The Oxford Handbook of Job Quality

Description

The aim of this Handbook is to produce an interdisciplinary and international benchmark text for anyone wanting to understand job quality. Job quality matters and has long and continually done so, even if the terminology used to describe it has, and continues, to vary. Debate about the future of work and job quality in the twenty-first century centres on the impact of the new digital technologies of the putative fourth industrial revolution. This debate compounds existing concerns about the restructuring of employment and, importantly, a worrying proliferation of poor-quality jobs, often within the context of neo-liberal political-economic hegemony since the early 1980s or the economic crisis that followed the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s. Job quality is offered as a solution to challenges such as health, welfare, productivity, innovation, economic competitiveness, democracy and democratic participation, Bildung/cultivation, societal equality, individual and collective quality of life, and environmental sustainability. As job quality is a key factor in addressing these and the other challenges, it needs to be understood in all its complexity in terms of what it affects as well as what affects it. This Handbook draws together into a single volume: first, an explicit focus on job quality both as a significant factor in and of itself and as producing instrumental effects on a range of other processes and outcomes; second, a catalogue of the diverse range of multiple contributions and applications related to job quality; and third, the complexity and multiple interpretations of the concept of job quality. Each chapter provides distinct responses to the question of why job quality matters, coupled to a contention about for whom or for what job quality matters most. As the chapters with their respective answers and arguments attest, there are a range of ways in which job quality is relevant to an equally broad range of social, economic, and political concerns. Cover THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF JOB QUALITY Copyright Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors Job Quality Matters PART I THE FOUNDATIONS OF JOB QUALITY 1. The Quality of Working Life 2. The Swedish Contribution to Job Quality 3. Job Quality: A Family Affair? PART II UNDERSTANDING JOB QUALITY 4. Understanding Differences and Trends in Job Quality: Perspectives from Cross-​National Research 5. Understanding Job Quality Using Qualitative Research 6. Quantitative Approaches to Assess Job Quality 7. Job Quality as the Realization of Democratic Ideals PART III KEY ISSUES IN JOB QUALITY 8. Job Polarization: Its History, an Intuitive Framework and Some Empirical Evidence 9. Geographies of Job Quality 10. The Cornerstone of Job Quality: Occupational Safety and Health 11. Innovation and Job Quality 12. Immigration and Job Quality 13. Job Quality for Service and Care Occupations: A Feminist Perspective 14. Inequality in Job Quality: Class, Gender and Contract Type PART IV REGIONAL DEVELOPMENTS IN JOB QUALITY 15. Job Quality in the United States and Canada 16. The Great Recession and Job Quality Trends in Europe 17. Job Quality in Emerging Economies through the Lens of the OECD Job Quality Framework PART V SECTORAL DEVELOPMENTS IN JOB QUALITY 18. Job Quality in High-​Touch Services 19. The Changing Quality of Office Work 20. The Steady but Uneven Decline in Manufacturing Job Quality 21. Neoliberalism’s Impact on Public-​Sector Job Quality: The US and Germany Compared 22. Job Quality and the Small Firm PART VI IMPROVING JOB QUALITY 23. Human Resource Management and Job Quality 24. Using Efficiency, Equity and Voice for Defining Job Quality, and Legal Regulation for Achieving It 25. Trade Unions and Job Quality Index