This book examines the experiences of the first graduates from The Doctor of Social Sciences (DSocSci) program at Royal Roads University, Canada's first applied research doctorate designed exclusively for working professionals. The program was developed in response to a growing demand nationally and internationally for scholar-practitioners who are leaders in their professional fields and who want to incorporate dedicated research and writing into their professional lives. Contributors describe their unique experiences in framing and conducting research that was outside the boundaries of discipline-based research and that was driven by issues on the ground.

This book examines international labour migrants in the context of South-South migration with a focus on Bangladeshi migration to Singapore. Two principal questions in the South-South migration are addressed: Why and how individuals migrate for work; and what impact this temporary form of migration has for migrants and their families. The book adopts a relatively new methodological approach to labour migration by linking different phases that migrants undergo in the migration process and by combining migrants in the host country with their families in the origin country. This is achieved through identifying and addressing six key areas: (i) migration policy, (ii) social imperatives of migration (iii) recruitment, (iv) social worlds of the migrants, (v) remittance process, and finally, (vi) family development dynamics. This book introduces the bari to migration research as a unit of analysis over and above individual and family units. The book reveals how social and cultural forces both initiate and perpetuate migration, and later on influence bari dynamics.

Contributing to the debate on work performance evaluation in a time of technological transformation, this book explores the impact of digitisation on production and organisation models, as well as on the rights and interests of the stakeholders involved. As organisations down-size, merge with other companies and become decentralised, the boundaries in employer-employee-customer relationships are blurred and new models for the organisation and assessment of work performance have emerged. With these new models, innovative regulatory approaches are sorely needed. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and drawing on theoretical concepts from organisation studies, human resource management, sociology and labour economics, this all-encompassing collection is not only essential reading for academics and students, but also for policy-makers and employers who are looking for innovative and practical solutions to the challenges of modern employment relations.

Sometimes I think that carrying - other people, the continuity of history, generational identity, the emotional load of the everyday - is the main thing that women do. In Marina Benjamin's new set of interlinked essays, she turns her astute eye to the tasks once termed 'women's work'. From cooking and cleaning to caring for an ageing relative, A Little Give depicts domestic life anew: as a site of paradox and conflict, but also of solace and profound meaning. Here, productivity sits alongside self-erasure, resentment with tenderness, and the animal self is never far away, perpetually threatening to break through. Drawing on the work of figures such as Natalia Ginzburg, Paula Rego, and Virginia Woolf, Benjamin writes with fierce candour of the struggle to overwrite the gender conditioning that pulls her back into 'the mud-world of pre-feminism' even as she attempts to haul herself out. From her upbringing as the child of immigrants with fixed traditional values, to looking after her mother and seeing her teenager move out of home, she examines her relationships with family, community, her body, and even with language itself. Ultimately, she shows that a woman's true work may lie at the heart of her humanity, in the pursuit both of transformation and of deep acceptance.

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

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.

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.

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.

This book reflects the development of Latin American labour history across broad geographical, chronological and thematic perspectives, which seek to review and revisit key concepts at different levels. The contributions are closely linked to the most recent trends in Global Labour History and in turn, they enrich those trends. Here, authors from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Spain take a historical and sociological perspective and analyse a series of problems relating to labour relations. The chapters weave together different periods of Latin American colonial and republican history from the vice-royalties of New Spain (now Mexico) and Peru, the Royal Audiencia de Charcas (now Bolivia), Argentina and Uruguay (former vice-royalty of Rio de La Plata) and Chile (former Capitania General).

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.

After a conceptual reflection on the different professional regulation patterns in Europe, this book explores the main features of the currently ongoing European professional deregulation policies. It focuses on the current changes in Portugal where there seems to be an important increase of self-regulating professional associations despite the European deregulation trend and highlights the fact that experts cannot stay away any longer from the prevailing changes in society nor should they remain confined to their specific disciplines.

This volume challenges the concept of the 'new African middle class' with new theoretical and empirical insights into the changing lives in Sub-Saharan Africa. Diverse middle classes are on the rise, but models of class based on experiences from other regions of the world cannot be easily transferred to the African continent. Empirical contributions, drawn from a diverse range of contexts, address both African histories of class formation and the political roles of the continent's middle classes, and also examine the important interdependencies that cut across inter-generational, urban-rural and class divides. This thought-provoking book argues emphatically for a revision of common notions of the 'middle class', and for the inclusion of insights 'from the South' into the global debate on class. Middle Classes in Africa will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, as well as NGOs and policy makers with an interest in African societies.

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.

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 introduces and reviews recent advances in the field in a comprehensive and non-technical way by focusing on the potential of emerging citizen-science and social-computation frameworks, coupled with the latest theoretical and modeling tools developed by physicists, mathematicians, computer and social scientists to analyse, interpret and visualize complex data sets. There is overwhelming evidence that the current organisation of our economies and societies is seriously damaging biological ecosystems and human living conditions in the short term, with potentially catastrophic effects in the long term. The need to re-organise the daily activities with the greatest impact - energy consumption, transport, housing - towards a more efficient and sustainable development model has recently been raised in the public debate on several global, environmental issues. Above all, this requires the mismatch between global, societal and individual needs to be addressed. Recent advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can trigger important transitions at the individual and collective level to achieve this aim. Based on the findings of the collaborative research network EveryAware the following developments among the emerging ICT technologies are discussed in depth in this volume: * Participatory sensing - where ICT development is pushed to the level where it can support informed action at the hyperlocal scale, providing capabilities for environmental monitoring, data aggregation and mining, as well as information presentation and sharing. * Web gaming, social computing and internet-mediated collaboration - where the Web will continue to acquire the status of an infrastructure for social computing, allowing users' cognitive abilities to be coordinated in online communities, and steering the collective action towards predefined goals. * Collective awareness and decision-making - where the access to both personal and community data, collected by users, processed with suitable analysis tools, and re-presented in an appropriate format by usable communication interfaces leads to a bottom-up development of collective social strategies.

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.

This collection describes the changing structure of jobs during the period of robust employment expansion that preceded the 2008 financial crisis. It also provides an analysis of labour market developments in the EU and the US in terms of gender, international mobility and debates over the quality of work.

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 uses a variety of empirical cases on topics including drug development, egg donation, and governance of healthcare facilities, to investigate how actors navigate the uncertainties that permeate the interfaces of health, technologies, and politics in post-Soviet settings and what the implications of their chosen navigation routes are. Contemporary societies are imbued with uncertainties, but the authors focus on settings where uncertainties multiply, making decisions, practises, and relations in everyday life precarious. Two worlds are brought into dialogue throughout the chapters of this book with the aim of facilitating mutual learning from one another - the world of science and technology studies (STS) and the high-income liberal democracies of the West, on one hand, and studies of post-socialism on the other. In so doing, this book encourages critical learning on ensuring the resilience of individual and societal health in situations of profound uncertainties. This timely collection will be of great interest to scholars, practitioners and policy makes in the fields of sociology, biomedicine, political science and public and global health.

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.

Drawing on articles appearing in popular women's magazines from 1950 to 1989, this study documents changes in justifications of gender-based divisions of labor in the home and workplace. The study details the types of rationalizations that have been used to reconcile one new familial arrangement--two-parent workers with traditional gender values that promote men as breadwinners/fathers and women as housewives/mothers. The study reveals that changes have taken place only within the context of being a "good mother." A serious analysis of women's burden of being both breadwinner and homemaker, therefore, has not occurred. Women's magazines serve as moral guides for their readers, providing justifications for both working and nonworking readers. They rely heavily on "experts" to provide personal direction to their readers. This work is in the same vein as Susan Faludi's Backlash, which examines the use of the media in the control of gender ideologies.

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.

Transformation from Wall Street to Well-being: Joining up the dots through Participatory democracy and governance to mitigate the causes and adapt to the effects of climate changeaddresses accountable leadership, supports collective interests, ethical governance and fairness to future generations in order to develop systemic approaches relevant to these issues. The humanistic focus, whilst central, addresses how we see ourselves in relation to the environment. It explores cultural perspectives in developed and developing parts of the world where people have a closer connection with the natural environment in comparison to those who live in cities. Furthermore the book discusses participatory action research to prefigure a means to hold the market to ensure that the use of resources that are necessary for the common good are accessible and equitable. The essential systemic aim this book offers is to balance human needs with nature. The research summarizes the discourses and the adaptive praxis in order to develop a bridge between cosmopolitan ethics and cosmopolitan governance. It does this in the interest of supporting and using cultural designs for living that support quality of life and spans five core domains as explained by the author. Overall, this monograph helps evaluates the extent to which the introduced approaches enable the community to consider their perceived assets and risks and the implications of their consumption choices."

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..