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The article analyses the configurations of social inequality in Argentina and Chile between 2000 and 2019 through a comparative biographical approach that combines three dimensions: macro-social (welfare models), meso-social (labour policies), and micro-social (occupational trajectories). In Argentina, welfare schemes oscillated between moderate protectionism and a liberal approach; in Chile, a movement was observed between revised neoliberalism and a protectionist liberal welfare approach. Regarding labour policies, a transition from employment regulation to self-management was observed in the Argentine job market; in Chile, a meritocratic discourse remains that advocates for worker self-management, regardless of changes in welfare schemes. These differences have no appreciable impact on the configuration of class trajectories, which are similar in both countries. While the service classes generally construct advantageous trajectories, the intermediate classes are ambivalently affected by crises and insufficient protection and the working classes accumulate disadvantages since they are conditioned by welfare schemes and social-labour policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically assesses the empirical evidence on the relationship between immigration and African American employment. Studies using various methodologies and data are reviewed: natural experiments, time series, and cross-sectional studies of local labor markets and intertemporal changes in the national labor market. We find that for African Americans as a whole, immigration may have little effect on mean wages and probability of employment. However, there is some evidence that immigration may have had an adverse impact on the labor market outcomes of African Americans belonging to low education-experience groups. However, even this modest conclusion must be qualified: the literature has many unresolved econometric issues that might easily undermine the received wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology of social stratification and labour market economics have developed in isolation from one another. The present paper attempts to bring these two traditions closer together. The starting point is a critique of the very notion of social 'stratification'. A return to Max Weber's idea of `class situation as market situation' and to his concept of `social closure' is advocated. On this basis, a conception of structured social inequality in advanced capitalist societies is developed which is open for conceptual innovations to be taken from labour market economics. A number of approaches to labour market analysis are discussed, and the special significance of several recent contributions related to the so- called 'dual labour market theory' is emphasized. This leads up to the construction of a typological model supposed to supersede the traditional notion of social inequality as a system of hierarchically superposed strata. This model comprises eight levels of labour market structuration characterizing structured social inequality in advanced capitalist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent for women. During this period, inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent. We report a decomposition, relating rising inequality to the union wage distribution’s shrinking weight. We argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity, reducing the dispersion of nonunion wages in highly unionized regions and industries. Accounting for unions’ effect on union and nonunion wages suggests that the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality—an effect comparable to the growing stratification of wages by education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Perspectives on inequality direr greatly regarding whether the logic of bureaucracy undermines sex based ascription in work organizations by reducing subjectivity in personnel decisions, or instead merely serves to obscure or "scientize" inequality. Past research has tended to operationalize bureaucratization in terms of the adoption of formal procedures and structures; the authors argue instead that disagreements about whether bureaucracy promotes or ameliorates inequality and segregation have less to do with the contours of bureaucracy than with the underlying logic of bureaucratic organization. Accordingly, the authors assess the link between bureaucratic organization and labor-market ascription by characterizing the logics underlying organizational employment systems. Using data on young high-technology companies in California's Silicon Valley, they find evidence that bureaucratization improves employment prospects for women in core scientific-technical roles within these enterprises. They further explore path dependence in organizational logics and find that such logics, when adopted, have powerful enduring effects on labor-force composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union integration process has stimulated a huge wave of cross-national comparative research and writing in Europe--particularly on women's position in society and the labor market, work-life balance, and the search for "equality." These three books illustrate the wide range of this new work: from narrowly theoretical empirical research to openly polemical discussion of how to change the world. Two books extend their comparisons to North America, China, and New Zealand. All are concerned with the pay gap between men and women, its causes, and mechanisms to deal with it. To varying degrees, all three books consider the social economic, institutional and legislative environment, and its impact on women's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa's triple transition--toward political democracy, economic liberalization, and racial equity--has generated a variety of responses at workplace level. Rather than a uniform response, a hybrid mix of managerial strategies is emerging that reveals both continuities and discontinuities with past practices. We argue that the challenge facing the South African workplace is to balance the contradictory demands of efficiency, employee rights, and equity arising out of the triple transition. What sort of a trade off, if any, between these competing pressures is required and what is politically feasible remains to be seen. What is clear from our case studies is that the challenge cannot be met unless the legacy of the apartheid workplace regime is decisively overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study that examined why job histories differ, with particular focus on how the use of social contacts reinforces and reproduces inequality for low-income women in San Francisco, California. Discussion on variation within the labor market segment; Information on the factors that affect job search; Background on human capital theory.

The research examines the role of local opportunity structure in the determination of social and economic outcomes by focusing on the impact of local labor market segregation on socioeconomic inequality between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Analysis of the 1983 Israeli Census reveals that the rules by which minority members achieve socioeconomic status vary considerably across bi-ethnic and mono-ethnic labor markets. Arabs working in Jewish communities (bi-ethnic labor markets) suffer the detrimental consequences of both occupational and income discrimination more than any other group. By contrast, Arabs working in Arab communities (mono-ethnic labor markets) are occupationally advantaged. With the absence of competition, they produce incumbents for positions usually held by Jews. The findings suggest that the magnitude of disadvantages that superordinate groups force on minority groups is highly dependent on the degree of group competition in the local labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]