There is limited research evidence on the mental health consequences of self-employment transitions from wage employment. This study fills this gap by investigating this issue using a difference-in-differences design with matching methods employing data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009–2021). The results suggest that transitions to self-employment are associated with a small but significant decrease in psychological distress, signalling improvements in mental health. These effects are stronger among workers with poorer initial mental health when compared to their non-self-employed counterparts. Along with the self-employment transitions, workers also experience declines in socio-economic status but improvements in job autonomy, job satisfaction and satisfaction with leisure time. Overall, these findings highlight the potential protective effects of self-employment on workers’ mental health; however, caution is needed in considering the mental health premium of self-employment transitions.
Employees are more often than not personally invested in their work. Such affective investment has been both praised as a potential source of self-fulfilment and condemned as a form of labour extraction. However, we aim to examine how employees in white-collar jobs navigate the multiple work and labour facets of their employment. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a revelatory context, with the unexpected collapse of work-life articulations, we draw upon 50 semi-structured interviews of employees in a French private organisation of higher education. We show how individuals interrogated their investment in their employment as labour, yet not into their work as subjective endeavour. Moreover, we analyse how the material and social context of the social organisation of labour conditions individuals’ personal attachment to work. Finally, we discuss the struggle for a meaningful experience of working in higher education after decades of new public management.
This study improves the understanding of the relationship between flexible work and gender regimes by exploring the flexibility stigma in a non-Western country – Romania, a former socialist Central and Eastern European nation, characterised by a particular gender order. The research delves into the experiences of 22 women managers across nine financial organisations through narrative interviews. The article contributes the concept of a hybridised, post-socialist flexibility stigma, defined by a high familistic penalty that emerges from the distinctiveness of the Romanian post-socialist gender regime – demanding workplace expectations of work devotion paradoxically adopted by the respondents despite high personal needs of flexibility – and cultural socialist legacies. Additionally, the research sheds light on organisational mechanisms of persuasion, control and consent manufacturing that organisations use for discouraging flexible work and that contribute to managers’ contradictory roles in stigma formation.
This collection is focused on understanding what we know and what we need to know on the topic of work, ageing and retirement. Work, Employment and Society has published 44 articles on this topic over 35 years, from 1989 to 2024. We analyse this article corpus and identify four themes that shed insight into what sociologists of work and ageing know: the macrostructural perspective, the organisational perspective, individual life courses, and retirement as process. Overall, we find a historical pattern whereby studies have shifted from a top-down structural approach utilising mostly quantitative survey data to an individualised and agentic approach utilising mostly qualitative data. Recent scholarship has begun to blend both structure and agency, introducing theoretical and methodological sophistication to derive more holistic understanding of ageing at work. We select 11 articles using various perspectives, theories, and methods that illustrate these trends. We conclude with suggested key directions for future research.
This study examines the long-term fertility scarring associated with nonstandard employment upon labor market entry in Japan, country characterized by dualized labor market and rigid gender norms. Analyses of retrospective occupational history data including work entry cohorts 1970–2015 with multistate life-table models indicate that early career disadvantages correlate with lower long-term fertility outcomes, especially for men. Compared to those in standard employment, men whose first job was nonstandard employment were approximately 18% points less likely to have married and 14% points less likely to have had a child by age 45. These disparities linked to nonstandard employment have increased significantly among cohorts entering the labor market after Japan’s economic downturn. Counterfactual estimates suggest that delayed or foregone marriage accounts for about one-third of the fertility penalty among men with early precarious employment. These results underscore how early labor market precarity leaves long-term demographic and social scars, especially within gender-inegalitarian contexts.
