Returns to Work in Occupational, Relational, and Corporate Settings (2023-2028)

ERC Starting Grant 2023, a new research project from the European Research Council - ERC) directed by Philipp Brandt.

 Philipp Brandt, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po and CSO researcher, has just been awarded funding from the European Research Council (ERC).

Duration: 60 months.

The project, which is in three parts, undertakes an analysis of atypical work trajectories in different organizations and labor markets.

Philipp Brandt focuses on the surprising, unexpected and unusual changes in the trajectories of male and female workers. What are the consequences of switching to a completely different profession, or applying a new method to one's workstation? Is there an increase in pay, or a change in position? What are the differences between the situations of men and women? This research uses innovative data sets and computer techniques. The first part attempts to capture different institutional contexts, focusing on job change sequences at national level for France, Germany and the USA. The second part looks at how workers in two types of occupation, one more intellectual and the other more applied, carry out their work while changing professional and organizational frameworks, and the effects this has. Finally, a last study, a combination of the first two parts, focuses on workers and how they interrogate conventional job presentations depending on whether they are in standard or non-standard work trajectories.

Abstract

The rise of platforms and remote work has refashioned concerns about work security and flexibility in public debates. Academic studies have documented an increase in non-standard work over decades, including polarization of rewards, shifting occupational boundaries, and winding paths among women and other marginalized groups. These findings had important policy implications but left questions about the unfolding of individual labor market experiences amid the more noticeable changes. This project mobilizes new techniques and data sources and overcomes divisions in research on work to address those problems. It will recover important complexity by (1) measuring the diversity of individual job trajectories in light of their economic returns, costs, and risks and by (2) grounding job trajectories in work activities and, crucially, workers’ interpretations of labor market structures. These objectives integrate previously divided formal and constructionist thinking to explain the interplay of contexts, practices, and meaning around work.
The project has three parts. Work package 1 (WP1) uses national-level employment datasets of France, Germany, and the US to survey job trajectories in relation to earnings across institutional contexts. It advances analyses of occupational and other categorical effects by drawing attention to job change sequences, standard and odd. WP2 asks how workers organize concrete work. It takes two strategic cases with detailed work records, one involving technical expertise and the other practical tasks, to study how workers do their jobs as they move between corporate and relational arrangements and to what effects. Both steps assume stable structures. WP3 asks how workers question conventional job presentations in standard and non-standard work trajectories. It draws on a unique dataset of career descriptions in two areas of work and two countries to capture institutional and cultural effects on meaning.

The ReWORCS project will bring together researchers, post-docs and PhD students around Philipp Brandt.

• Read on the ERC's website : ERC Starting Grants: 400 bright minds awarded over €628 million