This book argues that society must rethink the notion of formal employment and instead introduce and spread the notion of "meaningful work" so that societies can become independent of economic growth. The excessive consumption of natural resources and the immense emissions resulting from our growth-oriented economic system surpass the planetary boundaries. Despite this, society and the economy still strive for economic growth in order to generate jobs, to finance the social security system and to assure tax income. However, these expectations are increasingly unrealistic, not least because technological developments such as digitalisation and robotisation will change and limit formal employment opportunities as well. Against this backdrop, the book introduces the notion of meaningful activities that embrace various kinds of work, paid and unpaid, sequential or in parallel, which are meaningful for the worker as well as society as a whole. At the same time, the authors argue in favour of reduced working time in formal employment. Furthermore, the book also describes the necessary transformations in companies and for consumers, for social and tax systems, for social services and agriculture. Innovative and timely, this book will be a key resource for professionals and scholars interested in sustainability, economics, work, transformation and post-growth studies.

Based on ethnographic data, this revealing study presents a humane and realistic account of Romanian economic migrants and their life in the UK, providing a more balanced picture of the way new immigrant groups are depicted and popularly perceived.

Gendered Power Dynamics and Exotic Dance examines the social phenomenon of exotic dancing. Presenting a compelling multilevel analysis of dancer interactions, organizational practices, and institutional forces, this book challenges our understanding of sexuality and power. Centering the voices and experiences of exotic dancers, this book explores the relationship between exotic dancing and power at the micro-interactional, meso-organizational, and macro-institutional levels, informing a feminist theory of power that seeks out systems of domination in order to challenge and change them. Through direct interviews and observations collected between 1993 and 2021 from 40 different clubs in the United States, Deshotels and Forsyth demystify the seemingly contrary findings about exotic dancing and power. They show how and why individual dancers can be simultaneously empowered and exploited beyond individual traits, interactions, or settings in the nexus of gender and power in exotic dancing. The book will be useful for scholarly readers in the subject areas of sociology, cultural studies, gender/sexualities studies, sex work, and organizations theory. Written in a clear, accessible manner, this book will also appeal to a general audience interested in understanding the complex interactions of gender, power, feminism, and exotic dance.

This book portrays the experiences of self-described "outsider" or "other" teachers-teachers whose identities set them apart from their students based upon combinations of race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, ability status, religion, or other identity characteristics. The teachers profiled bring experiences of social isolation and difference into the classroom and demonstrate perspectives and habits of mind that inform a nuanced approach to interaction with students.

This volume examines the social history of oil workers and investigates how labor relations have shaped the global oil industry during the twentieth century and today. It brings together the work of scholars from a range of disciplines, approaching the social, political, economic and cultural dimensions of oil. The contributors analyze a number of key oil producing regions, including the Americas, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Europe and Africa.

This book synthesises several decades of research to extend beyond the limitations of a traditional functionalist model, offering a twenty-first century theory of professions and professionalism for a new generation engaging in theorising and research. It asserts nine innovative arguments, drawing on major theorists such as Johnson, Freidson, Larson, Weber, Foucault and Bourdieu to achieve a global framing of professions. Concepts of bundling and unbundling are used to explain changes happening to professions as they cease to be exclusive containers that fully control particular forms of knowledge. Examining how professions are changing today reveals the ways in which expectations around expertise and goodness have altered for all stakeholders: consumers, regulators, corporations and professions themselves. Unbundled professions morph into new forms of professional work, under new conditions, technologies and social arrangements Professionals and policy-makers interested in shaping the future of professions must recognise the potential impacts from an increasingly globalised, digitalised and managerialised world, and this book will be a key addition for scholars and practitioners alike.

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.

Corporations pour billions of dollars into diversity training without taking the time to research what diversity actually means for the people on the shop-floor. This book reveals the dynamics of gender, race and age as workers experience it for themselves. This methodical case study exposes the rhetoric of diversity to the realities and pressures of lean production in a blue collar environment. Diversity at Kaizen Motors brings the Japanese encounter with American diversity into focus by explaining how a major Japanese auto factory has tried to implement and manage diversity. The case study also evaluates how diverse Americans - women and men, white and non-white, older and younger workers - work together in lean production teams at a Fortune 500 automobile assembly plant. This systematic qualitative study contains close to 150 interviews with workers from a wide variety of teams. Diversity at Kaizen Motors reveals invaluable information and yields surprising results, which ultimately leads to a greater understanding of Japanese auto factories and lean production organizations overall.

Humans at Work in the Digital Age explores the roots of twenty-first-century cultures of digital textual labor, mapping the diverse physical and cognitive acts involved, and recovering the invisible workers and work that support digital technologies. Drawing on 14 case studies organized around four sites of work, this book shows how definitions of labor have been influenced by the digital technologies that employees use to produce, interpret, or process text. Incorporating methodology and theory from a range of disciplines and highlighting labor issues related to topics as diverse as census tabulation, market research, electronic games, digital archives, and 3D modeling, contributors uncover the roles played by race, class, gender, sexuality, and national politics in determining how narratives of digital labor are constructed and erased. Because each chapter is centered on the human cost of digital technologies, however, it is individual people immersed in cultures of technology who are the focus of the volume, rather than the technologies themselves. Humans at Work in the Digital Age shows how humanistic inquiry can be a valuable tool in the emerging conversation surrounding digital textual labor. As such, this book will be essential reading for academics and postgraduate students engaged in the study of digital humanities; human-computer interaction; digital culture and social justice; race, class, gender, and sexuality in digital realms; the economics of the internet; and technology in higher education.

1) This is a comprehensive book on Bangladeshi Diaspora in USA. 2) It contains rich ethnographic narratives from the Bangladeshi Americans in South California. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian Studies and Diaspora Studies across the world.

This is an academic inquiry into how labor power has been dehumanized and commodified around the world through the ages for capital accumulation and industrialization, and colonial and post-colonial economic transformation. The study explores all major episodes of slaveries beginning from the ancient civilizations to the end of Transatlantic Slave Trade in the eighteenth century; the worlds of serfdoms in the context of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia; the worlds of feudalisms in the context of Latin America, Japan, China, and India; the worlds of indentured servitudes in the context of the Europeans, the Indians, and the Chinese; the worlds of guestworkers in the contexts of the United States and Western Europe; the worlds of migrant labor programs in the context of the Gulf States; and the contemporary world of neoslavery focusing on human trafficking in both developing and developed countries, and forced labor in global value chains. The book is designed not only for students and academia in labor economics, labor history, and global socio-economic and political transformations, but also for the intelligent and inquiring policy makers, reformers, and general readers across the disciplinary pursuits of Economics, Political Science, History, Sociology, Anthropology, and Law.

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.

Thoroughly revised and updated, the third edition of The Sociology of Food and Agriculture provides a cutting-edge, comprehensive introduction to the study of food and society. The book begins by examining the food economy, with chapters focusing on foodscapes, the financialization of food, and a new chapter dedicated to food and nutrition (in)security. In Part II, the book addresses community and culture. While some books only look at the interrelationships between food and culture, this section problematizes the food system from the standpoint of marginalized bodies. It contains chapters focusing on agricultural and food labor and the peasantries, topics which are often overlooked, and gender, ethnicity, and poverty. Part III examines food and the environment, with chapters addressing important topics such as agro-ecosystems, food justice, sustainable food, and agriculture and food sovereignty. The final part focuses on food futures and includes a brand-new chapter on sustainable diets and ethical consumption. The book concludes by showcasing how we can rethink food production and consumption in a way that can help heal social, political, and cultural divisions. All chapters draw on international case studies and include learning objectives, suggested discussion questions, and recommendations for further reading to aid student learning. The Sociology of Food and Agriculture is perfect for students of food studies, including food justice, food and nutrition security, sustainable diets, food sovereignty, environmental sociology, agriculture, and cultural studies.

The literature on Change Management works from the premise that management possesses the power to achieve change and this is evident in that resistance is little more than a footnote in most textbooks. This assumption sits uneasily, however, with the high failure rate of Change Management interventions. This book seeks to explain this paradox by providing a critical 'relational' approach towards Change Management. What would a book on Change Management look like that takes resistance seriously? This book attempts precisely this by exploring how resistance is as much a part of change as the strategies of those that seek to enact it. The findings are drawn from a qualitative study of organizational transformation in a Local Government Authority in the UK. Its detailed empirical insights enable readers to explore organizational change from many different perspectives considering issues such as the strategic use of metaphor and counter-metaphors; management and employee resistance; organizational politics and cynicism. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students interested in change management, organizational studies, human resource management, and critical management studies.

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.

How do journalists know what they know? Who gets to decide what good journalism is and when it's done right? What sort of expertise do journalists have, and what role should and do they play in society? Until a couple of decades ago, journalists rarely asked these questions, largely because the answers were generally undisputed. Now, the stakes are rising for journalists as they face real-time critique and audience pushback for their ethics, news reporting, and relevance. Yet the crises facing journalism have been narrowly defined as the result of disruption by new technologies and economic decline. This book argues that the concerns are in fact much more profound. Drawing on their five years of research with journalists in the U.S. and Canada, in a variety of news organizations from startups and freelancers to mainstream media, the authors find a digital reckoning taking place regarding journalism's founding ideals and methods. The book explores journalism's long-standing representational harms, arguing that despite thoughtful explorations of the role of publics in journalism, the profession hasn't adequately addressed matters of gender, race, intersectionality, and settler colonialism. In doing so, the authors rethink the basis for what journalism says it could and should do, suggesting that a turn to strong objectivity and systems journalism provides a path forward. They offer insights from journalists' own experiences and efforts at repair, reform, and transformation to consider how journalism can address its limits and possibilities along with widening media publics.

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.

Art and the Challenge of Markets Volumes 1 & 2 examine the politics of art and culture in light of the profound changes that have taken place in the world order since the 1980s and 1990s. The contributors explore how in these two decades, the neoliberal or market-based model of capitalism started to spread from the economic realm to other areas of society. As a result, many aspects of contemporary Western societies increasingly function in the same way as the private enterprise sector under traditional market capitalism. This second volume analyses the relationships of art with contemporary capitalist economies and instrumentalist cultural policies, and examines several varieties of capitalist-critical and alternative art forms that exist in today's art worlds. It also addresses the vexed issues of art controversies and censorship. The chapters cover issues such as the culturalization of the economy, aesthetics and anti-aesthetics, the societal benefits of works of art, art's responsibility to society, "artivism", activist arts as protest and capitalism-critical works, and controversies over nudity in art, as well as considering the marketisation of emerging visual arts worlds in East Asia. The book ends with the a concluding chapter suggesting that even in today's marketized and commercialized environments, art will find a way. Both volumes provide students and scholars across a range of disciplines with an incisive, comparative overview of the politics of art and culture and national, international and transnational art worlds in contemporary capitalism.

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.

The Global Perspective of Urban Labor in Mexico City, 1910-1929 examines the global entanglement of the Mexican labor movement during the Mexican Revolution. It describes how global influences made their entry into labor culture through the cinema, the theater, and labor festivals as well as into the development of consumption patterns and advertisement. It further shows how the young labor movement constituted its discourse and invented its tradition at meetings and in the columns of newspapers. The local conditions constitute the framework for the examination of Mexican labor's perspectives on and engagement with contemporary events of global significance. Thereby, this book demonstrates how workers turned to the global context in search of guidance and role models, embracing global developments and narratives. It also reveals the differentiations from this context in order to create a unique local identity. This approach allows new perspectives on the role of a neglected revolutionary actor and on the influence of global developments in a revolution that has been predominantly interpreted from a national point of view. It shows the way global ideas were brought to life in the framework of revolutionary Mexico City - providing new insights into the grand-narratives of Globalization and Revolution.

This book is among the first of its kind to comprehensively examine the implementation of soft skills in universities in the developing country, Vietnam. The context is unique as the implementation is taking place within the distinctive socio-economic, cultural and political characteristics of the country, amidst several simultaneously-executed educational reforms. Tran lays down the foundation for discussion by providing readers with a comprehensive review of how soft skills implementation has come into existence in higher education across the globe, before diving into the implementation of soft skills in Vietnamese universities. He goes on to highlight the interesting differences in the conceptualization of soft skills between Vietnamese universities and those in the West. The book depicts and compares how university leaders and managers tackle contextual factors, submit to constraints enforced by political forces, and how they use institutional advantages available for implementation. It goes further to examine how personal and contextual factors affect teachers' and students' engagement with the implementation, and highlights the role of work-integrated learning and extra-curricular activities in developing soft skills for students. Finally, the book investigates the contribution of external stakeholders, such as alumni, employers, skills experts, and local authorities, to the implementation and obstacles that prevent their participation. This book will be a valuable reference for the implementation of soft skills in higher education around the world.

Drawing on Australian and comparative case studies, this volume reconceptualises non-metropolitan creative economies through the 'qualities of place'. This book examines the agricultural and gastronomic cultures surrounding 'native' foods, coastal sculpture festivals, universities and regional communities, wine in regional Australia and Canada, the creative systems of the Hunter Valley, musicians in 'outback' settings, Fab Labs as alternatives to clusters, cinema and the cultivation of 'authentic' landscapes, and tensions between the 'representational' and 'non-representational' in the cultural economies of the Blue Mountains. What emerges is a picture of rural and regional places as more than the 'other' of metropolitan creative cities. Place itself is shown to embody affordances, unique institutional structures and the invisible threads that 'hold communities together'. If, in the wake of the publication of Florida's Rise of the Creative Class, creative industries models tended to emphasize 'big cities' and the spatial-cum-cultural imaginaries of the 'Global North', recent research and policy discourses - especially, in the Australian context - have paid greater attention to 'small cities', rural and remote creativity. This collection will be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners in creative industries, urban and regional studies, sociology, geography and cultural planning.

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.

The ontology of work and the economics of value underpin the legal institution, with the existence of modern law predicated upon the subject as labourer. In contemporary Europe, labour is more than a mere economic relationship. Indeed, labour occupies a central position in human existence: since the industrial revolution, it has been the principal criterion of reciprocal recognition and of universal mobilization. This multi-disciplinary volume analyses labour and its depictions in their interaction with the latest legal, socio-economic, political and artistic tendencies. Addressing such issues as deregulation, flexibility, de-industrialization, the pervasive enlargement of markets, digitization and virtual relationships, social polarisation and migratory fluxes, this volume engages with the existential role played by labour in our lives at the conjunction of law and the humanities. This book will be of interest to law students, legal philosophers, theoretical philosophers, political philosophers, social and political theorists, labour studies scholars, and literature and film scholars.