White-collar Sector Research Articles

Managerś attitudes towards common mental health problems differ across sectors: a Swedish study

Abstract Background The stigma around common mental health problems (CMHP) is a problem both in the society and in working life. Workplaces are characterized by prevailing norms and values, with impact on their employees’ attitudes. Population-based studies show highly educated and females to stigmatize CMPH less than others. Still, we lack knowledge if attitudes towards CMHP differ across work sectors. Our aim was to investigate if attitudes to CMHP of managers differ between blue, white and pink collar work sectors. Methods A version of the MSED scale, measuring managers’ stigma to employees with CMHP, was answered by Swedish managers (n = 2710) in the private sector in a web-survey in 2021. The participants were grouped into blue collar sector (working with things), white collar sector (working with symbols), pink collar sector (working with people) and others, based on industry affiliation. Multivariable logistic regression was used for calculating probabilities (ORs with 95% CI) for negative attitudes towards CMHP among white, pink and others using blue sector as reference category, adjusted for several organizational and individual factors. Results Compared to managers in the blue sector, managers in other sectors were less likely to have negative attitudes towards CMHP. For managers in the white sector the OR was 0.71 (CI 0.56-0.91), in the pink sector the OR was 0.76 (CI 0.58-0.99) and for managers in the other sector the OR was 0.64 (CI 0.47-0.86). Discussions The result confirmed that managers in the blue sector, which is characterized by more male employees and a lower educational level, were more likely to report stigmatizing attitudes to CMHP. Interventions to decrease stigma in workplaces need to be tailored differently depending on work sector. Key messages • Managers working in the private blue-collar sector in Sweden report a more negative attitude towards mental health problems than managers in other private sectors. • The private blue-collar sector needs more awareness regarding reducing stigma around mental health problems than other private sectors.

Beyond “Legal Equality” vs. “Difference” Feminism: Leah F. Vosko Interviews Eileen Boris on Women and the ILO

Beyond “Legal Equality” vs. “Difference” Feminism: Leah F. Vosko Interviews Eileen Boris on Women and the ILO

Internships, Workfare, and the Cultural Industries: A British Perspective

While media work has long been characterized as being structurally dependent on internships, “work experience,” and other forms of free labour (Banks 2007; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2010), the recent shift towards internships has served to normalize what has become known as the media industries “dirty little secret” (Silver 2005). This article contextualizes internship culture within the British cultural industries against a wider political and social frame. Internships and other modes of “apprenticeship” across the British economy reflect a continuation and transformation of national workfare policies, which seek to avert inflationary pressures by coercing people to work or risk losing their welfare benefits. Internship culture has been highly pronounced in the cultural industries and other attractive white-collar sectors such as law and finance (Perlin 2012). Yet, the provision of internships to young people in previously unimaginable contexts such as fast food, retail, and other low-pay service sectors represents a significant shift in policy, compounded by increasingly draconian demands on young people to comply in order to receive state benefits. Discursively, unpaid media work is now seen as an opportunity for the lucky few, rather than a mode of exploitation servicing corporate gain. This has particular relevance for battles over equality and exploitation which have been fought in these sectors, which this discursive shift makes appear increasingly archaic.

Occupational self-selection in a labor market with moral hazard

This paper studies the determinants and implications of self-selection when firms imperfectly observe worker effort. The effects of the resulting moral hazard problem on the self-selection mechanism are analyzed in a model in which workers simultaneously choose an employment sector and an effort level. The implications of the model reveal that in the presence of moral hazard, workers’ effort decisions become an additional mechanism determining the pattern of selection into sectors. Workers’ sector-specific endowments impact sectoral allocation through their effect on workers’ comparative advantage as well as their effect on workers’ shirking propensity. The model is then used in an empirical application that analyzes workers’ self-selection into white collar and blue collar occupations. The estimation results, based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, suggest that workers’ occupational self-selection leads to higher wages and lower dismissal rates in both occupations, compared to an economy in which workers are randomly assigned to each occupation. The difference in dismissal rates between the two occupations is driven by the higher expected productivity in the white collar sector. The positive effects of occupational sorting diminish as the labor market becomes increasingly characterized by moral hazard. Results also suggest that human capital investments in skills that are most relevant to blue collar jobs may generate higher wages and lower dismissal rates in both white collar and blue collar occupations.

Computers and the Gender Wage Differential

In this article, I report results of an exploratory data analysis that challenge the conventional wisdom on the relation between computer use and gender wage. Using the micro-economic data of 1984, 1993, and 2001, I find 1) the wage premium for females using computers at work is about 19-26 per cent higher than males within the high bluecollar sector, and 2) college-educated females who use computers at work earn a substantially higher wage than college-educated males. These results indicate that computers have re-structured work by deemphasizing physical skill that benefits women, and that college- educated women in the white-collar sector have unobserved female labor quality that could positively correlate with computer skill.

Overseas Legal Outsourcing and the American Legal Profession: Friend or “Flattener”?

In his bestseller The World Is Flat author Thomas Friedman commented on how the worldwide proliferation of high-speed broadband technology has "flattened" the global marketplace and enabled U.S. corporations to efficiently and cost-effectively offshore many traditionally domestic white-collar services. Friedman observed that a convergence of technological advances has leveled the global economic playing field and in turn created thousands of well-paying jobs for workers in English-speaking countries such as India and the Philippines. As a consequence of this flattening phenomenon, American white-collar jobs are moving overseas at record numbers to countries where they can be performed at a fraction of the cost. Could this offshore trend, which has already flattened so many other U.S. whitecollar sectors, also flatten the U.S. legal job market?

Growth, Girls’ Education, and Female Labor: A Longitudinal Analysis

The link between economic growth and labor market participation is complex and elusive. Investments in female education are expected to increase women's productivity at home, but the relationship to labor force participation is less clear. Research has identified a U-shaped relationship where women leave the labor market at early stages of economic development and return when a white-collar sector develops (Sinha, 1967; Durand, 1975; Pampel & Tanaka, 1986; Goldin, 1995; Horton, 1996; Mammen & Paxson, 2000; Juhn & Ureta, 2003). This study replicates previous models using time-series analysis and consideration of large increases in female schooling over the past 30 years. The results suggest that investments in female education can overcome potential reductions in female participation due to increases in wealth, and policies to invest in girls' education appear to have benefits for labor markets, as well as family production.

The Differing Nature of Black-White Wage Inequality Across Occupational Sectors

The nature of racial wage inequality appears to differ across occupation sectors. Specifically, I find that all of the racial wage inequality in the white-collar job sector can be accounted for by controlling for the academic skill level of each worker, but almost half of the overall racial wage inequality remains in the blue-collar sector after controlling for each worker’s academic skill. Relatedly, after controlling for academic skill, I find that black workers are actually more likely to work in the white-collar sector than white workers. I show that these findings are consistent, and arguably directly implied by, both preference-based and statistical-based models of discrimination. However, omitted variable bias and measurement error also cannot be ruled out as possible explanations.

Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century

In the 1980s two seminal historical works on the hard-to-define topic of information were published. In 1986 James R. Beniger gave us The Control Revolution. Three years later JoAnne Yates published Control through Communication. Beniger, a sociologist, took a sweeping view of information flows and goal attainment, with a focus on the United States. Yates, on a career path that led her to become the Distinguished Professor of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School, narrowed her work to the role of information systems and information technologies in two major American industries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her effort was informed by Alfred D. Chandler Jr.'s views on the role of new management techniques in the success of the American corporation. Beniger continued his work but focused on practical, contemporary problems, such as information networks and drug cultures. Yates, while busy with management theory and its application, soon began a ten-year effort to move her historical work into the twentieth century. In her new project, the focus is on the service or white-collar sector during the first half of the twentieth century. The theoretical lenses she uses are theories of technological change and the more general “structuration” approach of Anthony Giddens.

Work “Only a Woman Can DO”: The Women's Division of the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization, 1920–1937

For many of Canada's women the year 1920 was a tremendous break from the past. With the federal franchise finally conferred upon them after a long crusade, they stood on the threshold of a new decade wishing to do nothing less than change the world as participants in public life. That year, upper-class English Canadian women saw a major goal fulfilled: the creation of a new Women's Division within the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization. The division, staffed entirely by women, was a product of the women's wing of the social reform movement, and drew much of its support from imperial sentiment and a fear of unfit immigrants that had resurfaced during World War I. A division supervisor, Mary V. Burnham, provided further insight on why such an agency was necessary when she stated that this was that only a woman can do. (1) The Women's Division was made up of a relatively small group of predominantly elite women who worked with one type of immigrant. As federal officers, these women were determined that moral values should influence their work as much as, if not more so, than market interests. Their responsibilities were to recruit physically and morally suitable female immigrants for Canada, supervise them through every step of the journey, and finally place them as domestic servants in Canadian homes. In addition to populating the nation with white, Christian women British by birth and spirit, (2) the program aimed to provide immigrants with employment and a greater chance for marriage, while easing the enduring servant shortage. This study seeks to provide insight on why elite women wanted such a role in the Canadian immigration bureaucracy, how this was gained, and how this realm of women's work was subject to definite constraints. It attempts to weave threads together from numerous historical works on the immigration of servants, social reform and imperialism, as well as the professionalization of women's work between the two world wars, but is certainly not the first to bring the complex relationships among these phenomena to light. It highlights an area that has received relatively little attention; that is, the conflicts that arose surrounding the professionalization of women's immigration work in the post-suffrage era. As Canada's white collar sector expanded dramatically in the 1920s, women were permitted to join the civil service in significant numbers, though not on the same basis as men. This article builds upon the argument advanced by historian Veronica Strong-Boag that the achievement of suffrage led to nowhere near the extent of social change that women sought; this is certainly the case in the realm of immigration. (3) The Women's Division assisted over 25,000 women throughout the 1920s. When examined as part of the larger picture of immigration to Canada during that decade, one which included hundreds of thousands of American and Continental Europeans, the division's work might not appear particularly significant. However, this study reveals real and imagined connections among gender, imperialism, and the socioeconomic changes in interwar Canada. Immigration has always been perceived as an area of problem and promise, as has the behavior of women, and these phenomena were embodied in the Women's Division. Tremendous importance was placed on female immigrants and the Canadian women who guided them. English Canada, by focusing on women as objects of public policy and nation building, was expressing fear of its impending decay while at the same time hope for its cultural survival. (4) The division's activities came to an end during the Great Depression. Annual reports of Immigration and Colonization suggested financial retrenchment as the cause; however, there were numerous factors involved. By the mid twenties this endeavor in managed migration was losing support of Canadian householders because it neither strengthened Canada's Christian, character in any obvious ways, nor did it mitigate the servant shortage. …

Total workload, work stress and perceived symptoms in Swedish male and female white-collar employees

The aim of this study was to analyse how paid work, unpaid household tasks, child care, work-child care interactions and perceived work stress are associated with reported symptoms in male and female white-collar employees. A questionnaire was mailed to 1300 men and 1300 women belonging to the white-collar sector, with at least 35 hours of regular employment a week and a participant age of between 32 and 58 years. It contained items relating to total workload (hours spent on paid work, unpaid household tasks and childcare), subjective indices for work stress and symptoms. The response rate was 65% (743 women; 595 men). Gender difference in symptom prevalence was tested by analyses of variance. Odds ratios were used to estimate the bivariate associations between work-related variables and symptom prevalence. A multivariate analysis estimated the effect of paid and unpaid work interaction, work-childcare interplay and possible synergy. The frequency and severity of symptoms was higher in women than in men (P < 0.0001). Employed women's health was determined by the interaction between conditions at work and household duties (OR 2.09; 1.06-4.14), whereas men responded more selectively to long working hours, i.e. >50 h/week (OR 1.61; 1.02-2.54). However, childcare (<21 h/week) appeared to have a buffer effect on the risk of a high level of symptoms in men working long hours. Working life and private circumstances and the interplay between them need to be taken into account to curb stress-related ill health in both men and women.

Income, Cohort Effects, and Occupational Mobility: A New Look at Immigration to the United States at the Turn of the 20th Century

How did turn-of-the-20th-century immigrants perform in the American economy relative to native-born Americans? This article reassesses this question using data from the 1900 and 1910 American census files. I find in both cross sections that American immigrants perform well in blue-collar and white-collar occupations, with either faster growth in earnings or an outright earnings advantage over native-born Americans in the same occupational sector. Estimates of within-cohort growth reveal that the cross-sectional results do not overstate immigrant progress due to cohort effects. Immigrants also exhibit a high degree of mobility into the well-paid white-collar sector of the American economy, and the progress of the immigrant population as a whole was not slowed by the emergence of the “new” immigration.

The Growth and Unionization of White- collar Workers in Australia: Some Recent Trends

White collar workers have become an increasingly important element in the labour force during the past few years. The rapid expansion of the white collar sector has been accompanied by a trend toward greater unionization. A study of membership growth among eight major white collar unions in Australia, from 1970 to 1974, has revealed that women were a major con tributor to this development. There have also been significant changes in the activities of white collar unions including the use of direct industrial action and concern for issues beyond wages and conditions. Nevertheless, there are considerable variations between different white collar unions in this regard. This is partly due to the heterogeneity of the white collar sector which varies from highly-paid professionals to lower-paid clerical workers. The former have been the most militant and successful in pursuing their collective aims. It remains to be seen, however, whether their example is followed by other white collar workers in the future.

Career Orientations and Unionization Among Technical Specialists

Industrialized countries have experienced a considerable expansion in the white-collar sector, particularly at the professional, technical and executive level. This study is concerned with various technical specialists, known collectively as management services, which are representative of a group of emergent technical specialists not readily falling into traditional occupational categories. It examines the attitude of technical specialist staff employed in management services toward future careers and how their career orientations influence their membership of occupational associations. The study supports the view that membership of professional associations and trade unions, increasingly, is regarded as complementary rather than contradictory. Furthermore, the results contain implications for the future organization of technical specialists.

White-Collar Unions, Blue-Collar Unions, and Wages in Manufacturing

This essay outlines the theory of an equilibrium wage differential between white collar and blue collar labor in a closed labor market. It then analyses the effect of unions of office workers and of plant workers on this wage differential in order to estimate the potential effects of an increase in the extent of unionism in the white collar sector. In addition to discussing differences in wage behavior between white and blue collar unions this study should also provide predictions about the degree to which increasing unionization in offices will affect the attractiveness of office work for new entrants to the labor force. Moreover, it may, if we find that white collar unions have only slight wage effects, allay the fears of employers about the potential of these unions for disrupting customary wage relationships.