EXPRESS: The Ties that Bind us: Networks, Projects and Careers in British TV

The dominant view of careers is that they have been transformed by the emergence of ‘post-bureaucratic’ organizations. ‘Neo-bureaucratic’ structures have emerged, retaining centralized control over strategy and finance while outsourcing production, creating employment precarity. British television epitomises a sector that has experienced long-run deregulation. Producing television content is risky highly competitive. How do broadcasters minimise the risks of television production? Broadcasting neo-bureaucracies avoid relying on fragmented labour markets to hire technically self-disciplining crews. Control regimes are enacted through activating social networks by broadcast commissioners, green-lit to trusted creative teams who recruit key crew, through social networks which complement diffuse forms of normative control. Social networks and the self-discipline of crews are mutually constitutive, (re)producing patterns of labour market advantage/disadvantage. Younger freelancers prove vulnerable, exposed to precariousness inherent in freelance employment; to build a career they must access and sustain their social network membership. We locate individual decisions around career narratives in the context of specific social networks and industry structures. Careers are not boundaryless, individual constructs. We introduce the concept of ‘mosaic-career’, capturing the complexity of individual work histories, composed of fragmented employment in organisations/projects. How do neo-bureaucracies, then, intervene in labour markets? What are the consequences of those interventions?

Understanding Subpopulations on Mechanical Turk

We draw on the drift hypothesis and latent deprivation model to guide comparisons between such workers on Amazon's crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk, known as Turkers, who report no employment other than crowdsourced work (i.e., otherwise unemployed) and Turkers who report being part-time and full-time employed outside of crowdsourced work. Findings show otherwise unemployed Turkers and part-time employed Turkers report a greater percentage of time in their work histories being unemployed and greater neuroticism than full-time employed Turkers do. Findings also show an inverse relationship between employment status and time spent completing crowdsourced work, with otherwise unemployed Turkers spending the most time completing crowdsourced work. Finally, findings show otherwise unemployed and part-time employed Turkers each differ, in unique ways, from full-time employed Turkers on theorized employment status antecedents and consequences.

Decomposition of co-worker wage gains

We address the presence, magnitude, and composition of wage gains related to former co-workers and discuss the mechanisms that could explain their existence. Using Hungarian linked employer–employee administrative data and proxying actual co-workership with overlapping work histories, we show that the overall wage gain attributable to former co-workers consists of multiple elements: a contact-specific, an individual-specific, a firm-specific and a match-specific component. Former co-workers, besides the direct effect of their presence, may funnel individuals into high-paying firms, enhance the sorting of good quality workers into firms, and may contribute to the creation of better employer–employee matches. By introducing and applying a wage-decomposition technique, we demonstrate that there are non-negligible differences between linked and market hires in all empirically separable wage elements. By focusing on specific scenarios, we provide additional empirical evidence in favor of employee referral and information transmission as the main drivers of co-worker gains.

A Quantitative Retrospective Exposure Assessment for Former Chrysotile Asbestos Miners and Millers from Baie Verte, NL, Canada

Despite numerous studies of asbestos workers in the epidemiologic literature, there are very few cohort studies of chrysotile asbestos miners/millers that include high-quality retrospective exposure assessments. As part of the creation of the Baie Verte Miners’ Registry in 2008, a two-dimensional job exposure matrix (JEM) was developed for estimating asbestos exposures for former chrysotile asbestos miners/millers. Industrial hygiene data collected between 1963 and 1994 were analysed to assess validity for use in a retrospective exposure assessment and epidemiologic study. Registered former employees were divided into 52 exposure groups (EGs) based on job title and department and mean asbestos concentrations were calculated for each EG. The resulting exposure estimates were linked to individual registrants’ work histories allowing for the calculation of cumulative asbestos exposure for each registrant. The distribution of exposure for most EGs (82.6%) could be described as fitting a log-normal distribution, although variability within some EGs (55%) exceeded a geometric standard deviation (GSD) of 2.5. Overall, the data used to create EGs in the development of the JEM were deemed to be of adequate quality for estimating cumulative asbestos exposures for the former employees of the Baie Verte asbestos mine/mill. The variability between workers in the same job was often high and is an important factor to be considered when using estimates of cumulative asbestos exposure to adjudicate compensation claims. The exposures experienced in this cohort were comparable to those of other chrysotile asbestos miners/millers cohorts, specifically Italian and Québec cohorts.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter discusses the broader implications of the book's findings for theoretical and empirical scholarship on work and employment, social inequality in the workplace, evaluation processes, and the intersection of social categories. Here, the processes of inclusion and exclusion in the labor market are hardly straightforward. While hiring professionals extract meanings from the nonstandard, mismatched, and precarious work histories on job applicants' resumes, they do so in a complex way. The chapter also articulates key points of interest for policy makers interested in improving the outcomes of working individuals. It concludes by discussing pathways forward for increasing our knowledge about how the nature of work and employment affect the opportunity structure for workers in the new economy.

Sharing Knowledge and “Microbubbles”: Epistemic Communities and Insularity in US Political Journalism

This article examines the peer-to-peer dynamics of Washington political journalists as Communities of Practice (CoPs) to better understand how journalists connect to and learn from each other and establish conventional knowledge. We employ inductive computational analysis that combines social network analysis of journalists’ Twitter interactions with a qualitative, thematic analysis of journalists’ work histories, organizational affiliations, and self-descriptions to identify nine major clusters of Beltway journalists. Among these are an elite/legacy community, a television producer community inclusive of Fox producers, and CNN, as its own self-referential community. Findings suggest Washington journalists may be operating in even smaller, more insular microbubbles than previously thought, raising additional concerns about vulnerability to groupthink and blind spots.