Drawing on Marxism and engaging with theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj i ek, John Michael Roberts argues that a new expressive ideology has coalesced within the contemporary workplace around the theme of 'competence'. The 'competence' agenda encourages management and workers to build networks of trust, cooperation and dialogue between one another. By examining the competent public sphere as it appears in the global economy, the author takes to task the competence agenda, relates this agenda to the hegemony of global finance and to the fetishism of the new economy, exposes the dilemmas and contradictions of the competence agenda, and through everyday examples from the UK and USA illustrates how competence is played out and resisted in the contemporary workplace. This bookprovides a fascinating critical account of how the way we work today is debated and discussed by management and workers.

This contributed volume presents a state-of-the-art compendium for startups and corporations, focusing on corporate ventures. The book is based on the volume "Strategy and Communication for Innovation" and includes up-to-date discussions which help to better understand strategy and communication from a startup perspective. Each chapter offers a starting point for the exchange of ideas, key lessons and new insights from entrepreneurial perspectives such as e-ventures, corporate ventures and traditional ventures. Readers with an interest in innovation management will benefit from this book.

This volume, Technological Aspects of Mentoring, edited by Frances K. Kochan and Joseph T. Pascarelli, will examine mentoring in the technological age. It will focus upon the impact and use of technology in terms of program development, mentoring roles, problems and solutions and issues to be addressed including confidentiality, ethics, and implications for future practice. The editors will explore the possibilities for tomorrow from the work of today.

During World War I, the US demanded that all able-bodied adult men "work or fight." But fighting was mostly assigned to single white men who were not engaged in "productive" work. White men who were proper husbands and fathers, owned property, or worked at approved jobs, and who participated in civic activities, had the full benefits of citizenship without fighting. Women, men of color, and poor white men were often barred from achieving these benefits. This book uses the records of local draft boards and state draft officials in Georgia, New Jersey, Illinois, and California to tell the stories of men and women whose lives were touched by the Selective Service System.

This book presents a comprehensive, state-of-the-art portrait of entrepreneurship and small business management issues in Iran, and among the Iranian Diaspora. The major contributions in this book address topics such as innovation, female entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, migrant entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurship, institutional support of entrepreneurial initiatives and more. This book is the outcome of an extensive research endeavor spanning several years and includes the latest contributions from highly respected authors and experts from Iran and beyond.

This book compares the unique features of workplace mediation to other contexts of mediation, as well as the specific competences each situation requires of the mediator. It covers many important issues related to workplace mediation and discusses interventions by managers, such as conflict coaching and informal mediation. It proposes a new model to assess the effectiveness of mediation, and discusses the impact of legal systems, HRM policies, as well as power structures, and cultural differences. The book takes into account perspectives from multiple disciplines, such as management, business, psychology, law and sociology. It also discusses mediation aspects from a variety of cultural and regional contexts. The book advances knowledge about the application, process and effects of workplace mediation and includes practical tips for scholars, practitioners, mediators and managers to enhance their mediation practice or to foster constructive conflict management in organizations.

Employees have personal responsibilities as well as responsibilities to their employers. They also have rights. In order to maintain their well-being, employees need opportunities to resolve conflicting obligations. Employees are often torn between the ethical obligations to fulfill both their work and non-work roles, to respect and be respected by their employers and coworkers, to be responsible to the organization while the organization is reciprocally responsible to them, to be afforded some degree of autonomy at work while attending to collaborative goals, to work within a climate of mutual employee-management trust, and to voice opinions about work policies, processes and conditions without fear of retribution. Humanistic organizations can recognize conflicts created by the work environment and provide opportunities to resolve or minimize them.

This handbook empirically documents the dilemmas that result from responsibility-based conflicts. The book is organized by sources of dilemmas that fall into three major categories: individual, organizational (internal policies and procedures), and cultural (social forces external to the organization), including an introductionand a final integration of the many ways in which organizations can contribute to positive employee health and well-being.

This book is aimed at both academicians and practitioners who are interested in how interventions that stem from industrial and organizational psychology may address ethical dilemmas commonly faced by employees."

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1980 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

This book offers insights into facilitating sustainable careers through the study of a wide interdisciplinary range of policy investigations and assessment of ongoing practices in the field. By assessing and comparing the transferability of policies and good practices between firms in ten countries and regions of the European Union this book considers the development of sustainable careers across the lifespan at the levels of individuals, organizations and systems. This book is the culmination of a research project from the international European Social Fund network on 'Career and Age, Generation, Experience(AGE)'. It discusses and offers observations on key concerns at the European level: How to make people work longer, remain employable, develop sustainable competencies ? How to adapt the work environment and human resource management policies at employer's level ? And finally, how can public authorities take measures and incentives to support sustainable careers for individuals?

The 2004 reunification of Eastern and Western Europe and the subsequent economic crisis caused a surge in intra-European labour mobility and a profound shift in preceding patterns of migration in Europe. While previous decades of European integration brought very modest cross-border flows of labour, the past decade has engendered the largest European movements of labour in modern time - mostly from East to West, but eventually also from South to North. In a situation of record high European unemployment, this has sparked controversy about the very notion of free movement, one of the basic foundations of the European Community, and has unleashed heated debates about the conditions, causes, and consequences of large-scale labour migration for receiving as well as sending societies. Against this background, this volume of Comparative Social Research will contribute to improve our understanding of the drivers, mechanisms, and effects of the past decade's surge in cross-border labour mobility and work related migration within Europe.

How workers learn how to do their jobs is central to an understanding of the changing nature of work in post-industrial society. The role of job or worker training has, however, been underdeveloped in sociological theories of work and the labor market. By most accounts, the ongoing penetration of information technology into the workplace, a transformed socioeconomic lifecourse, managerial preferences for high performance organizations, and the globalization of labour markets have collectively rendered traditional models of skill acquisition badly outmoded. This volume offers sophisticated sociological analyses of job training that go well beyond standard accounts of general versus specific skills and overly simple assumptions about employer and worker behaviour. The chapters examine such topics as the incentives available to employers to provide training, socially structured inequalities in access to training, and cross-societal differences in training institutions. They break new ground in investigating the content of job training as well as its incidence and duration. The contributors to the volume bring to bear both qualitative case study and quantitative research to explore the emerging role of training in post-industrial labor markets.

Female Ambition traces the development of women in the workplace, and focuses on a host of critical issues such as current governmental legislation and the family unit, family-responsible companies, personal leadership and the management of time in the workplace and at home. In a comprehensive manner, the book addresses the challenges that women face as they seek to combine careers with a balanced and fulfilling family life. This book also provides practical tips on achieving this goal, and includes numerous real-life examples.

"Beyond the Workfare State" explores equality, discrimination and human rights in relation to employability and 'welfare-to-work' policies. It draws extensively on new research from the SEQUAL Project, undertaken for the European Social Fund, which investigated seven dimensions of discrimination in a labour market that is in theory 'open to all'. The book provides an overall analysis of policy shifts and presents a wide and distinctive range of illustrative studies that give voice to a variety of potentially marginalised groups. Chapters deal with obstacles to labour-market access around each of the following themes: gender and class; disability; race and ethnicity; geographical exclusion; sexual orientation; the problems of old and young people; and refugees. The authors draw attention to localised examples of promising practice, but also connect these to a broader 'human rights' agenda, linking them to changing legislative and governance frameworks. Its scope covers the whole of Great Britain and it shows how devolution in Scotland and Wales, and at the regional level in England, is creating new possibilities for mainstreaming good practice in this key area. The book will be of great interest to academics and students in social policy and related fields. It will also be valuable for professionals, policy makers and practitioners in the regeneration, community development and anti-discrimination fields, particularly in the UK but also in Europe and beyond.

The objective of this volume is to apply the economic sociology perspective to issues of work broadly defined. Economic sociology is a vibrant area of research investigating how social structures, power allocations and cultural understandings shape the production, consumption, distribution and exchange of goods and services. The volume consists of three parts. Contributors of this title include prominent senior scholars and promising junior researchers from some of the most eminent academic institutions like Princeton University, Duke University, Brown University, the University of California-Berkeley, and Ecole Normale Superieur, Paris, France.

The book explores the intersection of emotions and migration in a number of case studies from across the USA, Europe and Southeast Asia, including the transmigration of female domestic workers, transmigrant marriages, transmigrant workers in the entertainment industry and asylum seekers and refugees who are the victims of domestic violence.

The rhetoric of 'flexibility' and its potential to empower workers forms a key part of employment policy at the EU level. This book examines the regulation of 'flexible' or 'non-standard' forms of work, which include part-time, temporary, and temporary agency work. It unites analysis of changing patterns of work with exploration of the policy debate about how such work should be regulated. McCann explores how workers in non-standard jobs have traditionally been excluded from the protection of labour law or treated less favourably than the full-time permanent workforce because labour laws have been designed around the 'standard' full-time permanent employee. Analysing in detail recent United Kingdom legislative reforms and the wider context of the EU and International Labour Organization, this book shows how, although flexible working arrangements are now more strongly protected, they are not fully integrated into UK labour law. McCann ascribes the continuing disadvantage of flexible workers to the quest to maintain a 'flexible' labour market. She contends that the current balance between ensuring flexibility for employers, and ensuring minimum standards for workers is undermining protection for non-standard workers by allowing their employment rights to be derogated in the interest of labour market flexibility.

This book analyzes the processes of proletarianization and urbanization undergone by the St. Petersburg industrial working class from its inception in the early nineteenth-century up until 1914. Attention is focused on the severing of workers' ties to the village and the land. To that end, the thesis examines local conditions in the sending areas and traces the history of factory work in the Russian capital by workers from different provinces.

This book explores recent theoretical and empirical advances in the understanding of how professional and knowledge-based occupations are organised. Focusing in particular on the differences between established and emerging forms of expert work, this collection of papers are representative of recent authoritative work in this rapidly developing field. Theauthors suggests that despite some serious challenges, professionalism retains its viability as a work organisation method and continues to exercise a strong influence on the organisation and delivery of expertise.

With the growth of parental employment, leave policy is at the centre of welfare state development and at the heart of countries' child and family policies. It is widely recognised as an essential element for attaining important demographic, social and economic goals and is the point where many different policy areas intersect: child well-being, family, gender equality, employment and labour markets, and demography. Leave policy, therefore, gives a unique insight into a country's values, interests and priorities. International comparisons of leave policy are widely available, but far less attention has been paid to understanding the factors that bring about these variations. "The politics of parental leave policies" makes good this omission. Looking at parental leave policy within a wider work/family context, it addresses how and why, and by whom, particular policies are created and subsequently developed in particular countries. Chapters covering 15 countries in Europe and beyond and the European Union bring together leading academic experts to provide a unique insight into the past, present and future state of this key policy area. "The politics of parental leave policies" is essential reading for students, teachers and researchers in social policy, child and family policy, welfare states, gender relations and equality, and employment and labour markets, providing an opportunity to study in depth the creation of social policy. It will also be of interest to policy makers in national governments and international organisations.

Far from being the preserve of middle-class women from Northern Europe, au pairing is now booming worldwide. This collection, the first dedicated entirely to examining the lives of au pairs, traces their experiences across five continents showing how this form of domestic labour and childcare is thriving in the twenty-first century.

_______________ 'A fascinating exploration that challenges our basic assumptions of what work means' - Yuval Noah Harari 'There is eminently underlinable stuff on most pages ... Fascinating' - The Times 'One of those few books that will turn your customary ways of thinking upside down' - Susan Cain 'Illuminating' - New Statesman _______________ A revolutionary new history of humankind through the prism of work, from the origins of life on Earth to our ever more automated present The work we do brings us meaning, moulds our values, determines our social status and dictates how we spend most of our time. But this wasn't always the case: for 95% of our species' history, work held a radically different importance. How, then, did work become the central organisational principle of our societies? How did it transform our bodies, our environments, our views on equality and our sense of time? And why, in a time of material abundance, are we working more than ever before?

What drives workers to periodically contest their surrounding reality and how do they structure their protests? Maurizio Atzeni provides an in-depth analysis of the dynamics of workers' collective action using the cases of two car manufacturing plants located in Argentina. Criticizing the use of injustice as the basis of mobilization, it argues that workers' collective resistance should be seen as a function of the development of solidarity, which is alternatively created and destroyed by the contradictions between exploitation and cooperation continuously reproduced by the capitalist labor process.

The rapid economic growth of the past few decades has radically transformed India's labour market, bringing millions of former agricultural workers into manufacturing industries, and, more recently, the expanding service industries, such as call centres and IT companies. Alongside this employment shift has come a change in health and health problems, as communicable diseases have become less common, while non-communicable diseases, like cardiovascular problems, and mental health issues such as stress, have increased. This interdisciplinary work connects those two trends to offer an analysis of the impact of working conditions on the health of Indian workers that is unprecedented in scope and depth.

"A splendid and hard-hitting book that exposes the campaigns by some governments to urge their citizens to work overseas, a key and virtually unnoticed aspect of economic globalization." -Karen Brodkin, author of Power Politics "Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes brings the intricate workings of the Philippine state in brokering transnational migration into sharp critical relief. Anna Romina Guevarra offers an exemplary piece of scholarship that cuts across various scales of complexities and levels of analyses which will define the contours of future debates and research agendas on migration." -Martin F. Manalansan IV, associate professor of anthropology and Asian American studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Guevarra's carefully researched, richly textured ethnographic study provides a compelling analysis of the employment agencies that recruit, mold, and market Filipina nurses and domestic workers for export as 'model workers' to the United States and around the globe. Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes offers a valuable contribution to the literature on migration as well as that on care work." -Ruth Milkman, author of L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement In a globalized economy that is heavily sustained by the labor of immigrants, why are certain nations defined as "ideal" labor resources and why do certain groups dominate a particular labor force? Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes focuses on the Philippines-which views itself as the "home of the great Filipino worker"-and the multilevel brokering process that manages and sends workers worldwide. Anna Romina Guevarra unravels the transnational production of Filipinos as ideal migrant workers by the state and explores how race, color, class, and gender operate. This multisited ethnography reveals the disciplinary power that state and employment agencies exercise over care workers-managing migration and garnering wages-to govern social conduct, bringing this isolated yet widespread social problem to life. Anna Romina Guevarra is an assistant professor of sociology and Asian American studies and affiliated faculty of gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.