Publications by Author

Anna Haley-Lock

Research

Haley-Lock, A, (In press). Happy doing good? How workers’ career orientations and job satisfaction relate in grassroots human services. Journal of Community Practice.

An abstract for this article is not available.

Haley-Lock, A. & Kruzich, J. (In press). Serving workers in the human services: The roles of organizational ownership, chain affiliation and professional leadership in front-line job benefits. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.

A growing body of research has sought to understand forces shaping firms’ approaches to employee compensation and the impacts of job benefits on both organizational performance and worker well-being. One such line of work has documented advantages from employers adopting generous compensation practices, as evidenced by more successful worker recruitment and retention. Little of this work, however, has attended to benefits provided within nonprofit and public human service settings or to low-level workers. Drawing on a sample of Wisconsin nursing homes, this study addresses this gap by examining the roles of ownership, chain affiliation, and professional leadership in compensation provided to nursing assistants. Results indicate that public and nonprofit ownership and chain membership are positively related to benefit levels. Workers fare unexpectedly less well with professional directors in for-profit and public settings but better within professionally led nonprofits.

Haley-Lock, A. (2007). Up close and personal: Employee networks and job satisfaction in a human service context. Social Service Review. December, 683-707.

This article investigates the association between workers’ networks of relationships used for advice on job tasks and their job satisfaction. It thus extends the study of personal employment networks from previous efforts that focus primarily on businesses to an examination of a type of human service organization. It situates this examination within a population of nonprofit domestic violence program employees. Prior research suggests that having emotionally close and physically proximate ties is positively related to general job satisfaction and that distant and dispersed ties are related to satisfaction with compensation and opportunity for promotion. The current results instead suggest that close ties are positively related to both types of satisfaction and that networking patterns and payoffs may be contextually shaped.

Haley-Lock, A. and Ford Shah, M. (2007). Protecting vulnerable workers: How public policy and private employers shape the contemporary low-wage work experience. Families in Society, 88(3): 485-95.

This paper presents a conceptual approach to understanding how government and private employers shape the employment experiences of contemporary low-wage workers. After reviewing recent changes in employment conditions that have disproportionately affected poor working families, we present two perspectives on the structural vulnerability for low-wage workers: policy and organizational stratification. The stratification approach suggests that public policy and private workplace practices interact with workers’ personal and family circumstances to shape the outcomes of low-wage employment. Applying these lenses to restaurant workers, we examine why and how some workers may be uniquely disadvantaged by emerging proposals to change minimum wage laws. Promising directions for intervention are also discussed.

Haley-Lock, A. (2007). A workforce or workplace conflict?: Applying an organizational perspective to the study of human services employment. Administration in Social Work, 31(3): 41-62.

This paper applies an organizational perspective to the study of employment in human services workplaces, specifically domestic violence services agencies. The author used the theory of firmlevel labor markets to investigate how organizations occupying the same field of service may nonetheless differ in their approaches to granting instrumental benefits to their jobs. Data come from the population of 25 nonprofit domestic violence programs and their employees in aMidwestern metropolitan area. Examining a range of employment benefits, the author found that agencies as a whole and specific, comparable jobs differed in the access they provided to these "workplace opportunities," and concludes by discussing the theoretical and organizational implications of this variation for the workforce outcomes of recruitment, retention and diversity.

Haley-Lock, A., & Bruch, S. K. (2006). Workplace and workforce considerations in access to employment opportunity. Accepted for publication in D. Engstrom & L. Piedra (Eds.), Our Diverse Society: Race, Ethnicity, and Class, Washington, DC: NASW Press.

An abstract for this article is not available.

Lambert, S. J., & Haley-Lock, A. (2004). The organizational stratification of opportunities for work-life balance. Community, Work and Family, 7(2), 179-195.

As organizational scholars, we offer an 'organizational stratification' approach useful for revealing inequalities in the distribution of work-life 'opportunities' within and across jobs and workplaces. In doing so, we discuss the implications of historically narrow conceptualizations of workplace opportunity -- typically focused on promotion only -- and suggest a more expansive approach to theorizing, and in turn operationalizing, workplace opportunities essential to worker and family well-being. We illustrate how researchers might employ an organizational stratification approach by describing an ongoing research project in which we differentiate opportunities 'on paper' from opportunities 'in practice' and examine variations in how US employers distribute work-life opportunities among lower-skilled jobs. We demonstrate how an organizational stratification perspective can be useful for developing knowledge on the nature of inequality in the distribution of opportunities for work-life balance, and thus, for suggesting new avenues that enhance social justice in the workplace.