Occupational Closure Research Articles

"Not my Priority:" Ethics and the Boundaries of Computer Science Identities in Undergraduate CS Education

Researchers in the CSCW community have long problematized the separation of social and ethical considerations from design work. Despite increasing attention to tech ethics and ethics education, however, computer scientists' sense of ethical responsibility remains of concern. This paper offers insights on how this boundary between tech and ethics is maintained and reinforced for students as they develop their identities as computer scientists. Drawing on interviews with eight undergraduate computer science (CS) students at McGill University, we explore the role that ethics play in the legitimate peripheral participation of students inside and outside their formal education. We found that while individual opinions on the importance of ethics varied, students agreed that ethics are not valued or rewarded in their education, extracurriculars, or future work prospects. We describe how placing ethics outside the boundary of computing acts as a form of occupational closure, excluding both important multidisciplinary work and marginalized bodies. We argue that in order to promote ethical practice in the design of CSCW systems, we must make it in the interest of future designers to learn socially grounded ethics. This requires that designers, researchers, and future employers actively reshape the boundaries of computing by asserting social and ethical considerations as values of computing and design.

Intersectional Earnings Inequalities in U.S. Public Sector Workplaces and the Great Recession

The authors examine intersectional earnings inequalities in U.S. state and local government workplaces during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2011. Corresponding to closure and exploitation mechanisms as proposed in Relational Inequality Theory, the authors decompose pay gaps into between-workplace and within-workplace segregation components and within-job disparities. Between-workplace closure mechanisms tend to be absent or weak for all comparisons, but within-workplace occupational closure and within-job pay disparities are present for all and quite large for most groups. Within-job earnings inequalities tend to be largest for Black, Hispanic, and Native American women and smallest for Asian and Native American men. During the Great Recession, organizational resources to make claims on shrank, as low-wage job layoffs surged and resources contracted. This resulted in a shrinking of within-workplace and within-job, but rising between-workplace, inequalities.

The historical sociology of medicine in India: Introduction to the special section.

This introduction to a special section brings together three papers first presented at a panel, 'Medical Professions in South Asia: Historical and Contemporary Analyses', at the 26th European Conference on South Asian Studies, held in Vienna, Austria and online, in July 2021. All three papers deal with aspects of the professionalisation of biomedical doctors in India since its independence in 1947. The authors bring together historical and sociological approaches to illuminate the growth of specialisms, patterns of practitioner-patient interactions and efforts to maintain occupational closure and maintain status in the face of growing challenges. The introduction concludes with a discussion of the relevance of these papers for the sociology of health and illness in India and beyond.

Closure and matching payoffs from college majors

Abstract This article examines the undergraduate major as a closure mechanism in occupations among college graduates, using the American Community Surveys. We measure the college major density of occupations, termed “major specialization”, finding that greater major specialization of an occupation is associated with higher earnings, over and above previously identified closure devices (licensure, unionization, and vertical educational credentialing), and college selectivity. We conclude that major specialization operates as a powerful earnings-boosting closure device within higher-educated labor markets. Additional analyses regarding premiums from individuals matching their own college major with their occupation’s typical major indicate comparatively small earnings payoffs. Hence, deviating from one’s occupation’s usual credential does not generate a substantial earnings penalty. Furthermore, payoffs from major-occupation matching have a ceiling: there is no further payoff above the average match level. These findings demonstrate how occupational closure theory helps explain the substantial earnings advantages of certain college majors in the labor force.

Mothering Experiences of Migrant Architects While Navigating the Challenges of Occupational Closure

Mothering Experiences of Migrant Architects While Navigating the Challenges of Occupational Closure

The limits of ‘professionalisation from above’: On the ‘re-professionalisation’ of street-level policing in England

The occupation of policing is in crisis. Criticism of police failings has created intense pressure for the traditional ‘occupational closure’ model of policing as a craft to be replaced by new ‘professional’ models associated with ‘evidence-based policing’, harm reduction, risk management and vulnerability. Various change initiatives have amounted to the ‘re-professionalisation’ of policing, whereby previous models of police professionalism based on craft, discretion and judgement have been abandoned and replaced by new protocols, guidelines and enhanced external scrutiny. This article explores how these changes are interpreted by operational police officers, using qualitative interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to explore officers’ application and understanding of the new requirements. Whereas some literature argues that ‘police culture’ remains largely unchanged, our data illustrate how officers’ daily routines are in a state of enforced flux. While there was some limited support for the rationale for change, officers were highly critical of the practical implementation of policing vulnerability, were sceptical of the new doctrine of ‘professionalism’, and resentful of new managerial controls and priorities. This does not amount to the stubborn persistence of a ‘reform-proof’ police culture. Rather, officers described substantial change to the everyday culture and practice of policing, in ways they regard as confused, self-defeating and unworkable. We argue that professionalisation imposed ‘from above’ via dogmatic managerial logic can have detrimental implications for occupations and the public they serve.

Reconciling occupational safety and health (OSH) Master’s of Science curricula with employer demands

This study concurrently investigated the characteristics of 20 distance learning United States OSH M.S. programs and 101 OSH employment postings preferring or requiring candidates with an advanced degree. The goal was to determine if there was consensus in the required curricula and employer demands. Such agreement is one of the requirements for achieving occupational closure, an important step for OSH being considered a profession. The results demonstrated there is both diversity in OSH M.S. courses being offered and in knowledge, skills, and abilities being sought by employers. A Pareto comparison analysis illustrated that more OSH M.S. programs should offer courses in project management, auditing, leadership, training, and environmental, health and safety (EHS) management. Less emphasis should be given to research methods, capstone or thesis projects, and OSH management. At the OSH M.S. hiring level, there appeared to be more of an emphasis on management and soft skills than technical skills. It also appeared that many employers were hiring OSH individuals that have environmental responsibilities (not well represented in current curricula), supporting an EHS versus OSH paradigm. The most common job requirement sought by employers was regulatory knowledge, a course required in most OSH M.S. curricula. Specific recommendations are provided based on the study results to further promote the goal of OSH occupational closure.

Intersectional Experiences: Experiences of Commonwealth Female Migrant Architects in the UK

This paper presents the emergent findings of a larger research project on the lived experiences and career outcomes of female migrant architects from the Commonwealth in the UK architectural profession. I will employ a postcolonial feminist analysis, and the paper will, in particular, focus on considering the key challenges related to occupational closure hurdles. In the UK, architecture is a regulated profession. The geographic origin of qualifications is often used as a part of a professional project and closure mechanism, which can be used as a basis for exclusion. Adopting an intersectional framework merging with postcolonial feminist theory with the literature on professionalisation and professional closure, this paper addresses the question: how does the geographic origin of their architectural qualification influence the experiences of female migrant architects from the Commonwealth living and working in the UK? With a commitment to feminist research design, I am carrying out fifty semi-structured interviews with female migrant architects from Commonwealth countries. One of the key findings indicates that the re-qualification and re-certification requirements for labour market participation in the UK can create significant challenges for them. Some of the requalified migrant architects' lived experiences indicate that instead of successfully crossing occupational closure hurdles in terms of re-qualification, intersections of race, gender and migrant status significantly impact their experience at work. This research intends to contribute to the literature on professionalisation and closure of architecture by examining the intersections of migration, race and gender – an intersection hitherto underexamined in the context of architecture.

Higher education non-completion, employers, and labor market integration: Experimental evidence

Theories of job assignment suggest that employers give a lot of weight to achieved educational credentials. But what if credentials are missing? We theorize how college non-completion affects the hiring chances, identify its causal effect in different labor market segments, and assess which factors facilitate labor market entry for dropouts. Based on a simulated hiring process with N = 1382 German employers who rated more than 10,000 fictitious CVs, we show that college non-completion is not a scar per se, but rather depends on the educational attainment of the competitors who constitute the labor queue, and on the degree of occupational closure which varies on a granular level between firms that hire for the same occupations. We also find that employers, when rating dropouts, attach most value to CV attributes that signal a high stock of job-relevant skills, such as good performance during college or an occupation-specific internship. We conclude by discussing implications of our work for research on the labor market integration of dropouts.

Are first jobs in the German public sector more stable? An examination under consideration of the institutional structure

In recent decades, Germany has turned away from regular employment for the non-established, with employment entrance becoming the most insecure phase of a career. The public-sector employment regime, with its specific institutional setting, has been seen as a "model employer” for disadvantaged groups, but reforms and restructuring are increasingly calling this special status over the private-sector into question. This article examines whether the public sector provides more stable employment for entrants than the private sector. It is investigated whether the institutional structure of the public sector positively influences employment stability. In a decomposition-analysis, it tests potentially stabilizing (working in a service relationship, high occupational closure, participation in further education) and destabilizing institutional factors (fixed-term and part-time employment) to explain the stability of first jobs in the public sector. Using the labour market entry cohorts 1995 to 2012 of the retrospective life history data of the Starting Cohort six of the National Education Panel Study (NEPS). The results show that the public sector is offering more stable first jobs, and stabilizing factors, like further education are influential. However, destabilizing factors, like the intensive use of fixed-term contracts, have a significant negative impact. This suggests that the stabilising institutional structure of the public sector, while functioning, is under pressure and thus offers potential for polarisation.

Licensing, Educational Credentialing, and Wages Among Foreign Skilled Workers in Germany

The article studies whether foreign skilled workers have similar access to licensed and more credentialed occupations, and whether they profit from these regulations in terms of similar wages in these occupations to comparable domestic skilled workers. The theoretical foundations of this article are concepts of signaling and occupational closure. The analyses use a sample of 60,000 employed persons from the 2006, 2012 and 2018 Employment Surveys of the German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) and the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA), and a reweighting approach to account for the selection on observables. Results show an ambivalent picture of the regulation of occupations: on the one hand, at least foreign skilled men earn similar wages to domestic skilled men in more closed occupations; on the other hand, foreign skilled workers are less likely to enter these positions and they have monetary disadvantages compared with domestic skilled workers in less closed occupations.

Occupational Closure and Wage Inequality: How Occupational Closure Effects Vary Between Workers

Occupational closure continuously establishes, contests, or reinforces institutional boundaries around occupations. Occupational closure thereby interferes with wage-setting processes in the labor market. Recent research shows a substantial impact of occupational closure on wage determination processes in Germany. However, research on occupational closure is based on the assumption that all incumbents of an occupation benefit in the same way. We challenge this assumption by showing that occupational closure works differently for different workers. Using the 2006 sample of the German Structure of Earnings Survey, we distinguish nine worker profiles (three educational groups crossed with three career stages). For each of these profiles we investigate the effects of five closure sources (credentialism, standardization, licensure, representation by occupational associations, and unionization) on the expected mean wages of occupations, employing a two-step multilevel regression model. Our results show that occupational closure does indeed differ between workers. We can show that closure plays out differently throughout employees’ careers. For example, representation through occupational associations pays off the most as employees’ careers advance. Closure sources are unequally distributed across occupations and benefit employees with tertiary degrees more than employees with vocational qualifications. Credentialism also yields the largest advantages for workers with tertiary degrees regarding wage rents. However, our analyses also point to complex interactions between credentialism and standardization, demanding further research, to investigate the interplay between individual worker characteristics and the various sources of occupational closure.

The Precariatization of Zimbabwean Engineers in South Africa

This paper discusses how occupational closure of the engineering profession in South Africa left Zimbabwean migrant engineers amongst the precariat ranks. It aims to answer the following research question: what is the nature of precariousness experienced by immigrant engineers in South Africa. An exploratory study of the experiences of Zimbabwean engineers is used test out Standing’s (2011) notion of the precariat as an emerging social class. Semi-structured and group interviews were used as data collection tools. The findings reveal that bureaucratic challenges in obtaining relevant work permits from the department of Home Affairs, South African universities’ reluctance to acknowledge Zimbabwean qualifications at par with local qualifications as well as a host of insecurities in the workplace left migrant engineers in precariat ranks.

The Performance of Occupational Closure: The Case of Agriculture and Gender

AbstractIt is generally accepted that gendered occupational closure is a thing of the past and the inequalities that women now experience in the labour market are due to segregation and segmentation of employment. In this article it is argued that agriculture still displays gendered occupational closure. Previous research has considered structural closure, focusing on patrilineal inheritance and exclusion from farming organizations. Here structural exclusion is considered, but more attention is paid to the interactional processes of occupational closure. Consideration is given to symbolic interaction, non‐verbal communication, exclusionary tactics and language. How the dominant group justify their actions is considered along with the justification sometimes offered by the subordinate group. How structure and agency intertwine is considered alongside how change occurs. The research is based on qualitative interviews and focus groups conducted in Scotland. The article concludes that change does and has occurred, but the rate of change in agriculture remains low because of processes of gendered structural and interactional social closure.

Have Changes in Gender Segregation and Occupational Closure Contributed to Increasing Wage Inequality in Germany, 1992–2012?

AbstractWage inequality continued to increase through the 1990s and 2000s in post-industrial economies. This article contributes to the debate on occupations and inequality by assessing the role of occupational segregation and occupational closure for understanding the increase in inequality. Using employee data for West Germany in 1992 and 2012 and based on decompositions of unconditional quantile regressions the article investigates the contribution of changes in both occupational characteristics to changes in the wage structure. Our findings suggest that both the employment increase in more closed occupations and increased rewards in these occupations have contributed to wage increases across the distribution, especially in the lower half of the wage distribution. Our results further suggest disproportional wage increases in female-dominated occupations at the bottom of the distribution and disproportional wage decreases in male-dominated occupations at the top. If these occupational characteristics had remained at 1992 levels, then 90/10 wage inequality would have been 25 per cent higher in 2012. Thus, changes in occupational characteristics have contributed to wage compression in the observation period.

Patterns of Overeducation in Europe: The Role of Field of Study

Abstract This study investigates the incidence of overeducation among graduate workers in 21 European Union countries and its underlying factors based on the European Labor Force Survey 2016. Although controlling for a wide range of covariates, the particular interest lies in the role of fields of study for vertical educational mismatch. The study reveals country differences in the impact of these factors. Compared to Social sciences, male graduates from, for example, Education, Health and welfare, Engineering, and ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) are less and those from Services and Natural sciences are more at risk in a clear majority of countries. These findings are robust against changes of the standard education. Moreover, some fields show gender-specific risks. We suggest that occupational closure, productivity signals and gender stereotypes answer for these cross-field and cross-country differentials. Moreover, country fixed effects point to relevant structural differences between national labor markets and between educational systems.

Occupational closure and job quality: The case of occupational licensing in Britain

The notion of job quality has been at the forefront of academic and policy-debates, best crystallized in the pursuit to create more but also better jobs as a route to economic prosperity. Motivated by the need to better understand how occupational-level structures shape job quality, we derive predictions from the occupational closure literature to explore how occupational licensing – the strongest and fastest growing form of closure – shapes job quality in Britain. Using nationally-representative data over several decades, we find that the effects of licensing tend to be confined to jobs in the most stringently-licensed occupations, with such jobs having higher pay, lower job insecurity, greater opportunities for skill-use, and higher continuous learning requirements – relative to jobs in similarly-skilled unlicensed occupations. Of particular concern, however, is the finding that jobs in stringently-licensed occupations are also characterized by significantly lower task discretion and significantly higher job demands. Overall, our study adds a new dimension to job quality debates by highlighting the role of emergent occupational-level institutional structures in shaping job quality, and further, that despite the overall positive effects closure strategies have, they may come at a cost to certain critical intrinsic dimensions of job quality.

The Sheltering Effect of Occupational Closure? Consequences for Ethnic Minorities’ Earnings

It has been widely documented that immigrants receive lower earnings than the majority of the population in most Western countries. Previous research has pointed to various forms of discrimination that affect immigrants’ wage rates. The authors discuss whether the source of this wage inequality can be found at the occupational level. In this article, the authors argue that occupational closures reduce within-occupation wage inequality. To test their expectations, the authors use Norwegian register data that span all employees. The results align with their expectations, as both occupational licensing and union density strongly reduce immigrant-majority earnings’ inequality. However, neither certifications nor credentialization reduces the immigrant-majority earnings gap.

Wages of Nurturant and Reproductive Care Workers: Individual and Job Characteristics, Occupational Closure, and Wage-Equalizing Institutions

Despite the work’s social importance, nurturant and reproductive care workers earn less than others with comparable human capital and work demands. We explore three broad questions related to pay for care work. First, we examine nurturant and reproductive care penalties together to investigate what mechanisms produce the lower wages for these workers. Second, we examine how occupational closure through education credentials and licensing requirements creates varying returns to care work. Finally, we explore the roles of wage equalizing institutions—labor unions and government sector care provision—in reducing wage disparities associated with care work. Using the 1979-2012 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and fixed-effects regression models, we find that selection on stable factors and human capital differences explain much of the lower wages for reproductive workers, but none of the low wages of nurturant workers. However, compared to non-care workers, college-educated nurturant care workers receive lower returns to work experience, suggesting limitations in how much learning can increase efficiency in care work, given the labor intensive, face-to-face nature of much of it. Occupational closure matters: care jobs with the highest educational and licensing requirements pay a wage bonus, while less closed care occupations incur a penalty. Wage equalizing institutions have both floor and ceiling effects on care worker wages that mitigate care penalties for selected workers: women reproductive workers and women in low-education/high-licensing occupations. More consistently, ceiling effects of these institutions lower the wages of otherwise higher paid care workers: nurturant and high-education/high licensing occupations.

Occupations as labour market institutions. Occupational regulation and its effects on job matching and occupational closure

Wir definieren Berufe als Institutionen, die das Bildungssystem mit dem Arbeitsmarkt koppeln und argumentieren, dass Berufe idealtypische Anforderungsprofile von Stellenangeboten darstellen. Auf dieser theoretischen Grundlage erarbeiten wir unterschiedliche Mechanismen, wie berufliche Institutionen und deren Regulierung berufliche Qualifikationen definieren und den Zugang zu Berufen und gleichzeitig Mobilität zwischen Berufen strukturieren. Das Ausmaß der beruflichen Regulierung variiert erheblich zwischen den Berufen. Darauf aufbauend analysieren wir die Auswirkungen der beruflichen Regulierung. Wir zeigen, dass die Regulierung zweiteilige Effekte hat. Erstens erhöht die berufliche Regulierung den Informationsstand sowohl für Arbeitgeber als auch für Arbeitssuchende und verringert somit die Unsicherheit im Matching-Prozess. Zweitens produziert berufliche Regulierung "closed shops", indem der Zugang zu Berufen eingeschränkt wird. Studien, die sowohl die positiven als auch die negativen Auswirkungen beruflicher Regulierungen berücksichtigen, sind bisher selten. Wir schließen diese Lücke, indem wir zwei zentrale Arbeitsmarktprozesse untersuchen: Job Matching und berufliche Schließung. Um berufliche Regulierung empirisch abzubilden, verwenden wir einen innovativen Indikator und testen unsere Hypothesen mit deutschen Daten. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass je stärker die berufliche Regulierung bei sonst gleichen Bedingungen ist, desto weniger aufwändig gestaltet sich der Matching-Prozess für die Vertragspartner. Im Gegensatz dazu wird der Wechsel in eine neue Beschäftigung umso unwahrscheinlicher, je stärker ein Beruf reguliert ist.