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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Work & labour
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 book provides a fundamental and practical introduction to Enterprise Engineering, demonstrating how to employ this approach to map the essence of an organization at the core level of internal cooperation. It then explains how, based on these insights, organizations can benefit from opportunities for improvement that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Further, the book explains how to adapt the structure of an organization to the needs of its management and offers valuable tools for improving and perfecting it, along with guidelines on implementing profound and sustainable organizational changes. The examples and cases it presents show an increase in efficiency of up to 70% and increases in productivity and sales performance of more than 40%, once the flaws in an organization's structure have been identified and resolved.
This edited volume assesses from a variety of perspectives the policies introduced to support the development of household services across Europe. It highlights the impact of these costly policies on the creation of low quality jobs and on labour market dualisation, and questions their social and economic outcomes.
In the second half of the 1980s Japan has emerged as one of the new major destination countries for migrants from Asia. The migrant labour pool was then joined by Japanese descendants from South American countries in the 1990s. Japan's policy of keeping the labour market closed to foreign unskilled workers has remained unchanged despite the 1990 immigration policy reform, which met the growing need for unskilled labour not by opening the 'front-door' to unskilled workers but by letting them in through intentionally-provided 'side-doors'. This book throws light on various aspects of migration flows to Japan and the present status of migrant workers as conditioned by Japan's immigration control system. The analysis aims to explore how the massive arrival of migrants affected Japan's immigration policy and how the policy segmented the foreign labour market in Japan.
This thought-provoking monograph analyzes long- medium- and short-term global cycles of prosperity, recession, and depression, plotting them against centuries of important world events. Major research on economic and political cycles is integrated to clarify evolving relationships between the global center and its periphery as well as current worldwide economic upheavals and potential future developments. Central to this survey are successive waves of industrial and, later, technological and cybernetic progress, leading to the current era of globalization and the changes of the roles of both Western powers and former minors players, however that will lead to the formation of the world order without a hegemon. Additionally, the authors predict what they term the Great Convergence, the lessening of inequities between the global core and the rest of the world, including the wealth gap between First and Third World nations. Among the topics in this ambitious volume: * Why politics is often omitted from economic analysis. * Why economic cycles are crucial to understanding the modern geopolitical landscape. * How the aging of the developed world will affect world technological and economic future.< * The evolving technological forecast for Global North and South. * Where the U.S. is likely to stand on the future world stage. Economic Cycles, Crises, and the Global Periphery will inspire discussion and debate among sociologists, global economists, demographers, global historians, and futurologists. This expert knowledge is necessary for further research, proactive response, and preparedness for a new age of sociopolitical change.
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.
Fashion Branding and Consumer Behaviors presents eye-opening theory, literature review and original research on the mutual influence of branding strategies and consumer response. Contributors use multiple methods to analyze consumers' psychosocial needs and the extent that their fulfillment goes beyond the usefulness or value of the items they purchase as well as the fashion industry's means of communicating brand identity and enhancing brand loyalty. Along the way, these studies raise important questions about consumer behaviors, consumer welfare, environmental ethics and the future of consumer research. Included in the coverage: * A symbolic interactionist perspective on fashion brand personality and advertisement response.* Optimizing fashion branding strategies in a fluctuating market.* An analysis of fashion brand extensions by artificial neural networks.* Domestic or foreign luxury brands? A comparison of status- and non-status- seeking teenagers.* The impact of consumers' need for uniqueness on purchase perception.* How brand awareness relates to market outcome, brand equity and the marketing mix.A breakthrough volume on the complexities of how and why we buy, Fashion Branding and Consumer Behaviors will captivate researchers and practitioners in the fields of consumer psychology, marketing and economics.
Moving beyond polemical debates on globalization, this study considers complex intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality and class within the field of globalized labor. As a significant contribution to the on-going debate on the role of neoliberal states in reproducing gender-race-class inequality in the global political economy, the volume examines the aggressive implementation of neoliberal policies of globalization in the Philippines, and how labor export has become a contradictory feature of the country's international political economy while being contested from below. Lindio-McGovern presents theoretical and ethnographic insights from observational and interview data gathered during fieldwork in various global cities-Hong Kong, Taipei, Rome, Vancouver, Chicago and Metro-Manila. The result is a compelling weave of theory and experience of exploitation and resistance, an important development in discourses and literature on globalization and social movements seeking to influence regimes that exploit migrant women as cheap labor to sustain gendered global capitalism. Globalization, Labor Export and Resistance: A Study of Filipino Migrant Domestic Workers in Global Cities, is an invaluable resource for scholars, researchers, policy makers, non-governmental organizations, community organizers, students of globalization, trade and labor politics. It will be useful in the fields of women/gender studies, labor studies, transnational social movements, political economy, development, international migration, international studies, international fieldwork and qualitative/feminist research.
This text offers a fresh look at Taiwan's state workers in from the postwar period to the present day and examines the rise and fall of labor insurgency in the past two decades. Challenging the conventional image of docile working class, it unearths a series of workers resistance, hidden and public, in a high authoritarian era.
Volume 17 of Research in Occupational Stress and Well Being is focused on the stress and well-being related to the marketing discipline. This volume is focused on the connections between employee stress, health, and well-being as it relates to marketing, sales, and customers. We have 7 chapters devoted to critical topics such as internal selling, stress at the consumer-employee interface, how leaders can affect the customer experience, and the unique stressors associated with being a persuasion agent. Further, we have two comprehensive empirical reviews of topics in this domain. The first examines the degree to which positive psychology constructs relate to sales performance. The second examines customer mistreatment towards employees and how it impacts their well-being. The final chapter takes a more practitioner perspective and examines the importance of taking into account stress tolerance when selecting and training sales personnel. The objective of this series is to promote theory and research in the increasingly growing area of occupational stress, health and well-being, and in the process, to bring together and showcase the work of the best researchers and theorists who contribute to this area. Questions of work stress and well-being span many disciplines and many specialized journals. One of the virtues of this series has been to provide a multidisciplinary and international platform that gives a thorough and critical assessment of knowledge, and major gaps in knowledge, on occupational stress and well-being.
Global Rupture makes a key intervention in debates on informal and precarious labour. Increasing recognition that informal and precarious labour is an enduring reality under neo-liberal capitalism, and the norm globally, rather than the exception has ignited debates around analytical frames, activist strategies and development interventions. This pathbreaking volume provides a corrective through drawing upon theoretically informed rich case studies from the world outside of North America, Europe, and Australasia. Each contribution converges on the enduring and expanding significance of informal and precarious work within the Global South-the most significant factor in preventing a worldwide decent work agenda.
Using the concept of fulfilment and the framework of the serious leisure perspective, this book examines the signposts marking the fulfilment career. This career begins with an interest in a serious pursuit, leading to an efflorescence many years later in amateurism, hobbyism, volunteering, or devotee work - and ultimately deeper fulfilment.
2012 Americo Paredes Book Award Winner for Non-Fiction presented by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College Selected as a 2012 Outstanding Title by AAUP University Press Books for Public and Secondary School Libraries This is Olivia's story. Born in Los Angeles, she is taken to Mexico to live with her extended family until the age of three. Olivia then returns to L.A. to live with her mother, Carmen, the live-in maid to a wealthy family. Mother and daughter sleep in the maid's room, just off the kitchen. Olivia is raised alongside the other children of the family. She goes to school with them, eats meals with them, and is taken shopping for clothes with them. She is like a member of the family. Except she is not. Based on over twenty years of research, noted scholar Mary Romero brings Olivia's remarkable story to life. We watch as she grows up among the children of privilege, struggles through adolescence, declares her independence and eventually goes off to college and becomes a successful professional. Much of this extraordinary story is told in Olivia's voice and we hear of both her triumphs and setbacks. We come to understand the painful realization of wanting to claim a Mexican heritage that is in many ways not her own and of her constant struggle to come to terms with the great contradictions in her life. In The Maid's Daughter, Mary Romero explores this complex story about belonging, identity, and resistance, illustrating Olivia's challenge to establish her sense of identity, and the patterns of inclusion and exclusion in her life. Romero points to the hidden costs of paid domestic labor that are transferred to the families of private household workers and nannies, and shows how everyday routines are important in maintaining and assuring that various forms of privilege are passed on from one generation to another. Through Olivia's story, Romero shows how mythologies of meritocracy, the land of opportunity, and the American dream remain firmly in place while simultaneously erasing injustices and the struggles of the working poor. A happy ending for the maid's daughter: Hector Tobar's profile of Olivia for the LA Times
As populations age around the world, increasing efforts are required from both families and governments to secure care and support for older and disabled people.At the same time both women and men are expected to increase and lengthen their participation in paid work, which makes combining caring and working a burning issue for social and employment policy and economic sustainability. International discussion about the reconciliation of work and care has previously focused mostly on childcare. Combining paid work and family care widens the debate, bringing into discussion the experiences of those providing support to their partners, older relatives and disabled or seriously ill children. The book analyses the situations of these working carers in Nordic, liberal and East Asian welfare systems. Highlighting what can be learned from individual experiences, the book analyses the changing welfare and labour market policies which shape the lives of working carers in Finland, Sweden, Australia, England, Japan and Taiwan.
Early in the 19th century the work of American newspaper journalists was intertwined with the work of politicians. Journalists were primarily printers and editors, and newspapers were largely political organs, funded and used by politicians for political reasons. As the 19th century progressed, not only journalists, but politicians, were involved in newspaper work. Dooley explores the transformation of journalism, examining how journalists established occupational boundaries separating their work from that of politicians. She focuses on how an occupational group that had been inseparable from party politics early in the 19th century grew to be seen by many in society as more distant and independent from parties by the end of the century and became accepted as the citizenry's primary provider of political news and editorial opinion. This study of how journalists established occupational boundaries will be of interest to scholars and researchers of journalism history, political communication, and the sociology of work.
Craft and the Creative Economy examines the place of craft and making in the contemporary cultural economy, with a distinctive focus on the ways in which this creative sector is growing exponentially as a result of online shopfronts and home-based micro-enterprise, 'mumpreneurialism' and downshifting, and renewed demand for the handmade.
Rural Families and Work focuses on the findings of the Rural Families Speak research study and the theoretical frameworks that are utilized to examine the context of rural low-income families' employment. This volume provides a solid foundation for understanding rural employment problems and issues. Family ecological theory is the central framework with a discussion of theories that contribute to the opportunities for the contextual research, including family economic stress theory, human capital, human capability, and some selected policy frameworks. Employment is addressed through review of policy issues, community contexts, family and social support, and available resources. Throughout the volume future research directions and applications are highlighted.
How does organizations' embeddedness in broader social and cultural communities influence their behavior? And how has this changed with recent communication technology advances and globalization trends? In this volume, we consider how diverse types of communities influence organizations, as well as the associated benefit of developing a richer accounting for community processes in organizational theory. One goal of the volume is to move beyond the focus on social proximity and networks that has characterized existing work on communities. The papers in this volume consider specific topics that expand the definition of community beyond geography to include how transnational communities form and affect organizations' perception, the development of a community-form (C-form) organization as an important organizational architecture for understanding twenty-first century business, and how virtual communities influence key organizational processes. While there has been a recent revival of research into the effects of both geographic and non-geographic communities on organizational behaviors, this volume is the first effort to bring both perspectives together in order to aid in the identification of common and disparate mechanisms across multiple types of communities and how community as an organizing logic sits vis-a-vis other logics related to the market, corporation, family and religion.
Financial advisors, poker players, hedge fund traders, fund-raisers, sports agents, credit counselors and commissioned salespeople all deal with one central concern in their jobs: money. In Money at Work, Kevin Delaney explores how we think about money and, particularly, how our jobs influence that thinking. By spotlighting people for whom money is the focus of their work, Delaney illuminates how the daily practices experienced in different jobs create distinct ways of thinking and talking about money and how occupations and their work cultures carry important symbolic, material, and practical messages about money. Delaney takes us deep inside the cultures of these 'moneyed' workers, using both interviews and first-hand observations of many of these occupations. From hedge fund trading rooms in New York, to poker players at work in Las Vegas casinos, to a "Christian money retreat" in a monastery in rural Pennsylvania, Delaney illustrates how the underlying economic conditions of various occupations and careers produce what he calls "money cultures," or ways of understanding the meaning of money, which in turn shape one's economic outlook. Key to this is how some professionals, such as debt counselors, think very differently than say poker players in their regard to money-Delaney argues that it is the structure of these professions themselves that in turn influences monetary attitudes. Fundamentally, Money at Work shows that what people do for a living has a profound effect on how people conceive of money both at work and in their home lives, making clear the connections between the economic and the social, shedding light on some of our most basic values. At a time when conversations about money are increasingly important, Delaney shows that we do not merely learn our attitudes toward money in childhood, but we also learn important money lessons from the work that we do.
Stroll through any public park in Brooklyn on a weekday afternoon and you will see black women with white children at every turn. Many of these women are of Caribbean descent, and they have long been a crucial component of New York's economy, providing childcare for white middle- and upper-middleclass families. Raising Brooklyn offers an in-depth look at the daily lives of these childcare providers, examining the important roles they play in the families whose children they help to raise. Tamara Mose Brown spent three years immersed in these Brooklyn communities: in public parks, public libraries, and living as a fellow resident among their employers, and her intimate tour of the public spaces of gentrified Brooklyn deepens our understanding of how these women use their collective lives to combat the isolation felt during the workday as a domestic worker. Though at first glance these childcare providers appear isolated and exploited-and this is the case for many-Mose Brown shows that their daily interactions in the social spaces they create allow their collective lives and cultural identities to flourish. Raising Brooklyn demonstrates how these daily interactions form a continuous expression of cultural preservation as a weapon against difficult working conditions, examining how this process unfolds through the use of cell phones, food sharing, and informal economic systems. Ultimately, Raising Brooklyn places the organization of domestic workers within the framework of a social justice movement, creating a dialogue between workers who don't believe their exploitative work conditions will change and an organization whose members believe change can come about through public displays of solidarity.
Across the world, there has been a polite uprising to the perceived meaninglessness and stress of our accelerated and consumer driven lifestyles. Described simply as the slow phenomenon, this new brand of living entails not simply slowing down, but an embracing of alternative activities that promote meaning, thoughtfulness, engagement and authenticity. Whether it is through different practices of food production and consumption, alternative modes of transportation such as cycling through to our intimate relations with others, this new ethic of living has grown immensely in popularity. In this volume of work, key authors from across the world have been brought together to illustrate these alternative approaches to modern lifestyles by analyzing them empirically and theoretically. Through rigorous debate and insightful commentary, this book presents a compelling case for seeing the slow phenomenon as a significant cultural practice in contemporary society. |
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