This book takes a fresh look at professions - their history and sociology, and at the nature both of professional practice and professional competence. Based on research by the authors across 20 varied professions, the book offers an innovative model of professional competence and throws new light on how competence is acquired. It identifies a range of informal learning processes, which seem to be just as important to becoming competent as formal training. As a result, the authors suggest a paradigm of professional development that combines informal and formal learning and also brings together academic and competence-based approaches. Professions, Competence and Informal Learning provides practical advice to professional developers on programme design as well as tips for individual professionals on how to exploit their informal learning opportunities. It draws on the research to forecast the future skills needs of professionals and suggests how professional development programmes may need to change in response. The book should be of value to anyone who is interested in professional competence, whether as a professional educator or developer, or as an individual professional. It is also potentially of use to trainers and educators in non-professional areas, especially those with an interest in informal learning.

In this book, Mireya Loza sheds new light on the private lives of migrantmen who participated in the Bracero Program (1942-1964), a binationalagreement between the United States and Mexico that allowed hundredsof thousands of Mexican workers to enter this country on temporary workpermits. While this program and the issue of temporary workers has longbeen politicized on both sides of the border, Loza argues that the prevailingromanticized image of braceros as a family-oriented, productive, legal workforcehas obscured the real, diverse experiences of the workers themselves.Focusing on underexplored aspects of workers' lives-such as their transnationalunion-organizing efforts, the sexual economies of both hetero andqueer workers, and the ethno-racial boundaries among Mexican indigenousbraceros-Loza reveals how these men defied perceived political, sexual, andracial norms. Basing her work on an archive of more than 800 oral histories from theUnited States and Mexico, Loza is the first scholar to carefully differentiatebetween the experiences of mestizo guest workers and the many Mixtec,Zapotec, Purhepecha, and Mayan laborers. In doing so, she captures themyriad ways these defiant workers responded to the intense discriminationand exploitation of an unjust system that still persists today.

This volume presents Richard Blundell's outstanding research on the modern economic analysis of labor markets and public policy reforms. Professor Blundell's hugely influential work has enhanced greatly our understanding of how individuals' behavior on the labor market respond to taxation and social policy influence. Edited by IZA, this volume brings together the author's key papers, some co-authored and some unpublished, with new introductions and an epilogue. It covers some of the main research insights in the study of labor supply. The question of how individuals adapt their behavior in response to policy changes is one of the most investigated topics in empirical labor and public economics. Do people reduce their working hours if governments decide to raise taxes? Might they even withdraw completely from the labor market? Labor supply estimations are extensively used for various policy analyses and economic research. Labor supply elasticities are key information when evaluating tax-benefit policy reforms and their effect on tax revenue, employment, and redistribution. The chapters cover empirical and theoretical developments as well as applications to tax and welfare reform, and each represents a substantive research contribution from Blundell's publications in top research outlets.

Discrimination's dynamic nature means that no single theory, method, data or study should be relied upon to assess its magnitude, causes, or remedies. Despite some gains in our understanding, these remain active areas of debate among researchers, practitioners and policymakers. The specially commissioned papers in this volume, all by distinguished contributors, present the full range of issues related to this complex and challenging problem. Part 1 explores innovations in methods and data collection that help to provide richer descriptions of inequality. Part 2 reviews empirical evidence on discrimination that people with disabilities, older workers and gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals face. Although discrimination among these groups is not new, this Handbook shows that economists are beginning to more fully document their experiences. Part 3 presents a balanced discussion of anti-discrimination policies and the impact of affirmative action. The methods and data chapters are particularly designed to encourage researchers to utilize the new approaches and develop new data sources. Accessible and comprehensive, the Handbook is the seminal reference on the economics of discrimination for academic and professional economists, graduate students, advanced undergraduates, practitioners, policymakers, and funders of social science research.

Victory at Home is at once an institutional history of the federal War Manpower Commission and a social history of the southern labor force within the commission's province. Charles D. Chamberlain explores how southern working families used America's rapid wartime industrialization and an expanded federal presence to gain unprecedented economic, social, and geographic mobility in the chronically poor region. Chamberlain looks at how war workers, black leaders, white southern elites, liberal New Dealers, nonsouthern industrialists, and others used and shaped the federal war mobilization effort to fill their own needs. He shows, for instance, how African American, Latino, and white laborers worked variously through churches, labor unions, federal agencies, the NAACP, and the Urban League, using a wide variety of strategies from union organizing and direct action protest to job shopping and migration. Throughout, Chamberlain is careful not to portray the southern wartime labor scene in monolithic terms. He discusses, for instance, conflicts between racial groups within labor unions and shortfalls between the War Manpower Commission's national directives and their local implementation. An important new work in southern economic and industrial history, Victory at Home also has implications for the prehistory of both the civil rights revolution and the massive resistance movement of the 1960s. As Chamberlain makes clear, African American workers used the coalition of unions, churches, and civil rights organizations built up during the war to challenge segregation and disenfranchisement in the postwar South.

Organisations and the nature of work have undergone fundamental changes in recent decades. At the same time, the traditional family pattern in Europe is being challenged by the growing number of dual-income families, and by the rise of women's employment. The central aim of this book is to consider to what extent changes in organisations and in the nature of jobs are compatible with the need, increasingly expressed by employees, for greater integration between work and family life. The book questions what sort of dilemmas modern and future employees face, in terms of shaping their careers and organising their lives at home. The authors formulate answers to these problematic questions by shedding light on relevant developments in the European labour markets, the European workplaces, in (flexible) working patterns, changing preferences for working hours and in gender relations at work. With a focus on future developments, this book will be of interest to labour market researchers and social policymakers in Europe, and also students in the social sciences, management (HRM) and social policy.

Labour Supply and Incentives to Work in Europe highlights recent developments in the labour supply in Europe and gives a detailed assessment of their link with economic policies and labour market institutions. Despite major changes in European labour supply during the past few decades, the existing literature still lacks a comprehensive study of the relationship between labour supply and labour market institutions from a macro perspective. The contributors, themselves from a variety of academic disciplines and backgrounds, consider aspects of labour supply such as incentives to work, determinants of labour force participation and new forms of employment relationships. Each original and specially written chapter has its own discussion chapter to follow it. The book ends with a valuable panel discussion on the topic of labour supply in an enlarged Europe. This book will be read with interest by scholars of economics and labour economics in particular, as well as those researching industrial relations.

The position of low skilled workers in the labour market has deteriorated significantly over the past three decades. What has caused this deterioration in low skilled labour demand and what can explain the different labour market responses throughout the OECD? Mark Sanders addresses these questions and evaluates proposed policies to improve upon the present situation and prevent further deterioration in the future. The author develops a theoretical framework that produces two hypotheses to explain the shift in relative demand as well as the different ways in which this shift has manifested itself. The framework is then extended by introducing unemployment, and additional hypotheses are proposed to explain the main EU-US differences. The dynamics thus uncovered yield somewhat unorthodox policy implications on income-, labour market and technology policies in Europe and the US. This comprehensive book will appeal to both scholars and academics, whilst graduate and PhD-students looking for an accessible introduction to modelling the dynamics of technical change and its interactions with the labour market will find it of great interest.

Overeducation is one of the most important mechanisms for labour market adjustment when there is an excess supply of highly skilled workers. However, there is much debate about the consequences of this phenomena and the short- and long-term effects for both the overeducated worker and the economy as a whole. This book contributes to our understanding of recent developments in the research on overeducation by providing a detailed overview of the pertinent theoretical and policy issues. The authors study evidence that a substantial number of workers in Europe are overqualified and challenge the wisdom of greater investments in the education of the workforce. Although it may appear a waste of resources if many workers have a higher level of education than their job requires, others argue that overeducation may actually facilitate the development of a competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in Europe. They move on to look at labour mobility and skill mismatches in the labour market, and examine the impact of overeducation on earnings. They also address the somewhat controversial issue of how to measure employee overqualification, and propose an income ratio based on the difference between actual and potential earnings as an effective approach. Finally, they look at the effect of overeducation on specific groups in society such as licensed professionals, university graduates and ethnic minorities. Economists, social scientists, and academics interested in labour market theory and policy will find this an insightful and original volume which will make an important addition to the literature on overeducation.

Despite the fact that immigration policy is today one of the most salient political issues in the OECD countries, we know surprisingly little about the factors behind the very different choices countries have made over the last decades when it comes to immigrant admission. Why has the balance between inclusion and exclusion differed so much between countries - and for different categories of migrants? The answer that this book provides is that this is to an important extent a result of how domestic labour market and welfare state institutions have approached the question of inclusion and exclusion, since immigration policy does not stand independent from these central policy areas. By developing and testing an institutional explanation for immigrant admission, this book offers a theoretically informed, and empirically rich, analysis of variation in immigration policy in the OECD countries from the 1980s to the 2000s.

Microsimulation Modelling of Taxation and the Labour Market reports new research on behavioural microsimulation modelling of tax and transfer systems. Its aims are twofold. Firstly, the book discusses the rationale for the basic modelling approach adopted and provides information on econometric methods used to estimate behavioural relationships. Secondly, it describes the Melbourne Institute Tax and Transfer Simulator (MITTS) in detail, explaining its main features, installation and use.After providing a broad review of tax modelling, the authors review alternative approaches to the analysis of labour supply behaviour, discuss the main components of behavioural microsimulation models and present econometric results concerning wage functions and preferences. They go on to provide a detailed description of MITTS, which was constructed by the authors in order to examine the implications of tax reforms in Australia. Microsimulation Modelling of Taxation and the Labour Market will appeal to those with a special interest in the analysis of tax and transfer systems and labour supply behaviour.

Nonlinear Models, Labour Markets and Exchange offers a number of broad introductory surveys in the areas of nonlinear modelling, labour economics and the economic analysis of exchange. This collection of articles consists largely of recently published refereed papers. The early chapters provide an introduction to the analysis of 'chaos and strange attractors' and the use of the very flexible generalised exponential family of frequency distributions in analysing both time series and cross-sectional distributions. The volume then provides syntheses of the theories of internal labour markets, trade union bargaining, and population ageing and its implications. It goes on to survey a range of topics in the broad area of the theory of exchange, which is central to the neoclassical economic model. Finally, the book provides some advice for students who are about to start their first piece of research. It ends with a unique survey of the history of economic analysis. Providing introductory material and syntheses of a wide range of topics, Nonlinear Models, Labour Markets and Exchange will be welcomed by economics academics and researchers interested in labour economics and econometrics.

Innovation is the driving force of the dynamics of regions and cities. Innovation however, is not an autonomous miracle, but is emerging out of knowledge creation and adoption. Thus, knowledge production is at the heart of economic progress. Zoltan Acs offers in this book an overview of the relationship between successful entrepreneurship and knowledge-intensive areas. His ideas form a blend of elements from the new economic geography, the new growth theory and the new innovation economics theory, and provide a thorough analysis of the changing economic landscape in the USA. economic growth at the regional level, and reaches conclusions as to why some regions grow but others decline. While the analysis draws on industrial organization, labour economics, regional science, geography and entrepreneurship, the book focuses on innovation and the growth of cities with the use of endogenous growth theory. long-run regional growth, and explores the issues of how technology and entrepreneurship can foster and promote growth at the regional level.

During the last decade, privatization, understood here as the transfer of state-owned enterprises to the private sector, has become a widespread phenomenon among formerly socialist and mixed economies. It has been touted as a quick route to growth and prosperity in countries suffering from bloated, inefficient, and debt ridden public sectors. The contributors to this book, drawn from a number of social science disciplines, explore the various ways in which privatization programs affect workers in the reforming countries. The book includes an examination of how privatization impacts on labor economically, by changing the level and conditions of employment, as well as its influence on wages, benefits, and social services. A second section looks at the political effects of privatization on workers, focusing on the strength and militancy of trade unions and their relationship to political parties. The essays, written by scholars as well as policy practitioners, cover both post-socialist countries, including Russia, China, and Eastern Europe, and the developing regions - the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Scholars and students in economics and political science as well as policymakers will find this collection a welcome addition to the literature on privatization.

Higher education is beginning to play an increasingly important role in the process of globalization, which promotes information technologies, development and diffusion of innovations and the ability of economies to benefit from rapid shifts in the production of goods, services, and ideas. In this volume the editors have brought together some of the most significant previously published academic papers describing how highly skilled graduate labour impacts on the economy. Topics covered include the economic benefits of higher education, student choice of subject and university, the technology of higher education, empirical research on the cost functions faced by universities, the funding and financing of university education, the market for higher education and how universities compete. In their scholarly introduction, the editors provide an overview of the volume and offer suggestions for future research in this field.

This book is Karl Widerquist's first statement of the "indepentarian" theory of justice, or what he calls "Justice as the Pursuit of Accord" (JPA). It provides five arguments for UBI, one based on the JPA theory of freedom, another based on the JPA theory of property, and three that reply to common objections to UBI. Each of these three turns the argument around using the central concepts in a justification for UBI. Although the central argument is for one specific policy proposal, this book's perspective is much wider, including very basic criticism of social-contract-based and natural-rights-based theories of justice.

The 19th century witnessed an explosion of writing about unproductivity, with the exploits of various idlers, loafers, and "gentlemen of refinement" capturing the imagination o fa country that was deeply ambivalent about its work ethic. Idle Threats documents this American obsession with unproductivity and its potentials, while offering an explanation of the profound significance of idle practices for literary and cultural production. While this fascination with unproductivity memorably defined literary characters from Rip Van Winkle to Bartleby to George Hurstwood, it also reverberated deeply through the entire culture, both as a seductive ideal and as a potentially corrosive threat to upright, industrious American men. Drawing on an impressive array of archival material and multifaceted literary and cultural sources, Idle Threats connects the question of unproductivity to other discourses concerning manhood, the value of art, the allure of the frontier, the usefulness of knowledge, the meaning of individuality, and the experience of time, space, and history. Andrew Lyndon Knighton offers a new way of thinking about the largely unacknowledged "productivity of the unproductive," revealing the incalculable and sometimes surprising ways in which American modernity transformed the relationship between subjects and that which is most intimate to them: their own activity.

Skills are frequently in the news and in the public eye in every country. Stories highlight concerns about education and literacy standards, grades, learning by rote, and university students being unprepared for work, as well as debates surrounding internships and apprenticeships, and social exclusion through skills policy. The recent financial crisis has forced education and training to take a back seat, and has caused an increase in youth unemployment. Skill and skilled work are widely considered important for promoting both prosperity and social justice. But how do we define skill? Skills and Skilled Work brings together multiple perspectives- economics, sociology, management, psychology, and political science- to present an original framework for understanding skills, skilled work, and surrounding policies. Focussing on common themes across countries, it establishes the concept and measurement of skill, and investigates the role of employers, workers, and other social actors. It considers a variety of skill problems and how a social response from the government can be understood. Based on the findings of economics, management science, and theories of social determination, it develops a rationale for social intervention beyond market failure. This book weighs up both the prospects and the limitations of what can be achieved for societies with a better emphasis on skills and skilled work, and it promotes the study of skill in modern economies as a distinct sub-field.

As the world entered the twenty-first century, global skill shortages in many occupations were evident throughout the world. While these were mitigated by a global recession, there is no generally agreed upon method for measuring these shortages. This book discusses various theories for measurement. Using data collected from 19 developed countries in North and Latin America, Europe, and the Pacific region, the authors explore various aspects of skilled labor shortages, develop a methodology of measuring shortages by occupation, and provide estimates of the likelihood of the occurrence of such shortages. They develop labor market indicators which measure the degree of shortage or surplus in different occupations. The study covers as many as 49 occupational groups, although the number varies by country. The indicators are compared to anecdotal reports about shortages in the countries studied as well as correlated with various economic, political and institutional indicators. Some occupations such as CEO's, health professionals and computer scientists were common across many countries studied and part of a global shortage. Scholars, government officials, students and corporate and union representatives concerned with employment, labor and training policies and issues will find the data and analysis in this book a valuable addition to their knowledge.

From grassroots to global activism, the untold story of the world's first domestic workers' movement. Domestic workers exist on the margins of the world labor market. Maids, nannies, housekeepers, au pairs, and other care workers are most often 'off the books,' working for long hours and low pay. They are not afforded legal protections or benefits such as union membership, health care, vacation days, and retirement plans. Many women who perform these jobs are migrants, and are oftentimes dependent upon their employers for room and board as well as their immigration status, creating an extremely vulnerable category of workers in the growing informal global economy. Drawing on over a decade's worth of research, plus interviews with a number of key movement leaders and domestic workers, Jennifer N. Fish presents the compelling stories of the pioneering women who, while struggling to fight for rights in their own countries, mobilized transnationally to enact change. The book takes us to Geneva, where domestic workers organized, negotiated, and successfully received the first-ever granting of international standards for care work protections by the United Nations' International Labour Organization. This landmark victory not only legitimizes the importance of these household laborers' demands for respect and recognition, but also signals the need to consider human rights as a central component of workers' rights. Domestic Workers of the World Unite! chronicles how a group with so few resources could organize and act within the world's most powerful international structures and give voice to the wider global plight of migrants, women, and informal workers. For anyone with a stake in international human and workers' rights, this is a critical and inspiring model of civil society organizing.

While the debate on the impact of globalisation on the organisation of business is well established, its impact on working life has been left relatively untouched. This groundbreaking book attempts to redress this imbalance by examining the effect of globalisation on the institutions, processes and practices of working life in France, Scandinavia and the UK. The contributors examine global trends such as the decentralisation of industrial relations and the revival of neo-liberalism, and discuss them from a theoretical and empirical perspective. They go on to argue that these global trends can really only exist in nationally specific contexts and focus on the changing roles of trade union and labour movements in representing workers' interests. They trace the emergence of new European institutional and political dimensions of working, and attempt to answer the question of how converged, diverged or revised European working practices have become. The book concentrates on various aspects of working life to illustrate the variety of change and complexity and asserts the view that it is not possible to isolate abstract global trends from national, historical and social factors. Indeed, certain phenomena such as politics, gender and culture play an important role, the authors argue, in differentiating national experiences which can superficially appear to be similar global trends. European Working Lives will be of great interest to labour and social economists, industrial sociologists, employment policymakers and trade unions.