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Criminal background checks are used widely in the U.S. to screen applicants for employment, licenses, housing, and government benefits. State lawmakers instituted many of these requirements, ostensibly with the aim of managing criminal risk in various areas of social life. The present study examines the development of this legal form. Drawing from legislative discourse in the Illinois General Assembly, this study puts forward an endogenous account of constructing criminal risk, showing that lawmakers justified new background check laws largely as a means of filling security loopholes created by prior legislation. While the laws respond to identified criminal risks, the process of expanding background checks itself draws attention to other dimensions of vulnerability, necessitating the addition of new screening requirements. Incremental expansions are further justified on the basis of background screening’s low cost, which, lawmakers argue, creates an obligation to extend the requirements wherever vulnerabilities are identified, particularly when children are potential victims and sex offenders the possible villains. The study shows how security and vulnerability are mutually generative in the area of background screening and discusses implications for understanding this legal form in the context of contemporary American penality.

Barriers to employment are a significant issue in the United States and abroad. As civil rights legislation continues to be enforced and as employers seek to diversify their workplaces, it is incumbent upon the management field to offer insights that address obstacles to work. Although barriers to employment have been addressed in various fields such as psychology and economics, management scholars have addressed this issue in a piecemeal fashion. As such, our review will offer a comprehensive, integrative model of barriers to employment that addresses both individual and organizational perspectives. We will also address societal-level concerns involving these barriers. An integrative perspective is necessary for research to progress in this area because many individuals with barriers to employment face multiple challenges that prevent them from obtaining and maintaining full employment. While the additive, or possibly multiplicative, effect of employment barriers have been acknowledged in related fields like rehabilitation counseling and vocational psychology, the Human Resource Management (HRM) literature has virtually ignored this issue. We discuss suggestions for the reduction or elimination of barriers to employment. We also provide an integrative model of employment barriers that addresses the mutable (amenable to change) nature of some barriers, while acknowledging the less mutable nature of others.

It is widely established that many hiring managers view social networking websites (SNWs) such as LinkedIn and/or Facebook in the employment selection process, leading to the acceptance or rejection of job applicants. Due to the rapid evolution of social media, scientific study of SNWs has been substantially outpaced by organizational practice. This chapter focuses on a wide range of issues related to SNW screening relevant to research and practice.

The chapter: (1) reviews the current state of SNW screening practices, (2) describes a wide range of HR issues that should be considered such as privacy, discrimination, negligent hiring, validity, reliability, generalizability, impression management, applicant reactions, and utility, (3) draws connections to related issues already addressed by established employment selection methods to inform SNW screening, (4) discusses pros and cons of potential SNW screening approaches, and (5) provides a framework of best practices that should be incorporated into social network screening policies.

As an emerging employment selection approach, SNW screening demonstrates potential as a rich source of applicant information, but includes numerous legal and ethical issues. Further, these potential benefits and risks vary widely depending on the approaches used.

Provides HR practitioners with a wide range of information necessary to develop an effective social network screening policy, while making the case for academics to pursue research in this nascent area.

This chapter lays out a research agenda in the sociology of work for a type of data and organizational intermediary: work platforms. As an example, the authors employ a case study of the adoption of automated hiring platforms (AHPs) in which the authors distinguish between promises and existing practices. The authors draw on two main methods to do so: critical discourse analysis and affordance critique. The authors collected and examined a mix of trade, popular press, and corporate archives; 135 texts in total. The analysis reveals that work platforms offer five core affordances to management: (1) structured data fields optimized for capture and portability within organizations; (2) increased legibility of activity qua data captured inside and outside the workplace; (3) information asymmetry between labor and management; (4) an “ecosystem” design that supports the development of limited-use applications for specific domains; and (5) the standardization of managerial techniques between workplaces. These combine to create a managerial frame for workers as fungible human capital, available on demand and easily ported between job tasks and organizations. While outlining the origin of platform studies within media and communication studies, the authors demonstrate the specific tools the sociology of work brings to the study of platforms within the workplace. The authors conclude by suggesting avenues for future sociological research not only on hiring platforms, but also on other work platforms such as those supporting automated scheduling and customer relationship management.

Over the past decade, the rapid evolution of social media has impacted the field of human resource management in numerous ways. In response, scholars and practitioners have sought to begin an investigation of the myriad of ways that social media impacts organizations. To date, research evidence on a range of HR-related topics are just beginning to emerge, but are scattered across a range of diverse literatures. The principal aim of this chapter is to review the current literature on the study of social media in HRM and to integrate these disparate emerging literatures. During our review, we discuss the existent research, describe the theoretical foundations of such work, and summarize key research findings and themes into a coherent social media framework relevant to HRM. Finally, we offer recommendations for future work that can enhance knowledge of social media’s impact in organizations.

Relative to other industries, hospitality organizations tend to be labor intensive, employing large numbers of individuals in hotels, resorts, restaurants, and other related enterprises. There has been long-standing debate between the rights of worker personal privacy and the need for employers to know information concerning prospective and current employees. This article presents an evolution of employment relationships in the hospitality industry to demonstrate the complex nature of employment from legal, moral, and ethical perspectives that exists at the current time. It provides discussion of the balance between the rights of individuals and employers’ “need to know” private information to draw conclusions and suggestions for practicing hospitality human resource managers.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a rapidly emerging field of computer science. It refers to the use of software robots or similar virtual assistants, which are programmed to complete repetitive and labor-intensive tasks. It has been shown that RPA offers technologically advanced solutions to businesses around the world and can cut costs, raise levels of efficiency, and improve quality. In the effort to remain competitive in the market, RPA has become a powerful and competitive tool for companies spanning a range of different industries. In this chapter, the authors’ focus is on the role of RPA in the banking sector. In this chapter author will analyze the existing scientific research in this area, with a focus on the process requirements for implementing RPA in banks, RPA vendors, and the general benefits of robotization in banking. The chapter will provide additional value through a list of suggestions for the practical use of RPA in the banking industry.

We investigate outcomes associated with the turnover of unskilled workers, isolating its effects on revenue, cost, and profit. Little attention from researchers has been given to unskilled workers, a significant portion of the workforce.

This study investigates the relation between turnover among unskilled workers and financial performance using data from 527 hotels owned by the same lodging chain. The workers in our sample are full-time housekeepers and front desk attendants.

We find that the relation between turnover and performance differs by turnover type (voluntary vs. involuntary) and category of unskilled worker, reiterating the need to differentiate between turnover type and the importance of context in studying turnover. We challenge the assumption that voluntary turnover is categorically harmful and our results for front desk attendants support the view that organizations choose turnover levels that maximize performance. We also provide new evidence on the effects of involuntary turnover. Contrary to the established notion that dismissing less able employees should improve performance, we find that involuntary turnover has negative consequences.

Our results demonstrate the importance of distinguishing voluntary turnover from involuntary turnover and the need to include both in models predicting turnover’s performance effects.