Exploitation or Fun?: The Lived Experience of Teenage Employment in Suburban America

Objectivist scholars characterize typical teenage jobs as “exploitive”: highly routinized service sector jobs with low pay, no benefits, minimum skill requirements, and little time off. This view assumes exploitive characteristics are inherent in the jobs, ignoring the lived experience of the teenage workers. This article focuses on the lived work experience of particularly affluent, suburban teenagers who work in these jobs and explores the meaning they create during their everyday work experience. Based on a large ethnographic study conducted with the teenage workers at a national coffee franchise, this article unravels the ways in which objectivist views of these “bad jobs” differ from the everyday experience of the actors. The findings show that from the perspective of the teenagers, these “exploitive jobs” are often seen as fun, social, and empowering and are free spaces where they can express their creativity and individuality. These findings demonstrate the importance of employing a constructionist view in understanding teenage employment and inequality

The once and future information society

In the late twentieth century, many social scientists and other social commentators came to characterize the world as evolving into an “information society.” Central to these claims was the notion that new social uses of information, and particularly application of scientific knowledge, are transforming social life in fundamental ways. Among the supposed transformations are the rise of intellectuals in social importance, growing productivity and prosperity stemming from increasingly knowledge-based economic activity, and replacement of political conflict by authoritative, knowledge-based decision-making. We trace these ideas to their origins in the Enlightenment doctrines of Saint Simon and Comte, show that empirical support for them has never been strong, and consider the durability of their social appeal

Origins of the Gender Wage: Gender Differences in Pay in the Adolescent Labor Market

The gender wage gap is among the most durable and most the most studied characteristics of the labor market. Yet, most studies focus on the adult labor market, excluding the substantial population of teenagers in the United States who work while still in school. This project focuses exclusively on the teenage labor force, particularly those between the ages of 12 and 16, and explores gender differences in pay in the early labor markets. Research topics examined include the point or age at which the gender wage gap emerges, and how these gender differences in pay during the early years translate into the adult gender wage gap. The study uses data for 12-16 year old workers from both the United States and other industrialized countries for comparison

Social Research Methods by Example : Applications in the Modern World

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Recording Online Classes with Audacity and iTunes University

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Consuming Work : Youth Labor in America

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Race, Threat and Workplace Sexual Harassment: The Dynamics of Harassment in the United States, 1997–2016

Sexual harassment is a persistent problem for women in the workplace. Prior research has explored the effects of sexual harassment on the psychological, physical and economic wellbeing of the victims. Despite the extensive research exploring the causes, most studies focus on micro-level factors, and few studies examine the role of macro-level factors on sexual harassment in the workplace. Using public Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) data and a separate dataset of individual level workplace sexual harassment complaints, we test two hypotheses about sexual harassment in American workplaces. First, we show that the decline in workplace sexual harassment complaints has been uneven, with African-American women experiencing an increased relative risk of sexual harassment in the workplace, even as overall reported harassment complaints are down. Second, we show that economic threat — operationalized in this case through unemployment rates — drives increases in sexual harassment of women in American workplaces. While the data on harassment complaints is limited, data strongly suggests that the changes are driven by shifts in underlying levels of harassment, rather than changes in the likelihood of reporting harassment

Social Research Methods by Example (Second Edition)

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Gender Threat : American Masculinity in the Face of Change

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