Documents Hebson, Gail 13 results

"This article investigates the intersection between precarious work and precarious lives through interviews with workers in the care, hospitality and art sectors. These revealed that workers experienced precarity as a double-edged sword of time and income uncertainty shaped by the context in which they were embedded – namely their employment, their household and their relations with state welfare and care systems. These three domains shaped both the constraints they faced and the buffers and resources available to them as they managed these time and income uncertainties. A dynamic work–life articulation framework is developed that embeds the strategies workers deploy to mitigate uncertainty within these three domains and their intersections. These strategies may still only result in the least bad and often far from sustainable outcome due to changing contexts and trade-offs between time and income uncertainty."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"Drawing on a multilevel study of commissioning, employers, and care staff, this article explores the role of time in the management of domiciliary care work for older adults in England and the consequences for the employment conditions of care staff. An index of fragmented time practices among 52 independent-sector domiciliary care providers reveals widespread tendencies to use zero-hours contracts and limit paid hours to face-to-face contact time, leaving travel time and other work-related activities unpaid. Care staff interviews reveal how fragmented time creates insecurities and demands high work engagement. Time management practices are shown to derive directly from strict time-based local authority commissioning. Subcontractors, both independent small firms and those belonging to national chains, can at best adopt human resource (HR) policies that are partial routes to failure, as evident in widespread recruitment and retention problems. Informal HR practices to accommodate working-time preferences help to retain individual staff, but adjustments are often marginal, adversely affect other staff and fail to expand the recruitment pool for social care. Labor shortages are likely to persist as long as workers are required to adapt to a regime of fragmented time and to work more hours than are paid, even at pay rates close to the national minimum wage."

"Intersectional analysis has been developing since its emergence from critical race feminism in the 1980s when it was used to conceptualize the inter-relationship of race and gender and, particularly, the experiences of discrimination and marginalization of black women in employment. While its contribution has been much debated within sociological and gender specific journals, its use still remains relatively limited within studies of work and employment relations. It is argued here that this field of study would benefit from greater engagement with and understanding of an intersectional approach to both the design and interpretation of research. Two lines of reasoning are put forward for this contention: firstly, that the intersectional approach contains an important caution against over-generalization that has been obscured; secondly, that separating the challenge for all academics to be more intersectionally sensitive from the methodological challenges of taking an intersectional approach brings the significance of intersectionality into sharper relief."

"Studies of care workers frequently reveal relatively high levels of job satisfaction despite poor employment conditions. The rewarding nature of care work, altruistic motivations and gendered social norms have all been used to explain why subjective job satisfaction is high despite poor pay and terms and conditions. Using data collected in case-study research with domiciliary and residential care workers, this article offers a new direction for care worker research that contextualizes the taken-for-granted assumption that care workers tolerate poor pay and conditions because women find the work satisfying and intrinsically rewarding. The article draws on cultural analyses of class to offer an alternative framework that identifies the wider social processes that can shape care workers' job satisfaction."

'Through a critical rereading of key UK workplace case studies this article explores why gender analysis matters to studies of people at work. We argue that the field of industrial relations could benefit from a greater engagement with feminist-influenced methodologies. In particular, we analyse three methodological approaches that can assist in understanding the lives of workers; a framework that recognises intersectionality; an account that accommodates both material and cultural explanations; and a research process that is reflexive and recognises positionality. These are identified as intrinsic to a gender-sensitive analysis, and through a comparison of key texts it is possible to highlight why their absence leads to much research in this field remaining 'gender blind'.'

"The European Union (EU) has an explicit commitment to raise the employment rate for women and to advance gender mainstreaming (GM) and gender equality in both employment and social inclusion policies. In this article we assess developments in the latest round of National Action Plans (NAPs), with particular attention to the situations in the 10 new member states. GM continues to be patchy and inadequate, with a similarly narrow focus in both 'old' and 'new' member states. After enlargement, the greater diversity of national situations in conjunction with ongoing reforms to EU policy frameworks create new challenges for GM."

"This book is inspired by, and dedicated to, Jill Rubery. Jill is a major figure in international debates on inequalities in work and employment. Her intellectual contributions are renowned for both their critical questioning of mainstream theoretical approaches, whether in economics, management, industrial relations or comparative systems, and their attention to real-world empirical detail. Jill's intellectual roots are with the influential Cambridge economics group researching labour market segmentation in the late 1970s and 1980s during a period when Keynesian economic thought was being eclipsed by neoclassical economics modelling. The research was inter-disciplinary, grounded in data (mostly involving case studies of firms) and driven by an ambitious intellectual agenda that developed theory while also illuminating practical matters of relevance to policy-makers and practitioners."