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This article reports on factors affecting the withdrawal of older workers from the labour market associated with unemployment, premature retirement and retirement at 65 years of age. Longitudinal data from three interviews with 175 adult males are examined; and findings show a process of psychological withdrawal from the labour market reflecting changes in personal identity which occur prior to reaching the formal retirement age, most strongly for those without heavy financial commitments. For most of those interviewed, retirement was a preferred option to unemployment, and allowed them to regain control over their lives. Older workers whose financial needs keep them in the employment market are doubly disadvantaged since they cannot select the route of early retirement and find it much harder to compete with younger people.

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This article presents the results of a qualitative study of 72 workers in regional Victoria, Australia. Against the background of the growing casualization of the workforce it demonstrates the impact on the health and well-being of these workers, focusing on the intersection between psychosocial working conditions and health. In particular it focuses on the detrimental impact on workers' sense of self-efficacy and self-esteem. It emphasizes how the job insecurity characteristic of non-standard work extends beyond the fear of job loss to involve uncertainty over the scheduling of work, with debilitating consequences for workers' autonomy, self-efficacy and control over their lives. Additionally, it is argued that the exclusion of these workers from paid leave and other entitlements in the workplace confers a lower social status on these workers that is corrosive of their self-esteem. It is these key socio-psychological mechanisms that provide the link between insecure work and workers' health.

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The aim of this article is to elucidate how male and female managers of small-scale enterprises in Norway and Sweden relate to and experience the intersection between work and private life. A qualitative content analysis was adopted to explore interviews with 18 managers. The analysis resulted in three primary categories: conflict as a part of the deal, using management to construct balance, and management identity contributing to enrichment. A key theme that emerged was doing management. Both men and women reproduced masculine values in describing their management identities and in explaining how they enacted management. This clear identification was used to legitimate conflict, construct balance and explain the interaction between work and private life as enriching. How the managers enacted gender emerged primarily in how they related to family responsibilities and their feelings of guilt in relation to home and children.

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While Scandinavian countries are deemed the most equal in the world, vertical sex segregation remains resilient in the Scandinavian academy. This article investigates women’s equality in universities in three Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, countries where women’s share of professorships is below the [European Union] EU average. It explores the perception of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian women academics with respect to sex equality, hiring and discrimination. In doing so, it exposes the resilience of inequality regimes in Scandinavian universities and thereby questions the reality of sex equality in countries deemed the ‘most equal’. However, the article also finds that Norwegian respondents were less likely to report discrimination and it reflects on the reasons for differences between the Scandinavian countries.

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The National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom has recently undergone structural and policy changes. These changes significantly influenced the work of hospital and community nurses. For example, nurses have experienced devolution of managerial responsibility and increased pressure to treat patients more quickly while containing service costs. As a result, health service managers have had to reappraise the work of nurses and the skills required to carry it out. ‘Changing skill mix’ is the term used to describe the outcome of this reappraisal process. This article provides a detailed examination of the impact of NHS restructuring on nursing roles as described by first line managers. It builds on earlier research undertaken by Lloyd and Seifert in 1995. Two questions are examined within the context of NHS Trust human resource management (HRM) culture and practice. Firstly, what effect has restructuring had on the range and nature of skills used by NHS nursing staff? Secondly, how do nurses experience the outcomes of current HRM strategies? Show less

In this article, we contribute to the debate on skill, education and work in the ‘new economy’ through a consideration of the education, credentials and skill acquisition activities of [information technology] IT workers in Canada and elsewhere. We begin with a brief review of the theoretical literature debating the relationship between education and skill. We continue to explore this relationship, and consider whether it might be changing in the ‘new economy’ through a consideration of the experiences of information technology workers. There is a growing literature on employment in the IT field that stresses the importance of adaptability, flexibility and self-learning. These workers appear to be ‘self-programmable’ in Castells’ sense [Castells, 2000b: 12] but are they also educated? Is education a primary source of skill in the new economy? How relevant is formal education - and the credentials it confers - to IT employment? We argue that education is important, but less for the skills it brings, than for the adaptability it implies. If IT workers are at all emblematic, new economy workers may feel increasing pressure to acquire skills through a variety of formal and informal strategies.

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This article critiques a case of modern prison-labour by exploring prisoners' attitudes towards the prison-work they undertake while incarcerated. The study is based at a privatised male prison in the UK, assigned the pseudonym 'Bridgeville'. Bridgeville contracts with private-sector firms in providing market-focused prison-work - so-called real work - for inmates in some of its workshops. In exploring prisoners' perceptions of this privatised prison-work, it is found that it mainly comprises mundane, low-skilled activities typical of informalised, poor-quality jobs that are socially, legally and economically devalued and categorised as forms of 'invisible work'. At Bridgeville, such privatised prison-work largely fails in engaging or upskilling inmates, leaving them pessimistic about its value as preparation for employment post-release. Its rehabilitative credentials are therefore questioned. The article contributes to the debate around invisible work more generally by problematising this example of excluded work and the cycle of disadvantage that underpins it.

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The article draws on data from in-depth interviews and testimonies with 75 young undocumented migrants from Brazil, China, Kurds from Turkey, Ukraine and Zimbabwe living in England. The article provides a detailed qualitative understanding of the working lives and decision making of undocumented migrants, a group about which little is known. Sectors of employment and working conditions are explored alongside job-seeking strategies and the role of and use of social capital in job seeking. Variations in employment experiences between undocumented migrants, particularly in relation to work within or outside of the ethnic enclave, are evident from the data. Moreover, the role of narrow, usually co-ethnic and often undocumented, social networks in finding work and the intersections between job-seeking strategies and being undocumented is clear throughout the narratives.

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The objective of this article is to analyse the effect of acquiring a new formal qualification as an adult (measured as an upgrade or a side-step) on the likelihood of being in non-precarious employment. Three countries with similar longitudinal datasets are compared: Spain, the UK and Russia. The results indicate that adult education is beneficial in the three countries; with differences, however, depending on the definition of precarious employment used and the (previous) employment status of individuals. The findings suggest that the differences among countries are related to different labour market structures: adult education has a clearer beneficial impact on accessing and remaining in non-precarious employment in more flexible employment systems than in more rigid insider-outsider economies, where labour trajectories are strongly determined by what happens during the first years after school.

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Does being self-employed, as opposed to being an employee, make a difference to how parents with young children can balance work and family demands? Does self-employment facilitate more equal gender divisions of labour? This article uses the Australian Time Use Survey to identify associations between self-employment and mothers' and fathers' time in paid work, domestic labour and childcare and when during the day they perform these activities. The time self-employed mothers devote to each activity differs substantially from that of employee mothers, while fathers' time is relatively constant across employment types. Working from home is highly correlated with self-employment for mothers, implying the opportunity to be home-based is a pull factor in mothers becoming self-employed. Results suggest mothers use self-employment to combine earning and childcare whereas fathers prioritize paid work regardless of employment type. Self-employment is not associated with gender redistribution of paid and unpaid work, although it facilitates some rescheduling.

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