Colloquium Series: Beth Rubin, UNC Charlotte

Beth Rubin, Professor, UNC Charlotte                                                                                                                                        President, Southern Sociological Society, 2011-2012

Conceptions of the Social Contract

Abstract: Shifts in the Social Contract, Rubin (1995) that summarized the changes in the economy and workplace that were transforming social life in the United States. This paper elaborates on those themes and addresses the shifting social contracts of the current era. The author draws on her research on new workplace temporalities, worker hyper-exploitability and generational differences at work to posit that the social contracts structuring social life are again in flux. She argues, too, that conceptions of the Social Contract provide a valuable organizing framework for linking macro-economic and structural change to the micro-level enactment of those changes, a framework with utility for studying a wide range of topics.

Beth Rubin‘s current research interests and activities center around understanding the ways in which economic and workplace transformation alter society, workplace (and other) organizations and the behavior of individuals within those organizations. Speaking to the general issue of economic and workplace transformation, she is exploring how employment insecurity affects commitment and other workplace outcomes. A related project tests hypotheses drawn from her work on the shifting social contract to analyze generational differences and similarities to in those workplace outcomes. Likewise, while considerable research has focused on issues of globalization as a master mechanism of the 21^st century, a related shift is the transition from a 9-5/5 day-a-week, to a 24/7 economy. She is studying some of the micro consequences of these macro changes by investigating the changing temporal structures of organizations, time-pressures in the workplace and its impact on organizational and workplace commitment and work-family spillover among other things. A related empirical focus is on how the changed temporal and spatial structuring of work affect various aspects of creativity at work given tensions among empowerment, debureacratization and surveillance in contemporary workplaces. Finally, she continues her research on how industrial transformation affects stratification and inequality.