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This study aims to examine how Chinese rural-urban migrant workers' socio-economic status was associated with their decent work.

Grounded in the psychology of working theory (PWT), this study tested the path from rural-urban migrant workers' socio-economic status to decent work via work volition, with this path moderated by environmental uncertainty and trade union support. 470 rural-urban migrant workers from four manufacturing enterprises were investigated.

Results indicated that rural-urban migrant workers' socio-economic status was positively associated with rural-urban migrant workers' decent work through work volition. In addition, environmental uncertainty weakened the impact of socio-economic status on work volition while trade union support strengthened the relationship between socio-economic status and work volition.

The study contributes to the growing research on the PWT by testing its utility among rural-urban migrant workers in the Chinese context. The study also identifies the crucial effects of environmental uncertainty and trade union support, which are distinctive characters of contemporary China, in the formation process of rural-urban migrant workers' decent work. A detailed explanation of the results and implications is discussed in the end.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model that investigates volition and self-efficacy as antecedents, and work engagement and job satisfaction as outcomes of perceived employability. It also evaluates the moderating role of job insecurity on the relationships between perceived employability and the two employee outcomes.

The data were collected via a random sampling survey on living conditions of Hong Kong citizens in 2014. The final sample consists of 414 Chinese working adults. The authors employ structural equation modeling and moderated regression analysis to test the hypotheses.

Results show that volition and self-efficacy are positively related to perceived employability, and perceived employability in turn positively relates to work engagement and job satisfaction. Besides, perceived employability fully mediates the effect of volition and partially mediates the effect of self-efficacy, on the two outcome variables. The authors also find that job insecurity acts as a significant moderator on the relationships between perceived employability and the outcomes.

Limitations of this study include self-reported data, cross-sectional research design, and selected respondents with a large proportion of recent immigrants. By delineating the process through which perceived employability affects employees’ work engagement and job satisfaction, this study provides some implications for research and practice.

This study introduces a conceptual model that includes both antecedents and consequences of perceived employability. It examines the relationships among volition, perceived employability, and work engagement, which has not been studied before. By identifying job insecurity as an important moderator, it reveals a boundary condition of perceived employability on employee outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine “black box” links between HRM innovations and organizational performance by investigating the perspective of a workforce often excluded from the HR realm. Professional Independent Contractors (IPros) play a vital role in achieving workforce flexibility and innovation. While the use of such arrangements has been examined often using a compliance-oriented lens, the authors explore the value of adding a commitment aspect.

In total, 375 IPros working in Australian organizations completed an online questionnaire distributed by a national business support services provider.

Results show organizational support significantly predicted work engagement and affective commitment. Self-efficacy, age and gender were also significant predictors.

The cross-sectional nature of this study and reliance on self-reported data limit the reliability of the findings. In addition, the findings may be specific to the Australian labor market.

The study present the views of a difficult to reach population and the findings suggest by adopting an innovative hybrid commitment-compliance HR configuration, practitioners may positively increase desirable contractor outcomes.

Concerns that organizational imperatives for efficiency, quality and high performance will be compromised by considering the human side of non-employee work arrangements are not supported. Indeed, as previously outlined, much of the concern with the employee/non-employee dichotomy is legally based and an artefact of a system of labor law that in many settings has failed to move with the times.

Few investigations of the impact of high commitment HRM practices have incorporated the perspective of professional, non-employees. While IPros are recipients of compliance focused contractor management practices, carefully integrated commitment-based HRM aspects have the potential to deliver positive outcomes for both individuals and organizations.

The purpose of this study is to address United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs) 8 and 9 from a service perspective. SDG 8 is a call to improve the dignity of service work by enhancing wages, working conditions and development opportunities while SDG 9 calls upon nations to construct resilient infrastructures, promote inclusivity and sustainability and foster innovation.

This study uses a bibliometric review to extract important themes from a variety of scholarly journals.

Researchers tend to investigate policy-level topics, such as national and international standards related to working conditions, while ignoring the experiences or well-being of workers occupying marginalized and low-opportunity roles in service organizations. Service researchers, educators and practitioners must collaborate to improve the state of service industries by conducting participatory action research, promoting grassroots organizing/advocacy, implementing digitized customer service and addressing workforce soft skills deficiencies.

The authors consider how service work can be transformed into respectable employment and present four specific ways nations can enhance their service industries.

Economic planners can view SDGs 8 and 9 as a framework for understanding and promoting the well-being of service employees and accelerating the productivity and innovation levels of the service sector.

The United Nations’ SDGs are examined from a services perspective, which increases their significance in service-dominated economies.

Meaningful work is gaining importance in the core domains of human resources research. However, there is confusion regarding what constitutes meaningful work and its determinants and outcomes. Earlier studies have conflated conceptual and empirical arguments. Hence, researchers lack clear insights into factors related to employees' experiences of meaningfulness. This study aims to discuss the aforementioned issue.

The authorsconducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 88 studies (2000–2020) meeting relevant criteria to identify dominant trends and significant gaps in the authors’ understanding of meaningful work.

This review identified six aspects to conceptualize meaningful work. At the same time, the authors highlighted the dominant theory and the instrument used to explain and measure meaningful work. Based on the same, the authors identified different groups of individual and organizational-level determinants and outcomes of finding meaning in work. The analysis also indicates that the comprehension of meaningful work was restricted because most data were obtained from the USA, Europe and certain regions of Asia. During this assessment, the authors observed that several studies emphasized individual-level effects, self-reporting and cross-sectional studies, which restricted the ability to make causal inferences.

This study extends earlier works where the authors stock-take existing research for the past 20 years and build on past trajectories to enrich the authors’ understanding of meaningful work. Unlike earlier works that focused on a specific domain, such as human resource development, this work differentiates by taking an integrated framework-based approach leveraging the antecedents, decisions and outcomes (ADO) and the theories, contexts and method (TCM) framework to consolidate and advance knowledge in the field thoroughly.

The literature on volition indicates that the only dichotomous measure that differentiates voluntary from involuntary temporary workers is unable to fully explain temporary workers’ attitudes. There are more detailed explanations of why workers choose temporary work. The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a scale of reasons for choosing temporary employment.

The study is divided into two parts. In the first part, 32 items were selected based on the literature. They were administered to a sample of 337 Italian temporary agency workers. Then, an exploratory factor analysis was used. In the second part of the study, previous findings were subjected to a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) considering a sample of 325 Italian temporary agency workers.

A two-factor solution (i.e. integrated regulation and identified regulation) emerged from the CFA. The authors present the scale with means and standard deviations for the measurement of the constructs. The integrated regulation subscale appears sensitive enough to differentiate the contract preference.

The two samples were from a single temporary work agency, thus they did not represent the entire heterogeneous population of temporary workers.

This study proposes a first attempt to construct a questionnaire about the reasons for choosing temporary employment in Italy that raises questions about how institutional factors within various labor markets influence issues of volition and employment contract choice.

This paper aims to quantitatively explore the trends and patterns of the existing literature in the gig economy.

Using a total of 1,707 documents retrieved from the Scopus and Web of Science databases, bibliometric analysis using R-Biblioshiny and VOSviewer software was performed to map the studies in the gig economy.

The paper provides information on the most productive authors, countries and journals, as well as the emerging themes in gig research. It highlights the most prolific authors, with a notable presence from the USA and the UK, which are also the countries with the most publications and citations. China has also emerged prominently, both in terms of the number of publications and its involvement in thematic clusters and trending topics. Through co-word analysis and thematic clustering, the study provides information about emerging themes in gig economy studies, such as labor, technology, management and precarity. The results provide insightful information for comprehending the effects of gig labor in the contemporary workforce.

This study provides a comprehensive overview of the scholarly literature related to the gig economy, exploring the key insights by highlighting the evolving trends in gig research.

By mapping thematic clusters, tracking research evolution and identifying trending topics, it provides a unique perspective on the field's development and emerging areas of focus. It serves as a valuable means for addressing the challenges and opportunities presented by the gig economy.

Education policies in the United States reinforce social stratification by prioritizing and normalizing middle-class whiteness in schools (Leonardo, 2007; Picower, 2009). The teacher labor market has also become more feminized, making white middle-class women paragons of exemplary educators (Rury, 1989; Tolley & Beadie, 2006). These sociopolitical and historical factors continue to play out in the current U.S. education workforce where 80% teachers are white and 76% of teachers are female (Hussar et al., 2020). Meanwhile, student demographics are shifting with students of color comprising over 50% of the public student population (de Brey et al., 2019). Diversifying the educator pipeline is a well-documented strategy to improve educational outcomes for all students, specifically students of color, and to achieve greater equity and inclusion in public education. However, the retention and promotion of educators of color remains a critical and complex issue.

Thus, looking at the intersection of race and gender in the education workplace, the purpose of this chapter is to highlight the experiences and expertise of women K-12 educators of color to identify best practices for career development. Applying Psychology of Working Theory (PWT) and utilizing modified meta-synthesis methodology, the chapter highlights the experiences of Black, Latinx, Asian American, and Indigenous/Native American women K-12 principals and superintendents to (1) thematize and conceptualize how women of color define their work in education spaces through a PWT lens and (2) understand how PWT themes can illuminate ways to build more diverse and inclusive career pathways for women of color leaders.

This chapter explores the development of an individual-level measure of decent work. It draws on a recent article written by the authors, which was part of a larger international project to validate a cross-cultural self-report measure of decent work within the context of the Psychology of Working Theory (Dodd et al., 2019). It discusses the importance of a psychological perspective on decent work to better understand working lives; summarizes the findings from the validation studies Decent Work Scale (DWS) in eight countries; outlines potential uses of the DWS; and considers the limitations of the DWS as well as challenges to conceptualizing decent work more generally.