Work,Employment and Society

Participant observation and interviews in a large community unique for enacting gender egalitarianism provide evidence that subversive, collective action at the interactional level can redo gender at the wider institutional level. A series of interdependent practices collectively designed and undertaken through member interaction effectively created sustained structural and cultural changes at the institutional level – which simultaneously created conducive conditions for gender-atypical behaviour at the interactional level. These practices include uniform working hours and ‘earnings’ for all members; communal provision of often privatised forms of domestic labour such as childcare; and a 50:50 gender quota for all representative positions underpinned by a comprehensive role rotation system. Two processes of ‘redoing’ gender proved to be mutually reinforcing: as participants become accountable to revised normative conceptions of gender-appropriate behaviour at the institutional level, gender becomes a less salient feature of how work is divided between women and men at the interactional level.

There is a broad debate concerning migrant workers’ forms of agency and organising. This debate, however, is highly polarised between studies looking at migrants’ participation in established and grassroots unions, and others examining informal, subtle and covert forms of everyday resistance. The latter are commonly framed as individual acts, often exercised by migrant workers through mobility, and are therefore sometimes seen as potentially undermining collective organising. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from the agriculture and meat processing industries in Italy, this article explores forms of agency among unorganised migrant workers that fall between union activity and workers’ individual choices. It distinguishes between collective strategies of resilience, reworking, and resistance, and examines when and how migrant workers engage in them. In conclusion, the article calls for a move beyond dichotomous understanding and encourages a view of resistance in general – and migrant resistance in particular – as a fluid, gradual, and ongoing process.

This article offers a novel reinterpretation of John Kelly’s mobilization theory through the lens of the Great Strike of Zonguldak (1990–91), a landmark event involving over 100,000 workers and their families in a 120-km march for justice and dignity. By drawing on 46 formal interviews, autobiographical accounts, documentary testimonies and an extensive review of national newspapers, the study explores how grassroots activism and union bureaucracy dynamically interacted to produce one of the most significant labour mobilizations in Turkish history. While Kelly’s model emphasizes the role of informal leadership in framing injustice and facilitating collective action, this study advances the theory by revealing the emergent and context-sensitive interplay between informal and formal leadership during contentious mobilizations. Integrating insights from Rick Fantasia and empirical critiques of Kelly’s framework, the article provides a refined perspective on grassroots dynamics and union structures, offering broader insights into labour mobilization processes across diverse socio-political contexts.

Research into migrant workers suggests noncitizens are subject to tensions between their inclusion for labour and their exclusion as the ethnic ‘other’. These tensions are held in balance by a stable configuration of state and social actors. However, a security crisis provides an opportunity for actors to shift the balance towards their interests and is likely to strengthen the exclusionary logic. We analyse the labour market in Israel/Palestine following the extreme crisis of October 2023, to show how actors shift the inclusionary/exclusionary balance and how this impacts the entry and employment terms of noncitizen workers. We find that while crisis enables actors to challenge the status quo, key logics underpinning that status quo are resilient, and neoliberal inclusionary pressures persist even during extreme security crises. We thus reveal the structural constraints that market economies place on ethnonational projects, including ethnocracies with a powerful ethnonational ethos expressed in populist racist politics.

Domestic violence (DV) is a global problem affecting individuals, communities and societies, and increasingly a workplace problem. During the COVID-19 pandemic, home became both the workplace under government-directed lockdowns and a site for increased DV in a ‘shadow pandemic’ of violence. This article examines how workplaces supported DV victim–survivors when working-from-home during lockdowns. Drawing primary data from interviews with DV first-responders in Aotearoa New Zealand workplaces, a country with epidemic levels of DV, we theorise how workplaces conceptualised their responsibility for DV across ‘blurred’ spaces of home and work and enacted duty of care obligations when working-from-home. We argue that given DV is a complex work health and safety risk, mere legal compliance for protecting victims when working-from-home falls short of employers’ ethical responsibilities for ensuring safe workplaces and preventing violence.

This article explores how disabled people navigate normative temporalities in the workplace through everyday practices of adaptation and resistance. Grounded in qualitative research with disabled participants, it examines how linear, productivity-driven temporal norms—referred to as chrononormativity—shape discriminatory and exclusionary structures that possess constitutive power in the production of disability. Using the lens of crip time, the analysis reveals how ongoing temporal negotiations and adjustments generate additional labour for disabled people and challenge the common assumption that flexibility offers a sufficient remedy to temporal constraints. The article thereby contributes to broader debates on disability, work and precarity while strengthening and empirically supporting critiques of the ableist foundations of the labour system, which marginalise those whose temporalities diverge from the norm. Ultimately, it calls for temporality—until now largely overlooked—to be foregrounded as one of the key structuring forces of ableism in the workplace.

Sex workers lack structural power; they cannot withdraw their labour to stop production and most do not have a single employer with whom to collectively bargain. The absence of ‘wage-effort bargaining’ has led to conclusions that these workers cannot form successful unions. Yet own-account informal workers in the Global South have routinely organised outside employment relationships and wage-effort bargaining. Organisational forms amongst such workers are generally characterised as spontaneous and non-traditional, with demands focused on social welfare at the municipal scale. Drawing on 32 interviews in Guatemala and Colombia, we demonstrate that sex workers have established formal unions and accessed ‘institutional power’, including re-scaling contestation from the municipal scale to the nation state. We theorise formal union recognition as an enduring vital strategy, with direct material implications for the conditions of work inside the workplace.

The practices of frontline workers in public job centres who try to match disadvantaged claimants with employers are discussed in this article, based on a case study of Danish job centres. The notion of bridge-building emotional labour and the frontline practices and tensions involved in matching disadvantaged claimants with employers are presented, which contribute to understanding the emotional labour involved in boundary spanning. The study shows how frontline workers’ emotional labour is directed towards bridging key institutional logics: bureaucracy (efficient policy implementation), consumerism (customer service directed towards employers) and professionalism (professional empathy for vulnerable claimants). Through bridge-building emotional labour, frontline workers try to diminish the gap between the policy goals of public street-level organizations, the demands of the labour market and the reduced ability to work of disadvantaged claimants.

Craft is re-emerging in debates on improving contemporary work. A recurring theme in research on craft is its potential to thwart alienation, which is considered one of the central pathologies of modern work. Through a case study of the Swedish craft beer community, we examine craft’s potential for de-alienating work. Drawing on Jaeggi’s conception of alienation as a relation of relationlessness, we show that craftworkers cultivate relations to themselves and to their material and social environments. These relations foster receptiveness and transformation, enabling experiences of work as unalienated. Yet, craft work also remains deeply ambivalent: to sustain unalienated experiences, craftworkers must accept several downsides of craft work. Our findings suggest that de-alienation in craft is best understood as a continuous process of negotiating alienation, which is constrained by the broader dynamics of capitalism.

This article analyses the mobilisation of migrant workers in SAC, the main syndicalist trade union in Sweden. It theorises mobilisation and solidarity from a labour process perspective and, based on ethnography, identifies accessibility, contentiousness and belonging as key mechanisms to explain the union’s form of mobilisation. By drawing on the class struggle unionism framework, it conceptualises two strategies – of ‘collapsing servicing and organising’ and ‘participation follows action’ – to explain why and how SAC is successful in its mobilisation efforts. It shows that SAC’s confrontational methods mobilise a migrant worker community where workers’ intersubjective experiences of migration and precariousness shape solidarity and build associational power. The article concludes that SAC’s mobilisation of migrant workers is groundbreaking in a Swedish context and that class struggle unionism has plenty to offer also to other unions.

Wage and benefit theft is a systemic feature of capitalist organisations, yet it remains critically under-theorised in sociology. Drawing on an in-depth case study of the Bangladeshi garment industry, this article identifies three interrelated mechanisms of wage and benefit theft—denial of the monthly attendance bonus, alternative calculations of maternity allowance and maintenance of two service books—normalised through the interplay of micro-level practices and macro-structural imperatives. This article makes two key contributions. First, it challenges discourses framing such theft as aberrant misconduct by deviant employers, exposing it instead as a routinised, industry-wide exploitation strategy. Second, it advances the theorisation of normalisation by showing how macro-structural conditions foster environments that embed exploitative micro-level practices with impunity. The systematic erosion of meso-level institutions under authoritarian regimes intensifies this normalisation. This article calls for collective resistance to empower trade unions and civil society in confronting the normalisation of wage and benefit theft.

Despite flexibility being central to the gig economy, platform businesses face challenges balancing operational needs with labor mobility. Through empirical analysis of China’s food delivery platforms, this study finds that professionally oriented couriers in the outsourced model, while viewing platform work as a steppingstone to formal employment and exhibiting higher exit intentions, simultaneously develop stronger organizational identification through identity-building strategies that produce a suppressing effect on turnover intentions. Analysis further reveals heterogeneous effects across economic dependency groups, with platform-dependent couriers more sensitive to work model influences. The theoretical contribution of this study lies in identifying organizational identification as the central mechanism through which platforms reconcile the tension between flexibility and stability. Through this mechanism, platforms achieve organizational management of labor mobility without altering the legal form of flexible employment. These findings provide new insights into labor relations transformation and management innovation in emerging economic forms.

This article examines how (un-)certainty in settlement intentions affects the socio-economic integration of Ukrainian refugees in Germany, using longitudinal data from the IAB-BiB/FReDA-BAMF-SOEP survey. Applying an instrumental variable approach, we estimate the effects of permanent, temporary, and uncertain settlement intentions on employment, employment aspirations, and host-country language proficiency. Findings show that settlement intention uncertainty hinders integration outcomes – most notably German language acquisition – while temporary intentions are linked to lower language proficiency and reduced employment aspirations. Permanent intentions, in contrast, facilitate stronger integration across all outcomes. Refugees with uncertain plans exhibit intermediate results. Theoretically, the article contributes to migration literature by disentangling the effects of settlement intention certainty from anticipated duration of stay, and by demonstrating how subjective expectations shape forward-looking behaviour. Our results advance Goal-Setting and Rational Choice Theories, and the Immigrant Human Capital Investment model by integrating uncertainty as a key moderating factor in refugees’ integration trajectories.

This article examines how self-expatriates (SEs) negotiate tensions between multiple social identities and how this affects their long-term social and professional adjustment to work and life in another country. We use identity work theory to broaden social identity theory (SIT) and offer a deeper understanding of the roles played by social communities in the lived experiences of SEs. Longitudinal qualitative data were collected through 60 in-depth semi-structured interviews with 18 participants. The thematic analysis of the data reveals how SEs balance their allegiance to their expatriate community and host-country nationals (HCNs) as they (re)construct their identities to fulfil their work and lifestyle goals. By highlighting how group membership is not fixed but negotiated and reframed, we contribute to the sociological literature on expatriation by identifying four waves to the identity and adjustment process experienced by SEs.

Examining the skilled migration of IT workers from South Korea to Japan, this study illuminates the critical role of the sending country government in steering migration intermediaries and migrants towards less-than-ideal employment outcomes in the destination country. By analysing the three phases of pre- and post-migration mediation – attraction, allocation and integration – and examining the interactions among multiple actors in each phase, the study uncovers how the continuous flow of IT skilled migration from South Korea to Japan since around 2000 has produced skilled yet flexible migrant labour in Japan’s expanding IT industry. This study advances theoretical discussions on the nexus between migrant labour and the flexible labour market structures of the host country by shedding light on the role of sending states in constructing ‘supply-driven’ skilled yet flexible labour mobility.

This paper examines how diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives (DEI) hinder better outcomes for the workforce labelled as diverse. Fieldwork in three Australian organisations demonstrated that the lack of progress towards equality was not just caused by the persistence of inequality but by how the practice of equality perpetuated a repressive status quo. Bringing together Joan Acker’s ‘inequality regimes’ and Herbert Marcuse’s ‘repressive tolerance’ explains how the understanding and enactment of equality constrain workplace change. From this, ‘repressive equality regimes’ is developed to explain how the ensemble of culturally organised sets of practices that seemingly promote DEI prevent achieving meaningful progress towards equality. ‘Repressive equality regimes’ registers the disassociating and segregating processes that create and maintain hierarchies of difference, limit the tolerance of ‘others’ and bound equality to an unchallengeable practice. To address structural inequalities and embed sustainable change at work it is essential to illuminate the political in DEI.

This article examines whether the EGP (Erikson–Goldthorpe–Portocarero) schema and its reliance on employment relations remain relevant in today’s post-industrial labour market. Ongoing shifts in work structures and employment conditions may challenge the relationship between employment relations and class distinctions as defined by EGP. Prior studies have validated that employment relations correlate with EGP classes; however, they have not explored other class-defining factors, potentially overlooking important dimensions. Building on this, the present study employs Lasso regression – a machine learning method – and leverages indicators encompassing employment relations, work conditions, skills and socio-demographics to enable a comprehensive, albeit exploratory, analysis of factors underlying EGP class. The findings reveal that class distinctions may be shaped more by job characteristics, sector and gender than by the theoretically proposed employment relations. The results suggest a conflation of employment relations with tasks within the EGP schema, highlighting the need for re-evaluation as the labour market evolves.