The brave new world of unstable jobs hiding in plain sight: A reply to Murphy and Turner
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article Employment stability and decent work published in the Journal of Industrial Relations by Murphy and Turner presents evidence forming the basis of a claim that job instability has not increased in Ireland between 1998 and 2021. This contrasts with a rich literature in industrial relations and the sociology of work and organizations, which documents the fundamental transformation of employment relationships since the 1990s toward greater insecurity. In this response paper, I question the empirical foundations of Murphy and Turner's claims. Analyzing the same data set used in their study, I provide clear evidence that an increase in job instability consistent with the precarious work literature has been hiding in plain sight. I also engage with their efforts at theorizing the nature of the recent transformation of employment relationships in Ireland specifically, and in Liberal Market Economies more broadly. In doing so, I suggest research avenues that go beyond a polarized debate in whether or not job instability has increased in order to contribute to a more complex understanding of contemporary changes in career trajectories.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".