Research Findings

My mother was a middle manager at a call center when she lost her job during the Great Recession. For the next eight years, I watched her work one odd job after another to make ends meet, but her employment during that time was never as reliable as it was before the country’s economic crash forced her to change course.

More than a decade later, my mother’s story is no longer unique. In fact, short-term employment, especially in the gig economy is fast becoming the norm. Millions of Americans – both blue and white collar – are making a living through platforms such as TaskRabbit, Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Fiverr, UpWork, GrubHub, and others. According to government data, more than a third of the American workforce is participating in non-standard work arrangements, such as gig jobs, a number that is expected to rise.

This compelling data, combined with my mother’s experiences, inspired me to study the gig economy. Specifically, I wanted to know how independent workers give meaning to their daily tasks and find personal satisfaction in jobs that are highly transactional and lacking in organizational structure. The freedom to work without walls, annoying co-workers, or micromanaging bosses has its highs, but the lows can be hard on the soul.

“They squeeze the spirit and the heart out of everything they touch,” Tracy said.  She was referring to mainstream health care. “Not every hospice nurse has that heart, and not every doctor has that heart, but I do.”

Tracy is an end-of-life activist. A former oncology and hospice nurse, she wants to change how we care for people who are dying. Her vision is modeled after the natural birth movement, and she describes herself as a death midwife. She owns a business that teaches and certifies end-of-life doulas.         

As a nurse, Tracy was troubled by how many people suffer needlessly at the end of their lives.  Palliative care worked wonders, but it was usually too little, too late. “It pained me to see that people could come onto hospice, and within a day or two most of the time, we could get them comfortable,” she said. “They had been suffering for months and years.”  

Social networks can be crucial for getting a job. Cue Mark Granovetter’s enduring sociological insight on the strength of weak ties, the crucial role connections beyond our close networks can play in connecting us to opportunity. Platforms and structures that facilitate professional networking—such as LinkedIn—are based on this insight that extended networks can link people to opportunities beyond their immediate circles.

Researchers have extensively conceptualized and described the ties people use to find work and move up in their field, uncovering a number of ties that transcend the strong-weak dichotomy. Other scholars have shown how those facing adversity—poverty, racism, social marginalization–often draw on strong, reciprocal ties to survive. This work, taken together, reveals how people form and draw on social ties in a range of different ways, and how the form those ties take and their capacity to help people get by—and get ahead–is deeply informed by structural constraints.

However, sociologists have paid less attention to how the spatial and temporal dynamics of work processes and industry structures affect how people form and use social networks over space and time. In a recent article, I draw on interviews with Texas-Mexico borderlands-based agricultural workers and Texas-based oil and gas field workers. Both groups describe forming strong ties with peers while working far from home and living in close quarters for weeks at a time.

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Philippine government instituted what may be considered one of their most controversial emigration policies. For an indefinite period, state agencies decided to ban Filipino healthcare workers from leaving the country for jobs overseas.

This “deployment ban” was unprecedented, not only in scope but because the Philippines is also the primary source of migrant nurses worldwide. While the state curtailed the departure of 13 health professions, nurses comprised the largest group, with hundreds unable to leave for jobs waiting in the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore.

Philippine government officials argued that the ban would redirect human resources toward national health needs. Yet, instead of consolidating the country’s pool of nurse labor, the ban divided nurses into two distinct groups.

In a recent study, we conducted an inductive study of military personnel operating drones for the U.S. Air Force to understand how workers experience and respond to emerging technologies.

The introduction of drone technology in the U.S Air Force has fundamentally changed traditional warfare. The drone program has removed the need for direct physical deployment of personnel to an active war zone and instead have operators stationed in remote command centers in the US to remotely control drones from afar. In other words, drones have “unmanned” the aircraft.

By drawing on a set of 43 unsolicited personal diaries of those involved, paired with interviews with the diarists to understand their experiences, archival material and ethnographical observations in the field, we address how an emerging technology can prompt changes in the core meaning, and values of work.

There is a “coach” for everything these days. There are dating coaches, health coaches, career coaches, and speaking coaches. There are coaches to help you find wellness, financial freedom, and the serenity of a decluttered closet. And, perhaps most audaciously, there are legions of self-described “life” coaches.

Where did all these new experts come from? And, given their general lack of credentials, why do people hire them?

You may wonder if this a multi-level marketing kind of arrangement – suspecting, correctly, that coaches are much less successful than they let on and are hoping to sell others on an entrepreneurship class (also correct). You may wonder if this is outright fraud, ideological snake-oil, or just the blind leading the blind. And you may also ask yourself, occasionally, does it work?

In a recently published article, I report results from a year I spent studying career coaches, in particular – observing their pitches and conducting in-depth interviews with both coaches and their clients. I find that none of these characterizations quite capture why and how “coaching” has grown to $3 billion industry in recent years.

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is the publicly funded health care provider in the country. It is the largest non-military employer in the world. Similar to US medical services, it is heavily dependent on migrant doctors to deliver essential medical services. Many accounts, though, find evidence for inequality in their careers and pay.

Twenty six percent of UK doctors have obtained their primary medical qualification overseas, migrating from the European Economic Area (EEA) or further afield (international medical graduate or IMG). Research on the experience of women doctors and on migrant doctors can be located, but with a notable exception. It is less common to see gender and place of qualification considered together. So, we wanted to know – do NHS migrant doctors experience pay gaps compared with their UK-trained counterparts? Are they worse for women? And if so, how can they be narrowed?

How far are we from achieving gender equality in the division of labor at home and at work? Across the world, women spend more time on unpaid domestic work, and men do more labor market work. This gender division of labor is the cause and the consequence of many other forms of gender inequalities, such as the gender pay gap and the tendency for men and women to work in different jobs.

Yet gender relations are changing. Nowadays in most industrialised societies more women than men go to the university. More women have jobs than before, even after they have become mothers. Have we witnessed a gender revolution in the division of labor accordingly? In other words, are men doing more housework, and are women doing more labor market work?

Organizing is hard. It is hard to organize workers to improve their working conditions and seek redress for workplace abuse. And it is especially hard to organize low-wage workers who inhabit the deregulated, fissured workplaces of the post-Fordist labor market.

The challenges of organizing low-wage workers are as much structural and institutional as they are tactical. Formal legal protections are only as good as the ability of workers to engage in individual and collective claims-making to pull the “fire alarm” of a wage theft claim, prompt an Occupational Safety and Health Administration(OSHA) investigation, or initiate a sexual harassment complaint, for example. Worker advocates have stepped in to help bridge that gap. Their work is more critical now than ever as union membership has plummeted and is nearly nonexistent in many of the jobs and industries that many vulnerable workers occupy.

To this end, worker centers and other alt-labor groups have developed creative mobilization strategies to support worker claims and build worker power in the low-wage labor market. Since 2008, we have engaged in research with low-wage workers who participated in the individual and collective claims making processes of two worker centers, one in Chicago and the other in the San Francisco Bay area, both serving low-wage, mainly immigrant worker constituency.

As Julia, a 28-year-old college graduate in Madrid, Spain, described she and her friends’ persistent experiences with unemployment and precarious, low-paying employment, she burst into tears:   

“We’re doing badly in absolutely everything…It’s a limbo, what I call the professional limbo, in which the logical progression, which is you study, you go to high school, college, you have a job, has changed completely.”

Nonetheless, when Julia imagined her life in five years, she described herself in a stable professional trajectory—in a job she disliked as a private school teacher, but one she would be in permanently: