Through a series of studies, the overarching aim of this book is to investigate if and how the digitalization/digital transformation process affects various welfare services provided by the public sector, and the ensuing implications thereof. Ultimately, this book seeks to understand if it is conceivable for digital advancement to result in the creation of private/non-governmental alternatives to welfare services, possibly in a manner that transcends national boundaries. This study also investigates the possible ramifications of technological development for the public sector and the Western welfare society at large. This book takes its point of departure from the 2016 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report that targets specific public service areas in which government needs to adopt new strategies not to fall behind. Specifically, this report emphasizes the focus on digitalization of health care/social care, education, and protection services, including the use of assistive technologies referred to as "digital welfare." Hence, this book explores the factors potentially leading to whether state actors could be overrun by other non-governmental actors, disrupting the current status quo of welfare services. The book seeks to provide an innovative, enriching, and controversial take on society at large and how various aspects of the public sector can be, and are, affected by the ongoing digitalization process in a way that is not covered by extant literature on the market. This book takes its point of departure in Sweden given the fact that Sweden is one of the most digitalized countries in Europe, according to the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), making it a pertinent research case. However, as digitalization transcends national borders, large parts of the subject matter take on an international angle. This includes cases from several other countries around Europe as well as the United States.

Mass youth unemployment is now endemic and almost ubiquitous in the global north and south alike. This book offers an original and challenging interpretation of the ways in which young people's unemployment and general non-participation is becoming marginalised and criminalised. It re-examines the causes and consequences of non-participation from an unusually wide range of disciplines, using an innovative theorisation of the fast-changing relationships between extended studentship, welfare provision, labour market restructuring and crime. This approach offers an important contribution for understanding what it means for young people to be socially re-positioned and economically excluded in increasingly unequal societies, in and beyond the UK.

In the last twenty years, Italy has undergone significant changes in the functioning of the labor market and industrial relations. This makes it an excellent case study for evaluating labor market practices and possibilities for reform. This book brings together leading Italian and European scholars to trace the evolution of labor bargaining and industrial relations from both a theoretical and empirical perspective.

Approximately half of all migrants today are female. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which attention to gender is moving debates away from old paradigms, such as the push/pull motivation which used to dominate the field of migration studies. The authors consider women's experience of migration, especially in long distance, transnational moves. They examine the extent to which labour migration is a social and strategic decision for women.

Uzbekistan is the world's fifth largest producer and second largest exporter of cotton in the world, and unlike other countries where child labor is common, it is the totalitarian state of Uzbekistan's official policy to employ children. This book discusses the use of child labor in cotton cultivation in Uzbekistan following the fall of the Soviet Union, drawing on an extensive field investigation and in-depth interviews with human rights activists, government officials, and social workers.

Since 1958, the economic theory of the participatory or labor-managed firm and its performance compared to capitalist firms, has exploded into a vast literature comprising several hundred articles. Indeed, as one early contributor has recently remarked, the theory has become a 'new discipline' in itself. Producer Cooperatives and Labor-Managed Systems provides, for the first time, a careful selection of the most significant theoretical and empirical contributions to this burgeoning field, and promises to become a valuable research tool and reference volume.

This book offers a timely exploration of how climate change manifests in the global workplace. It draws together accounts of workers, their work, and the politics of resistance in order to enable us to better understand how the impacts of climate change are structured by the economic and social processes of labour. Focusing on nine empirically grounded cases of labour under climate change, this volume links the tools and methods of critical labour studies to key debates over climate change adaptation and mitigation in order to highlight the active nature of struggles in the climate-impacted workplace. Spanning cases including commercial agriculture in Turkey, labour unions in the UK, and brick kilns in Cambodia, this collection offers a novel lens on the changing climate, showing how both the impacts of climate change and adaptations to it emerge through the prism of working lives. Drawing together scholars from anthropology, political economy, geography, and development studies, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change adaptation, labour studies, and environmental justice. More generally, it will be of interest to anybody seeking to understand how the changing climate is changing the terms, conditions, and politics of the global workplace.

How can we account for the dynamic growth of East and Southeast Asian countries? Much of the debate has turned on the question of the 'state' versus the 'market' as exclusive (and often competing) explanations of the successful performance of individual countries. This book explores the distinctively interdependent nature of the East and Southeast Asian experience. As firms create a regional organization of production, the growing interdependence of national labour markets is one major outcome.

In January 2005, the German government enacted a substantial reform of the welfare system, the so-called "Hartz IV reform." This book evaluates key characteristics of the reform from a microeconometric perspective. It investigates whether a centralized or decentralized organization of welfare administration is more successful to integrate welfare recipients into employment. Moreover, it analyzes the employment effects of an intensified use of benefit sanctions and evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of the most frequently assigned Active Labor Market Programs. The analyses have a focus on immigrants, who are highly over-represented in the German welfare system. "

London's Global Office Economy: From Clerical Factory to Digital Hub is a timely and comprehensive study of the office from the very beginnings of the workplace to its post-pandemic future. The book takes the reader on a journey through five ages of the office, encompassing sixteenth-century coffee houses and markets, eighteenth-century clerical factories, the corporate offices emerging in the nineteenth, to the digital and network offices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While offices might appear ubiquitous, their evolution and role in the modern economy are among the least explained aspects of city development. One-third of the workforce uses an office; and yet the buildings themselves - their history, design, construction, management and occupation - have received only piecemeal explanation, mainly in specialist texts. This book examines everything from paper clips and typewriters, to design and construction, to workstyles and urban planning to explain the evolution of the 'office economy'. Using London as a backdrop, Rob Harris provides built environment practitioners, academics, students and the general reader with a fascinating, illuminating and comprehensive perspective on the office. Readers will find rich material linking fields that are normally treated in isolation, in a story that weaves together the pressures exerting change on the businesses that occupy office space with the motives and activities of those who plan, supply and manage it. Our unfolding understanding of offices, the changes through which they have passed, the nature of office work itself and its continuing evolution is a fascinating story and should appeal to anyone with an interest in contemporary society and its relationship with work.

This book explores student education transition and employability negotiation experiences in various contexts. It explores determinants of student transitions at three levels including macro, meso and micro but focuses on exploring affordances, constraints and strategies at the micro level. The framework underpinning the explorations at the micro level covers a range of different forms of capital including human, culture, social, identity, psychological and agentic. The book is unique in three ways. First, it consists of chapters about critical discussion, empirical research and practical guidance about student transition experiences. The critical discussion and empirical research chapters explore and obtain insights about the complexity of student transitions and develop conceptual frameworks that guide the development of applicable practices. The book is, therefore, a useful resource for policy makers, institutions, academics, professionals and students. Second, it provides insights about how student transitions are determined by a range of factors at different levels. These insights extend discussions about student transitions in the current literature which have mainly explored impacts of policies, institutional programmes and human capital. Finally, it is international in focus because it draws on research with different cohorts of students and graduates in different contexts. Insights provided in the book are, therefore, rich, diverse and comparative.

This book examines the long-term impact of redundancy on a workforce who lost their jobs when a Sheffield steel company closed one of its plants. The authors set the key findings of a large number of detailed interviews in the context of the discussion of economic decline, deindustrialization, redundancy, unemployment and employment policy. They also analyse current debates about the impact of recession, the role of trade unions and possible solutions to structural unemployment. "After Redundancy" provides valuable insights into the impact of recession on a workforce accustomed to relative affluence. It also records interesting shifts in attitudes towards trade unions and the Labour Party. The book is intended for second or third year undergraduates and researchers in sociology of work, sociology of Britain, industrial sociology, industrial relations, labour studies and employment policy studies.

This book argues that economic activity in the public sphere now underwrites private corporations, and rejects rigid adherence to traditional economic theories that no longer apply. Adam Smith's widely used "merchant's model" assumes that most investment is private, when in fact research demonstrates that public investment in the workforce through education and training far outweighs the private sector, and does not account for the growing presence of consensual pricing, the diversification of modern businesses, or the increasing internal authoritarianism of globalizing companies. With de facto public support for these adaptations undermining the universally presumed economic model, private corporations are able to increase their profits while misrepresenting the investment of their own global labor forces. This book suggests an "economy of laws" solution that balances the needed degree of central investment planning with the continuation of our pluralist economy of largely autonomous firms, principally by extending the full rights of citizens into the workplace itself.

Global Talent seeks to examine the utility of skilled foreigners beyond their human capital value by focusing on their social capital potential, especially their role as transnational bridges between host and home countries. Gi-Wook Shin and Joon Nak Choi build on an emerging stream of research that conceptualizes global labor mobility as a positive-sum game in which countries and businesses benefit from building ties across geographic space, rather than the zero-sum game implied by the "global war for talent" and "brain drain" metaphors. The book empirically demonstrates its thesis by examination of the case of Korea: a state archetypical of those that have been embracing economic globalization while facing a demographic crisis-and one where the dominant narrative on the recruitment of skilled foreigners is largely negative. It reveals the unique benefits that foreign students and professionals can provide to Korea, by enhancing Korean firms' competitiveness in the global marketplace and by generating new jobs for Korean citizens rather than taking them away. As this research and its key findings are relevant to other advanced societies that seek to utilize skilled foreigners for economic development, the arguments made in this book offer insights that extend well beyond the Korean experience.

Full Employment and Growth presents James Tobin's unique modern Keynesian slant on the major monetary, fiscal and international policy issues of the 1990s.More than twenty recent essays collected together in this volume address the major contemporary issues of macroeconomic policy, especially in America. Usually dissenting from the orthodoxies of the day, both liberal and conservative, Professor Tobin offers a common sense, unhysterical view of public deficits and debt, speaks for pragmatic monetary policies, argues against protectionism and favours slowing down the speculative movement of funds between currencies. The author also presents his own suggestions for reform of social security and health care. Again and again, Professor Tobin warns against blind faith that the markets will always produce optimal results. All those interested in the application of economic analysis and argument to the salient policy issues of our time will find these essays eminently readable and will appreciate the clear ways in which the power of economic analysis is explained and used.

In order to bridge the lack of information on child labour and to stimulate policy interventions the IREWOC Foundation (International Research on Working Children) has undertaken action-based research in the field of the worst forms of child labour in Latin America. In 2006 and 2007 a comparative study on the Worst Forms of Child Labour was carried out in 7 different economic sectors in Bolivia, Guatemala and Peru focussing on the hazardous worst forms. The central research objectives were as follows: * to map the working and living situations of children who are working in specific economic sectors and what the consequences of this work are for their physical and emotional wellbeing. * to investigate the reasons why these children are working in these worst forms sectors. The research results were expected to give important insights into the currently polarised debate between those who state child labour is above all related to cultural considerations and those who state that economic reasons are fundamental to the phenomena of child labour. * to map the existing policy initiatives for child labourers in the worst forms and to identify the best practices. In the face of challenges imposed by achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set by the UN, specific attention was paid to educational initiatives. Is education a useful tool in combating child labour, and vice versa, is child labour a significant obstacle to achieving universal primary education? Although the evidence from the various cases discussed in the book illustrate positive trends in terms of the worst forms of child labor, thousands of children were still found to be engaged in activities that form a direct threat to their physical, mental and moral health and jeopardize their education. This book proposes several practical recommendations for possible interventions.

The literature on gender and professions shows that professional careers continue to be impacted by gender - albeit with important differences among professions and countries. Much less researched is the issue of the significance of gender and age-cohort or generation to professional work. Gender, Age and Inequality in the Professions explores men's and women's experiences of professional work and careers through an intersectional lens by focusing on the intersection of gender and age. The chapters explore different professions - including Medicine, Nursing, Law, Academia, Information Technology and Engineering - in different Western countries, in the present and over time. Through original research, and critical re-analysis of existing research, each of the chapters explores the significance of gender and age-cohort or generation to professional work, with particular attention to professionals just entering professional careers, those building professional careers, and comparisons of men and women in professions across generational cohorts. The book contributes to literature on inequalities in the professions by demonstrating the ways in which gender and age converge to confer privilege and produce disadvantage, and the ways in which gender inequality is reproduced, and disrupted, through the activities of professionals on the job. The book constitutes a departure point for future research in terms of theoretical perspectives and empirical findings on how gendered and age-related processes are produced and reproduced in particular organisational, professional and socio-cultural contexts. To enhance generational understanding, relationships and collaboration in educational institutions, organisations and professions, the book ends with a section on policy recommendations for educators, professionals, professional organisations as well as policy- and decision-makers. This book will also appeal to students and researchers in the fields of Sociology, Gender Studies, Organisational and Management Studies, Law, Medicine, Engineering and Information Technology as well as related disciplines.

This book presents a probabilistic approach to studying the fundamental role of labor in capitalist economies and develops a non-deterministic theoretical framework for the foundations of political economy. By applying the framework to real-world data, the authors offer new insights into the dynamics of growth, wages, and accumulation in capitalist development around the globe. The book demonstrates that a probabilistic political economy based on labor inputs enables us to describe central organizing principles in modern capitalism. Starting from a few basic assumptions, it shows that the working time of employees is the main regulating variable for determining strict numerical limits on the rate of economic growth, the range of wages, and the pace of accumulation under the present global economic system. This book will appeal to anyone interested in how the capitalist mode of production works and its inherent limitations; in particular, it will be useful to scholars and students of Marxian economics. "Emmanuel Farjoun and Moshe Machover, follow up their pathbreaking work on the application of statistical physics methods to political economy in this book with David Zachariah, in which they develop methods for making educated and structured estimates of stylized facts applicable to capitalist economies. There's a lot for economists and anyone interested in the political economy of capitalism to learn from their reasoning on these issues, including their novel and challenging suggestion of bounds on the rates of increase of use-value productivity of labor, and on the range of variation of the wage share." Duncan K. Foley, Leo Model Professor of Economics, New School for Social Research

Today’s economics offers us a far too narrow perspective on the role that paid work plays in our lives, as individuals and as a society. This book examines the urgent workplace challenges we’re facing today, from automation to AI and climate change, with an interdisciplinary and historical analysis that challenges and broadens the scope of existing economic literature. Exploring the current economic proposals to address these issues, it advocates for a more egalitarian and sustainable future that builds workers’ protections into the very fabric of our economic systems. This is a resounding call for greater economic social justice and equality at work and a valuable resource for social scientists from fields like heterodox economics, business and sociology.

First published in 1987. The reform of the welfare state in the United Kingdom is high on the agenda of all political parties and the proposals for reform, both official and private, are numerous. In this book, Professor Beenstock and his colleagues took a comprehensive account of the social security of the 1980s, as well as the tax system, as it had evolved over the Beveridge era and how it affected our incentive to work. The book describes the theory of labour supply decisions in their relationship to the tax benefit system. It illustrates how tax and social security arrangements affected labour supply decisions as well as monitoring how these decisions had evolved over the post-war period. It also considers retirement decisions in the UK as well as the government's plans to reform the social security system.

First published in 1997. Politicians of all shades argue that the labour market should be more flexible and workers more mobile. But what does this mean in reality? How flexible and mobile are workers likely to be? Is there an ideological base to the language of flexibility? These are some of the issues covered in this book. Data from a large factory and office is used to argue that the macro labour market consists of non-competitive work groups where strongly held views and values represent a substantial barrier to simplistic definitions of flexibility and mobility. The analysis takes place in three chapters, dealing with recruitment for work, skills used in work and perceptions of different types of work and workers. The findings suggest that non-economic forces (such as institutional, social, historical and political phenomena) strongly influence the creation of separate work cultures. Furthermore, it is argued that the reason for differences between work groups being articulated in a defensive fashion reflects the climate of fear in the labour market, where flexibility is associated with a loss of the (often limited) power, control and influence workers have over their position in the labour market.

First published in 1987. This volume explores the inter-war unemployment problem and the development of economic and social policy in relation to that problem. Contemporary policies and levels of unemployment can only be compared with the inter-war period and in recent years economists and other commentators have increasingly turned their attention to the 1930s. This book is written by a group of expert historians and policy analysts who have been in the forefront of recent research. In particular, new insights into economic policy which have come from the release of cabinet and departmental papers at The Public Record Office are revealed. Recent economic theory is also taken into account and the findings question established views on many grounds. New economic lessons from the 1930s are suggested and some astonishing similarities to the 1980s and demonstrated. This work will be essential reading for students of modern British history and economic and social history as well as economic policy and government and politics.

First published in 1984. This book presents a great deal of research findings, new advances in theory and comprehensive overviews of key aspects of labour economics. It examines the latest trends in the field and assesses the impact of recent policies together with the likely impact of proposed policies. This study covers a wide range of topics but concentrates in particular on questions connected with the economics of trade unions which is a major area of concern for labour economists.

First published in 1982. Unemployment was a major scourge of the advanced capitalist countries in the 1930s, but in the golden age of post-war expansion which lasted until 1973, it had seemingly been vanquished by enlightened economic policy. Since 1973, unemployment has re-emerged as a major problem, along with accelerated inflation and problems of structural adjustment imposed by soaring energy prices. The rise in European unemployment came in two surges as a result of the generalised recessions of 1974-5 and 1980-1. At the beginning of 1982 unemployment in the European Community was running close to 10% of the labour force compared with a 'norm' of under 2% in the 1960s. These abrupt and serious changes in the labour market have created major new dilemmas for economic policy and have stirred significant and acrimonious theoretical controversy. For this reason it is useful to analyse the policy issues and the academic debate in a comparative perspective. The present volume contains three comparative papers on the employment policy discussions in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK as well as papers examining the theoretical adequacy of Keynesian, monetarist, structuralist and Marxist reactions to the new issues. The papers are all accompanies by a critique from the discussants.

First published in 1981. This book reports on a decade of research into the effects of taxation on the supply of labour. In addition to their work in making labour supply estimates, the study explores a number of the ways labour supply estimates can be used. When budget constraints are non-linear it is not possible to estimate the effects of (tax) or other policy changes from knowledge of labour supply elasticities alone, and it is necessary to re-estimate the original model used to derive the estimates. The implications of labour supply estimates for the study of inequality and optimal taxation are considered. Macro-economic models of the economy typically omit labour supply functions or include functions which are inconsistent with micro-economic work on labour supply. This book will appeal to academic economists, senior students and policy-makers in the field of public finance and labour economics, who will find much of interest from both the theoretical and policy standpoints.