Short Abstract:

In this session Professor Francis Green (UCL, UK) will present his forthcoming book "Hard at Work: Job Quality, Wellbeing and the Global Economy". He will frame the terrain of job quality science in the context of the capability approach and review the evidence for selected domains of job quality and their associations with wellbeing. He will also offer concluding remarks for job quality policies.

Long Abstract:

Session Organisation:

In this session Professor Francis Green (UCL, UK) will first present his forthcoming book "Hard at Work: Job Quality, Wellbeing and the Global Economy". Subsequently, Professor Kirsten Sehnbruch (LSE, UK) will discuss his work, before the floor will be opened for questions and comments from the audience.

This session will be held virtually.

Keywords: Job quality, wellbeing, social progress

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In 2017, one in three South Koreans, two in three Britons, and as many as three in five Americans in jobs said that they were working ‘at very high speeds’ or to ‘tight deadlines’ for at least three quarters of their time at work – that is, for nearly a third of their waking hours. So many people hard at work, and for so long! This book springs from the conviction that, if work is absorbing so much of people’s lives, social science had better be well-placed to understand and account for their evolving experiences in this realm.

The science of job quality is an emerging interdisciplinary, scientific field. Work is the predicament – and the opportunity – that almost everybody on earth finds themselves in at some time. But there is an immense variety in the quality of jobs: from the best, where the work is meaningful, well-paced, safe, well-paid with good prospects and a fount of social support and validation from a community; to the worst, where the work is tightly controlled, low-paid, insecure, fast-paced, and the environment dangerous and toxic. All types of jobs co-exist in the global economy, but are the good ones expanding, and if so for whom? What if any are the signs of social progress in this part of our lives? Or are the bad jobs taking over?

This book provides some answers to these questions, creatively using data from around the developed world. Locating its analysis in terms of the capabilities afforded by jobs, it deploys a general job quality framework now widely utilised for analysis. Being something that almost everyone does at some time or another, many have opinions about jobs. Presenting a new scientific analysis which builds on the rich literature in this emerging field, the style treads a path between the every-day language and experience of work, and an overly specialised, jargon-dense formality. Drawing on ideas, theories and evidence from economics (the author’s own training), sociology, psychology and occasionally from related areas, it adopts a narrative style supported by diagrams based on formal analyses of job quality trends.

The book is in three parts. Part A sets out the terrain of job quality science, and frames it in the context of the capability approach in social science. It charts the growth of interest in job quality among policy-makers and scholars since the start of the century, and sets out the job quality framework involving seven domains: earnings, prospects, working-time quality, autonomy and skill, work intensity, social environment and physical environment. It then sets out a model of job quality which juxtaposes affluence theories with power-relations theories, locates the determination of job quality within the global economy, and discusses ‘bad jobs’. Part B considers each job quality domain, reviewing evidence of its associations with wellbeing, and presenting new evidence of its trends this century. Part C concludes with a consideration of job quality policies, framed in the context of the discourse about the future of work in a digital age.