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Informed by social representation theory, the study aims to explore how marketing workers represent their activities on social media.

A naturalistic data set of 17,553 messages posted on Twitter by advertising workers was collected. A sample of over 1,000 unique messages from this data set, incorporating all external links and images, was analysed inductively using structured thematic analysis.

Advertising workers represent marketing work as a series of fun yet constrained activities involving relationships with clients and colleagues. They engage in cognitive polyphasia by evaluating these productive differences in both a positive and negative light.

The study marks a novel use of social representation theory and innovative social media analysis. Further research should explore these relations in greater depth by considering the networks that marketing workers create on social media and establish how, when and why marketing workers turn to social media in their everyday activities.

Marketing workers choose to represent aspects of their work to one another, using social media. Marketing managers should support such activities and consider social media as a way to understand the lives and experiences of marketing workers.

Marketing researchers have embraced digital media as a route to understanding consumers. This study demonstrates the value of analysing digital media to develop an understanding of marketing work. It sheds new light on the ways marketing workers create social relationships and enables marketing managers to understand and observe the social aspects of effective marketing.

Social prescribing is a model of integrated care, in which primary healthcare staff can link patients to the social care sector. However, social prescribing can occur in different forms. To better understand the concept of social prescribing, this literature review examines the role of the link workers, activities and target groups.

A literature review was conducted. Studies before May 2020 were considered. In total, 1,700 studies were identified using the databases Pubmed, PsycInfo, Cinahl, Web of Science and Cochrane Library. After eligibility checks, 16 studies were included in the final analysis.

A few studies warned of a deeper engagement of the link worker due to service dependency, but most studies encouraged an active and supportive role of the link worker. Participants engaged in social, physical and counseling activities. The majority of studies emphasized the importance of linking group activities with personal preferences and identity needs. The main target groups were composed of individuals with psychosocial needs, but some studies also included patients with physical or mental illnesses.

Social prescribing is widely advocated as an innovative model of integrated care. However, few studies have looked into the complex system of social prescribing. This study analyzes the linking processes, activities and target groups in extant social prescribing programs.

During the transition from socialist to post-socialist regimes, many Central and Eastern Europe societies have developed a broad sector of informal work. This development has caused substantial economic and social problems. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper aims to answer two questions regarding European countries with a relatively weak economy and welfare state: what are the differences in the social characteristics between workers in formal and informal employment? And how might they be explained? According to the main assumption, a key reason why people work in undeclared employment in such countries is that they are in particularly vulnerable positions in the labour market. This paper uses the example of Moldova. The empirical study is based on a unique survey data set from the National Statistical Office of Moldova covering formal and informal employment.

The findings show that, in informal employment, workers in rural areas, workers with a low level of education, young workers and older workers – in the final years of their careers and after the age of retirement – are over-represented. It seems that a significant reason why these workers are often engaged in informal employment is the lack of alternatives in the labour market, particularly in rural areas, compounded by limited social benefits from unemployment benefits and pensions.

Research about social differences between workers in formal and informal employment in the countries of the European periphery is rare. This paper makes a new contribution to the theoretical debate and research regarding work in informal employment.

Using a mixed methodology comprising interviews, case file analysis and descriptive statistics, this study aims to examine the experiences of all 43 young people in Wales subject to secure accommodation orders between 1st April 2016 and 31st March 2018.

Children in the UK aged 10–17 years who are deemed to be at a significant level of risk to themselves or others may be subject to a secure accommodation order, leading to time spent in a secure children’s home (SCH) on welfare grounds. Following a rise in the number of children in Wales referred to SCHs for welfare reasons, this paper describes these young people’s journeys into, through and out of SCHs, giving insight into their experiences and highlighting areas for policy and practice improvements.

Findings indicate that improvements in mental health support and placement availability are key in improving the experiences of this particularly vulnerable group of young people throughout their childhood.

Other practical implications of the study’s findings, such as improvements in secure transport arrangements, are also discussed.

While the findings are limited by the reliance on self-report methods and the size of the study, namely, the small number of young people with experience of SCHs who were able to participate, the findings build on the existing knowledge base around children’s residential accommodation and provide new insights into how best to support these children.

Loneliness is known to adversely impact employee health, performance and affective commitment. This study involves a quantitative cross-sectional analysis of online survey data reported by adults employed in the United States (n = 5,927) to explore how loneliness and other related factors may influence avoidable absenteeism and turnover intention.

Worker loneliness was assessed using the UCLA Loneliness Scale (Version 3). Composite variables were constructed as proxy measures of worker job and personal resources. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine independent variable effects on dependent outcomes of (a) work days missed in the last month due to stress (stress-related absenteeism) and (b) likelihood to quit within the next year (turnover intention).

The job resources of social companionship, work-life balance and satisfaction with communication had significant negative relationships to loneliness in the SEM, as did the personal resources of resilience and less perceived alienation. Results further show lonely workers have significantly greater stress-related absenteeism (p = 0.000) and higher turnover intention ratings (p = 0.000) compared to workers who are not lonely. Respondent demographics (age, race and gender) and other occupational characteristics also produced significant outcomes.

Study findings underscore the importance of proactively addressing loneliness among workers and facilitating job and personal resource development as an employee engagement and retention strategy.

Loneliness substantially contributes to worker job withdrawal and has negative implications for organizational effectiveness and costs.

Although the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic appears to disproportionately affect those in informal employment, they often receive less government support than the formally employed. This paper considers definitions of the informal economy and informal employment, explores the rationale for participating in the informal economy and reflects on some effects of the pandemic on these workers.

The paper presents a narrative literature review with analysis of the selected academic and policy literature.

There are considerable short- and long-term implications of the pandemic for informal employment and the informal economy. This occurs against the background of unresolved tensions arising from informal workers' desire for more employment security and employers' striving for continued labour flexibility while transferring costs to government and workers. The COVID-19 pandemic might accelerate current trends and force new solutions to better protect basic work security while helping organisations to remain competitive. Government policies supporting work safety, income security, moves to formalisation of employment and fairness for informal employees are particularly important.

As statistical and qualitative evidence is currently limited, it is too early to identify the full effects of COVID-19 on employment in the informal economy.

The results suggest that governments need to carefully consider explicit support for those in informal employment to create fair, resilient and ethical structures for workers, businesses, economies and wider societies.

The paper identifies some of the social implications of COVID-19 for the informal sector.

The analysis offers initial insights into the impacts of a major health, economic and social shock on informal working.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the multidimensional nature of social and nonprofit organisations' accountability and performance measurement systems (PMSs). It further considers how these systems help in defining outcome performance indicators downward to beneficiaries

The paper discusses participatory action research (PAR) within an Italian social enterprise. In order to increase dialogue, participation and engagement, the researchers adopted focus groups as a preferred method of investigation and conducted a broad documental analysis from July 2016 to March 2018. The paper discusses the gathered data in light of the social impact value chain as well as the multiple-constituency approach.

The findings support the idea that social and nonprofit organisations lack the expertise and resources to evaluate outcomes and impact; however, through PAR, the organisation defined their desired outcomes and ascertained which internal output measures were most likely to be correlated with these outcomes. Moreover, the findings highlight that nonprofits develop outcome measurements less frequently because they have more control over their immediate activities and outputs.

This research suggests the need to reinforce lateral and downward accountability based on mission and mission-based activities in order to make the performance management system of social and nonprofit organisation linked to the organisational strategies.

This paper innovates methodologically in two directions: 1) it adopts action research as a qualitative method, allowing the researcher to generate solutions to collectively-identified problems and 2) the paper's arguments are strongly supported by rich empirical exploration that occurred over a period of 20 months in an Italian social enterprise.

Social norms about the timing of retirement and stereotypes about qualities of younger and older workers are pervasive, but it is unclear how they relate to employers’ ageist preferences. The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of employers’ retirement age norms and age-related stereotypes on their preferences for younger or older workers in three types of employment practices: hiring a new employee; offering training; and offering a permanent contract.

Survey data from 960 Dutch employers from 2017 are analysed to study employers’ preferences for younger or older workers. Effects of organisations’ and managers’ characteristics, retirement age norms and stereotypes are estimated with multinomial logistic regression analyses.

Many employers have a strong preference for younger workers, especially when hiring a new employee, while preferences for older workers are highly uncommon. Higher retirement age norms of employers are related to a lower preference for younger workers in all employment decisions. When employers are more positive about older workers’ soft qualities (such as reliability and social skills), but not about their hard qualities (such as their physical capacity and willingness to learn), they rate older workers relatively more favourable for hiring and offering training, but not for providing a permanent contract.

This is one of the first studies to estimate the effects of retirement age norms and age-related stereotypes on ageist preferences for a diverse set of employment practices.

This study examines Covid-19-related policies as a showcase for priorities in migration governance, the role of the state and employers’ associations, as well as gaps in social security and social protection.

This paper looks at how immigration interacts with the labour market in the Czech Republic through the prism of the varieties of capitalism framework and its relation to the concepts of labour market segmentation and flexibility.

The findings show that pandemic-related measures focused on continuously adjusting a legislative framework granting access to third-country workers. However, protective measures that would guarantee migrant workers and their families access to social rights, such as healthcare, were lacking. In this context, several lines of segmentation are observed: between migrant workers in standard employment and those in non-standard employment, when looking at their access to healthcare; between migrants hired directly by employers and those working through temporary agencies in terms of their wages, stability and protection; and, at a sectoral level, between the skilled workforce and migrants that are pushed to low-qualified poorly paid, and routinised jobs.

This paper expands the existing literature on the preferences and influence of governments, employers and trade unions regarding the demand for foreign labour in varieties of capitalism by adding the perspective of a Central European economic model. At the same time, its findings contribute to the understanding that labour market inequalities are not fostered on the supply side of migrant labour, through exogenous societal or cultural characteristics specific to countries of origin, but rather through institutionalised measures, practices and policies in countries of destination.

With a focus on the position of EU mobile workers in the Dutch meat industry, this article discusses the multi-level State efforts to enhance protection of workers who experienced limited protection of existing State and private enforcement institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic, with virus outbreaks at Dutch meat plants, fuelled public and political will to structurally improve these workers' precarious work and living conditions. Yet, the process of policy change is slow. The authors show it is the gradual transformation in the institutional environment that the State needs to counter to become more protective for EU mobile workers.

Using the gradual institutional change approach and the concept of State ignorance, the authors examine State responses drawing on interviews with expert stakeholders in the public and private domain, public administration records and newspaper articles.

Through knowledge creation, boosted social dialogue mechanisms, enhanced enforcement capacity and new housing legislation, the Dutch State focuses on countering gradual institutional change through which existing institutions lost their effectiveness as protectors of EU mobile workers. The organization of work is, nevertheless, not (yet) fundamentally addressed with tighter public legislation.

The findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the role of the State as multifaceted actor in institutional change processes towards increased protection for EU mobile workers.