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The purpose of this paper is to explore the attitudes of disabled employees toward availability of work facilities, treatment of other employees, and the working conditions in the Jordanian public sector.

A purposive sample of disabled public sector employees (198) was selected to participate in the study by filling the designated questionnaire.

Disabled employees reported a relatively moderate level of satisfaction about the availability of facilities. Also, participants are satisfied with the treatment of their supervisors and colleagues and of the working conditions. Disabled female participants and those who hold graduate degrees reported high-satisfaction level about the treatment they receive from their colleagues at work. The findings also showed that 55 percent of the participants were hired based on humanitarian bases as a result of their disability cases compared with 45 percent who were hired based on their qualifications and merits.

This research significantly contributes to the scarce knowledge that currently exists in the position of disabled employees in the Arab world. Policy makers and human resource managers should develop a clear strategy to provide the facilities for disabled people to accommodate at work. In addition, they should provide professional guidance and rehabilitation training programs aiming to enhance disabled employees’ participation and involvement in the labor market.

The study is one of the first to investigate the status of disabled public sector employees in Jordan and in the Arab world.

The UK government has suggested that women's inequality can be addressed through improved education and training. The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which this is the case by examining the opportunities for learning in a range of low‐paid jobs in local government, which are predominantly but not exclusively occupied by women.

Drawing on a case study involving over 100 face‐to‐face interviews with low‐paid workers, their supervisors, managers, trainers and union representatives in one local authority, it uses Scherer's 2004 framework to examine whether low‐paid jobs and the opportunities they provide for training act as “stepping stones” or “traps” to job progression and better pay.

As a solution to the problem of low pay, the discourse of individual self‐improvement under‐estimates the structural problems facing low‐paid workers, their lack of resources and entitlements to learning. Moreover, it ignores the fact that many low‐paid workers in the public sector value their work as socially useful. This public service ethos should not be a justification for low basic pay.

This paper extends the theme of gender equality in UK public services by examining to what extent measures focusing on education and training can lift women workers off the “sticky floor” of low‐paid low status work.

Gender segregation remains a remarkably persistent feature of the workforce in all member states of the European Union (EU), regardless of variations in rates of female economic activity, the growth of equality legislation and changing values prompted by notions of social justice. However, the argument that such patterns of segregation, in particular the clustering of women in low skilled, low paid work, represents a waste of human resources has a more powerful resonance in the context of converging economic and social factors. The creation of a Single Market, chronic skill shortages and an ageing workforce have combined with a more acute awareness of social justice and climate of political correctness to put women's skill and training needs higher on the political agenda than ever before. As a consequence, the Commission of the European Communities (CEC), which arguably has a good track record in acting as a catalyst in the promotion of equal opportunities (EO) more generally, is now in a unique position to challenge the rigidities of segregation through its funding programmes for training.

As a step toward more firmly establishing factors to promote retention among younger employees in the hospitality industry, this study aims to focuses on fun in the workplace (fun activities, manager support for fun and coworker socializing) and training climate (organizational support, manager support and job support) as potential antecedents of turnover in a European context.

Logistic regression was used to analyze the impact of fun and training climate on turnover with a sample of 902 employees from Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands. Data on fun and training climate were obtained through surveys, which were paired with turnover data from organizational records.

With respect to fun in the workplace, group-level manager support for fun and coworker socializing were significantly related to turnover, but not fun activities. With respect to training climate, individual-level job support was significantly related to turnover, but not organizational support and manager support.

As the data were obtained from employees from one organization, further research would be valuable with additional samples to substantiate the generalizability of the results.

Given the challenge of turnover, organizations should foster informal aspects of fun in the workplace and learning opportunities to promote retention.

The study examined the fun–turnover relationship in a context outside of the USA where previous fun–turnover research has been conducted, and it examined fun relative to training climate, which has not been studied heretofore. This study also investigated group- and individual-level effects of both fun and training climate on turnover.

The purpose of this paper is to explore experiences and attitudes associated with “precarious work”, an umbrella term for insecure, casual, flexible, contingency, non-standard and zero-hour types of employment.

The investigation was carried-out through two studies. The “outside-in” view was represented by business undergraduates (n=56), responding to a four-item questionnaire on precarious work. It was contrasted with the “inside-out” perspective of migrant, care and hospitality workers (n=72) expressed in 48 in-depth interviews, and four focus groups.

Participant narratives included counterfactual comparisons that were more often of a downward (“it could have been worse”) than of an upward (“not as good as it could have been”) kind. Precarious participants spontaneously remarked that they were “lucky” (rather than “unlucky”) to be in precarious work.

Precarious work is likely to give rise to insecurity, uncertainty and vulnerability. However, this study distinguishes between the perspectives of “outside-in” observers, and “inside-out” participants. The former view was aligned with the standard view of work social scientists, yet the latter ran counter to both. Interestingly, the narratives of participants were compatible with the self-evaluations of people exposed to other hardships (like natural disasters).

There is a limited research on how the use of counterfactual thinking and difference of vantage points shapes attitudes and evaluations of precariousness. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study which has identified and explained the unprompted use of “luck” in the narratives of precarious workers.

Randy Hodson’s categories offer an ambitious, comprehensive framework for analysing the objective and subjective conditions that shape dignity and resistance at work. In this chapter, we engage with Hodson and his collaborators work through exploring its potential usefulness in helping understand the experience of low-skill and low-paid factory workers at the end of supermarket supply chains in the United Kingdom. In emphasising the purposeful and strategic actions of workers to attain and maintain dignity within work, and management-influenced conditions that destroy or deny it, Hodson’s perspectives overlap with themes in more recent labour process theory that elaborate expanded notions of labour agency. While we share such concerns, we also identify some limitations to the framework and its explanatory powers, particularly where threats to dignity are associated with concepts of abuse and mismanagement. Our investigations of the supermarket supply chain reveal that management, authority and work organisation in these plants is not, by and large, ‘abusive’, ‘chaotic’ or ‘anomic’. Such terminology creates the unavoidable impression of pre-rational workplaces based on arbitrary, personal power. In our cases, the plants are not much ‘mis-managed’ as managed rationally according direct and indirect pressures exerted through supply chain power dynamics. Hodson’s framework for addressing issues of dignity and to a lesser extent resistance, remain an indispensable but incomplete entry point for understanding its dynamics.

The purpose of this viewpoint is to discuss and provide solutions for the current staffing crisis facing tourism-related industries. Considering that staff shortages are prominent in most industries this article suggests organizational changes that are needed to address these problems

This viewpoint unpacks the reason behind the shortage in staff and suggests potential solutions, based on organizational development

The strategies offered here as potential solutions for human resources center on changing the image of the roles that are suffering shortages. This includes developing organizational practices to provide changes in the areas of recruitment, reward, and work-life balance. These strategies are contextualized with the transformation of other jobs due to the global pandemic and the feminized nature of the tourism-related industries.

This viewpoint is particularly topical as it speaks to the current well-publicized crises in the staffing of airports and wider shortages of hospitality staff in developed nations. It is well positioned to spark discussion and future research on areas such as dignity at work in tourism-related industries, gendered work, and post-pandemic employment practices in services.

This paper aims to report on a preliminary study of how professionally qualified immigrants from Hong Kong to Canada make sense of their experiences, particularly workplace opportunities.

The study is framed by a Critical Sensemaking approach, involving in-depth interviews with 12 informants from the Hong Kong Chinese community and discursive analysis (Foucault, 1979) of the local and formative contexts in which they are making sense of workplace opportunities.

The findings suggest that a dominant discourse of “integration” strongly influences the way that professionally qualified immigrants come to accept the unchallenged assumptions that the government is providing help for them to “get in”; and that ethnic service organizations are offering positive guidance to the immigrants’ workplace goals and opportunities. Immigrants’ identity and self-worth are measured by whether they “get in” – integrate – into so-called mainstream society. The effect of this hidden discourse has been to marginalize some immigrants in relation to workplace opportunities.

The interplay of structural (i.e. formative contexts and organizational rules), socio-psychological (i.e. sensemaking properties) and discursive contexts (e.g. discourses of immigration) are difficult to detail over time. The interplay – although important – is difficult to document and trace over a relatively short period of time and may, more appropriately lend itself to more longitudinal research.

This paper strongly suggests that we need to move beyond structural accounts to capture the voice and agency of immigrants. In particular, as we have tried to show, the sensemaking and sensemaking contexts in which immigrants find themselves provide important insights to the immigrant experience.

This paper suggests widespread policy implications, with a call for greater use of qualitative methods in the study of immigrant experience. It is suggested that policymakers need to move beyond uniform and structural approaches to immigration. How selected immigrants in context make sense of their experiences and how this can help to identify improved policies need to be understood.

This paper is original in going beyond both structural and psychological accounts of immigration. Through the developing method of Critical Sensemaking, the study combines a focus on structure and social psychology and their interplay. Thus, providing insights not only to the broad discriminatory practices that so-called non-White immigrants face in Canada (and likely other industrial societies) but how these are made sense of. The study is also unique in attempting to fuse sensemaking and discourse analysis to show the interaction between individual sensemaking in the context of dominant discourses.

Considers the position of women in the computing industry and the impact of new technology on women employed in information handling occupations. Examines the role of traditional attitudes to women, education and training, this is of particular importance as the computer industry faces a skill crisis in the 1990s. Trends would seem to suggest that although women have the potential to take up new opportunities in computing, they fail to see computing as an attractive option and are technically ill‐equipped to do so.

Despite previous research indicating that fun in the workplace has favorable outcomes, the effect of fun on turnover has not been definitively determined. The present study analyzed the direct effects on turnover of three dimensions of fun: fun activities, coworker socializing and manager support for fun, and the moderating influence of managed fun (e.g. whether fun is perceived as contrived).

Logistic regression was used to analyze the fun in the workplace-turnover relationship with a sample of 491 hourly associates from 141 stores of a US national retailer. Data on the fun were obtained through surveys that were paired with turnover data collected six months afterward from corporate records.

Fun activities were only found to be associated with a lower turnover when employees perceived fun as less managed. When employees perceived fun as more managed, fun activities had no effect on turnover. Coworker socializing was associated with a lower turnover when fun was perceived as less managed and higher turnover when fun was perceived as more managed.

As the data were obtained from employees from one organization, further research would be valuable with additional samples to substantiate the generalizability of the results.

Given the challenge of turnover and the increasing prevalence of efforts to promote fun in the workplace, organizations should allow fun activities to be less managed (and thus more organic) to help reduce turnover.

While previous research has addressed managed/less managed fun in qualitative research, the present study represents the first investigation to examine this aspect of fun in the workplace from a quantitative perspective and to examine its relationship with employee turnover.