2002 Reviews

David Neumark, On the Job: Is Long-Term Employment a Thing of the past?

DiPrete, Thomas A.

Neumark interprets the findings of this volume to imply a weakening of the bond between workers and employers, but he argues that the change is not huge and has not persisted long enough to constitute a trend, being instead possibly "a unique product of changes in the corporate world in the 1990s" (p. 23). Not all readers (and perhaps not even all the authors of the chapters in the volume) would necessarily agree with this characterization. Certainly it will take more data to see if these changes have persisted into the first years of the current decade. But any researcher working in the areas of job mobility, contingent work, or corporate downsizing needs to pay close attention to the excellent research reported in this volume.