Approaching "work" as at heart a practice of exchange, this volume explores sociality in work environments marked by the kind of structural changes that have come to define contemporary "flexible" capitalism. It introduces anthropological exchange theory to a wider readership, and shows how the perspective offers new ways to enquire about the flexible capitalism's social dimensions. The essays contribute to a trans-disciplinary scholarship on contemporary economic practice and change by documenting how, across diverse settings, "gift-like" socialities proliferate, and even sustain the intensified flexible commoditization that more commonly is touted as tearing social relations apart. By interrogating a keenly debated contemporary work regime through an approach to sociality rooted in a rich and distinct anthropological legacy, the volume also makes a novel contribution to the anthropological literature on work and on exchange.

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.

This book compiles empirical evidence on both the challenges raised by neo-liberal policies and the internet to trade unions, and the development of more flexible forms of worker organisation and collective representation. The relationship with digital devices seems inevitably to contribute to differentiating trends, simultaneously acting as an internal and external constraint on organisation. Gathering academics and experts from European and Brazilian universities, this book is recommended for researchers and students in the fields of sociology of work, labour studies and collective action, as well as practitioners and others interested in worker interest organisations and collective representation in the early 21st Century.

A timely work that reviews the phenomenon of gender and its many manifestations of equality. Well-suited for increasing awareness and justice in academic and professional environments, this collective work addresses long-standing and ongoing social problems such as discrimination, stereotyping, prejudice, as well as a plethora of societal and industry influences that sustain the trend of gender imbalance. Aiming to span a broad scope in time, backgrounds and implementation, this book presents a wide variety of topics, including a historical overview, contemporary gender-based Issues, gender approaches across the disciplines, and cultural influences. The reader is guaranteed to confront existing biases when digesting topics related to gender communication differences, stereotypes, tensions and resistances, assigned social roles, transgenderism, non-binary identities, tension fields between equality and equity, relational aggression, and more. A critical underlying aim of this book is to contribute constructively and progressively to the dialogue on the definition of gender, thus addressing an ongoing challenge for policy makers, organizational leaders, and scholars.

The book aims at perfecting the national governance system and improving national governance ability. It evaluates the balance sheets of the state and residents, non-financial corporations, financial institutions and the central bank, the central government, local government and external sectors - the goal being to provide a systematic analysis of the characteristics and trajectory of China's economic expansion and structural adjustment, as well as objective assessments of short and long-term economic operations, debt risks and financial risks with regard to the institutional and structural characteristics of economic development in market-oriented reform. It puts forward a preliminary analysis of China's national and sectoral balance sheets on the basis of scientific estimates of various kinds of data, analyzes from a new perspective the major issues that are currently troubling China - development sustainability, government transformation, local government debt, welfare reform, and the financial opening-up and stability - and explores corresponding policies, measures, and institutional arrangements.

Euro-commuters' have emerged as a new group of migrants since the onset of the economic crisis in the EU. These people work in one country but live in another. This book analyses the characteristics of these migrants, their motivations and how commuting influences their personal, family and social lives.

Has COVID-19 ushered in the end of the office? Or is it the office's final triumph? For decades, futurologists have prophesied a boundaryless working world, freed from the cramped confines of the office. During the COVID-19 crisis, employees around the globe got a taste of it. Confined by lockdown to their homes, they met, mingled, collaborated, and created electronically. At length, they returned to something approaching normality. Or had they glimpsed the normal to come? In The Momentous, Uneventful Day, Gideon Haigh reflects on our ambivalent relationship to office work and office life, how we ended up with the offices we have, how they have reflected our best and worst instincts, and how these might be affected by a world in a time of contagion. Like the factory in the nineteenth century, the office was the characteristic building form of the twentieth, reshaping our cities, redirecting our lives. We all have a stake in how it will change in the twenty-first. Enlivened by copious citations from literature, film, memoir, and corporate history, and interspersed with relevant images, The Momentous, Uneventful Day is the ideal companion for a lively current debate about the role offices will play in the future.

This book offers strategic leaders with essential information for their most important role: the change management function of positioning the organization for success into the future. To do so, leaders need to sort through a myriad of forecasts, predictions and weak indicators of change to make timely decisions. This volume addresses the most critical factor for future success: people and, specifically, harnessing the potential the current youth cohort will bring when they join the full-time workforce. Drawing on multi-disciplinary analyses by 37 researchers, the book presents an integrative assessment of the characteristics that those in the current youth cohort are likely to bring to the workplace. The focus is on those born after 2005 with an examination of the implications of this cohort being raised from birth immersed in an increasingly omnipresent digital environment which extends far beyond social media. The authors see the coming 'digital tsunami' as creating disruptive effects across major elements of our economy and even society however optimistically conclude that the digital environment and the development of 21st Century skills in schools will equip the next generation with essential competencies, attitudes, social skills and work goals. The key to harnessing the potential of this generation will be to modify current human resources and workplace practices which will mean sweeping away much of the 'boomer' legacy that this cohort has imprinted on organizations. To assist leaders, the book goes beyond presenting a rich portrait of who these youth may become by providing practical recommendations for the changes that need to start now in order to position the organization to benefit from what they will bring. As the astute strategic leader knows: objects in the future can be closer than they appear.

"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.

This book mainly analyzes the major issues at all phases of the transition of urban-rural relation, as well as measures adopted by the transition launcher in face of such issues, including not only the system and policy design of the national and local government, but the countermeasures of basic-level units at urban and rural areas and the people. Through reference of the social structure and social behavior, it proposes "opportunity structures", "interactive mechanism" and "behavior strategies" for different periods, which to some degree promotes the transition of urban-rural relation and brings in new, more complicated issues for the development. It is under the impact of such new and existing issues that big problem follows when the urban-rural relation steps onto a new stage, showing several paths and practices different from the general urbanization and modernization theories.

Migrant Citizenship from Below explores the dynamic local and transnational lives of Filipina and Filipino migrant domestic workers living in Schoenberg, Germany. Shinozaki examines their irregular migrant citizenship status from 'above', which is produced by complex interactions between Germany's welfare, care, and migration regimes and the Philippines' gendered politics of overseas employment. Despite the predominant representation of these workers as invisible, these spatially immobile migrants maintain sustained transnational engagements through parenting and religious practices. Shinozaki studies the reverse-gendered process of international reproductive labor migration, in which women traveled first and were later joined by men. Despite their structural vulnerability, participant observations and biographical interviews with the migrants demonstrate that they enact and negotiate migrant citizenship in the workplace, transnational households, religious practices and through accessing health provisions.

Contrary to the assumption that Western and Eastern European economies and cinemas were very different from each other, they actually had much in common. After the Second World War both the East and the West adopted a mixed system, containing elements of both socialism and capitalism, and from the 1980s on the whole of Europe, albeit at an uneven speed, followed the neoliberal agenda. This book examines how the economic systems of the East and West impacted labor by focusing on the representation of work in European cinema. Using a Marxist perspective, it compares the situation of workers in Western and Eastern Europe as represented in both auteurist and popular films, including those of Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrzej Wajda, DusanMakavejev, Jerzy Skolimowski, the Dardenne Brothers, Ulrich Seidl and many others.

This book explores how we make sense of ourselves when work is precarious and intrinsically alienating. We know little about how this experience of work impacts the lives of men and women, and less about the way individuals understand themselves in the face of institutions and organizations from which they feel marginalized. Based on the narratives of men and women who underwent extraordinary work life changes, Crisis at Work examines how we negotiate greater meaning and fulfilment when our productive lives fail to sustain and satisfy. Reflecting a growing fracture between what we value, believe in, and are committed to and the degree to which work and career have become incapable of assuaging those desires, Potter examines how individuals attempt to assemble working-lives they find rich and rewarding and how that work is negotiated within the constraints and possibilities of the contemporary moment.

Discussion regarding health care in the United States usually centers around the doctors and insurance companies. This book deals with one group that is largely overlooked: nurses. As an example of white collar workforce, nurses are segmented by class. Amongst this group is a class-conscious working class, a status-conscious nursing management and a class- and status-conscious mid-level. This book focuses on nurses' positions in the labor process and their reaction to that labor process, their choice of collective strategy (trade unionism, professional unionism, or professionalization), and why they choose these roles.

This book analyses the emergence of a transformed Big Science in Europe and the United States, using both historical and sociological perspectives. It shows how technology-intensive natural sciences grew to a prominent position in Western societies during the post-World War II era, and how their development cohered with both technological and social developments. At the helm of post-war science are large-scale projects, primarily in physics, which receive substantial funds from the public purse. Big Science Transformed shows how these projects, popularly called 'Big Science', have become symbols of progress. It analyses changes to the political and sociological frameworks surrounding publicly-funding science, and their impact on a number of new accelerator and reactor-based facilities that have come to prominence in materials science and the life sciences. Interdisciplinary in scope, this book will be of great interest to historians, sociologists and philosophers of science.

This book provides a critical and theoretically-informed assessment of the nature and types of structural change occurring in the Irish welfare state in the context of the 2008 economic crisis. Its overarching framework for conceptualising and analysing welfare state change and its political, economic and social implications is based around four crucial questions, namely what welfare is for, who delivers welfare, who pays for welfare, and who benefits. Over the course of ten chapters, the authors examine the answers as they relate to social protection, labour market activation, pensions, finance, water, early child education and care, health, housing and corporate welfare. They also innovatively address the impact of crisis on the welfare state in Northern Ireland. The result is to isolate key drivers of structural welfare reform, and assess how globalisation, financialisation, neo-liberalisation, privatisation, marketisation and new public management have deepened and diversified their impact on the post-crisis Irish welfare state. This in-depth analysis will appeal to sociologists, economists, political scientists and welfare state practitioners interested in the Irish welfare state and more generally in the analysis of welfare state change.

Innovatively linking actual implementation to ratification of International Labour Office (ILO) Core Conventions, the author develops a new method and uses unexploited data from the ILO's supervisory system to rate the achievement of basic human rights in the world of work - freedom of association and freedom from forced labour, child labour and discrimination - for 159 countries during the period 1985-2003. It will appeal to the human and labour rights communities as well as to social scientists interested in indicators or international relations.

New technologies and the growing flow of information create new conditions for individuals who use these technologies in the work place. The existence and application of modern IT systems can result in new forms of work, tasks that have actually emerged as a result of modern computer and other systems. This second Work Life 2000 Yearbook contains the proceedings of European workshops, organised by the Swedish National Institute for Working Life. These workshops illuminate many different aspects of working life in many nations.

The collapse of the Soviet Union led to a period of steep economic decline, followed by economic reform, soaring inflation, corruption and crime. Despite the fact that unions were part of the State and that membership was obligatory, incorporating 98 percent of the labor force, millions of workers were not paid their wages.

Based upon an abundance of first-hand material, "Labour After Soviet Socialism "examines the complex interplay of history, ideology, leadership, state policy and economics, to explain the difficulty workers have encountered in defending their interests.

David Mandel, labor scholar and activist, teaches political science at the University of Quebec, Montreal. He is co-founder of the School for Worker Democracy, which conducts rank-and-file labor education in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Twenty-six scholars present findings from a wide range of national experiences, including those of Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Although the bulk of the study is empirical, the conceptual approach with which the book opens pervades the entire analysis, so that important questions such as the following are raised frequently in differing contexts:
- Do organizations send mixed signals about flextime to their professional employees?
- What if anything compensates for the virtual elimination of "slack time" in the skilled labour market?
- Are flexible staffing arrangements inherently discriminatory?
- Do local managers tend to implement organizational strategic visions of good working life in a way that merely creates new compromises for their subordinates?
- How do non-permanent workers balance anxiety and freedom?
- Have flexible work arrangements affected traditional patterns of gender discrimination?
- Does "nonstandard" often mean "substandard"?

Bringing together contributions from international scholars, this book explores the changing nature of young people's transitions and challenges assumptions about pathways from education into employment in contemporary society.

This work reports on a range of research studies in the career field that use biographical, narrative, and ecological approaches within an interpretive framework. It responds to the recognized dissonance between career theory and research, on the one part, and practice, on the other. It also responds to the view that in recent years practice has outstripped career theory and research. The qualitative approaches used in the research reported have gained popularity in the social sciences in recent years, but have been largely untried in the career field.

This work offers specific interpretive studies that range over the life span and involve a number of perspectives including contexts such as parental influence, socio-political milieu, early career studies of apprentices, medical students, and nurses, studies of the established careers of secretaries, women entrepreneurs, teachers, and studies of the careers of older workers. In addition, the book contains interpretive studies pertaining to career theory, counseling and other interventions, and the research process. It also recognizes issues highlighted by a postmodernist perspective. A number of audiences will find this book useful: industrial/organizational psychologists, counseling psychologists, career counselors, counselor educators, and researchers in the career area from psychology and sociology.

Globalization, the economic crisis and related policies of austerity have led to a growth in extreme exploitation at work, with migrants particularly vulnerable. This book explores the lives of the growing numbers of severely exploited labourers in the world today, questioning how we can respond to such globalized patterns of extreme inequality.

For decades, the idea that more education will lead to greater individual and national prosperity has been a cornerstone of developed economies. Indeed, it is almost universally believed that college diplomas give Americans and Europeans a competitive advantage in the global knowledge wars.
Challenging this conventional wisdom, The Global Auction forces us to reconsider our deeply held and mistaken views about how the global economy really works and how to thrive in it. Drawing on cutting-edge research based on a major international study, the authors show that the competition for good, middle-class jobs is now a worldwide competition--an auction for cut-priced brainpower--fueled by an explosion of higher education across the world. They highlight a fundamental power shift in favor of corporate bosses and emerging economies such as China and India, a change that is driving the new global high-skill, low-wage workforce. Fighting for a dwindling supply of good jobs will compel the middle classes to devote more time, money, and effort to set themselves apart in a bare-knuckle competition that will leave many disappointed. The authors urge a new conversation about the kind of society we want to live in and about the kind of global economy that can benefit workers, but without condemning millions in emerging economies to a life of poverty.
The Global Auction is a radical rethinking of the ideas that stand at the heart of the American Dream. It offers a timely expose of the realities of the global struggle for middle class jobs, a competition that threatens the livelihoods of millions of American and European workers and their families."

This book juxtaposes the experiences of regions that have lived or are living through industrial transition in coal-mining and manufacturing centres throughout Europe, opening the way to a deeper understanding of the intensity of change and of how work helps shape new identities.