Why do ordinary people who used to engage in domestic and leisure activities for free now try to make a profit from them? How and why do people commodify their free time? This book explores the marketization of blogging, cooking, craftwork, gardening, knitting, selling second-hand items, sexcamming, and more generally the economic use of free time. It outlines how the development of web platforms, the current economic context and post-Fordist values can account for this extension of market and labor. Drawing on a range of interviews, ethnographic observations, and quantitative surveys, the contributors question the empowering effects of commodification, with a specific focus on how gender and class inequalities affect the social meanings of extra money. Ultimately, the collective findings demonstrate how commodification pervades even the most mundane social activities. This research will be invaluable to scholars and students with a focus on gender and digital sociology, the sociology of work and labour, and the marketization of leisure.

This book includes a series of papers that mainly discuss the proposition of "double middle-income traps." It analyzes various perspectives of middle-income groups of Russia and China including employment, education, consumption, mobility, social insurance, social values and identity, social and political participation. This book further indicates that the expansion of middle-income groups plays an important role in promoting mass consumption, maintaining continuous and stable economic growth, and overcoming the double middle-income traps. The middle class and middle-income group generally owns higher economic capital and cultural capital and is proved to be the main strength in expanding consumption by many empirical studies. However, the middle class and middle-income group has currently encountered hindrance to upward mobility, life quality, social security and class identity, which prevent the expansion of the middle-income group and improvement of social structure. Through comparing the middle-income groups of these two countries, this book gives us a panoramic view of their social and economic condition. Successfully combining theory and concrete practical guidelines, the book offers a valuable resource for all those active in this dynamic field. The book is important for students, scholars, researchers and professionals in economic and social science fields.

This book deals with the widespread economic and financial crime issues of corruption, the shadow economy and money laundering. It investigates both the theoretical and practical aspects of these crimes, identifying their effects on economic, social and political life. This book presents these causes and effects with a state of the art review and with recent empirical research. It compares the international and transnational aspects of these economic and financial crimes through discussion and critical analysis. This volume will be of interest to researchers and policy makers working to study and prevent economic and financial crime, white collar crime, and organized crime.

This handbook provides an overview of developments in the youth mobility and migration research field, with specific emphasis on movement for education, work and training purposes, encompassing exchanges sponsored by institutions, governments and international agencies, and free movement. The collection features over 30 theoretically and empirically-based discussions of the meaning and key aspects of various forms of mobility as practiced in contemporary societies, and concludes with an exploration of the costs and benefits of moving abroad to individuals and societies at a time when the viability of free circulation is being called into question. The geographical scope of the book covers Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas, and takes into account socio-economic and regional inequalities, as well as recent developments such as the refugee crisis, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. The book integrates the fields of youth mobility and migration studies, creating opportunities for the establishment of a new paradigm for understanding the spatial circulation of youth and young adults in the twenty-first century.

What will citizenship mean to the peoples of a new, wider Europe? Welfare state retrenchment and technological change in the work place are undermining social citizenship rights and provoking a critical assessment of the West European concept itself. In the light of these changes, what models can the democratic, industrialized states of the West offer the transitional economies of the East?This innovative book presents new work by an international group of leading social scientists offers historical analysis and empirical description, as well as theoretical and political assessments, of work and citizenship in Europe. It examines the erosion of the welfare state, the emergence of poverty and the underclass, and the rights and duties connected with social citizenship. After a review of labour rights and obligations in the former socialist countries, it also assesses the state of industrial citizenship. It asks why the technological transformation of work tends to create segmentation and exclusion and argues for a debate about economic citizenship rights. Work and Citizenship in the New Europe concludes with theoretical and political arguments in favour of specific social policies on work and citizenship, examining such issues as labour participation, basic income guarantees and durable economic growth.

Perestroika's fate was determined by the hostile reaction of the working class. Strikes, protest and the fear of working class action had a devastating impact, yet relatively little is known about the workers' movement during this period. This book surveys the development of the new workers' movement in Russia under perestroika to understand how it connected with the workers at shop floor level and the national and local political authorities to whom it addressed its demands, and whose development it sought to influence. Drawing on a programme of collaborative research on Russian industrial relations from 1987 to 1992, the authors use a series of case studies to explain the gulf between the thousands of tiny independent groups, often based in a single enterprise or even a single shop and regional and national organizations without a grassroots base. Extensive interviews with participants, tape and video recordings as well as substantial documentary material are used in case studies of the 1989 miners' strike in Kuzbass, the Kuzbass Regional Council of Workers' committees, the Independent Miner's Union in Kuzbass, Sotsprof in Moscow and the Federation of Air Traffic Controllers' Unions.

The book consolidates systems thinking as a new world-hypothesis that is already suggesting itself behind the advancement of quantum mechanics and Ashby's cybernetics. In particular, it shows how Einstein's misgivings about quantum mechanics boil down to his persistence in defending the principle of contiguity at the root of the modern cosmology and, in relation to neo-cybernetics, the book rediscovers Ashby's theory of adaptive behaviour enabling a new synthesis between physiology, psychology and ethology that has implications for systems practice. Furthermore, this new "cosmology" comes with a new "anthropology" that informs utopics, the science of utopic systems, and sheds new light on the actual founding fathers of the domain of human science. In particular, the book provides an understanding of how our human world works and how it is being constituted by utopic systems that look into the future to realize something possible. Finally, it points the way to the future unification of knowledge bringing together systems philosophy and systems science given that world-hypothesis is what makes logically possible the development and consolidation of all the different domains of science.

This book presents a novel viewpoint in HR management: in addition to the macroeconomic factors (demographic development, industry 4.0, digitization, etc.) and its micro-political counterparts (shortage of skilled workers, an aging workforce, shortage of MINTs), personnel policy in the highly developed economic regions of the world can increasingly be seen from the third point of view, which is the ego-perspective. The complexity of the economic world 4.0 is manifesting itself for the employees in a working world of unlimited possibilities, offering almost limitless freedom of choice, especially for younger people. Due to this shift in the balance of power, the influence of the employers decreases and is often reduced to countering the pronounced self-confidence of the employees in asserting their expectations with corresponding company incentives. The author emphasizes that dealing with the challenges of this extremely fragile world of work - currently exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic - must by no means be left solely in the hands of overburdened personnel managers. The contribution of the line manager or direct superior is becoming increasingly important. And it is only through close and clearly defined cooperation between the two that the opportunity for effective human resources management lies. This book aims to illustrate this process of division of labor in the individual phases of personnel management.

Waiting for the workers is based on the extensive research and interviews conducted by Peter Thwaites over 40 years ago when he was writing his thesis. He was given special access to the Party's papers and introduced to former Party members. Dr Thwaites' book describes in detail how World War II affected the Party's activities and the subsequent impact of the war on the Party itself. In 1932 the Independent Labour Party split from the Labour Party but was badly damaged as a result and by 1938 it was considering rejoining. But the outbreak of the Second World War, which the ILP believed was solely a struggle between rival capitalist powers, made that impossible. As a result the ILP became the only political party with parliamentary representation that consistently opposed Great Britain's participation in the war; and it fought by-election and propaganda campaigns putting forward its revolutionary socialist proposals for ending the war and winning the peace. Post-war defections to the Labour Party, however, removed its parliamentary and local government representation and decimated its membership so that by 1950 it had become a spent force. This book examines this largely forgotten aspect of the history of the war years and details the ILP's political beliefs and policies, and describes both its opposition to the war and the internal disagreements over its relationship to the Labour Party which eventually tore it apart.

Pearl Jephcott (1900–1980) was a pioneer of sociological research, largely forgotten in recent times, her works paved the way for many of the subsequent developments that were to come in the sociology of gender, women’s’ studies, urban sociology, leisure studies and the sociology of youth. An originator and an early adopter of many research methods, Pearl Jephcott, deserves to be rediscovered. This collection of 5 books, each with a new foreword, were originally published between 1954 and 1971. Including one previously unpublished work from 1954, they are a selection of her most important work and a fascinating record of sociological research in action.

This thoroughly documented book provides an overview of social policies affecting women in Germany, Italy, Denmark, Britain, Ireland, Norway, France and Sweden. The central theme is the relationship between paid and unpaid work, something very few European governments have been prepared explicitly to address as a social issue and which has yet to enter the European Commission's agenda.Contributors discuss the literature on women and welfare in their particular country concerned and outline the developments in social policies relating to women and the position of women in regard to reproductive and labour market behaviour in the post-War period. The essays analyse the assumptions behind policies affecting women's family and work lives and discuss specific legislative approaches to securing 'equality'. A concluding chapter discusses the European Community's contribution to the goal of equal opportunities for both men and women. The main aim of the book is to provide students with a source of easily accessible information about a major issue in social policy: the relationship between women, the family and employment.

This open access book makes a contribution to our understanding of one of the social challenges facing many western nations i.e. the challenge of an ageing population. It specifically addresses the issue of competence among older employees. Others have studied ageing populations in terms of the economic burden or the pressure on healthcare services and generally view the rising numbers of seniors more as a challenge than an opportunity. In this book, authors discuss ways of gaining positive benefits from our ageing and more experienced work force.

This book explores social productivity in work teams on production sites, with an eye toward human welfare. It focuses especially on "sympathy management" by the use of multivariate analysis in a worldwide social survey. Manufacturing production sites have many work teams, and their activities support productivity. Productivity, however, is evaluated only by the production system. Therefore, the social system's sympathy evaluation as teamwork in the work team is completely disregarded by management activity. Management recognizes this social system and must upgrade teamwork as a social system from tacit to explicit knowledge as an appraisal system. Thus, this new paradigm significantly contributes to industrial society beyond conventional management. The work team's social system functions in a production system and affects team productivity. Therefore, it must take a bird's-eye view of social productivity as an overall strategy. Social productivity has two appraisal criteria, the social system's sympathy and the production system's productivity. Increasing explicit knowledge of sympathy as teamwork requires the perspective of human-social science. Social productivity has been verified through global deployment by social research and case studies and contributes to humankind's welfare on sustainable development goals and ISO56000, an innovation management system. Social productivity can also decrease opportunity loss based on ignoring the social system of the work team.

This book describes how international negotiations can be conducted in a structured, professional and effective manner. It also offers recommendations based on examples of successful negotiations from both economically leading countries such as the USA, China and Japan, as well as smaller countries such as the Netherlands, Israel and Morocco. Providing practically relevant experiences from middle and top management positions in different business sectors, the contributors focus on all elements of negotiations, spanning from preparation, execution, strategies and tactics to non-verbal communication and psychological factors. Moreover, the chapters offer detailed introductions to more than 25 countries around the globe, which can be used as a reference guide to doing business in the specific contexts.

In a time of changing technology and cultural shifts, it is difficult to measure some aspects of the workforce. Education and the American Workforce brings together a comprehensive collection of employment and education information from federal statistical agencies. The Census Bureau is the leading source of quality data about the nation's people and economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is the principal federal agency responsible for measuring labor market activity, working conditions, and price changes in the economy. Together, these agencies produce a wealth of information about the American workforce. This book includes information about the jobs that people hold, the occupations that they pursue, the industries where they work, and the education levels that people have attained. In addition to tables, each section also includes relevant figures and highlights of notable data. Some examples of interesting data found inside Education and the American Workforce include: *With no formal educational requirement and a median salary of $22,680, 4.5 million people are employed as retail salespersons, the most of any single occupation. Cashiers and food preparation/serving workers account for another 3.5 million each. There are 2.9 million registered nurses, the most numerous of occupations that require a bachelor's degree. *The biggest numeric decline is expected for Postal Service mail carriers, dropping by about 78,000 in ten years. When combined with other Postal Service occupations-such as clerks, sorters, postmasters, and others-a decline of 140,000 jobs is expected for the Postal Service. *Among the 75 largest counties, Bronx County, NY had the highest number of residents age 25 and over with less than a high school diploma at 29.4 percent while Montgomery County, PA had the lowest percentage at 6.2 percent. *Meanwhile, New York County, NY and Fairfax County, VA had the highest percentage of residents with a bachelor's degree or higher at 59.9 percent followed by Montgomery County, MD at 57.9 percent among the 75 largest counties. Nationally, between 2011 and 2015, 29.8 percent of the population had a bachelor's degree or higher.

Providing an in-depth case study on the emergence of social impact investing in the UK, this book develops a new perspective on financialization processes that highlights the roles of non-financial actors. In contrast to the common view that impact investing gears finance toward the solution of social problems, the author analyzes how these investments create new problems and inequalities. To explain how social impact investing became popular in British social policy despite its unclear effectiveness, the author focuses on cooperative relations between institutional entrepreneurs from finance and various non-financial actors. Drawing on field theory, he shows how seemingly unrelated social transformations - such as HM Treasury's expanding role in public service reform - may act as resonance spaces for the spread of finance. Opening up a new perspective on financialization processes in the terrain of public policy, this book invites readers to refocus scholarship on capitalist dynamics to the meso-level. Based on this analysis, the author also proposes ways to transform social impact investing to increase its potential for reducing global inequalities.

Europe has become a dominant frame for the generation, regulation and perception of social inequalities. This trend was solidified by the current economic crisis, which is characterised by increasing inequalities between central and peripheral countries and groups. By analysing the double polarisation between winners and losers of the crisis; the segmentation of labour markets; and the perceived quality of life in Europe, this book contributes to a better understanding of patterns and dynamics of inequality in an integrated Europe.The contributions from experts in the field offer a multi-level perspective. They explore links between objective inequalities and subjective perceptions and frames of reference. They combine the analysis of growing inequalities between different social groups and between central and peripheral countries. Analysis of unemployment and income inequality is based on European-wide micro datasets and the editor argues for both European and national frames of reference for analysis of unemployment and income inequality. Offering new insights on the increasing unemployment and income inequalities in Europe before and during the current financial and Eurozone crisis this is a vital text. Anyone interested in the challenges of social cohesion in Europe will find this book a rich, innovative resource. Contributors include: F. Buttler, M. Heidenreich, C. Ingensiep, S. Israel, J. Preunkert, C. Reimann,

This book brings together various threads of research in the field of gender mainstreaming. It aids in further supporting and understanding the role of gender in health and safety research, practice, and policy. It looks at gender mainstreaming as being recognised as key in cultivating sustainable worker health and working systems due to it being a central component of many international policy initiatives. This book deals with gender mainstreaming being advocated at a policy level, while focusing on the limited recognition and discourse on the issue of gender and its direct and indirect association to workers' health in the field of occupational health and safety. This book addresses problems facing gender-sensitive policies and outlines and reflects upon current best practice principles and practices to support the development and implementation of policies, interventions, and research initiatives.

"Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider is that rare thing nowadays, an academic book that not only engages with a wider public but also provides a sharp campaigning edge to the analysis. Historical and broad in its coverage, this is one of the best accounts of contemporary racism published in a good long time." Mark Perryman, Philosophy Football Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider offers an original perspective on the significance of both racism and anti-racism in the making of the English working class. While racism became a powerful structuring force within this social class from as early as the mid-Victorian period, this book also traces the episodic emergence of currents of working class anti-racism. Through an insistence that race is central to the way class works, this insightful text demonstrates not only that the English working class was a multi-ethnic formation from the moment of its inception but that racialized outsiders - Irish Catholics, Jews, Asians and the African diaspora - often played a catalytic role in the collective action that helped fashion a more inclusive and democratic society.

Television and film not only entertain and reflect social change, they may also participate and influence these changes -- the recent success of The Full Monty and Billy Elliot show popular British comedy based on such painful social transformations.

Looking at Class brings together film and television practitioners with academic students of cultural and economic change to examine the media representation of the British working class in the twentieth century -- a time of decline for the manual working class when a complex service-based economy emerged. The book covers a large range of genres from documentaries to soaps and shows that complex cultural transitions can be communicated clearly in prose as well as in screen drama.

This book provides empirically driven discussions and investigations in the relevance of Actor Network Theory (ANT) and its theoretical concepts. As our civilization evolves from a human to a technologically driven society, new socio-technical network of actors - in society, industry and government are emerging by the day. These networks of actors collaborate to produce contemporary goods and services; handle production processes; manage risks; develop social and commercial networks; develop policies; manage complexities; and create a new way of life. This book provides unique conceptual tools needed to analyze such processes, highlighting the effectiveness of ANT in fostering collaborations between governments, organizations and society.

This edited collection explores building construction as an inspiring, yet often overlooked, place to develop new knowledge about the development of human societies. Eschewing dominant engineering and management perspectives on construction, the book is purposefully broad in its scope, both empirically and theoretically, as reflecting the rich underexplored potential of studies of building construction to inform a wide span of intellectual debates across the social science and humanities. The seven chapters encompass contributions to theories of: spatiotemporal organization with wildlife on building sites; institutional change with building ruins; home with Mexican self-help housing; place with a suburban housing development; socio-materiality with the adaptation of a university library; migrant labour with the Parisian postwar construction boom; and gender with a female site manager in Sweden. This book seeks to develop a new critical sub-area for construction studies that focuses on the actual processes and practices of 'constructing'. Bringing together diverse members of construction research communities working in a variety of contexts, it develops empirical engagements with building work to challenge its marginalization, relative to architectural studies, to provoke novel understandings of human history, geography and sociology.

This book explores all aspects of the sharing economy, pursuing a multidisciplinary approach encompassing Service Design, Spatial Design, Sociology, Economics, Law, and Transport and Operations Research. The book develops a unified vision of sharing services, and pinpoints the most important new challenges. The first, more theoretical part covers general topics from the perspectives of experts in the respective disciplines. Among the subjects addressed are the role of the user in co-design and co-production; impacts of sharing services on cities, communities, and private spaces; individual rewarding and social outcomes; regulatory issues; and the scope for improving the efficiency of design, management, and analysis of sharing services. In turn, the second part of the book presents a selection of case studies of specific sharing services, in which many of the concepts described in the first part are put into practice. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of sharing services and of the hidden problems that may arise. Key factors responsible for the success (or failure) of sharing services are identified by analyzing some of the best (and worst) practices. Given its breadth of coverage, the book offers a valuable guide for researchers and for all stakeholders in the sharing economy, including startup founders and local administrators.

This is a study of how governments and their specialist advisers, in an age of free trade and the minimal state, attempted to create a viable legal framework for trade unions and strikes. It traces the collapse, in the face of judicial interventions, of the regime for collective labour devised by the Liberal Tories in the 1820s, following the repeal of the Combination Acts. The new arrangements enacted in the 1870s allowed collective labour unparalleled freedoms, contended by the newly-founded Trades Union Congress. This book seeks to reinstate the view from government into an account of how the settlement was brought about, tracing the emergence of an official view - largely independent of external pressure - which favoured withdrawing the criminal law from peaceful industrial relations and allowing a virtually unrestricted freedom to combine. It reviews the impact upon the Home Office's specialist advisers of contemporary intellectual trends, such as the assaults upon classical and political economy and the historicized critiques of labour law developed by Liberal writers. Curthoys offers an historical context for the major court decisions affecting the security of trade union funds, and the freedom to strike, while the views of the judges are integrated within the terms of a wider debate between proponents of contending views of 'free trade' and 'free labour'. New evidence sheds light on the considerations which impelled governments to grant trade unions a distinctive form of legal existence, and to protect strikers from the criminal law. This account of the making of labour law affords many wider insights into the nature and inner workings of the Victorian state as it dismantled the remnants of feudalism (symbolized by the Master and Servant Acts) and sought to reconcile competing conceptions of citizenship in an age of franchise extension. After the repeal of the Combination Acts in the 1820s collective labour enjoyed limited freedoms. When this regime collapsed under judicial challenge, governments were obliged to devise a new legal framework for trade unions and strikes, enacted between 1871 and 1876. Drawing extensively upon previously unused governmental sources, this study affords many wider insights into the nature and inner workings of the mid-Victorian state, tracing the impact upon policy-makers of contemporary assaults upon classical political economy, and of the historicized critiques of labour law developed by Liberal writers. As contending views of 'free trade' and 'free labour' came into collision, an official view was formed which favoured allowing an unrestricted freedom to combine and sought to withraw the criminal law from peaceful industrial relations.

The transformation of women's lives over the past century is among the most significant and far-reaching of social and economic phenomena, affecting not only women but also their partners, children, and indeed nearly every person on the planet. In developed and developing countries alike, women are acquiring more education, marrying later, having fewer children, and spending a far greater amount of their adult lives in the labor force. Yet, because women remain the primary caregivers of children, issues such as work-life balance and the glass ceiling have given rise to critical policy discussions in the developed world. In developing countries, many women lack access to reproductive technology and are often relegated to jobs in the informal sector, where pay is variable and job security is weak. Considerable occupational segregation and stubborn gender pay gaps persist around the world. The Oxford Handbook of Women and the Economy is the first comprehensive collection of scholarly essays to address these issues using the powerful framework of economics. Each chapter, written by an acknowledged expert or team of experts, reviews the key trends, surveys the relevant economic theory, and summarizes and critiques the empirical research literature. By providing a clear-eyed view of what we know, what we do not know, and what the critical unanswered questions are, this Handbook provides an invaluable and wide-ranging examination of the many changes that have occurred in women's economic lives.