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This paper examines an identified but unexplored career gap evidenced at a mid-level classification in the academic career path for women in Australia. This career-stalling effect or holding pattern, is examined to determine underlying causes of career trajectory interruption.

Guided by the epistemological stance of standpoint theory, this exploratory abductive study employs a novel arts-based method, draw, write, reflect, to access experiences that may be difficult to convey verbally. The obtained drawings and reflections were thematically analysed.

Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of illusio this article finds support for female academics’ bifurcated consciousness. Results demonstrate how opposing social role prescriptions result in the deliberate avoidance of work-life conflict, a nuanced lack of confidence in work tasks in combination with other, often competing responsibilities, and the uneven distribution of administrative duties known as “academic housework”, which combine to stall careers. Female academics feel pressure to prioritise their domestic role and eschew career progression.

Despite the small sample size, the findings provide rich career narratives and experiences of female academics in Australia providing additional impetus for increased gender equity efforts.

This study is the first to explore the previously unidentified holding pattern for female academics in Australia. Findings suggest there is a range of previously unexplored impediments resulting in a gendered stalling at a mid-level classification interrupting female academic career progression.

It has been 50 years since the publication of Studs Terkel’s groundbreaking book, Working, which consists of a compilation of interviews carried out with over 130 workers in the United States. In this chapter, the author revisits this masterpiece, which offers a penetrating analysis of the dehumanization and degradation of work. The author argues that Working is an ode to, and guide for, ethnographic scholarship on work and that it remains as powerful and relevant today as when it was originally published a half of a century ago.

In this paper we explore the gendered ways in which academic staff resistance and compliance is configured in a post-1992 University in England, including the emotions implicated in the navigation of neo-liberalisation and research intensification of their academic institution and its associated disciplinarian mechanisms.

We draw on data from an interview study of a diverse sample of 32 academics of different gender, discipline and academic grade. Analysis informed by a feminist post-structuralist framework of power and discourse explored different forms of academic resistance and compliance; how the embodied academic subject was (re)negotiated within gendered discourses of neo-liberal research excellence and managerialism and the gendered emotions generated in processes of resistance and compliance.

Institutional change and expectations to engage with research performativity generated fear, anxiety and anger. Female staff appeared to actively resist the masculinized research subject performing all hours work and individualism in the context of private and institutional gendered relations and labour. Male staff though actively resisted the feminization of higher education and the neo-liberal instrumentalization of caring and therapeutic cultures and ideologically resisted the surveillance mechanisms of higher education including the REF.

Our work contributes to scholarship problematizing the assumed neutrality of resistance and compliance and highlighting women’s symbolic struggle to (dis)identify with a masculine professional norm. In terms of theorising academic resistance to neo-liberalism and identity construction, further attention should be given to the mobilization and symbolic capital of academics and emotions positioned differently due to their gender and intersecting differences.

Our study addresses a gap in the scholarship of academic resistance and compliance by advancing the understanding of gender inequalities and emotions implicated in the process of resistance and compliance against neo-liberalism.

Due to the rapid ageing of the continent's population, a significant surge in long-term care expenses for the elderly is expected across Europe in the coming years. Could a potential solution to this challenge involve the increased informal care provided by adult children? In this context, we examined a general view or moral duty of European citizens regarding whether adult children should assume responsibility for providing long-term care to the elderly.

Our multilevel analysis draws on individual-level data from the 2017 European Value Study and country-level data from various European sources encompassing participants from 21 member countries of the European Union.

The findings reveal that in nations where public long-term care services are sufficiently available and of superior quality, there is a negative sentiment towards the notion that adult children should bear the responsibility for elderly care. In total, 71% of the country-level variance in our dependent variable was explained by the availability and quality of formal long-term care in a country. Furthermore, various individual-level attributes contribute to shaping attitudes towards care-giving responsibility. We observed that women, middle-aged individuals, those without religious affiliations, those with modern gender role attitudes and non-immigrants tended to hold unfavourable attitudes towards the responsibility of adult children in long-term care provision.

There are relatively many studies on the general attitude of the population towards filial obligation. However, so far there have been very few studies available that examine the population's attitude towards the obligation of adult children to commit to their parents' long-term care. Our research explains the variation of the phenomenon in Europe with both country-level and individual-level factors.

This study examines the construction of essential labour during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Research questions include: (1) How have government policies shaped designations of essential versus non-essential labour? (2) What are the consequences of these designations for essential workers? To address these questions, the author employs a case study of custodial services employees at Prairie University, a large public university in a major Texas city (Prairietown). The author begins with an examination of federal, state, and municipal guidelines about COVID-19 safety and critical infrastructure in order to understand the policy landscape within which custodial employees at Prairie University were formally deemed essential. Drawing on theories of non-nurturant care work, the author shows how government guidelines for essential work released during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic discursively invisibilized cleaning labourers. The author then demonstrates how this invisibilization contributed to Prairie University custodial services staff members’ exposure to COVID-19. The author concludes by considering the implications of the findings for future research on care work and the construction of essential labour.

This paper aims to identify the role of coproduction and value-in-use in the overall hotel experience value, and its effects on cognitive-affective satisfaction and loyalty. The country chosen is Spain, in the context of the “new normal,” where the increase in tourist flow after the COVID-19 pandemic has been very relevant, setting up the chance to better assess and discuss value creation in a post-pandemic era.

The causal model is validated with partial least squares (PLS) in a panel of 405 hotel guests (applying sampling quotas by sex, age and region).

The chain of effects is verified with stronger links at the end and with a greater weight of value-in-use compared to coproduction. Hotels’ efforts to adapt to the pandemic situation work better if a customized, unique experience is offered and if intensive communication is with and not just to the guest. The role of experience value is key for the cocreation to produce results for satisfaction and loyalty.

This study contributes to the value creation literature by highlighting the respective roles of coproduction and value-in-use as drivers of the satisfaction−loyalty chain, and by introducing the guest’s overall hotel experience value into this chain. This is viewed against the backdrop of the contextual changes that have occurred since 2020 in the Spanish hotel industry. The post-pandemic context “forces” the client to actively participate. Analysis of the implications of this kind of new cocreation on the overall customer experience is relevant for both tourism scholars and managers.

The Covid-19 pandemic appears to have engendered heterogeneous effects on individuals’ labour market prospects. This paper focuses on two possible sources of a heterogeneous exposition to labour market risks associated with the pandemic outbreak: the routine task content of the job and the teleworkability. To evaluate whether these dimensions played a crucial role in amplifying employment and wage gaps among workers, we focus on the case of Italy, the first EU country hit by Covid-19.

Investigating the actual effect of the pandemic on workers employed in jobs with a different degree of teleworkability and routinization, using real microdata, is currently unfeasible. This is because longitudinal datasets collecting annual earnings and the detailed information about occupations needed to capture a job’s routine task content and teleworkability are not presently available. To simulate changes in the wage distribution for the year 2020, we have employed a static microsimulation model. This model is built on data from the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (IT-SILC) survey, which has been enriched with administrative data and aligned with monthly observed labour market dynamics by industries and regions.

We measure the degree of job teleworkability and routinization with the teleworkability index (TWA) built by Sostero et al. (2020) and the routine-task-intensity index (RTI) developed by Cirillo et al. (2021), respectively. We find that RTI and TWA are negatively and positively associated with wages, respectively, and they are correlated with higher (respectively lower) risks of a large labour income drop due to the pandemic. Our evidence suggests that labour market risks related to the pandemic – and the associated new types of earnings inequality that may derive – are shaped by various factors (including TWA and RTI) instead of by a single dimension. However, differences in income drop risks for workers in jobs with varying degrees of teleworkability and routinization largely reduce when income support measures are considered, thus suggesting that the redistributive effect of the emergency measures implemented by the Italian government was rather effective.

No studies have so far investigated the effect of the pandemic on workers employed in jobs with a different degree of routinization and teleworkability in Italy. We thus investigate whether income drop risks in Italy in 2020 – before and after income support measures – differed among workers whose jobs are characterized by a different degree of RTI and TWA.

Employees facing challenges in their careers – i.e. female, migrant, elderly and lower-educated employees – might expect job searches to have a low likelihood of success and might therefore more often stay in unsatisfactory positions. The goal of this study is to discover inequalities in job mobility for these employees.

We rely on a large sample of Dutch public sector employees (N = 30,709) and study whether employees with challenges in their careers are hampered in translating job dissatisfaction into job searches. Additionally, we assess whether this is due to their perceptions of labor market alternatives.

Findings show that non-Western migrant, elderly and lower-educated employees are less likely to act on job dissatisfaction than their advantaged counterparts, whereas women are more likely than men to do so. Additionally, we find that although they perceive labor market opportunities as limited, this does not affect their propensity to search for different jobs.

This paper is novel in discovering inequalities in job mobility by analyzing whether employees facing challenges in their careers are less likely to act on job dissatisfaction and therefore more likely to remain in unsatisfactory positions.

The paper aims to examine the role played by property tax in influencing strategic decisions regarding marital separation and divorce in Italian municipalities.

The empirical analysis is conducted on a sample of 6,458 Italian municipalities by applying the ordinary least squares (OLS) and instrumental variables (IVs) approaches.

The estimation results show a small increase in marital separations and divorces as the difference between the municipal secondary and primary home tax rate increases. Specifically, an increase of 1‰ in the property tax rate differentials is accompanied by an increase of six marital separations and four divorces per 1,000 inhabitants.

The main limitation of the analysis is that the strategic behavior of the married couple is inferred from econometric analysis with data aggregated at the municipal level. To investigate this phenomenon more precisely, it would be useful to have individual data collected by surveys on strategic divorce decisions due to property tax incentives.

This study contributes to the scant existing literature on the tax incentives for strategic divorce. It is the first study to empirically investigate the effects of property tax on separation and divorce decisions by investigating the Italian context. In Italy, a property tax was introduced in 1993, encouraging “false” divorces by spouses with a second home since the tax on the secondary home was set at a rate higher than that on the primary residence. Moreover, there were no tax deductions and no additional tax breaks on the secondary home, while they were established on the primary one. Higher property taxes and the absence of tax breaks on the secondary home may have encouraged a strategic behavior whereby many married couples filed for false separation and divorce in order to recover part of property tax rebates.