The Asymmetry in Gratitude

Luccarelli, Valentina

doi:10.1007/s42087-018-0016-8

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Considering the meaning of gratitude in the context of our case‐study of workers in part‐time jobs in the UK we had real misgivings about proceeding further and uncritically with the “grateful” dimension of the 1991 metaphor too. White (), for example, suggested that gratitude can be seen as a response “by which the beneficiary honours and celebrates the benefactor’s goodwill.” Luccarelli () identifies a “gratitude of duty” in which “something special” is given by someone “with power” to someone without, and the powerless beneficiary must reciprocate by expressing gratitude or else be seen as an “ingrate.” A benevolent employer offering work as an act of goodwill, and demanding gratitude in return, is a highly dubious framework for analyzing the contemporary part‐time labor market. These notions of honor, gifting, and beneficiaries that lie at the heart of the gratitude concept have been left unspecified, untheorized, and unchallenged, in both the 1991 formulation of “grateful” slaves and responses to it.…”

Section: The Grateful Slave Part‐timer: Revisiting and Evaluating Thementioning

confidence: 99%

Ungrateful slaves? An examination of job quality and job satisfaction for male part‐time workers in the UK

Warren

Lyonette

2020

British Journal of Sociology

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Research on part‐time work has concentrated over many decades on the experiences of women but male part‐time employment is growing in the UK. This article addresses two sizable gaps in knowledge concerning male part‐timers: are men's part‐time jobs of lower quality than men's full‐time jobs? Are male part‐timers more or less job‐satisfied compared to their full‐time peers? A fundamental part of both interrogations is whether men's part‐time employment varies by occupational class. The article is motivated by the large body of work on female part‐timers. Its theoretical framework is rooted in one of the most controversial discussions in the sociology of women workers: the “grateful slave” debate that emerged in the 1990s when researchers sought to explain why so many women expressed job satisfaction with low‐quality part‐time jobs. Innovatively, this article draws upon those contentious ideas to provide new insights into male, rather than female, part‐time employment. Based upon analysis of a large quantitative data set, the results provide clear evidence of low‐quality male part‐time employment in the UK, when compared with men's full‐time jobs. Men working part‐time also express deteriorating satisfaction with jobs overall and in several specific dimensions of their jobs. Male part‐timers in lower occupational class positions retain a clear “lead” both in bad job quality and low satisfaction. The article asks whether decreasingly satisfied male part‐time workers should be termed “ungrateful slaves?” It unpacks the “grateful slave” metaphor and, after doing so, rejects its value for the ongoing analysis of part‐time jobs in the formal labor market.

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Section: The Grateful Slave Part‐timer: Revisiting and Evaluating Thementioning

confidence: 99%