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.

Media Economics and Media Management in India is a new and emerging area of study within the discipline of mass communication and journalism. This book will play a key role in formalizing this area of study and its expansion in India. This book provides a detailed treatment of the fundamentals of media economics and management in India. It offers a comprehensive understanding of key concepts and terms in media economics and management, explains their applications and analyses relevant data for post-graduate and undergraduate students. An accessible guide to the basic principles and concepts of media economics and management in India, with illustrations from Indian and global media industries, this will be an essential resource for students, researchers and teachers of media and communication studies, media economics and management, media industries, creative industries and advertising industries, political studies, sociology as well as for professionals in media and advertising industries.

Against the background of a growing tendency among state and local governments in the United States to vie against one another, spending public funds, and foregoing corporate tax revenues in order to attract private investment, this book offers an analysis of local economic development and business recruitment in the automotive industry. Asking why localities felt they could - and, more importantly, should - make deals with private capital in the first place, this book examines the shift toward entrepreneurial local governance from a global and historically informed perspective. Through a study of the 19 greenfield automotive assembly plants constructed in the United States during the neoliberal era, the author draws on interviews with corporate and government elites, to chart the connections between increasingly global competitive industry pressures and changing attitudes toward "incentivizing" private investment. Studying the development of an approach that has partially reoriented local governments away from managing localities and towards helping manage transnational capital flows by absorbing some of the increasing risk of long-term capital investment, Entrepreneurial Governance in the Neoliberal Era will appeal to scholars of sociology, politics, and urban studies with interests in globalization, the sociology of work and industry, the sociology of development, and neoliberal governance.

This book examines patterns of political engagement of long-term unemployed youth. The authors show how unemployment affects the personal, social, and political life of young people. Focusing on the case of Geneva in Switzerland, the study shows the importance of socioeconomic, relational, psychological, and institutional resources for the political engagement of unemployed youth. The book shows specifically how the relationship between unemployment and the political engagement of unemployed youth is mediated by a number of factors: their socioeconomic status and more generally their individual background, their level of deprivation and the associated degree of subjective well-being; the social capital that unemployed youth draw from involvement in voluntary associations and interpersonal networks and relations, and the political learning stemming from interactions with welfare institutions and their perception of such interactions. Students and scholars in areas including Sociology, Political Science, Economics, Youth Studies and Social Policy will find this study of interest.

Living on the margins offers a unique insight into the working lives of undocumented (or 'irregular') migrants living in London, and their employers. Breaking new ground, this topical book exposes the contradictions in policies, which marginalise and criminalise these migrants, while promoting exploitative labour market policies. However, the book reveals that the migrants can be active agents in shaping their lives within the constraint of status. Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, this fascinating book offers an international context to the research and provides theoretical, policy and empirical analyses. It will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and academics, as well as policy makers, practitioners and interested non-specialists.

Capitalist societies need to undergo major change to provide for the material needs of all the people who work within the system, not just the 1 percent. They have become dysfunctional and need a different kind of orientation to continue in existence. Instead of creating wealth, which is what they are supposed to accomplish, they have created nothing but debt for the past several decades and are now in serious trouble with regard to finding the wherewithal to keep on functioning as viable societies that can provide job opportunities for their workers and the promise of a better life in the future for their citizens. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed just how many people live paycheck to paycheck and have not been able to accumulate any kind of savings. The 1 percent, meanwhile, have benefited greatly and have vastly increased their wealth over the past several decades. This book does not advocate the need to turn to a form of socialism, however, to give most workers a chance at a decent life for themselves. What is needed is a redefinition of capitalism to make it work for everyone. Capital and Capitalism seeks to uncover various myths about capitalism that hinder our ability to change the system and discuss the task of redefining capitalism by examining where neo-liberalism went wrong and what role restructuring the corporation along stakeholder lines can play in making capitalism more responsive to the entire society. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of business and society, leadership, and business ethics.

A sociologist and former fashion model takes readers inside the elite global party circuit of "models and bottles" to reveal how beautiful young women are used to boost the status of men Million-dollar birthday parties, megayachts on the French Riviera, and $40,000 bottles of champagne. In today's New Gilded Age, the world's moneyed classes have taken conspicuous consumption to new extremes. In Very Important People, sociologist, author, and former fashion model Ashley Mears takes readers inside the exclusive global nightclub and party circuit-from New York City and the Hamptons to Miami and Saint-Tropez-to reveal the intricate economy of beauty, status, and money that lies behind these spectacular displays of wealth and leisure. Mears spent eighteen months in this world of "models and bottles" to write this captivating, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking narrative. She describes how clubs and restaurants pay promoters to recruit beautiful young women to their venues in order to attract men and get them to spend huge sums in the ritual of bottle service. These "girls" enhance the status of the men and enrich club owners, exchanging their bodily capital for as little as free drinks and a chance to party with men who are rich or aspire to be. Though they are priceless assets in the party circuit, these women are regarded as worthless as long-term relationship prospects, and their bodies are constantly assessed against men's money. A story of extreme gender inequality in a seductive world, Very Important People unveils troubling realities behind moneyed leisure in an age of record economic disparity.

This book examines the concept of the fourth industrial revolution and its potential impact on vocational education and training. Broadly located in a framework rooted in critical/radical theory, the book argues that the affordance of technologies surrounding the fourth industrial revolution are constrained by their location within a neoliberal, if not capitalist, logic. Thus, the impact of this revolution will be experienced differently across European regions as well as low and middle income economies. In order to break this impasse, this book calls for a politics based on non-reformist reforms, premised on an aspiration towards a socially just society that transcends capitalism.

The rapid influx of women into the labour market has come to be recognised as one of the most important economic and social developments of the latter half of the 20th century. Women in the Labor Market is an authoritative collection of those papers which have made the greatest contribution to our understanding of this development and its causes. The emphasis is on empirical work which has served either to support or undermine the theoretical foundations of this field, but also included are papers by sociologists who provide insights on economic issues not found in the work of economists.The opening section explores the causes of women's participation in the labour market. The following section investigates the nature of the work in which women are involved and the explanations for this occupational distribution. The question of earnings differentials between male and female occupations and the trends and explanations for this gender wage gap are addressed in the third section, while the penultimate section offers an exploration of the policies which have been proposed in order to improve the status of women in the labour market. In conclusion, the impact of women's work on their lives and families is evaluated.

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.

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 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.

Artificial Intelligence is a seemingly neutral technology, but it is increasingly used to manage workforces and make decisions to hire and fire employees. Its proliferation in the workplace gives the impression of a fairer, more efficient system of management. A machine can't discriminate, after all. Augmented Exploitation explores the reality of the impact of AI on workers' lives. While the consensus is that AI is a completely new way of managing a workplace, the authors show that, on the contrary, AI is used as most technologies are used under capitalism: as a smokescreen that hides the deep exploitation of workers. Going beyond platform work and the gig economy, the authors explore emerging forms of algorithmic governance and AI-augmented apps that have been developed to utilise innovative ways to collect data about workers and consumers, as well as to keep wages and worker representation under control. They also show that workers are not taking this lying down, providing case studies of new and exciting form of resistance that are springing up across the globe.

This book concerns the dignity and the degradation of labor. Because our work has considerable power either to foster or to undermine our happiness and well-being, the degradation of labor is a profound obstacle to human flourishing. Yet the moral dimension of labor has been neglected in our political theory and practice. In this book, James Bernard Murphy aims to restore productive labor to its rightful place in moral and political debate. Ever since Aristotle, there have been many theories of distributive justice but very little in the way of a theory of justice in production. Through a bold reconstruction and critique of Aristotle's views of nature and moral reason, Murphy develops a new Aristotelian theory of productive labor. According to Aristotle, work has dignity when the worker executes what he has first conceived in thought, and work is degraded when one worker merely executes what is conceived by another. With Aristotle's definition of work as a unity of conception and execution, we can see what is wrong with work in the contemporary world: the detailed division of labor has divorced conception from execution. Although the prevalence of monotonous and stultifying work is widely regarded as the inevitable cost of economic progress, Murphy argues that restoring the unity of conception and execution in the design of jobs is compatible with our economic interests in efficient production and is required by our moral interests in human flourishing.

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.

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.

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.

This collection presents an array of policy debates and implications emerging from virtual work. The authors cover a range of areas, including: conceptual debates, measuring virtual work; discourses and levels of policy intervention; the role of the sharing and collaborative economy; and resultant challenges for organized labour, law and regulation. The authors of the chapters analyse the ways in which processes of digitalization leading to virtual work impact so many aspects of our lives: the way we buy, sell, network, communicate, participate, create, consume, and, of course, the way we work. In turn they focus on the subsequent implications for the future of work as well as the viability of existing social protection systems. The developments examined here are salient for both policy stakeholders and for the academic community in areas such as labour sociology, industrial relations, gender studies, political economy, and economic geography.

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.

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.

Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden today all enjoy a reputation for strong labour movements, which in turn are widely seen as part of a distinctive regional approach to politics, collective bargaining and welfare. But as this volume demonstrates, narratives of the so-called "Nordic model" can obscure the fact that experiences of work and the fortunes of organized labour have varied widely throughout the region and across different historical periods. Together, the essays collected here represent an ambitious intervention in labour historiography and European history, exploring themes such as work, unions, politics and migration from the early modern period to the twenty-first century.

There are no other books with the same balance of theory and practice which focus on the UK and European context The content is thematically organised around key labour market, organisational and human resources issues related to equality and diversity New coverage of topical areas such as female representation on executive boards, religious diversity, and economic migration following EU enlargement This book provides up-to-date case studies and discussion questions for use in seminars PowerPoint slides will be available for lecturers

This book argues that post-PhD career planning should ideally begin at the same time as the PhD itself. Drawing from ten years of research and stories of close to 50 individuals, each chapter focuses on the stories of individuals who share common career intentions and how they negotiate these both before, during and after their studies. Each career trajectory is different as individuals planned and made decisions in the face of both expected and unexpected work, personal experiences and responsibilities. The book concludes with resources to help those who are currently planning or reflecting on their own career trajectories.