Challenging work—characterized by opportunities for skill development, task variety, learning new things, and creativity—is widely considered a valuable job resource and a cornerstone of higher-status occupations. Yet, less is known about the health-related trade-offs that may accompany this key dimension of job quality. Drawing on five waves of panel data from the Canadian Work, Stress, and Health Study (2011–2019), this study examines the promise and price of challenging work by assessing its links with psychological distress and sleep problems. Results show that challenging work is associated with better health through lower work-to-family conflict and greater mastery. At the same time, two countervailing mechanisms emerge: Challenging work is associated with job pressure and role blurring which, in turn, are linked with worse health. Collectively, these findings underscore the health-related trade-offs of challenging work and offer new insight into the complex pathways through which higher-status work conditions impact health.
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.
