Seminar – Stepping Stone or Dead End: How Work Arrangements Shackle or Enable Workers

Dr Jing Zhu, Nanyang Business School

Non-standard work arrangements have been variously presented as opportunities for flexibility, a means of keeping workers in the precariat or a stepping stone into the workforce. While each of these might be true for workers at any given point in time, no studies have examined how all three might be present at different points of time in the work pathways of individual workers. Drawing on the path dependence theory (Sydow, Schreyogg & Koch, 2009), we argue that non-standard employment is “sticky” in that movement out of non-standard work to standard work is difficult, but that under certain conditions, non-standard work might provide a stepping stone between unemployment and standard employment. With a French national longitudinal survey of 10,961 youths over ten years, after leaving school from 1998 to 2008, we examine how their current employment status predicts later employment status over time. Our multi-wave results confirm the “stickiness” of employment status – individuals’ employment status in a given time t positively predicts the likelihood of being in the same employment status in the next time t + 1 over time. Consistent with our theory, this stickiness effect is weaker among individuals with higher human or social capital. We also find evidence for the “stepping-stone” effect, for example, the likelihood of unemployed individuals at time t to be in standard work at time t + 2 is enhanced for those who were in non-standard jobs at time t + 1. But such a stepping-stone effect seems to only exist among men, not women. Finally, we identify factors that predict the likelihood that individuals exercise their options of switching from standard to non-standard work over time.

Speaker bio

Jing Zhu is an Associate Professor in the Nanyang Business School (NBS) at Nanyang Technological University. Prior to joining NBS, she was an Associate Professor of Management at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). She received her bachelors degree from Remin University of China and PhD from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. She studies theoretically driven behaviour changes and development of individuals during work-related transitions with a temporal perspective (including dynamics of newcomer and expatriate experiences, temporary work, and job search of the unemployed) and team diversity and processes. Her work has appeared in top management journals including the Academy of Management Journal and Journal of Applied Psychology. She has served or is serving on the editorial board of Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review Special Theory Forum on “Diversity at a Critical Juncture: New Theories for a Complex Phenomenon”, and Journal of Business Research. She has also received a number of awards including the International Human Resource Management Scholarly Research Award and the Scholarly Achievement Award of the Human Resources Division, the best paper award of the Conflict Management Division, and the Best Symposium of the Year award of the Careers Division of the Academy of Management, finalist of the Academy of Management Journal’s best paper award, Citations of Excellence award from Emerald Group Publishing, and Dean’s Recognition of Teaching Excellence from HKUST.