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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Work & labour
This book is the first in a series on Chinese management based on the Global Chinese Management Conferences (from 2015 to 2017), an annual conference organized by the Sun Tzu Art of War Institute. The first volume is by FOO Check Teck, professor at Fudan and Hunan University and founding editor of Chinese Management Studies (SSCI), who encourages readers to broaden their minds to embrace the Universe as a Community. The book argues that the lives of all beings are worth preserving and urges the academic community to recognize the ideologies at heart of management and to see research as a deep, reflective thinking process that goes far beyond the testing of hypotheses - great works, lasting 2,500 years are the result of deep reflection upon experiences. It also calls for the re-framing of management integration of a variety of ideological strands, typically in topics in MBA or MPA programs: earnings, mobility of human capital, complex adaptive systems, HRM (in small high-tech firms), technology standardization, Xin (trust: labor relations), multi-leveling, re-forming (hospitals), He-Xie (doctoral work), upgrading (automobile industry). The major consequential consideration must be what it means for people.
Work and Family - Allies or Enemies? offers a new lens for viewing the real struggles that business professionals - particularly women - face in their daily battle to find ways of 'getting a life' and 'having it all'. Based on a pioneering study that surveyed more than 800 business professionals, this volume will help readers understand and deal with the effects of gender, professional culture, and social expectations, on the evolving roles of men and women in crafting an integrated life.
This book offers a critical perspective on the issues related to women's empowerment, microfinance, and entrepreneurship in India. Written by distinguishing experts in this field, this book highlights women's empowerment, which is a process of entrusting power to an individual on the control over resources and decisions. However, these two factors are less effective in a society where religion and cultural dominance is high. The book sheds light on the social security measures undertaken by the government aiming to the right to work helped women who are bounded by social restrictions. Over time there is a shift in rural occupational structure towards non-farm activities, which is largely distress driven self-employment. Access to credit is a great source to provide self-employment that develops self-esteem among women and uplift their position. The book highlights the discrimination against women entrepreneurs in access to credit led to gender biased entrepreneurial society. Association with self-help groups (SHGs) has made women more socially empowered. SHG members help them to change their life in a positive manner through micro-entrepreneurial activities. The book has emphasized on the role of microfinance, which has served the poor to become financially self-reliant. It is observed that for second generation borrowers, the impact of microfinance seems to fizzle out, where MFIs who are gaining efficiency are diverting their objective of servicing poor, signalling a sign of mission drift.
This book draws on a wide range of practical examples to describe how conflicts within organisations are traditionally managed and the complementary conflict management methods that can be employed. Stephan Proksch clearly explains these innovative methods and their potential applications. The central focus is on mediation as an effective form of conflict resolution. Discussion and questioning techniques as conflict management tools are explained in simple and concise terms.
On Coerced Labor focuses on those forms of labor relations that have been overshadowed by the "extreme" categories (wage labor and chattel slavery) in the historiography. It covers types of work lying between what the law defines as "free labor" and "slavery." The frame of reference is the observation that although chattel slavery has largely been abolished in the course of the past two centuries, other forms of coerced labor have persisted in most parts of the world. While most nations have increasingly condemned the continued existence of slavery and the slave trade, they have tolerated labor relationships that involve violent control, economic exploitation through the appropriation of labor power, restriction of workers' freedom of movement, and fraudulent debt obligations. Contributors are: Lisa Carstensen, Christian G. De Vito, Justin F. Jackson, Christine Molfenter, David Palmer, Nicola Pizzolato, Luis F.B. Plascencia, Magaly Rodriguez Garcia, Kelvin Santiago-Valles, Nicole J. Siller, Marcel van der Linden, Sven Van Melkebeke.
The historian Wolfgang Mommsen was one of the foremost experts on Max Weber as well as an insightful and accessible interpreter of his work. Mommsen's classic book, first published in 1974 under the title The Age of Bureaucracy, not only concisely explains the basic concepts underlying Weber's worldview, but also explores the historical, social, and intellectual contexts in which he operated, including Weber's development as an academic, his relationship to German nationalism, and his engagement with Marxism. Supplemented with a new foreword, a bibliography that includes recent studies, and a postscript by Volker Berghahn that surveys the most important debates on Weber's work since his death, this short volume serves as an excellent resource for scholars and students alike.
This book examines the new ways of working and their impact on employees' well-being and performance. It concentrates on job demands and flexible work emanating from current economic and organizational change, and assesses impact on workers' health and performance. The development of issues such as globalization, rapid technological advances, new management practices, organizational changes and new job skills are addressed. This book gives an overview and discusses the potential negative and positive effects of such new job demands and new forms of work.
Gender is a defining feature of informal/precarious work in the 21st century, yet studies rarely adopt a gendered lens when examining collective efforts to challenge informality and precarity. This volume foregrounds the gendered dimensions of informal/precarious workers' struggles as a crucial starting point for re-theorizing the future of global labor movements. This volume includes six empirical chapters spanning five countries - the United States, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, and India - to explore exactly how gender is intertwined into informal/precarious workers organizing efforts, why gender is addressed, and to what end. The chapters focus on two gender-typed sectors - domestic work and construction - to identify the varying experiences of and struggles against gender and informality/precarity, as well as the conditions of movement success and failure. Across countries and sectors, the volume shows how informal/precarious worker organizations are on the front lines of challenging the multiple forms of gendered inequalities that shape contemporary practices of accumulation and labor regulation. Their struggles are making major transformations in terms of increasing women's leadership and membership in labor movements and exposing how gender interacts with other ascriptive identities to shape work. They are also re-shaping hegemonic scripts of capitalist accumulation, development, and gender to attain recognition for female-dominated occupations and reproductive needs for the first time ever. These outcomes are crucial as sources of emancipatory transformations at a time when state and public support for labor and social protection is facing the deep assault of transnational production and globalizing markets.
This collection of seventeen essays takes its inspiration from the scholarly achievements of the Dutch historian Jan Lucassen. They reflect a central theme in his research: the history of labor. The essays deal with five major themes: the production of specific commodities or services (diamonds, indigo, cigarettes, mail delivery by road runners); occupational groups (informal street vendors, prostitutes, soldiers, white-collar workers in the Dutch East India Company, VOC); geographical and social mobility (career opportunities on non-Dutch officers in the VOC, immigration into early-modern Holland; the influence of migrants on labor productivity; income differentials as migration incentives); contexts of labor relations (late medieval labor laws, subsistence labor and female paid labor, Russian peasant-migrant laborers, diverging political trajectories of cane-sugar industries); and the origins of labor-history libraries and archives.
This book examines cooperation among rival partners in a Northeastern US corporate law firm. Members are portrayed as interdependent entrepreneurs who build social niches in their firm, and both cultivate and mitigate status competition among themselves. This behaviour generates informal social mechanisms that help a flat organization to govern itself. The resulting theory of the collegial organization generalizes its results to partnerships, larger multinational professional services firms, and collegial pockets in flattening bureaucracies.
In this increasingly neoliberal gig economy, exponentially expanding with technological advances, the ability to work online remotely has led some western millennials to travel the world to work and play, while making a subsistence living as digital platform workers. Digging beneath the superficial newspaper articles that highlight beach-bound, bikinied workers, adorned with laptops, this book asks, what are the social implications of adopting the subcultural lifestyle known as 'Digital Nomadism'? This book explores the inherent social problems with this lifestyle. Examining how Digital Nomadism provides an individualistic fix for an otherwise downwardly-mobile millennial generation, Thompson demonstrates how this generation increasingly postpone markers of adulthood-purchasing a house, getting married, or having children-because of their financial insecurities. Thompson highlights that while being a Digital Nomad can provide a high quality of life while living on the beaches of Thailand, such avenues obscures their inabilities to afford a comfortable lifestyle in their home countries.
The papers included in the volume explore how mobilizing Boltanski and Thevenot's EW framework helps address questions regarding the premises and dynamics of agreement and disagreement in coordinated action, both within and across organizations, and by so doing, help advance our understanding of organizational processes more generally. The book is organized into four sections, each with contributions that address one of the four core theoretical objectives around which the volume is structured (1) to clarify how individuals manage the contradictions and compromises inherent to organizational pluralism; (2) to look at organizations critically by unpacking the roles of rhetoric and justification in the practice of critique; (3) to reconsider valuation and evaluation in organizations; and (4) to push the boundaries of the EW framework. These four objectives provide a scaffolding that helps further embed the framework in our contemporary thinking about organizations.
This book is a comprehensive look at the results of a study, done under the auspices of Kent State University, that explored the attitudes, beliefs, and life orientation of 253 women between the ages of 25 and 45. Depending upon the amount of employment that the subjects' mothers had outside the home while the subjects were growing up, the adult subjects responded to questions of adjustment to life, overall sense of well-being, emotional stability, and sense of self-fulfillment. The overwhelming response was that women whose mothers had worked while they were growing up were more likely to suffer from depression, to feel less effective as parents, and to report less satisfaction with their parenting skills, careers, and life in general. Contrary to perceived notions of family adjustment to working mothers, day care, and women's liberation, this study forces us to respond to the warning signals issued by a generation of the daughters of working mothers. While Sugar's findings are clear and unambiguous, she provides ample information for the reader to explore other interpretations of the data and the cause and possible solutions.
A major force in American society, the work ethic has played a pivotal role in U.S. history, affecting cultural, social, and economic institutions. But what is the American work ethic? Not only has it changed from one era to another, but it varies with race, gender, and occupation. Considering such diverse groups as Colonial craftsmen, slaves, 19th century women, and 20th century factory workers, this book provides a history of the American work ethic from Colonial times to the present. Tracing both continuities and differences, the book is divided into sections on the Colonial era, the 19th century and the 20th century and includes chapters on both major occupational groups, such as farmers, factory workers, laborers, and gender, racial, and ethnic minorities. This approach, which covers all major groups in U.S. history, enables the reader to discern how the work ethic applied to different occupational and ethnic groups over time. The book subjects the work ethic to an analysis based on historical, sociological, economic, and anthropological perspectives and provides an analysis of current thinking about how the work ethic applied to various groups and classes in different historical periods.
The purpose of the book is to devise an alternative conceptual vocabulary for studying innovation by stressing the role of social, contextual and cultural perspectives. This vocabulary is drawn on a service and on sociological perspectives on innovation based on the ontological assumption that innovation is a value co-creation matter and that it takes place in a reality that is multiple, constructed and socially embedded. The aim is to tackle key issues such as social construction, service innovation, knowledge and learning processes, value (co) creation, innovating and innovation activities networking and collaborative innovation.
This book analyzes the effects of wives' employment on the economic status of families, using both descriptive and empirical research. The historical and socio-economic causes of change in the employment status of wives and husbands are detailed. The empirical studies respond to some basic questions about dual-earner families: How does having an employed wife influence family lifestyles? What effects do dual-earners have on the finances of their households and on the distribution of income? What policy changes are needed to recognize the economic importance of dual-earner families? In Working Wives and Dual-Earner Families, one-earner and dual-earner families are differentiated, with particular attention to the impact of wives' employment status (full-time or part-time) on household decision making. Among the most interesting research findings are: total family income or tax bracket and the cost of child care are among the critical determinants of dual-earner employment; married-couple families at the same level of income have very similar expenditure patterns regardless of whether the wife is employed; full-time working wives make the distribution of income less equal, but part-time working wives generate greater equality in the distribution of income; families with full-time working wives have higher income, but they do not save more or have greater financial assets than other families; families with part-time employed wives are similar to those with non-employed wives and differ from families with full-time employed wives. The authors conclude that the real incomes of dual-earner families will continue to grow, as one-earner real income remains the same or declines. Household planning and decision making will increasingly be predicated upon having two earners, which will be perceived as the norm. Dual-earner families, based on amenities, mobility, growing families, and demands for public goods, will drive private markets and public policy.
This book aims at presenting a conceptual apparatus and empirical analysis of the ways Nordic civil society is affected by social transformations by focusing on the Norwegian case. The Norwegian empirical focus allows identifying processes and factors of change that are relevant outside this context and enable us to understand, on a more general basis, the relationship between social transformations and transformations affecting the voluntary sector. This book will make an original contribution to the field of comparative civil society studies both by increasing the available knowledge on the Nordic civil society model and by analyzing the societal transformations affecting civil society over time.
This book looks at the routine taken-for-granted features of work as experienced by professional women in bureaucratic environments. It shows why these trivial features are not trivial, but add up to a good part of what all work is composed of. Finally, it considers why the women interviewed in this study encountered and experienced their professional careers in the ways they did. There are many books on the general subject of women at work and the sociology of work, but few deal with what the work consists of, how it is accomplished, what one needs to know to undertake it competently, and how it is experienced by the worker. This book deals with all these issues, and more, that are typically overlooked in the literature on women at work in particular and on work in general.
Gender often influences the type of occupation that individuals choose, as well as the way they work and the outcomes of that work. Home-based employment is no different. The proximity of these workers to their families' living activities provides an unique opportunity to study the effects of work-at-home on family interaction and the role that gender plays in this traditionally female-dominated situation. The chapters provide a range of gender considerations from the perspectives of the workers and the workers' families, with emphasis on either the workers, the family, or the work/business. The first chapter provides an overview of the subjects being covered and defines several of the concepts used. The range of viewpoints is extensive: Chapter 2 considers home-based employment from a global perspective, while Chapter 8 narrows the focus to one particular location and type of home-based worker. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 7 examine in various ways the data from a 9-state study, basing their analyses in theoretical and conceptual frameworks related to gender. Chapter 6 explores the dilemma of parents who have to hire child care in order to complete their home-based work. Also included are recommendations for public policy considerations.
This book reinvigorates the debate about the origins and development of police culture within our changing social, economic and political landscape. An in-depth analysis and appreciation of the police socialisation, identity and culture literature is combined with a comprehensive four-year longitudinal study of new recruits to a police force in England. The result offers new insights into the development of, and influences upon, new police recruits who refer to themselves as a "new breed" of police officer. Adding significantly to the police culture literature, this original and empirically based research also provides valuable insights into the challenges of modern policing in an age of austerity. Scholars of policing and criminal justice, as well as police officers themselves will find this compelling reading.
Major political and economic shifts have marked the turn into the 21st century: the collapse of the Soviet bloc; the rise to prominence of ecological issues; social changes generated by globalization; and, most recently, one of the worst world financial crises ever. These developments compel us to examine the capitalist system with a critical eye and to reflect on the need for alternatives. The 150th anniversary of the birth of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) (1864-2014) offers an important opportunity to compare present mainstream paradigms and the political platform developed by the IWA in order to better address our contemporary crisis?] and theorize solutions. This sourcebook introduces and contextualizes the most valuable notes and proceedings from these legendary meetings, and includes letters and commentary surrounding the events themselves, many appearing for the first time in English. The carefully compiled materials reach beyond Marx's writings through the history of the IWA to include the cooperative movement, trade union reformism, collectivism, and anarchism. In his introductions to these texts, acclaimed scholar Marcello Musto provides accessible critical evaluations and explanations. The text also highlights how certain themes--self-emancipation of the working class versus communist vanguardism and the taking of political power to achieve social ends versus oppressive Soviet-style state control--find sharp discontinuity between Marx's thought as a political leader of the IWA and the tradition of Soviet Marxism. Carefully selected and painstakingly translated, this volume is an invaluable resource for all those interested in the foundations of modern political and labor history.
This expertly prepared policy issues handbook surveys the changing workplace and the failures of America's public health and education systems to prepare the future work force to compete at home and abroad. Carl Stenberg and William Colman analyze the key issues; review a mass of information, ideas, and insights about policy options that are available; and assess their pros and cons. Students, teachers, administrators, policymakers, and concerned citizens will find a wealth of clearly presented data along with careful analyses of the major proposals for reform. Figures, tables, short summaries, appendices, bibliographical aids, and a full index make this one-volume landmark reference accessible to researchers and readers at different levels and for varied use.
This volume introduces the notion of Thinking Infrastructures to explore a broad range of phenomena that structure attention, shape decision-making, and guide cognition: Thinking Infrastructures configure entities (via tracing, tagging), organise knowledge (via search engines), sort things out (via rankings and ratings), govern markets (via calculative practices, including algorithms), and configure preferences (via valuations such as recommender systems). Thus, Thinking Infrastructures, we collectively claim in this volume, inform and shape distributed and embodied cognition, including collective reasoning, structuring of attention and orchestration of decision-making.
Contributions to this volume review, in international perspective, the European social model of collective bargaining, minimum wages, employment rights, and social welfare support, which is seen as both cause and cure for joblessness and low-wage employment in Europe. They find that collective bargaining and minimum wages protect vulnerable workers, while wage flexibility is not economically effective in creating jobs for the low-skilled.
This volume describes and maps congregations of Christian confessions and denominations, as well as groups with Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and various other spiritual faiths, in different European countries. Consisting of three parts, it presents concrete sociological studies addressing how established and not established, old and new congregations of various faiths create a new kind of religious diversity at the country level; how religious congregations are challenged and thrive in large cities; and how religious congregations change in the 21st century. The book enlightens by its descriptive analysis and the theoretical questions it raises concerning the religious transformations happening all over Europe. It addresses issues of religious diversity in the cities of Europe by presenting large studies conducted in cities such as Barcelona in Spain, and Aarhus in Denmark. By means of large-scale censuses taken in areas such as North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany and in countries like Switzerland and Italy, the book shows how the historically established churches restructure their congregations and activities. It clarifies for the new gatherers where and how a new diversity of religious congregations is in the process of being established. Finally, the book covers two important topical issues: pluralisation and secularisation. It provides new data on religious diversity, painting a new picture of secularisation: the impact and structural consequences of the long-term decrease of membership in the established churches. |
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