Introducing the notion of boredom into the academic context, Boredom and Academic Work proposes a fresh sociological perspective on boredom and academic work alike. It invites a reader to reflect on the essence of boredom and the nature of academic work from the sociological perspective. It constitutes methodological and conceptual guidance for all those interested in their own emotions both at work and outside. It also provides an original, interactional and essential definition of boredom and a novel standpoint for observing academic work, both in its systemic and practical level, and shows how the academic system influences its subjects' well-being, motivation, emotions, and practices. Covering various approaches from the qualitative methodology, linguistics, sociology of work, emotions, and higher education, and telling a story of research and teaching university staff, the book will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas and the general academic public as well.

This book takes a Marxist approach to the study of media piracy - the production, distribution, and consumption of media texts in violation of intellectual property laws - to examine its place as an endemic feature of the cultural economy since the rise of the Internet. The author explores media piracy not in terms of its moral or legal failings, or as the inevitable by-product of digital technologies, but as a symptom of a much larger restructuring of cultural labor in the era of the Internet: labor that is digital, entrepreneurial, informal, and even illegal, and increasingly politicized. Sketching the contours of this new political economy while engaging with theories of digital media, both critical and celebratory, Mueller reveals piracy as a submerged social history of the digital world, and potentially the key to its political reimagining. This significant contribution to the study of piracy and digital culture will be vital reading for scholars and students of critical media studies, cultural studies, political theory, or digital humanities, and particularly those researching media piracy, digital labor, the digital economy, and Marxist theory.

This book uses a variety of empirical cases on topics including drug development, egg donation, and governance of healthcare facilities, to investigate how actors navigate the uncertainties that permeate the interfaces of health, technologies, and politics in post-Soviet settings and what the implications of their chosen navigation routes are. Contemporary societies are imbued with uncertainties, but the authors focus on settings where uncertainties multiply, making decisions, practises, and relations in everyday life precarious. Two worlds are brought into dialogue throughout the chapters of this book with the aim of facilitating mutual learning from one another - the world of science and technology studies (STS) and the high-income liberal democracies of the West, on one hand, and studies of post-socialism on the other. In so doing, this book encourages critical learning on ensuring the resilience of individual and societal health in situations of profound uncertainties. This timely collection will be of great interest to scholars, practitioners and policy makes in the fields of sociology, biomedicine, political science and public and global health.

The experience of an abrupt and often premature departure from work can leave individuals feeling disorientated and disappointed and can prevent their valuable economic potential from being tapped. This report explores the possibilities of more flexible forms of work that bridge the gap between a steady career job and retirement. It examines such jobs in the wider context of the types of transition that are being made by people leaving work early. Transitions after 50 series People are living longer, yet increasingly are leaving working life well before the state retirement age. The Joseph Rowntree Fountain programme, Transitions after 50, explores people's experiences, decisions and constraints as they pass from active labour market participation in their middle years towards a new identity in later life. Reports in this series look in particular at issues about work, income and activities beyond work during this period of transition. For other titles in this series, please follow the series link from the main catalogue page.

In this long-awaited book, Ursula Huws brings together the results of decades of prescient research on labour market transformation to provide an authoritative overview of the impacts of technological, economic, social and political change on working life in the 21st century. Placing current upheavals in global labour markets firmly in their historical context, she debunks myths about the impacts of artificial intelligence on labour, pointing to the processes whereby new employment is created, as well as old jobs destroyed, while never underestimating the contradictory impacts of digitalisation on work organisation, resistance, adaption and innovation. This book is underpinned by a clear conceptual framework, that analyses the dynamics of the restructuring of capitalism and labour, taking full account of unpaid social reproductive work, and integrating a feminist analysis whilst also pointing to new forms of commodification that will shape the future. Labour in Contemporary Capitalism will be an invaluable resource and point of reference for students and scholars studying the sociology of labour, economic structures, technology, and globalisation.

The process of European integration and the transfer of political authority from the national to the European level have led to the emergence of a field of EU policy making in Brussels, which attracts professionals and experts from all EU member states. This book contributes to research on the dynamics of social integration unfolding at the heart of this field. Based on in-depth interviews with officials working for the European Commission - the EU's supranational organization - the author explores the perception and negotiation of symbolic boundaries related to their diverse national and regional backgrounds. In line with their cosmopolitan attitudes and role-conception as European civil servants, Commission officials tend to de-emphasize national and regional divisions among them. Nevertheless, subtle symbolic boundaries remain in connection with their diverse organizational cultures, working language preferences, professional values and influence and career prospects. This nuanced account of patterns of social categorization and group-making in a European context will appeal to sociologists with interests in European integration and the emergence of social fields and groups beyond the nation state.

Workers and Workplaces in Revolutionary China collates documents detailing the conflict and politics of Chinese industrial development in the 1970s. Originally published in 1974, issues discussed in this volume include socialism, the harbour docks in china and tobacco factory workers. This title will be of interest to students of Asian studies, anthropology and politics.

This book is a fascinating investigation into how communalism plays out in everyday India. Using the metaphor of tana-bana - the warp and the weft of the Banarasi sari - the author reproduces the interwoven life of Hindu-Muslim relations in the Banarasi sari industry. As the city of Banaras in Uttar Pradesh takes the centre stage as the site of this ethnographic study, the author documents the dissonance in representations of Banaras as a sacred Hindu city and its essential plural character. The volume * examines in-depth the lives of Banaras Muslims in the social and economic matrix of the sari industry; * highlights how women negotiate between home, family and their place in the artisanal industry; and * sheds light on their fast-changing world of the Banaras weavers and their responses to it. With a new introduction and fresh data, the second edition looks at the subsequent developments in the weaving industry over the last decade. This volume will be of immense interest to scholars and researchers of social anthropology, gender studies, development studies, sociology and South Asian studies.

Gendered processes of globalisation, transnationalisation and urbanisation are increasing local and global inequalities and widening the gap between the rich and the poor. The global finance industry plays a key role in these processes, directing its operations from local command points in global cities such as London. Drawing on empirical data collected after the 2008 financial crisis - in depth interviews with male City of London bankers who are also fathers, in depth interviews with the bankers' wives, observational data of work and family spaces, and banks' promotional online material -this book explores the day-to-day individual and institutional social practices of wealthy City bankers and banks. The book's analysis offers insight into how the spaces of work and home are integrally linked in ways that mutually shape, support and sustain the gendered dominance of the industry and its highly paid workers. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, researchers and academics interested in the fields of gender studies, critical studies of men and masculinities, urban and metropolitan studies, sociology, studies of globalisation and transnationalisation, anthropology, cultural studies and business management. It will also be interesting for those concerned about the role of the finance industry and neoliberal capitalist ideologies, values and practices in ever-widening local and global inequalities.

From the perspective of trade unions, European integration makes it more necessary than ever before to establish common political positions. At the same time, increasing heterogeneity between the member states makes the crafting of such positions more and more difficult. Can, under these circumstances, a joint political line among European trade unions emerge? To answer this question, the book sheds light on transnational trade union cooperation in the three most important policy fields: the debate around the Freedom of services, the discussion over a European minimum wage, and the efforts of international wage coordination. Drawing on the results of extensive field research based on a qualitative study among trade unions from Hungary, Poland, Sweden, and Germany, as well as representatives from the European level, this book points to a significant gap in European trade union politics between pretensions and reality. The findings provide a solid theoretical framework, suitable not only to explain current dynamics in the field of European trade unionism, but also promising for further research on the topic. With its focus on a contested political field, Trade Unions in the Course of European Integration contributes to practical and theoretical debates within European trade unionism. As an adequate understanding of European trade unionism in general and collective bargaining requires a twofold perspective on European integration and the role of trade unions in European labor relations, two fields of scholarly interest are being addressed. Moreover, with its focus on European trade unionism as an internationalist project of labor politics, the book will also appeal to those interested in the field of Global Labor Studies.

Middle class executives are the people who've done everything right - gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills and build up impressive resumes - yet they have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster. In Bait and Switch, Ehrenreich enters a shadowy world of Internet job searches, lonely networking events and costly career-coaching sessions, a world in which 'professional' mentors and trainers offer pop-psychology and self-help mantras to desperate would-be employees. Poignant and blackly funny, Bait and Switch delivers a stark warning about the future that faces corporate employees everywhere and calls for collective action to guard against it.

Worker Participation: Current Research and Future Trends, Volume 16 of Research in the Sociology of Work, offers cutting edge research on the character and implications of workplace participation. Written by some of the leading scholars in the sociology of workplace transformation and alternative organizations, the chapters here examine various outcomes, causes, and consequences related to participation programs and worker democracy today. Topics include ways in which participation schemes are socially constructed and negotiated; the meanings that workers attach to opportunities for involvement in the workplace; practice, participation, and consent in alternative organizations such as cooperatives and collectives; and theoretical treatments that call for new ways of thinking about workplace participation. Methodologically pluralist and concerned less with specific productivity effects of worker participation, this volume highlights the social structural, social constructionist, and meta theoretical dimensions of worker participation and democratic organizations in the twenty-first century.
The global, 24/7 economy and the organizational changes it has generated have enormous implications for the organization, experience and use of time in (and out of) the workplace. In addition to eroding the boundary between home and work, creating time pressures both within and outside of the workplace, the need for businesses to compete in a 24/7 global economy has re-problematized time in the workplace. Drawing on sociology, labor economics, organizational behavior and social history, the papers in this volume examine either empirically or theoretically, a variety of aspects of time in theworkplace. Contributors to this volume examine issues surrounding the distribution of and struggle over work hours and how these vary across a number of factors including race, class, occupation and other structural components of work. They examine temporal structures within organizations including inequities in flexible scheduling, entrainment and work teams, polychronicity, and how changing temporal structures affect professionalism and expertise. They also consider the way in which changing uses and organization of work time, in the context of economic instability and globalization, affect the difficulties of reconciling work and family. At the more micro-level, the papers consider individuals' perceptions and constructions and intersubjective constructions of time. To varying degrees, the authors speak to the policy implications or strategies for managing new times. Taken as a whole, these papers shed light on the way in which globalization and the emergence of a 24/7 economy have altered the ways, times, and meanings of time at work.
Research in the Sociology of Work is now available online at ScienceDirect ??? full-text online of volumes 10 onwards.
*Examines various worker participation models and evaluates the success of their outcomes
*Adopts a variety of methods and highlights the different dimensions of worker participation

Bringing together leading international scholars within the fields of social and political theory and philosophy, this book explores how we should understand work and its role(s) in our lives and wider society. What challenges are posed by work in our changing economy and the new economic forms that are beginning to emerge, and how can we best address these challenges? In what ways do patterns of working, as well as work technologies, shape people's lives within and outside work, in particular their life opportunities and their social and natural environment? How might we organize-or seek to reorganize-workplaces so that the experience of work better reflects our shared ethical ideals and normative principles? This volume examines these vital questions in a comprehensive and systematic manner in order to provide much needed theoretical insight and practical guidance in reflecting on the nature, problems, and possibilities of work currently. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students and established academics in the areas of contemporary political theory and philosophy, social theory, legal philosophy, labour studies, the sociology of work, practical ethics, critical theory, and political activism.

Where presidents or members of affluent families were previously seen, it is increasingly the case that car manufacturers are owned by banks and investment funds which have taken control of the entire economic life of these firms. This has significant impact on the terms of employment and layoffs, wages and precarious work, growing inequalities in income strata, compensation levels for executives, and the implementation of short-termist strategies across business operations. This book explores this increasing financialisation - the predominance of the financial sector over the productive sector - in the automotive industry. In particular it is shown that the financial operations of these companies through leasing, insurance, loans and other financial instruments is now much more profitable than the manufacturing aspects of the business, which was originally the raison d'etre for these fi rms. The chapters demonstrate how there are great demands to increase the return to shareholders as a main concern, despite other metrics and/ or other stakeholders. The work studies the impact of financialisation at the world's five largest automakers which together represent almost 50% of car production, providing an exploratory analysis of profitability, shareholder composition, compensation to executives, workers' salaries, dividend payments to shareholders and employment. Encouraging debate on contemporary economy, this book marks a significant addition to the literature on financialisation, contemporary forms of capitalism, labour and economic sociology more broadly.

This book presents the comprehensive investigation of critical thinking in higher education from the perspectives of the study and labor market. It looks for an answer to the vibrant question of what and to whom critical thinking is. The study brings together findings from systematic literature review, analysis of descriptions of higher education study programs and study subjects, phenomenographical research and survey and supplements the existing perceptions of critical thinking with novel data-driven insights. The book reveals how critical thinking manifests itself in the contexts of higher education and the labor market and advocates for the significance of the critical thinking at personal, interpersonal, and social levels.

A major book from one of the most influential and well-known economists of the 20th century, who coined the term 'creative destruction' His students include famous economists such as Robert Solow and the former Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan and The Economist magazine even had a column called 'Schumpter' for many years Schumpeter launched the idea of the 'business cycle' in this book, which has become a permanent feature of thousands of curricula in business and economics Includes a new foreword by Richard Swedberg

With the rapid growth of Asian economies and growing work, family and personal life demands, this book addresses a critical topic. The well-being of societies, families and workers is of increasing social and economic importance. The book will be a valuable addition for anyone who wants to understand the similarities and differences in how work-life dynamics are unfolding across Asia.' - Ellen Ernst Kossek, Purdue University, Krannert School of Management, US'Through its focus on work-life balance in Asian societies this much needed collection, edited by Luo Lu and Cary L. Cooper, addresses a significant omission in the field. Since the 1980s, research on the balance between employment and family commitments has grown massively. Yet most studies are based on Euro-American samples. The Handbook of Research on Work-Life Balance in Asia shifts this emphasis on Europe and the USA, mapping how work-life balance is negotiated within Asian societies such as China, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam. It offers state-of-the-art views on how work-life balance in Asia is experienced from a range of angles: individual, organizational and societal. In so doing, it contributes important new perspectives to the work-life balance field.' - Caroline Gatrell, Lancaster University Management School, UK In Asian societies, work and family issues are only recently beginning to gain attention. The pressure of rapid social change and increasing global competition is compounded by the long hours work culture, especially in the Pan-Confucian societies such as Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea. Furthermore, with the rising female labor participation, more and more Asian employees are now caught between the demands of work and family life. The aim of this Handbook is, thus, to shed new light on work life balance in Asia by adopting a distinct Asian perspective in theory, research and practice. It provides a state-of-the-art collection of evidence from studies, and empirical research, to explain why and how work and family interference arises and affects well-being for Asian adults; and further address the topics through both a mono-cultural and cross-cultural analysis, with the help of expert contributors in the field. Students and scholars will find the comprehensive and updated review of empirical evidence useful in their research. The book also provides a thoughtful reflection on governmental and organizational family-friendly practices in major Asian societies, which will be of interest to practitioners in the field of management, business and investing. Contributors: P. Brough, D.E. Caughlin, C.-L. Chang, F.M. Cheung, E. Cho, C.L. Cooper, T. Kalliath, C.-W. Koh, Y. Li, H. Liu, C.-q. Lu, J. Lu, L. Lu, N.D. Mohd Mahudin, N.M. Noor, M. O'Driscoll, A. Shimazu, O.-L. Siu, J. Sun, H.-L.S. Tien, C. Timms, J.F. Uen, Y.-C. Wang, J.-M. Woo, T. Wu, X.-m. Xu

This book highlights the vital necessity for combining sustainable development processes from different areas, with applications in areas such as science, education and production sectors. These sectors have previously been separated by linguistic and technological barriers. Breaking down these barriers will allow an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary flow of information, leading to greater efficiency, and towards a more real resilient and sustainable economy development. This book fills in the gap in respect of publications addressing aspects of innovation and sustainable development and focuses on a range of areas, such as I. Gradual transition to innovative development; II. Continuity of technology in education, science and industry; III. Convergency directions, interdisciplinary relations in scientific research; IV. Digital technologies for sustainable development; V. Global trends and regional aspects of innovation and traditions in environmental management; VI. International legal regulations and environmental and economic relations among business communities. The publication fosters the global efforts towards taking better advantage of the many opportunities which innovation in specific areas may offer.

This book addresses some of the questions that have been brought to light by the varied experiences of culture industry workers and consumer publics across East Asia over the past decade. For over twenty years, the creative industries have been seen as the engine driving global economic transformation, as a way out of the dilemmas of de-industrialization, and as key to the projection of national soft power. The chapters in this book cover the former 'Tiger Economies' of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as Japan and China, and focus on a number of different industries - cinema, television, graphic design, fashion, and literature. The authors include sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars, who approach the topics of creative work, government policy, and entrepreneurial strategy from a variety of perspectives. The chapters examine the varied political, economic, and social structures that influence the development of creative industries within the region and reveal how the careers of creative industry workers in different cities and different industries can vary. They also show how the development of the creative industries can affect many aspects of society, including city planning, policing, democratic politics, and ethnic and national identities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique.

Irrespective of whether one thinks of philosophy explicitly, each organizational researcher is a philosopher. A philosophical position is predicated on a variety of approaches relating to ontology, epistemology, methodology, ethics, and political positions. Depending on where one stands with regard to these philosophical building blocks, their orientation may be characterized as positivist, realist, critical-realist, and constructivist, with pragmatist and political considerations weighing in as well. Also, management theories all inhabit the same spectrum of philosophical positions that enrich them and add to their relevance to the world of firms and organizations. This book provides a broad-based commentary on the terrain of philosophy as it pertains to management studies, especially for the relatively unfamiliar organizational theorist. This book serves as a succinct overview of the field of management philosophy as well as a roadmap for those readers who wish to explore the terrain further. The book argues that all knowledge inquiry invokes philosophy and philosophical thinking, and that the artificial separation between philosophy and social science is fallacious. Just as philosophy is everywhere, so is power, and for better or worse they go hand in hand. Hence, philosophical positions are political positions. The authors do not shy from addressing the politics of their own research practice or the subjects of their inquiry. Philosophy and Management Studies targets a new generation of management researchers, whose interest in philosophy vastly exceeds their resources to engage with it, partly because of their unfamiliarity with its often mystifying and outsider-unfriendly conventions. It seeks to bridge the chasm between interest in philosophy in organizational studies and knowledge about it. It is not for the trained philosopher or the expert, but for a relative newcomer.

Due to automation, nearly half of the jobs will vanish over the next two decades in the US. However, the problem is not confined to any particular country. Management educators in higher education are faced with two fundamental questions: (a) how we prepare our students for new required technology competencies when conducting international business and (b) how we work with new technologies to prepare our students. While the next generation of employees requires competencies in working with artificial intelligence relying on data analytics, the emergence of artificial intelligence and new technologies in augmenting teaching is changing the nature of higher education across the globe. Management Education and Automation explores international management education in light of exponential development of artificial intelligence, big data, demographic shifts, expansion of robotic utilization in many economic sectors, aging populations and negative population growth in developed economies, multipolar international political systems, migration patterns, and fundamental shifts in individual and social interactions via digital media. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to researchers, academics, policymakers, and students in the fields of international business and management, globalization, management education, and management of technology and innovation.

Using a philosophical and interdisciplinary approach, this book looks at how accountability can provide solutions to our current environmental and global political problems. When a social system has external elements imposed upon it, or presented to it, political problems are likely to emerge. This book demonstrates that what is needed are connecting social elements with a natural affinity to bring people together despite their differences. This book is different from others in the field. It provides new insights by critiquing the extant understandings of accountability and expands the possibilities by building on Charles Taylor's philosophies. Central to the argument of the book are perspectives on authenticity and expressivism which are found to provide a radical reworking of our understanding of being in the world, and a starting point for rethinking the way individuals and communities ought to be dealing politically with accountability and ecological crises. The argument builds to an accountability perspective that utilises work from interpretivism, liberalism, and postmodern theory. The book will be of interest to researchers in environmental philosophy, critical perspectives on accounting, corporate governance, corporate social reporting, and environmental accounting.

Walking around the commercial streets of New York, San Francisco, Milan, London, or Paris and looking at the succession of multinational chain stores' windows, you can easily forget what country you are in. However, if you hear the small talk among the employees, you hear very different stories. In New York, a 30-year-old woman is worried because she does not know if she will work enough hours to make a living the following week-whereas, in Milan, a mother of the same age knows she will work 20 hours a week but is concerned about whether her contract will be renewed at the end of the following month. Following three years of fieldwork, which included 100 in-depth interviews with front-line retail workers and unionists in New York City and Milan, Front-Line Workers in the Global Service Economy investigates both the lived experiences of salespersons in the "fast fashion" industry-a retail sector made of large chains of stores selling fashion garments at low prices-and the possibilities of collective action and structured forms of resistance to these global trends. In the face of economic globalization and vigorous managerial efforts to minimize labor costs and to standardize the retail experience, mass fashion workers' stories tell us how strong the pressure toward work devaluation in low-skilled service sectors can be, and how devastating its effects are on the workers themselves.

Most contemporary organizations use management teams to manage and coordinate their businesses at all levels of the organizational hierarchy. Management teams typically set overall goals, strategies, and priorities, making vital organizational decisions. They discuss issues, solve problems, offer advice, and ensure various processes and units are aligned and interact efficiently. Although management teams are vital for overall organizational performance, research indicates that they are largely underused and less effective than their potential would suggest for value creation. This book provides a research-based and practical model of the characteristics of effective management teams. It looks in depth at each factor of the model, discusses the supporting research, provides examples of how the factors influence the work and effectiveness of management teams, and shares tips and tools for successfully working with management team development. It provides researchers, academics, and students of organizational behavior with an overview of the variables that empirical research has found to be robustly related to management team effectiveness and will enable leaders and management consultants to develop more effective management teams.

Professions and professionalism have played an integral part in business and society. In this book, Mike Saks provides a thorough overview of this field through an analysis of a range of professions, including, amongst others, accountants, doctors and lawyers. The book offers a critical analysis of such privileged occupational groups in modern societies. Anticipating a positive if changing role for such groups in the years ahead, the book outlines conflicting theoretical perspectives on professions and discusses current developments in an accessible, multi-disciplinary style. The book documents their evolution and contemporary transformation from medieval guilds to fully-fledged professions and international professional service firms, while pointing a path towards their future in the world of work and beyond. With insights into the recent challenges provided by clients, citizens, the state and corporations in neo-liberal societies, Professions provides a concise overview that will be essential reading for students, academics and others interested in the operation of these key occupational groups in business and society.