When contrasted with the miners' dramatic strike victories in 1972 and 1974, the shattering industrial defeat suffered by British miners in 1985 has been seen as evidence of the further weakening of working-class solidarity. Undertaken with complete unity, the strikes of 1972 and 1974 brought the miners substantial material gains, contributed to the downfall of a government, and reinforced the National Union of Mineworkers' position at the core of the British labour movement. In contrast, the strike in Britain in 1984/85 was marked by internal division and by the miners' attempt to resist the pit closure programme of the Thatcher government, and it ended in bitter defeat.

The strike by Local P-9 against the Hormel Co. in 1985-86 marked a turning point in American labor history. The central role played in the strike by the Austin United Support Group brought the issues of economic justice and community survival to the forefront of the labor movement agenda. In response to isolation from their traditional communities, these women created a vital and successful strike culture that was characterized by cooperation, solidarity, and a variety of institutions to meet the economic, social, and spiritual needs of the 1,500 striking families. This work is important because it shows the strength of the women and their vision of economic justice, how deeply committed they remain to their ideals and their struggle, and how little the passage of time has diminished their anguish. This work is important also as a portrait of a typical midwestern company town where community life is colored strongly by economics.

Fewer than 20% of Baby Boom women will experience a secure retirement. Marriage, education, occupation, home ownership--these variables predict their future. Possession of all four indicates retirement security, and absence of any increases risk of old-age poverty. This riveting sociological study also examines the social relations and structures that will determine the retirement experience, options, and decisions for more than 40 million Baby Boom women. These women's material base and social status are examined through the use of empirical data, and the key predictors of their retirement are identified.

The massive entry of Baby Boom women into the labor force increases the importance of retirement planning for working women. It comes at a time when existing research models and data are outdated and inadequate to effectively predict their future retirement experience. Over the past 30 years, American men and their spouses have benefited from the linear, undifferentiated model of the traditional male retirement. For the Baby Boom generation, however, the nature of work has changed significantly. The current retirement model may not serve Baby Boom men as well as in the past, let alone Baby Boom women. In contrast, this book offers a new, dynamic model that considers the social and work structures influencing women's lives and that accurately reflects the predictors and parameters of Baby Boom women's retirement.

Helen Tsiganou's study explores the enormous diversity of worker participation schemes across national contexts. Using a historical comparative approach, worker participation schemes are examined in two major settings: the developed capitalist countries of the United States, Japan, Sweden, Norway, England, Germany, and France; and the centrally planned less developed socialist countries of Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, China, and the Soviet Union. Tsiganou addresses the conditions under which participation schemes emerge and the reasons for similarities or differences among these schemes. She first studies the origins and history of schemes within a given national setting. She then draws on specific national experiences and makes cross national comparisons. This is not a systematic, detailed, country-by-country comparison but an explanation of the enormous diversity of worker participative schemes through comparative analysis. Part I of this volume examines the motives and goals behind various participatory schemes and their development and outcomes in the two distinct settings. The comparative logic and analytical framework of the book is laid out against a background of existing theoretical and analytical work. Meanings and definitions attached to worker participation, and their significance in denoting the dynamics of power within the workplace and society, are also covered. This section concludes with a discussion of the book's major assumptions. Part II deals with the diversity of workers participation schemes in several developed countries--countries with advanced industry and democratic pluralist political systems. Part III discusses schemes in several centrally planned socialist societies; and their efforts through reforms to correct their weaknesses. The final section summarizes the findings of the study and explores issues that emerge as cross-national and cross-sectional comparisons are made.

The 1940s were a pivotal decade in the history of the American labor movement. Large migrations significantly changed the composition of the industrial work force while, simultaneously, the organized labor movement sought to consolidate its base. These essays examine topics including aspects of the institutional development of the labor movement at the national level, while west coast case studies explore the conflicts generated at the workplace and in communities by the increased presence of women and minority workers. American labor historians and labor studies specialists will find this collection fills a major void in the research on American labor.

Culture will keep you fit and healthy. Culture will bring communities together. Culture will improve your education. This is the message from governments and arts organisations across the country; however, this book explains why we need to be cautious about culture. Offering a powerful call to transform the cultural and creative industries, Culture is bad for you examines the link between social inequality and who produces, consumes and participates in culture. Exclusion from culture begins at an early age, the authors argue, and despite claims by cultural institutions and businesses to hire talented and hardworking individuals, women, people of colour, and those from working class backgrounds are systematically disbarred. While the inequalities that characterise both workforce and audience remain unaddressed, the positive contribution culture makes to society can never be fully realised.

This book presents an in-depth perspective of knowledge as a fundamental process of any organization rather than just another resource to be managed. The author presents a process-oriented theory of creating and applying knowledge directed towards bothresearchers and practitioners. In this book the author develops normative knowledge management guidelines which draw from a unique view on knowledge, discussed in the field of philosophy since Plato but neglected by most knowledgemanagement authors - by applying a philosophically grounded 'social epistemology' to organizations. The guidelines in this book call for an open and reflective space of knowledge creation, aligned with goals and structures of the organization. Numerous examples, field studies, and an application to the main case study on Seven-Eleven Japan complement both the descriptive view on knowledge as well as the normative guidelines presented in this book. "

A major reason complex programs are so difficult to evaluate is that the assumptions that inspire them are poorly articulated. Stakeholders of such programs are often unclear about how the change process will unfold. Thus, it is so difficult to reasonably anticipate the early and midterm changes that need to happen in order for a longer-term goalto be reached. The lack of clarity about the "mini-steps" that must be taken to reach a long-term outcome not only makes the task of evaluating a complex initiative challenging, but reduces the likelihood that all of the important factors related to the long term goal will be addressed. Most of the resources that have attempted to address this dilemma have been popularized as theory of change or sometimes program theory approaches. Although these approaches emphasize and elaborate the sequence of changes/mini steps that lead to the long-term goal of interest and the connections between program activities and outcomes that occur at each step of the way, they do not do enough to clarify how program managers or evaluators should deal with assumptions. Assumptions, the glue that holds all the pieces together, remain abstract and far from applicable. In this book the author tackles this important assumptions theme head-on-covering a breadth of ground from the epistemology of development assumptions, to the art of making logical assumptions as well as recognizing, explicit zing and testing assumptions with in an elaborate program theory from program design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

This book presents a new and nuanced exploration of the position of women in Muslim countries, based on research involving more than 300,000 women in 28 Muslim countries. It addresses topical debates on the role of Islam, modernization, globalization, neocolonialism, educational inequalities, patriarchy, household hierarchies, and more.

What motivates a lifelong scholarly pursuit, and how do one's studies inform life outside the academy? Sociologists, who live in families but also study families, who go to work but also study work, who participate in communities but also try to understand communities, have an especially intimate relation to their research. Growing up poor, struggling as a woman in a male-dominated profession, participating in protests against the Vietnam War; facts of life influence research agendas, individual understandings of the world, and ultimately the shape of the discipline as a whole.^NL Barry Glassner and Rosanna Hertz asked twenty-two of America's most prominent sociologists to reflect upon how their personal lives influenced their research, and vice versa, how their research has influenced their lives. In this volume, the authors reveal with candor and discernment how world events, political commitments and unanticipated constraints influenced the course of their careers. They disclose how race, class, and gender proved to be pivotal elements in the course of their individual lives, and in how they carry out their research. Faced with academic institutions that did not hire or promote persons of their gender, race, sexual orientation, or physical disability, they invented new routes to success within their fields. Faced with disappointments in political organizations to which they were devoted, they found ways to integrate their disillusionment into their research agendas. While some of the contributors radically changed their political commitments, and others saw more stability, none stood still.^NL An intimate look at biography and craft, these snapshots provide a fascinating glimpse of the sociological life for colleagues, other academics, and aspiring young sociologists. The collection demonstrates how inequalities and injustices can be made into motors for scholarly research, which in turn have the power to change individual life courses and entire societies.

Lawyer, doctor, scientist--these are the jobs Americans commonly cite when asked to list the most prestigious occupations. The word "professional" today implies expertise, authority, and excellence. To do a job professionally is to do it well. Yet in a society in which knowledge has become a prized asset and an advanced degree the ticket to wealth and power, the rise of professionalism has a darker, more ominous side.
Power in the Highest Degree, one of the most comprehensive studies of professionals ever undertaken, exposes professionalism as a double-edged sword; it illustrates how experts have come to "own" and control knowledge, much like the wealthy control capital, thereby transforming capitalist and socialist society, both for better and for worse. Knowledge long predates money as a source of power and wealth in human society, and professionals are only the most recent in a long succession of powerful knowledge classes that have included shaman, witchdoctors, and the Confucian mandarins who ruled China for over a thousand years.
Drawing on interviews with over 1,000 practicing professionals, the authors show how, by dispensing self-interested and morally colored judgements as scientific truth, modern professionals are consolidating a monopoly over what passes for objective knowledge. Experts discredit the ordinary knowledge of the general public to generate a vast market of dependent clients. The result is a powerful professional class that creates vital new knowledge and life-saving services, but also wields growing influence over a population deeply insecure about its ability to manage private and public affairs without "expert" guidance.
This sweeping study also reveals that more and more experts are abandoning private practice to work for corporations, becoming junior partners in a new "Mandarin capitalism." While often outspoken advocates of a more socially responsible business world, professionals have joined big business to produce one of the most pronounced divisions of mental and manual work in history, creating a new dispossessed majority, the uncredentialed. We learn of an experiment at Polaroid to give machine operators more responsibility which is cancelled when managers and engineers decided that they "just didn't want operators that qualified." The authors argue that, as this new "mandarin" class radically transforms the social order, it helps to reform some of the traditional scourges of the business world, but also poses a new threat to equality in America. To reverse this trend, they propose a post-professional society that de-emphasizes skill hierarchies and substantially democratizes knowledge.
A bold and incisive new work of social criticism, this book provides a fascinating look at the modern professional and provokes Americans to think in a new way about democracy in the age of experts.

Culture Works addresses and critiques an important dimension of the "work of culture," an argument made by enthusiasts of creative economies that culture contributes to the GDP, employment, social cohesion, and other forms of neoliberal development. While culture does make important contributions to national and urban economies, the incentives and benefits of participating in this economy are not distributed equally, due to restructuring that neoliberal policies have wrought from the 1980s on, as well as long-standing social structures, such as racism and classism, that breed inequality. The cultural economy promises to make life better, particularly in cities, but not everyone can take advantage of it for decent jobs. Exposing and challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions around questions of space, value and mobility that are sustained by neoliberal treatments of culture, Culture Works explores some of the hierarchies of cultural workers that these engender, as they play out in a variety of settings, from shopping malls in Puerto Rico and art galleries in New York to tango tourism in Buenos Aires. Noted scholar Arlene Davila brilliantly reveals how similar dynamics of space, value and mobility come to bear in each location, inspiring particular cultural politics that have repercussions that are both geographically specific, but also ultimately global in scope.

The twenty-first century has witnessed a transformation of the organization, opportunities, and terms of work. Downsizing, restructuring, and outsourcing are the forces altering employment relationships throughout the work force. Those who tend to see the future in a positive light view the evolving role between employer and employee as empowering for the individual.

This book examines the consequences of economic instability due to job loss and the displacement of millions of workers. It draws upon case studies of worker displacement as well as national labor force surveys. Thomas S. Moore finds that consequences of economic instability are productivity slowdown, increased disparities in earnings and income, and higher average unemployment. He assesses the extent of job loss nationwide, its costs to the individuals directly affected, and the way in which the incidence of displacement and earnings loss has shifted over time. Although drawn from an earlier period, the data have an obvious relevance to today's labor markets.

Moore argues for an employment and training system that gives employers an incentive to invest in the skills of their employees. Federally funded training programs have not improved the earning ability of displaced and disadvantaged workers, and state-sponsored programs tend to exclude those most in need of assistance. Moore suggests direct employer investment in the general skills of employees. Initially published in a different economic downturn, this continues to be a must read book for all economists, sociologists, and policymakers.

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.

Continuing to Disrupt the Status Quo? Young and New Women Professors of Educational Leadership was conceptualized as a follow-up to Breaking Into the All-Male Club: Female Professors of Educational Administration (Mertz, 2009), a book about and by many women who were the first women faculty admitted into departments of educational administration primarily in the 1970's and 1980's. This book offers narratives of those women new to the field of educational leadership and makes comparisons to those stories shared by the veteran women in the field to highlight both similarities and differences. Continuing to Disrupt the Status Quo? Young and New Women Professors of Educational Leadership is a literary way to preserve and continue the tradition of the sharing/addition of voices to the field of educational leadership that was begun with Breaking Into the All-Male Club. It begs the question, ""If the women from Breaking Into the All-Male Club are ""firsts,"" ""pioneers,"" and ""groundbreakers,"" then who are we, the young and new women of the field? If the entrance of women into the field of educational leadership was threatening enough for the veteran women (and still is for many of the young and new women), then the addition of age and ethnicity as confounding factors has likely created a cacophony of dissonance forty years later! Continuing to Disrupt the Status Quo? represents a decade of stories (2002-2012) from young and new women to the field of educational leadership.

This book advances research into the government-forced labor used widely in colonial Kenya from 1930 to 1963 after the passage of the International Labor Organization's Forced Labour Convention. While the 1930 Convention intended to mark the suppression of forced labor practices, various exemptions meant that many coercive labor practices continued in colonial territories. Focusing on East Africa and the Kenya Colony, this book shows how the colonial administration was able to exploit the exemption clause for communal labor, thus ensuring the mobilization of African labor for infrastructure development. As an exemption, communal labor was not defined as forced labor but instead justified as a continuation of traditional African and community labor practices. Despite this ideological justification, the book shows that communal labour was indeed an intensification of coercive labor practices and one that penalized Africans for non-compliance with fines or imprisonment. The use of forced labor before and after the passage of the Convention is examined, with a focus on its use during World War II as well as in efforts to combat soil erosion in the rural African reserve areas in Kenya. The exploitation of female labor, the Mau Mau war of the 1950s, civilian protests, and the regeneration of communal labor as harambee after independence are also discussed.

This book investigates how people encounter, experience and shape their careers. Both the concept and the reality of a career is changing as organisations respond to globalisation and market forces. This impact is reflected in the internal labour market and hence career journeys of individuals. How people think about their career and career choices is more diverse than ever before due not only to environmental transformations but also to variations in the workforce, consisting now of five generations. With each new generation, there is little argument that contemplating career choices, seeking and promoting work opportunities as well as hiring relationships are now markedly different and less certain than previously. People have now and increasingly a greater choice over when, where, how to work and for how long. This book will provide learning for those people early in their careers as well as those in mid to later career, looking to develop or enrich their careers in some way. Understanding how work functions in people's lives; the personal and family costs incurred in maintaining and exiting a career, and how and why remaining or leaving a career is successful or not, is highly relevant. The need for career support, derived from personal, professional and organisational connections plays an important role in career choice, career transition, and career opportunities. Creativity and other 21st century skills, the vital dimensions of career development, is also discussed in this book.

The monograph disseminates the very topical issue of retirement and its timing as the key to one of the greatest challenges facing ageing societies. Postponing retirement is now almost universally regarded as indispensable in order to relieve European welfare states from the demography-related financial pressures. This seminal study, derived from a statistical analysis of a large-scale survey data, provides a thorough understanding of the micro- and macro-level determinants of retirement timing in contemporary Western Europe. The book is the first monograph to combine the analysis of the retirement attitudes with the analysis of the retirement behaviour within one research. It tackles the question as to whether early retirement can be explained by "early exit culture", triangulating life course theory with a social stratification approach. The author used a novel and innovative approach to obtain the results. The methodology includes: tobit models of proscriptive age norms; simulations of the impact of class structure on a country's average retirement age; competing risks models of different work-exit modalities; duration selection models of retirement timing.

This far-sighted volume describes emerging trends and challenges in university-level social sciences education in an era marked by globalization, austerity, and inequity. It spotlights solution-focused and interdisciplinary methods of teaching, developed to match influential academic ideas, such as self-directed learning and learning in communities, as students seek to engage with and improve conditions in their immediate environments. Chapters offer real-world applications of foundational concepts in the modern practice of teaching, learning, and curriculum development. Accordingly, the editors emphasize the relationship between pedagogy and curriculum, as both are critical in encouraging student autonomyand promoting optimum academic and societal outcomes. Included in the coverage: * Towards a concept of solution-focused teaching: learning in communities. * Heutagogy and the emerging curriculum. * Collaborative working in the statutory and voluntary sectors. * Delivering a community development curriculum to students with multiple identities. * Photography and teaching in community development. * A model for change: sharing ideas and strategies. The Pedagogy of the Social Sciences Curriculum will inspire sociologists, social workers, and health and sociology educators to take a deeper role in community well-being as students, faculty, and communities collaborate to make lasting contributions to society.

This book identifies a major threat to the productivity, profitability, and competitiveness of American business. This threat is the deteriorating relationship between managers and employees in the face of repeated downsizing, cost-cutting, and demands to accomplish more with fewer resources. Stress brings out dysfunctional, abusive behavior in managers, and a form of generic harassment results. Emily S. Bassman creates a vision of the antithesis of an abusive environment: one that is enpowering, where fair treatment is lived out in daily practices, where employees choose to exert discretionary effort, creating a peak performance culture. In creating this vision, the author applies principles from Total Quality Management to human relationships in the workplace, especially to those between managers and subordinates. The unique contribution is putting W.E. Deming's quality principles into behavioral terms based on psychology and learning theory. The author effectively documents that a transformation of how employees are treated is necessary, and not primarily to increase employee satisfaction. Rather, the primary reason to use these principles is to create the conditions whereby every employee can reach their full potential, thereby maximizing their contribution to the business and achieving transformational, rather than incremental improvements in productivity.

Bassman begins by mapping out the problem-defining and describing the various forms of abuse that surface in organizations, and clarifying how employee victims of abuse behave very similarly to victims of other forms of abuse. The unique elements of employee abuse are explained in terms of the nature of power in organizations. Why we persist in self-defeating, punishing interactions is explained with reference to principles of learning, and strategies are outlined for breaking the cycle of punishment and methods of negative behavior control. The author then moves from a consideration of individual abusive relationships to institutional abuse. How employees are treated is positioned as an ethical issue, and related to aspects of corporate culture, policies, and management practices. This leads into a discussion of the impact of employee abuse on organizations. Bassman documents the costs incurred by organizations that tolerate abuse, and describes some of the corporate programs that can be used to assess the extent to which employee abuse exists in the organization. The last section of the book deals with solutions, offering guidance for senior management teams that choose to involve themselves in an assessment and cultural change effort. This book is designed to educate management and senior leadership about the issues, and provide a roadmap for change, both for leaders and managers, and for those change agents (consultants, human resource managers) who may work with them.

A satisfactory and healthy integration of work with other life domains is one of the key challenges of modern society. Work-life balance and work-life integration have become focal points of today's human resource management practice and theory. Professionals who have been described as "extreme workers" regarding their work hours and engagement are under particular pressure to balance work and "the rest of life."

This collection maps the increasingly extensive discussion of work-life issues for professionals and discusses key aspects in depth. What is work-life integration? What are the specific challenges for professionals? How do they manage their blurred work-life boundaries? How can companies intervene? Internationally leading authors discuss antecedents and individual and organizational outcomes of work-life integration, gender-specific perspectives and challenges as well as the use and usefulness of corporate work-life balance initiatives. In five sections distinguished researchers from across the world present experiences and research findings to provide a compendium of academic and applied research on the work-life integration of professionals. Cutting-edge research and novel theoretical perspectives make this collection a source of knowledge and inspiration for academic and business audiences interested in work-life integration issues in general and in the case of professionals in particular.

Although the centrality of work to people's lives is pervasive, it is only within the past few decades that objective, empirical accounts of the meaning of work for the average individual have been available. This volume adds an important dimension to the growing body of literature in this area by presenting a detailed examination of the meaning of work in Israel. The result of a 6-year research project designed to systematically explore the meaning of work in different occupational groups, the data is drawn from about 2000 structured interviews conducted among individuals in 10 target groups including, women, part-time workers, occupational and professional groups, age groups, unemployed and retired people--and in a national sample representative of the total Jewish labor force. Based on his research, the author demonstrates how patterns of work meanings have developed and are determined by a variety of personal history and environmental factors and analyzes the consequences of different work meanings for individuals, organizations and society in general.

The author begins with an historical examination of the meaning of work in Israel from biblical times through the present. He then details the macro socioeconomic environment within which his study took place and presents the underlying theory and concepts that guided the research. Following a chapter that presents the study methodology, Harpaz investigates the developmental histories and consequences of different work meanings in order to understand the role of work meanings in industrial society. Individual chapters address issues such as the concept of work centrality, societal norms concerning work, the importance of work goals, definitions of work, the meaning of work patterns, and work role identification. In his final chapter, Harpaz assesses the relevance of his findings for Israeli society and future policy initiatives. Two appendices, one the study interview schedule and the other detailing the response distribution data for national sample and target groups, complete the study.

With the exception of sleep, humans spend more of their lifetimes on work than any other activity. It is central to our economy, society, and the family. It underpins our finances and our sense of meaning in life. Given the overriding importance of work, we need to recognize a profound transformation in the nature of work that is significantly altering lives: the incoming tidal wave of shadow work.Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations. It has slipped into our routines stealthily; most of us do not realize how much of it we are already doing, even as we pump our own gas, scan and bag our own groceries, execute our own stock trades, and build our own unassembled furniture. But its presence is unmistakable, and its effects far-reaching.Fueled by the twin forces of technology and skyrocketing personnel costs, shadow work has taken a foothold in our society. Lambert terms its prevalence as  middle-class serfdom," and examines its sources in the invasion of robotics, the democratization of expertise, and new demands on individuals at all levels of society. The end result? A more personalized form of consumption, a great social leveling (pedigrees don't help with shadow work!), and the weakening of communities as robotics reduce daily human interaction.Shadow Work offers a field guide to this new phenomenon. It shines a light on these trends now so prevalent in our daily lives and, more importantly, offers valuable insight into how to counter their effects. It will be essential reading to anyone seeking to understand how their day got so full and how to deal with the ubiquitous shadow work that surrounds them.

This English-language volume is an edited collection of articles from the 2010 Chinese-language volume of the Green Book of Population and Labor. It examines recent developments in the Chinese demographic transition and its implications, especially for the labor market. The global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 impacted the Chinese labor market during and after its occurrence; it hit the real economy and caused lay-offs for urban workers and a mass exodus of migrant workers from the non-agricultural workplace. The Chinese economy recovered quickly, thanks to the government's fiscal stimulus package. It was impressive to see social protection programs implemented by the central and local governments with the interests of vulnerable people in mind. This volume intends to draw some lessons from the experiences and to discuss the trends of the labor market and social protection in the post-crisis period by focusing on three issues: policy measures, challenges to future growth, and the vulnerability of factions within the labor market.