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Uber, the virtual service that connects drivers to passenger, presents a novel form of work-organization in which managerial functions are transposed into a virtual platform. This ethnographic study documents how Uber drivers in the city of Monterrey, Mexico navigate and come to make sense of the Uber model of work. Employing the conceptual device of the work-game, this study argues that engagement in the game of “earning coins” coupled the interest of drivers in generating the most-possible income with the interest of management in maintaining a readily available labor pool. Reinforcing this coupling was Uber’s deployment of an entrepreneurial ideology of “being your own boss,” which was especially important given the company’s lack of a physical management structure. However, as Uber takes advantage of the deindustrialization that has gripped Monterey, it attracts drivers exhibiting varied employment trajectories. This in turn creates different modes of playing the work-game and thus generates sharply divergent subjective understandings of the work, whose nature this chapter explores.

Research on job precarity and job instability have largely neglected the labor market trajectories in which these employment and non-employment situations are experienced. This study addresses the mechanisms of volatility and precarity in observed work histories of labor market entrants using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1997. Several ideal-typical post-education pathways are modeled for respondents entering the labor force between 1997 and 2010, with varying indicators and degrees of precarity. A series of predictive models indicate that women, racial-ethnic minorities, and lower social class labor market entrants are significantly more likely to be exposed to the most precarious early careers. Moreover, leaving the educational system with a completed associate’s, bachelor’s, or post-graduate degree is protective of experiencing the most unstable types of career pattern. While adjusting for these individual-level background and education variables, the findings also reveal a form of “scarring” as regional unemployment level is a significant macro-economic predictor of experiencing a more hostile and turbulent early career. These pathways lead to considerable earnings penalties 5 years after labor market entry.

Insights into the origins of entrepreneurial activity are gained through a study of alternative mechanisms implicated in the tendency for children of the self-employed to be substantially more likely than other children to enter into self-employment themselves. I use unique life history data to examine the impact of parental self-employment on the transition to self-employment in Denmark and assess the different mechanisms identified in the literature. The results suggest that parental role modeling is an important source of the transmission of self-employment. However, there is little evidence to suggest that children of the self-employed enter self-employment because they have privileged access to their parent's financial or social capital, or because their parents’ self-employment allows them to develop superior entrepreneurial abilities.

Despite recent advances, neither organizational studies nor the scholarship on economic resilience has systematically addressed how the ecologies of organizations that populate local economies can serve as infrastructures for responding proactively to economic shocks. Using county-level data, this study analyzes relationships between the prevalence of organizational alternatives to shareholder value-oriented (SVO) corporations within a particular locality and its unemployment levels during and after the Great Recession. The results support the hypothesis that the presence of such alternative organizations can enhance the capacities of local economies to resist and recover from recession shocks. Cooperative, municipal, and community-based enterprises, research universities, and nonprofits more generally were associated with greater resistance to the recession shock and stronger recoveries – specifically, lower surges in unemployment rates from 2007 to 2010 and greater reductions in unemployment rates from 2010 to 2016. By contrast, SVO corporations were associated with greater surges in unemployment and perhaps weaker recoveries. Providing a proof of concept, this study opens up new lines of inquiry for organizational studies by linking organizational ecologies to the promotion of collective efficacy and a more broadly shared prosperity in economic life.

This study examined changes in work precarity (i.e., job insecurity and income insecurity) and involuntary job loss following the start of the Great Recession in 2007 among people with and without disabilities. Using five waves of nationally representative data from the Americans' Changing Lives (ACL) panel study, the findings demonstrated that people with disabilities who had early experiences of income insecurity were more likely to experience later income insecurity than people without disabilities. Those who had a functional disability and experienced job insecurity and income insecurity at W1, in 1986, were also significantly more likely to experience involuntary job loss following the start of the Great Recession. These findings highlight the disproportionate impact of early work precarity for people with disabilities and are discussed as an application of the life-course concept of cumulative disadvantage.

Past studies suggest that full-time maternal employment may be negatively related to children’s cognitive development. Most studies measure maternal employment at one time point, while mothers’ work hours may not be stable during early childrearing years. Using data from the 2001 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort (N ≈ 6,500), the authors examine stability in mothers’ work hours across four waves when children are 9 and 24 months old, in preschool, and in kindergarten, mothers’ background characteristics associated to it, and its link to child cognitive development. Results show that the majority of mothers change work hours across the four waves. Analysis using multinomial logistic regression models suggests that mothers’ older age, fewer children, and higher household income are related to working full time at all four waves compared to varying work hours across the waves; more children and less than high school completion are related to staying home at all four waves; and mothers’ older age, being White, no change in partnership status, and holding a college degree are related to working part time at all four waves. Compared to mothers’ changing work hours, mothers’ stable work hours, full time or part time, at all four waves is related to children’s better reading, math, and cognitive scores in kindergarten, whereas mothers’ staying home at all four waves is negatively related to these scores. These associations disappear when background characteristics are controlled for in ordinary least squares regression models. These findings underscore the role of background characteristics in shaping both mothers’ stable employment and children’s cognitive development.

The purpose of this study was to explore low-income women’s perspectives of the shared meaning of work and employment values in their intergenerational family context from a critical and systemic lens. Participants were rural and urban women from low-income contexts (N = 14). Semi-structured interviews were designed to elicit thick description of lived experiences of work and family. Analyses were conducted using Van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenology coding process (1990).

Four emergent categories (Purpose to Work, What Work Is, Motherhood and Work, and Loss, Resilience and Work) with 16 themes described work–family integration. These narratives evoked a deep interconnectedness of work, family, and life. Because participants were recruited in locations where they were either already employed or seeking employment, these findings may not represent other women.

Effectiveness of programs and policies could be expanded by incorporating women’s values and motivations for employment and targeting family-level interventions. Programs could better empower women to seek employment and skills training for lasting financial sustainability, rather than just getting any job. Because participants distinguished between careers and jobs based on college education, many felt they could never obtain a career. Additionally, participants described work–family integration, not the prevalent idea of “work–life balance.” Participants described fighting to provide a better life for their children.

This study highlights under-represented perspectives of low-income women about work. Understanding the experiences of low-income women is essential for designing programs and services that will be practical and useful.

The objective of this paper is to report results from a Canadian-based study addressing systems-level barriers that restrict the employment of persons with vision loss, specifically in the experience of searching for and maintaining competitive employment. This paper aims to generate knowledge which may inform strategies and advocacy efforts to enhance opportunities for, and experiences of, paid employment for persons with vision loss.

This constructivist, grounded theory study used in-depth, semi-structured interviews with seven participants with restricted vision (those who are legally blind) to frame data collection and analyses.

Three interconnected themes emerged: facing and negotiating barriers, the cyclical process of seeking and keeping employment and settling for second best. Participants described barriers to employment that have been described in previous literature that not only continue to exist, but that act to potentiate one another, resulting in settling for competitive employment experiences that are second best. This represents a type of social injustice that has been previously described as ‘occupational injustice’. We explain this concept and link it to participants’ experiences.

This was a small, geographically bounded study. Nonetheless, the findings resonate with previous research and further our understanding regarding how barriers are experienced.

Knowledge gained furthers the understanding of how systemic obstacles restrict and bound the participation of persons with vision loss in the labour market.

While the barriers to employment for persons with low vision have been previously well described, this paper demonstrates how these barriers interact and act synergistically with one another, thereby reinforcing the need to focus on shortcomings at the service, system and policy level, in addition to individual rehabilitation.