A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1954, the first Burger King was opened in Miami, Florida.

“In low-status, low-pay service work, there may be little to smile about, but not to smile can be unforgivable. Some employers install ‘smile police’ to pose as customers, while others rely on spy cameras, the monitoring of phone calls, or customer satisfaction questionnaires. Still others go for a blunt, confrontational, approach: ‘I’ll go up in their faces and I go, “What is wrong?” ’ says a Brooklyn Burger King manager. ‘They look at me like they don’t know what I am doing. “What is wrong with your face?” I am smiling. You don’t know what it is like.’ […]

Workers of this sort may seek relief in a backstage zone, such as the galley area of an aircraft, the restaurant lobby, or staff rest-room. They are places where different emotion rules apply, a temporary amnesty from their usual emotional labours. There, the ‘obnoxious’ passenger, client, or customer can safely be derided, in the presence of a receptive audience of peers.

Some companies are keen to attract employees who are prepared to ‘really take on board’ and internalize the company’s message and training; to ‘really feel’ for the customer. The service worker is encouraged to fuse their personality with their work role; to synchronize their feelings with the required corporate line. Those susceptible to such injunctions are well-inducted emotional labourers and less fazed by pressures or inconsistencies experienced by their surface-acting counterparts. But outside of work they can find it difficult to extract themselves from the roles in which they have become so engrossed.” — From ‘Work: A Very Short Introduction’ by Stephen Fineman

[Pg. 76-7 — From ‘Work: A Very Short Introduction’ by Stephen Fineman.]

Image via Wikimedia Commons

The well-known adage states, “you are only as old as you feel,” but does it actually matter how old people feel? In other words, does a person’s “subjective age” predict future well-being, attitudes, and success within a work context and beyond?

Subjective age (sometimes also called “personal age,” “perceived age,” or “psychological age”) has been defined as “the age people think of themselves as being,” or as individuals’ self-perceptions of their age. A recent article published in Work, Aging and Retirement finds that an older subjective age was associated with lower psychological well-being among middle-aged and older adults. A younger subjective age was frequently linked to a more positive fundamental evaluation of oneself overall. In addition to being a potential alternative marker of development, subjective age is also an interesting method with which to explore individual behavior and functioning.

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I met with a woman at a community college in Chicago that had a director of financial aid that someone recommended that I meet with. And when I met with her, I talked to her, I told her about my story. I told her about my background and some of the courses and things I was engaged in… . And she looked at me and she heard my story. And she said, “Someone like you should be in college. You should be in college.” And she was so sorry to hear all of the things I had to go through. And this woman was not affiliated with any college that I was applying to. It was a community college in Chicago, just someone had recommended to me to talk to her. 

And she … I don’t know exactly what she did, but she created a waiver on the system in my name, so that when I applied to any college in the system they would see me as an independent student. And that’s how I was able to continue my education. If it wasn’t for her, I would be delayed in finishing my degree, because I would not have been able to get the financial aid that rewarded someone with my type of grades and my type of experience.

Milo’s story featured in The Importance of Work in an Age of Uncertainty conveys the importance of emotional support as one of the strongest threads to fostering decent and optimally meaningful work lives. The fact that the financial aid advisor was able to understand Milo’s experience, both the content and emotional tone in his presentation, seemed critical in providing the right type of support at the right time. The impact of one person can make a transformative change in one’s life trajectory.

Image by rawpixel via Pixabay

The industrialized world faces a rapidly aging population, and it has become more important than ever to understand what influences the wellbeing of older people. A recent article from Work, Aging and Retirement focuses on the importance of social connectedness among older adults, and the kinds of factors that can strengthen this sentiment later in life. 

The article also poses the question of whether or not older adults should consider re-entering paid work after retirement, as recent research has shown that the decision to remain in the workforce in later years can actually increase overall wellbeing and social connectedness. Employment can provide more than just a regular paycheck - it can also offer an expanded friend group, increased social participation, and a greater sense of purpose and inclusion.

Read the article from Work, Aging and Retirement.

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“Never in history have employees or organizations produced so much data or had so much access to data about each other.  Many of us go about our daily lives having innumerable interactions with the digital world in the form of emails, internet browsing, credit card purchases, phone calls, and TV viewing—all of which leave digital footprints.  Like archeologists who study thousand year-old footprints in remote jungles and deserts, today’s digital archeologists are quantitative investigators trying to make sense of the colossal mountains of data each of us generates daily.  Today’s buzzword is ‘Big Data’ and the belief is that Big Data leads to Big Profits. It is an appealing story, but one that’s too good to be true. Simply having access to massive amounts of data is not necessarily meaningful for business purposes. Most of what is in Big Data is just noise.  However, for those who know what kinds of data to look for and how to leverage these data to assist in decision making and forecasting, there is a possibility of finding hidden insights. These insights will not be discovered by Big Data itself but rather by a surgical approach to data called talent analytics.”

In an increasingly connected world, having so much choice and so much information on potential hires may seem like a boon for companies seeking out new talent. But recruiting the right talent at the right place at the right time is still a difficult task, especially when considering candidates all over the globe. Robert E. Ployhart, Jeff A. Weekley, and Julian Dalzell want to show how to effectively, intelligently, and practically acquire global talent, all the way from attraction through retention.

Image: Cytonn-photography-604681-unsplash by Cytonn Photography. Public domain via Unsplash.

“The nature of the relationship between employers and employees has been changing over the past three decades, with firms increasingly relying on contractors, temp agencies, and franchises rather than hiring employees directly. Across a wide range of industries, firms have been focusing on their “core competencies” and hiring outside companies to provide services that were once performed by their own employees, such as cleaning, security, logistics, human resources, or IT.”

How have non-traditional employment arrangements affected nation-wide wage structures and distribution?

Image credit: blur bottle bright building by Pixabay. Public domain via Unsplash.

Throughout August, we are focusing on how religion and business are related in terms of everything from ethical business decisions to religious equality in the workplace. Both religion and going to work are such huge parts of many people’s lives, yet we often don’t think about how they overlap.

We’ve put together the below reading list for some interesting perspectives on the relationship between religion and business, both in a contemporary context and throughout history.

• “Faith at Work?” by David W. Miller from Oxford Scholarship Online.
  
• Jewish Business Ethics by Barry J. Leff from Oxford Handbooks Online.
  
• “Sunday Business and the Decline of Sunday Closing Laws: A Historical Overview” by Alan Raucher from Journal of Church State.
  
• “Zen and Professional Leadership” by Steven Heine from Oxford Scholarship Online.
  
• PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire by John Wigger.
  
• The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity by Darren E. Grem.
  
• Religion and the Marketplace in the United States edited by Jan Stievermann, Philip Goff, Detlef Junker, with Anthony Santoro and Daniel Silliman.
  
• Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000-1900 edited by Francesca Trivellato, Leor Halevi, and Catia Antunes.
  

For more on our religion and business theme, follow @OUPReligion on Twitter.

Image credit: business time clock by jarmoluk. Public domain via Pixabay.

What is the relationship between stress and work? How can we work together to combat stress in the workplace? In support of World Day for Safety and Health at Work on 28 April, we have collated articles around the observance day theme of “Workplace Stress: A collective challenge.” This collection is freely available to read online until the 24th of July.

Image: Office job by Joergelman. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

“One area that is relatively understudied by economists is the role of the social environment, particularly the effect of parental time allocation on children’s nutritional behaviors and outcomes.”

What is the relationship between parental work and children’s eating?

Image: Family eating at the table dining by skeeze. Public domain via Pixabay.