While both the nature of families and the composition of the workforce have gone through radical changes, few adjustments have been made so that work and family are aligned in ways that promote strong families and a strong economy. Changing Realities of Work and Family takes a multidisciplinary look at the topic of work and family, ultimately addressing four primary questions: How do families and employers accommodate the demands of employment and children?; How does society deal with diversity and discrimination in areas such as age, community, and sexual orientation?; How does working and caring for families affect health?; and What is the effect of work-family integration in politics, business, and the legal system?These questions are addressed from a variety of perspectives and a diverse assortment of contributors, including a former Governor who gave birth to twins while in office; a distinguished legal professor and leading authority on workplace discrimination against mothers and pregnant women; a researcher whose work on parental stress includes videotaped interactions between parents and children as parents return home from work; and a consultant to corporations developing workplace flexibility with a particular focus on low-wage workers. Comprised of original empirical articles written expressly for this work and real world examples and strategies for balancing the two, this book presents the most current research on the field of work and family..

Retail workers are a large labor force, yet their jobs are generally devalued and dominated by low wages, precarious conditions, and disrespect. Coulter draws on three years of comparative research on retail workers and political action, including fieldwork in Canada, the United States, and Sweden, to explore what is needed to improve workers' wellbeing and transform retail work. The only book of its kind, "Revolutionizing Retail" explains the strategies being used to improve retail jobs and retail workers' quality of life, including diverse forms of organizing, public policy, and good management. Coulter analyzes the degree to which current efforts are succeeding, and what lessons they offer about the present and future of work, forms of agency, and class, gender, and race relations. The power of culture, emotions, and workers' personal experiences of political action are at the heart of this engaging discussion of the challenges and possibilities of social change.

The provision of care has been widely referred to as facing a 'crisis'. International migrants are increasingly relied upon to provide care - as domestic workers, nannies, care assistants and nurses. This international volume examines the global construction of migrant care labour and how it manifests itself in different contexts.

This book questions whether technologies are the rational, tangible, scientific, forward-thinking, neutral objects they are so often perceived to be, exploring instead how powerful, mythic ideas about technologies drive our social understanding and our expectations of them. Against a rising tide of information, we encounter significant technological, scientific, and medical advances which promise to create an educated, humane, and equal world. This book explores that promise, deconstructing technologies to conclude that though they do afford us significant and empowering advances, they remain largely cloaked in mystery, and often promise more than they can deliver. Contributors from diverse intellectual backgrounds and political and epistemological stances - spanning sociology and psychosocial investigations, innovation studies, and scientists - combine philosophical inquiry and empirical case studies to create a book which is at once provocative, innovative, and exciting in the challenges it poses.

Consult this handy reference work when you need accurate, up to date information on subjects ranging from the effects of work on children's education to the use of child labor in Eastern Europe. From Dickensian exploitation of orphans to the after-school jobs of American students, child labor continues to generate controversy. Surveying working children from the Industrial Revolution to the present day, Child Labor takes the subject beyond the usual third world confines as it looks at traditional children's occupations, from chimney sweeps in Victorian Britain to child actors in TV commercials. A-Z entries are also arranged by category Numerous citations of contemporary books and studies

In past decades, most democratic European countries sought to achieve a more equal division of labour between men and women, both within families and organisations. At the same time, they wanted to offer individuals and families sufficient freedom to determine their own roles. But how far can the basic values of 'equality' and 'freedom' be realised in the daily division of labour in a complex modern society? How can they be linked with other principles, such as 'solidarity' and 'efficiency'?"Towards a democratic division of labour" starts from the challenge of balancing these values in all sections of modern society, introducing the Combination Model as a scientific tool for studying the division of professional and family work. Following an integrated conceptual approach, the book explains the historical evolution of the division of labour in modern welfare states. Three policy models are developed to illustrate how a democratic division of labour can be conceived in the long-term and the Complete Combination Model is presented as the most suitable for the development of an integrated policy programme. "Towards a Democratic Division of Labour" offers inspiration to all scientists, policy makers, representatives of societal organisations and managers who are searching for new theoretical, empirical and policy perspectives.

Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesn't. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors.

The authors investigate the phenomenon of highly skilled Chinese returnees and their impact on the development of the Chinese economy and society, and on the transformation of China into a key player on the global stage. They analyse the reasons why Chinese entrepreneurs choose to return to their native country and how their overseas experience shapes their attitude and behaviours. This study is solidly grounded on fresh data from online and offline surveys and on evidence collected in over 200 interviews of successful returnees entrepreneurs. These global Chinese returnees have contributed to the rise of Chinese economy into a global powerhouse and this continuing brain movement and circulation will have much more future implications and impact for China's exchange with outside world.

Unemployment costs the United States at least $400 billion per year in lost output. This number does not begin to add up the total costs of unemployment that include many serious social problems like increased divorce and crime rates. If unemployment costs so much, why don't we simply pump up demand and push the unemployment rate down? The answer lies in the relationship between inflation and unemployment: we simply cannot push unemployment below the rate that is compatable with stable inflation.

Must we, then, just live with unemployment? No. But to understand how we can reduce unemployment, we must understand the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). What determines the level of the NAIRU? Has that level increased? Can we reduce the current NAIRU? These are important questions addressed in "Reducing Unemployment" Ottosen and Thompson argue that the NAIRU has increased significantly over the past 30 years. Many blame structural unemployment for that increase. Others have argued that increases in social welfare programs and payments are to blame. But hardly anyone has examined the effects of increasing government regulations on the NAIRU. "Reducing Unemployment" remedies this oversight, and also looks at the effects of unionization and productivity on the NAIRU. The authors conclude that the United States does not have to tolerate a high unemployment rate, for the NAIRU can be reduced through appropriate government deregulation.

This innovative book examines the nature of work and reward, and the place each has in today's society. The author examines why so many people feel trapped in the workplace today, and develops a framework that can be used to improve life both in and out of the workplace. The author states that the current definition of work today is sacrifice' and the reward is frequently money. He argues that employees also need access to such things as truth, good, beauty, and power. Concentration on the work ethic will give way to the development ethic which minimizes sacrifice and maximizes development through the use of technology and the restructuring of our value system. This illuminating book provides an interesting perspective on business for undergraduate business students, MBA students, and those directly involved in the business world.

"Work and RewardS" begins with an examination of the work world as it stands today. The author explores the possibilities for change in technology, the nature of work, reward systems, balance, and success. Finally, the book introduces a new framework for work and life.

The free movement of labour will be one of the key elements of the Single Market soon to be implemented, One would therefore expect that efforts would have been made to harmonize social policies, especially on the legal status of workers. But the existing EC Treaty contains no provision and the Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers of 1989 fails to fill the gap. The Charter delegates the socio-political responsibility in almost all points to the member states. Yet the constitutions of most refer to general human rights only. The author here stresses the importance of economic and social human rights which, like human rights in general, have their roots in the Enlightenment, especially in the works of Montesquieu, Adam Smith and Kant.

This book examines the extent to which studying and living overseas enable returning graduates to enhance their professional work and contribute to community development. It assesses the transformative potential that returnees are assumed to have in terms of capabilities and skills acquired through an international education. This book is based on a research study on Vietnamese overseas graduates who have returned to Vietnam. It examines the complexity of competing aspirations, responsibilities, identities and cultural dynamics in these returnees' professional, intellectual and civic environments.

This book presents an accessible and fascinating account of theoretical debates around identity and work, recent empirical trends and methodological arguments concerning the role of oral testimony and its interpretation. Focusing on three occupational sectors in particular teachers, bank workers and the railway industry it also presents an argument that is both more general than this and theoretically and analytically wide-ranging. The book explores some important questions: how are workers, both in the past and the present juncture, socialised into work cultures? What are the cultural and structural differences with regard the world of work across class, gender, and generation? What are the historical conditions of which these differences play a part? How is the idea of work found in a range of representations, from artistic production to sociological discourse expressed and explored? The development of concepts such as 'structures of feeling' and affect, and the weaving in of historical and visual material, make the book important to a wide range of readers including ethnographers, cultural sociologists and narrative researchers. In turn, this book offers an authoritative and sophisticated summary and analysis of work and identity and is an important intervention into mainstream sociology concerns.

Global poverty is a central concern for world politics, yet we lack and adequate conception of the ways the "global poor" affect contemporary world order. This book examines the proposition, inspired by the work of Robert W. Cox and Jeffrey Harrod, that such a conception must be based on an analysis of how the "global poor" take part in power relations as" unprotected workers." It examines the ways in which production and power relations constitute world politics, and the chapters shed light on the politics of production in the Third World, migration, prostitution, the "clash of civilizations" and union internationalism.

In this study, labor economist Henry Schechter concludes that there is a need for greater international prohibitions and for keeping open channels for collective bargaining for higher wages. He presents an analysis of recent changes in the United States and elsewhere, highlighting the spread of automated production technology to lesser developed, low-wage areas of the world, which leads to global demand-supply imbalances and downward pressure on wages. This circumstance, he charges, is aggravated as multinational corporations affiliate with one another, lessening competition and increasing monopolistic influences worldwide. This work will be of interest to the scholars and policymakers in academia, government, business, and the labor movement concerned with fiscal and labor economic policies.

This book is about how much people earn and why the distribution of earnings has been changing over time. The gap between the top and bottom in the United States has widened significantly since 1980. Why has this happened? Is it due to new technologies? What is the role of globalisation? Are there historical precedents?
The book begins with the "race" between technology and education, and shows that continuing technical progress does not necessarily imply a continuing rise in dispersion. It then examines the experience of 20 OECD countries over the twentieth century, material presented in the form of 20 country case studies. The book breaks new ground in assembling data on the distribution of individual earnings covering much of the twentieth century and drawing on a variety of under-exploited sources.
The findings overturn a number of widely-held beliefs. It is not the earnings of the low paid that have been most affected by the recent changes; widening is largely due to what is happening at the top. The recent rise in earnings dispersion is not unprecedented, but should be seen as part of a longer-run history of successive compression and expansion of earnings differences.

This collection analyzes shifting relationships between gender and labour in post-Fordist times. Contingency creates a sexual contract in which attachments to work, mothering, entrepreneurship and investor subjectivity are the new regulatory ideals for women over a range of working arrangements, and across classed and raced dimensions.

Why is it that in France, a country renowned for its gastronomy, chefs tend to develop a nostalgia syndrome? Having been taught how to work in the most prestigious restaurants, they soon discover another reality in everyday restaurants or cafeterias: chefs have to cope with family constraints and are often forced to accept positions in standardized organizations that leave little room for daily inspiration. Feeling the burden of their professional commitments, these chefs are considered as having made an egotistic professional choice, both by society and the French educational system. With this in mind, their identity is distorted, regardless of possible improvements in working conditions. This book analyses vocational identities in French foodservices in their different stages and diversity, using international and inter-industry comparisons in the sociological field of professional groups.

Toward a Future Beyond Employment proposes that as poor nations move to the emerging stage and as emerging economies become advanced, advanced economies are transitioning to a stage of their own, to a type of post-employment economy where society works less, consumes less, but instead has more time.

These proceedings from the 2012 symposium on "Chaos, complexity and leadership" reflect current research results from all branches of Chaos, Complex Systems and their applications in Management. Included are the diverse results in the fields of applied nonlinear methods, modeling of data and simulations, as well as theoretical achievements of Chaos and Complex Systems. Also highlighted are Leadership and Management applications of Chaos and Complexity Theory.

Defining Global Justice offers the first comprehensive overview of the history of the United States' role in the International Labor Organization (ILO). In this thought-provoking book, Edward Lorenz addresses the challenge laid down by the President of the American Political Science Association in 2000, who urged scholars to discover "how well-structured institutions could enable the world to have 'a new birth of freedom'." Lorenz's study describes one model of a well-structured institution. His history of the U.S. interaction with the ILO shows how some popular organizations, including organized labor, the women's movement, academics, the legal community, and religious institutions have been able to utilize the ILO structure to counter what the APSA president called "self-serving elites and ... their worst impulses." These organizations succeeded repeatedly in introducing popular visions of social justice into global economic planning and the world economy.

By underscoring the role of women in this process, he highlights the importance of gender relations in the development of labor standards policy. Lorenz also shows how transformations in the economic and social reproduction of knowledge gradually displaced academics from the cutting edge of research on labor issues.

Throughout this fascinating study, Lorenz reminds his readers that the development of decent labor standards has come in large part from the efforts of religious groups and a host of other nongovernmental, voluntary civic organizations that have insisted labor is a human activity, not a commodity.

Defining Global Justice reveals why the United States, despite showing exceptional restraint in domestic social policymaking, played a leading role in the pursuit of just international labor standards. Lorenz's lucid volume covers a century's worth of efforts, charting the development of a body of international law and an institutional structure as important to the global economy of the twenty-first century as the battle against slavery was in the nineteenth century.

This book demonstrates how local contexts of urbanization and cultures of work are intimately meshed together. Each chapter explores a discrete dimension of the way people organize their working lives in post-industrial cities, taking close account of the social and environmental impact of this balancing act. The book features cross-national and inter-city comparative household level research, highlighting significant contradictions underpinning the nature of production, consumer expectation, work-life balance and urban environmental quality.

Based on new empirical evidence, this book provides a comparative analysis of the transition from school to work across the European Union. It examines the negative impacts of the recent employment turbulences on school leavers' integration into the labour market, as well as identifying the individual, social, and economic factors that facilitate smooth transitions.