This book aims at presenting a conceptual apparatus and empirical analysis of the ways Nordic civil society is affected by social transformations by focusing on the Norwegian case. The Norwegian empirical focus allows identifying processes and factors of change that are relevant outside this context and enable us to understand, on a more general basis, the relationship between social transformations and transformations affecting the voluntary sector. This book will make an original contribution to the field of comparative civil society studies both by increasing the available knowledge on the Nordic civil society model and by analyzing the societal transformations affecting civil society over time.

This book analyzes the effects of wives' employment on the economic status of families, using both descriptive and empirical research. The historical and socio-economic causes of change in the employment status of wives and husbands are detailed. The empirical studies respond to some basic questions about dual-earner families: How does having an employed wife influence family lifestyles? What effects do dual-earners have on the finances of their households and on the distribution of income? What policy changes are needed to recognize the economic importance of dual-earner families? In Working Wives and Dual-Earner Families, one-earner and dual-earner families are differentiated, with particular attention to the impact of wives' employment status (full-time or part-time) on household decision making. Among the most interesting research findings are: total family income or tax bracket and the cost of child care are among the critical determinants of dual-earner employment; married-couple families at the same level of income have very similar expenditure patterns regardless of whether the wife is employed; full-time working wives make the distribution of income less equal, but part-time working wives generate greater equality in the distribution of income; families with full-time working wives have higher income, but they do not save more or have greater financial assets than other families; families with part-time employed wives are similar to those with non-employed wives and differ from families with full-time employed wives. The authors conclude that the real incomes of dual-earner families will continue to grow, as one-earner real income remains the same or declines. Household planning and decision making will increasingly be predicated upon having two earners, which will be perceived as the norm. Dual-earner families, based on amenities, mobility, growing families, and demands for public goods, will drive private markets and public policy.

This innovative book analyses the role gender plays in the relationship between globalisation, migration and reproductive labour. Exploring the gendered experiences of migrant men and the social construction of racialised masculinities in the context of the 'international division of reproductive labour' (IDRL), it examines how new patterns of consumption and provision of paid domestic/care work lead to forms of inequality across racial, ethnic, gender and class lines. Based on an ethnographic analysis of the working and family lives of migrant men within the IDRL, it focuses on the practices and strategies of migrant men employed as domestic/care workers in Italy. The authors highlight how migrant men's experiences of reproductive labour and family are shaped by global forces and national public policies, and how they negotiate the changes and potential conflicts that their 'feminised' jobs entail. They draw on the voices of men and women of different nationalities to show how masculinities are constructed within the home through migrant men's interactions with male and female employers, women relations and their wider ethnic network. Bridging the divide between scholarship on international migration, care work and masculinity studies, this book will interest sociologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists and social policy experts.

In the long course of late imperial Chinese history, servants and concubines formed a vast social stratum in the hinterland along the Grand Canal, particularly in urban areas. Concubinage and Servitude in Late Imperial China is a survey of the institutions and practice of concubinage and servitude in both the general populace and the imperial palace, with a focus on the examination of Ming-Qing political and socioeconomic history through the lives of this particular group of distinct yet associated individuals. The persistent theme of the book is how concubines, appointed by patriarchal polygamy, and servants, laboring under the master-servants hierarchy, experienced interactions and mobility within each institution and in associating with the other. While reviewing how ritual and law treated concubines and servants as patriarchal possessions, the author explores the perspectives available for individual concubines and servants and the limitations in their daily circumstances, searching for their "positional powers" and "privilege of the inferiors" in the context of Chinese culture during the Ming-Qing time period. For a list of the book's tables and their sources, please see: http://www.wou.edu/wp/hsiehb/

This book offers the first ethnographic account of the experiences of highly educated young professional women, hailed by the Chinese media as 'white-collar beauties'. It exposes the organizational mechanisms - naturalization, objectification and commodification of women - that wield gendered and sexual control in post-Mao workplaces. Whilst men benefit from symbolic and bureaucratic power, women professionals skilfully enact indirect power in a game of domination and resistance. The sources of women's subversion are grounded in their only-child upbringing which breaks the patrilineal base of familial patriarchy fostering an unprecedented ambition in personal development, gender as inherently relational and a role-oriented system, and inner-outer cultural boundaries as signifiers of moral agency. This raises a new feminist inquiry about the agents for social change. Through a nuanced analysis grounded in the socio-cultural locality, this book throws fresh light upon the ways in which gender, sexuality and power could be theorized beyond a Euro-American reality.

This book introduces in an accessible way how CSR and its reporting are being used to address problems of corruption and tax evasion or tax avoidance. It discusses the efforts, both of organizations and governments to integrate these issues into CSR practices and the developments that have occurred at the levels of national and international legislation. The book analyses governments efforts to compel or try to induce companies to have practices more in line with what is expected of them in terms of combating corruption and paying their fair share. The book is suitable for students of CSR and Business Ethics, practitioners and researchers on CSR and corporate issues.

This book focuses on subjugated indentured Indian women, who are constantly faced with race, gender, caste, and class oppression and inequality on overseas European-owned plantations, but who are also armed with latent links to the women's abolition movements in the homeland. Also examining their post-indenture life, it employs a paradigm of male-dominated Indian women in India at the margins of an enduringly patriarchal society, a persisting backdrop to the huge 19th century post-slavery movement of the agricultural indentured workforce drawn largely from India. This book depicts the antithetical and contradictory explanations for the indentured Indian women's cries, degradation and dehumanization and how the politics of change and control impacted their social organization and its legacy. The book owes its origins to the 2017 centennial commemorative event celebrating 100 years of the abolition of the indenture system of Indian labor that victimized and dehumanized Indians from 1834 through 1917.

This volume describes and maps congregations of Christian confessions and denominations, as well as groups with Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and various other spiritual faiths, in different European countries. Consisting of three parts, it presents concrete sociological studies addressing how established and not established, old and new congregations of various faiths create a new kind of religious diversity at the country level; how religious congregations are challenged and thrive in large cities; and how religious congregations change in the 21st century. The book enlightens by its descriptive analysis and the theoretical questions it raises concerning the religious transformations happening all over Europe. It addresses issues of religious diversity in the cities of Europe by presenting large studies conducted in cities such as Barcelona in Spain, and Aarhus in Denmark. By means of large-scale censuses taken in areas such as North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany and in countries like Switzerland and Italy, the book shows how the historically established churches restructure their congregations and activities. It clarifies for the new gatherers where and how a new diversity of religious congregations is in the process of being established. Finally, the book covers two important topical issues: pluralisation and secularisation. It provides new data on religious diversity, painting a new picture of secularisation: the impact and structural consequences of the long-term decrease of membership in the established churches.

This book illustrates the potential for computer simulation in the study of modern slavery and worker abuse, and by extension in all social issues. It lays out a philosophy of how agent-based modelling can be used in the social sciences. In addressing modern slavery, Chesney considers precarious work that is vulnerable to abuse, like sweat-shop labour and prostitution, and shows how agent modelling can be used to study, understand and fight abuse in these areas. He explores the philosophy, application and practice of agent modelling through the popular and free software NetLogo. This topical book is grounded in the technology needed to address the messy, chaotic, real world problems that humanity faces-in this case the serious problem of abuse at work-but equally in the social sciences which are needed to avoid the unintended consequences inherent to human responses. It includes a short but extensive NetLogo guide which readers can use to quickly learn this software and go on to develop complex models. This is an important book for students and researchers of computational social science and others interested in agent-based modelling.

Gender often influences the type of occupation that individuals choose, as well as the way they work and the outcomes of that work. Home-based employment is no different. The proximity of these workers to their families' living activities provides an unique opportunity to study the effects of work-at-home on family interaction and the role that gender plays in this traditionally female-dominated situation.

The chapters provide a range of gender considerations from the perspectives of the workers and the workers' families, with emphasis on either the workers, the family, or the work/business. The first chapter provides an overview of the subjects being covered and defines several of the concepts used. The range of viewpoints is extensive: Chapter 2 considers home-based employment from a global perspective, while Chapter 8 narrows the focus to one particular location and type of home-based worker. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 7 examine in various ways the data from a 9-state study, basing their analyses in theoretical and conceptual frameworks related to gender. Chapter 6 explores the dilemma of parents who have to hire child care in order to complete their home-based work. Also included are recommendations for public policy considerations.

This book looks at the routine taken-for-granted features of work as experienced by professional women in bureaucratic environments. It shows why these trivial features are not trivial, but add up to a good part of what all work is composed of. Finally, it considers why the women interviewed in this study encountered and experienced their professional careers in the ways they did. There are many books on the general subject of women at work and the sociology of work, but few deal with what the work consists of, how it is accomplished, what one needs to know to undertake it competently, and how it is experienced by the worker. This book deals with all these issues, and more, that are typically overlooked in the literature on women at work in particular and on work in general.

Office, home, and the balance between them. When significant numbers of college-educated American women began, in the early twenty-first century, to leave paid work to become stay-at-home mothers, an emotionally charged national debate erupted. Karine Moe and Dianna Shandy, a professional economist and an anthropologist, respectively, decided to step back from the sometimes overheated rhetoric around the so-called mommy wars. They wondered what really inspired women to opt out, and they wanted to gauge the phenomenon's genuine repercussions. ""Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples"" is the fruit of their investigation - a rigorous, accessible, and sympathetic reckoning with this hot-button issue in contemporary life. Drawing on hundreds of interviews from around the country, original survey research, and national labor force data, Moe and Shandy refocus the discussion of women who opt out from one where they are the object of scrutiny to one where their aspirations and struggles tell us about the far broader swath of American women who continue to juggle paid work and family. Moe and Shandy examine the many pressures that influence a woman's decision to resign, reduce, or reorient her career. These include the mismatch between child-care options and workplace demands, the fact that these women married men with demanding careers, the professionalization of stay-at-home motherhood, and broad failures in public policy. But Moe and Shandy are equally attentive to the resilience of women in the face of life decisions that might otherwise threaten their sense of self-worth. Moe and Shandy find, for instance, that women who have downsized their careers stress the value of social networks - of 'running with a pack of smart women' who've also chosen to emphasize motherhood over paid work.

This expertly prepared policy issues handbook surveys the changing workplace and the failures of America's public health and education systems to prepare the future work force to compete at home and abroad. Carl Stenberg and William Colman analyze the key issues; review a mass of information, ideas, and insights about policy options that are available; and assess their pros and cons. Students, teachers, administrators, policymakers, and concerned citizens will find a wealth of clearly presented data along with careful analyses of the major proposals for reform. Figures, tables, short summaries, appendices, bibliographical aids, and a full index make this one-volume landmark reference accessible to researchers and readers at different levels and for varied use.

This book provides valuable insights into how cities are innovating in the field of the sharing economy through case studies. Each chapter explains how different cities have employed the sharing economy to solve their sui generis problems. The concept of Sharing Cities is getting considerable traction with grassroots groups and city governments around the world. Starting with the earliest Sharing City, Seoul, under the efforts of different Sharing Economy Associations and Organizations, more and more cities are being transformed. This book aims to highlight the positive changes that the sharing economy brings to cities and will be a valuable reference to those working in this emerging field.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is not close to meeting its mandate to protect American workers, according to administrative law specialists McGarity and Shapiro. Thousands of men and women are still victims of workplace accidents and occupational disease. The goal of this book is to analyze why OSHA has failed and to suggest what can be done to set it back on track. The book, divided into six parts, evaluates the current status of the protection of workers and provides a history of OSHA regulation. The authors suggest four methods to reduce workplace health and safety risks: (1) better management of OSHA; (2) reduced oversight by the courts and the executive branch; (3) a change in OSHA's legislative mandate; and (4) empowering workers to protect themselves.

This important work will be of interest to scholars and professionals in occupational health, labor economics, labor law, and human resource management.

In this thought-provoking and innovative book, Kendra Coulter examines the diversity of work done with, by, and for animals. Interweaving human-animal studies, labor theories and research, and feminist political economy, Coulter develops a unique analysis of the accomplishments, complexities, problems, and possibilities of multispecies and interspecies labor. She fosters a nuanced, multi-faceted approach to labor that takes human and animal well-being seriously, and that challenges readers to not only think deeply and differently about animals and work, but to reflect on the potential for interspecies solidarity. The result is an engaging, expansive, and path-making text.

This book offers an illuminating story of how social and political change can sometimes result from the vision, leadership, and commitment of a few dedicated individuals determined not to fail. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Movement chronicles the drive for a union of one of American society's most exploited groups. It is a story of courage and determination, set against the backdrop of the 1960s, a time of assassinations, war protests, civil rights battles, and reform efforts for poor and minority citizens. American farm workers were men and women on labor's last rung, living in desperate and inhumane conditions, poisoned by pesticides, and making a pittance for back-breaking work. The book shows how these migrant workers found a champion in Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union. With the help of quotes from documentary material only recently made available, it tells the story of the boycotts, marches, and strikes-including hunger strikes-used to force concessions for better conditions and pay. It also shows how the farm workers movement helped set the stage for growing Latino cultural awareness and political power. Interviews, speeches, congressional testimony, diary entries, and firsthand recollections from the early 1960s to the present Profiles of men and women who played important leadership roles in the farm workers movement

Social Contracts and Informal Workers in the Global South draws on the accounts of informal workers, who represent over 60 per cent of the global workforce, to advocate for radically new conceptualizations of state-society, capital-labour and state-capital-labour relations, illustrating how current social contracts may be considered inadequate, irrelevant or unjust. Bridging social contract theories, both mainstream and critical, and the experiences of informal workers - self-employed, wage employed and sub-contracted - this book sheds light on how many existing social contract models stigmatize informal workers and do not offer legal or social protection. Instead of ideologically driven 'top-down' calls to revitalize the social contract, it advocates for 'bottom-up' initiatives focused on the demands of the working poor in the informal economy. With a wealth of cross-national evidence, as well as promising case studies, this timely and thought-provoking book will prove vital for scholars and researchers of informal workers and of state-capital-labour relations; and for policy makers negotiating new social contracts.

This book presents the most recent theoretical insights and practical intervention methods to (re)build trust between management and organized employees in organizations. Offering a multidisciplinary perspective on trust and conflict management in organizations, the book draws from diverse fields such as organizational psychology, business, law, industrial relations and sociology. It examines the often encountered breaches of trust between management and organized workers, and the resulting destructive social conflicts, social actions, strikes or dramatic business decisions. Its focus is on trust and conflict management at the organizational level in an industrial relations context: that of employee representatives and management. The book introduces a new theoretical approach: the Tree of Trust, designed to analyse and mediate the interconnected levels of trust and distrust in industrial relations. It presents case studies and practical recommendations to build trust and constructive conflict management in the organizations, and illustrates these by means of experiences from different countries around the globe.

When Congress enacted Social Secuirty in 1935, with the age of retirement set at age 65, average life expectancy was 62 years. By the time Medicare was enacted 30 years later, life expectancy had risen to age 70. Since the enactment of Medicare, life expectancy has risen to age 76 today and may be expected to increase further in the decades to come. Clearly, the increase in post-retirement life expectancy has significant implications for the level of national expenditures attributable to an aging population. One of the approaches suggested as a solution to the so-called income transfer problem is to redefine old age, that is, to push retirement and its associated benefits off to a later age. This would effectively increase the size of the workforce, with older workers continuing to contribute their payroll taxes for an extended period of time. The critical question Sicker poses is, will there be enough appropriate employment opportunities for a growing number of older workers in the workforce of the future? The evidence for a positive response is far from clear or compelling.

Sicker examines the prospective place of the aging worker in the employment environment of the 21st century in light of the restructuring of American business and the world of work in the final decades of the last century. In doing so, he raises serious concerns about the validity and utility of some of the neoclassical economic ideas and assumptions that have become part of the conventional wisdom of our time. Sicker contends that these dubious propositions have unwittingly contributed signficantly to the problem through their manifestation in public policy. However, the principal focus of his analysis is not on economic theory as such, but on the realities and uncertainties that an aging American workforce will face in the decades to come. This book is significant reading for scholars, researchers, and the general public interested in labor force and aging policy issues.

Drawing on interviews with nurses, social workers, exotic dancers and hairdressers, this book explores the processes involved in producing and reproducing gendered and classed workers and occupations.

Examining the subtle forms of aggression, violence, and harassment that occur in our society and manifest in institutions and places of work, the expert contributors collected here describe the experience of social marginalization and expose how vulnerable individuals work to navigate exclusionary climates. This volume explores how bodies disrupt the status quo in multiple contexts and locations; provides insights into how institutions are structured and how practices that may cause harm are maintained; and, finally, considers progressive and proactive alternatives. This book will be a key resource for academics and professionals in education, sociology, nursing, law, business and political science, as well as organizations and policymakers grappling with aggression in the workplace.

To fully grasp Marx's theory of the labor movement, Lapides supplies a deeper insight into the economic analysis underlying it. This book presents Marx's theory of wages and wage labor, previously scattered throughout his writings, in its entirety for the first time. The author places the theory in its historical context, locating the sources of Marx's wage theory, its intellectual antecedents, and the roots of later controversies, but the primary focus of the work is the actual development of Marx's theory in the words in which he expressed it. In order to reveal the true nature and rich texture of Marx's thought, the author has assembled Marx's own formulations, scattered throughout his numerous works and buried beneath mountains of commentary and criticism. The book provides a faithful record of the complete evolutionary progress of Marx's theory.

In this book the author aims to describe the path from Information Technology to Information Management and Information Governance. This path allows organizations to identify IT Business Value and take advantage of it. The book synthesizes the main approaches that have emerged in recent years, compares these approaches along multiple variables, and finally proposes an advanced and new approach to Information Governance, based on the concept of Organizational Absorptive Capacity. Furthermore, the book presents a new approach to Information Management: the SIGMA (Strategic Information Governance Modelling and Assessment) approach. The new approach is centered on information as a key factor allowing integration between IT applications, organizational capabilities and business strategy. In particular, the Absorptive Capacity concept is presented and discussed: this concept represents the ability of an organization to maintain and absorb the potential of information and IT investments. After having presented and discussed the model, we also provide the reader with a brief presentation of how the SIGMA approach should be applied in companies. The book adopts a scientific approach to ensure methodological rigour; however, it is also concrete and describes problems from the viewpoints of managers, adopting a clear and easy-to-understand language in order to capture the interest of top managers and graduate students.

This book explores how the labour and leisure lives of people in contemporary rural China have been structured and transformed, discussing the changing dynamics of power relations both between and within genders, and in local (village and family/household) and remote (the state and market) contexts. It combines perspectives from sociology, gender studies, social history and demography to investigate the changes and continuities in the lives of women and men in Lianhe, a rural village in central China, examining the period from 1926 to 2013 through the lens of labour and leisure. Employing methods from the field of ethnography, the research focuses on the life stories of three generations, including 57 women in Lianhe. The book develops a 'double comparison' analytical framework to compare the organisation of labour and leisure in the three respective generations, proceeding, on the one hand, diachronically along the historical time, that is, the pre-collective era, collective era and reform era, and synchronically along the women's life stages on the other. In so doing, the book links women's shifting role in changing family/household forms with broader socio-economic, political, demographic and cultural changes. Moreover, it employs a holistic perspective to reflect changing patterns in women's labour and leisure by disrupting the remunerated/unremunerated, home/labour, within/outside household and labour/leisure dichotomies, and exploring the interrelations between them. Based on this, the book then identifies the determinants of rural women's labour and leisure and reveals the women's experiences of their changing identities, particularly concerning their relationships with their parents (-in-law), sisters (-in-law), husbands and children. Particularly highlighting the interdependence and inequality among women, it also reveals their own perception of their identities and relationships, and their understanding of husband-wife fairness and gender equality. Lastly, it demonstrates that the prevalent androcentrism in the remote world does not match the increasing husband-wife fairness in the local world and argues that this mismatch has caused the complex and paradoxical experiences and subjectivities of these women. Given its scope, the book is of interest to scholars, students and researchers in the fields of sociology, anthropology, gender and development, as well as a general audience looking to explore contemporary rural China.