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There is currently widespread concern that access to, and success within, the British acting profession is increasingly dominated by those from privileged class origins. This article seeks to empirically interrogate this claim using data on actors from the Great British Class Survey (N = 404) and 47 qualitative interviews. First, survey data demonstrate that actors from working-class origins are significantly underrepresented within the profession. Second, they indicate that even when those from working-class origins do enter the profession they do not have access to the same economic, cultural and social capital as those from privileged backgrounds. Third, and most significantly, qualitative interviews reveal how these capitals shape the way actors can respond to shared occupational challenges. In particular we demonstrate the profound occupational advantages afforded to actors who can draw upon familial economic resources, legitimate embodied markers of class origin (such as Received Pronunciation) and a favourable typecasting.

We document for 13 countries ranging from rich (Canada, United States) to poor (India, Indonesia) that average wages are considerably lower in agriculture than in the other sectors. Moreover, agriculture has less educated workers and lower Mincer returns. We view these findings through the lens of a multi-sector model in which workers differ in observed and unobserved characteristics and sectors differ in their human-capital intensities. We derive expressions for the implied barriers to the reallocation of labor out of agriculture. We find that in our sample these barriers are considerably smaller than what the macro-development literature has argued.

This research note evaluates the benefits and pitfalls of unpaid work as an entry route into employment in the creative industries and investigates the consequences of this practice for those who already work in the sector. Based on a qualitative study of perspectives of stakeholders in unpaid work, this article argues that the social capital thesis, often used as a rationale for unpaid work, inadequately explains the practice of unpaid work experience, primarily because it does not take cognisance of the consequences of this practice for other people working in the sector. The study also highlights methodological issues that need to be considered in the future. As well as the importance of a plurality of stakeholder perspectives, the study emphasizes the need to consider the perspectives of those who are excluded from unpaid work and those who are potentially displaced by it.

This article examines how cultural workers interpret and respond to reputational challenges they encounter when leading portfolio careers. Specifically, the portfolio career model involves the cultivation and signalling of adaptability through broad competencies and diverse portfolios comprised of boundary-spanning work. These practices conflict with standards of artistic legitimacy and highlight specialist-generalist tensions, since they can make workers appear to be ‘jacks of all trades, masters of none’ – unskilled, opportunistic dabblers, lacking expertise and artistic integrity. The article draws on 56 interviews with cultural producers working as filmmakers, fashion designers and musicians. Findings show how workers engage in ‘reframing’ to reinterpret the symbolic meanings attached to their behaviours and, in the process, carve out new positions and standards for legitimacy within their fields. Reframing is structured by field and labour market conditions, but also represents the possibility of change as a form of culture in action.

In the studies on labour market change and transformation of employment relations, the growth of new forms of self-employment, including platform work, has raised a broad debate about how to define, classify, and analyse the wide range of positions within the heterogeneous category of self-employed workers. This article analyses the emergent methodologies used in European comparative labour statistics to identify forms of dependency in self-employment. Using the 6th wave of the 2015 European Working Condition Survey and the 2017 ad hoc module on self-employment from the European Labour Force Survey, this article discusses how the representation of dependent self-employment changes by adopting a different operationalization of economic and operational dependency. Findings show how different indicators of dependency change the representation of self-employment in different economic sectors, affecting our understanding of the transformation of working arrangements within self-employment and the boundaries between employment and self-employment.

Aspirations have been a key target of education policy, situated as central to meeting the needs of the ‘knowledge economy’. In the UK, there have been calls to raise young people’s aspirations for careers in the creative industries—identified as emblematic of the new economic order and a key growth sector. Yet, the sector is socially and spatially restricted, characterised by unclear entry routes, exclusionary working practices and uneven geographical concentration. This paper draws on research with young people (aged 14–16 years) living in three urban areas of deindustrialisation in England to examine the geography of young people’s aspirations for careers in the creative industries. The concept of place-specific habitus is used to problematise asocial and aspatial discourses of aspiration and to illuminate how social class and place powerfully and complexly interrelate to shape young people’s opportunities for social and geographical mobility through and for work in the knowledge economy.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly adopted by organizations. In general, scholars agree that the adoption of AI will be associated with substantial changes in the workplace. Empirical evidence on the phenomenon remains scarce, however. In this article, we explore the adoption of AI in the context of knowledge work. Drawing on case study research in eight German organizations that have either implemented AI or are in the process of developing AI systems, we identify three pervasive changes that knowledge workers perceive: a shift from manual labor and repetitive tasks to tasks that involve reasoning and empathy, an emergence of new tasks and roles, and an emergence of new skill requirements. In addition, we identify three factors that are conducive to the development of AI systems in the context of knowledge work: leadership support, participative change management, and effective integration of domain knowledge. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

With the aid of a geographical information system, our paper constructs a three stage least squares simultaneous equation model to investigate the interrelationships between the interregional flows of human capital, and the innovation dynamism of a region. In order to do this, we model the interregional migration behaviour of high quality British university graduates from university into first employment, and we relate these human capital flows to both the labour market characteristics and the knowledge characteristics of the employment regions. This is done for all industries and separately for just high technology industries. Our results indicate that for England and Wales there is a two-way causality between the interregional human-capital employment-migration flows of recent university graduates and the innovation performance of regions. However, the results for Great Britain as a whole depend on whether London is included and Scotland is excluded. We find little or no support for the argument that the presence of local universities or small firms promotes regional innovation.

The 2022 edition discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on young people and their labour market prospects during the recovery and beyond. Youth have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic and youth labour markets are now being buffeted by the lingering impacts of the pandemic, geopolitical risks and macroeconomic risks such as the impact of supply chain disruptions and rising inflation, particularly that of food and energy. There is also the potential permanent damage wreaked by these crises on the fabric of labour markets. As countries seek to address these multiple challenges, they must also not lose sight of longer-term priorities. In particular, targeted investment in the green, blue (ocean), digital, creative and care economies hold great potential to provide decent jobs for young people while setting economies on path towards greater sustainability, inclusiveness and resilience.

\"Research increasingly stresses the role of human capital in modern economic development. Existing historical evidence - mostly from British textile industries - however, rejects that formal education was important for the Industrial Revolution. Our new evidence from technological follower Prussia uses a unique school enrollment and factory employment database linking 334 counties from pre-industrial 1816 to two industrial phases in 1849 and 1882. Using pre-industrial education as instrument for later education and controlling extensively for pre-industrial development, we find that basic education is significantly associated with nontextile industrialization in both phases of the Industrial Revolution. Panel data models with county fixed effects confirm the results.\" (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: historisch; empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Querschnitt. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1816 bis 1882.