Citizenship Work Research Articles

A Study of the Impact of Free Compulsory Education on the Urban Mobility of Migrant Workers

This study examines the impact of China's free compulsory education policy on the urban mobility of migrant workers. With the acceleration of urbanization, migrant workers have become an important force in China's urbanization and industrialization, but face barriers to urban integration. The report emphasized the promotion of migrant workers' citizenship, in which improving their education level is key. Since 2006, China has fully implemented free compulsory education and included rural compulsory education in the scope of public finance guarantee, which has had a positive impact on the education of migrant workers and their children, and a heterogeneity analysis reveals the existence of marital and educational heterogeneity. This policy is expected to enhance the willingness of rural migrant workers to reside in cities, promote urban-rural integration and development, and provide strong support for rural migrant worker citizenship.

Blurred boundaries: fantasy citizenship, the worker citizen and mobility controls

ABSTRACT This article uses the lens of state control over mobilities of residents both migrants and citizens to move away from assumptions that position them as competitors for the privileges of membership. I begin by critiquing the migrant/citizen binary, claiming that it promotes as actuality Fantasy Citizenship of equality and accessible rights when the reality is one of banal citizenship. This Fantasy citizen is a Worker Citizen. However, the substance of the ‘right to work' is the right to the welfare safety net and the banal citizen finds access to this safety net restricted by the ‘duty to work'. Taking the example of the UK and specifically, England, I examine how citizens' mobility is restricted and controlled, firstly by social housing allocation policies which effectively turns citizens into ‘migrants’ via worker citizenship, and secondly through the restrictions of COVID-19 including its racialised policing. In this way, I suggest closer attention to state restrictions on the mobilities of citizens can help draw out connections in practice between the citizen and the migrant, connections that are obscured by Fantasy Citizenship and the migrant citizen binary.

Driving the Extra Mile in the Gig Economy: The Motivational Foundations of Gig Worker Citizenship

The emergence of gig work (e.g., freelancing, rideshare driving, food and parcel delivery, travel nursing, virtual assistantship) and the gig economy challenges organizational researchers to consider how they should revise traditional theories of work behavior to consider the dynamics of new work arrangements. As a prime example that is central to this review, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is a form of job performance whereby motives stem from the quality of work relationships with direct supervisors, coworkers, and other organizational agents. However, gig workers experience very different work relationships and may perform OCB for different reasons (if at all). In this review, we address the question of how OCB theory should evolve to be relevant to gig workers. We summarize traditional motives for OCB performance and review current research describing and classifying gig work. We conclude by ( a) identifying gig worker citizenship (GWC) as a form of citizenship behavior that better fits the reality of gig work and ( b) offering a revised model of how OCB motives may help predict GWC performance.

The work ‘ethics’: negotiating a neoliberalized and respectable lesbian citizenship in a group of ‘post-90s’ Chinese lesbians’ discourses

ABSTRACT This article offers a discursive analysis of two sets of interview data, out of a corpus of ten in-depth interviews, where young Chinese lesbians (born in the 1990 s) performatively negotiate an acceptable lesbian citizenship. Findings suggest that this lesbian citizenship, made in strong comparison with heteronormative citizenship, is constructed discursively as a triad between the individual, the corporate and the society in the participants’ discourses. The subjects’ capacity to work is framed as essential to this citizenship. More specifically, the participants’ citizenship claims are achieved by their making duties claims and mixing discourses of social involvement and career. These discursive acts, at times with a collectivist undertone, index a work-ethic ideology related to China’s contemporary neoliberal campaigns, and thus construct a lesbian citizen identity that is highly participatory in work and economically productive. In this way, the participants create and claim a particular lesbian citizenship acceptable and as respectable as, if not more respectable than, heteronormative citizenship. At the same time, the claims of a normative ‘worker citizenship’ suggests a more sociocultural reading of the concept of ‘homonormativity’ (whose default usually centres upon consumption) rather than one all-encompassing notion of homonormativity especially at sites outside the global north.

Protection for Migrant Workers under Evolving Occupational Health and Safety Regimes in China

Migrant workers in China are a distinctive group due to the existence of the hukou system under which they continue to face restrictions on housing, education, and health care in urban areas. The equal employment legislation does not solve the discrimination problems. Compared with their urban counterparts, migrant workers are more vulnerable, in terms of both precarity of employment and the occupational hazards that they are exposed to, and badly need OHS protection. Any weakness of OHS regime will have a disproportionately adverse effect on migrant workers. China’s OHS regime has been through constant evolution. The old prevention structure, which separated occupational health from occupational safety, was proved to be less effective in protecting migrant workers. In recognition of its deficiencies, China’s top legislature made adjustments to the OHS legal framework by enacting and updating a series of laws. The new prevention structure, unifying the occupational health administration and the occupational safety administration, represents a step forward in terms of OHS protection for migrant workers. According to worker citizenship theory, China’s OHS regime can be categorized as a direct state regulation model. It carries with it both the strengths and weaknesses of direct state regulation models. On the participation rights dimension, the lack of consultative joint OHS committees and the lack of effective collective bargaining shut migrant workers out from the decision-making process on OHS matters. On the social rights dimension, the gendered and aged-based approach becomes a hindrance for female migrant workers and young migrant workers. Furthermore, levels of enforcement vary considerably across different periods and areas, subject to the ever-changing priorities on the government’s agenda. Migrant workers are still facing tremendous obstacles and challenges in obtaining access to adequate protection under the current OHS regime in China. Future reform measures should focus on delivering OHS protection for migrant workers in the informal sector, strengthening participation, and centralizing OHS administration, especially enforcement.

Workplace Democracy and Civic Engagement in Vermont Food Cooperatives

This article argues that the efforts of worker‐run governance bodies are integral for securing worker citizenship at consumer cooperatives; however, are not immune to challenges associated with forging worker solidarity across racial and ethnic lines. Using a mixed methods approach that includes focus groups, individual interviews, and textual and policy analyses, this study looks at the impact of unions on the social, political, and civil rights of workers in two unionized food cooperatives in Vermont. It was concluded that unions provided critical opportunities for civic engagement and workplace democracy although more work was needed in the area of inclusion.

Let's go outside: bodies, prostitutes, slaves and worker citizens

In liberal thought, slavery is imagined as reducing the human being to nothing but a body, while the free and equal political subjects of modern liberal democracies are held to be abstract, universal and disembodied individuals. In theory, bodies are also unimportant in the wage labour exchange. Though traditional models of worker citizenship insist on state and employers' duty to protect the human worth of worker citizens, they also assume the disembodied, thing-like nature of commodified labour power. Because bodies are so obviously important in the exchange between prostitute and customer, sex work is difficult to reconcile with liberal fictions of disembodiment, and one strand of feminist debate on prostitution is preoccupied by the question of whether prostitutes are like slaves or wage labourers. Protagonists on both sides of this debate often reproduce liberal understandings of labour power as a ‘thing’ that can be detached from the person. And yet labour power is also a contested commodity, and wage labour has historically been likened to slavery by activists struggling against the commodification of labour power. This article argues that stepping outside liberal fictions of disembodiment and recognising the parallels between prostitution, wage labour and slavery would allow greater scope for establishing a common political subjectivity amongst prostitutes, other wage workers and all those who have an interest in halting and reversing the current global trend towards the commodification of everything. In this way, common political ground between prostitutes and other wage workers is more visible when we step outside liberal assumptions about embodiment, slavery, work and citizenship.

Operation Princess in Rio de Janeiro: Policing ‘Sex Trafficking’, Strengthening Worker Citizenship, and the Urban Geopolitics of Security in Brazil

This article develops new insights into the gendered insecurities of the neoliberal state in Latin America by exploring the militarization of public security in Rio de Janeiro during 2003—08 around campaigns to stop the ‘trafficking’ of sex workers. Findings illuminate the intersection of three neoliberal governance logics: (1) a moralistic humanitarian-rescue agenda promoted by evangelical populists and police groups; (2) a juridical ‘law and rights’ logic promoted by justice-sector actors and human-rights NGOs; (3) a worker-empowerment logic articulated by the governing Workers’ Party (PT) in alliance with social-justice movements, police reformers, and prostitutes’ rights groups. Gender and race analyses map the antagonisms between these three logics of neoliberal governance, and how their incommensurabilities generate crisis in the arena of security policy. By exploring Brazil’s fraught efforts to attain the status of ‘human security superpower’ through these interventions, the article challenges the view that the reordering of security politics in the global south is inevitably linked to desecularization, disempowerment, and militarization.

Migrant Workers as Citizens within the ASEAN Landscape: International Law and the Singapore Experiment

Using both legal and sociological definitions of citizenship, this paper examines how the international community, ASEAN countries and Singapore have responded to the migrant worker question. The first part of this paper uses ASEAN examples and interrogates the question of migrant worker citizenship from an international legal or policy perspective, particularly recent efforts to construct a differentiated citizenship for migrant workers within destination States based on an inclusionary principle. The second part of this paper then undertakes a close case study of foreign domestic workers or “maids” in Singapore. I examine how maids are depicted as non-citizens under Singapore’s law and policy, how Singaporean nongovernmental organizations have sought to counter this and how the latter may be guided by internationally developed concepts of differentiated citizenship and the inclusionary principle.

Senator Barack Obama and Immigration Reform

Senator Barack Obama played a key role in supporting bipartisan efforts led by Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy to legislate “comprehensive immigration reform.” This new legislation calls for augmenting border security, enforcing employer sanctions for firms that hire “undocumented workers,” and creating a path to “earned” citizenship for workers already in the United States. The authors argue that Senator Obama uses a “both . . . and” rather than an “either . . . or” approach to immigration that seeks to shift the terms of the debate. In this article, the authors chart Senator Obama's stance on immigration in relation to conservative and liberal positions. By doing so, they explore how Obama's constructed understanding of “earned” citizenship stands in sharp contrast to ultraconservatives' essentialized notion of “patriotic” citizenship.

Remapping Worker Citizenship in Contemporary Occupational Health and Safety Regimes

The article draws on the rapidly growing field of citizenship studies to map and explore the dynamics of contemporary occupational health and safety (OHS) regulation. Using two key dimensions of OHS regulation (protection and participation), the author constructs four ideal types of worker citizenship (market, public, private industrial, and public industrial citizens). Historically, workers have been written into OHS regulatory regimes in each of these ways. Most recently lawmakers have created a new species of OHS regimes, best described as mandated partial self-regulation. Its distinguishing characteristic is its flexibility, such that worker citizenship can take on any of the forms previously described, often without changing the statutory framework. Using Ontario as an example, the study finds that in the late 20th century, workers made significant strides toward public industrial citizenship and, surprisingly, even under a neoconservative government, workers successfully defended their participatory rights and saw their right to protection modestly strengthened through increased enforcement. The conditions under which this regime operates, however, constantly threaten to undermine the efficacy of worker participation rights and to weaken the enforcement effort. Some suggestions are made about using a citizenship discourse to revitalize the worker OHS movement and strengthen OHS rights.

Organizational Trustworthiness: Findings from the Population of Organizational Ethnographies

Contemporary workplaces solicit heightened effort and initiative from employees through teams and related forms of participation. Trustworthy behavior on the part of organizations is an important precondition for heightened employee effort and initiative. The current article develops a model of organizational trustworthiness based on: (1) employment practices and (2) managerial competence. Testing such models has been difficult in the past because of the difficulty of gathering data on relevant management and employee behaviors across a broad population of organizations. The current article uses data derived from a content analysis of the population of organizational ethnographies (N=204) to address this problem. The analysis verifies the existence of employment practices and management competence as separate factors. The effects of these factors on worker citizenship, employee-management conflict, and coworker relations are also evaluated. Supportive employment practices are an important precondition for worker citizenship. Management competence, however, is even more consequential for worker citizenship and for other workplace relations as well. The findings highlight the importance of cross-methods comparisons for advancing organizational theory.

Management Citizenship Behavior: A New Concept and an Empirical Test

Increased participation and heightened effort are increasingly expected of workers. Yet increased expectations of worker citizenship are not always matched by increased commitment on management's part. The workplace literature has had difficulty analyzing this discrepancy because of the underconceptualization of appropriate management behavior. The present article introduces the concept of “management citizenship behavior” to parallel the widely used concept of “organizational citizenship behavior.” Based on a quantitative analysis of data derived from organizational ethnographies (N = 108), management citizenship behavior is shown to be a principal determinant of worker citizenship behavior and workplace harmony. The concept of management citizenship behavior provides sociologists with a preliminary tool with which to evaluate management behavior in the contemporary workplace.

Declaring War on War: Gender and the American Socialist Attack on Militarism, 1914-1918

Declaring War on War: Gender and the American Socialist Attack on Militarism, 1914-1918 Kathleen Kennedy Three weeks before the United States entered World War I, New York socialist women formaUy declared war on the war. In a letter pubUshed in two major socialist newspapers, they berated "the leading socialist men of Europe," whose support of the war they caUed "a more painful revelation than the war itself." "The only ray of Hght in that period of utter darkness," the letter continued: was the consistent, courageous attitude of individual socialist men and practicaUy aU the socialist women of Europe. We American women are proud of the fact that not a single representative Socialist woman in any of the belUgerent countries allowed herself to be carried away by the general wave of war hysteria; that not a single representative Socialist woman abandoned her ideals of international working-class soUdarity. . . . From our hearts we echo Clara Zetkin's words: "When men kiU one another, it becomes the supreme duty of women to battle for the maintenance of Ufe. When men are süent, it becomes the sacred mission of women to remain true to their ideals and to raise their voices in protest."1 Like members of the Woman's Peace Party (WPP), sociaUst women claimed a poUtical position based on sexual difference—as mothers women had an obUgation to preserve Ufe where men had chosen to take it. Attacking war, feminist peace advocates increasingly argued, required an equaUy ferocious assault on gender roles and the poUtical disenfranchisement of women. Yet paradoxicaUy, they conducted this assault in a language that reinforced rather than challenged sexual difference. That emphasis, historians have argued, enabled feminist peace advocates to justify a unique and separate role for women in international pontics.2 For sociaUst feminists, this language posed problems—socialists defined issues of peace and war as gender-neutral. Socialists' obUgation to oppose war stemmed from their membership in an international citizenship of workers which required that them to transcend national interests and oppose war. Yet, sociaUst feininists expücitly gendered the issue of American participation in the war; they claimed leadership based on conduct, on the fact that sociaUst women had remained true to the principles that their male coUeagues had failed.3 It was men who had acted © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. τ No. 2 (Summer) 28 Journal of Women's History Summer hystericaUy, who had aUowed the gendered expectations of bourgeois society to govern their poUtical actions and alUances—a charge that was most often leveled against sociaUst feminists.4 The tone of New York socialist women's letter reflected more than their disappointment with men's conduct; it was an effort to reconstruct the role that miUtary obUgation and its attendant assumptions about gender, played in defining entitlement to citizenship. Historians and poUtical theorists have produced a large and controversial body of Uterature that places gender at the center of relationships between war and citizenship. Drawing in part on the historical and rhetorical dichotomy between women's roles as mothers and men's as warriors, "social feminists" argue that women's experiences construct different values than men's. Within contemporary peace poUtics and historical analysis this position argues that the "social experience of motherhood " demands interactive and cooperative forms of engagement that women can use to influence international poUtics. Maternal poUtics serves as an antidote to a male-dominated, militarist culture that privileges the experience of war.5 Following the lead of contemporary "social feminist" theorists, historians examine how maternal poUtics constructed a unique and effective poUtical space for women in peace and international poUtics.6 Social feminism presents significant analytical and poUtical problems. Historian Nancy Cott argues that as a descriptive term, social feminism 'leaches out meaning from the word feminism" as it fails to distinguish between women's entrance into the pubUc and a specific commitment to a feminist poUtical program. The specific poUtical choices that women made upon their entrance into the pubUc, Cott contends, are key to understanding "how conditions of gender were bunt into state regulations and distributions ."7 Historians must, in Cotf s estimation, develop a vocabulary that recognizes and problematizes the specific poUtical...