Work Matters:
28th Annual
International Labour Process Conference
Rutgers University, March
15-17, 2010
SPECIAL INTEREST STREAM: Are bad jobs inevitable?
Despite or
perhaps because of the recession, job quality has again become an issue. Until
recently, government and academic interest has focussed on good jobs with high
skill and high pay. However, evidence suggests a polarisation across the
developed economies with good jobs and bad jobs. The latter are typically characterised by low
skill, pay and prospects. They are often inadequately protected by collective
bargaining and employment law. Often these
jobs involve vulnerable workers, many of whom are female or racial/ethnic minorities,
with low or no qualifications are often part-time and work in the retail,
hospitality, health and social care sectors.
Labour
process analysis has long sought to explore and explain why bad jobs exist and
has implicitly been concerned about improving such jobs. The aim of this stream
is to generate discussion between different perspectives on bad jobs, including
the labour process tradition, the low-wage work research agenda, and analyses
of tradeoffs between quality and quantity of jobs. We ambitiously seek to
attract papers from sociology, economics, industrial relations and related
disciplines as well as from practitioners looking at:
·
Defining and measuring bad jobs
·
How to explain variation and change in job quality
across sectors and countries
·
Generating
better understanding of the practices and policies that might make bad jobs
more bearable
·
Generating better understanding of the levers and
obstacles to workers exiting bad jobs into better jobs
·
Exploring the policies and strategies for making
bad jobs better
Papers can be conceptual, empirical and/or policy-focused.
Stream
Organisers:
·
Chris Warhurst, University of Strathclyde, UK.
Email: Chris.Warhurst@strath.ac.uk
·
Patricia Findlay, University of Edinburgh UK.
Email: P.Findlay@ed.ac.uk
·
Françoise Carré, University of Massachusetts Boston,
USA.
Email: Francoise.Carre@umb.edu
·
Chris Tilly, UCLA, USA.
Email:
The Conference:
The
Annual International Labour Process Conference is a leading conference on work
and employment. It brings together academics and policy makers from the
sociology of work and employment, labour studies, business and management,
human resource management, industrial relations, organization studies and a
range of other disciplines. Selections
of conference papers are published in edited books, with twenty now published.
It is intended that a selection of papers from the women’s work stream will be
published in a journal special edition.
Abstracts for the stream should be between 350-500 words and can be
either theoretical and/or empirical. Abstract contents should enable the
referees to determine what issue, development or problem is being investigated,
how it is investigated, what the findings are and what contribution is being
made to understanding in the field.
ILPC 2008 Conference
Organizers:
Prof. Eileen Appelbaum
Prof. Adrienne Eaton
Dean David Finegold
Dr. Mary Gatta
For
questions about the conference please contact: ilpc2010@ilpc.org.uk
Please submit to www.ilpc.org.uk by October 31, 2009