What do people do for a living? How do they do what they do for a living? These are the questions that interest me most: What do we do and How do we work? More specifically, I'm fascinated by the intersections of work, gender, and class, all of which affect both What we do for a living and How we do it.
Many, if not most, people identify pretty closely with their occupation. Occupational choice is, in part, a result of one's sex (else there wouldn't be "women's jobs" and "men's jobs"). Occupational choice is also a result of class because educational attainment is a function of (and helps to define) income and class status. Certainly, changes have occurred over time: women in different class categories experience the (formal) labor market differently, but there remain resilient similarities! There are still sex-segregated jobs among the most highly educated, and similar dynamics exist for women training for, finding, and keeping male-dominated jobs, whether they are molecular biologists or master carpenters. (mistress carpenters?)
Government policy has been involved in chipping away the barriers that women face in male-dominated occupations. When markets fail to allocate resources-in this case, labor markets fail to distribute information about job opportunities due to social attitudes about who should do what kind of work-then government intervention is warranted. Similar interventions have opened job opportunities to African Americans, Latinos, and people with different physical abilities. Increasing integration eventually changes the face of an occupation. Before such changes occur, and let's face it, the pace of this kind of attitudinal change tends to be glacial, policy remains necessary to alter the ways that a particular labor market distributes information and the ways that current workers treat newcomers who don't look like them.
My research on what people do for a living therefore focuses on Occupational Segregation by Gender, studies on Minimum Wage work, and research involving working poor families.
How we work is also shaped by sex and class. How we work has changed remarkably in recent decades, owing largely to the ubiquitousness of micro computing. Other changes relate to job tenure and expectations of loyalty: Can we count on a steady, full-time job throughout our work lives? Dual-earner families need to balance work and family responsibilities, which has resulted in some moving away from full-time, year-round jobs. On the other hand, employers increasingly disabuse workers of any sense of employment-for-life. To minimize personnel costs, employers try to use workers only as they need them to the greatest extent possible. Class helps to determine whether a flexible working arrangement is the choice of the employee or the employer.
How much of ourselves do we invest in our work? How much is required to get the job done? Fully one-third of all jobs involve emotional labor, or the need to manage your own or someone else's emotions in order to get the job done. It has been assumed that women are expected to engage in emotional labor more than men are, but our research has demonstrated otherwise. Police officers need to display and elicit a range of emotions in order to maintain public safety, including building trust with informants, instilling calm amidst a domestic violence call, or swallowing fear and panic during dangerous standoffs. Social workers similarly must display and elicit a range of emotions. One occupation is male-dominated and the other is female-dominated. Emotional labor demands exist in a range of jobs. Finally, government provides a very interesting context within which to examine all of these What and How issues. Layered atop expectations of personal investment and loyalty is the public service ethic, and for these reasons and others, my research has focused on both the private and public sectors.
Meier, Kenneth J., Sharon H. Mastracci, and Kristin Wilson. 2006. "Emotional labor and its link to performance." Public Administration Review 66(6): 899-909.
Mastracci, Sharon H. 2006. Commentary to Selden Public Administration Review: Theory to Practice 66(6): 910.
Mastracci, Sharon H. 2006. “Whose Information Age? Employment Opportunities for Non-College Women and Men in the New Economy.” Challenge: The Journal of Economic Affairs 49(4): July/August 2006.
Mastracci, Sharon H., Meredith A. Newman, and Mary Ellen Guy. 2006. “Appraising Emotion Work: Determining Whether Emotional Labor is Valued in Government Jobs.” American Review of Public Administration 36(2): 139-155 (lead article).
Mastracci, Sharon H. and James R. Thompson. 2005. “Nonstandard Work Arrangements in the Public Sector: Trends and Issues.” Review of Public Personnel Administration 25(4): 299-324 (lead article and recipient of SPALR's Best Paper award in 2005).
Mastracci, Sharon H. 2004. Breaking Out of the Pink Collar Ghetto: Policy Solutions for Non-College Women. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.
Emotional Labor: Putting the Service in Public Service. Book manuscript in progress (with Meredith Newman and Mary Ellen Guy)
Retaining IT Professionals in Public Agencies. Public Personnel Management (PPM), forthcoming
The Color of Money: A Race Decomposition Analysis of Household Income Disparities in Chicago, 1983-2003. Revise and resubmit at Review of Black Political Economy (RBPE)
State Minimum Wages: Natural Experiments, Critical Experiments, and Exploratory Data Analysis. Under review at the Journal for Regional Policy & Analysis (JRAP) (with Joe Persky)