Work,Employment and Society

Flexible work arrangements significantly impact childcare divisions among dual-earner parents, yet few studies address their impact on fathers as primary caregivers. This article explores the relationship between fathers’ ability to work flexibly and their share of childcare responsibility across financial situations. A capabilities perspective is applied to better understand why fathers’ childcare aspirations may not align with what they are capable of in practice. Using 2021 survey data on fathers (n = 493) and mothers (n = 472) of young children in different-sex partnerships from four European countries, multinomial logistic regressions are estimated to predict childcare responsibility. Findings suggest fathers’ spatial flexibility (working from home) increases their likelihood of being the person primarily responsible for childcare, whereas temporal flexibility (varying the start/end times of the working day) does not. Economic conditions influence these dynamics, with financially strained fathers benefiting most from spatial flexibility.

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.

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.

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.

This study explores how the interplay between perceived autonomy and dependence in online crowdwork shapes workers’ perceptions of fairness and frustration. Promises of autonomy entice workers to crowdwork, yet these promises often mask deeper dependencies on platforms and requesters. This study finds that high autonomy, when coupled with high dependence, may have adverse effects on fairness and frustration. These findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between autonomy and dependence in online crowdwork. Workers with low autonomy are less affected by dependence, while those with high autonomy are more likely to perceive platforms as operating unfairly when coupled with high dependence. These findings support the fauxtonomy hypothesis, demonstrating how autonomy, under conditions of dependence, creates a sense of false self-employment and amplifies worker frustration. Addressing these disparities is critical to ensuring fair treatment and reducing frustration among platform workers, especially for those who feel trapped in high-dependence situations.

Although it is widely acknowledged that vulnerability to climate change is distributed unevenly, the significance of differences in working conditions remains understudied. This article explores workplace climate vulnerability through analysis of the ‘politics of production’, understood as the interaction between negotiations at the level of institutional regulation and those pertaining to the labour process. The matter is considered through interviews with Jan, a Swiss construction worker. Jan’s narrative indicates that a ‘politics of production’ does not represent clashes of pre-existing interests but rather themselves generate definite subjectivities that in turn influence how climate change is negotiated. For example, norms of masculinity which prescribe the silent endurance of pain, can prevent individuals from taking action to protect themselves from the effects of climate change. The perspective of a ‘politics of production’ also aids in the understanding of a persistent maladaptation to climate change now causing further environmental and worker-related strains.

We document the lived experience of Shiv, a care home recruitment manager, during the period of mandated employee vaccination in the COVID-19 pandemic. Care homes in the United Kingdom, as in many parts of the world, became a brutal front line in the battle to mitigate the pandemic’s worst effects. Residents and staff were among the most vulnerable to infection, a risk heightened by failure to test incoming residents and employees. In response to rising mortality in care homes, the UK government made vaccination a condition of employment from 11 November 2021. Through Shiv’s reflective narrative, we examine the ethical tensions and practical challenges of enforcing mandatory vaccination in care homes – and the confusion and consequences that followed its abrupt withdrawal.