September Article of the Month

Our September article of the month received multiple votes for this year’s Nevile Plowman Prize for best article published in a calendar year. Andrew Stevens and Catherine E. Connelly cast a critical gaze over discourses of ‘entry-level’ and ‘low-skill’ jobs. They examine the construction of an ideal food service worker, and find that it is gendered, racialised and status-oriented. This may not be an enormously surprising top line result. However, the decision of the authors to focus on the point of hiring – particularly the concept of ‘fit’ – enables them to draw practicable insights and develop lines of inquiry about the impact of these very localised socialisation processes on the wider labour force. This all turns on seeing the moment of hiring as both an expression of processes of socialisation and then in turn a contributing cause of racialised and gendered structuring. This is a wonderful contribution drawing entirely on qualitative data and has valuable implications for both researchers and policymakers.