Returns to Work in Occupational, Relational, and Corporate Settings

Introduction

The rise of platforms and remote work has refashioned concerns about work security and flexibility in public debates. Academic studies have documented an increase in non-standard work over decades, including polarization of rewards, shifting occupational boundaries, and winding paths among women and other marginalized groups.

These findings had important policy implications but left questions about the unfolding of individual labor market experiences amid the more noticeable changes. This project mobilizes new techniques and data sources and overcomes divisions in research on work to address those problems.

Objectives

It will recover important complexity by:

1. Measuring the diversity of individual job trajectories in light of their economic returns, costs, and risks.
2. Grounding job trajectories in work activities and, crucially, workers’ interpretations of labor market structures.

These objectives integrate previously divided formal and constructionist thinking to explain the interplay of contexts, practices, and meaning around work.

Project Structure

The project has three parts:

Work Package 1 (WP1)

WP1 uses national-level employment datasets of France, Germany, and the US to survey job trajectories in relation to earnings across institutional contexts. It advances analyses of occupational and other categorical effects by drawing attention to job change sequences, standard and odd.

Work Package 2 (WP2)

WP2 asks how workers organize concrete work. It takes two strategic cases with detailed work records, one involving technical expertise and the other practical tasks, to study how workers do their jobs as they move between corporate and relational arrangements and to what effects. Both steps assume stable structures.

Work Package 3 (WP3)

WP3 asks how workers question conventional job presentations in standard and non-standard work trajectories. It draws on a unique dataset of career descriptions in two areas of work and two countries to capture institutional and cultural effects on meaning construction.