Hande Inanc

The hidden face of job insecurity

Drawing on nationally representative data for British employees, the article argues for a more comprehensive concept of job insecurity, including not only job tenure insecurity but also job status insecurity, relating to anxiety about changes to valued features of the job. It shows that job status insecurity is highly prevalent in the workforce and is associated with different individual, employment and labour market characteristics than those that affect insecurity about job loss. It is also related to different organizational contexts. However, the article also shows that the existence of effective mechanisms of employee participation can reduce both types of job insecurity.

Direct Participation and Employee Learning at Work

The creation of a learning environment at work has been seen as an essential concomitant of the growth of an advanced economy. This article explores the implications of direct participation for different types of employee learning, drawing upon the British Skills and Employment Surveys of 2006 and 2012. It confirms that direct participation is strongly associated with enhanced learning opportunities at work but finds important differences in the benefits of specific forms of direct participation. Moreover, direct participation was found to be particularly important for those in less favorable work contexts with respect to technological level and skill.

Fits, misfits and interactions: learning at work, job satisfaction and job‐related well‐being

The resource-based view (RBV) of the firm has focused attention on the importance of aligning employees’ needs with the requirements of the jobs they do. This article focuses on how these needs and requirements interact in terms of learning. It does so in two ways. First, it develops new survey instruments to capture the learning demands of jobs and the learning dispositions of workers and uses them for the first time in a survey of 2,810 employees. Second, it examines how these person and job characteristics correlate with specific aspects of job satisfaction and job-related well-being. The results show that although learning alignment is associated with high levels of satisfaction and well-being, not all learning misalignments are associated with the reverse.

The Declining Volume of Workers’ Training in Britain

The conventional focus on the training participation rate, rather than training volume, in official statistics and research has obscured a radical transformation in workers’ training in Britain. To obtain a picture of the trend in training volume, we synthesize a narrative through a new analysis of multiple surveys. The duration of training fell sharply with the result that the training volume per worker declined by about a half between 1997 and 2012. This fall is hard to reconcile with optimistic rhetoric surrounding the knowledge economy. Potential explanations are discussed. We conclude with recommendations to improve the collection of training statistics.

The quality of work in Britain over the economic crisis

Previous research on trends in the quality of work in Britain was carried out in a period marked by long-term growth and increasing prosperity. Although often taken as an exemplar case of a ‘liberal’ regime, the implications of an emphasis on deregulation and work-force flexibility for employees’ quality of work are arguably less serious when labour markets are tight and the market power of employees may oblige employers to be concerned about the retention and commitment of the work-force. The prolonged economic crisis that followed the economic recession of 2008–2009, however, provides a more severe test of the implications of a relatively deregulated employment regime for employee welfare. It is precisely under conditions of high unemployment and weak bargaining power that it could be expected to facilitate a sharp reassertion of employer prerogatives both to shed labour and to restructure work processes. Did the economic crisis, then, lead to major changes in work and employment conditions in the UK?