To advance understanding of the entrepreneurship process in developing economies, this article evaluates whether registered enterprises that initially avoid the cost of registration, and focus their resources on overcoming other liabilities of newness, lay a stronger foundation for subsequent growth. Analyzing World Bank Enterprise Survey data across 127 countries, and controlling for other firm performance determinants, registered enterprises that started up unregistered and spent longer operating unregistered are revealed to have significantly higher subsequent annual sales, employment, and productivity growth rates compared with those that registered from the outset. The theoretical and policy implications are then discussed.

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Informal Entrepreneurship in Developing Economies: The Impacts of Starting up Unregistered on firm Performance:

Chinese universities are being continually subjected to new managerial practices and technologies that have fundamental consequences on the university faculty's academic life. Within a predominantly communitarian theoretical framework of academic identity, this qualitative case study draws upon interviews with 25 academics in Mainland China to expose the extent to which Chinese academics’ values, beliefs and behaviour are convergent and consistent with those that might be expected within the reform agenda. The systematic data analysis identified six identity-related characterisations of how Chinese university faculty at this case university have reacted to this shifting context, contributing to the global literature on the academic profession in two respects. First, it contributes to the empirically grounded knowledge of the complex manner in which Chinese academics negotiate, challenge or comply with the new managerialist agenda. Second, it explores the prime academic identity that Chinese academics have...

Academic identities and university faculty responses to new managerialist reforms: experiences from China

This chapter lays out a research agenda in the sociology of work for a type of data and organizational intermediary: work platforms. As an example, the authors employ a case study of the adoption of automated hiring platforms (AHPs) in which the authors distinguish between promises and existing practices. The authors draw on two main methods to do so: critical discourse analysis and affordance critique. The authors collected and examined a mix of trade, popular press, and corporate archives; 135 texts in total. The analysis reveals that work platforms offer five core affordances to management: (1) structured data fields optimized for capture and portability within organizations; (2) increased legibility of activity qua data captured inside and outside the workplace; (3) information asymmetry between labor and management; (4) an “ecosystem” design that supports the development of limited-use applications for specific domains; and (5) the standardization of managerial techniques between workplaces. These combine to create a managerial frame for workers as fungible human capital, available on demand and easily ported between job tasks and organizations. While outlining the origin of platform studies within media and communication studies, the authors demonstrate the specific tools the sociology of work brings to the study of platforms within the workplace. The authors conclude by suggesting avenues for future sociological research not only on hiring platforms, but also on other work platforms such as those supporting automated scheduling and customer relationship management.

Platforms at Work: Automated Hiring Platforms and Other New Intermediaries in the Organization of Work

Reports in public media suggest the existence of a stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men. The present online survey aimed at supporting this incidental observation by empirical data. For this, 488 participants from various ethnic backgrounds (US, UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, and others) filled out a self-developed online-questionnaire. Results showed that overall more than 50% of the participants believed in gender differences in multitasking abilities. Of those who believed in gender differences, a majority of 80% believed that women were better at multitasking. The main reasons for this were believed to be an evolutionary advantage and more multitasking practice in women, mainly due to managing children and household and/or family and job. Findings were consistent across the different countries, thus supporting the existence of a widespread gender stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men. Further questionnaire results provided information about the participants’ self-rated own multitasking abilities, and how they conceived multitasking activities such as childcare, phoning while driving, and office work.

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"Women Are Better Than Men" - Public Beliefs on Gender Differences and Other Aspects in Multitasking.

This article considers how college resources (academic abilities, social engagement, and career skills) affect the likelihood of a successful post-graduation job search. Using survey data from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (N = 16,659 alumni who graduated between 1976 and 2015), we find that arts graduates are increasingly likely to be lost in transition. Over recent decades, the likelihood of experiencing a prolonged job search after graduation or initial employment in an unrelated field has increased. Yet, we find that higher levels of social engagement and career skills, but not academic abilities gained through traditional instruction, are predictive of labor market success. Female and non-White alumni report lower levels of college resources, longer initial job searches, and are more likely to find work in an unrelated field. Furthermore, gender moderates the relationship between career skills and job search length such that career skill development is associated with stronger gains for ...

Lost in Transition: College Resources and the Unequal Early-Career Trajectories of Arts Alumni:

This volume includes contributions which discuss: work and identity, including the experiences of actors and teachers; authority and control at work, including insights from the hospitality and publishing industries; and issues of gender and sexuality in the workplace, including insights on sexual harassment in the workplace.

Steven P. Vallas

Papers

Research in the Sociology of Work