Quality of work research: a methodological review

Abstract

The research on quality of work experienced remarkable resurgence during the noughties, partially as a result of the inclusion of the topic in European and international policy-making agendas. In the second half of the decade, the global economic crisis largely redirected the attention to the quantitative dimensions of labour market policy. Nonetheless, academic production on job quality has maintained its vitality over the years. As in many other relevant research topics, consensus over the conceptualization and measurement of quality of work has been difficult to achieve among academics and policy-makers. Apart from the lack of a commonly agreed definition, measurement also tends to be varied and supported by different methods. In fact, both academics and policy-makers claim the need for a more consensual definition as a way of improving the comparability between countries, sectors of activity or occupations. In this article, we compare the methodological designs of a selected group of quality of work studies to identify the degree to which there are significant discrepancies within the academic community and to assess progress regarding the challenge of conceptualizing and measuring quality of work. The article offers a review of the most-cited articles indexed at the Scopus database between 2000 and 2015, and a comprehensive analysis over the question of conceptualization and measurement.