A growing body of social science literature has examined the organizational innovations and staffing practices comprising new flexible forms of work. Researchers have investigated the depth and scope of these changes and questioned how they affect diverse groups of workers in the United States. Reviewing the research on this transformation reveals a model of combined and uneven flexibility, characterized by the opening of opportunities that are differentially distributed across different groups of American workers, emerging under conditions in which effort is intensified, control is decentered, and employment is destabilized. The essay concludes by suggesting additional areas of inquiry for sociologists concerned with new forms of work organization.

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Turbulence and unpredictability in 21st-century labor markets arguably magnify the importance of maintaining employability. Drawing on recent research, I discuss three mechanisms for enhancing employability in this context: identity work, training and networking, and laboring in unpaid and marginal paid positions. Few of these activities are counted as 'work' because they are mostly unpaid and they often take place outside formal job structures. By specifying how a range of employment-related activities are essential to and even constitute work, this article contributes to debates about the scope and boundaries of employment and shows how everyday actions build and reinforce new economic structures -how individual actions make the new economy possible. It also provides greater specification of the concept of employability.Keywords employability, employee risk, human capital, job search, labor market turbulence, sociology of work This article unpacks an analytically underappreciated dimension of employment: the work it takes to enhance one's employability in an era of turbulent unpredictability. I am concerned in particular with the core activities of planning for labor force participation and navigating contemporary job markets: searching for jobs, undergoing training, acquiring information and skills, and other activities that enable people to manage employment and unemployment, and achieve mobility. In the destabilized economies described by Beck (2008), Giddens (1991, Sennett (1998) and others, labor force participants must human relations 63(2) 279-303

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Under recent conditions of economic competition, customer/worker interactions increasingly are a source of profitability in service firms. Companies may employ refined methods for making these interactions a source of information about workers' performance. This paper investigates how managers and employers use customer feedback to monitor, evaluate and discipline service workers. We argue that management by customers may deepen and complicate authority and power relations in the workplace, and may also give rise to new forms of workplace conflict.

Marked changes in human dispersal and development during the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition have been attributed to massive volcanic eruption and/or severe climatic deterioration. We test this concept using records of volcanic ash layers of the Campanian Ignimbrite eruption dated to ca. 40,000 y ago (40 ka B.P.). The distribution of the Campanian Ignimbrite has been enhanced by the discovery of cryptotephra deposits (volcanic ash layers that are not visible to the naked eye) in archaeological cave sequences. They enable us to synchronize archaeological and paleoclimatic records through the period of transition from Neanderthal to the earliest anatomically modern human populations in Europe. Our results confirm that the combined effects of a major volcanic eruption and severe climatic cooling failed to have lasting impacts on Neanderthals or early modern humans in Europe. We infer that modern humans proved a greater competitive threat to indigenous populations than natural disasters.

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