Prosocial behavior consists of behaviors regarded as beneficial to others, including helping, sharing, comforting, guiding, rescuing, and defending others. Although women and men are similar in engaging in extensive prosocial behavior, they are different in their emphasis on particular classes of these behaviors. The specialty of women is prosocial behaviors that are more communal and relational, and that of men is behaviors that are more agentic and collectively oriented as well as strength intensive. These sex differences, which appear in research in various settings, match widely shared gender role beliefs. The origins of these beliefs lie in the division of labor, which reflects a biosocial interaction between male and female physical attributes and the social structure. The effects of gender roles on behavior are mediated by hormonal processes, social expectations, and individual dispositions.

The his and hers of prosocial behavior: An examination of the social psychology of gender.

Turbulence and unpredictability in 21st-century labor markets arguably magnify the importance of maintaining employability. Drawing on recent research, I discuss three mechanisms for enhancing employability in this context: identity work, training and networking, and laboring in unpaid and marginal paid positions. Few of these activities are counted as ‘work’ because they are mostly unpaid and they often take place outside formal job structures. By specifying how a range of employment-related activities are essential to and even constitute work, this article contributes to debates about the scope and boundaries of employment and shows how everyday actions build and reinforce new economic structures — how individual actions make the new economy possible. It also provides greater specification of the concept of employability.

Review article: Enhancing employability: Human, cultural, and social capital in an era of turbulent unpredictability

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reconceptualise employer branding in sustainable organizations at the intersection of branding, strategic human resource management (HRM) and corporate social responsibility (CSR).Design/methodology/approach – Based on an outline of current conceptualisations of employer branding, the paper discusses the strategic potentials of merging corporate branding processes, strategic HRM and CSR into a theoretical framework for reconceptualising employer branding as co‐created processes and sustainable employer‐employee relationships.Findings – When organizations adapt strategies for sustainable development (including CSR), it affects how to approach stakeholder relations and organizational processes, including the employee‐employer relationship and employer branding processes. However, current employer branding conceptualisations do not comply with such changed corporate conditions. The suggested framework reconceptualises employer branding as an integrated part of a CSR ...

Conceptualising employer branding in sustainable organisations

This paper reports different managerial approaches to engaging employees in two contrasting organizations. We categorize these approaches to employee engagement as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, and examine how these reflect the different external contexts in which management operate and, in particular, their influence on management's ability to promote a supportive internal context. The paper extends the existing literature on the antecedents of engagement by illustrating the importance of combining practitioner concerns about the role and practice of managers with the insights derived from the psychological literature relating to job features. We build from these two approaches to include important features of organizational context to examine the tensions and constraints management encounter in promoting engagement. Our analysis draws on the critical organizational and HRM literature to make a contribution to understanding different applications of employee engagement within organizations. In so doing, we outline a situated and critical reading of organizations to better appreciate that management practices are complex, contested, emergent, locally enacted and context specific, and thereby provide new insights into the inherent challenges of delivering engaged employees.

Context matters: examining ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ approaches to employee engagement in two workplaces

Career patterns and competences of PhDs in science and engineering in the knowledge economy: The case of graduates from a UK research-based university

Towards the end of the century many grandiose assertions were made about changes in the workplace and what these implied for the role of work in our lives. Many of these were incorporated into the idea of the 'knowledge economy' in which working with the new technologies was supposed to be more intrinsically satisfying, knowledge workers displayed higher levels of commitment and work in general was becoming a 'central life interest'. This book critically investigates the evidence for such trends by taking two new and expanding information-intensive employment sectors - call centres and software development. Through observation, survey and interview data from nine case studies, the book records, analyses and tries to understand the multiple levels of meaning which people attach to work today. It records not only the changes to the contemporary workplace but also the continuities with the past. Work today is the same mixture of satisfaction and unpleasantness as it has always been, but the contemporary workplace is perhaps a more unstable environment than we have been used to for some time.

The Meaning of Work in the New Economy

With the increasing number of teaching and classroom assistants across the UK there is now much debate about what their role should be. In particular concerns have arisen about the extent to which they overstep the boundary from supporting teaching and learning into teaching pupils. This study assesses this issue within Scotland. It draws on a national survey of 2000 head teachers, teachers and classroom assistants and interviews with directors of education in nearly half of all Scottish local authorities. Findings from the research suggest a small number of classroom assistants in Scotland are overstepping the boundary into teaching. The paper concludes with an explanation as to why this is happening taking into account aspects such as local authority policy, school size and the individual characteristics of the classroom assistants.

‘Role stretch’: assessing the blurring of teaching and non-teaching in the classroom assistant role in Scotland

Despite the existence of effective equal pay legislation in the UK since 1975 aimed at eradicating pay discrimination, women are still in receipt of only 79.5 per cent of the hourly earnings received by men (EOR 1994b). Whitehouse (1992) claims that a centralized collective bargaining model is more likely to lead to equality for women in the labour market than a liberalized individualistic model. The model was tested at an aggregated level for 13 OECD countries. This article provides a case study which charts a trade union claim for equal pay over a period often years (1984–94), which may be seen as an examination of the Whitehouse proposition at a disaggregated level. The paper highlights the barriers to equality bargaining and analyses the case study to identify the criteria necessary for achieving equality.

Generating equality? Equal pay, decentralization and the electricity supply industry

In response to growing challenges, many labor organizations are reevaluating themselves in an effort to become more efficient and effective. Their efforts, however, are limited by their frames of reference. Seldom do unions compare practices across labor movements. To expand these frames of reference we compare union administrative practices in three countries: Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Two specific areas of union administration are examined — human resource/personnel practices and strategic planning. Results from these countries are presented and analyzed to identify and explain similarities and differences.

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Union administrative practices: A comparative analysis

This article examines the claim made by Barbara Castle when introducing the Equal Pay Act (EPA) in 1970 that there is nothing preventing unions pressing for job evaluation schemes to achieve equal pay. It does this by examining the research on potential hurdles to job evaluation and those that can be found in the UK law since the introduction of the EPA. The article concludes that the standards for selecting job evaluation and the obstacles of introducing job evaluation have significantly changed over the period, leaving little promise of an extension of its use to achieve equal pay

Kay Gilbert

Papers

The Meaning of Work in the New Economy

‘Role stretch’: assessing the blurring of teaching and non-teaching in the classroom assistant role in Scotland

Generating equality? Equal pay, decentralization and the electricity supply industry

Union administrative practices: A comparative analysis

Promises and practices: job evaluation and equal pay forty years on!