Flexibility in the gig economy: managing time on three online piecework platforms

Gig economy platforms seem to provide extreme temporal flexibility to workers, giving them full control over how to spend each hour and minute of the day. What constraints do workers face when attempting to exercise this flexibility? We use 30 worker interviews and other data to compare three online piecework platforms with different histories and worker demographics: Mechanical Turk, MobileWorks, and CloudFactory. We find that structural constraints (availability of work and degree of worker dependence on the work) as well as cultural‐cognitive constraints (procrastination and presenteeism) limit worker control over scheduling in practice. The severity of these constraints varies significantly between platforms, the formally freest platform presenting the greatest structural and cultural‐cognitive constraints. We also find that workers have developed informal practices, tools, and communities to address these constraints. We conclude that focusing on outcomes rather than on worker control is a more fruitful way to assess flexible working arrangements.     

Are false own-account workers less job satisfied than true ones?

This article compares job satisfaction of true and false own-account workers. The latter group refers to own-account workers who are employed with the same tasks by the same employer for whom they previously worked as employees. To create a valid comparable group, the former workers are defined as paid employees who independently started a new business as own-account workers. Using data drawn from the European Community Household Panel for the EU-15 and controlling for possible self-selection issues, we observe that false own-account workers, compared with true ones, have less job satisfaction in terms of type of work, number of working hours, working times, and working conditions and environment. Our results are consistent with existing policies aimed to combat false self-employment developed by many OECD countries.     

Rethinking the Career Anchors Inventory framework with insights from a finance transformation field study

It is claimed that the re-engineering and automation of routine work should free accountants to adopt broader, so-called ‘value-adding’ roles as partners to business decision-makers. The ‘new world of work’, involving new process-based methods, single instance ERP systems and the wholesale relocation of professional work to lower cost areas, brings opportunities for accountants in systems design and adding value to the business. For many others, the new reality may be a more competitive and less secure working environment, with a mid-level career bottleneck reflecting a polarisation between the upper and lower layers of the finance function.Based upon Schein's theory of career anchors and using exploratory sequential mixed methods, we consider the impact on the career perceptions of individual accountants as accounting expertise, traditionally embodied in people, is codified and embedded within end-to-end business processes in the context of a finance shared service centre. Key findings include new perceptions of careers with greater emphasis on the acquisition of general managerial competence and leadership skills, with the importance of cultivating a sense of ‘global connectedness' to maintain individual employability. Suggestions are made to update Schein's Career Orientation Inventory to better reflect the reality of accounting in the ‘new world of work'.     

Discretionary technology bootlegging tensions in institutional healthcare work

We explore individuals who take some of their technology use ‘underground’, described as ‘bootlegging’, to enhance healthcare work. We find that healthcare professionals’ informal use of mobile applications in healthcare work sometimes ‘sticks out’ and this produces professional identity tensions: (1) conflict with perceptions of professional behaviour, and (2) defilement of expert judgment. Our analysis, moreover, reveals that identity work (i.e. ‘accepting’ and ‘sensemaking’) provides a coping mechanism to deal with these unresolved professional identity tensions. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the constitutive entanglements and two‐way interactions of discretionary technology bootlegging, professional identity and autonomy in institutional healthcare work.     

Is corporate social responsibility (CSR) participation the pathway to foster meaningful work and helping behavior for millennials?

This study examines how corporate social responsibility (CSR) participation affects organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) through meaningful work. This work is significant for three reasons: the joint examination of CSR, meaningful work, and OCB is novel; the comparative effects of CSR perception versus CSR participation have not been examined previously; and this is the first examination of such relationships for different generations of employees. Data from 245 employees of four-star hotels were analyzed using a partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach and multigroup analysis (MGA). Results reveal that CSR participation has a strong influence over work-related outcomes. The strongest effect of CSR participation on helping behavior is in Generation Y whereas CSR perception has a strong indirect effect on helping behavior through meaningful work in Generation X. These findings offer managerial implications to hotel managers on how best to manage generational differences in predicting helping behavior at workplace.     

Going Through Hell: Increased Work Effort in the Aftermath of Terrorism in Norway*

I analyze how sickness‐absence behavior in Norwegian municipalities was affected by exposure to the terrorist attack in Norway in 2011. The main finding is that in municipalities from which a resident was killed in the attack, sickness absence declined by 4 percent compared with municipalities without victims. The effect is precise, stable, and persistent. The results do not seem to be driven by changing labor market composition. The effect is found also in neighboring municipalities and is larger for people close to the age of the victims.     

创新网络领域知识主题研究述评

在知识经济时代，创新网络在企业创新中扮演着重要角色，而研究网络中知识要素的产生、传播、吸收等问题对了解企业网络化创新具有重要意义。基于国内外核心文献数据库，收集创新网络领域知识要素相关文献，并结合文献计量分析方法，对该领域近30年有关知识主题研究的演化规律、整体趋势等进行梳理。结果表明，国内外研究年度发文量均呈现3个阶段变化趋势，且分别拥有各自重要载文期刊，国内研究已形成核心团队，而国外并未形成；国内外研究既有相同之处，也存在差异性，且均形成较为清晰的研究框架；在演化规律上，国内横向拓展和纵向深化研究特征显著，而国外更加注重纵向深入探索分析，研究内容也更加分散；在未来前沿热点分析上，中外学者关注内容既有相同点，也有不同点，知识协同、知识惯例、企业数字化转型对知识影响的研究是未来关注重点。     

How and when do prior international experiences lead to global work? A career motivation perspective

While research suggests a link between individuals' prior international experiences and their future participation in global work, we know little about how and the conditions under which this relationship occurs. Drawing on career motivation theory, we conceptualize global identity as a mediator between individuals' density of prior international experiences—defined as the extent to which time spent in culturally novel countries has provided individuals with developmental opportunities—and their global work aspirations, which in turn leads to their global work involvement. Further, this multi-stage mediation model holds mainly when individuals receive positive feedback regarding their intercultural competencies (i.e., cultural intelligence) from their peers. We test our model using a multi-wave multi-source dataset spanning 6 years. We discuss implications for the literatures on prior international experiences and global careers.     

Alternative balanced scorecards built from paradigm models in strategic HRM and employment/industrial relations and used to measure the state of employment relations and HR system performance across U.S. workplaces

This paper constructs alternative balanced scorecards based on high‐performance work system (HPWS) and employment relations system (ERS) models. The models are depicted and compared in diagrams and used as framework skeletons for building separate HPWS and ERS scorecards, intended to provide a detailed data picture of the operational health and performance of an organization's employment/HR system and its operations, processes, and inputs/outputs. The scorecards are filled in with nationally representative data from 2,000+ U.S. workplaces using more than 50 employment/HR indicators, as reported by separate panels of managers and employees. The indicators for each workplace are aggregated into an overall HR/employment system score, ranked from low‐to‐high, and graphed as frequency distributions. These distributions provide a unique snapshot picture of the mean and dispersion of the state of employment relations and HR system performance for companies across the United State. They also reveal that “models matter” since the HPWS and ERS scorecards provide distinctly different evaluation assessments.