The PhD candidate will study how workers fare and (re)act within organizations using quantitative and qualitative methods. How are workers' careers affected by firm policies, practices and culture concerning flexible employment contracts? This question will be tackled with quantitative methods, part of the ERC project DYNANSE, which focuses on employment trajectories of employees on non-standard contracts, such as temporary contracts or on-call contracts. You will use register data on employment from Statistics Netherlands linked to collective labour agreement (CLA) data to study the relation between collective action, CLAs and employment conditions. The project will go further into studying how the way firms shape workers' careers, interacts with workers' participation in individual and collective action. In this, the PhD candidate will tackle broader questions: why do some employees join a trade union and a strike, and others not? Why do some employees do the bare minimum at work to protect their mental health, while others work until they burn out? We will study the influence of employment characteristics (pay, autonomy, etc), social norms regarding work (work ethos) and personal resources on the willingness and ability to take part in different forms of action and will study the effects of these actions on working conditions and well-being of employees. This will be done qualitatively, by interviewing workers with different backgrounds about their motives for taking part in different forms of action.
We are looking for researchers who are interested in labour market sociology and who have interest and knowledge of qualitative and quantitative research and who are motivated to further develop as researchers. The successful candidate are able to and enjoy formulating research ideas and questions that are related to the topics described above.
Your duties
- To write a dissertation about the relation between employment conditions, work ethos, employee action and well-being
- To conduct high-quality quantitative and qualitative sociological research, resulting in publications in scientific journals
- To conduct research based on co-creation with different stakeholders, e.g. trade unions, to increase societal impact of research
- Develop research questions and ideas that give further substance to the research project
- Be an active member of the ERC research team
- To follow courses at the level of a PhD candidate to collect 30 ECTS, for instance at the Graduate School of the Faculty of Social Sciences (GSSS; admission to the GSSS is mandatory. For more information click here)
- Support 'open science' and work in a reproducible way and share tools and data with the wider scientific community
- Assist in the teaching of courses in Sociology or Statistics and Methodology in courses of the curricula of the Faculty of Social Sciences