This study explored how fathers' occupational status shapes their constructions, experiences, and negotiations of Flexible Working. In particular, we examined whether occupational status impacted ...men's access to, and the acceptability of using FWAs for the purposes of care. Data from semi-structured interviews with 43 working fathers from diverse occupational roles within the Australian financial sector were analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis. Findings suggest that fathers' access to flexibility is contingent upon and shaped by their position in the organisational hierarchy. Fathers in 'higher-status' roles reported significant power and agency in their access to and adoption of FWAs. However, a major barrier to their use of flexibility was the discursively constructed expectation that men in these positions should be dedicated to their paid work role and career progression rather than caring for their child(ren). In contrast, men in 'lower-status' roles lacked autonomy, agency, and power in relation to accessing flexibility for caring purposes. These fathers reported being closely monitored in their paid working roles, having little flexibility available to them in these roles, and felt trepidatious about even requesting FWAs for caring for their child(ren).
Research suggests that employee status, and various status proxies, relate to a number of meaningful outcomes in the workplace. The advancement of the study of status in organizational settings has, ...however, been stymied by the lack of a validated workplace status measure. The purpose of this manuscript, therefore, is to develop and validate a measure of workplace status based on a theoretically grounded definition of status in organizations. Subject-matter experts were used to examine the content validity of the measure. Then, 2 separate samples were employed to assess the psychometric properties (i.e., factor structure, reliability, convergent and discriminant validity) and nomological network of a 5-item, self-report Workplace Status Scale (WSS). To allow for methodological flexibility, an additional 3 samples were used to extend the WSS to coworker reports of a focal employee's status, provide additional evidence for the validity and reliability of the WSS, and to demonstrate consensus among coworker ratings. Together, these studies provide evidence of the psychometric soundness of the WSS for assessing employee status using either self-reports or other-source reports. The implications of the development of the WSS for the study of status in organizations are discussed, and suggestions for future research using the new measure are offered.
This study focuses on how socio-demographic status and personal attributes influence self-protective behaviours during a pandemic, with protection behaviours being assessed through three perspectives ...– social distancing, personal protection behaviour and social responsibility awareness. The research considers a publicly available and recently collected dataset on Japanese citizens during the COVID-19 early outbreak and utilises a data analysis framework combining Classification and Regression Tree (CART), a data mining approach, and regression analysis to gain deep insights. The analysis reveals Socio-demographic attributes – sex, marital family status and having children – as having played an influential role in Japanese citizens' abiding by the COVID-19 protection behaviours. Especially women with children are noted as more conscious than their male counterparts. Work status also appears to have some impact concerning social distancing. Trust in government also appears as a significant factor. The analysis further identifies smoking behaviour as a factor characterising subjective prevention actions with non-smokers or less-frequent smokers being more compliant to the protection behaviours. Overall, the findings imply the need of public policy campaigning to account for variations in protection behaviour due to socio-demographic and personal attributes during pandemics and national emergencies.
•Assesses how individuality impact pandemic protection behaviours•Subjectivity characterises protection behaviours from various perspectives•When devising public health policy, need to consider individualistic variations•Data mining can assist in understanding subjective pandemic behaviour.
Objective: Both social stratification (e.g., social rank) as well as economic resources (e.g., income) are thought to contribute to socioeconomic health disparities. It has been proposed that ...subjective socioeconomic status (an individual's perception of his or her hierarchical rank) provides increased predictive utility for physical health over and above more traditional, well-researched socioeconomic constructs such as education, occupation, and income. Method: PsycINFO and PubMed databases were systematically searched for studies examining the association of subjective socioeconomic status (SES) and physical health adjusting for at least 1 measure of objective SES. The final sample included 31 studies and 99 unique effects. Meta-analyses were performed to: (a) estimate the overlap among subjective and objective indicators of SES and (b) estimate the cumulative association of subjective SES with physical health adjusting for objective SES. Potential moderators such as race and type of health indicator assessed (global self-reports vs. more specific and biologically based indicators) were also examined. Results: Across samples, subjective SES shows moderate overlap with objective indicators of SES, but associations are much stronger in Whites than Blacks. Subjective SES evidenced a unique cumulative association with physical health in adults, above and beyond traditional objective indicators of SES (Z = .07, SE = .01, p < .05). This association was stronger for self-rated health than for biologically based and symptom-specific measures of health. Almost all available data were cross-sectional and do not allow for strong causal inference. Conclusions: Subjective SES may provide unique information relevant to understanding disparities in health, especially self-rated health.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a lockdown in European countries in the first half of 2020, including stay-at-home orders and closure of non-essential businesses. To mitigate the detrimental effects on ...the financial stress of employees and households, the UK government implemented a furlough scheme that temporarily secured earnings up to 80 percent of regular pay. Other employees were at risk of reduced work hours or permanent job loss. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study COVID-19 Supplement, this study examines the extent to which different earnings groups and sociodemographic groups (gender, race/ethnicity, class background) became exposed to economic hardship between March and May of 2020. Results indicate that lower earnings groups were more than twice as likely to experience economic hardship relative to top quintile earners. Furthermore, among pre-COVID employed individuals, men had a higher probability of being furloughed or dismissed from work, as well as whites in middle-income jobs. Analyses indicate that these gaps are to a large extent attributable to structural gender earnings inequalities within occupations and the fact that women and racial-ethnic minorities are employed in essential occupations.
How 3‐ to 11‐year‐old children integrate recipients' merit and social status when allocating resources was examined in 2021 and 2022. Study 1 (Han Chinese, n = 309, 150 girls) showed that while ...children prioritized merit, they developed from favoring high‐status recipients to favoring low‐status recipients. Study 2 (n = 194, 98 girls) and Study 3 (n = 138, 68 girls) revealed that children held stereotypes about the relation between merit and social status which shifted with age from expecting high‐status peers to expecting low‐status peers to work harder, these expectations corresponded allocation decisions. These findings suggest children shift from perpetuating to rectifying inequity and changing stereotypes about people of different social status may serve an important function in the process.
This study focuses on the teleworking experiences of professional, middle‐class, married women with children in Turkey in the context of Covid‐19 pandemic. The aim of the study is to understand how ...switching to telework affected their family and work life during the Covid‐19 lockdown. Semi‐structured interviews were held during the lockdown measures with 18 women for this purpose. Interview questions include description of an ordinary day before and during pandemic; sharing of domestic chores by the spouses and teleworking experiences during the pandemic. A thematic analysis revealed how their work and family lives have been changed by Covid‐19 lockdown. The study has revealed four major themes: women's domestic status during the pandemic, women's work status during the pandemic, status of the husband at home, and women's teleworking experiences. Findings revealed that teleworking regulations that have been implemented due to the pandemic have the risks of detaching women from professional work, precarizing their labor, and consolidating their roles as traditional housewives.
During the 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola epidemic, transmission chains were controlled through contact tracing, i.e., identification and follow-up of people exposed to Ebola cases. WHO recommendations ...for daily check-ups of physical symptoms with social distancing for 21 days were unevenly applied and sometimes interpreted as quarantine. Criticisms arose regarding the use of coercion and questioned contact tracing on ethical grounds. This article aims to analyze contact cases' perceptions and acceptance of contact monitoring at the field level. In Senegal, an imported case of Ebola virus disease in September 2014 resulted in placing 74 contact cases in home containment with daily visits by volunteers. An ethnographic study based on in-depth interviews with all stakeholders performed in September–October 2014 showed four main perceptions of monitoring: a biosecurity preventive measure, suspension of professional activity, stigma attached to Ebola, and a social obligation. Contacts demonstrated diverse attitudes. Initially, most contacts agreed to comply because they feared being infected. They adhered to the national Ebola response measures and appreciated the empathy shown by volunteers. Later, acceptance was improved by the provision of moral, economic, and social support, and by the final lack of any new contamination. But it was limited by the socio-economic impact on fulfilling basic needs, the fear of being infected, how contacts' family members interpreted monitoring, conflation of contacts as Ebola cases, and challenging the rationale for containment. Acceptance was also related to individual aspects, such as the professional status of women and health workers who had been exposed, and contextual aspects, such as the media's role in the social production of stigma. Ethnographic results show that, even when contacts adhere rather than comply to containment through coercion, contact monitoring raises several ethical issues. These insights should contribute to the ethics debate about individual rights versus crisis public health measures.
•First in-depth analysis of Ebola contacts' perceptions of quarantine in West Africa.•Monitoring is interpreted as biosafety, work suspension, stigma, social obligation.•Contacts adhere then comply to containment due to risk, stigma and social pressure.•Even without coercion, social distancing for contacts raises ethical issues.
Summary
Although research suggests that leader humor shapes followers' perceptions of their leaders' status, questions remain as to whether and how leader humor can shape followers' own acquisition ...of status at work. Drawing from the approach‐avoidance framework, we provide an important extension to the leader humor literature by developing a serial mediation model that explains how and why two styles of leader humor—aggressive humor and affiliative humor—differentially impact followers' ability to garner and wield social influence in the work environment. We theorize that leader aggressive humor, which constitutes unconstrained execution of power that is invasive and hostile in nature, produces a status‐suppressing effect by activating followers' avoidance system, whereas leader affiliative humor, which constitutes relational connection with restrained superiority, produces a status‐enabling effect by activating followers' approach system. We further propose that leader aggressive (affiliative) humor has a negative (positive) indirect effect on followers' constructive voice and work engagement via their avoidance (approach) orientation and workplace status. We find consistent support for our hypothesized predictions across two survey studies. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of this study.
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