Summary: “The military has historically been the single largest employer of young men and the largest vocational training institution in the nation.” So how are the benefits? Jay Teachman and Lucky Tedrow examine the long-term impact of military service on men’s income and find that military service gives young men from disadvantaged backgrounds an income boost while they’re active, but things tend to even out for enlistees once discharged. Furthermore, white veterans with at least a high school degree suffer an income deficit when compared to their civilian counterparts.

“Nearly two decades following discharge from the military (and net of many important controls, including several attempts to adjust for selectivity), better educated White veterans earn about 87% of the income enjoyed by their nonveteran counterparts. Thus, on the face of the matter, military service does not appear to be a wise economic choice for many men who could otherwise do better by remaining in the civilian labor market. They lose critical labor market experience and likely lose important information about job networks.”

The noteworthy exception to this trend is that Blacks with less than a high school education receive an income premium from their service. These results have important implications for military recruitment efforts.

Summary: This study of workbloggers in Manchester asserts that contrary to common perceptions that white collar workers are disinterested in social change, workers who blog about their jobs have subversive political potential even while participating in the corporate capitalist system.

Abstract:

Anonymous workbloggers – employees who write online
diaries about their work – are often simultaneously productive workers and savage critics of the organizational cultures in which they toil. This research focuses on a small group of white-collar workers from the Greater Manchester and Lancashire area, who risk their jobs by writing publicly about their office experiences under assumed identities. Countering the notion that resistance to corporate culture leads to ‘confusion and emptiness’ (Willmott, 1993: 538), this study contributes to the recent revival of interest in worker misbehavior and recalcitrance. By focusing on workers as authors, it addresses a shortcoming in the existing critical literature, which treats informal employee resistance as an intellectually and artistically unsophisticated phenomenon. Drawing parallels with the lives and work of authors such as Franz Kafka and T.S. Eliot, it evaluates whether embedded writers, in spite of their ambivalence about the alternative, can constitute an effective counter-hegemonic force.

]]> Article: Diary of a working boy: Creative resistance among anonymous workbloggers Ethnography, Vol. 8, no. 4

Summary: This study of workbloggers in Manchester asserts that contrary to common perceptions that white collar workers are disinterested in social change, workers who blog about their jobs have subversive political potential even while participating in the corporate capitalist system.

Abstract:

Anonymous workbloggers – employees who write online
diaries about their work – are often simultaneously productive workers and savage critics of the organizational cultures in which they toil. This research focuses on a small group of white-collar workers from the Greater Manchester and Lancashire area, who risk their jobs by writing publicly about their office experiences under assumed identities. Countering the notion that resistance to corporate culture leads to ‘confusion and emptiness’ (Willmott, 1993: 538), this study contributes to the recent revival of interest in worker misbehavior and recalcitrance. By focusing on workers as authors, it addresses a shortcoming in the existing critical literature, which treats informal employee resistance as an intellectually and artistically unsophisticated phenomenon. Drawing parallels with the lives and work of authors such as Franz Kafka and T.S. Eliot, it evaluates whether embedded writers, in spite of their ambivalence about the alternative, can constitute an effective counter-hegemonic force.

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