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The rationale of this article is to study and evaluate the stress faced by individuals, especially Indian working women within their families, during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this study, the authors aim to highlight the impact of the pandemic on Indian women grappling with mental and emotional distress. For this study, primary research techniques have been used. A survey instrument was constructed and circulated among women working from home or employees of any firm. Based on the survey, focused group interviews were conducted with randomly selected females. The total responses for this study were 203. The study results were collated and a statistical analysis of multivariate regression was used to conclude the findings. From this study, three factors contributed to the overall stress levels faced by working women induced by the COVID-19 pandemic: depression, nervousness and anxiety. Many studies have examined healthcare workers and their stress levels during the global pandemic. However, there is little literature on Indian working women, especially those working in I.T. and manufacturing companies. This article aims to identify the factors that can lead to stress and burnout in Indian working women specifically during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study of U.S. postdocs and unions analyzes the public discourse of national entities, a national postdoc advocacy group, and of local postdoc unions and their collective bargaining agreements. The analytical focus and findings address: (a) postdocs’ identity as “professors-in-training” or exploited employees; (b) the professional jurisdictional issues and due process rights identified as problematic and on which postdocs’ bargaining is focused; and (c) broader ideologies and social justice issues that characterize postdocs’ working conditions and that inform their mobilizing. The findings offer insights into organizing professionals in a time when their status/work is being degraded.

Declining unionization rates in the private sector have long been a major object of research across the social sciences and among students of the labor movement. Nowhere is this issue felt more acutely than in core productive sectors of the American South, where employers have beaten back nearly every significant organizing effort. These problems are epitomized by the United Autoworkers Workers’ 2014 defeat at the hands of German automaker Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where it failed to win an election despite management's ostensible neutrality. Though various competing explanations have been offered, I attribute the UAW's underwhelming performance principally to the union's own mistakes and shortcomings. Applying an analytical framework first proposed by Marshall Ganz, I argue that on three key measures of organizational performance—access to information, strategic capacity, and ongoing learning—the UAW fell short, ultimately sealing its fate. First, the UAW neglected to draw important lessons from its previous efforts to organize foreign-owned automakers, which often bore an uncanny resemblance to Volkswagen. Second, the UAW did not deploy its resources effectively, all but disregarding the widely held “best practices” and often displaying a more fundamental ineptitude. Finally, while successful unions adapt to changing conditions, the UAW suffered from path dependency, refusing to make necessary corrections when its pre-ordained strategy sent it veering off-course. These findings suggest, contra the dominant narrative, that the UAW bears some responsibility for its own organizing failures, with profound implications for the future of unions in the American South and beyond.

We argue that firm-specific theories are critical for understanding the emergence and evolution of ecosystems. We first highlight how existing research on ecosystems lacks microfoundations and tends to be overly structural. We focus on the theory-led firm—the role that a firm-specific theory plays in capability development and the associated growth of ecosystems. Ecosystems are contingent on firm-specific theories of value. We also discuss the implications of our arguments for search- and demand-based approaches to ecosystems and point toward a theory-based and supply-side alternative.

Our research examines the relationship between teachers’ unions, teacher compensation, employment conditions, and turnover in Southern US states that prohibit the collective bargaining of public school teachers. We assess union strength by meet-and-confer status and the teacher union density of districts and estimate union impact using propensity score matching. We find that teachers’ unions are positively associated with teacher compensation and employment conditions, even in the absence of collective bargaining. Districts with strong unions have higher dismissals of nontenured teachers for poor performance and a lower attrition rate of qualified teachers, compared to districts with weak unions. This study shows that teachers’ unions in the United States still organize without formal labor-management institutions and make a significant impact on teachers’ work lives, even in a hostile legal environment toward unions.

The purpose of this article is to provide a first-hand account of how human resources (HR) practitioners from India are revisiting their traditional perceptions of managing HR in the wake of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. This study applies an in-depth interview method to probe the mindset of 13 top-level HR practitioners from India. The time duration of each interview ranged between 45 minutes and 1 hour. The data generated from the qualitative interviews are analysed through latent thematic analysis. The findings throw light on how HR managers in India are rethinking their traditional practices to adjust to the new normal. The themes point to a shift towards a virtual organizational structure, with emphasis given to developing virtual empathy and virtual team building. There is also the resonance of being more future-ready for the potential recurrence of such types of economically disruptive shock events. There is more willingness to hire gig workers and freelancers now given the increased risk of overstaffing in the post-pandemic market. This study provides practitioners with a lot of validity about the way forward in the new world of work-from-home and virtual employment contracts. This is a novel exploration of what some of the senior HR practitioners from India are doing to counter the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic-induced workplace disruption.

It is often assumed that the ideological dominance of neoliberalism has profoundly altered job security and long-term employment relationships. Such claims of a more unstable and insecure jobs market in the twenty-first century are the focus of this paper. Using Labour Force Survey data employment stability in the private sector over more than 20 years in Ireland is examined. As a liberal market economy, Ireland represents a fitting context in which to examine this issue given that it is one of the world's most globalised economies and among the most severely affected by the global financial crisis. Assertions of a more unstable and insecure labour market are not in the main supported by our findings. Reasons suggested for the persistence of a stable employment regime are the continued strategic institutional role of trade unions in influencing regulation, and the interest of employers in retaining skilled employees. However, the emergence of the challenging economic conditions since the pandemic may challenge trade union capacity and employer support for such stability.

We conducted a qualitative study of the category of independent tourism entrepreneurs in the politically contested territory of Northern Cyprus to understand how a collective of entrepreneurs whose shared identity is deeply rooted in place perceives and copes with threats arising in an extreme context. Northern Cyprus is an extreme context as it suffers from enduring political and socio-cultural challenges. Our findings reveal that the entrepreneurs’ collective identity is rooted in a deep-seated attachment to local family, culture, and region. This place-based collective identity drives not only their entrepreneurial engagement, but also their explicit concern for cultural suppression and dilution as a core identity threat and commons problem within the extreme context. Our findings show how the place-based entrepreneurs, in coping with this threat, become custodians of local culture as they engage in a set of collective custodial activities aimed at preserving the local cultural heritage. Our study holds important contributions for research on categories and place, custodianship, and entrepreneurship in extreme contexts.

Understanding how the construction of a market category occurs is contingent upon a consideration of where it occurs. Yet extant research mostly depicts place as the backdrop against which market actors cognitively formulate claims about the meaning of a category. Drawing on an inductive historical study of over four decades of the US specialty coffee category, I induce an empirically grounded model of category construction through dynamic emplacement: actors’ ongoing efforts to ground category meanings in particular places and places’ ongoing heightening of the category’s credibility. This model reorients research away from an exclusive focus on socio-cognitive explanations that highlight claim-making and claim-evaluation as the drivers of category construction and, instead, recognizes that categories are also experienced and transformed materially. Dynamic emplacement unfolds as (1) actors anchor category meanings, shift material forms, and transpose the category to new meaning systems, and (2) places, as bundles of location, material forms, and meanings, become truth-spots—sites in which experiences of the category render “what ought to be” and, thus, what is central to the category. The study suggests that dynamic emplacement helps to address construction challenges, enabling the category to develop without losing its bearings.

Existing category research tends to divorce categories from place. When considered at all, place is often relegated to the contextual background. We see at least three important elements of place that can inform our understanding of categories: first, categories are rooted in the materiality of place; second, those who inhabit a place often share a collective identity that can impart meaning to categories; third, places influence the collective action that underlies category processes. Accordingly, we call for categories “to be put in their place” in category research, by attending to the materialities, collective identities, and collective action present in place. We present an integrative framework for future research that links place, categories, and organizational outcomes, and suggest mechanisms that link these constructs.

Temporary employment (TE) arrangements have become increasingly common in Canada among both high- and low-skilled workers. In this study, we examine the prevalence and earnings effects of TE across education levels with a specific focus on highly educated workers. We also examine the earnings effects of TE across the earnings distribution. We find that higher levels of schooling are negatively associated with the probability of TE. However, the earnings discounts for temporary work are significant and increase in magnitude for individuals with higher levels of educational attainment. For highly educated workers at the top end of the earnings distribution, the discount associated with being in a temporary job is large enough to substantially reduce, although not entirely negate, the sizeable earnings premiums associated with higher levels of education.

In this paper, we consider the legal frameworks that enable workers to influence and exercise voice over the deployment of new workplace technologies in the UK and the future of worker voice and algorithmic management in a post-Brexit Britain. The paper demonstrates how the primary legal mechanism which facilitates voice at work, namely the law governing collective bargaining via trade unions, can be leveraged to influence employers’ choices regarding algorithmic management. However, it also identifies significant challenges to workers seeking to use these mechanisms to ‘negotiate the algorithm’, including the familiar issue of limited coverage of collective bargaining in the UK and more novel difficulties arising from attempts to bargain over management processes undertaken by complex algorithms. In light of these problems, the paper assesses the impact of regulatory proposals emerging from the EU in establishing a greater degree of co-determination in this context and considers the further regulatory measures that are necessary to enhance worker voice over the use of workplace technologies. This includes more extensive consultation duties for employers and the creation of specific workplace representative roles relating to algorithmic management, as well as new mechanisms facilitating worker voice throughout the lifecycle of these technologies which aim to ensure they function in a manner consistent with workers’ rights and interests at the development stage before they even enter the workplace.

This article discusses the risks that artificial intelligence (AI) poses for work. It classifies risks into two types, direct and indirect. Direct risks are AI-induced forms of discrimination, surveillance and information asymmetries at work. Indirect risks are enhanced workplace automation and the increasing ‘fissurisation’ of work. Direct and indirect risks are illustrated using the example of the transport and logistics sector. We discuss policy responses to both types of risk in the context of the German economy and argue that the policy solutions need to differ according to the type of risk. Direct risks can be addressed by European and national regulation against discrimination, surveillance and information asymmetries. As for indirect risks, the first step is to monitor the risks so as to gain an understanding of sector-specific transformations and establish relevant expertise and competence. This way of addressing AI-induced risks at work will help to improve the prospects of decent work, fair remuneration and adequate social protection for all.

The digitalisation of work is associated with a range of technologies, including digital platforms and so-called artificial intelligence (AI), as well as ideas about how they will improve productivity and competitiveness. This article analyses how unions anticipate the consequences of digital technologies and how they mobilise to address their impact on employment, skills, and quality of work. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in aerospace manufacturing in Belgium (Wallonia), Denmark and Canada (Quebec), our findings suggest that unions are mobilising contrasting frames and repertoires of action, drawing on traditional institutions, and experimenting with new ones to shape the future of work in the aerospace industry.

Research at the intersection of social movements and categories has stressed how movements initiate and transform categories that influence the emergence, downfall, and restructuring of markets and industries. Yet, this literature tends to underestimate how social movement organizations are under pressure to align with powerful regulatory categories. This pressure is emplaced, depending on ideology and laws, and can be avoided by adopting reformist strategies and engaging in category work in free spaces. I discuss how Rainbow, a nonprofit organization, while seemingly aligned with the state-imposed categories of “underprivileged neighborhoods” and “diversity,” sought in practice to reform the meanings of these categories to address racism and islamophobia. Through ethnography, interviews, and textual analysis, I demonstrate how social movements facing pressure to comply with regulatory categories can engage in category reform, challenging the substance of these categories in free spaces and altering their meanings, while buffering oppositions through reformist strategies.

While organization theorists have established the importance of typicality, most studies examine situations where producers and audiences dwell within the same category system (e.g. a country, industry, or market). However, much less attention is paid to the role of typicality when products are introduced from one system to another. Since defining what is typical is commonly system-specific, typical products in one category system may be perceived as being atypical in others. It is therefore important to understand how typicality shapes market exchanges when products traverse category systems. To shed light on this, we introduce two key concepts—home typicality and host typicality—and examine specifically how they affect the performance of products distributed across countries. By analyzing a large sample of films, we find that films are more successful in international markets, when they are more typical of their home countries and/or more atypical of their host countries.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the world of work. For trade unions, the issue of how to regulate the use of AI is a central but difficult topic because the technology is still at an early stage and experience on its use limited. Focusing on Germany, this article addresses the following questions: (1) what areas of application and use cases for AI are relevant for trade unions and works councils?, (2) what role do trade union positions and demands play in the political discussion on regulating the use of AI?, (3) what strategies are trade unions using to influence the regulation and use of AI in the workplace?, and (4) what experiences are they gaining during this process? Reviewing trade union strategies, this article shows which concepts of human-centred AI the trade unions are trying to promote, how they try to ensure that works councils and trade unionists get appropriate training to understand the new technologies, and how dealing with AI is changing the way works councils work. The article also shows how the characteristics of the German system of industrial relations influence discussions on AI and the processes of implementing it in the workplace. Der Einsatz künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) verändert die Arbeitswelt. Für die Gewerkschaften ist die Frage, wie der Einsatz von KI am Arbeitsplatz reguliert werden soll, ein zentrales, aber schwieriges Thema, denn diese Technologie befindet sich noch in einem frühen Entwicklungsstadium, und die Erfahrungen mit ihrer Verwendung sind begrenzt. Der vorliegende Artikel befasst sich in erster Linie mit Deutschland und geht folgenden Fragen nach: (1) Welche Anwendungsbereiche und Anwendungsfälle für KI sind relevant für Gewerkschaften und Betriebsräte? (2) Welche Rolle spielen Standpunkte und Forderungen der Gewerkschaften in der politischen Diskussion über die Regulierung des Einsatzes von KI? (3) Welche Strategien nutzen die Gewerkschaften, um Einfluss auf die Regulierung und den Einsatz von KI am Arbeitsplatz zu nehmen? und (4) Welche Erkenntnisse gewinnen sie im Rahmen dieses Prozesses? Der vorliegende Artikel stellt Gewerkschaftsstrategien für eine menschenzentrierte KI vor. Diese umfassen Qualifizierungsstrategien für Betriebsräte und Gewerkschafter:innen und Veränderungen in deren Arbeitsweise. Der Artikel zeigt zudem, wie die Eigenheiten des deutschen Systems der Arbeitsbeziehungen die Diskussionen über KI und die Prozesse der Implementierung dieser Systeme beeinflussen.

Motivated by general theoretical ideas about the societal consequences of diversity among organizations, I examine how the diversity of organizational forms in a local community shapes the formation of its museums. I argue that the diversity of organizations that cut cross major community segregation lines helps to integrate a community and consequently enhances its ability to act collectively, in this instance to create a museum to serve the community. In contrast, the diversity of organizations that are confined to the major segregation lines widens community cleavage and decreases the community’s ability to establish a museum collectively. Empirically, I investigate how diversity in the local press affected the formation of museums in American counties from 1872 to 1976. The findings provide empirical support for my theory. I find that the diversity of general appeal newspapers has a positive relationship with the formation of museums, implying the integrating effects of general appeal newspapers that cut across boundaries of race and ethnicity, the dominant segregation lines in US communities. In contrast, there is a negative relationship between ethnic newspaper diversity and museum formation, showing the segregating effects of ethnic newspapers by race and ethnicity. I conclude the study with a discussion of its implications for a general research program on how organizational diversity shapes social interaction patterns in a community, and consequently influences the community’s civic engagement for public good.

Union responses to the liberalization of the political economy are often portrayed as either beating the same drum for decades or retreating into the defence of an increasingly small group of core workers. This article argues otherwise. A longitudinal ideational analysis of collective bargaining documents issued between 1976 and 2021 by the Netherlands Trade Union Confederation (FNV) shows that the Federation has gradually adapted its Keynesian-inspired interests to a more market-oriented understanding of the labor market, wages, and employment, legitimized by Third Way ideology in the 1990s. During the 2010s the union returns to Keynesian thinking. The findings suggest that the ideological conversion of the trade union movement may have been more significant than currently realized in explaining the liberalization of the labor market.

This article addresses the challenges raised by the introduction of algorithmic management and artificial intelligence in the world of work, focusing on the risks that new managerial technologies present for fundamental rights and principles, such as non-discrimination, freedom of association and the right to privacy. The article argues that collective bargaining is the most suitable regulatory instrument for responding to these challenges, and that current EU legislative initiatives do not adequately recognise the role of collective bargaining in this area. It also maps current initiatives undertaken by national trade union movements in Europe to govern algorithmic management.

This study investigates the power of a community namesake, defined as an organization named after the geographic community, in discouraging potential entrants from entering the local market during industry emergence. I argue that the presence of a community namesake is likely to make potential entrants anticipate stronger competition, because they tend to believe that the local membership proudly claimed by the namesake may drive community stakeholders to reciprocate the namesake with disproportionally more resources. During industry emergence, when there lacks objective information on competitive intensity, the presence of a community namesake can be a sufficient cue of a high local entry barrier that deters potential entrants, resulting in lower founding rates during the post-namesake period at the level of communities. I further predict that the namesakes’ symbolic power should vary depending on their material forms. Material forms that corroborate (i.e. through purpose-built buildings) or make salient (i.e. through visually prominent architectures) the namesakes’ claimed local membership should decrease founding rates to a higher degree. The analysis of the emergence of historical movie theaters in Chicago communities, 1905–1927, provides empirical support to the theorizing.

While union membership has declined over the last several decades, there has been a recent surge in union organizing among contingent faculty—non-tenure-track faculty who tend to experience low wages and job insecurity. Based on interviews with 100 contingent faculty at two large public research universities—one where contingent faculty are unionized, and one where they are not—this article demonstrates that contingent faculty at the unionized institution experience higher job satisfaction, greater job security, and higher wages than those at the non-unionized university, but that the union still faces some limitations in improving contingent faculty jobs.

The study attempts to identify the critical enablers that can mitigate supply chain (SC) disruption and model the interconnectedness among them in the context of the Indian Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). The supply chain in many Indian MSMEs has been seriously affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing forth the need to identify avenues that can mitigate the disruptions. This study conducts a two-stage qualitative interview and a structured interview with MSME owners. Domain experts are associated with the automotive, aerospace and design services industries. Based on their responses, we have identified seven major critical enablers specific in the context of Indian MSMEs. To model the interconnection among these factors, we have used the ISM (Interpretive Structural Modelling) approach. Results suggest that ‘top management support’ is the most crucial enabler in the hierarchy. Further, we find that if the supply chain is designed efficiently with redundancy in mind and the culture of the MSME remains conducive, advanced forms of ‘multi-sourcing’ and differentiated logistics can be explored to mitigate supply chain disruption.

In Australia and Canada, working holidaymaking is rationalized on the basis of encouraging cultural exchange among youth. Yet, in both countries, there is mounting evidence that working holiday programs are operating as back-door migrant work programs to help fill demands for labor in occupations and industries characterized by precarious jobs undesirable to locals. As scholarship on working holidaymakers’ labor market participation is more developed in Australia than in Canada, and administrative data available are also more extensive therein, this article sheds new light on the Canadian case vis-à-vis the Australian example. In exploring regulatory strategies adopted by these two settler states and their effects, comparative analysis of administrative data and historical and contemporary immigration and labor and employment laws and policies reveals how nationally specific program design can foster similar ends: precariousness among participants in the industries in which working holidaymakers are concentrated, including agriculture, tourism, and accommodation and food services. It also shows that stratification between working holidaymakers more closely approximating the image of the “cultural sojourner” and those who are effectively migrating for work purposes takes shape principally along the lines of source country in both countries.

With the initial context of COVID-19 fuelling Amazon’s exponential growth, this article investigates how the pandemic (re)defined labour struggles, i.e., cultivating labour’s structural, associational and institutional powers in two case study countries, Germany and the US. By analysing these power resources in its two largest markets, I argue that Amazon’s structural conditions by which it organises its warehouse labour, which predate the pandemic, have continued to act as obstacles to collective labour action. While in Germany, ver.di continues to mobilise its workplace power but has been unable to get Amazon to sign a collective agreement, the pandemic triggered unprecedented workplace mobilisations and the pursuit of associational power in the US, albeit with varying outcomes. Despite their different industrial relations systems and labour struggles, these two cases highlight the key role of shop-floor organising to put pressure on Amazon, while Amazon’s continued rejection of unions as negotiating partners further underlines the importance of regulating Amazon’s union-busting tactics.

The market categories literature is reaching the adolescent stage. To ‘look forward’ and chart the next stages of this literature’s growth, we first need to ‘look back’ at what we have learned so far. We thus begin with a systematic review of the literature on market categories from the 1990s to the present. Our search of leading management and sociology journals yielded 100 empirical papers, which we group into eight themes. We then discuss in more detail the findings under the top three of these themes: category spanning, new category construction and category change. Based on our review, we then ‘look forward’ and offer suggestions for future research on market categories. Specifically, we call for more explicit attention to (1) agency, particularly in studies of category spanning, (2) market categories at the intersection of multiple institutional logics, (3) market categories as an outcome rather than antecedent and (4) construct clarity and consistency. We hope these recommendations will ensure a long and healthy future for this burgeoning literature.