Contemporary Social Science

Beyond Employment and Unemployment: Rethinking Labour Utilisation and Underutilisation

Part-time work, precarious self-employment and variability in work hours, including zero-hours contracts, have become more prevalent in labour markets in many countries (Stamou et al., 2025). In Europe as well as the USA, since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, wages have been more affected by underemployment than unemployment (Bell and Blanchflower, 2021). Consequently, monitoring of labour markets has widened beyond traditional measures of unemployment and employment to include time-based underemployed workers (who want to work more hours) and discouraged workers or the marginally attached who may potentially be available for work.

Together with unemployment, these categories are internationally used to identify labour market availability and hidden capacity (‘slack’) that is important for macroeconomic policy and employer responses to changing patterns of in-labour demand (Houston and Lindsay, 2025). However, as repeatedly shown, aggregate measures of levels of ‘slack’ reveal little about the contributing factors. For example, while unemployment follows the economic cycle, the ‘other’ forms of labour underutilisation, although also connected to the economic situation, are more stable over time seemingly reacting to other factors than the economic cycle (MacDonald, 2019; Eurostat. 2025).

This Special Issue adopts labour under/utilisation as a framework for capturing the increasing complexities and imbalances in contemporary labour markets that create inadequate employment (Baum et al., 2008). The key underlying argument is that inadequate employment cannot be understood through analysing, for example, unemployment or underemployment alone (Rodriguez Hernandez, 2021). The existing fragmentation of employment situations calls for a renewed attempt to make connections between (a) the diversity of individual responses to low demand in hours and in certain skills and (b) high fluidity in labour markets.

We refer to labour utilisation as employment both at the extensive margin (employment rate) and intensive margin (hours worked) while labour underutilisation encompasses workers whose demand for employment is unmet fully or partially, including the underemployed (time- or skills-based), the unemployed, the marginally attached, the discouraged, NEETs, and those holding multiple jobs or doing self-employed work on the side. Some labour market statuses may be a starting point, a transitional stage or an ongoing process characterised by constrained employment opportunities (Ralston et al., 2016).

The growing literature on underemployment has shown that being underemployed is more complex than simply wanting to work more hours. Because of local labour demand in certain sectors and occupations, and the individual costs of mobility, people may be pushed into jobs in which their skills are underutilised and their work under-rewarded (Hane-Weijman, 2021). Time-based underemployment may also lead people to hold more than one job or to take up self-employed work alongside a job in the waged and salaried sector. However, the literature on multiple jobholding has rarely developed connections with the literatures on labour utilisation and underemployment.

Bringing together underemployment and multiple jobholding using a labour under/utilisation framework aids understanding of the individual characteristics and contextual factors that are driving unmet demands in terms of hours, skills, living wages and job security. Using a multidimensional framework of labour under/utilisation also enables connections to be made between the more commonly recognised forms of underutilised labour (e.g. time-based underemployed workers) and other forms of marginal labour market attachment including NEET status and economic inactivity.

Inadequate employment is associated not only with individual characteristics, health and family background but also with regional and local economic and employment conditions (Houston et al., 2025; Bacher et al., 2017; Livanos and Zangelidis, 2012). However, insights from the limited body of research on the regional determinants of labour utilisation remain fragmented, as non-spatial approaches continue to dominate the field.

This Special Issue therefore welcomes papers that explore the multidimensional and regional perspectives of labour utilisation and underutilisation to advance understanding of the extent, drivers, and lived experiences of inadequate employment, as well as their implications for policy and practice. We are particularly interested in the following (non-exhaustive) topics:

• Different forms of underemployment,
• Different forms of multiple employment including multiple jobholding, moonlighting and side hustles,
• NEET, young people and labour utilisation,
• New measures of labour utilisation and underutilisation in contemporary labour markets,
• Discovering labour utilisation and underutilisation in administrative data,
• Longitudinal and dynamic perspectives on inadequate employment and insecurity,
• Contextual and regional factors of labour under/utilisation and inadequate employment,
• Gender, intersectionality and labour under/utilisation,
• Precariousness, precarious self-employment and gig work.

We invite submissions across all fields of social science, economics, geography and management studies as we are particularly interested in developing new interdisciplinary and integrated perspectives on labour utilisation, underutilisation and inadequate employment. Conceptual, theoretical and empirical submissions are all welcome, including qualitative and quantitative and regional or city-level case studies.