In last month’s post, I contrasted the positive, intrinsic view of work that underlies high-road HR strategies with the negative, instrumental view of work frequently seen in songs about work. Continuing with the theme of how we think about work, varying perspectives on work often correspond with assumptions about work embedded in different academic disciplines. In general terms, economics treats work as a commodity and as a lousy activity endured because of a need for money, whereas psychology focuses on personal fulfillment, and sociology on social norms. Most songs on work are consist ..read more

Different HR strategies for managing people are founded, at least in part, on different ways in which we think about work. Is work simply an input into a productive process that’s tracked and traded like other commodities? Or something bad that individuals do primarily for income? Or a source of personal satisfaction? A way to serve others? A way to fulfill societal expectations? Low-road, market-drive HR strategies are based on the depersonalized commodity view, incentive-based HR strategies are rooted in seeing work as a necessary evil to earn income, and high-engagement or commitment strate ..read more

Note: if you'd prefer an animated version of this posting, see: Before almost any major election in democratic countries, each political party publishes its manifesto which declares the party’s values, goals, and policies it will pursue if elected. In order to fully inform candidates from that party as well as voters, manifestos comprehensively cover a wide range of topics. Researchers have created ways of categorizing these topics to study them. In fact, researchers from the Comparative Manifesto Project have assembled a data set of manifestos for over 1,000 parties from more than 50 countr ..read more

To successfully resolve a conflict or dispute, Alex Colvin (Cornell), Dionne Pohler (Saskatchewan), and I assert that you must first understand its roots or sources, and then appropriately match a dispute resolution method. We call this "managing conflict at its sources." To this end, we’ve created a three-part typology of the roots of conflict—specifically, structural, cognitive, and dispositional sources of conflict—to facilitate the identification of effective dispute resolution methods tailored to the particular sources of a given dispute.  This can be facilitated by a diagnostic tool ..read more

Here's the Twitter thread version of my new article: Excited that “The Importance of Political Systems for Trade Union Membership, Coverage, and Influence: Theory and Comparative Evidence” with @jryanlamare is in the current BJIR issue. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12575 1/ Ideological links between the state & industrial relations have-of course-been recognized as important for a long time. We build on this to consider the influence of the structural nature of a country’s political system, irrespective of the ideological leaning of the state. 2/ By political system, we mean 1) the ex ..read more

The stories are familiar by now: businesses claim that there’s a labor shortage and others reply that they need to pay more. Pay is obviously an important part of a job, but we need to remember that the positive and negative aspects of work are complicated, which means that we must consider more than pay when evaluating job quality and worker well-being. Among many important things, this includes paying attention to how the quality of work affects society.   Concerns with how workplace experiences affect the political arena are longstanding. Over 150 years ago, John Stuart Mill advocated ..read more

 As people look ahead to the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, many are heralding a work-from-home revolution. But for centuries, it’s been easy to overstate predictions about the future of work. Even when they are not just plain wrong, such predictions are, at best, only partially true because how people experience work varies tremendously by education and skill level, gender, race, class, age, unionization, geography, sector, occupation, employer, and more. Even someone in 1935 who predicted a future of greater unionization in the wake of the then-new National Labor Relations Act would have ..read more

In the recent union organizing drive at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, workers were presented with competing narratives. Amazon portrayed unionization as unnecessary because it already provides good wages and benefits along with direct communication between workers and their managers, whereas union advocates emphasized the need for increased power through collective voice to counter Amazon’s power. While this messaging taps into employee fears or material interests, it also fundamentally reflects different beliefs about the underlying nature of the employment relationship. Is it bes ..read more

Last Fall, workers at two popular craft breweries in the Twin Cities (Fair State and Surly) announced their intent to unionize. The CEO of Fair State responded by saying “I am proud of the self-determination our team has shown by taking on the responsibility of organizing to make Fair State better,” and Fair State became the first U.S. microbrewery to unionize. However, Surly announced plans to close its taproom two days later. Even if this had already been planned due to pandemic-related financial losses, Surly certainly didn’t embrace the unionization effort, and it remains nonunion. If mark ..read more

Happy International Women's Day! First came the wave of teacher strikes led by women fighting the devaluing of their work, then Google employees walked out in protest of its handling of sexual harassment and (later) formed the Alphabet Workers Union, and now racial justice is a central theme as Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama vote on whether to unionize. In between have been innumerable other actions of protest, solidarity, and collective action spurred by concerns with racial justice, the she-cession and other pandemic-induced inequalities, and feelings of powerlessness. Despite numerous ..read more