Project B4

This project studies how "atypical employment relationships" arising from a conjunction of different company employment policies, individual labor-market characteristics, and the interests of employees impact upon inequality over time. During the first funding period, the project will examine the example of a phenomenon previously neglected in labor market research: dismissal and subsequent rehiring by the same employer ("recalls"). Recalls are a particularly appropriate object of research, because they activate a whole spectrum of mechanisms of inequality production studied by the Collaborative Research Group (inclusion and exclusion, hierarchization, "opportunity hoarding," and the stabilization of asymmetrical dependencies). The goal is to find out why, how, and under which conditions companies and jobseekers enter a recall employment relationship, and what consequences this has not only for the companies but also for employees’ relationships in the workplace (work style) and outside it (lifestyle). This extends the current state of research in three directions:
(1) It will be shown that the company level plays a crucial role in the generation of inequalities.
(2) The causes and consequences of nonstandardized, unstable forms of employment will be observed and analyzed in a way that goes beyond the workplace context to include the context of individual daily life and the household.
(3) Because company and individual rationalities cannot be reconstructed empirically with the quantitative data that labor market research has hitherto concentrated on collecting, it is necessary to apply qualitative assessment methods and linked personal and company data.

Research questions
(1) Why, how, and under which conditions do companies and employees enter recall employment relationships?
(2) What are the effects of "disrupted organization memberships" on employees and within companies, and do these produce inequalities?
(3) What mechanisms of inequality production can be identified, and what effects do they have?

Design
(1) Secondary analyses (data from the German Institute for Employment Research IAB and the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, SOEP)
(2) Qualitative interviews (focused, semi-structured interviews, expert interviews) on a company and individual level
(3) Standardized employee survey and subsequent linkage of data with IAB datasets