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High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

In this paper, we argue that work should be recognized as “commons.” We call for a new approach to how managers define their role and responsibility regarding the problem of work flexibility and of its societal implications. We argue that, in the global and digitized economy, it is in the best interest of all the company’s stakeholders that managers choose combinations of work arrangements and human resource policies considering the externalities of these decisions. Managers’ responsibility spans to the costs and risks that the broader social system of organizational stakeholders will bear because of their decisions. When labor market institutions are “thin,” it is management’s responsibility to contribute structuring and shaping them, so that the interests of workers, independent of the work arrangements, are considered.

The 1980s and 1990s at Stanford University were a uniquely productive era for research on organizations and labor markets. I describe three important, interconnected themes that characterize the research on organizations and labor markets that emerged from Stanford during this era: the central role of the firm in a multi-level system that determines labor market outcomes, the role of institutions in both creating and constraining labor market outcomes, and the dynamic, often unexpected, consequences of labor market outcomes. I describe the genesis and development of each theme and conclude by discussing what lessons can be learned from this era about creating an innovative and productive research culture.

This study investigates the effects of organizational factors on firms' adoption and use of internal staffing strategies. In particular, we examine the different effects of firm- and branch-level factors on the adoption of internal development programs and the selection of entry-level employees. We find that firm-level factors, such as firm size and organizational prestige, are positively associated with the adoption of development programs. Branch-level factors, such as branch size and leverage ratio, are positively associated with entry-level hiring. This study offers new insight into the dynamics between different levels of organizational factors and their relationship with human resource management practices.

This chapter addresses the two important themes that we believe characterise how the platform-based gig economy operates. The first of the two themes explores the shifting boundaries of the triangular business model and its place within the wider, evolving capitalist structure. The triangular business model is the foundation of the platform-based gig economy and consists of the digital platform, the producer/worker and the end consumer. The digital platform acts as the intermediary and provides a market for exchange of goods and services between the workers and the end consumers. The fluidity of the triangular relationship has left the platform-based gig economy beyond the reach of the traditional neo-liberal regulatory system leading to the blurring of employee and employer relations. The second theme is based on the exploration and application of the Marxist concept of surplus value creation and its appropriation within the gig structure. Here, the authors seek to show the exploitation of the worker as a participant in the triangular business model. Given that the worker bears the majority of the entrepreneurial risk and provides capital they ought to receive a proportion of the surplus value created from the transaction. The authors have established the increasing dominance of platforms within the triangular business model and the enhanced scope for exploitation of workers in form of poor remuneration standards due to employee status ambiguity and the appropriation of a disproportionate amount of surplus value flowing to the platform owners.

What happens to nonelite workers’ meaning, belonging, and identity when work is “on-demand”? On-demand organizations, such as Uber and TaskRabbit, have ambiguous boundaries and locations of workers. This qualitative study investigated how organizational and societal boundary discourse and the organization of the work itself, constructed sometimes conflicting worker roles that influenced how ride-hailing workers understood the boundaries of the on-demand organization and their location with respect to it. The roles of app–user and driver–partner constructed ride-hailing workers as outside the boundaries of the organization, while the driver–bot role constructed them as (nonhuman) elements of organizational technology. While the driver–partner role had positive and empowering identity, meaning, and belongingness associations, its conflict with the other roles blocked these positive associations, and led to cynicism and fatalism. We reflect on the possible impacts of the on-demand economy on society, workers, and the practice of work, particularly for nonelite workers.

This chapter summarises the results of empirical research with regard to the shaping up of migration policies in given countries. At the same time recommendations are developed for the migration policies of particular states in the context of labour market security. Regulations introduced in the migration policy and labour law may influence the profiles of immigrants who will arrive in a particular labour market. In Chapter 2, perspectives are presented: that of the immigrants and that of the state. In the former case, the issue of labour market security is presented as the factor behind individual migration-related decisions and the choice of a particular destination country. In the latter case, i.e., the perspective of the state, the issue of labour market security is an element of migration policy based on selection of immigrants depending on the demand from the economy and on the model of immigration preferred by a given country.

How does having an external affiliation influence the probability of employee inter-firm mobility? Our review of the literature suggests that it is difficult to predict ex-ante whether holding an external affiliation increases or decreases inter-firm mobility due to the presence of competing arguments related to the benefits of employment flexibility against agency costs. In the absence of a clear direction for prediction, we conduct an exploratory analysis on administrative labor market data from Sweden during 2002–2010. Specifically, we examine the effects of a few contingencies that are prominent in the study of employment and organizations, namely, organizational age, size, and employment tenure. We find that holding an external organizational affiliation reduces inter-firm mobility among younger and smaller organizations, and for recent hires; yet it increases inter-firm mobility for other organizations and employees. We discuss the implications of our work for future research.