While anecdotal accounts have noted the growing appeal of state-sector jobs in China since the COVID-19 pandemic, no formal investigation has yet examined this trend. We use nationally representative data from the 2016–2022 China Family Panel Studies to analyze cross-sector trends in job satisfaction from before to during the pandemic. Multi-dimensional job satisfaction is examined, including satisfaction with income, job security, working environment, working hours, promotion opportunities, and overall job quality. Fixed-effects models reveal that before the pandemic, increases in job satisfaction were greater among non-state-sector employees; during the pandemic, however, they were greater among state-sector employees. Proposed mediators (income, confidence in the future, and subjective income or social status) do not explain the observed sectoral differences. Our findings highlight the shifting landscape of work-related inequalities across employment sectors amid drastic social change.
Scholars have demonstrated how managerial elites circumvent legal mandates through symbolic compliance, decoupling, or regulatory capture. Yet less is known about how labor and occupational activists resist this weakening of laws within organizations, as most legal mobilization research focuses on labor and social movements’ exogenous strategies to target organizations (lobbying for regulations or using litigation). Drawing on archival data, we explore a union-led movement that started inside France Telecom to hold the company and its executives accountable after the 2008–2009 deaths by suicide of dozens of employees. We show how this movement was able to document and counter managerial strategies to weaken anti-harassment law and how this endogenous legal mobilization ended up transforming the interpretation of nationwide laws. We argue that this endogenous legal mobilization is an understudied aspect of legal mobilization and may be a crucial component in explaining the outcomes of subsequent legal mobilization. This helps demonstrate how insider activists (such as occupational activists or union activists) use multi-sited legal strategies to reinforce pre-existing laws and hold organizational elites accountable, through mobilizations that start within companies. Our concept of endogenous legal mobilization contributes to both labor and occupational activism literature by stressing an understudied aspect of these activists’ tactical repertoire.
Artificial intelligence (AI) usually enters organizations as a tool whose work-design implications appear only after implementation. This study shifts the analytic starting point upstream to examine how healthcare AI "makers," through market-facing narratives, frame AI as suitable for adoption in a regulated, professionally governed field. We ask how technology makers construct and legitimate work-design scripts before organizational implementation. We then analyze public-facing materials from 100 U.S. healthcare AI firms (2023-2026)-including vision statements, product descriptions, and white papers-alongside 19 healthcare trade-journal articles (2023-2025) quoting hospital executives and physician leaders. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we identify three recurring design logics that makers use to frame AI as adoptable: efficiency, which simplifies complexity and boosts productivity; safety, which establishes quality control and risk management; and precision, which ensures accuracy through human oversight. Makers operationalize these logics through three adoption scripts: turnkey solutions that promise rapid deployment and interoperability, configurable solutions that frame bounded rule-setting as a route to governability, and customizable solutions that emphasize partnership and validation for contextual fit. Trade-journal discourse provides demand-side triangulation by framing responsible adoption in governance terms. By showing how technology makers' scripts direct work organization before implementation even begins, the study advances a theory of upstream work design centered on the marketing of novel technology.
This paper examines how employer demand for workers skilled in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is associated with employment patterns in copyright-intensive industries within the U.S. information sector. Using panel data from the Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators combined with data on AI-related job postings, we analyze how the relationship between employer demand for AI skills and employment levels varies across worker groups between 2018 and 2024. Furthermore, we document changes in this relationship following the widespread introduction of generative AI in late 2022. We find that employment in copyright-reliant information industries declined relative to other industries after late 2022, and that the association between AI-related job postings and employment is highly heterogeneous. Initial findings indicate that employment relationships were negative or statistically insignificant for workers who had not completed a four-year college degree, for women, and for the youngest and oldest age cohorts. A positive relationship existed for college educated workers, men, and prime-age workers, though this weakened in the periods after the introduction of generative AI. These findings provide early insights into how demand for generative AI skills may reshape labor market stratification within creative and information-intensive industries and underscore the importance of examining technological change in future research.
Artificial intelligence and other digital technologies are rapidly transforming work, reviving longstanding questions about technology, labor, and power. While much attention has focused on AI's capabilities, its effects on work are neither uniform nor technologically determined. Rather, they depend on how digital technologies are embedded in practices and institutional power relations structuring authority, control, and autonomy. This editorial introduces a special issue on AI-driven technological change, work, and power, and develops a framework for understanding these transformations. Drawing on endogeneity-contingency perspectives, we construct ideal-type configurations of production regimes and production logics . Building on the six empirical studies in the issue, we conceptualize technological change as the outcome of negotiated processes involving managers, workers, unions, technology providers, and regulators, whose relative power shapes the design and deployment of digital systems. Our framework distinguishes production regimes , understood as the institutional balance of power between labor and management, potentially alongside other actors, from production logics embedded in technologies, managerial strategies, and practices orienting work toward control or autonomy. We show that AI and digital tools generate divergent outcomes depending on whether they are deployed in management-dominated or more balanced production regimes, and how they interact with control- or autonomy-oriented production logics. We thus contribute an integrated framework linking workplace dynamics to broader institutional structures, highlighting how technological change both reflects and reproduces differences in authority and control while remaining subject to contestation. We illustrate this framework through the six studies and conclude by outlining implications for future research on AI, work, and power.
In an age of insecurity, what is it like to hold a secure job with a single employer? While extensive research documents the challenges of job insecurity, the experiences of the stably employed have gone largely unexamined. Drawing on interviews with 126 white-collar workers in highly secure positions at large firms in Korea, I find that job security is devalued . These jobs are viewed not as a privilege but as an obstacle to embodying a “culture of enterprise,” which idealizes self-responsibility, flexibility, and mobility. Interviewees highlighted the social risks tied to staying in their jobs, citing the lack of “growth,” meaning the development of marketable skills and experiences that are portable across organizations. I term this fear of failing to meet the prevailing cultural ideal of self-entrepreneurship stagnation anxiety . This led some to quit and pursue alternative careers better aligned with enterprise culture, while others stayed but struggled with feelings of inadequacy. Only a small minority rejected enterprise culture in favor of even more secure employment. These findings reveal that shifting understandings of what constitutes a successful career has created new dilemmas even for those in highly secure employment.
Research on dual-career households and precarity has shown that mobility and instability shape professional lives, yet existing accounts incompletely explain how uncertainty is generated for workers whose career trajectories are not intrinsically insecure. Studies of dual-career couples emphasize household negotiation around co-location, while precarity research locates instability in contingent employment or labor-market volatility. What remains underdeveloped is how institutionally-sequenced careers might produce prolonged uncertainty that reorganizes the career planning of connected romantic partners. This paper addresses that gap by examining how institutional timelines governing one partner's career shape how the other plans their career. Drawing on qualitative interviews with seventy partners of individuals embedded in doctoral and medical training regimes, I show how respondents narrated their employment as provisional. Work was described in conditional terms, subordinated to institutional milestones and unresolved geographic futures. Rather than treating accommodation as a one-time compromise, respondents anticipated extended periods in which their own careers would remain contingent on externally governed timelines. To manage this uncertainty, they oriented their employment toward compatibility rather than advancement, redesigning work for flexibility, undershooting aspirations, or assembling patchwork arrangements. The analysis demonstrates institutional crossover as a mechanism through which institutional calendars governing one partner's advancement restructure the career horizons of another. It also introduces provisional framing of work as an interpretive orientation through which workers understand stable jobs as temporary or deferrable. Together, these concepts extend theories of precarity and dual-career mobility by showing how instability can be produced relationally and temporally, even when employment itself appears secure.
Segregation is a pervasive social phenomenon that separates individuals across social settings. Workplaces, as key hubs of the labor market, are not only central to economic outcomes but also potential sites for cross-cutting social ties. Yet workplace segregation can exacerbate inequality and weaken social cohesion. Existing research has largely examined highly visible categories such as race and ethnicity, while much less is known about segregation by subtler statuses. Social class origin is one such case: it is harder for individuals to observe in interaction and more difficult to measure at the population level. In this paper, we analyze workplace segregation by social class origin using Swedish register data from 2012. We find substantial segregation by social origin, well above what would be expected if employees were randomly allocated across workplaces. Segregation also persists beyond what can be explained by individual and workplace characteristics such as education, occupation, or region. Even after adjusting for our richest set of covariates, employees remain somewhat overexposed to coworkers who share their class origin. Notably, excess segregation is smallest among workers from the lowest origins and largest among those from the highest. Being the hub of the labor market, the workplace is central to accessing labor market rewards by providing employment, job ladders, and wages. Research demonstrates that workplace segregation structures substantial portions of earnings inequality. But the workplace is also a potential facilitator of social interactions, providing a setting where individuals from diverse social backgrounds encounter one another. It may enforce social interaction, influence social cohesion, the formation of political attitudes, and therefore shape broader patterns of inequality and social integration.
Research highlights the prison's contributions to habituating marginalized individuals into labor productivity or compliance. Minoritized communities are disproportionately exposed to such discipline. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within a medium security prison for men, this study uncovers ground-level processes through which labor discipline is enacted unequally on the inside, reifying racial structures and amplifying disparities among working prisoners. To explain this, I advance the concept of racializing labor discipline, through which the prison conditions the incarcerated not only for precarious positions in outside markets, but into unequal roles in an ethnoracial labor order. Bridging work, punishment, and racialization scholarship, I identify four key mechanisms through which this unfolds within the hierarchical carceral employment system.
