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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Work & labour
This book, first published in 1973, sets out the reason why workers' control is the necessary alternative to the present system. It describes the struggle of the workers through their organizations to achieve a greater control over their lives; and it discusses the practical steps which need to be taken to achieve complete workers' control. Practicality is the keynote of this book, which starts from the reality of the 1970's and progresses towards the essence of socialism - workers' control.
The book, first published in 1983, examined whether the Yugoslavs' extensive implementation of their principle of self-management by small work units was costly in terms of economic efficiency. Were they atomizing their firms into inefficiently small fragments? Was the system of worker self-management appropriate only for small firms? Can a modern industrial enterprise of efficient scale, indeed very large scale, by run that way? In order to answer these questions, the author applies to large firms in former Yugoslavia the transactions cost analysis developed by the economist Oliver Williamson.
This title, originally published in 1925, provides a scientific exploration of some of the forms of co-operative organisation which had attained considerable development in other countries, but were little known to English students of the movement. This account of the co-operative movement in Italy will be of interest to students of economic democracy and economic history.
In a world in which individuals will undergo multiple career changes, is it possible any longer to conceive of a job as a meaningful vocation? Against the background of fragmentation and rationalisation of work, this book explores the significance and meaning of work in contemporary life, raising the question of whether people continue to feel motivated to dedicate their lives to their work, or must now look to other areas of life for meaning. Based on rich, in-depth interviews conducted with workers of different ages and across a broad range of occupations in the major city of Melbourne, Making a Living, Making a Life reveals that work continues to be a source of pride, passion and purpose, the author shedding light on the ways in which cultural narratives, collective meanings and structural factors influence people's feelings about work. An engaging and empirically grounded examination of the meaning and centrality of work to people's lives in today's 'liquid' modern world, this book will appeal to sociologists with interests in cultural sociology, social theory, ethics, the sociology of work and questions of identity.
Winner of the 2018 Outstanding Edited Book Award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association The Agency of Organizing explains why the notion of agency is central to understanding what organizations are, how they come into existence, continue to exist, or fade away, and how they function. Written by leading organizational communication scholars, the chapters in this edited volume present seven different theoretical perspectives on agency in the dynamics of organizing. Authors discuss how they conceptualize agency from their own perspective and how they propose to investigate agency empirically in processes of organizing by using specific methods. Through insightful case studies, they demonstrate the value of these perspectives for organizational research and practice.
Originally published in 1978. The present study had grown out of the deliberations of wage policy at the 1971 Congress of LO, the Swedish Confederation of Trade Unions. For many years the LO had pursued a policy of solidarity in wage policy - a policy which sought to relate pay to the nature of the work which an employee carried out, and not to the capacity or ability of the employer to pay. Several issues related to this policy are explored. This study was extremely controversial when first published in Sweden, and will therefore be of great interest to students of economic history and democracy.
Originally published in 1990, Soviet Urbanization provides an assessment of Soviet urban systems. Drawing on her personal experiences at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and bringing with her much material otherwise unavailable in the West, the author analyses the structure of the Soviet urban network and its future development under the constraints of central planning. The author concludes that the danger to Soviet urbanization programme lies in the gap between central planning on the one hand and actual spatial change on the other. This book will appeal to students and academics working in the disciplines of geography, urban studies and planning.
Disability Servitude traces the history and legacy of institutional peonage. For over a century, public and private institutions across the country relied on the unpaid, forced labor of their residents and patients in order to operate. This book describes the work they performed, in some cases for ten or more hours a day, seven days a week, and the lawsuits they brought in an effort to get paid. The impact of those lawsuits included accelerated de-institutionalization, but they fell short of obtaining equal and fair compensation for their plaintiffs. Instead, thousands of resident and patient-workers were replaced by non-disabled employees. Disability Servitude includes a detailed history of longstanding problems with the oversight of the sub-minimum wage provision in the Fair Labor Standards Act oversight. Beckwith shows how that history has resulted in the continued segregation and exploitation of over 400,000 workers with disabilities in sheltered workshops that legally pay far less than minimum wage.
Together with changes in the nature of modernity, globalisation is restructuring society. The sovereignty of the nation-state is undermined, the structuring of identity is realigned and a sense of individualism (which involves a freedom of choice re institutional alignments) prevails. English emerges as the global lingua franca. At the heart of these developments is the knowledge economy within which work is organised according to principles quite different from those of the Taylorism that prevailed in the industrial economy. Language and culture play a crucial role in the elaboration of the shared meaning that is crucial for learning within team working. The book argues that creativity is enhanced by the use of multilingualism within working practices. It concludes with an overview of how our understanding of language is also changing.
First published in 1985, this book provides a descriptive study of social activities in a neurosciences laboratory. Based on fieldwork conducted by the author in the laboratory during 1975 and 1976, and taking an ethnomethodological approach, it focuses on the phenomenon of the social accomplishment of natural scientific order. Through the examination of shop work and shop talk in this environment, it identifies an analyzable social basis in the local production of accounts of natural objects in laboratory research. This work will be of interest to students and scholars of ethnomethodology and sociology.
This book examines gender and professions in the 21st century. Historically the professions encompassed law, medicine and the church, all of which excluded women from participation. Industry and the 20th century introduced new professions such as engineering and latterly information technology skill and, whilst the increase in credentialism and accreditations open up further avenues for professions to develop, many of the 'newer' professions exhibit similar gendered characteristics, still based on a perceived masculine identity of the professional workers and the association of the professional with high level credentials based on university qualifications. In contrast, professions such as teaching and nursing, characterized as women's professions which reflected women's socially acceptable role of caring, developed as regulated occupations from the late 19th century. Since the 1970s and the women's movements, anti-discrimination and equal opportunity legislation and policies have aimed to break down the gendered bastion of the professions and grant women entry. With growing numbers of women employed in a range of professions and the political importance of gender equality gaining prominence globally, Gender and the Professions also considers how women and men are faring in a diverse range of professional occupations. Aimed at researchers, academics and policy makers in the fields of Professions, Gender Studies, Organizational Studies and related disciplines. Gender and the Professions provides new insights of women's experiences in the professions in both developed and less developed countries and in professions less often explored.
At the end of the 1970s, Chinese merchandise moved to Brazil via Paraguay, forming an on-the-margins-of-the-law trade chain involving the production, distribution, and consumption of cheap goods. Economic changes in the twenty-first century, including the enforcement of intellectual property rights and the growing importance of emerging economies, have had a dramatic effect on how this chain works, criminalizing and dismantling a trade system that had previously functioned in an organized form and stimulated the circulation of goods, money, and people at transnational levels. This book analyses how exchange networks that produced, distributed, and sold cheap manufactured products animated a huge and vibrant system from China to Brazil, examining the process at global, national, and local levels. From a global perspective, intellectual property is a powerful discourse that governs the world system by framing the notion of piracy as a criminal activity. But at the national level, how do nation-states resist and/or endorse, interpret, and apply a global perspective? And what effect does that have on how ordinary people organize their lives around this system? Interweaving discourse on transnational traders and producers, national projects, and international institutions, Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South presents low-income traders not as passive victims of globalization, but as active actors in the distribution of cheap goods across borders in the Global South. Based on fifteen years of ethnographic field work in China and Brazil, Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South will be of interest to scholars of economic anthropology, development studies, political economy, Latin America studies, Chinese studies, and socio-legal studies.
"I found the volume to be consistently stimulating and was excited by a new visual anthropology dwelling not in the image but in how people actually look and see...and important and timely volume that does much to further our understanding of vision. It will be of great interest to researchers and students concerned with studies of sensory perceptions." . Social Anthropology Most arguments for a rediscovery of the body and the senses hinge on a critique of "visualism" in our globalized, technified society. This approach has led to a lack of actual research on the processes of visual "enskillment." Providing a comprehensive spectrum of case studies in relevant contexts, this volume raises the issue of the rehabilitation of vision and contextualizes vision in the contemporary debate on the construction of local knowledge vs. the hegemony of the socio-technical network. By maintaining an ethnographic approach, the book provides practical examples that are both accessible to undergraduate students and informative for an academic audience."
How do the class and gender inequalities found in horseracing affect the working practices of women within the industry? Drawing on the work of Bourdieu and his concepts of field, capital and habitus, this book shows the inequalities that are prevalent within the world of racing, both historically and currently, by illustrating the classed and gendered nature of racing and how it has developed since the eighteenth century when it was the sport of the aristocracy. Using research obtained through her year-long ethnographic study of a racing yard, Deborah Butler demonstrates that the racing field is an arena of power conflicts, and that men and women who work in racing acquire a contradictorily gendered racing habitus. This is achieved by learning certain elements in a formal setting but mainly informally, by 'doing', developing practical skills and participating in a (gendered) community of practice. For female stable staff this means adapting their behaviour and working practices in order to be accepted as 'one of the lads'. This book will appeal to both scholars and students of the sociology of sport, the sociology of work and gender studies.
This book is a timely and innovative exploration of the vital relationship between sex and capitalism in the digital age. It provides a lively, provocative analysis of how specifically digital forms of capitalist accumulation and labour shape and discipline the contemporary sexual body. Rebecca Saunders focuses on pornography in order to investigate the impact of digital forms of capitalism on contemporary sexuality and reveals the centrality of pornography to the digital attention economy, affective economics, the information economy, the creative industries and neoliberalism. Saunders uncovers a fundamental shift in the aesthetics and meaning of pornographic film, from a genre concerned with representing sexual pleasure to one that has become focused on representing sex as labour. Contemporary pornographic film is therefore read as a sign and symptom of how digital forms of capitalism regulate the twenty-first century sexual body through digital interfaces and technologies. Bodies of Work analyses major porn studios, dominant streaming platforms, significant directors and performers and queer and alternative pornographies, and presents new and significant concepts such as sexual datafication, the labour of visibility and interventionist pornography. Discussing pornographic film, sexuality, digital culture, labour and capitalism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars across gender studies, media and cultural studies, digital humanities and economics.
First published in 1979, The Miners: A History of the National Union of Mineworkers 1939-46 describes the events and factors that led to the nationalisation of the coal industry in 1946. The World War had a creative as well as a destructive effect on the industry; it compressed fundamental changes into seven short years. By the end of the war, the federated trade unions had succeeded in bringing about the unification of their industry; and the various county, district and craft associations were themselves also unified in one single national body. Two rival plans emerged during 1945: a coal-owners' plan, in conjunction with an 'experts' report', approved by Churchill and his Caretaker Cabinet, and Labour's 'plan for the coal industry' which came into force in 1946 as the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act. Anew epoch in management had begun, with a National Coal Board, new industrial relations and a new National Union of Mineworkers. This book will be of interest to students of history, sociology, economics and political science.
In 1300, women brewed and sold most of the ale drunk in England, but by 1600 the industry was largely controlled by men. Ale, Beer and Brewsters investigates this change, asking how, when, and why brewing ceased to be a woman's trade and became a trade of men. In doing so, Bennett sheds new light on a central problem in women's history: the effects of early capitalism on the status of women's work.
Young people in Europe have been disproportionally affected by unemployment as a result of the economic crisis and a large number of the most disadvantaged are migrant youth, or those of a different ethnic origin, living in deprived city neighbourhoods. This book examines the need for more appropriate interventions aimed at improving the inclusion of young people in the labour market, bringing together theoretical reflections and empirical evidence on emerging innovative policies and practices. Using case studies from across Europe, it asks how effectively innovative interventions respond to the specific needs, motivations, aspirations and strategies of unemployed and vulnerable youth within the contextual conditions of the welfare state and locality. It also provides a new theory of the effectiveness of interventions. As social exclusion remains high among young people in Europe, Effective Interventions for Unemployed Young People in Europe is essential reading for policymakers and practitioners. This book demonstrates where we can look for effective innovative interventions and how these can potentially add up to large-scale social innovation. It is also a crucial resource for academics and students interested in social and labour inclusion measures.
In this day and age, much has been discussed as to what it means 'to be an Arab'. However, this enlightening volume seeks instead to invite us deeper into young Arab-Australian men's lives as we explore their vocational aspirations and working experiences within highly racialised and hierarchical industries. Young Migrant Identities is an in-depth exploration into the lives of Arab-Australian young men living in Western Sydney with creative career aspirations. Indeed, not only does Idriss explore how these men develop interests in fields such as music, filmmaking, and design, but she also examines the multilinear routes that they take to turn these interests into vocational identities. However, in the local migrant communities in which these young men live, creative identities are seen to compromise individual and familial prospects for social mobility, and artistic interests tend to go unsupported. Thus, this book also strives to offer new insights about how notions of gender, ethnicity, and social class are experienced because of these young men's 'risky' career ambitions. A timely volume, Young Migrant Identities draws together a range of theoretical issues and debates, engaging with sociological approaches to race and social class, creative and cultural economies, and studies on youth. It will particularly appeal to post-graduate students and post-doctoral researchers interested in fields such as Youth Studies, Ethnicity Studies, Cultural Economy, and Migration Studies.
Telecommunications Industry in India represents the first comprehensive study of a state-run enterprise in the telecommunications industry. The study traces over a period of half a century (1948-2009) the growth and decline of Indian Telephone Industries (ITI). At the heart of the monograph stands one central interrogation: How does the socio-technical system of production in a state-controlled firm shape the relations linking the four main actors: the state, management, union and workers? The original contribution of this book lies in combining business history and labour history within a single conceptual framework. The author evaluates the broader conclusions about the telecommunications industry and public sector through the lens of an individual firm to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of change in the globalizing Indian economy. The work is well in command of the literature on the global business history counterparts of ITI in the telecommunications industry. It is further strengthened by the use of French material on the subject which is now accessible for the first time in English. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka
Intersectionality and Ethnic Entrepreneurship brings together a group of eminent and up-and-coming young scholars who apply an intersectional perspective to the study of ethnic entrepreneurship. Against the traditional approach's emphasis on ethnicity and its primacy, which tends to conflate ethnicity with other social groupings (i.e., social class), considers their effect as an additive or secondary consequence only (i.e., gender), or ignores their influence altogether (i.e., race), the studies in this volume recognize that multiple dimensions of identity intermix to condition entrepreneurial outcomes. Starting with the premise that systems of oppression and privilege, specifically capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, are endemic to the American social structure, the works in this volume recognize that these interlocking systems of inequality condition the life chances of entrepreneurs from diverse social locations differently, even among members of the same ethnic group. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.
How Speech Acting and the Struggle of Narratives Generate Organization seeks to shed understanding on how speaking or speech-acting affects how we are organized and how we influence each other and wield power. It is suggested that speaking is a major clue to organization and to the creation of new organizations. The task is to describe how speech-acting organizes. This book takes findings in the project's philosophy of collective intentions - its philosophy of society - into the field of empirical study of organization and politics. The book investigates the relation between knowledge and politics, between describing the world and changing it, between cognitive - sensing - and volitional - wilful - processes and goes on to describe how speech-acting organizes, reorganizes - and destroys organizations. It looks at persons and groups as speech-actors. It investigates how speech-acting can spur movements in organizations from routines to learning to innovations and back How Speech Acting and the Struggle of Narratives Generate Organization develops a model of how speech-acting generates new organization - or social innovations. Empirical studies of some economic, political and ideological organizations are mined for model development. Speech-acting occurs in the context of institutions, with capital producing firms and nation states at present as the most ubiquitous. But speech-acting has an element of freedom that makes some of its results unpredictable and difficult to control. Aimed at academics, researchers and students in the field of Organizational Studies How Speech Acting and the Struggle of Narratives Generate Organization examines a new contribution and direction in the field.
Human Resource Development (HRD) involves the design, delivery and evaluation of learning and/or training interventions within organisations to improve the work performance of individuals and groups. This edited collection will demonstrate the potential of identity theorising for problematizing and reconceptualising HRD activities. Identity will thus be established as a foundation for enhancing HRD policy and practice. While identity has emerged as a key focus for theoretical debate and for empirical research within management and organisational studies, the potential of identity as a new paradigm for understanding learning and for examining HRD more broadly is still emergent. That identity has such potential can be seen in the increasing recognition that training and development for many contemporary occupations represents nothing less than a "project of the self". Identity as a Foundation for Human Resource Development will complete a gap in the market providing sound, single source, theoretical foundations from the latest trends in identity theorising, now a key area of organisation studies, and apply these to HRD policy and practice. The emphasis throughout will be on informing HRD policy and practice, research and education the book includes a chapter on resources and techniques for HRD educators. In short, the book will "put identity to work" for HRD scholars. The intended audiences are Human Resource Development scholars, academics, students and professionals, this exciting new volume will provide a thoughtful theoretical analysis and operational practise for modern HRD.
Our popular image of the era of the Great Depression is one of bread lines, labor wars, and leftist firebrands. Absent from this picture are religiously motivated social reformers, notably Catholic clergy and laity. In A Catholic New Deal, Kenneth Heineman rethinks the religious roots of labor organizing and social reform in America during the 1930s. He focuses on Pittsburgh, the leading industrial city of the time, a key center for the rise of American labor, and a critical Democratic power base, thanks in large part to Mayor David Lawrence and the Catholic vote. Despite the fact that Catholics were the core of the American industrial working class in the 1930s, historians (and many contemporary observers) have underestimated or ignored the religious component of labor activism in this era. In fact, many labor historians have argued that workers could not have formed successful industrial unions without first severing their religious ties. Heineman disputes this, arguing that there would have been no steelworkers union without Pittsburgh Catholics such as James Cox, Patrick Fagan, Carl Hensler, Phil Murray, and Charles Owen Rice. He presents a complex portrait of American Catholicism in which a large number of activist priests and laity championed a distinctly Catholic vision of social justice. This vision was anti-Communist, anti-Fascist, and anti-laissez faire. These Catholics, in turn, helped to make the Democratic Party and the CIO powerful organizations. A Catholic New Deal shows conclusively the important role that religion played in the history of organized labor in America.
The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism revolves around a two-part question: "What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism-and how should organization studies approach them?" Changes in the texture of capitalism, heralded by social and organizational theorists alike, increasingly focus attention on communication as both vital to the conduct of work and as imperative to organizational performance. Yet most accounts of communication in organization studies fail to understand an alternate sense of the "work of communication" in the constitution of organizations, work practices, and economies. This book responds to that lack by portraying communicative practices-as opposed to individuals, interests, technologies, structures, organizations, or institutions-as the focal units of analysis in studies of the social and organizational problems occasioned by contemporary capitalism. Rather than suggesting that there exists a canonically "correct" route communicative analyses must follow, The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism explores the value of transcending longstanding divides between symbolic and material factors in studies of working and organizing. The recognition of dramatic shifts in technological, economic, and political forces, along with deep interconnections among the myriad of factors shaping working and organizing, sows doubts about whether organization studies is up to the vital task of addressing the social problems capitalism now creates. Kuhn, Ashcraft, and Cooren argue that novel insights into those social problems are possible if we tell different stories about working and organizing. To aid authors of those stories, they develop a set of conceptual resources that they capture under the mantle of communicative relationality. These resources allow analysts to profit from burgeoning interest in notions such as sociomateriality, posthumanism, performativity, and affect. It goes on to illustrate the benefits that investigations of work and organization can realize from communicative relationality by presenting case studies that analyze (a) the becoming of an idea, from its inception to solidification, (b) the emergence of what is taken to be the "the product" in high-tech startup entrepreneurship, and (c) the branding of work (in this case, academic writing and commercial aviation) through affective economies. Taken together, the book portrays "the work of communication" as simultaneously about how work in the "new economy" revolves around communicative practice and about how communication serves as a mode of explanation with the potential to cultivate novel stories about working and organizing. Aimed at academics, researchers, and policy makers, this book's goal is to make tangible the contributions of communication for thinking about contemporary social and organizational problems. |
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