Research Findings

Since the 1990s, policy makers across Europe have promoted product market reforms to reduce costs and improve market efficiency. These reforms most often targeted industries dominated by state monopolies, such as telecommunications, water, and electricity.

Studies have tried to measure how consumers and the wider economy benefit from these reforms, typically comparing their effects on service quality, prices, value added and employment. There has been less attention to their impact in the workplace: How did product market liberalization affect job quality, especially job security and wages? What kinds of jobs were created after the privatization of state monopolies? Were there differences across countries in worker outcomes – and if so, what explains these differences?

We have recently addressed these questions by comparing developments in the telecommunications sector of four European countries: Austria, Denmark, Germany and Sweden. Our findings are based on company publications and 76 interviews with union representatives and employers at the sectoral and at workplace level.

These four countries are often referred to in academic and policy debates as social market economies. They are all thriving capitalist economies that long sustained low wage inequality, thanks in large part to strong traditions of social partnership between well-organized employers’ associations and labor unions. In the telecommunications sector, pay and working conditions were regulated through collective agreements negotiated between these ‘social partners’. They are thus good cases to compare, to ask how industrial relations and labor market institutions filter downward pressure on wages and working conditions from more competitive markets – as well as how those institutions themselves change following product market reforms.

We found substantial variation in the evolution of collective bargaining structures and, as a result, in patterns of wage inequality across our four countries. In Austria and Sweden, unions were able to maintain and extend encompassing collective bargaining agreements across the telecommunications sector. In contrast, telecommunications workers in Germany and Denmark experienced increasingly decentralized and fragmented collective bargaining.

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Picture a professor.  Who comes to mind?  These are the pictures I found in a Google Search for public domain images of a “Professor.”  The first 22 above are a diverse group, at least in terms of their eyewear, neckwear, and hair (facial and otherwise).  They are real and fictional, live and animated.  And they are all white men.

This group of images captures an enduring cultural stereotype about who discovers and possesses scientific knowledge.  It also captures an aspect of reality.  Women are more likely to hold university faculty positions than ever before, yet they remain underrepresented in the highest prestige institutions, the highest paying disciplines and at the highest ranks.  As of the academic year 2013-2014, men were about three times as likely as women to be full professors at degree-granting postsecondary institutions.  As this image suggests, most of these men were white.  Of all full professors, 57% were white men, while men of all other racial and ethnic groups made up 13%.  White women were 25% of all full professors, women of all other racial/ethnic groups, 5%.

To explain gender disparities in the academy, many scholars argue that women faculty face a “chilly climate” in which subtle and overt discrimination accumulate to saturate the atmosphere of their workplaces.  The problem with the metaphor is that it often does not match women’s own understanding of their experiences.  For example, Laura Rhoton (2011) found that the women STEM faculty she interviewed rejected systemic accounts of discrimination, like the chilly climate, and minimized the importance of gender, seeing it as a distraction from their real work as scientists.

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The Supreme Court is hearing a case—Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission—about whether a business can refuse service to a gay couple for religious reasons. But is this case really about religious liberty, or is it about something else?

In a national survey experiment with Brian Powell and Lauren Apgar, we asked Americans what they thought about denial of services. What they said surprised us.

We presented people with a vignette—or short scenario—in which a gay or interracial couple attempted to purchase wedding invitation portraits and was refused service. These vignettes varied the reason for refusal (religious/nonreligious) and the type of business refusing services (individual/corporation). We then asked our respondents to tell us whether they supported the refusal.

We expected religion reasons for refusal to be key in whether Americans supported refusal. But, surprisingly, people who support denial of service don’t see it as a matter of religious freedom. Americans were just as likely to support a business denying service for non-religious reasons as for religious reasons. In other words, religious freedom has no impact on Americans’ beliefs about denial of service.

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Throughout his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump routinely described so-called sanctuary cities as posing a threat to public safety by harboring “criminal aliens.” He also characterized immigrants—particularly unauthorized Mexican immigrants—as criminals.

This xenophobic and anti-immigrant discourse resonated with a segment of voters and helped propel Trump into the White House.

Sanctuary ordinances are passed by cities to prohibit city employees from cooperating with the enforcement of Federal immigration law. In January 2017, President Trump signed Executive Order 13768, which withholds certain federal grants from sanctuary jurisdictions until they fully cooperate with the Federal government in the enforcement of immigration law (see Section 9(a)). In November 2017, a Federal judge found Section 9(a) of the executive order unconstitutional and issued a permanent injunction on its nationwide implementation.

According to several recent studies, there is no evidence that the implementation of sanctuary policies leads to violent crime.

Our analysis of violent crime in 107 cities contributes to this growing body of research. We found cities that adopt sanctuary ordinances experience a decrease in robberies. Moreover, among sanctuary cities, an increase in the relative concentration of unauthorized Mexican immigrants leads to a reduction in homicides. These results are contrary to the prevailing political discourse.

Trump’s political rhetoric and policy decisions raised several important questions that we addressed in our research. First, what exactly is a sanctuary policy? Second, does the implementation of such an ordinance in any way affect crime? Finally, is unauthorized immigration associated with increased crime?

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Women are underrepresented in high status positions in companies and universities, in part because they are less likely to receive promotions at work than are men.

What is the reason behind this gender gap in promotion? One possibility is that women are less productive than men in their jobs, and promotion decisions are simply rewarding the most productive individuals. Another option is that men and women start off in different types of workplaces, and women’s workplaces could have different promotion processes or expectations that affect their likelihood of promotions. A third possibility is that promotion evaluations themselves contain gender inequality and bias.

In a recent study described here, I tested these three explanations for the gender gap in promotion to tenure in academia, among three disciplines. To do this, I collected and analyzed data on research productivity, school and department context (size, type of university, department prestige, etc.), and promotion outcomes from over 1,500 professors at research universities in three departments.

I find that in Sociology, Computer Science, and English departments, some productivity measures partially account for the gender gap in promotion, but large portions of the gender gap are not explained either by research productivity or by the department/school context. In other words, the results suggest that gender inequality in the promotion evaluation processes are contributing to the gender gap in promotion among professors.

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Employees in Europe have had the right to a voice in company decisions over jobs and working conditions for over 25 years. Since the introduction in 1989 of the Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers (the ‘Social Charter’), successive pieces of EU legislation have given employees the right to be informed and consulted by their employer over a variety of issues relating to their work life.

These rights are typically exercised through forms of workplace employee representation – either trade unions or consultative committees (sometimes referred to as ‘works councils’). However, despite the presence of a unified policy framework at the supra-national level, the prevalence of workplace employee representation varies greatly across the European Union (see below). Why is this?

Our recent research – based on data from over 25,000 workplaces across 31 EU Member States and candidate countries – shows that a combination of factors at national, sectoral and workplace level each help to explain why some employees have trade union or works council-type representation at their workplace and others do not.

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For many of today’s workers it’s not necessarily enough to give their time, reliability, and skill to a job, they must also give their emotions. Emotional labor—the management and display of emotions at work—has become a prominent job requirement for many occupations in the United States.

Looking at the service producing industries in the U.S., employment in this sector has increased steadily in recent years. Many of the fastest growing occupations are seen in healthcare and social assistance.

As automation and new technologies make many physical and even cognitive-based jobs obsolete, the emotional labor economy—driven by the carework, healthcare, and retail sectors—will put emotional and social skills front and center of the future of work in the United States.

Think home-health aide rather than manual laborer. Therapist instead of financial bookkeeper.

If jobs like these are becoming a staple of the American economy, what are the health implications for contemporary workers when managing emotions is a critical requirement of their job?

Is this ‘emotional labor’ an opportunity for satisfying work through the cultivation of meaningful relationships with customers, or is it a source of stressful interpersonal demands that stifle workers’ ability to have authentic feeling and genuine emotional expression?

We set out to investigate this issue.

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by Andreas Kornelakis and Dimitra Petrakaki

It is a commonplace that we live in the age of disruption. The latest trend towards digitalisation is set to accelerate changes in the workplace and transform the labour market perhaps irreversibly. Current debates on the digitalisation of work concern the extent and degree to which advanced technology such as robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and algorithmic decision-making could substitute for manual labour. More worryingly, this is considered to be a potentiality that affects not only the manufacturing industry but also the services sectors and impact on knowledge-intensive jobs.

But technological innovations do not only lead to the displacement of jobs, they also change the nature of jobs. This transpired in research that we carried out, which examined the complex interplay between work autonomy, technology and routinisation. We examined the cases of two healthcare organisations in England that implemented a new technology (Electronic Patient Record system). We found that the introduction of new technology standardises the work to a degree and constrains the autonomy of high-skill professionals (such as doctors and nurses), but also reallocates task discretion between occupational groups. More broadly, digitalisation may increase work autonomy for some occupational groups, but also standardise work and lead to monotonous and repetitive tasks for other groups.

Some commentators emphasise the perspective of digitalisation as a ‘blessing’. It is seen as one of the key drivers to boost competitiveness and productivity, allowing businesses to operate with minimum costs, whilst ensuring high performance and minimal product defects and human errors. A recent publication from Nesta also highlights that digitalisation and automation should not be demonised given their potential to lead to job creation and to a re-focusing on skills that are more humane such as emotional intelligence and inter-personal skills. Proponents of digitalisation often paint an optimistic view of new digital technologies, ignoring the potential negative disruption on working conditions and societal outcomes.

However, a recent paper by Frey and Osborne finds that technological change drives jobs and skills polarisation in the labour market; with growing inequality between high-income cognitive jobs and low-income manual occupations. Furthermore, the OECD acknowledges that the growing digitalisation of the labour market through the ‘platform economy’ raises questions about wages, labour rights and access to social protections for the workers involved, while it also creates problems of unemployment due to the inherent potential of technology to substitute work. This may also reinvigorate fears of social risks for a ‘race to bottom’ in wages and working conditions and a growing ‘precariat’ as an emerging global class with no financial security, job stability or prospect of career progression.

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Sociological studies of work have long ventured overseas to understand the conditions of employment and global networks that produce goods consumed in the global north. Scarce are studies that take a look at globalization and work at the other end of the supply chain: consumer services. This is important because in recent years retailers and hoteliers have traveled from the global north to the global south nearly as fast as manufactured goods have journeyed the opposite direction. This is also critical because the sociology of service work has rarely ventured beyond contexts in which customers and workers largely share in a single culture (with all its etiquettes, manners, symbols and rules), even as class, race and gender differences may be present. As a result, sociologists tend to focus on how workers use familiar habits of behavior in workplaces that require interaction with customers. For example the word “emotion work” is used to describe the psychological effort expended when workers are asked to treat strangers with the warmth they might reserve for family members or friends. Another term “aesthetic labor” describes the ways in which workers’ manner of dress, style, grooming and speech must conform to the meet the expectations of posh or hip clientele. Employers hire workers of the appropriate class backgrounds to perform such labor. Overlooked by these two terms is the effort workers make to learn new ways of expressing emotions, novel styles of presenting themselves and unfamiliar modes of interacting when their customers originate from different nations and cultures.

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Photo is the author’s work.

The migrant crisis, the seemingly unstoppable rise of terrorism and urban violence, the more secretive rise of multinational companies’ power on a global scale, the growing job precariousness, with workers laboring long hours under hazardous conditions for low pay, all these phenomena picture a world of extreme disequilibrium and powerlessness.

So one should accept one’s fate, be it someone being expelled from the Calais jungle, an exploited worker, an evicted Spaniard, or one of the victims of deadly shots or of a crazy truck in the middle of a street…Is this an excessively somber picture, describing late modern people as alone, cut off from their roots, indifferent or ignorant?

The question is important because sometimes people win over big powers. When they decide not to renounce their rights, the dignity of the worker, insisting that the integrity of social life be defended against the vandalism of corporate rationality, when they radicalize their resistance, certain things are possible. This is what we learn from a three-year online ethnographic study conducted on a group of bloggers, former insurance sellers fired by their company for having refused to change crucial aspects of how they do their job, and how they are paid for a job well done.

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