David Marsden Best Paper Prize 2024

Jury Members: Uschi Backes-Gellner, Wenzel Matiaske, Héloïse Petit

Preliminary remarks
The call for entries for a prize in memory of David Marsden was a success in both quantitative and qualitative terms. We received a total of 158 applications, including 100 full papers, which had to be reviewed. Nearly half were thematically suitable. Among those, 13 were very good papers, in our view, thematically appropriate and related to David Marsden’s work and perspective. We would like to emphasize that Karen Shire in particular was a great help for the pre-selection work.
In an online meeting of the prize committee, we discussed the papers on the shortlist and several others. In view of the high quality and originality of the papers, the selection was not easy.
Furthermore, the studies cover a wide range of topics: globalization and value chains, labor discipline and central bank policy, the use of robots, the role of works councils, education and equal opportunities, are just some of the keywords that illustrate the range of topics. Methodologically, too, the entire breadth of social science methodology was found among the ones on the shortlist, from econometric analyses of administrative data, over field and laboratory experiments to interviews and qualitative case studies. We are sure that David Marsden would (also) have welcomed the methodological diversity if all these papers had been submitted to his and our network.

The prize
It is in the nature of things that one prize has to be awarded at the end of a competition. This year’s prize was awarded to a team of researchers whose study deals with the current topic of the institutional design of labor markets in increasingly digitalized economies. This is a topic that will occupy us for a long time to come and is therefore highly relevant in terms of social and labor market policy. In addition, a gap in the research on platforms and the associated forms of work is being addressed and at the same time closed to some extent.
In their study, “Neither employment, nor self-employment”, Sara Maric (Johannes Kepler University Linz, first author), Laura Thäter (Johannes Kepler University Linz), and Elke Schüßler (Leuphana University Lüneburg), analyze the instability of platform-based work systems in the professional crowd work sector. To do so, they take up David Marsden’s theory of labor relations and specify the economic, legal and psychological levels of labor relations for platform work that David distinguishes. Empirically, the work is based on interviews and a self-collected, extensive set of secondary material in the context of two platforms in Austria and Germany. The carefully prepared combination of materials provides “dense descriptions” of the power of platforms in shaping relationships and the interests and resources of freelancers. It also examines the beginnings of
regulation and organization by the state and trade unions. The authors develop a well-argued analysis that is also a pleasure to read.
Like every outstanding study, this one also points to something more. The force of the platforms’ attack on the standard legal form of employees, even outside the highly skilled labor segment, remains a topic for research. Maric, Thäter, and Schuessler’s work will be referred to here.

To emphasize
As noted, we had a number of high-quality studies to choose from. We would like to mention one in particular. This work draws on another of David Marsden’s guiding assumptions – the relevance of the institutional context but is less closely related to David Marsden’s theorizing and work. The team of authors Guendalina Anzolin (Cambridge), Chiara Benassi (Bologna), and Armanda Cetrulo (Pisa), in their paper “Industrial relations and firm-level innovation. A comparative analysis of establishment data in Germany and Italy”, address the classic question of whether trade union influence at company level inhibits or stimulates innovation. While in the typical Anglo-Saxon literature the predominant opinion is that employee influence proves to be an obstacle for innovation, in a more European context there are different arguments and findings that come to the opposite conclusion, both at the macro level and at the meso level of the company. However, the European institutions prove to be anything but homogeneous. The empirical part of the paper is based on secondary data from Italy and Germany and compares the institutional regulations – collective agreements, contracts at company level and the existence of works councils – with each other.
Whereas in international comparative analyses, cultural factors are all too often used ad hoc to explain the differences in the “country dummy”, a careful and well-written analysis of the institutional context is presented here. This is remarkable and exemplary for other comparative country analyses of industrial relations.

Postscript
We warmly congratulate Sara Maric, Laura Thäter, and Elke Schüßler. We thank all participants for their submissions and the opportunity to study their papers in more detail. We have learnt a lot.

A Note from the Network G Coordinators
The David Marsden Best Paper Prize was initiated by Network G, Labor Markets, Education, and Human Resource Management, and accepted submissions in 2022 and 2023 only from Network G.
In 2024 for the first time, and following the suggestion of the SASE Executive Council, the David Marsden Best Paper Prize was opened to all SASE networks, and submissions were received from all SASE networks and nine Mini-Conferences in 2024.
The decision to open submissions to all SASE networks led to an unanticipated high number of submissions. As a result, we were not able to complete the preparatory work for the jury in time for the 2024 meetings in Limerick. We thank the jury members for their patience and efficient review of the submissions. While we are making the award in 2024, we plan to honor the winner and the mentioned paper at the awards ceremony of the 2025 meetings in Montreal. We will continue to solicit submissions for the prize from the entire SASE community.
The prize-winning paper in 2024 was submitted to Network G; the mentioned paper was submitted to Network E.
From 2024, and for the next five years, the prize is being funded by the Socio-Economic Review and the German Journal of Human Resource Management. We thank both journals for their generous support.

Eunmi Mun, Martin Schneider and Karen Shire, Coordinators, Network G in 2024