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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Work & labour
Concise expert guide to a key research topic Unique shortform premium literature review Essential reading for early career researchers and established scholars new to the topic
Today’s economics offers us a far too narrow perspective on the role that paid work plays in our lives, as individuals and as a society. This book examines the urgent workplace challenges we’re facing today, from automation to AI and climate change, with an interdisciplinary and historical analysis that challenges and broadens the scope of existing economic literature. Exploring the current economic proposals to address these issues, it advocates for a more egalitarian and sustainable future that builds workers’ protections into the very fabric of our economic systems. This is a resounding call for greater economic social justice and equality at work and a valuable resource for social scientists from fields like heterodox economics, business and sociology.
'Revolutionises our understanding of the carceral state' - Fidelis Chebe, Director of Migrant Action During 2019-20 in England and Wales, over 17 million hours of labour were carried out by more than 12,500 people incarcerated in prisons, while many people in immigration removal centres also worked. In many cases, such workers constitute a sub-waged, captive workforce who are discarded by the state when done with. Work and the Carceral State examines these forms of work as part of a broader exploration of the relationship between criminalisation, criminal justice, immigration policy and labour, tracing their lineage through the histories of transportation and banishment, of houses of correction and prisons, to the contemporary production of work. Criminalisation has been used to enforce work and to discipline labour throughout the history of England and Wales. This book demands that we recognise the carceral state as operating at the frontier of labour control in the 21st century.
South Africa has one of the highest rates of youth unemployment and is renowned for being one of the most unequal societies in the world. In this context, training and education play critical roles in helping young people escape poverty and unemployment. Post-school Education offers insights about the way in which young people in South Africa navigate their way through a host of post-school training and education options. The topics range from access to, and labour market transitions from, vocational education, adult education, universities, and workplace-based training. The individual chapters offer up-to-date analyses, identify some of the challenges that young people face when accessing training and education and also point to gaps between education and the labour market. The contributors are all experts in their respective components but write with a holistic view of the post-school education system, using an unashamedly empirical lens. Post-school Education will be of interest to all researchers and policymakers concerned with the transformative role of further education and training in society.
Architecture for the Commons dives into an analysis of how the tectonics of a building is fundamentally linked to the economic organizations that allow them to exist. By tracing the origins and promises of current technological practices in design, the book provides an alternative path, one that reconsiders the means of achieving complexity through combinatorial strategies. This move requires reconsidering serial production with crowdsourcing and user content in mind. The ideas presented will be explored through the design research developed within Plethora Project, a design practice that explores the use of video game interfaces as a mechanism for participation and user design. The research work presented throughout the book seeks to align with a larger project that is currently taking place in many different fields: The Construction of the Commons. By developing both the ideological and physical infrastructure, the project of the Commons has become an antidote to current economic practices that perpetuate inequality. The mechanisms of the production and governance of the Commons are discussed, inviting the reader to get involved and participate in the discussion. The current political and economic landscape calls for a reformulation of our current economic practices and alternative value systems that challenge the current market monopolies. This book will be of great interest not only to architects and designers studying the impact of digital technologies in the field of design but also to researchers studying novel techniques for social participation and cooperating of communities through digital networks. The book connects principles of architecture, economics and social sciences to provide alternatives to the current production trends.
'A powerful, salient and gracefully written study of the corrosive dynamics of race in Britain from a trusted voice on the subject. We can all benefit from reading it' Diana Evans In this transformative book, Nicola Rollock, one of our pre-eminent experts on racial justice, offers a vital exploration of the lived experience of racism Miles, a successful lawyer, is mistaken for the waiter at a networking event. Femi is on the verge of breakdown having been consistently overlooked for promotion at her university. Nigel's emails, repeatedly expressing concern about his employer's forthcoming slavery exhibition, are ignored. Carol knows she can't let herself relax at the work Christmas party... This is racism. It is not about the overt acts of random people at the fringes of society. It's about the everyday. It's the loaded silence, the throwaway remark, the casual comment or a 'joke' in the workplace. It's everything. The Racial Code is an unprecedented examination of the hidden rules of race and racism that govern our lives and how they maintain the status quo. Interweaving narrative with research and theory, acclaimed expert Nicola Rollock uniquely lays bare the pain and cost of navigating everyday racism -- and compels us to reconsider how to truly achieve racial justice.
This book studies young people who are Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET); a prime concern among policymakers. Moving past common interpretations of NEETs as a homogeneous group, it asks why some youth become NEET, whereas other do not. The authors analyse diverse school-to-work patterns of young NEETs in five typical countries and investigate the role of individual characteristics, countries' institutions and policies, and their complex interplay. Readers will come to understand youth marginalization as a process that may occur during the transition from school, vocational college, or university to work. By studying longitudinal analyses of processes and transitions, readers will gain the crucial insight that NEETs are not equally vulnerable, and that most NEETs will find their way back to the labour market. However, they will also see that in all countries, a group of long-term NEETs exists. These exceptionally vulnerable young people are sidelined from society and the labour market. The country cases and cross-national studies illustrate that policies intended to help long-term NEETs to find their way in society are very limited. The book provides useful theoretical and empirical insights for scholars interested in the school-to-work transition and marginalized youth. It also provides helpful insights in vulnerability to policymakers who aim to combat youth marginalization. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
This comprehensive and authorative sourcebook offers academics, researchers and students an introduction to and overview of current scholarship at the intersection of marketing and feminism. In the last five years there has been a resurrection of feminist voices in marketing and consumer research. This mirrors a wider public interest in feminism - particularly in the media as well as the academy - with younger women discovering that patriarchal structures and strictures still limit women's development and life opportunities. The "F" word is back on the agenda - made high profile by campaigns such as #MeToo and #TimesUp. There is a noticeably renewed interest in feminist scholarship, especially amongst younger scholars, and significantly insightful interdisciplinary critiques of this new brand of feminism, including the identification of a neoliberal feminism that urges professional women to achieve a work/family balance on the back of other women's exploitation. Consolidating existing scholarship while exploring emerging theories and ideas which will generate further feminist research, this volume will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in marketing and consumption studies, especially those studying or researching the complex inter-relationship of feminism and marketing.
This book explores the meaning and practice of empowering methodologies in organisational and social research. In a context of global academic precarity, this volume explores why empowering research is urgently needed. It discusses the situatedness of knowing and knowledge in the context of core-periphery relations between the global North and South. The book considers the sensory, affective, embodied practice of empowering research, which involves listening, seeing, moving and feeling, to facilitate a more diverse, creative and crafty repertoire of research possibilities. The essays in this volume examine crucial themes including: * How to decolonise management knowledge * Using imaginative, visual and sensory methods * Memory and space in empowering research * Empowerment and feminist methodologies * The role of reflexivity in empowering research By bringing postcolonial perspectives from India, the volume aims to revitalise management and organisation studies for global readers. This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of management studies, organisational behaviour, research methodology, development studies, social sciences in general and gender studies and sociology.
This third volume in the Routledge Focus on Women Writers in Organization Studies series challenges us to think again about the implications of gender, embodiment and fluidity for organizing and managing. The themes of this book disrupt our understanding of dualisms between sex (men and women), gender (masculinity and femininity) and mind / body, and in so doing analyze the ways in which dominant power relations constitute heteronormativity throughout organizational history, thereby reinforcing mainstream management research and teaching. By centring the work of women writers, this book gives recognition to their thinking and praxis; each writer making political inroads into changing the lived experiences of those who have suffered discrimination, exclusion and marginalization as they consider the ways in which organizational knowledge has tended to privilege rather than problematize masculinity, fixity, control, normativity, violence and discrimination. The themes and authors (Acker, de Beauvoir, Halberstam, Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kristeva, Yourcenar) covered in this book are important precisely because they are not generally encountered in mainstream writing on management and organization studies. They are significant to the study and analysis of organizations because they demonstrate how our understanding of managing and organizing can be transformed when other voices/bodies/genders write on what it is work, live, lead and relate to self and others. All the writers turn to the ways in which individuals matter organizationally, acknowledging that lived experiences are a source of political and ethical practice. Each Woman Writer is introduced and analyzed by experts in organization studies. Further reading and accessible resources are also identified for those interested in knowing more. This book will be relevant to students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology. Like all the books in this series, it will also be of interest to anyone who wants to see, think and act differently.
In a time of flexible and mutable work arrangements, there is hardly a domain of organizing that has not been affected by liminality. Temporary workers who switch companies based on projects, consultants who operate at the boundaries between the consultant and the client companies, or 'hybrid entrepreneurs' who start new ventures, while still keeping their previous job, are examples of liminality in organizations. Liminality is also felt by managers who handle interorganizational relationships within customer-supplier networks or scientists who, albeit affiliated with R&D units, have strong ties with their scientific communities, acknowledging that they belong to neither setting thoroughly. Precious hints for enriching our comprehension of liminality in organizational settings can be conveyed by the reflection that has flourished in different fields. This book advances knowledge of liminality management by elaborating on a model that puts together aspects of the liminal process that have been mostly described in a separate way so far, benefiting from the input provided by experience in sociology, medicine, and education. Through the articulation of a model that accounts for the antecedents, content, and consequences of liminality in organizations, the book intends to prompt quantitative research on this topic. It will be of value to those interested in organizational behavior, organization and management, marketing, sociology of work, and sociology of organizations.
Spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, the writers considered in this first book of the Routledge Focus on Women Writers in Organization Studies series make an important contribution to how we think about rationality in managing, leading and working. It provides a space in which to think differently about rationality, challenging dominant masculine logics while positioning relations between people centre stage. A critical and intellectually provocative text, the book provides a nuanced and practical account of rationality in organizational contexts, making it clear that women have and continue to write groundbreaking work on the subject: women like Lillian Moller Gilbreth, who was at the forefront of developments in scientific management, and Frances Perkins, who was the first female US cabinet secretary. Both are important not only for what they achieved but also as illustrations of the ways in which women have been written out of the accounts of managing and management thought. This matters not only because credit is denied to those who deserve it, but also because it impoverishes our understanding of complex organisational phenomenon. Where so much extant writing on managing and organizing is preoccupied with abstract notions of structure, strategy, metaphor and machines, the writers considered here explain why effective working and managing is primarily about seeing and working with people. Writers such as Arlie Hochschild, Mary Parker Follett and Heather Hoepfl remind us that rationality cannot be decoupled from emotion or, where a system is to be rationalised, then it should start with and enhance the lives of people - be designed with people at the centre. In this sense, the book is not arguing for a wholesale rejection of rationality. Rather, authors call on readers to move beyond a preoccupation with rationality for its own sake, seeing it instead as a useful and highly contestable aspect of organizational life. Each woman writer is introduced and analysed by an expert in their field. Further reading and accessible resources are also identified for those interested in knowing more. This book will be relevant to students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology. Like all the books in this series, it will also be of interest to anyone who wants to see, think and act differently.
There is a long tradition of research on politics, power and exclusion in areas such as sociology, social policy, politics, women's studies and philosophy. While power has received considerable attention in mainstream management research and teaching, it is rarely considered in terms of politics and exclusion, particularly where the work of women writers is concerned. This second book in the Routledge Series on Women Writers in Organization Studies analyses the ways in which women have theorised and embodied relations of power. Women like Edith Garrud who, trained in the Japanese art of jujutsu, confronted the power of the state to champion feminist politics. Others, such as Beatrice Webb and Alva Myrdal, are shown to have been at the heart of welfare reforms and social justice movements that responded to the worst excesses of industrialisation based on considerations of class and gender. The writing of bell hooks provides a necessarily uncomfortable account of the ways in which imperialism, white supremacy and patriarchy inflict unspoken harm, while Hannah Arendt's work considers the ways in which different modes of organizing restrict the ability of people to live freely. Taken together, such writings dispel the myth that work or business can be separated from the rest of life, a point driven home by Rosabeth Moss Kanter's observations on the ways in which power and inequality differentially structure life chances. These writers challenge us to think again about power, politics and exclusion in organizational contexts. They provide provocative thinking, which opens up new avenues for organization theory, practice and social activism. Each woman writer is introduced and analysed by experts in organization studies. Further reading and accessible resources are also identified for those interested in knowing (thinking!) more. This book will be relevant to students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology. Like all the books in this series, it will also be interest to anyone who wants to see, think and act differently.
Politics is an aspect of everyday life within organizations, and is a force that inhibits individual and collective behaviour. If not fully understood, it can impede organizational change and development. In order to minimise the political aspects of organizational dynamics there is a need to understand the extent to which organizational culture brings about politicised conformance and how individuals shape their behaviour through self-interest to conform-sense-giving and sense-making nexus-thus moderating the degree of change initiatives. The Politics of Organizational Change explores the relationship between self-interest, power, politics and managing organizational change from a theoretical perspective. It encourages the fundamental questioning of the relationship between self-interest, power and control inherent within organizational change, and discusses the attendant implications for managing change. It will be of value to those who require a text that goes beyond set patterns of coverage found in textbooks dealing with managing change.
Concise expert guide to a key research topic Unique shortform premium literature review Essential reading for early career researchers and established scholars new to the topic
* It offers an original answer to this question: evaluation spreads because we want to be evaluated. * Developing a critical reflection from a psychoanalytic perspective, it argues that workers are not mere victims of evaluation systems but are complicit in them. * Benedicte Vidaillet focuses on the aspects of our subjectivity that come into play in evaluation at work -our expectations, desires, need for recognition, our conceptions of ourselves at work, as well as our relationship with others such as colleagues, managers or clients - to explore how evaluation affects us, where it gets its evocative power, and what it stirs within us to make us want it, despite its detrimental effects in its currently practiced form. * Chapters draw on real-life examples, case studies from a variety of organizations, and observations from clinical practice, to provide insight into the many mechanisms that have enabled evaluation to spread unimpeded through our subjective complicity in the process, revealing how they came to seem so innocuous. * This book will be of interest to scholars studying the topic of evaluation at work from a critical perspective as well as professionals who use evaluation systems or are under the pressure of evaluation in all sectors and organizations. * By exposing the psychological mechanisms that evaluation uses to appeal to us, it gives each of us the tools we need to break free of its grasp.
Italy is not a country for young people. Why? This book provides a unique and in-depth collection of empirical and theoretical material providing multiple answers to this question whilst investigating the living conditions of young people in Italy today. By bringing together a variety of approaches and methods, the authors of this collection analyze Italian youth through the lenses of three dimensions: 'Activism, participation and citizenship', 'Work, Employment and Careers' and 'Moves, Transitions and Representations'. These dimensions are the analytical building blocks for challenging stereotypes and unveiling misinterpretations and taken-for-granted assumptions that portray young people in Italy as selfish, 'choosy', and unwilling to make sacrifices, commit and manage an independent life. These prejudices often underplay the role of constraints they are facing in the transition to adulthood. Studying Italian youth, therefore, not only allows us to capture their peculiar characteristics but also to reflect more broadly on the conceptual toolbox we need in order to understand contemporary youth more generally. By doing so, the volume aims to contribute to international discussion on the youth condition in Europe.
This book examines the commercialisation of domestic and care work through private agencies that organise transnational care arrangements by brokering migrant workers. The book focuses on the emergence of private for-profit home care agencies following the 2011 extension of the Free Movement of Workers to Eastern European Countries agreement in Switzerland. The agencies recruit migrant women from these countries and place them in private households for elderly care. This book explores how circular labour migration for these care workers is facilitated. In the form of a mobile ethnography, it traces their journey from Eastern European countries to Switzerland - from when care workers find employment and are recruited by agencies to when they arrive at their designated households. From the agencies' analytical standpoint, the book examines the recruitment and placement practices of the home care agencies and their role in facilitating migration. Brokering Labour Migration offers an understanding of new migration patterns and highlights fundamental changes in migration control with the extension of free movement of workers in Switzerland to lower-wage countries in Eastern Europe. It will be an invaluable resource for academics and scholars of geography, anthropology, sociology, and gender and migration.
The book examines corporate takeovers
Whatever happened to the Swedish model? Once the prime example of a Nordic welfare state, Sweden's labour market is now a highly individualized competitive arena. With attention to detail as well as global trends, this important book describes the dismantling of the Swedish welfare state across various arenas where being employable is increasingly framed as an individual responsibility. This book offers unique insight into current shifts from state to market, from institutional loyalty to marketing of self.' - Marianne Lien, University of Oslo, Norway'What remains of the emblematic Swedish model of the welfare state? Taking the example of labor market policy, Makeshift Work brings to light a major shift: from the commodification of work to the commodification of workers. In depth empirical investigations into the institutional and individual consequences of this shift make this book a reference for understanding the current transformations in Swedish society and more generally brings into focus the challenges facing Europe as a whole.' - Benedicte Zimmermann, EHESS, France 'The rise and development of the Swedish model of labour market policy has been thoroughly dealt with in many important social science and economic analyses, but the present dismantling of the model and its consequences have only started to be understood. This book is therefore an extremely important contribution in that it combines concrete analyses of changes in the infrastructure of employment services and of the implications thereof from a human perspective.' - Jan Ch. Karlsson, Karlstad University, Sweden In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, people who had never before had cause to worry about losing their jobs entered the ranks of the unemployed for the first time. In Sweden, the welfare state has been radically challenged and mass unemployment has become a reality in what used to be viewed as a model case for a full employment society. With an emphasis on Sweden in the context of transnational regulatory change, Makeshift Work in a Changing Labour Market discusses how the market mediates employment and moves on to explore the ways in which employees adjust to a new labor market. Focusing on the legibility, measurability and responsibility of jobseekers, the expert contributors to this book bring together an analysis of activation policy and new ways of organizing the mediation of work, with implications for the individual jobseeker. Students and researchers of labor market policy, the organization of markets and work and society both in Sweden and abroad will find this book to be of interest. Policy makers will find the empirical examples of policy processes among employees an extremely useful and insightful tool.
* Focuses on advancing collaborative, equitable and sustainable labor relations approaches and strategies in higher education, offering practical advice to those managing and leading. * Provides benchmark measures of success and best practices * Offers timely information on select employee groups where there is interest and activity, particularly with respect to the COVID 19 matters, which are going to have a dramatic impact on negotiations, particularly graduate students, adjunct, contingent and part-time employees.
Made to Work analyses the conditions of mobile knowledge work (MKW) in contemporary worklives, contrasting and drawing parallels among three highly significant sectors of the Knowledge Economy: academia, information communication technology (ICT) management, and digital creative work. It introduces the concept of 'corollary work' to characterise the elusive work underpinning the configuration of workers, informational, technological, relational and infrastructural resources in (re)producing liveable worklives. It ultimately illuminates the myriad strands of corollary work that enable MKW to take place and contributes to emergent debates on how exploitation, at least in the domain of MKW, can be named, resisted and creatively subverted. In so doing, it opens up a conversation about the complex ways in which contemporary worklives are 'made to work', and about potential interventions to bring about more just worklife conditions in the future.
The stunning photographs in this book are not only an anthropological study on the types of work done all over the world and the different societies which undertake them, but are also a real look at work that is still carried out by manual labour, usually away from the Western World. This fascinating collection reveals the intricacies of these jobs and the people who perform them, looking in detail at farmers, tailors, mechanics and a huge number of other industries where the physical work of men and women create communities who pride themselves on ingenuity and creativity. ' People at Work' is a captivating look at the socioeconomic development of different communities around the world and how they are fundamentally shaped by the type of work they perform. The evolution of technology in the modern age has meant that most job titles have become ambiguous and the notion of work in the traditional sense has been lost to a certain extent. This beautiful volume looks at the hands-on approach to work in an innovative way. AUTHOR: Jago Corazza is a journalist and publicist, but above all, is a photographer and traveller who began contributing to an important photo agency in Bologna at 15. He has made documentaries, in more than 120 countries. He has produced material for CNN Turner classic Movies and has been awarded three 'Telegatti' prizes, and, in the US, the Telly Award for culture. Corzza is President of the Italian Association of Nature Photography, and is editor for the anthropology section of Oasis review, as well as publishing various other magazines, such as White Star-National Geographic, for which he produced important anthropological reports on the last prehistoric tribes on earth. He is a UNICEF ambassador and collaborator. For White Star he has published 'This is My Home', Journey through the Evolution of Human Dwellings. Greta Ropa is an author and foreign language correspondent with a degree in human resource training and selection studies. She has many years' experience in the fashion and advertising sector and has worked as a photographer and a model. With a passion for writing, travelling and photography, she has worked all over the word in TV and film production and has produced various monographs for White Star-National Geographic and Oasis. She is a UNICEF ambassador and collaborator. Full colour photos
'Work hard, have fun, make history' proclaims the slogan on the walls of Amazon's warehouses. This cheerful message hides a reality of digital surveillance, aggressive anti-union tactics and disciplinary layoffs. Reminiscent of the tumult of early industrial capitalism, the hundreds of thousands of workers who help Amazon fulfil consumers' desire are part of an experiment in changing the way we all work. In this book, Alessandro Delfanti takes readers inside Amazon's warehouses to show how technological advancements and managerial techniques subdue the workers rather than empower them, as seen in the sensors that track workers' every movement around the floor and algorithmic systems that re-route orders to circumvent worker sabotage. He looks at new technologies including robotic arms trained by humans and augmented reality goggles, showing that their aim is to standardise, measure and discipline human work rather than replace it. Despite its innovation, Amazon will always need living labour's flexibility and low cost. And as the warehouse is increasingly automated, worker discontent increases. Striking under the banner 'we are not robots', employees have shown that they are acutely aware of such contradictions. The only question remains: how long will it be until Amazon's empire collapses?
Debate surrounding the employability of graduates has been around for many decades, and interest in this area has grown particularly since the start of this century. Tackling this relevant area of scholarship, this book uses an innovative approach to analyse the relationship between the university and the labour market from different perspectives, taking into account both sociological and economic theories. Key areas explored include work transition, graduate employability, and the effects of public interventions/initiatives which are aimed at matching the competences of graduates to labour market needs. The chapters summarise several years of author original research, including study on the employability of graduates in Poland more specifically, and the effects of their public interventions to increase graduate employment and facilitate entry into the workforce (e.g. Commissioned Fields of Study, Competences Development Programme). More generally, university - labour market relations are analysed from three perspectives: micro (understood as individual characteristics shaping educational and occupational choices and decisions), and meso and macro (e.g. features of the education system and such as the strength of the signal sent by HE diplomas; the macroeconomic situation and the condition of the labour market and the state of debate on general and employability competences and its implications). The conclusions made are pertinent given ongoing debates around graduate mismatch in the labour market, as well as the questioning of tuition fees and the role of the university in society more broadly. The interdisciplinary nature of this book makes it of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of sociology, economy, public policy, and also to practitioners designing educational interventions themselves. |
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