CfP: What Makes a Job Good or Bad? Standards of Good Work Revisited

Standards of good work – in economics, law, sociology and industrial psychology – are rooted in ideas of protecting labour against exploitation and alienation. Certainly, these basic ideas have not lost their importance. However, organisations as socio-technological systems have radically changed during the last decades, which entails the need for revision of the implications formulated in the 1960s. The front against Taylorism and the bureaucratic phenomenon will prove fruitless in times of the flexible organisation and subsequently flexible women and men. E. g.:

  • Technical progress may result not only in a reduction of workload but also in a devaluation of human capital which is bounded to persons, relatives and communities. New sourcing strategies of enterprises for example via crowd and click work platforms will change the structure of relevant labour markets.
  • Labour law may foster the unintended effect of building up a non-core workforce which is excluded from regulations which protect regular employees. The questions of how protection can be organised elsewhere, and whether monetary instruments as an unconditional minimum wage are a good remedy are still debated intensely.
  • The additional margin for manoeuvre intended as a resource enabling coping in models of work-related stress has converted to a stressor itself in flexible organisations.
  • Changes of value orientations, which are out of the perspective of social research since decades, may result in altered individual demands and hence on answers to the question what makes a good job.
  • The same is true for the change in the structure of the workforce, for example concerning age, gender, generation and religious orientation, on the collective level.
  • […]

The special issue welcomes empirical studies as well as theoretical papers.

 

Guest Editors:

  • Dorothea Alewell, University of Hamburg (Germany)
  • Simon Fietze, University of Southern Denmar
  • Wenzel Matiaske, Helmut-Schmidt-University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg (Germany)

Submission Guidelines

Manuscript length should not exceed 8,000 words (excluding references) and the norm should be 30 pages in double-spaced type with margins of about 3 cm (1 inch) on each side of the page. Further, please follow the guidelines on the journal’s website and submit the papers electronically by sending a “blind” copy of your manuscript (delete all author identification from this primary document).

Deadline

Full papers for this special issue of management revue – Socio-Economic Studies must be submitted by August 31st, 2018. All contributions will be subject to double-blind review. Papers invited to a “revise and resubmit” are due January 31th, 2019. The publication is scheduled for issue 3/2019. Please submit your papers electronically via the online submission system at http://www.mrev.nomos.de/ using “SI Standards of Good Work” as article section.