Low-status Work Research Articles

Relationships That Matter: Four Perspectives on AI, Work, and Organizations

The past decade has witnessed a surge of interest in how AI will transform work and organizations, presenting scholars with the difficult task of studying emergent technologies. This article advances a relational perspective that emphasizes how firms and workers are situated in, and respond to, extra-organizational pressures and forces. We examine four sets of relationships that can frame scholarly engagement with AI: finance and technology, monopoly and competition, producers and adopters, and high-status and low-status workers. We argue that this perspective illuminates connections between levels of analysis that might otherwise seem unrelated, revealing how AI tools and practices are situated within, and contribute to, broader social, financial, and industrial dynamics.

Analyzing Trans and Nonbinary Workers’ Response to Workplace Discrimination

Workplace discrimination against trans and nonbinary workers is pervasive and contributes to high rates of unemployment, underemployment, and economic precarity. Scholars have begun to identify the ways cisnormativity is embedded in workplace organizations in ways that contribute to hostile work environments for trans and nonbinary workers. However, relatively little research has explored the strategies trans and nonbinary workers use to navigate such environments. The current study contributes to this growing field by exploring the predictors of worker agency among trans and nonbinary workers. Drawing on data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, this study analyzes the role of social status, including race, gender, and social class, and institutional protections, including union membership and antidiscrimination policies, in shaping trans and nonbinary workers’ responses to discrimination. Our findings suggest that lower status workers are more likely than higher status workers to rely on self-protective measures that pose risks to their health and well-being, while comprehensive antidiscrimination policies enhance the ability of all workers to pursue redressive action. We consider the implications of our findings for workplace policy and practice.

Converging economies of care? Immigrant women workers across 17 countries and four care regimes.

This study analyses 17 care economies using 2016 Luxembourg Income Study data to contribute to extant debate regarding the ongoing utility of care regimes as a classificatory schema for cross-national comparison. Examining similarities and differences in the provision of low-status work in health, education, social work, and domestic services - the 'care economy' - the data reveal devaluation of the labour done by immigrant women care workers, net of national and regime-level variation. In addition, numerous similarities across liberal, corporatist, social democratic, and central and eastern European care regimes emerge, in terms of the overrepresentation of immigrant women in low status care work, and the disproportionate financial penalties these workers incur. Together, findings suggest that notwithstanding national and policy-specific differences, there has been considerable convergence across economies of care towards a 'migrant in the market' model of employment. Such large-scale evidence of this trend calls into question the ongoing efficacy of care regimes for national comparisons of migrant care work under conditions of neoliberal globalization.

Gendering data care: curators, care, and computers in data-centric biology

ABSTRACT The increase in molecular data and the use of computer technologies in biology have led to the emergence of professional biocurators, who populate biological databases and knowledgebases with high-quality information. Although crucial to life science knowledge production, biocuration is, to a large extent, invisible labour that takes place behind the scenes of data-centric life science. The field suffers from a lack of recognition and status that has been linked to a language of service and a scientific system that is not equipped to recognise and reward new types of scientific practices. However, as the majority of biocurators are highly educated female biologists, biocuration is also reproducing the problematic pattern of women leaving the scientific tenure track in favour of less prestigious positions. Instead of viewing the issue as just another example of ‘the leaky pipeline,’ the gendering of biocuration could be seen as an interplay of gendered structures in science, organisations and society which makes a career in biocuration attractive for female scientists while at the same time positioning the activity as non-scientific low-status work. By illuminating some of the ways gender works in the processes which render certain kinds of technoscientific work invisible, biocuration serves as an example of how existing social structures influence the emerging data-centric science.

‘Neither work nor leisure’: Motivations of microworkers in the United Kingdom on three digital platforms

This article examines the experience of microworkers living in the United Kingdom. Based on a survey of 1189 microworkers and 17 in-depth interviews, the article explores the experiences of UK-based microworkers on three digital platforms: Prolific, Clickworker and Amazon Mechanical Turk. The article draws on the theoretical framework of self-determination theory to analyse workers’ motivations for performing microwork. It reveals that workers’ relatively high satisfaction with otherwise low-paying and low-status work was possible because workers conceptualised their activity as occupying an ambiguous space and time in their lives, blurring traditional distinctions between work and leisure. These findings contribute to our understanding of how microworkers experience their relationship to work in the United Kingdom.

Looking for Greener Grass? Prior Status and Exploration-Exploitation Decisions in Job Search

Research on the returns to specialist versus generalist careers has largely neglected what drives individuals’ motivations to build different career profiles in the first place. Although specialization is widely associated with benefits, generalist careers are seen as more at risk except in certain mitigated conditions. At the same time, given the uncertainty in labor markets, future returns to specialization cannot simply be assumed. We introduce in this paper a novel mechanism behind the formation of generalist careers, opportunity-enhancing generalism, whereby workers willingly give up the benefits to specialization to dissociate from a past expertise considered to yield relatively poor future prospects. On the premise that one’s prior experience provides the basis for exploration-versus-exploitation decisions, we argue that aspects of one’s previous jobs, including status, will importantly affect decisions about whether to continue specializing. Specifically, negative feedback about prospects for advancement in their prior jobs will increase workers’ motivation to search for jobs in new areas of expertise. Focusing on managerial workers’ job search decisions, we predict that individuals who come from low-status firms, low-status work domains, or both will be more likely to search for jobs in a new area than job seekers coming from high-status firms and work domains. Using data on job searches in a Master in Business Administration labor market, we find support for our prediction and suggestive evidence for the opportunity-enhancing mechanism we propose. Funding: This work was supported by the French National Research Agency [Grant “Investissements d’Avenir” Labex Ecodec/ANR-11-LABX-0047] and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [Grant MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1663 .

The uneven consequences of rapid organizational change: COVID-19 and healthcare workers

We examine the consequences of rapid organizational change on high and low-status healthcare workers (HCWs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on 25 interviews, we found that rapid change can create a sense of social disorder by exacerbating the uncertainty brought on by the pandemic, crystallizing the lack of training to deal with crisis, and upending taken-for-granted roles and responsibilities in health infrastructures. Our work contributes to scholarship at the intersection of organizations, professions, and social studies of medicine. First, we show how organizations that must respond with rapidity, such as during a crisis, sets up workers for failure. Second, hastily made decisions can have monumental consequences in the work lives of HCWs, but with differences based on status. All HCWs had trouble with the rearrangement of tasks and roles. Low status HCWs were more likely to feel the strain of the lack of resources and direct contact with COVID-19 patients. High status HCWs were more likely to experience their autonomy undermined – in the organization and content of their work. In these contexts of rapid change, all HCWs experienced social disorder and a sense of inevitable failure, which obscured how organizations have perpetuated inequalities between high and low status workers.

Racial disparities in the screening of candidates for software engineering internships

Internships are a common way for firms to hire college-educated workers, prompting concerns about how internship hiring affects various forms of inequality in the transition from school to work. Some of these concerns center on whether internships might be less accessible for workers from non-white racial groups. In this paper, I examine racial disparities in internship hiring and argue that, relative to full-time hiring, in internship hiring firms have less information about candidates’ qualifications and are also less motivated to screen candidates intensely. Therefore, group-based status beliefs play a larger role in the screening of intern candidates than in the screening of full-time candidates, leading to larger disadvantages for low-status workers (i.e., non-white workers). I examine these claims using data from a Silicon Valley software firm recruiting for both software engineering internships and entry-level software engineering positions. I find evidence consistent with such “cursory screening” of intern candidates leading to non-white (i.e., Asian, Hispanic, Black) job candidates being more strongly disadvantaged relative to white candidates in competing for internships as compared with full-time positions.

“Lots of Time They Don’t Pay”: Understanding Wage-Theft and Resistance in Bryan, Texas through Critical Community-Engaged Research

This critical community-engaged mixed methods study quantifies worker mistreatment on day labor corners in Bryan, Texas, and examines how day laborers resist labor exploitation. Day laborers seek work in open air spot markets. The work is precarious, with temporary and unregulated employment relations, weak enforcement, and poor working conditions. In this weak penalty and labor enforcement regime, labor violations are not surprising. Contrary to dominant theories, however, we argue that demand-side (industry) characteristics are more important for explaining the prevalence of labor violation than supply-side (worker characteristics). We use the Central Texas Day Labor Survey (2012–2021), 210 ethnosurveys consisting of 55% unauthorized workers, 24% authorized workers, and 20% Latinx, Black, and White citizens. We find that higher indices of labor violations and work abuse are not associated with lower-status workers; all workers, irrespective of legal status or citizenship, experienced abuse by employers. Demand-side characteristics were partially associated with higher levels of wage theft and mistreatment. In terms of wages, we found a gradation of wages with the lowest for unauthorized immigrants, then authorized immigrants, Latinx citizens, Black citizens, and lastly White citizens. Finally, workers collectively fight back against injustice by warning each other about unscrupulous employers.

Factors in workers' dehumanization: Multiple stigmatization, social status, and workers' sex.

The aim of this study is to examine how different factors (multiple stigmatization, perceived social status, and workers' sex) as well as their interactions are associated with the dehumanization of workers. In the preliminary study (N=991), we selected 16 occupations with different types of stigmatization and perceived status relevant to the Russian socio-cultural context. In two experimental studies (N1=1060, N2=1081), we demonstrated that multiple stigmatization increases metaphor-based and attribute-based animalistic but not mechanistic dehumanization: low-status workers were more animalistically dehumanized than high-status workers; the high status decreased the metaphor-based animalistic dehumanization of occupations with multiple stigmatization, and the attribute-based animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization of workers regardless of their stigmatization; and male workers were more mechanistically dehumanized than female ones but there were no differences in animalistic dehumanization. The results obtained are discussed in the context of understanding the specificity of workers' dehumanization and the possible consequences of this dehumanization.

Coming to Terms with the Greek Crisis: Highly Educated Young Women’s Employment Struggles in Conditions of Economic Austerity

The global financial recession which began in 2008 has led to significant economic and social consequences for youth, with the case of Greece being a notable one in terms of severity. Repeated political-economic ‘shocks’ to the structure of Greek society have manifest in common situations of unemployment and underemployment. Although impacting heavily on the working classes, severe curtailments in medium-high-skilled labour have also been observed among the middle classes as well. Following these contexts, the article examines the experiences of highly educated young women in Greece ( n = 36) as they navigate precarious employment within the midst of the Greek economic crisis. It is argued that rather than their educated status offering opportunities to deploy resources to help withstand the crisis, their high education levels create frustrations and barriers towards achieving suitable employment. These perceived mismatches between high education and low status and/or poor-quality work conditions are assessed in the context of research on emerging adulthood.

Lessons from China on different approaches to pension coverage extension

AbstractAchieving universal pension coverage is both an aspiration and a challenge for many developing economies. Traditional contributory schemes are less effective in extending pension coverage to workers who are not in the formal sectors of the economy. As an alternative, non‐contributory schemes have gained popularity in recent years. China’s pension reforms mirror this global trend. The introduction of a contribution‐based pension scheme for urban employees (Employees’ Pension) was followed by a scheme for rural and urban residents (Residents’ Pension), which is partly government financed and partly contributory, with multiple options for premium payment. This study uses nationally representative survey data collected in 2016 to compare the inclusiveness of the two schemes. It finds that access to the Residents’ Pension scheme is more equal than the Employees’ Pension. Lower status workers in terms of education, employment, income and hukou‐migration are more likely to participate in the Residents’ Pension as opposed to the Employees’ Pension, compared with higher status workers. The Chinese experience suggests that a workable solution for pension extension in low‐ and middle‐income countries is to have a scheme that is flexible, affordable and responsive to the diverse needs of the population.

"There's Money but No Work": Diploma Disruptions in Urban Papua

In this article, we explore themes of education, work, and employment in the life stories of Indigenous inhabitants of Jayapura, the capital city of Papua Province, Indonesia. We draw on life-history interviews collected from men and women ranging from the pre–World War II generation to contemporary youth. This population is the most educated and literate in the province, but education does not shield people from marginalization and displacement or from violence, tragedy, isolation, and economic hardship. What education "does" is often bittersweet, as our interlocutors reveal the rocky course of the first sixty years of formal schooling in an enduring colony. We look beyond statistics about high literacy and educational attainment to illuminate the decline of an urban public service, the stops and starts in school and work because of familial influences, and the circuitous and unpredictable pathways unleashed by a fluctuating "project" economy. All of the stories shared here involve mobility away from Jayapura, job precarity, and serial casual employment. Women's work in particular usually involves a considerable history of unpaid service and volunteer work. We suggest that education in a fluctuating, frontier economy leads to "diploma disruption" rather than "diploma inflation," in which graduates outnumber jobs or do not want low-status work. What education is for, or even what it is, is conditional and temporary, yet there is continuity in the belief that having some education, whatever it entails or brings, is better than having none.

Work-related lung cancer concentrate among lower status workers: a quantification approach

Background/Aim: Although the concentration of carcinogenic exposures within specific socio-occupational groups is widely acknowledged, most burden of disease (BOD) approaches focus on the general population, missing the dimension of occupational health inequities. This raises social justice issues as those quantification tools are increasingly used for discussing cancer prevention priorities and occupational disease compensation rules. Our general aim was to explore ways by which population health metrics could integrate occupational inequities, and to identify eventual data gaps. Our specific aim was to compare the burden of work-related lung cancer between different socio-economic groups taking into account three known occupational carcinogens (asbestos, silica and DME) and smoking. Methods: We conducted a secondary analysis of the population-based case-control study ICARE (Investigation sur les Cancers Respiratoires et l’Environnement). The study included 2926 lung cancer cases and 3555 frequency-matched controls covering 13% of the French population. Lifelong occupational exposures were assessed by job-exposure matrices and self-report. We compared sources of variation in the attributable fractions (AF) estimates, including interaction with socio-economic position (SEP) and SEP indicator (education or occupation-based), using STATA. Results: The analysis was based on men-only due to the limited number of exposures among women. The AF for the combined indicator of asbestos, silica and DME exposures was 29.4% (95%CI [23.9-34.4]) overall, while the AF for exposed blue-collar workers compared to non-exposed groups regardless of SEP was 26.9% (95%CI [21.9- 31.7]). AFs were slightly higher when capturing SEP through education. Our results provide quantified evidence that the burden of work-related lung cancer attributable to these 3 known carcinogens concentrates massively (over 90%) among manual workers. Conclusion: They exemplify the need for integrating indicators of occupation and industry sector into BOD estimates to inform decision-making in cancer prevention and compensation. More broadly, they plead for information systems linking SEP, environmental and occupational health.

Legitimate earnings inequality and national welfare commitment: Correspondence between economic institutions and the pay 80,000+ people in 30 nations think legitimate for ordinary jobs and for elite jobs

In formulating views of just reward for high-status and low-status work, do ordinary citizens take cues from their nation's public stance on income inequality as institutionally embedded in their welfare state, i.e. their social welfare and labor market policies, their "welfarism"? How large a morally correct earnings gap flows from that? Our multilevel analyses (fixed effects, random intercepts) replicate prior research on the impact of individual characteristics and socioeconomic development. They open new territory with the discovery that public opinion on legitimate/just earnings of high-status occupations aligns moderately strongly with welfarism, ceteris paribus, with welfare state citizens advocating lower pay for the elite but not higher pay for working-class occupations: The welfare state is not (or no longer) a matter of helping the poor but instead of bringing down the elite, "cutting down the tall poppies". Data: World Inequality Study v2.1: 30 countries, 71 surveys, and over 88,000 individuals.

Comparing Care Regimes: Worker Characteristics and Wage Penalties in the Global Care Chain

Abstract This study uses 2010–2014 Luxembourg Income Study data to measure care work quantitatively within and across four care regimes, with a particular focus on the reliance on migrant women for low-wage, low-status work in health, education, social work, and domestic services. Care regimes are examined in order to highlight similarities and differences in twelve care economies: while liberal and corporatist care regimes are found to display a “migrant in the market” model of employment, familialistic and social democratic regimes exhibit somewhat different employment trends yet continue to financially undervalue highly feminized work in care.

Saisir les dynamiques de genre en milieu populaire depuis la scène du travail subalterne

Ce texte est l’introduction au numéro spécial « Genre et classes populaires au travail », qui réunit des travaux prenant pour objet les rapports de genre au sein du salariat subalterne, avec pour originalité de se centrer sur les relations entre les sexes dans cette zone de l’espace professionnel, au sens des interactions concrètes entre femmes et hommes. Nous revenons dans un premier temps sur les travaux de sociologie analysant les relations de pouvoir internes aux univers de travail à la lumière du genre, comme la ségrégation sexuée inter- et intra-professionnelle ou encore la reproduction des stéréotypes de genre. Cette revue de la littérature permet de souligner un point aveugle que ce numéro entreprend d’éclairer : l’étude des effets de la mixité et des interactions directes entre les sexes dans le salariat subalterne. Dans un deuxième temps sont mis en relief les apports originaux des six articles composant le numéro thématique : quatre enquêtes récentes, une note critique portant sur des travaux d’histoire peu connus des sociologues, et la traduction d’un article de deux sociologues américaines paru en 1994. Dans un troisième temps, nous ouvrons des perspectives de recherche complémentaires pour explorer les dynamiques des rapports sociaux de classe, de genre, mais aussi de race ou d’âge, au sein du salariat subalterne et des classes populaires.

Testing the Limits of Colonial Parenting: Navajo Domestic Workers, the Intermountain Indian School, and the Urban Relocation Program, 1950–1962

Abstract Closely examining the experiences of mostly female Navajo students, this article demonstrates that the Intermountain Indian School played a pivotal role in carrying out postwar Indian Policy. Like Progressive Era Indian boarding schools, its gendered curriculum prepared students to assimilate as low-status workers into American society and move away from their reservation communities. However, beginning with the first graduating class, Navajo students took advantage of the training but did not necessarily conform to policy makers’ expectations.

A Motivated Account of How Attributions of Passion Serve to Legitimize the Poor Treatment of Workers

The pursuit of passion in one’s work is touted in contemporary discourse. We suggest that this cultural emphasis may serve to facilitate the legitimization of poor worker treatment, and that this process may be motivated by system- and status-legitimizing beliefs. Study 1 found that people do in fact deem poor worker treatment (e.g., asking workers to do uncomfortable tasks that are irrelevant to their job description, asking workers to work extra hours without pay) as more legitimate when workers are presumed to be “passionate” about their work. This effect was mediated by a set of rationale – beliefs that, for passionate workers, work itself is its own reward and assumptions that passionate workers would have volunteered for this work if given the chance. We also found support for the motivational account: (1) participants who held strong beliefs in a just world showed a tendency to rely on the set of rationale to legitimize exploiting passionate workers (Study 1) and (2) participants with a high social dominance orientation were more likely to legitimize exploiting low-status (vs. high-status) workers, and in turn endorse the set of rationale to justify this action (Study 2). Taken together, although passion appears a positive attribute to assume in others, it can also license poor treatments of workers, especially for people who are motivated to justify unfair outcomes and group inequality.

English-speaking and Educated Female Domestic Workers in Contemporary India

This article foregrounds a labour market for English-speaking and educated female domestic workers and their Western expatriate employers. Many women in this anthropological study had left office jobs and institutional environs connoting dignity to take up employment in Euro-American households performing what is widely perceived as low-status work. Using the narratives of domestic workers, this article scrutinizes motivations for opting for a stigmatized occupation and finds women’s accounts to be multilayered and provocative, thereby challenging established generalizations. In the intimate space of the expatriate household, these female workers diligently perform the tasks of an ‘all-rounder’ that represents a new managerial role in globalizing India. As part of expanding niche labour markets, the article highlights how these roles demand eclectic skill sets, professionalism, certified training, transnational experience and gender-specific expertise. Nonetheless, a key leitmotif is how domestic service with expatriates’ remains embedded in power relations and class-race hierarchies. In developing the anthropology of domestic labour, this article illuminates the continuation of persistent inequality and stratification in a locally functioning transnational labour market.