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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Work & labour
This innovative work is established as the substantive exploration of the literary endeavours of working people and socialists over 200 years.H. Gustav Klaus challenges the complacent assumptions about working class and socialist literature as merely a "symptom", arguing that the literature of labour is an integral part of the historical development of the working class and deserves much closer attention.This work breaks away from the 'Great Tradition' and in revealing the rich source of creativity within the literature of labour, introduces an alternative tradition of English literature.
The writings in this volume see the South African labour movement as a factor capable of shaping democratization. Through the strategic use of power, labour has reconfigured democratization through negotiated compromises, attempting to ensure that the costs of adjustment are not borne by workers alone. This examination of these strategies and practices assesses labour's capacity to exert influence in the future. The findings suggest that labour's marginalization would put at risk the consolidation of democracy.
In this book, first published in 1989, the authors have sought to highlight some of the major themes in the study of time and work within separate but related fields of study. A number of common starting points and issues are examined, alongside the various conclusions which different researchers have drawn together. Working together, the four authors have enriched their individual understanding of worktime through exposure to approaches taken by others working within different discipline boundaries. This title will be of interest to students of business studies.
This book, originally published in 1999, provided the first comparative, in-depth analysis of workplace relations in east and west Germany. The collapse of communism and the ensuing process of reform means that East Germany provides a particularly interesting case, having experienced rapid and radical political and economic transformation, and representing an historically outstanding experiment of the shifting of an entire social system onto a different society. This book examines the success of the institutional transfer of west German labour organisations into east Germany workplaces and addresses central questions such as : Can capitalist labour institutions be imposed on a former communist workforce? What conditions determine the success or failure of these institutions? Can 'social partnership/ between capital and labour be learned?
The workforce across industrialized nations has become both older and more age-diverse, and this trend is expected to continue in the coming decades. These changes will have important implications for motivating and managing both individual employees and teams and because people are retiring later, it is important to address ways to sustain the wellbeing and productivity of workers. With a specifically international focus, this volume addresses these critical issues from the individual and psychological perspectives. Based primarily in empirical research, it covers a wide range of topics related to the aging workforce, including the motivation of older workers - to work and to retire; what organizations can do to attract and retain the talent of older workers; how to improve relations and productivity among age-diverse teams; how to design jobs to support older and younger talent; and how to better understand why older workers may choose to return to work. This volume includes contributions from the top I/O researchers in the field of the aging workforce. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology.
How are we to characterise the context in which organisations operate? The notion that organisational activity is shaped by institutional logics has been influential but it presents a number of problems. The criteria by which institutions are identified, the conflation of institutions with organisations, the enduring nature of those institutions and an exaggerated focus on change are all concerns that existing perspectives do not tackle adequately. This book uses the resources of historical work to suggest new ways of looking at institutional logics. It builds on the work of Roger Friedland who has conceived of institutional logics being animated by adherence to a core substance that is immanent in practices. Development of this idea in the context of organisation theory is supported by ideas drawn from the work of the social theorist Margaret Archer and the broader resources of the philosophical tradition of critical realism. Institutions are seen to emerge over time from the embodied relations of humans to each other and to the natural world on which they depend for material existence. Once emergent, institutions develop their own logics and endure to form the context in which agents are involuntarily placed and that conditions their activity. The approach adopted offers resources to 'bring society back in' to the study of organisations. The book will appeal to graduate students who are engaging with institutional theory in their research. It will also be of interest to scholars of institutional theory, of the history of organisations and those seeking to apply ideas from critical realism to their research.
Against the background of a high incidence of long-term benefit receipt and an increasing focus of interventions on the individual beneficiary, this study shows how individualised policies within the German minimum income scheme serve long-term beneficiaries as a way out of benefit receipt. By applying a qualitative research design, the link between individual appropriations of policies and individual life planning is reconstructed in the form of an empirically grounded typology. The analysis shows that individualised policies are ridden with prerequisites. Beneficiaries, that are not able to expertly appropriate them and to plan in the long-term, face unintended consequences like a limitation of life planning, a separation from the scheme or an establishment within entitlement.
This is the era of flexibility. Under constant pressure to be adaptable, organizations increasingly adopt employment practices such as zero-hours contracts, the casualization of the workforce and the use of temporary and agency labour. These flexible practices are central to debates about the changing nature of job quality and its causes, trends and consequences. Arguing that job quality is central to understanding contemporary work, this book explores the internal and external pressures for flexibility in workplaces, professions and sectors and how this pressure shapes workers' experiences of job quality. By studying job quality dynamics via case studies from organizations and occupations in the UK, Poland, Belgium and Sweden, the volumes illustrates the diversity of practices and experiences, as well as market pressures and institutional arrangements which effect working lives. Finally, the editors propose a policy debate on the new concept "flexiquality" - a combination of flexibility and job quality that can be beneficial for both management and workers.
This book, first published in 1914, examines the economic position of women at the turn of the twentieth century. Women's economic position had been undermined by the helpless dependence engendered, among the better-off, by nineteenth century luxury, and among manual workers by the loss of their hold upon land and by the decline of home industries. The essays collected here examine the changing state of affairs, with a new force at work: the revolt of the modern woman against economic dependence in all forms.
The theory and practice of management accounting should be seen within the context of varieties of global capitalism, to appreciate its role as a 'calculative technology of capitalism' which is practiced on factory floors, corporate boards, computer networks, spreadsheets, and so forth. This new textbook is the first to introduce the field from a rounded social science perspective. Strategizing Management Accounting offers a theoretical discussion on management accounting's strategic orientation by accommodating two interrelated lines of analyses, from historical and contemporary perspectives. The book illustrates how 'new management accounting' has evolved into the form in which it exists today in its neoliberal context and how those new management accounting practices have become manifestos for the managers, as calculative technologies of decision making, performance management, control, corporate governance, as well as global governance, and development within various forms of organizations across the globe. Each chapter draws on Foucauldian analysis of biopolitics explaining how neoliberal market logic informs a set of strategies and mechanisms through which various social entities and discourses are made governable by considering them as biopolitical entities of global governance. Written by two recognized accounting experts, this book is vital reading for all students of management accounting and will also be a useful supplementary resource for those wanting to understand and research accounting's vital role in contemporary society.
In this book, first published in 1971, the authors show from first-hand studies of family and working life (and with evidence from many countries, including the socialist societies of Eastern Europe) the nature of the discrimination facing women in the professions - and how various family and employment patterns might contribute to solving it. Their point is not that some new stereotype should be substituted for traditional views of the role of husbands and wives: different patterns fit different situations.
Based upon classical and contemporary theory and empirical research, this text forms a sociological analysis of organizations, focusing on the impacts that organizations have upon individuals and society.
Taste is a core concept for the social sciences and an orienting notion in everyday practice. It is of equal relevance to academics and laypeople alike. Theorizations of taste are frequently multi- disciplinary, bringing an opportunity to cross-fertilize ideas and concepts. At the same time, a reader, challenged by the diverse body and dispersed nature of theories on taste, needs guidance navigating the literature and framing areas of interest. Until now, those interested in an academic perspective on the concept have had to traverse a wide range of literature. This is the first book that assembles a range of writings on taste from across disciplines to provide the reader with a sense of the emerging and expanding boundaries of this field of study. Taste, Consumption and Markets offers a comprehensive and up-to-date review of taste, with an emphasis on how taste shapes boundaries, subcultures, and global culture, complemented by an introduction that provides a scaffold for the reader and a concluding section that reflects on the past, present, and future of research on taste. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to students at an advanced level, academics, and reflective practitioners. It addresses the topics with regard to the sociology of taste and consumption and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of consumer studies, consumption ethics, sociological perspectives on consumption, and cultural studies.
This first of two companion volumes places the labor markets, workplaces, jobs and workers of Europe in comparative perspective. It focuses on the politics, economics, sociology, and history of work and workers in Europe. Authors contribute a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives, with papers that push the boundaries of evidence and argument. In order to place European workers in comparative perspectives, the volume features articles that analyze specific European countries, industries and firms, analyze Europe as one of a few cases, and analyze many European countries within a cross-national sample. Specific topics in 'Comparing European Workers Volume 1: Experiences and Inequalities' include: a multilevel study of perceived job insecurity in 27 European countries; work values and job rewards among European workers; explaining cross-national variation in wage inequality; managerial intensity and earnings inequality in affluent democracies; cross-national patterns in individual and household employment and work hours by gender and parenthood; and domestic and international causes of the rise of pay inequality in OECD nations.
Dance and Organisation is the first comprehensive work to integrate dance theory and methods into the study of management, which have developed an interest in the arts and the humanities. Dance represents dynamics and change and puts the moving body at the centre, which has been ignored and oppressed by traditional management theory. 'Being' a leader however also means to 'move' like one, and critical lessons can be learned from ballerinas and modern dancers. Leadership is a dialogue, as in the work of musicians, conductors and DJs who manage groups without words. Movement in organisational space, in a museum or a techno club can be understood as a choreography and site-specific performance. Movement also is practically used for leadership and employee development workshops and can be deployed as an organisational research method. By taking a firm interdisciplinary stance in dance studies and organisational research to explore management topics, reflecting on practitioner accounts and research projects, the book seeks to make an innovative contribution to our understanding of the moving body, generating new insights on teamwork, leadership, gender in management, organisational space, training and research methods. It comprises an important contribution to the organizational behaviour and critical management studies disciplines, and looks to push the boundaries of the academic literature.
In the last two decades there has been an explosion of research inspired by Michel Foucault's suggestion of a new concept, 'governmentality'. The distinctive feature of modern governmentality is that across all sorts of fields, rule is predicated upon the active subject as the vehicle through which-and by which-power is exercised. The appeal of governmentality is that, whether we are considering the workplace, the school or welfare regimes, it opens up new ways of looking at familiar institutions. Foucault and Managerial Governmentality is about Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality. The novelty of this concept is that looks at the ways that populations and organisations are imagined in ways that premise collective gains through expanding individual freedoms. Specifically, how are technologies of freedom devised that improve the overall performance-health, productivity, or parental responsibility-of a given population? Understanding the operation of technologies of control is a simple enough task, argues Foucault, but also one that blinds us to the increasing prevalence of technologies of freedom. Foucault and Managerial Governmentality aims not just to locate this concept in Foucault's wider research project but to apply it to all sorts of management techniques. By applying governmentality to questions of management and organization we will also develop Foucault's original, somewhat sketchy concept. This book has three innovative narratives: an awareness of the historicity of the concept; the application of governmentality to specific forms of management means that we escape the temptation to read any and all forms of technology and organization as an expression of neoliberalism; and, finally, the interviews with Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose provide unique intellectual and personal insights into the development of the governmentalist project over the last thirty years.
The book explores the macroeconomic and sectoral employment implications (in agriculture, industry and services) of China's World Trade Organisation accession. It argues that while short-run employment losses may occur, in the longer term China will be able to generate additional employment particularly in the tertiary sectors; and that it can maintain its comparative advantage in labour-intensive exports by relocating production from high-cost coastal areas to the hinterland with abundant supply of cheap labour. It also argues that, although China is likely to benefit in the long run, in the short and medium term China is likely to face enormous problems, including increased unemployment as weaker links cease to be protected by tariffs, and the problem of restructuring state-owned enterprises.
More than 40,000 children die daily in the developing world from avoidable sickness and disease. Tens of millions of children labour in mines, mills and sweatshops, or scavenge for a living on city streets and dumps. In the so-called developed world, children's lives are similarly blighted by drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse and violence. Children of the rich are unhealthily obsessed with consumerist desires while children of the poor suffer from lack of opportunity. The global market is responsible for both of these ills. In Children of Other Worlds Jeremy Seabrook examines the international exploitation of children and exposes the hypocrisy, piety and moral blindness that have informed so much of the debate in the West on the rights of the child. Seabrook insists that the whole question of protecting children's rights must take into consideration the structural abuses of humanity that are inherent in globalisation.
In thirteen chapters, the contributors to this volume analyse the different dimensions of a new form of collaboration, termed collective co-production, in the Scandinavian countries. It is a characteristic of the Scandinavian countries - Sweden, Norway and Denmark - that they have both a large public and voluntary sector. For decades, the dominant type of collaboration between the two sectors has consisted of the public sector providing financial support to organisations in the voluntary sector, while the activities are undertaken by the organisation itself. In recent times, however, a new discourse has emerged, with a strong political focus on developing closer collaboration between the two sectors. The book analyses collective co-production between the voluntary and public sectors, and identifies what distinguishes this form of collaboration from others. It looks at the scope of collective co-production, how and why it differs between welfare areas, as well as the political vision for co-production and the extent to which it lives up to those expectations. This discourse promotes a type of collaboration wherein organisations, associations and volunteers can participate in the implementation of tasks for which public institutions are responsible. The book is a valuable resource for professionals in voluntary organizations and public welfare units working with co-production and for researchers and students in the fields of civil society, voluntary sector and welfare policy.
This book explores the connection between British and German officer cadets' perceptions of the past and their motivations for enlisting in the military forces in the United Kingdom and Germany. Drawing upon qualitative interviews and survey data conducted at officers' academies in the UK and Germany, the author offers a comparative analysis using differing approaches towards history and memory in Britain and Germany, while considering the roles of individual goals and societal orientations in the decision to enlist. Employing the notion of pragmatic professionalism, which reflects the fact that occupational and institutional reasons for enlisting are not opposite points on a single scale, Professionalism, Memory and Identity examines history-orientated reasons for enlistment by shedding light on officer cadets' values, beliefs and wider cultural understandings of the past. With attention to differences in motivation as a result of differing national backgrounds and former military training, as well as the extent to which these divergences contribute to the emergence of different types of soldiers in the two countries, this comparative, international study will appeal to scholars of sociology, politics and war studies with interests in the military profession and the role of history in contemporary Britain and Germany.
'Organizational research methods' (ORM) are making an ontological turn by studying the nature of Being, becoming, and the meaning of existence in the world. For example, without ontology, there is no 'ground' and no 'theory' in Grounded Theory (GT). This book explores ten ways to develop fourth wave GT that is grounded and theory. 1st wave GT commits inductive fallacy inference, 2nd wave GT bandaids it with positivistic content coding. 3rd wave GT turns to social constructivism, but this leaves out the materiality and ecology of existence. The first three waves do not address falsification or verification. There is another theme. Qualitative research methods is a discipline craft, not mere science or something that automated text analysis software can displace. Quantiative narrative analysis (QDA) is one more way to colonize and marginalize indigenous ways of knowing (IWOK). Without an ontological turn, its the death of storytelling predicted by Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein predicted. The good news is Western Empirical Science is beginning to listen to IWOK-Native Science experiential living story method of relations not only to other humans but to other animals, plants, to living air, water, and earth in living ecosystem of an enchanted world There is a gap in the qualitative research methodology practices and comprehensive advanced approaches causing a split between practice and theory. So called Grounded Theory (inductive positivism) . Organizational Research: Storytelling in Action is about how to conduct ten kinds of ontological Research Methods and conduct their interpretative analyses, for organization studies, in an ethically answerable way. It is aimed at people who want a more 'advanced' treatment than available in so-called Grounded Theory or automated narrative analysis books.
This book presents an analysis of why some large infrastructure projects are delayed or compromised and offers important insights into the better delivery of future projects. It provides an important reaction to the ambitious EURO315 billion investment plan devised by the European Commission, wherein Europe's infrastructure is a key investment target. Germany is adopted as a focus, as Europe's largest economy, and a nation that has seen significant delays and tensions in the delivery of key infrastructure projects. The contributions to this volume demonstrate various patterns for infrastructure assets and illustrate how factors such as poor project governance, early planning mistakes, inappropriate risk management and unforeseen technological challenges influence delivery. The in-depth case studies on the Berlin Brandenburg Airport, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, and offshore wind parks show how project delivery can face massive problems, and illuminating solutions are offered to these problems. Overall, the case of Germany also offers the opportunity to assess various new forms of project delivery, such as public-private partnerships (PPP), and the risks and opportunities of ambitious first-mover 'pioneer' projects. The book will be of great interest for scholars and upper-level students of human geography, business and management, as well as policy makers.
The emergence of a 'labour market' in industrial societies implies not just greater competition and increased mobility of economic resources, but also the specific form of the work relationship which is described by the idea of wage labour and its legal expression, the contract of employment. This book examines the evolution of the contract of employment in Britain through a close investigation of changes in its juridical form during and since the industrial revolution. The initial conditions of industrialization and the subsequent growth of a particular type of welfare state are shown to have decisively shaped the evolutionary path of British labour and social security law. In particular, the authors argue that nature of the legal transition which accompanied industrialization in Britain cannot be adequately captured by the conventional idea of a movement from status to contract. What emerged from the industrial revolution was not a general model of the contract of employment, but rather a hierarchical conception of service, which originated in the Master and Servant Acts and was slowly assimilated into the common law. It was only as a result of the growing influence of collective bargaining and social legislation, and with the spread of large-scale enterprises and of bureaucratic forms of organization, that the modern term 'employee' began to be applied to all wage and salary earners. The concept of the contract of employment which is familiar to modern labour lawyers is thus a much more recent phenomenon than has been widely supposed. This has important implications for conceptualizations of the modern labour market, and for the way in which current proposals to move 'beyond' the employment model, in the face of intensifying technological and institutional change, should be addressed.
This book examines the structural changes in the labour market in North-East India. Going beyond the conventional study of tea and agricultural sectors, it focuses on the nature, pattern and structure of work and employment in the region as well as documents emerging shifts in the labour force towards farm to non-farm dynamics. The chapters explore historical developments in employment patterns, labour market policies, issues of gender and social-religious dimensions, as well as point to growing forms of casual, informal and contractual labour across sectors. Through large-scale data and detailed case studies on unfree labour in plantations and those employed in crafts, handloom and the manufacturing industry, the book provides insights into labour and employment in the region. It also delves into the temporal and spatial dimensions of non-farm employment and its relationship with rural income distribution and labour mobility. By bringing interdisciplinary perspectives from scholars working on North-East India, this work fills a major gap in the political economy of the labour market in the region. The volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of development studies, North-East India studies, labour studies, economics, sociology and political science as well to those involved with governance and policymaking.
This book presents the findings, applications, and theoretical underpinnings of a unique leadership communication model: motivating language theory. Drawing from management, social science, and communication theories, motivating language theory demonstrates how leader-to-follower speech improves employee and organizational well-being and drives positive workplace outcomes (such as employee performance, retention, and job satisfaction) in a wide array of settings. It presents an integrated model based on empirical findings and theoretical developments from the past three decades to explore the three dimensions of motivating language: direction giving language, empathetic language, and meaning-making language. It will be a comprehensive source for its empirical relationships, generalizability, theoretical basis, and future directions for research and practice. |
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