGCW through literature research and to clarify the interaction mechanisms and hierarchical structures of influencing factors using the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) to design appropriate human resource practices to promote their job satisfaction. Research findings show that there are 12 main influencing factors of job satisfaction of the NGCW, which are at three levels: personal traits, job characteristics and social environment, and the influencing factors can be divided into a cause group and an effect group, including four layers: the root layer, controllable layer, key layer and direct layer in the multi-level hierarchical structure model. Furthermore, the critical influencing factors of the job satisfaction of the NGCW consist of education level, competency, career development, salaries and rewards, rights protection and work–family balance. This research enriches the job satisfaction literature of construction workers and provides an important reference for decision makers in construction enterprises and the construction industry to understand what influences the job satisfaction of the NGCW and how it is influenced to then improve it in China.
Purpose
This study aims to build a framework of the influencing factors of construction workers' career promotion and identifies the critical determinants so as to propose suggestions for the government and enterprises to offer construction workers a path for career promotion.
Design/methodology/approach
In line with the theory of human resources, such as Herzberg's two-factor theory, this study constructs a theoretical framework that affects the career promotion of construction workers. Using evidence from Guangzhou city, valid data provided by 464 workers from 50 sites were collected by a questionnaire survey, and the significance test on the influencing factors of construction workers' career promotion was taken by binary logistic regression.
Findings
The overall career development of construction workers in Guangzhou is worrying. The binary logistic regression indicates that age, working years, type of work, career development awareness, legal awareness, professional mentality, vocational psychological training and career development path are critical factors that affect construction workers' career promotion.
Originality/value
This study for the first time explores the career promotion of frontline construction workers. Specifically, it identifies the critical factors that affect the career promotion of workers and thus lays a foundation for further research and the promotion and continuous and healthy development of the construction industry. Thus, this study is original and has theoretical and practical significance.
In spite of the considerable research on construction labor management, labor resource availability remains a challenge for China’s construction projects. The reason is the separation between contractors and laborers caused by the main labor resource utilization method, namely, labor subcontracting rather than direct recruitment. Service-oriented concept and technology are introduced by multiple industries for the management and optimal allocation of distributed resources, and have the potential to solve the problem of labor resource availability faced by China’s construction industry. However, insufficient conceptual understanding impedes implementation. Accordingly, this research extends the service-oriented concept to construction labor and proposes a conceptual framework for explanation, thereby contributing to the body of knowledge. In this framework, a service-oriented labor resource management model called labor-as-a-service is covered and described from three aspects: organizational relationship, managerial process, and technical framework. A strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis is conducted to preliminarily investigate the potential of the proposed framework. Results show that the conceptual framework suits China’s conditions and has the potential to improve labor resource management.
The increasing pace of globalization and competition for highly skilled professionals have accelerated the international mobility across national boundaries for knowledge exchange and economic reasons. The purpose of this study was to examine the current trend and determinants of migration intentions in China. For this purpose, we carried out a survey in China from 2021 respondents by using a probability sampling technique. For empirical estimation, we employed the logistic regression estimation technique to compute and evaluate the data. In the findings of this study, several push-and-pull factors have been identified for both inflow and outflow of skilled human capital in China. The findings of this study derived that high wages outside China and low wages within China are considered as the top reasons to leave China. In addition, more opportunities and a better lifestyle in the host countries are the key factors to push skilled human capital from China. The results also indicate that better education in the host countries has a positive correlation with migration intentions in China. Therefore, it can be argued that education, wages, more opportunities and better lifestyle are the significant push factors that determine why highly educated people emigrate from China.
BACKGROUND: Financial rewards might not the only way to keep employees’ stay and to have high performance. We attempt to introduce the perspective of psychological contract (PC) to study the employment relationship. OBJECTIVE: This study is based on the Chinese private enterprise context to explore the effect of psychological contract violation (PCV) and explore whether there are generational differences in the organization. METHODS: We adopt PLS-SEM for empirical research evaluation. A total of 313 valid sample questionnaires were taken. RESULTS: The statistical analysis results show that the psychological contract violation has a significant positive impact on turnover intentions. Psychological contract violation also has significant negative effects on in-role performance and organizational citizenship behavior. In the analysis of generational differences for generation Y employees and generation X employees, when facing psychological contract violations, generation Y employees are more likely to have a stronger turnover intention, lower in-role performance, and less organizational citizenship behavior than generation X employees. CONCLUSIONS: The revised psychological contract violation model is confirmed in the Chinese context. There are significant differences in the influence of generational factors on the psychological contract violation model.
BACKGROUND: Despite the obvious importance of emotional labor for employees, organizations, and customers, a lack of coherence and clarity around the construct has impeded its development. OBJECTIVE: Our study aims to provide a comprehensive review of emotional labor spanning about 40 years. METHODS: Our study used a qualitative literature review method along with a theoretically derived path diagram of key emotional labor constructs. We also used meta-analysis to explore the relationship between emotional labor and outcomes in different national contexts. RESULTS: We expect our research to expand the field in five different ways. First, we review contemporary theoretical conceptualizations of emotional labor and its dimensions. Second, we summarize seven existing measures of emotional labor in light of their contents. Third, we map the theoretical and nomological network of emotional labor about its antecedents, outcomes, moderators, mediators. Fourth, we use meta-analysis to explore the relationship between emotional labor and other variables in different contexts. Finally, we conclude by showing a detailed future research agenda to bring the field forward from different perspectives, including theoretical and empirical advancement. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, our review provides a whole picture of where the literature has been and where it should go.
The poor conductivity of sulfur and the "shuttle effect" of polysulfide intermediates have hindered the development of next generation lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries with high energy and low consumption. Herein, novel Co9S8-S composite nanotubes are developed to efficiently alleviate above-mentioned problems. Experiments and theoretical calculations show that Co9S8 has strong adsorption on soluble polysulfides. This can not only restrain polysulfides diffusion and ensure their utilization, but also enhance the intimate contact between the active materials and the conductive substrates to promote the kinetics of conversion reaction. The three-dimensional (3D) conductive network with high surface area formed by interlinking Co9S8 nanotubes further improves the electronic conductivity of the composite cathode. As a result, the Co9S8-S cathode shows a high capacity of 1153 mAh g-1. After 500 cycles, it shows a high capacity of 462 mAh g-1 (2 C) with a negligible capacity decay of ~0.04% per cycle.
BACKGROUND: In the global competition for talent, the highly skilled and professional workers are increasingly being recognized as key drivers for innovation and economic prosperity. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate the wave and determinants of the brain-drain migration of skilled human capital from China. METHODS: We carried out a survey across a few rural and urban areas in China with 2,077 respondents by using a probability sampling technique. For empirical estimation, we employed the logistic regression estimation technique to compute and evaluate the data. RESULTS: The findings of this study suggest that high wages outside China and low wages within China is the top reason to move out of China. Additionally, more opportunities and better lifestyle away from China are key factors to push skilled human capital from China to host country. The findings of our study also indicate that better education abroad has a positive correlation with the brain-drain migration intention in China. CONCLUSIONS: The empirical results of the survey should be a high concern for the policy makers of China. Most survey respondents were young, well-educated and highly skilled, they identified several critical reasons that compel them to migrate from China.
We review seminal publications on employee turnover during the 100-year existence of the Journal of Applied Psychology. Along with classic articles from this journal, we expand our review to include other publications that yielded key theoretical and methodological contributions to the turnover literature. We first describe how the earliest papers examined practical methods for turnover reduction or control and then explain how theory development and testing began in the mid-20th century and dominated the academic literature until the turn of the century. We then track 21st century interest in the psychology of staying (rather than leaving) and attitudinal trajectories in predicting turnover. Finally, we discuss the rising scholarship on collective turnover given the centrality of human capital flight to practitioners and to the field of human resource management strategy.
This book aims to provide a scholarly account of recent understandings and reflections on some of the prevalent and emerging issues in urban and regional China, such as urbanization, inequality, hukou (household registration) reforms, labor relations, not-in-my-backyard protests, and environmental governance. Presenting rich data analysis and case studies, these book chapters together utilize multidisciplinary approaches and contribute to the empirical and theoretical literature in development studies.
After three decades of contributing to the Chinese economy and society, the first generation of rural-to-urban migrant workers is being replaced by a new generation in the urban labour market. The study aims to better depict the nature of the cohort, and thus promotes a better understanding of this group. This study presents a different portrait of migrant workers from previous research because getting urban jobs and wage income has become a means to embrace urban life for new-generation migrant workers, rather than the sole or major purpose of migration. In contrast to their predecessors, these new migrant workers are younger, better educated, less connected to the countryside, and have a broad urban dream. This study draws on original data from interviews of migrant workers, employers, managers and government officials, comparing the two generations and examining their living and working conditions and aspirations in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province. They are in difficulties and confusion caused by a long-standing rural-urban divide, thwarted by institutional barriers and market forces. Investments in rural human capital development, in addition to institutional reform, are needed to address their concerns.
Occupational mobility is one of the hotspots in academic research. The construction worker’s occupational mobility is the key element of affecting the healthy and sustainable development of construction industry in China. Based on domestic and foreign occupational mobility literature, this paper analyze the regional distribution, classic literatures and hotspots about construction worker’s occupational mobility, by Citation Network, Keyword Co-Occurrence and other bibliometrics and qualitative tools. It sort out systematically the development skeleton so that we can grasp the future research directions of occupational mobility. Moreover, it will be important for solving the problem of construction worker’s occupational mobility.
While the career benefits associated with professional networking are relatively well-established, the repercussions of this highly regarded career management activity for voluntary turnover have rarely been examined. Given the potential costs associated with voluntary turnover, the current study sought to clarify the roles of networking behaviors in relation to voluntary turnover by focusing on the distinction between internal and external networking. Based on survey responses of industrial and organizational psychology professionals, we found that internal and external networking behaviors differentially predicted decisions to voluntarily leave employers two years later: The likelihood of voluntary turnover was negatively predicted by internal networking and positively predicted by external networking. Further, to shed light on the reasons why employee networking behaviors differentially predicted turnover decisions, this study also examined four turnover antecedents (job satisfaction, job embeddedness, perceived employment opportunities, and job offers) as potential mediating mechanisms. Results revealed that the relationships of internal and external networking with voluntary turnover were mediated by job embeddedness and job offers, respectively. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding and managing employee networking and retention. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
Statistics suggest that young men and women in China migrate at almost equal numbers, but we know less about gender differences in the decision to migrate. We examine the factors associated with migration decisions and the rationales given by young migrants. Our results are consistent with previous figures and show no overall gender differences in susceptibility to migration. However, we find that a sibship structure operates differently on the decisions of boys and girls. We also found that young men were more likely to report that they had moved for purposes of starting a business or personal development than young women, while young women were more likely to report that they had moved to support the tuition of a family member. We argue that, despite the gender parity of the migrant youth population, gender shapes migration decisions by affecting the family circumstances and migration motivations of men and women.
The construction industry historically is characterised by high levels of labour mobility favouring the recruitment of migrant labour. In the EU migrant workers make up around 25% of overall employment in the sector and similar if not higher figures exist for the sector in Russia. The geo-political changes of the 1990s have had a substantial impact on migration flows, expanding the pool of labour recruitment within and
from the post-socialist East but also changing the nature of migration. The rise of temporary employment has raised concerns about the weakness and isolation of migrant workers and the concomitant risk of abuse. Migrant workers though cannot be reduced to helpless victims of state policies and employers’ recruitment strategies. Findings of the research presented here unveil how they meet the challenges of the
international labour market, the harshness of debilitating working conditions and the difficult implications for their family life choices.
In the Chinese cities, migrants have been treated differently from urban locals in varied aspects because of their rural or non-local hukou (household registration) status. But the existing literature provides little understanding on how migrant workers' welfare entitlements and benefits are affected by discrimination and institution in the urban labour market. On the basis of an extended analytical framework that examines not only the segregation between urban locals and rural migrants but also the segregation between locals and non-locals, this paper investigates the discrimination against migrant workers in employment-based benefits in four megacities. The results show that there are gradient differences in access to overall and individual items of benefits among urban locals, urban migrants, and rural migrants. More than half of the benefit disparities between urban locals and migrant workers are caused by discrimination against the latter, implying that the hukou system still plays a role in segmenting China's urban labour market. Urban migrants and rural migrants suffer similar extent of discrimination when they are compared with urban locals, suggesting that urban labour market segmentation is currently dominated by the segregation between locals and non-locals rather than by the segregation between urban locals and rural migrants that was observed in the earlier stage of reforms. In addition, this study suggests that previous studies focusing on the mean wage may have underestimated the extent of discrimination against migrants. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This article explores the use of contingent forms of employment in two diverse country contexts—the UK and Sweden—and investigates the influence of changing regulatory and economic conditions over a period that covers the current economic downturn. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data for the construction sector, the article addresses three questions. How do employers balance their flexibility preferences in the context of regulatory constraints? How has the global recession influenced employer behaviour? And to what extent can the Swedish experience be explained by convergence on other country models? While the UK employment model encourages employers to externalise the risk of unpredictable market conditions through the use of contingent contracts, the more supportive welfare regime in Sweden underpins a resilient preference of employers for open-ended employment contracts. Ongoing changes in labour market regulation pose challenges to the strongly regulated Swedish model, yet we find only a shared direction of travel with the UK rather than convergence in the use of contingent employment.
The Chinese construction industry is characterised by the frequent job changes of lower-level workers, which has been identified as one of the principal causes of poor performance, quality and safety accidents, and high technology loss in the construction industry. Assuming that each party has incomplete market information about the other, we can thus define a dynamic game relationship between employers’ incentives to retain workers and workers’ mobility behaviour. By using evolutionary game theory, in this study we analyse various conditional evolutionary stable strategies and explore how employer behaviour influences the mobility of the workers in this industry in China. The results show that under the prevailing employment model, construction workers are bound to change jobs regardless of whether their employers adopt incentives to retain them or not. This finding suggests that the government, as the market regulator, should reform its employment model to ensure that construction workers switch jobs in an orderly and rational manner.
Both in developing and developed countries, creative industries have been recently self-developing rapidly, especially in the fashion sub-sector. Creative-firm owners need creative employees, including creative designers, and marketing and production workers. This article examines employee creativity in daily working activities and owners' efforts to build their firms' creativity. Using the case-study approach, the research samples twenty owners of Indonesia's fashion sub-sectors. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and observations. A major finding is that working in fashion sub-sectors requires knowledge, creative attitude and skills, and professional qualifications, moderated by the working environment, human relationships and motivation, and collegial leadership and management. Creative-firm owners too are trying to encourage employee creativity through training on the job and in other institutions, and by hiring professional experts.
Half Title Series Information Title Copyright Dedication Contents Preface
The resource-based view (RBV) of the firm has been consistently used as a backdrop in strategic human resource management (SHRM) research and has the potential to bridge the ‘micro–macro’ divide. The tension between the SHRM and the strategic human capital literature, however, signifies that RBV has not reached its potential. In this paper, we begin with a brief review of the conceptual logic linking human resource management (HRM) practices and firm outcomes that aim at highlighting the different treatment of RBV in the SHRM and strategic human capital literatures. We then propose a conceptual model that suggests that HRM practices are not simple levers that enable firms to create sustainable competitive advantage, as most of the strategic human capital research postulates. On the contrary, we argue that HRM practices can contribute to a firm's sustainable competitive advantage not only by enhancing employees' ability, and offering motivation and opportunities, but also by shaping supply-side and demand-side mobility constraints.
This study uses evolutionary game theory to define the dynamic game relationship between construction employers’ intention to provide trainings and workers’ willingness to attend. Most construction workers live in rural areas, and their skillset is minimal. Therefore, improving their training is critical. The government plays a crucial role in workers’ attendance of vocational skills trainings (i.e. pre- and on-the-job trainings), which provide them theoretical, operative skills, and safety knowledge. The results show that employers do not offer such trainings in the absence of government participation, making such participation indispensable. In the case of government participation, however, employers will do so provided they can benefit from these trainings. Reduced training costs, intensified rewards and punishment incentives by the government for employers, and increased marginal productivity of construction workers motivate construction employers to provide trainings, while reduced opportunity costs and increased wages drive construction workers towards attending them.
Leadership is a key factor impacting construction safety, but previous research merely investigated the single-level relationship between safety leadership and safety performance and ignored the leadership interaction between different project stakeholders. To fill this gap, this paper aims to examine the relationships between safety leaderships of project owners, contractors and subcontractors and discover leadership dimensions which significantly impact construction safety performance. An impacting mechanism involving owner safety leadership, contractor safety leadership and subcontractor safety leadership are hypothetically proposed and empirically tested. The results show that significant relationships exist between safety leaderships of the three key stakeholders. Project safety culture acts as a significant mediator in these relationships. In addition, among all leadership dimensions of owners and contractors, safety influence and role modeling has the widest range of influence on project safety culture and other stakeholders' safety leadership. As such, it is suggested that owners and contractors should cultivate charisma and the ability of being influential about ideals in project managers and require them to behave as role models for others. The results also show that the caring dimension of leadership is more required in the frontline environment. Supervisors need more attention and support from the contractor in their well-being and organizational identification for the project. In conclusion, this paper establishes clear leadership impacting paths from owners to site supervisors of subcontractors in construction projects, which provides insights into effective ways to implement managerial measures and publicize policies and values to construction sites.
Previous research has increased our understanding of organizational commitment; however, few researchers have analyzed the antecedents and consequences of organizational commitment of marketing managers. A structural equation model explaining the organizational commitment of 335 marketing managers was developed and tested. Higher levels of distribute justice, job satisfaction, promotional opportunity and seniority were significant predictors of organizational commitment. Marketing managers intention to leave their jobs was highly influenced by their degree of organizational commitment. Kinship responsibility was not a significant predictor in the model.
In an attempt to probe the nuanced processes of non-unionization, this article analyses the agency of migrant construction workers and the ways they negotiate and navigate an increasingly flexible and pan-European labour market. Drawing upon qualitative interview data, the article argues that the precarious employment context limits opportunities for effective collective action (and unionization), and that workers employ a wide range of strategies to ‘get by’ and ‘get ahead’ instead. This analysis contributes to an understanding of the resilience of current employment relations by extending the discussion of agency with the category of reworking. Instead of challenging the way cross-border employment relations are organized, migrant construction workers employ various strategies that rework existing conditions to their advantage. On a broader scale, however, these practices contribute to the continuation of current employment relations.
Employee turnover has been identified as one of the principal causes of poor performance, low competitiveness and high technology loss in the construction industry. Construction managers normally acquire knowledge and skills in construction methods and management techniques on the basis of long-term practice, and their turnover can significantly impact on a construction organisation's survival and development. Therefore, there has been an increasing need to understand the major critical variables affecting the turnover of construction managers. The aims of this research were to determine these variables and use them to develop a quantitative turnover prediction model. A system framework was first developed to categorise all turnover variables into job satisfaction, organisation commitment and demographic variables and the turnover intention was measured in diverse directions. Based on an empirical study in Hubei province in China, the statistical results indicate that seven job satisfaction and organisational commitment variables dominate the turnover intentions of construction managers.
Drawing on social exchange theory, we developed and tested a cross-level model of organizational-level predictors of job engagement. Specifically, we examined the impact of high-performance human resource (HR) practices on employee engagement and work outcomes. Based on a sample of 605 employees, their immediate supervisors, and HR managers from 130 companies, our results indicated that high-performance HR practices were directly related to job engagement as well as indirectly related through employees' perceived organizational support. In turn, job engagement was positively related to in-role performance and negatively related to intent to quit. Culture was found to act as a critical contextual factor, as our results also revealed that the relationship between HR practices and perceived organizational support was stronger when collectivism was high and when power distance orientation was low. Overall, the findings shed new light on the processes and conditions through which employee work-related outcomes are enhanced owing to high-performance HR practices.
Are workers in China underpaid? And if so, what may be the reasons and by how much? We address these questions empirically by deploying a heteroscedastic stochastic frontier model, using nationally representative household surveys of the period of 2003–2008. We estimate that labour underpayment is approximately 43.7% in this period of assessment, a significantly higher figure than the estimates for Western economies. Underpayment in this period takes a U-shape relationship. Determinants of underpayment were proposed by seven hypotheses and confirmed by bootstrap method, except age discrimination. Test results show that intergenerational effects are the most salient factor for underpayment. At the same time, we construct an index to measure the wage distortion in the labour market. Our findings indicate a general trend in which underpayment is increasing and differs between workers of different demographic characteristics and across regions. Our study contributes to the field by applying three models to capture the differing levels of influence of a range of factors on underpayment in the Chinese labour market.
This article examines spatial politics involved with the remaking of urban citizenship across Chinese cities. China’s emerging urban citizenship is shaped by its hukou system, which not only spatially and socially segregates rural migrants and urban natives in the cities, but also creates a large group of unregistered or ‘illegal’ migrants. This case study of unregistered migrant street venders looks at the implications of their unregistered status and how it has changed over time, shifting from creating benefits to becoming a burden. I capture how unregistered migrants’ lack of status has increasingly become an important basis of exclusion, and a burden, as they are denied access to new legitimate avenues of claims-making such as NGOs, courts and arbitration. This helps explain the increasingly common, and intensifying, clashes between migrant street vendors who are struggling for a right to the city and the chengguan, public security officers who are charged with regulating the streets.
According to Granovetter, weak ties link individuals to other social circles that place them in strategic positions to gain access to job information and opportunities otherwise not available in their innate networks. This paper affirms that weak ties, as a form of social capital, matter and that they assist in explaining variations in status attainment between ethnic groups in Singapore. I show that access to weak ties affects status attainment differently across ethnic groups and that the Malay’s weaker performance in the labour market is partly due to their lower access to weak ties. This paper would be of interest to scholars concerned with the intertwining of social stratification with social capital and ethnicity.
In China, informal precarious work has exploded and now represents a majority of urban employment. This article explores precarious informal work by presenting a case study of migrant workers in the construction industry. Despite the fact that these workers are all unregistered migrants performing informal construction work, there exists a diversity of labour market situations, working conditions and work relations. This article introduces the concept of ‘employment configuration’ to analyse this diversity and to bring informal workers, who are operating outside of state regulations, back into our industrial labour relations framework. The concept of employment configuration also refocuses our attention from the dyadic worker-employer relationship to the more complex triad of the worker, the employer and the state, shedding light on varying sources of control and exploitation of these migrant workers.
Since 2004, the massive flow of surplus rural labour in China has dried up; indeed, the country's eastern coastal region is currently experiencing a “labour shortage”. This phenomenon, which is bound up with China's ongoing economic and social development, has arisen because migrant workers have little or no social security in China. Rather than a labour shortage, there is in fact still a huge rural labour surplus. If the system governing migrant workers' social security and labour rights were improved, this could ease the apparent labour shortage and solve firms' employment problems, thereby increasing productivity and supporting China's long-term economic growth.
From the reviews of the First Edition."An interesting, useful, and well-written book on logistic regression models . . . Hosmer and Lemeshow have used very little mathematics, have presented difficult concepts heuristically and through illustrative examples, and have included references."—Choice"Well written, clearly organized, and comprehensive . . . the authors carefully walk the reader through the estimation of interpretation of coefficients from a wide variety of logistic regression models . . . their careful explication of the quantitative re-expression of coefficients from these various models is excellent."—Contemporary Sociology"An extremely well-written book that will certainly prove an invaluable acquisition to the practicing statistician who finds other literature on analysis of discrete data hard to follow or heavily theoretical."—The StatisticianIn this revised and updated edition of their popular book, David Hosmer and Stanley Lemeshow continue to provide an amazingly accessible introduction to the logistic regression model while incorporating advances of the last decade, including a variety of software packages for the analysis of data sets. Hosmer and Lemeshow extend the discussion from biostatistics and epidemiology to cutting-edge applications in data mining and machine learning, guiding readers step-by-step through the use of modeling techniques for dichotomous data in diverse fields. Ample new topics and expanded discussions of existing material are accompanied by a wealth of real-world examples-with extensive data sets available over the Internet.
This article is based on an ethnographic study of life histories of 28 rural–urban (internal) migrant men located within southern China. It explores their narratives with a particular focus on changing social relations within the family, from the perspective of migrant sons. It argues that traditional gender norms, such as those attached to being a ‘filial son’, are lived out, albeit reworked, among Chinese male migrant workers across generations. The men recount the role of traditional familial gender norms, which are central cultural resources in forging their ‘dislocated’ identities within specific temporal and spatial conditions. For example, being a ‘filial son’ has become an important reference point for these mobile male workers to actively negotiate their emerging masculine identities in the process of negotiating urban lives, while living away from their rural homes. The article also explores a more complex understanding of rural–urban migration in terms of critically engaging with the men's well-being as urban workers.
This study investigated the effects of supervisor and co-worker relationships on the turnover intentions of workers in Korea and China. A U-shaped relationship between supervisor relationships (i.e. leader–member exchange) and turnover intention reported in the studies using western samples has not been replicated in the Asian samples of this study. Instead, each of supervisor and co-worker relationship had a negative and linear association with turnover intentions in China. On the other hand, co-worker relationships had a negative linear relationship with turnover intentions while supervisor relationship did not relate to worker's turnover intention in Korea. The comparison between Korea and China showed that the supervisor and co-worker relationships had stronger influence on turnover intentions in China than in Korea. Discussions and implications concerning the Korean HRM in the global context are offered.
Over the past few decades of economic reform, China's labor markets have been transformed to an increasingly market-driven system. China has two segregated economies: the rural and urban. Understanding the shifting nature of this divide is probably the key to understanding the most important labc market reform issues of the last decades and the decades ahead. From 1949, the Chinese economy allowed virtually no labor mobility between the rural a urban sectors. Rural-urban segregation was enforced by a household registration system called "hukou.' Individuals bom in rural areas receive "agriculture hukou" while those bom in cities are designated as " nonagricultural hukou." In the countryside, employment and income were linked to the commune-bas production system. Collectively owned communes provided very basic coverage for health, education, and pensions. In cities, state-assigned life-time employment, centrally determined wages, and a cradle-to-grave social welfare system were implemented. In the late 1970s, China's economic reforms be but the timing and pattern of the changes were quite different across rural and urban labor markets. This paper focuses on employment and wages in the labor markets, the interaction between the urban and rural labor markets through migration, and future labor market challenges. Despite the remarkable changes that have occurred, inherited institutional impediments still play an important role in the allocation of labor; the hukou system remains in place, 72 percent of China's population is still identified as rural hukou holders. China must continue to ease its restrictions on rural-urban migration, and must policies to close the widening rural-urban gap in education, or it risks suffering both a shortage of workers in the growing urban areas and a deepening urban-rural economic divide.
In this study we examine whether, for a sample of retail chains, high levels of employee compensation can deter employee theft, an increasingly common type of fraudulent behavior. Specifically, we examine the extent to which relative wages (i.e., employee wages relative to the wages paid to comparable employees in competing stores) affect employee theft as measured by inventory shrinkage and cash shortage. Using two store-level datasets from the convenience store industry, we find that relative wages are negatively associated with employee theft after we control for each store’s employee characteristics, monitoring environment, and socio-economic environment. Moreover, we find that relatively higher wages also promote social norms such that coworkers are less (more) likely to collude to steal inventory from their company when relative wages are higher (lower). Our research contributes to an emerging literature in management control that explores the effect of efficiency wages on employee behavior and social norms.
Construction is one of the most hazardous industries due to its unique nature. Measured by international standards, construction site safety records in China are poor. This paper aims to examine the status of safety management in the Chinese construction industry, explore the risk-prone activities on construction sites, and identify factors affecting construction site safety. The findings reveal that the behavior of contractors on safety management are of grave concern, including the lack of provision of personal protection equipment, regular safety meetings, and safety training. The main factors affecting safety performance include ‘poor safety awareness of top management’, ‘lack of training’, ‘poor safety awareness of project managers’, ‘reluctance to input resources to safety’ and ‘reckless operations’. The study also proposes that the government should play a more critical role in stricter legal enforcement and organizing safety training programs.
The objective of the study was to determine the influential safety factors that governed the success of a safety management system for construction sites. The number of incidences among construction workers and the level of awareness on matters concerning safety were also determined. The study involved a self-administered three-part questionnaire among the workers and interviews with industry experts involved in brick-laying, concreting and in related assorted trades. Part A of the questionnaire concerned personal particulars, Part B involved training and experience and Part C was based on 28 industry-accepted safety factor elements. The construction sites ranged from high rise buildings, landed houses and infrastructure renovation. The sample size was 275. From the survey it was found that the most influential safety factor was personal awareness followed closely by communication. Suggestions and recommendations on equipment design and improved work practices and procedures to improve the efficiency and productivity of construction workers were proposed. Management was urged to get their workers better informed about safety matters.
Migration studies analysing firms' recruitment behaviour are quite limited.This article, built around and examining a demand-driven labour migration hypothesis, explores how recruitment decisions by companies can affect international migratory flows. The study focuses on the construction industry, where a foreign (nondomestic, or expatriate) labour force forms a major component. Through a cross-country comparison, we highlight the impact of the characteristics of the sector and of labour market conditions on recruitment decisions impinging on foreign (non-domestic, or expatriate) labour.The article finally suggests a typology of strategies that construction companies may adopt in order to recruit foreign workers, and it analyses those factors that influence the different decisions in each national context. By considering in depth the relationship between recruitment strategies and patterns of international labour mobility, it is then explained why a company's behaviour can either produce immobility or mobility of foreign workers.
China has experienced a huge wave of rural to urban migration over the last 25 years; however, Chinese cities do not have the large-scale slum settlements found in other developing countries. Has China found a new way to solve the housing problems of migrants and the urban poor? This paper addresses this question and reports the findings of a recent research project carried out in Shenzhen City. In general, Chinese migrants are poor in comparison with official urban residents. The majority of them live in shared rooms or small apartments in the so-called urban villages. Housing poverty, especially overcrowding, is a serious problem. This paper also highlights the positive contributions made by urban villages and private landlords in housing the large number of migrants in cities.
The large-scale reform of the state-owned sector and the development of a private sector in the 1990s changed the nature of employment in urban China. The system of allocated, lifelong jobs, denoted the iron rice bowl, that had previously prevailed under state planning was eroded, permitting more labor turnover and mobility. Using an urban household survey for 1999 that has rich data on job duration and job change, we analyze inter-firm mobility in the urban labor market, its evolution, and its explanation. A distinction is made between the institutionally favored urban residents and the rural–urban migrants. The mobility rate of migrants greatly exceeds that of urban residents. The extent, patterns, determinants, and consequences of mobility for the two groups are explored and compared. Journal of Comparative Economics32 (4) (2004) 637–660.
In Social Capital, Nan Lin explains the importance of using social connections and social relations in achieving goals. Social capital, or resources accessed through such connections and relations, is critical (along with human capital, or what a person or organization actually possesses) to individuals, social groups, organizations, and communities in obtaining their objectives. This book places social capital in the family of capital theories (the classical and neo-capital theories), articulates its elements and propositions, presents research programs, findings, and agenda, and theorizes its significance in various moments of interactions between individual actions and social structure (for example, the primordial groups, social exchanges, organizations, institutional transformations and cybernetworks). Nan Lin eloquently introduces a groundbreaking theory that forcefully argues and shows why it is 'who you know', as well as 'what you know' that makes a difference in life and society.
Employee turnover affects performance and competitiveness of companies. Traditional voluntary employee turnover models attempting to predict voluntary turnover are based on job satisfaction. A recent model that breaks away from this tradition is the unfolding model of voluntary employee turnover (UMVT) which takes account of additional factors such as labour market forces, economy and habit. UMVT has been tested in various industries. However, in the construction sector UMVT is tested for the first time in this study. A convenience sample of 320 construction professionals was taken from the Global Construction Consultants, Davis Langdon. The sample provided useable online survey data from 104 respondents who had voluntarily left their previous employers in the last four years. The results reveal that UMVT's ability to interpret voluntary employee turnover among construction professionals was weak. In contrast to previous studies of UMVT, a significant number of respondents (80.8%) followed paths other than the original five theorized paths. As a result, a new extended version of the UMVT is proposed that includes two new paths that have been theorized, which add to the understanding of voluntary employee turnover and may, in the long term, help support human resource management in construction professional practices to predict and manage voluntary employee turnover.
A survey was undertaken to explore the experience of 'burnout' among engineers working in the Australian construction industry. The most widely recognized model of burnout, comprising emotional exhaustion, cynicism and a diminished sense of personal accomplishment was found to be valid. However, Australian engineers experience a strong sense of the social worth of their professional activity, independently of believing in their own individual competence as engineers. There was also a widespread belief that the rewards enjoyed by engineers as a result of their professional endeavours are not commensurate with their level of skill and responsibility. The results of the study also show that burnout cannot be attributed to a single cause but occurs as a result of a complex interaction of individual characteristics and issues in the work environment. As such, there is no single 'cure' for burnout and multiple intervention strategies are probably needed. However, the relative importance of job characteristics compared to personality characteristics in predicting burnout suggests that job re-design may be an effective preventive strategy. Cynicism and emotional exhaustion were strong predictors of engineers' intention to leave their jobs. This suggests that measures to prevent burnout could also help to reduce turnover and its associated costs.
Wald’s test as applied to hypotheses in logit analysis
- Hauck
Liquidity Employment of Migrant Workers
- Bai
The household registration system and migrant labor in China: Notes on a debate
- Chan
Labour market turnover and mobility
- Darcy