The notion of regular, full-time employment as one of the defining features of the U.S. economy has been called into question in recent years by the apparent growth of alternative or nonstandard - work arrangements - part-time hours, temporary help, independent contracting, and other...

Concerns over the supply of skills in the U.S. labor force, especially education-related skills, have exploded in recent years with a series of reports not only from employer-associated organizations but also from independent and even government sources making similar claims. These complaints...

We use longitudinal data to assess whether individuals who place greater importance on marriage and family pay a price for that priority in subsequent labor market success. Male respondents placing a high priority on marriage and family before entering the labor market can earn more, a finding...

Concern about job instability and insecurity has a long history and has generated a considerable body of research across the social sciences, most recently focused on whether job stability and security have declined. Internally flexible systems for organizing work, sometimes called 'functionally...

The author investigates the reasons for the diversity in concession bargaining experience among plants in the meatpacking and tire industries. In 1981 negotiations, about one-third of the plants in each industry engaged in concession bargaining and the others did not. The author hypothesizes...

Using data from surveys of employees and their supervisors in eight companies in 1992, the authors examine how each of two forms of employee involvement affected an important dimension of individual performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), defined as individual discretionary...

Franchise jobs are often viewed as epitomizing a "low-road" employee-management approach characterized by high turnover and several practices that are deemed unsophisticated, such as low investment in training, deskilling of work, and little encouragement of employee involvement. Research on...

This study examines data from a 1985 survey of employee attitudes at an airline that had introduced a merging (or temporary) two-tier pay plan the year before. The authors find, contrary to popular wisdom, that lower-wage `B' tier workers felt significantly more satisfied with their pay, work,...

Studies of how different work practices affect organizational performance have suffered from methodological problems. Especially intractable has been the difficulty of establishing whether observed links are causal or merely reflect pre-existing differences among firms. This analysis uses a...

We examine the relationship between wages and skill requirements in a sample of over 50,000 managers in 39 companies between 1986 and 1992. The data include an unusually good measure of job requirements and skills that can proxy for human capital. We find that wage inequality increased both...