The world of non-work obligations - defined as disagreeable activities that are neither work nor leisure - is a territory of social life that has largely been ignored by scholars of work and leisure alike. The exception to this rule is Robert A. Stebbins, who over the years has written extensively on the significance of non-work obligations and the mundane and often disagreeable tasks that we are all compelled to face in our daily lives. In this new book, Stebbins brings together years of writing and research on this topic to forcefully argue that the current research interest in work-life balance can no longer afford to ignore the effects that non-work obligation has on it. He contends that, whether we like it or not, non-work obligations bear heavily on both our work and leisure. Having to deal with disagreeable tasks and objectionable people on a daily basis, without the support of any outside agency, can seriously undermine our well-being, and it is only through recourse to voluntary simplicity that we can hope to limit the harmful impact of non-work obligations. Written both as a guide to happy living and as a powerful rejoinder to conventional orthodoxy in the fields of leisure and work studies, the book is essential reading for both the general reader and scholars of leisure, consumer, work and happiness studies.

This book uses the concepts of vulnerability and resilience to analyze the situation of individuals and institutions in the context of the employment relationship. It is based on the premise that both employer and employee are vulnerable to various social, economic, and political forces, although differently so. It demonstrates how in responding to those complementary institutional relationships of employer and employee the state unequally and inequitably favors employers over employees. Several chapters included in this collection also consider how the state shapes, creates and maintains through law the social identities of employer and employee and how that legal regime operates as the allocation of power and privilege. This unique and fundamental role of the state in defining the employment relationship profoundly affects the respective abilities and degree of resiliency of actual employers and employees. Other chapters explore how attention to the respective vulnerability and resilience of those who do and those who direct work in assessing the employment relationship can raise fundamental questions of social justice and suggest new avenues for critical engagement with labor and employment law. Collectively, these pieces articulate a framework for imaging what would constitute an appropriately "Responsive State" in the employment context and how those interested in social justice might begin to use the concepts of vulnerability and resilience in their arguments.

This title offers a front-burner issue on the public policy agenda today is the increased use of partnerships between government and nongovernmental entities, including faith-based social service organizations. In the wake of President Bush's faith-based initiative, many are still wondering about the effectiveness of these faith-based organizations in providing services to those in need, and whether they provide better outcomes than more traditional government, secular nonprofit, and for-profit organizations. In "Faith, Hope, and Jobs", Stephen V. Monsma and J. Christopher Soper study the effectiveness of 17 different welfare-to-work programs in Los Angeles County - a county in which the U.S. government spends 14 per cent of its entire welfare budget - and offer groundbreaking insight into understanding what works and what doesn't. Monsma and Soper examine client assessment of the programs, their progress in developing attitudes and resources important for finding self-supporting employment, and their experience in finding actual employment. This study reveals that the clients of the more explicitly faith-based programs did best in gaining in social capital and were highly positive in evaluating the religious components of their programs. For-profit programs tended to do the best in terms of their clients finding employment. Overall, the religiously active respondents tended to experience better outcomes than those who were not religiously active but surprisingly, the religiously active and non-active tended to do equally well in faith-based programs. "Faith, Hope, and Jobs" concludes with three sets of concrete recommendations for public policymakers, social service program managers, and researchers.

This book builds upon the ground-breaking work already undertaken by the author filling the absence of research into the significance, character and value of creative industries beyond major urban centres. What has emerged in this work is the specific centrality of place, time and the natural environment to the creative practice of those who have chosen or found themselves operating outside the mainstream of urban creative milieus. Unlike any existing book in the market, Locating Cultural Work uniquely examines creative workers in terms of three interlinked concerns: the wider history of creativity and place in the UK since the Industrial Revolution (in particular the Romantics and the Arts and Craft Movement, especially as manifest in the Lake District and Cotswolds); the emotional-affective-drivers of creativity and place; and, the relationship between rural and regional cultural industries, tourism and environmental awareness.

In the bustling cities of the mid-nineteenth-century Northeast, young male clerks working in commercial offices and stores were on the make, persistently seeking wealth, respect, and self-gratification. Yet these strivers and "counter jumpers" discovered that claiming the identities of independent men--while making sense of a volatile capitalist economy and fluid urban society--was fraught with uncertainty.

In On the Make, Brian P. Luskey illuminates at once the power of the ideology of self-making and the important contests over the meanings of respectability, manhood, and citizenship that helped to determine who clerks were and who they would become. Drawing from a rich array of archival materials, including clerks' diaries, newspapers, credit reports, census data, advice literature, and fiction, Luskey argues that a better understanding of clerks and clerking helps make sense of the culture of capitalism and the society it shaped in this pivotal era.

Since Vietnam introduced economic reforms in the mid-1980s, domestic service has become an established sector of the labour market, and domestic workers have become indispensable to urban life in the rapidly changing country. This book analyzes the ways in which the practices and discourses of domestic service serve to forge and contest emerging class identities in post-reform Vietnam. Drawing on a rich and diverse range of qualitative data, including ethnographies, interviews, and narratives, it shows that such practices and discourses are rooted in cultural notions of gender and rural-urban difference and enduring socialist structures of feeling, which, in turn, clash with the realities of growing differentiation. Domestic workers' experiences reveal negotiations with class boundaries actively set by the urban middle class, who seek distinction through emerging notions and practices of domesticity. These boundaries are nevertheless riddled with gender and class anxiety on the side of the latter, partly because of the very struggles and contestations of the domestic workers. More broadly, Minh T. N. Nguyen links the often invisible intimate dynamics of class formation in the domestic sphere with wider political economic processes in a post-socialist country embarking on marketization while retaining the political control of a party-state. As a pioneering ethnographic study of domestic service in Vietnam today, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Southeast Asian culture & society, social anthropology, gender studies, human geography and development studies.

This volume addresses issues of precariousness in a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, looking at socio-economic transformations as well as the identity formation and political organizing of precarious people. The collection bridges empirical research with social theory to problematize and analyse the precariat.

The promotion of an enterprise culture and entrepreneurship in India in recent decades has had far-reaching implications beyond the economy, and transformed social and cultural attitudes and conduct. This book brings together pioneering research on the nature of India's enterprise culture, covering a range of different themes: workplace, education, religion, trade, films, media, youth identity, gender relations, class formation and urban politics. Based on extensive empirical and ethnographic research by the contributors, the book shows the myriad manifestations of enterprise culture and the making of the aspiring, enterprising-self in public culture, social practice, and personal lives, ranging from attempts to construct hegemonic ideas in public discourse, to appropriation by individuals and groups with unintended consequences, to forms of contested and contradictory expression. It discusses what is 'new' about enterprise culture and how it relates to pre-existing ideas, and goes on to look at the processes and mechanisms through which enterprise culture is becoming entrenched, as well as how it affects different classes and communities. The book highlights the social and political implications of enterprise culture and how it recasts family and interpersonal relationships as well as personal and collective identity. Illuminating one of the most important aspects of India's current economic and social transformation, this book is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Business, Sociology, Anthropology, Development Studies and Media and Cultural Studies.

Despite calls for a renewal of family values and the proliferation of corporate work-family programs, the goal of achieving a healthy balance between the demands of work and a satisfying family life remains elusive. Dr. Parasuraman, Dr. Greenhaus, and the contributors to this well-balanced and thoughtful volume examine this increasingly prevalent social dilemma from a stakeholder perspective. They see work-family tensions as a multifaceted social issue, and they examine the nature and consequences of these tensions from the viewpoints of individuals, employers, consultants, counseling professionals, and other service providers. Their inclusion of legal, cultural, international, and research perspectives and recognition of the unique concerns of vulnerable groups, such as nonexempt employees and ethnic minorities, add to the breadth of coverage. Academics in the social and behavioral sciences, executive decision-makers in government and business, human resource professionals, and employed men and women interested in achieving work-life balance will find this volume insightful, stimulating, and useful.

The editors have arranged their book into five parts and 21 chapters. Part I provides a broad overview of the environmental factors impacting work and family. It then identifies the critical issues and challenges facing individuals, families, and employees in managing the complex interdependencies between work and family roles. In Part II they provide a view of the issues from the vantage point of specific stakeholders. Part III concentrates on the role of culture in shaping ideology, policies, and practices concerning work and family and the relationships among them. Part IV examines the impact of career development programs on employees and their families. It also discusses the effectiveness of alternative career tracks, various usages of work-family benefits by women and men, and the roles employers and employees can play in legitimizing alternative career paths. Part V concludes the book by examining the cultural barriers to achieving more effective integration of work and family, and by analyzing the appropriate role of key stakeholders in addressing work-family problems.

Bill Dunn considers and contests accounts of globalization and post-Fordism that see structural economic change in the late Twentieth-century as having fundamentally worsened the conditions and weakened the potential of labour. Including a comparative survey of restructuring in four major industries; automobiles, construction, microelectronics and finance, the book suggests the timing of change and its complex and contradictory nature undermine structural explanations of labour's situation. It redirects attention towards labour's political defeats and own institutional shortcomings.

This book traces the development of paid work for visually impaired people in the UK from the 18th century to the present day. It gives a voice to visually impaired people to talk about their working lives and documents the history of employment from their experience, an approach which is severely lacking in the current literature about visual impairment and employment. By analysing fifty in-depth face-to-face interviews with visually impaired people talking about their working lives (featuring those who have worked in traditional jobs such as telephony, physiotherapy and piano tuning, to those who have pursued more unusual occupations and professions), and grouping them according to occupation and framed by documentary, historical research, these stories can be situated in their broader political, economic, ideological and cultural contexts. The themes that emerge will help to inform present day policy and practice within a context of high unemployment amongst visually impaired people of working age. It is part of a growing literature which gives voice to disabled people about their own lives and which adds to the growing academic discipline of disability studies and the empowerment of disabled people.

The hiring of part-time and temporary workers has historically been a mechanism for adjusting imbalances between supply and demand in the labor market. The use of such workers has increased dramatically as technological changes have put a premium on flexibility, and as fringe benefits have come to constitute an increasing percentage of labor costs. Flexibility is sought not only by organizations, but also by individuals: students, women with children, disabled persons, and retirees all benefit by part-time opportunities. Part-Time Work discusses these opportunities, and the risk involved in employment which is sometimes underpaid and devalued, and from which movement to full-time positions is difficult.

This volume represents the work of a cross-section of specialists in labor economics, industrial relations specialists, and social scientists who are engaged in research on the transformation of work in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. Chapters focus on the structural aspects of part-time work, conditions under which such work is performed, constraints imposed on employers by official agencies, and expectations and attitudes of part-time workers rooted in a particular society. Part-Time Work will prove particularly useful to sociologists, labor specialists, and relevant government agencies, organizations, and unions.

Work-life integration is an increasingly hot topic in the media, social research, governments and in people's everyday lives. This volume offers a new type of lens for understanding work-family reconciliation by studying how work-family dynamics are shaped, squeezed and developed between consistent or competing logics in different societies in Europe and the US. The three institutions of "state", "family" and "working life", and their under-explored primary logics of "regulation", "morality" and "economic competitiveness" are examined theoretically as well as empirically throughout the chapters, thus contributing to an understanding of the contemporary challenges within the field of work-family research that combines structure and culture. Particular attention is given to the ways in which the institutions are confronted with various moral norms of good parenthood or motherhood and ideals for family life. Likewise, the logic of policy regulation and gendered family moralities are challenged by the economic logic of working life, based on competition in favour of the most productive workers and organizations. Demonstrating different aspects of what is behind and between the logics of state regulation, morals and market, this innovative volume will appeal to students, teachers and researchers interested in areas such as family studies, welfare state studies, social policy studies, work life studies as well as and gender studies.

The importance of social relationships at work has long been recognized in the social sciences. Interest in this topic has been renewed through scholarly and popular discussions of social capital as well as recent innovations in network data collection and analysis. These developments have allowed researchers to ask a variety of new questions about the role of networks in the world of work and a multitude of approaches to answering those questions. While several monographs have been written on issues related to networks and work, none has simultaneously brought together the range of approaches used to explore this topic. Furthermore, this volume is the first to merge this focus on networks and work with a sociological perspective on inequality. Specifically, the chapters illuminate the processes by which social networks in work organizations can effectively generate, sustain and ameliorate social inequalities across individuals, firms, and occupational fields. In doing so, this volume offers valuable insights that inform researchers and policy makers alike regarding issues of workplace discrimination, diversity and innovation.

The increasing demand for health care and advances in healthcare technologies has exacerbated the present shortage of health personnel. In response to these changes, physicians may choose to offer their services elsewhere. Labor and Health Economics in the Mediterranean Region: Migration and Mobility of Medical Doctors addresses the mobility of physicians in the Mediterranean region within a global context, focusing on the role mobility has played in the global health system in both developed and developing economies. Besides universities and researchers, public and private medical practitioners and agencies can make use of this book to further their knowledge of the changing healthcare industry.

Conflict and Change in the Russian Industrial Enterprise focuses on the new kinds of conflict that arise in the transition to a market economy. Following an editorial introduction, two chapters develop theories from new empirical research into patterns of conflict and forms of trade unionism in Russian enterprises in the transition period. These are followed by a detailed case study of the development of an independent trade union in one large industrial enterprise, and a chapter which explores changes in the status hierarchy of the industrial enterprise. Two chapters then address the much-neglected issue of gender differentiation in the work place and both chapters question the supposed passivity of Russian women workers. The two final chapters address the issue of conflict and change in the external relations of enterprises through case studies of the process of bankruptcy and of conflict between insiders and outsiders.

This book focuses on the relationship between European integration, its outputs and national institutional and political settings. It explores the political mechanisms through which the EU plays a role in domestic social policy changes.

This is the first book to challenge the concept of paid work for disabled people as a means to 'independence' and 'self determination'. Recent attempts in many countries to increase the employment rates of disabled people have actually led to an erosion of financial support for many workless disabled people and their increasing stigmatisation as 'scroungers'. Led by the disability movement's concern with the employment choices faced by disabled people, this controversial book uses sociological and philosophical approaches, as well as international examples, to critically engage with possible alternatives to paid work. Essential reading for students, practitioners, activists and anyone interested in relationships between work, welfare and disability.

Cohn lays out a new strategy of how states can produce economic development in poor nations - by considering barber shops, beauty parlours, hotels and restaurants in Brazil. Cohn considers the case of nations with budgetary limits that cannot afford to follow the East Asian model, and finds alternative policies that create jobs and reduce poverty.

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

Men Do It Too: Opting Out and In offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of men leaving mainstream careers models, adding to current debates on opting out. The book investigates how globalization, individualization, and this age of high modernity, in addition to issues of masculinity and what it means to be a man in contemporary society and organizational contexts, affect decisions to opt out. Throughout the book, social theory and relevant debates are interwoven with the narratives of 15 men who have left successful careers and mainstream career models to live and work on their own terms: six from the United States, five from Finland, and four from the UK. The narratives help illustrate the issues presented, as well as providing an insight into the men's identity work throughout their opting out processes. In addition, Biese explores what organizations can learn from the knowledge gathered in her research on men (and women) opting out. This is important in order to create sustainable work environments that not only attract but also retain employees.

Problems associated with work-family conflict do not belong to individual families alone, but have a major social and economic impact on the greater community. This scenario also holds true across sub-Saharan Africa, as nations enter the global economy and rising numbers of women enter the workforce.

One of the first resources to focus on this region, "Work-Family Interface in Sub-Saharan Africa" probes rarely-studied dimensions of conflict between paid employment and family responsibilities. It balances theoretical background, empirical findings, and current and emerging interventions for an insightful and practical review of ongoing issues affecting working women with families. Coverage contrasts concepts of work and family between the developing world and the West, and related social concerns such as gender expectations and sexual harassment are examined in the work context. The book describes a range of family strategies for resolving work-family friction, and chapters end with policy recommendations as first steps toward remedying longstanding challenges. Among the thought-provoking dispatches: Ghana: Managing work and family demandsNigeria: Strain-based family interference with workBotswana: The social impact of job transfer policy on dual-career familiesKenya: The role of household help in work-family balanceSouth Africa: State measures toward work-care integrationZambia: The quest for a family policy

As evinced by these chapters, progress is gradual and far from uniform. As a guide for future study and future policy, "Work-Family Interface in Sub-Saharan Africa" is a substantial reference for sociologists, public health professionals, public and social policymakers, and administrators."

Using over 50 case studies from 22 countries which show how unconventional projects have developed women's earning power, this book is a source of ideas for all those helping to develop cash-producing work for women in developing countries.

A fieldwork-based sociological study of how participants in City of London financial markets view the markets in which they work and the market mechanism in general. It is more than a narrow study of financial market participants because it is also an empirical investigation into how ideologies function and it develops a critique of pro-market ideologies such as "Thatcherism". Finally, it is a sociological study into the privileged world of high earners and the wealthy.

The articles in the volume examine the intersection of gender with other characteristics in a variety of settings including factory floors and corporate offices, welfare offices, state legislatures, the armed forces, universities, social clubs and playing fields. Central themes running through several of the articles include how men and women conceive their identities and their futures and talk about and manage their work, family and leisure lives, how women view their bodies and images, and the progress women have - or have not - made in over-coming poverty and advancing in the corporate, legislative and military worlds. The research sites include Canada, Cuba, England, Greece, Israel, Mexico and the United States. As in previous volumes in the series, the authors employ a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies and build on the current literature. Most of the articles have policy implications and are designed to stimulate further research. The volume is introduced with an essay by the editor and framed by an article about feminist intersectional research.