Paul Osterman
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 253393 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Paul Osterman |
| PRENOMES | Paul |
| SOBRENOME | Osterman |
| ASSINATURA | OSTERMAN P |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1210-7820 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 52 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 410 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 51 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1974 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Disposable Workers
Reconsidering Occupational Internal Labor Markets
What are useful ways to characterize varying employment systems? This article returns to an older idea, Internal Labor Markets (ILMs). The traditional assumption characterized ILMs as the core of the labor market but current thinking argues that ILMs have frayed. Little direct measurement has been carried out, however, and both viewpoints have relied on proxies or case studies. The author utilizes a new survey of employed US workers to provide an…
Contract Employment
This article utilizes a new nationally representative survey, executed in January 2020, that measures non-standard work. The author estimates the incidence of contract company employment and freelancing and describes who goes into non-standard employment. He then studies earnings and access to employer-provided training among contract company employees-the largest and most mis-measured group of non-standard workers. Training is important because …
How American Adults Obtain Work Skills
Employer-provided training is an important determinant of economic outcomes, yet our understanding of its extent and distribution is well out of date-with the most recent national survey being from 2008. This article updates our understanding of employer-provided training through a 2020 nationally representative survey of 3,648 working civilian adults between the ages of 24 and 64. Results show that while employer-provided training is reasonably …
A Forum on the Politics of Skills
The ILR Review invited this group of scholars who work within the fields of sociology, history, and urban planning to share their perspective on the politics of skills. We called on their expertise to draw attention to the politics that drive the definition and development of skill and its use in shaping the rights and voice of workers. The essays in this forum explore the politics of skill along three lines. First, they interrogate the definitio…
Improving Long‐Term Care by Finally Respecting Home‐Care Aides
The American system of long‐term care is disorganized and expensive. Obtaining care for a loved one is a confusing and difficult journey. When it comes to paying for that care, a bit over half who receive care are supported at least partially by insurance, and those with no insurance pay entirely out of pocket. The costs are exorbitant. What makes the system function is reliance on unpaid family members, who care for their loved ones often at con…
In Search of the High Road
This article is the first in a series to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ILR Review. We will be highlighting important research themes that have been featured in the journal over its many years of publication. In this article, Paul Osterman reviews research on the quality of jobs and recent debates over "High Road" and "Low Road" approaches to employment practices. Scholars and policy advocates frequently utilize the distinction between Hig…
Strengthening the Healthy Start Workforce
Introduction Healthy Start (HS) is dedicated to preventing infant mortality, improving birth outcomes, and reducing disparities in maternal and infant health. In 2014, the HS program was reenvisioned and standardization of services and workforce development were prioritized. This study examined how HS community health workers (CHW), as critical members of the workforce, serve families and communities in order to inform the development of a CHW tr…
Skill Demands and Mismatch in U.S. Manufacturing
Recent economic events have sparked debates over the degree of structural mismatch in the U.S. economy. One of the most frequent claims is that workers lack the skills that employers demand. The existing literature, however, analyzes this potential mismatch at a high level of aggregation with abstract indices and noisy proxies that obscure the underlying mechanisms. The authors address these issues by presenting and analyzing results from a surve…
Organizing for Good Jobs
Over the past several decades, there has been a remarkable surge of economic justice organizing across the country. The goal of this article is to examine these efforts and provide a framework for understanding their potential, their limitations, and their future. In what follows, the authors first describe five distinct organizing movements focused on low-wage work that have flourished in recent years. The authors then develop a framework for th…
Building Progressive Organizations
This comment considers the influence Saul Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation on the trajectory of unions and community organizations in the United States. It argues that this influence has been constructive along a number of important dimensions
Introduction to the Special Issue on Job Quality
Scholars, employers, and certainly many employees share a perception that how work is organized has radically changed. The long period of relative stability that followed World War II began to erode in the 1970s with the multiple shocks of the oil crisis and accelerating international competition. Many also believe that the computer revolution, which transformed possibilities for managing firms and work processes, hastened change. Diffusion of ne…
The Politics of Job Quality
In Good Jobs, Bad Jobs Arne Kalleberg provides an extremely useful portrait of job quality in America. This paper addresses the politics of job quality via a case study of weatherization jobs. Weatherization workers are typical of employees in many low wage jobs in America. The stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) substantially increased weatherization funding and a political struggle emerged over the quality of these jobs. …
Institutional Labor Economics, the New Personnel Economics, and Internal Labor Markets
The author illustrates the utility of institutional labor economics and makes a case for a reconsideration of it. Two recent developments motivate this effort: the rise of New Personnel Economics (NPE) as a significant subfield of labor economics and the substantial shifts in work organization that have taken place since the 1990s. Understanding how and why firms have reorganized work opens the door for a renewed interest in institutional approac…
Job Training in America
Training has long been of considerable interest to both policy makers and to researchers. This collection addresses future skill and competency demands and then takes up specific topics regarding program strategies and target groups. Each chapter is well done but the book invites larger questions about the nature of the American employment and training system. In answering this question, we need to go beyond the topics emphasized in the book beca…
Job design in the context of the job market
This paper examines issues in job design from the perspective of developments in the labor market. Among the issues considered are the impact of technological change, shifts in how work is organized, the changing balance of power between employers and employees, the growing diversity in employment practices among similarly situated firms, and the persistence of a large low wage sector in the labor market. All of this suggests that this is a dynam…
The Wage Effects of High Performance Work Organization in Manufacturing
An unresolved question about now-widespread innovative work systems such as teams and quality programs is whether they influence wage determination. This study examines that possible association in manufacturing. The author uses data from the 1997 National Establishment Survey that allow examination of how new work systems affected not only employees who were directly involved in them but other workers as well. The key finding is that for core bl…
Working in America
Farewell to Commitment? Changing Employment Relations and Labor Markets in the United States
Securing Prosperity
We live in an age of economic paradox. The dynamism of America's economy is astounding--the country's industries are the most productive in the world and spin off new products and ideas at a bewildering pace. Yet Americans feel deeply uneasy about their economic future. The reason, Paul Osterman explains, is that our recent prosperity is built on the ruins of the once reassuring postwar labor market. Workers can no longer expect stable, full-time…
Work Reorganization in an Era of Restructuring
High Performance Work Organizations (HPWOs) took root in the early 1990s but then faced an environment of organizational turmoil and restructuring. This paper, drawing on a second-round survey of employers that replicated and extended a 1992 survey, addresses two questions: whether HPWO practices continued to spread, and whether their productivity and quality gains redounded to employees' benefit. The results show that HPWO practices continued to…
Securing Prosperity
We live in an age of economic paradox. The dynamism of America's economy is astounding--the country's industries are the most productive in the world and spin off new products and ideas at a bewildering pace. Yet Americans feel deeply uneasy about their economic future. The reason, Paul Osterman explains, is that our recent prosperity is built on the ruins of the once reassuring postwar labor market. Workers can no longer expect stable, full-time…
Broken Ladders
Change at Work
Change at Work
This book illuminates what is really happening in the American workplace. The contributors explain how the widespread restructuring of American firms--usually resulting in a reduction of the workforce to cut costs--has had a profound impact on the lives of workers. The book explains how the new relationship requires high skill levels, but does not provide training for them. Workers themselves now must take charge of their personal development ins…
How Common is Workplace Transformation and Who Adopts it
The author, using data on 694 U.S. manufacturing establishments from a 1992 survey, examines the incidence of innovative work practices (teams, job rotation, quality circles, and Total Quality Management) and investigates what variables, including human resource practices, are associated with the adoption of these practices. He finds that about 35% of private sector establishments with 50 or more employees made substantial use of flexible work or…
Work Reorganization in an Era of Restructuring
High Performance Work Organizations (HPWOs) took root in the early 1990s but then faced an environment of organizational turmoil and restructuring. This paper, drawing on a second-round survey of employers that replicated and extended a 1992 survey, addresses two questions: whether HPWO practices continued to spread, and whether their productivity and quality gains redounded to employees' benefit. The results show that HPWO practices continued to…
An Empirical Study of Labor Market Segmentation
Introduction to the Special Issue on Job Quality
Scholars, employers, and certainly many employees share a perception that how work is organized has radically changed. The long period of relative stability that followed World War II began to erode in the 1970s with the multiple shocks of the oil crisis and accelerating international competition. Many also believe that the computer revolution, which transformed possibilities for managing firms and work processes, hastened change. Diffusion of ne…
In Search of the High Road
This article is the first in a series to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ILR Review. We will be highlighting important research themes that have been featured in the journal over its many years of publication. In this article, Paul Osterman reviews research on the quality of jobs and recent debates over "High Road" and "Low Road" approaches to employment practices. Scholars and policy advocates frequently utilize the distinction between Hig…
The Wage Effects of High Performance Work Organization in Manufacturing
An unresolved question about now-widespread innovative work systems such as teams and quality programs is whether they influence wage determination. This study examines that possible association in manufacturing. The author uses data from the 1997 National Establishment Survey that allow examination of how new work systems affected not only employees who were directly involved in them but other workers as well. The key finding is that for core bl…
Welfare Participation in a Full Employment Economy
This paper employs original survey data on female single parents in Boston to examine the determinants of welfare participation. Particular attention is paid to the hypothesis—growing out of the literature on the urban underclass—that there are important neighborhood effects. The results provide support for the existence of neighborhood effects. These effects remain after controls for the personal characteristics of the respondents and for the po…
Skill Demands and Mismatch in U.S. Manufacturing
Recent economic events have sparked debates over the degree of structural mismatch in the U.S. economy. One of the most frequent claims is that workers lack the skills that employers demand. The existing literature, however, analyzes this potential mismatch at a high level of aggregation with abstract indices and noisy proxies that obscure the underlying mechanisms. The authors address these issues by presenting and analyzing results from a surve…
Institutional Labor Economics, the New Personnel Economics, and Internal Labor Markets
The author illustrates the utility of institutional labor economics and makes a case for a reconsideration of it. Two recent developments motivate this effort: the rise of New Personnel Economics (NPE) as a significant subfield of labor economics and the substantial shifts in work organization that have taken place since the 1990s. Understanding how and why firms have reorganized work opens the door for a renewed interest in institutional approac…
Job design in the context of the job market
This paper examines issues in job design from the perspective of developments in the labor market. Among the issues considered are the impact of technological change, shifts in how work is organized, the changing balance of power between employers and employees, the growing diversity in employment practices among similarly situated firms, and the persistence of a large low wage sector in the labor market. All of this suggests that this is a dynam…
Organizing for Good Jobs
Over the past several decades, there has been a remarkable surge of economic justice organizing across the country. The goal of this article is to examine these efforts and provide a framework for understanding their potential, their limitations, and their future. In what follows, the authors first describe five distinct organizing movements focused on low-wage work that have flourished in recent years. The authors then develop a framework for th…
The Politics of Job Quality
In Good Jobs, Bad Jobs Arne Kalleberg provides an extremely useful portrait of job quality in America. This paper addresses the politics of job quality via a case study of weatherization jobs. Weatherization workers are typical of employees in many low wage jobs in America. The stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) substantially increased weatherization funding and a political struggle emerged over the quality of these jobs. …
The Impact of Computers on the Employment of Clerks and Managers
This paper investigates how the increased use of computers affects clerical and managerial employment. The author hypothesizes that the much-discussed displacement effect-computers taking over for clerks-is offset at least in part by complementary effects. For example, computers may increase clerical and managerial employment by lowering unit cost, thus expanding production, and by inducing structural reorganization of the firm. Analyzing new dat…
Education and Labor Markets at the Turn of the Century
How American Adults Obtain Work Skills
Employer-provided training is an important determinant of economic outcomes, yet our understanding of its extent and distribution is well out of date-with the most recent national survey being from 2008. This article updates our understanding of employer-provided training through a 2020 nationally representative survey of 3,648 working civilian adults between the ages of 24 and 64. Results show that while employer-provided training is reasonably …
Farewell to Commitment? Changing Employment Relations and Labor Markets in the United States
Why Don′t 'They' Work? Employment Patterns in a High Pressure Economy
Sex Discrimination in Professional Employment
Analyzes sex discrimination in professional employment in a metropolitan publishing firm. How sex differentials in earnings are generated within a single company; The company's internal labor market; Impact of marriage and children on the results and interpretation of the data; Differences in test reliability. (Abstract copyright EBSCO.)
A Forum on the Politics of Skills
The ILR Review invited this group of scholars who work within the fields of sociology, history, and urban planning to share their perspective on the politics of skills. We called on their expertise to draw attention to the politics that drive the definition and development of skill and its use in shaping the rights and voice of workers. The essays in this forum explore the politics of skill along three lines. First, they interrogate the definitio…
Employer-Centered Training for International Competitiveness
There has been a surge of new interest in federal training policy. This momentum has been fueled by concerns with productivity and competitiveness, whereas past federal policy has been more focused upon distributional issues. A wide range of new proposals have been put forth, and high on the list are initiatives to work directly with firms. As making employers the clients of training programs is a relatively new idea, there is very little past fe…
Employment Futures
Getting Started
Reconsidering Occupational Internal Labor Markets
What are useful ways to characterize varying employment systems? This article returns to an older idea, Internal Labor Markets (ILMs). The traditional assumption characterized ILMs as the core of the labor market but current thinking argues that ILMs have frayed. Little direct measurement has been carried out, however, and both viewpoints have relied on proxies or case studies. The author utilizes a new survey of employed US workers to provide an…
Contract Employment
This article utilizes a new nationally representative survey, executed in January 2020, that measures non-standard work. The author estimates the incidence of contract company employment and freelancing and describes who goes into non-standard employment. He then studies earnings and access to employer-provided training among contract company employees-the largest and most mis-measured group of non-standard workers. Training is important because …
Job Training in America
Training has long been of considerable interest to both policy makers and to researchers. This collection addresses future skill and competency demands and then takes up specific topics regarding program strategies and target groups. Each chapter is well done but the book invites larger questions about the nature of the American employment and training system. In answering this question, we need to go beyond the topics emphasized in the book beca…
Public Employment and Urban Poverty
An Empirical Study of Labor Market Segmentation
Labor Markets
An Empirical Study of Labor Market Segmentation
Sex Discrimination in Professional Employment
Analyzes sex discrimination in professional employment in a metropolitan publishing firm. How sex differentials in earnings are generated within a single company; The company's internal labor market; Impact of marriage and children on the results and interpretation of the data; Differences in test reliability. (Abstract copyright EBSCO.)
Education and Labor Markets at the Turn of the Century
Getting Started
Sex Discrimination in Professional Employment
Employment Structures Within Firms
Affirmative Action and Opportunity
T HE effectiveness of affirmative action efforts has been a topic of some controversy and the literature is unclear about whether women and/or minorities benefit. One source of confusion is that in some models the economywide effect can be in a different direction than the effect upon regulated (or covered) individuals and firms. In a sense this is much like the minimum wage in that, while some individuals benefit, there is considerable controver…
Getting Started
Manufacturing Consent
Getting Started
Internal Labor Markets
Internal Labor Markets
Internal Labor Markets
Career Mobility in a Corporate Hierarchy
The Impact of Computers on the Employment of Clerks and Managers
This paper investigates how the increased use of computers affects clerical and managerial employment. The author hypothesizes that the much-discussed displacement effect-computers taking over for clerks-is offset at least in part by complementary effects. For example, computers may increase clerical and managerial employment by lowering unit cost, thus expanding production, and by inducing structural reorganization of the firm. Analyzing new dat…
Choice of Employment Systems in Internal Labor Markets
Employment Futures
Employment Futures
Welfare Participation in a Full Employment Economy
This paper employs original survey data on female single parents in Boston to examine the determinants of welfare participation. Particular attention is paid to the hypothesis—growing out of the literature on the urban underclass—that there are important neighborhood effects. The results provide support for the existence of neighborhood effects. These effects remain after controls for the personal characteristics of the respondents and for the po…
Employer-Centered Training for International Competitiveness
There has been a surge of new interest in federal training policy. This momentum has been fueled by concerns with productivity and competitiveness, whereas past federal policy has been more focused upon distributional issues. A wide range of new proposals have been put forth, and high on the list are initiatives to work directly with firms. As making employers the clients of training programs is a relatively new idea, there is very little past fe…
Why Don′t 'They' Work? Employment Patterns in a High Pressure Economy
How Common is Workplace Transformation and Who Adopts it
The author, using data on 694 U.S. manufacturing establishments from a 1992 survey, examines the incidence of innovative work practices (teams, job rotation, quality circles, and Total Quality Management) and investigates what variables, including human resource practices, are associated with the adoption of these practices. He finds that about 35% of private sector establishments with 50 or more employees made substantial use of flexible work or…
Economics (43 obras) · Business (33 obras) · Labour economics (31 obras) · Political science (29 obras) · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality (24 obras) · Employment and Welfare Studies (23 obras) · Labor Movements and Unions (23 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Sociology (14 obras) · Computer Science (13 obras)