Pub Date : 2025-11-17DOI: 10.1177/09500170251371989
Charles Umney, Nicky Shaw, Simon Williams
This article examines how understandings of passion shape people’s agency at work, through interviews with UK publicans. It addresses calls to rethink how ‘passion’ is conceptualised in the sociology of work. While discourses around passion are often thought to legitimise individualised working practices, the article explores more collective interpretations. It analyses how publicans exercised agency in negotiating externally imposed problems including the pandemic and exploitative relationships with leading industry actors. It identifies a collective understanding of passion centralising notions of community, which shaped participants’ agency in responding to these problems in three ways: providing motivation to persist in the industry; a frame for critiquing perceived injustice and (occasionally) mobilising against it; and a resource for reinvention in pursuing business sustainability. The main contribution is thus new concepts for analysing how ‘collectively oriented passion’ shapes individuals’ agency at work.
{"title":"What Does it Mean to be Passionate about Your Job? Three Meanings of ‘Collectively Oriented Passion’ in UK Pubs","authors":"Charles Umney, Nicky Shaw, Simon Williams","doi":"10.1177/09500170251371989","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170251371989","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how understandings of passion shape people’s agency at work, through interviews with UK publicans. It addresses calls to rethink how ‘passion’ is conceptualised in the sociology of work. While discourses around passion are often thought to legitimise individualised working practices, the article explores more collective interpretations. It analyses how publicans exercised agency in negotiating externally imposed problems including the pandemic and exploitative relationships with leading industry actors. It identifies a collective understanding of passion centralising notions of community, which shaped participants’ agency in responding to these problems in three ways: providing motivation to persist in the industry; a frame for critiquing perceived injustice and (occasionally) mobilising against it; and a resource for reinvention in pursuing business sustainability. The main contribution is thus new concepts for analysing how ‘collectively oriented passion’ shapes individuals’ agency at work.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":"146 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145531467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-31DOI: 10.1177/09500170251380025
Louise Ashley, Hilary Sommerlad
Professional Service Firms (PSFs) rely on their socially exclusive approach to recruitment as a source of cultural capital and social prestige, but recent developments have obliged them to implement a more inclusive recruitment policy. The resulting contradiction between exclusivity and inclusivity has accentuated pre-existing tensions inherent to professions’ claim to high status and their supposed social detachment. Drawing from a UK government commissioned study examining attitudes towards socio-economic diversity in elite PSFs, we use critical discursive psychology to analyse and illustrate how these tensions are managed in talk. Empirically, this illustrates that interviewees draw on contradictory ‘interpretative repertoires’ to present themselves and their firms as balanced and fair, thereby helping to legitimate their continuing use of exclusionary practices. We interpret these findings theoretically using the work of Bourdieu, to highlight how the location of firms within overlapping fields limits professionals’ agency to challenge the status quo.
{"title":"Diamonds in the Rough: How Social Class Difference is (De)Valued in Elite Accountancy Firms","authors":"Louise Ashley, Hilary Sommerlad","doi":"10.1177/09500170251380025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170251380025","url":null,"abstract":"Professional Service Firms (PSFs) rely on their socially exclusive approach to recruitment as a source of cultural capital and social prestige, but recent developments have obliged them to implement a more inclusive recruitment policy. The resulting contradiction between exclusivity and inclusivity has accentuated pre-existing tensions inherent to professions’ claim to high status and their supposed social detachment. Drawing from a UK government commissioned study examining attitudes towards socio-economic diversity in elite PSFs, we use critical discursive psychology to analyse and illustrate how these tensions are managed in talk. Empirically, this illustrates that interviewees draw on contradictory ‘interpretative repertoires’ to present themselves and their firms as balanced and fair, thereby helping to legitimate their continuing use of exclusionary practices. We interpret these findings theoretically using the work of Bourdieu, to highlight how the location of firms within overlapping fields limits professionals’ agency to challenge the status quo.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145405135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-29DOI: 10.1177/09500170251373033
Jean-François Stich, Antonio Díaz Andrade, Wendelin Küpers
Digitally enabled work arrangements such as remote work, mobile work and digital nomadism have increasingly been researched. More recently, a distinct form of work arrangement has emerged that allows employees to relocate temporarily to a foreign destination where they simultaneously engage in both professional work and leisure activities. This study develops an empirically grounded, substantive theory of this emerging novel arrangement termed ‘holiwork’. Employing grounded theory methodology, the research draws upon the experiences of six individuals engaged in holiwork. The findings illustrate that holiwork constitutes a complex blend of ambivalent feelings and experiences split between the novelty and alluring appeal of unfamiliar cultural environments and the continuous demands of their full-time professional responsibilities. These insights contribute to the literature on the sociology of digitally mediated work, offering theoretical implications for understanding new work arrangements shaped by digital connectivity and global mobility.
{"title":"Holiworking: Perspectives on New Ways of Integrating Holiday and Work","authors":"Jean-François Stich, Antonio Díaz Andrade, Wendelin Küpers","doi":"10.1177/09500170251373033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170251373033","url":null,"abstract":"Digitally enabled work arrangements such as remote work, mobile work and digital nomadism have increasingly been researched. More recently, a distinct form of work arrangement has emerged that allows employees to relocate temporarily to a foreign destination where they simultaneously engage in both professional work and leisure activities. This study develops an empirically grounded, substantive theory of this emerging novel arrangement termed ‘holiwork’. Employing grounded theory methodology, the research draws upon the experiences of six individuals engaged in holiwork. The findings illustrate that holiwork constitutes a complex blend of ambivalent feelings and experiences split between the novelty and alluring appeal of unfamiliar cultural environments and the continuous demands of their full-time professional responsibilities. These insights contribute to the literature on the sociology of digitally mediated work, offering theoretical implications for understanding new work arrangements shaped by digital connectivity and global mobility.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145397364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-29DOI: 10.1177/09500170251380738
Anna Kallos
This article explores the rationales through which teenage students make sense of and legitimise unpaid labour in low-wage service jobs, contributing to theorising how such exploitation becomes normalised as part of their working lives. Based on 40 in-depth interviews with working school students in Sweden, it focuses on experiences of wage theft and coercive extra shifts, understood as employer strategies to extract unpaid labour time. The analysis identifies three key rationales, shaped by various discourses, through which teenagers made sense of these exploitative practices: framing them as secondary to self-investing in employability, downplaying them as an expected aspect of student jobs, and interpreting them in relation to their perceived vulnerability as young workers. These rationales outline a discursive terrain through which exploitative practices became ambivalently accepted as part of working life, with teenage workers often assuming individual responsibility for their conditions.
{"title":"Making Sense of Exploitation: Teenage Workers’ Experiences of Unpaid Labour in Low-Wage Service Jobs","authors":"Anna Kallos","doi":"10.1177/09500170251380738","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170251380738","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the rationales through which teenage students make sense of and legitimise unpaid labour in low-wage service jobs, contributing to theorising how such exploitation becomes normalised as part of their working lives. Based on 40 in-depth interviews with working school students in Sweden, it focuses on experiences of wage theft and coercive extra shifts, understood as employer strategies to extract unpaid labour time. The analysis identifies three key rationales, shaped by various discourses, through which teenagers made sense of these exploitative practices: framing them as secondary to self-investing in employability, downplaying them as an expected aspect of student jobs, and interpreting them in relation to their perceived vulnerability as young workers. These rationales outline a discursive terrain through which exploitative practices became ambivalently accepted as part of working life, with teenage workers often assuming individual responsibility for their conditions.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145397344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-29DOI: 10.1177/09500170251380740
David Farrugia
This article develops concepts of moral economy to show how workers’ notions of justice and practices of social reciprocity contribute to the structural conditions and value relations of precarious service employment. The article draws on a project which interviewed 75 young workers employed in the retail, hospitality and call-centre industry, exploring the normative ideas and social relationships that shape how young workers’ negotiate their conditions. Data shows that young workers draw on lay definitions of fairness, entitlement and obligation, to make critical and reflexive moral evaluations of their workplaces, and form moral communities enacted through everyday social reciprocity. Lay moralities are constitutive of the social relations of labour and processes of exploitation in the service economy, because they determine the social legitimacy of working schedules and wages, and because they are the basis for young people’s reflexive evaluation of their position as workers.
{"title":"Lay Moralities of Young Workers and the Moral Economy of Service Labour","authors":"David Farrugia","doi":"10.1177/09500170251380740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170251380740","url":null,"abstract":"This article develops concepts of moral economy to show how workers’ notions of justice and practices of social reciprocity contribute to the structural conditions and value relations of precarious service employment. The article draws on a project which interviewed 75 young workers employed in the retail, hospitality and call-centre industry, exploring the normative ideas and social relationships that shape how young workers’ negotiate their conditions. Data shows that young workers draw on lay definitions of fairness, entitlement and obligation, to make critical and reflexive moral evaluations of their workplaces, and form moral communities enacted through everyday social reciprocity. Lay moralities are constitutive of the social relations of labour and processes of exploitation in the service economy, because they determine the social legitimacy of working schedules and wages, and because they are the basis for young people’s reflexive evaluation of their position as workers.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145397322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-18DOI: 10.1177/09500170251375724
Richard Gater
Youth unemployment is increasing and disproportionately affects marginalised working-class young men, a subgroup commonly associated with manual employment aspirations and protest masculinity. Despite the detrimental impact of youth unemployment on this demographic and recent research exploring their masculine identity, there remains a limited understanding of their current employment aspirations. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted in the South Wales Valleys, UK, this article seeks to fill the knowledge gap by examining the employment orientation of marginalised working-class young men. The findings reveal both continuity and change in the understanding of this subgroup’s employment aspirations. Continuity includes a protest masculine-related rejection of certain service sector work and an attraction to manual employment influenced by familial socialisation. Change is observed through an interest in non-manual work, which for some participants appears to stem from what is described as a rupturing process, or significant social influences that destabilise working-class masculine modes of being.
{"title":"Continuity and Change: The Employment Orientation of Contemporary Marginalised Working-Class Young Men","authors":"Richard Gater","doi":"10.1177/09500170251375724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170251375724","url":null,"abstract":"Youth unemployment is increasing and disproportionately affects marginalised working-class young men, a subgroup commonly associated with manual employment aspirations and protest masculinity. Despite the detrimental impact of youth unemployment on this demographic and recent research exploring their masculine identity, there remains a limited understanding of their current employment aspirations. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted in the South Wales Valleys, UK, this article seeks to fill the knowledge gap by examining the employment orientation of marginalised working-class young men. The findings reveal both continuity and change in the understanding of this subgroup’s employment aspirations. Continuity includes a protest masculine-related rejection of certain service sector work and an attraction to manual employment influenced by familial socialisation. Change is observed through an interest in non-manual work, which for some participants appears to stem from what is described as a rupturing process, or significant social influences that destabilise working-class masculine modes of being.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145314514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-18DOI: 10.1177/09500170251375727
Devika Bahadur
{"title":"Joint Book Review AkyelkenNihanWomen, Work and Mobilities: The Case of Urban and Regional Contexts in TurkeyAbingdon: Routledge, 2024, £39.99 pbk, (ISBN: 9781032562988), 148 pp.BertoliniSoniaGoglioValentinaHofäckerDirkJob Insecurity and Life CoursesBristol: Bristol University Press, 2024, £27.99 ebk, (ISBN: 9781529208733), 208 pp.","authors":"Devika Bahadur","doi":"10.1177/09500170251375727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170251375727","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":"352 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145314516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-16DOI: 10.1177/09500170251373035
Lauren Ryan, Brendan Churchill, Leah Ruppanner
Recent technological advances and globalised distribution of work have accelerated the rise of remote-first organisations where everyone works remotely, yet the effects of this approach on working parents remain underexplored. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 25 mothers and 16 fathers from 31 remote-first organisations, this study examines the gendered impact of standardised remote-first flexibility on work–family reconciliation. Findings show that remote-first work enhances location and schedule freedom, allowing parents to sustain a dual devotion to work and family. Fathers used this flexibility to increase engagement with domestic tasks and caregiving, while mothers focused on meeting work demands (in addition to caregiving responsibilities). The use of remote-first working arrangements increased employee trust and empathy among working parents, reducing flexibility stigma concerns. While fathers resisted tendencies to overwork, the remote-first model perpetuated the gendered flexibility paradox for mothers, leading to increased labour expansion and self-exploitation in both paid and unpaid work.
{"title":"The Gendered Flexibility Paradox and Remote-First Work: How Working Parents Reconcile Work and Care","authors":"Lauren Ryan, Brendan Churchill, Leah Ruppanner","doi":"10.1177/09500170251373035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170251373035","url":null,"abstract":"Recent technological advances and globalised distribution of work have accelerated the rise of remote-first organisations where everyone works remotely, yet the effects of this approach on working parents remain underexplored. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 25 mothers and 16 fathers from 31 remote-first organisations, this study examines the gendered impact of standardised remote-first flexibility on work–family reconciliation. Findings show that remote-first work enhances location and schedule freedom, allowing parents to sustain a dual devotion to work and family. Fathers used this flexibility to increase engagement with domestic tasks and caregiving, while mothers focused on meeting work demands (in addition to caregiving responsibilities). The use of remote-first working arrangements increased employee trust and empathy among working parents, reducing flexibility stigma concerns. While fathers resisted tendencies to overwork, the remote-first model perpetuated the gendered flexibility paradox for mothers, leading to increased labour expansion and self-exploitation in both paid and unpaid work.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145295615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-07DOI: 10.1177/09500170251360175
Hannah Johnston, Nelly Slye
This article situates teletherapy platforms within the context of digital labour platforms. It explores commonalities including workers’ employment status, worker autonomy and platform control, user recruitment practices and working time flexibility to show how teletherapy platforms have adopted the platform business model to mental health care. Presenting a first-person account from Nelly, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and social worker based in a large city in the Northeastern United States, the article reveals how teletherapy platforms erode work quality and increase precarity. While Nelly’s experience ends in a successful unionisation campaign, it also warns of the innate tensions between startup culture and the conditions that foster quality mental health care.
{"title":"‘Get on Board or Get Off’: Nosediving Job Quality for Mental Health Providers in the Age of Platform Work","authors":"Hannah Johnston, Nelly Slye","doi":"10.1177/09500170251360175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170251360175","url":null,"abstract":"This article situates teletherapy platforms within the context of digital labour platforms. It explores commonalities including workers’ employment status, worker autonomy and platform control, user recruitment practices and working time flexibility to show how teletherapy platforms have adopted the platform business model to mental health care. Presenting a first-person account from Nelly, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and social worker based in a large city in the Northeastern United States, the article reveals how teletherapy platforms erode work quality and increase precarity. While Nelly’s experience ends in a successful unionisation campaign, it also warns of the innate tensions between startup culture and the conditions that foster quality mental health care.","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145241989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-04DOI: 10.1177/09500170251376252
Martí López-Andreu
{"title":"Book Review: Jan Drahokoupil and Kurt Vandaele (eds), A Modern Guide to Labour and the Platform Economy DrahokoupilJanVandaeleKurt (eds) A Modern Guide to Labour and the Platform EconomyCheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021, £146 hbk, (ISBN: 9781788975094), 384 pp.","authors":"Martí López-Andreu","doi":"10.1177/09500170251376252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170251376252","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48187,"journal":{"name":"Work Employment and Society","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2025-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145246399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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