Search Results

This chapter explores what the interactions of individuals and firms in their vicinity and in broader communities reveal about the spatial structure of cities as self-organization by agents. It first introduces a benchmark, the Alonso–Mills–Muth model of a city in its bare essentials, and examines its implications for urban density and the associated pattern of land prices in the case with a predetermined center, the central business district (CBD). It then considers the geometry of spatial equilibrium when there is no predetermined center and social interactions are dispersed, along with the location decisions of firms in urban space, monocentric versus polycentric models of the urban economy, and the Lucas–Rossi-Hansberg models of urban spatial structure with productive externalities. It also analyzes neighborhood effects, urban equilibrium when proximity is a conduit for the transmission of job-related information, and the link between choice of job matching and spatial structure.

People who develop severe mental illness later in life may have advanced education and successful careers. The goal of returning to work for a highly trained individual has different challenges than for people who are starting entry-level jobs. This chapter includes an illustration of an individual who developed severe mental illness after working successfully as a professor and wanted to return to his career. The employment specialist and the rest of the team provide hope and encouragement for people to achieve their goals. The team makes recommendations about specific steps toward reaching the goal. While respect and dignity should be part of every encounter a client has with the employment specialist and other practitioners, the team needs to recognize and respond to the sense of loss in societal and economic status that many people who have had careers and advanced training experience.

Chapter 4 describes how the effects of gender stereotypes on social relations (Chapter 3) reproduce gender inequality in paid work. The gender frame interacts with the institutional frame of work organizations to shape preferred worker images, the job-matching process between workers and employers, and workplace relations and culture. These effects contribute to sex segregation in jobs and the gender gap in wages and authority. Implicit biases triggered by the gender frame create the glass ceiling for women at the top and a maternal wall for mothers in the workplace. Workplace relations that are implicitly biased by the gender frame infuse gendered meanings into new workplace procedures and structures that actors create, and these gendered arrangements persist through organizational inertia.

The labor market depicted by undergraduate textbooks is a pure spot market, characterized by complete information and atomistic price taking. Labor Market Intermediaries (LMIs) are entities or institutions that interpose themselves between workers and firms to facilitate, inform, or regulate how workers are matched to firms, how work is accomplished, and how conflicts are resolved. Labor market information is not usually complete or symmetric, workers are not typically commodities, firms are not always price takers, and in general, there may be scope for third parties—LMIs, in particular—to intercede both to improve the operation of the labor market and to profit from its imperfections. Despite widely heralded advances in the technology of job matching, LMIs will continue to arise to address, ameliorate, and exploit the imperfect environment in which workers and employers interact.