Vicki Smith

Review article: Enhancing employability: Human, cultural, and social capital in an era of turbulent unpredictability

Turbulence and unpredictability in 21st-century labor markets arguably magnify the importance of maintaining employability. Drawing on recent research, I discuss three mechanisms for enhancing employability in this context: identity work, training and networking, and laboring in unpaid and marginal paid positions. Few of these activities are counted as ‘work’ because they are mostly unpaid and they often take place outside formal job structures. By specifying how a range of employment-related activities are essential to and even constitute work, this article contributes to debates about the scope and boundaries of employment and shows how everyday actions build and reinforce new economic structures — how individual actions make the new economy possible. It also provides greater specification of the concept of employability.

Reluctant managers : their work and lifestyles

The changing context of work, careers and lifestyles the costs and benefits of work organizational change and management style personal ambitions and careers women, work and careers homw lives and personal lifestyles man and women managers and their partners.

Institutionalizing Flexibility in a Service Firm Multiple Contingencies and Hidden Hierarchies

This article uses in-depth case study research to examine one set of organizational and staffing arrangements designed to facilitate flexible service delivery. “Institutionalized flexibility” incorporated multiple contingent bases of employment and concealed hidden hierarchies in workplaces within and across organizations. It also relied on the combined efforts of permanent, moderately skilled workers and temporary, deskilled workers. The article analyzes how these multitiered organizational settings created unique opportunities and costs for the individuals working within them, and introduced new intraorganizational and interorganizational complexities.

Braverman's Legacy: The Labor Process Tradition at 20.

Commemorating its twentieth anniversary, this paper examines the legacy of Harry Bravermans Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Bravermans book provoked three areas of inquiry that continue to thrive and to orient sociological research: the topic of workers interests, participation, and resistances; gendered outcomes and causes of labor process transformation; and the interrelated topic of changes in skill levels and control strategies. The paper describes the conceptual transformation these topics have undergone and identifies lingering dilemmas facing those who study the labor process in the late twentieth century.

Banking on Flexibility: A Comparison of Flexible Employment in Retail Banking in Britain and France.

Part 1: approaches to cross-national employment research labour markets, firms and flexibility the banking sector. Part 2: functional flexibility temporary work subcontracting part-time work. Part 3: the societal construction of female labour supply industrial relations and labour regulation conclusions.

“You Get the Economy You Choose” The Political and Social Construction of the New Economy

This article reviews three new books that analyze trends in jobs, careers, and labor markets. All three highlight ways in which work and employment have become precarious and how different groups of workers have experienced degradation in their labor market positions. They also show how economic and institutional transformations are the products of conscious choices made by political and corporate leaders, and by workers themselves. The article briefly reviews each, shows their overlapping themes, and notes their contradictory lines of thinking about how to best improve the American economy and labor markets. It concludes with a call for sociological research on understanding industrial and labor market transformations that might help us interpret the trends highlighted in these books.

Employment Management Work: A Case Study and Theoretical Framework

Managing employment and labor market experiences is a critical activity for virtually all adults but it is undertheorized in the sociology of work. In this article, we argue for the concept of employment management work, referring to the generic, lifelong process in which everyone in a capitalist market economy engages to some degree. To grasp the significance of employment management work, we draw on and synthesize multiple streams of literature and then analyze a set of in-depth interviews from a study of low-wage workers in an effort to bridge these literatures and to highlight salient features of a theory of employment management work.

Introduction to special issue: Workers, risk and the new economy

This special issue aims to develop new perspectives on the much-debated issue of risk. As the articles discuss in detail, and as thus need no comment here, the works of Beck and Giddens in particular established the broad idea of the ‘risk society’. The idea is that modern economies expose workers to increased insecurity and uncertainty. Following on from this broad concept, some researchers have used nationally representative samples to assess the experience of work. In the UK, for example, the work of Gallie et al. (1998) has been updated and extended by McGovern et al. (2007), and further extended to take heed of the international comparative level (e.g. Gallie, 2007). Several key points emerge from these studies. On average, one key indicator of security, job tenure, has not changed very much, and the permanent employment contract remains the dominant form. Despite much debate about the decline of careers and of internal labour markets, career ladders remain in place. If employers were driven purely by cost minimization, or if the market were dominant, then they would not deploy the costly measures aimed at motivating employees associated with ‘high performance’ models which have been as much a feature of the recent past, as has marketization (McGovern et al., 2007). Such studies, however, of necessity operate at a broad level. They suggest that there may be conflicting and contradictory tendencies rather than just one monolithic trend. More specific studies are needed to establish how these tendencies operate in particular circumstances. This special issue moves from the broad level to discrete empirical arenas. Our call for papers underlined the need to discuss the ‘concrete meaning of risk in specific circumstances’. It went on: