This book proposes an original approach to analyse the social and professional trajectories of migrant women with tertiary education. It focuses on the role of essentialism in stratifying labour markets based on gender, class and racialisation, and in limiting migrant women's employment opportunities. Based on multi-sited fieldwork conducted in France and Italy, the book highlights how essentialism influences the assessment of working capacities, stressing that skills are socially constructed and valued depending on who embodies them. It also emphasises that migrant women and labour market gatekeepers are not only passively accepting essentialism, but some are also resisting and eventually challenging this process. Deconstructing essentialism enables us to better understand the mechanisms that produce stratifications and aids in designing paths towards more equal access to employment.

This book explores how migrant construction workers in Southern Europe faced unemployment and precarious work conditions during and after the Great Recession. By drawing on rich qualitative data, it investigates the experiences of Albanian men within and beyond the workplace, and sheds light on the capacity of migrant builders to deal with economic hardships and the role of their families and masculine identities in shaping their coping practices. This book suggests a new framework for the study of coping practices among migrant (construction) workers, and adds to the study of integration processes in Southern European countries by comparing the narratives of settled migrants in Italy and Greece. This book also looks at the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on migrant builders' lives in Southern Europe. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this book is of interest both to students and researchers in the field of migration studies and those working in the fields of sociology, geography, anthropology, political science and economics.

A generation of magnificent scholars, from Peter Drucker to Jack Welch, have taught us that understanding business issues and the profound changes the world's economy is undergoing makes sense if set in historical context. Today the best managers in the world demand to know how things came to be as they are. This collection of essays is designed to give the reader an historical perspective on the fastest growing sector of the work force: knowledge workers. The articles tell you how knowledge workers evolved from manufacturing and agricultural jobs and then go on to give you some insight as to what the future roles of knowledge workers will be. The readings in this volume come from a variety of sources not normally looked at by managers and business executives. There are reports from historians, sociologists, academics, and economic experts. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction on the material, its significance, and something about the context in which it was written, including brief biographical comments on the author. The Rise of the Knowledge Worker is intended for business people, managers, leaders, government employees, and students.

In recent years the environment has become an increasingly important issue in many sectors of society, from business and industry to community and government. This volume offers an analysis of the progress being made in a number of European countries towards sustainable development and the impact this is having on the jobs market and the career structure of those employed for their environmental skills and expertise. It examines institutionalized environmental policies, including the impact of the European Environment agency and European Community environmental directives, as well as global conventions and agreements on biodiversity and sustainable development.;The book reviews the areas of expertise, training and education required across Europe to meet these environmental challenges and examines the resultant job opportunities in the private and public sector. With contributions from across Europe and wide-ranging analysis and empirical case studies, this text should be of use to students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in environmental studies, business and economics.

First Published in 1998. This is Volume XV of the eighteen in the Sociology of Work and Organization series. This study on work and leisure looks at present materials that point to the fields of study of non-work obligations, family and home leisure centredness, declining worker interest in the job, passivity and the cultural level.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book, adopting a multidisciplinary approach, investigates the definition of autonomous work and the kind of protection it receives and should receive in a global perspective. The book advocates for the existence of genuine autonomous work to be distinguished from employment and false self-employment. It deserves specific attention from legislators in the view of removing any obstacles to the exercise of freedom of association and collective action at large. The book is divided into two parts. The first focuses on the evolving notion of autonomy and its consequences on social protection, offering a theoretical frame from an organizational, political and legal point of view. The second aims at discovering new regulatory and protective horizons for autonomous work, in the light of blockchain, platform work, EU Competition Law, social security and liberal professions. Finally, the authors offer insights and recommendations on how to protect work beyond categories.

This volume's goal is to help readers understand how people react to career barriers and how people develop constructive ways of coping with them. Drawing on original cases and data from interviews with people who faced different types of career barriers, the author describes how people react to, and make sense of, unfortunate events in their lives--and career barriers when they occur. He considers how and why some people cope constructively while others don't, and explores how resilience and support from others help get us through tough times and emerge with a sense of renewal and career growth. He suggests how we can manage career barriers and prepare for--or even prevent--career barriers through foresight, planning, and education. These methods also suggest what managers and organizations should do to help their employees who are or may soon be facing career barriers.
People can learn while facing the stress and self-questioning that accompany career barriers, but this is not an easy process. Learning requires considerable self-understanding and environmental support. The organization can play a vital role in limiting people's pain and creating opportunities. However, despite generous severance packages and outplacement services, many organizations have been little help to people who lose their jobs, suffer job stress, face unreasonably demanding bosses, or suffer from physical handicaps or chronic illnesses. Most of the burden falls on individuals and their families. Assistance can and should come from employers, government agencies, educational institutions, and religious organizations.
While the book focuses on the perspectives of people who have been or may be affected by career barriers, the material should be of interest to a broad range of readers --in particular, academics who study careers, practitioners in the fields of training and development, and government officials who set public policy that affects displaced workers.

Recent trends like "lean production" and "McDonaldisation" indicate that Taylorism is a persistent, underlying principle of many organisations. Despite global competition and the need for speed, flexibility and quality, still the principle of Taylorism remains in the contemporary workplace. Moreover, information technology is often being used in way's that reinforce Taylorist patterns. For some this may be a fact of life. Hans D. Pruijt argues that this is not the case. There is a countermovement, particularly in North-West Europe where viable alternatives are being purseued. But, a systematic analysis of the resulting change of anti-Taylorist practice at shop-floor level has been lacking. This text fills this gap by analyzing 150 cases of anti-Taylorist initiatives in Scandinavia, the UK and the Netherlands. An example of anti-Taylorist principles working towards job enrichment can be seen in Germany; it also examines the role of state policy, research and consultancy in an experiment at Bosch where assembly workers learned testing skills.

This book will advance readers' understanding of the knowledge development, building and/or management process within human service organizations, informed by the author's experience in human service organizations, as consultant, and practitioner. Readers can come to understand the knowledge building process, and gain a conceptual framework in building organizational knowledge for the advancement of human services practice. The importance of knowledge management in social welfare and human service is twofold. Knowledge management is about an organization managing what it knows in order to achieve more competent and more effective performance. It also is about how domains and fields of practice may transform themselves over time through the purposeful creation and destruction of knowledge. Knowledge management can be a cornerstone of today's human service and social welfare organizations and may be a principal strategy for effecting innovation and evolution in the ways societies address and meet human needs.

Following the Asian economic crisis of the 1990s, this is the first book to examine the structure and transformation of the labor markets and social stratification of contemporary East Asia, namely Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China, focusing in particular on gender inequality. It deals with social mobility and gender differences in unemployment, temporary employment and self-employment. Additionally, gender segregation, social identity and suicide rates are also addressed. Taken together, the issues raised in this volume reinforce the advantage of a comparative approach to East Asian Studies. The findings, supported by strong statistical analysis, clearly call into question a longstanding view that East Asian gender regimes and class structure are homogeneous. Indeed, this is demonstrably not the case, as Labor Markets, Gender and Social Stratification in East Asia shows, revealing as it does considerable diversities in labor markets, gender regimes, and social mobility within East Asian societies due to historical and institutional differences. Contributors include: Chang Chin-Fen, Kim Young-Mi, Oda Akiko, Phang Hanam, Sakaguchi Yusuke, Shibata Haruka, Takamatsu Rie, Takenoshita Hirohisa, Tarohmaru Hiroshi, Xie Guihua, and Yamato Reiko.

The twenty-first century has witnessed a transformation of the organization, opportunities, and terms of work. Downsizing, restructuring, and outsourcing are the forces altering employment relationships throughout the work force. Those who tend to see the future in a positive light view the evolving role between employer and employee as empowering for the individual.

This book examines the consequences of economic instability due to job loss and the displacement of millions of workers. It draws upon case studies of worker displacement as well as national labor force surveys. Thomas S. Moore finds that consequences of economic instability are productivity slowdown, increased disparities in earnings and income, and higher average unemployment. He assesses the extent of job loss nationwide, its costs to the individuals directly affected, and the way in which the incidence of displacement and earnings loss has shifted over time. Although drawn from an earlier period, the data have an obvious relevance to today's labor markets.

Moore argues for an employment and training system that gives employers an incentive to invest in the skills of their employees. Federally funded training programs have not improved the earning ability of displaced and disadvantaged workers, and state-sponsored programs tend to exclude those most in need of assistance. Moore suggests direct employer investment in the general skills of employees. Initially published in a different economic downturn, this continues to be a must read book for all economists, sociologists, and policymakers.

Port cities have distinctive global dynamics, with long histories of casual labour, large migrant communities, and international trade networks. This in-depth comparative study examines contradictory global legacies across themes of urban identity, waterfront work and radicalism in key post-industrial port cities worldwide.

This volume of Advanced Series in Management offers cutting-edge research into international migration in Europe. Living and working in a host country is challenging both for the host country (for its institutions, organizations and local people) as well as for the incoming migrants. Therefore, integration activities are essential for easing the transition. The purpose of this book is to examine various practices of integrating migrants in European countries from national, organizational and individual perspectives. This publication will be valuable to researchers in the field, as well as for entrepreneurs, international corporations employing from abroad, trainers preparing employees to work in multicultural teams, as well as for investors who plan to expand their business into foreign markets.

Full Contributors:
Jill Rubery, School of Management, UMIST, Manchester, UK; Paul Edwards, University of Warwick, UK; Paul Marginson, University of Warwick, UK; Peter Armstrong, Sheffield University, UK; John Purcell, University of Bath, UK; John Allen, The Open University, UK; Nick Henry, University of Birmingham, UK; Tony Lane, University of Liverpool, UK; Bryn Jones, University of Bath, UK; Duncan Gallie, Nuffield College, Oxford, UK; Carole Thornley, Keele University, UK; Alice Lam, The University of Kent at Canterbury, UK; Jacqueline O'Reilly, WZB Berlin, Germany; Abigail Gregory, Irene Bruegel, Judy Wajcman, University of Warwick, UK.

The Social and Spatial Ecology of Work is an important contribution to the P- num Studies in Work and Industry. It is a theoretically informed case study, unique in that it takes full measure of the importance of physical space and the built environment for the quality of people's daily working lives and the attainment of organizational goals. Rita Gorawara-Bhat provides us with a theoretical framework for understanding how important space and envir- ment are for experiential aspects of work as they are contextualized in social relations, linked to status and role, and embedded in organizational culture and bureaucratic structure. Her framework is a creatively synthetic one that draws notably from traditions in social psychology, symbolic interactionism, dramaturgical sociology, and social ecology. Sociologists will find themselves in comfortable surroundings; this is a case study of a major social science research center affiliated with a prominent midwestern university. Studies carried out by psychologists and social psychologists in the - cades of the 1960s and 1970s held great promise for introducing a language and methodology for inquiry about the importance of the physical envir- ment for social life. However, the overall impact of this research turned out to be short lived, perhaps owing to overly deterministic assumptions about space and spatial constraints.

"Gender, Work and Space" explores how boundaries are constructed between women and men, and among women living in different neighborhoods. Focusing on work, the segregation of men and women into different occupations, and variations in women's work experiences in various parts of the city, the authors argue that these differences are grounded, are constituted in and through space, place and situated networks.
The authors use a case study of a contemporary city to establish that many women are dependent on extremely local employment opportunities, especially those women with heavy household responsibilities. Women's dependence on locally available jobs focuses attention on the existence of different employment districts throughout the city. The argument is that social, economic and geographic boundaries are overlaid and intertwined. This book contributes to debates about the geography of labor market segmentation, to our understanding of sex-based occupational segregation and, in the close attention given to the construction of social, geographic, economic and symbolic boundaries in ordinary lives, provides a counterbalance to the focus on mobility within contemporary feminist theory.

This book discusses the interaction between and the impact of overlapping actions by regional organizations while dealing with critical events. It compares all the sub-regions in South America and Africa from this perspective and creates new knowledge through cross-regional gleanings. The book analyses types of institutional interaction among regional organizations and the effects of overlapping actions on the coexistence or fracturing of regional processes. It examines and compares the dynamics of these interactions in both South America and Africa. The book contributes to the study of comparative regionalism by providing generalization and institutional learning based on a cross-regional approach. It gives to students, researchers and interested readers an understanding of the complexity of regional affairs in multi-organizational environments.

A new book, "The Work/Life Dichotomy," explores the redesign of mundane jobs; studies the trends in work/life relationships; and examines the link between training and the supply and demand of skilled and unskilled labor. Because business has shifted to a human development orientation, the book is of great value to HR professionals. . . . This book should be required reading for those concerned with the gap between work and life and reuniting the two for a healthier society, one in which human growth and development are as important as corporate productivity gains. "HR Magazine"

In his provocative new book, Morf argues that the severe productivity problems being experienced in Western economies--particularly in the United States--result from an entrenched perceived dichotomy between work and life in our society. Further, he asserts, social problems such as lack of competitiveness in world markets and low worker morale and individual concerns like low job satisfaction can only be attacked effectively when seen for what they are: manifestations of this deep gap between work life and home life which began to develop during the industrial revolution. Morf's sober, well-researched, yet eminently readable book synthesizes information from a variety of disciplines ranging from history to industrial psychology to offer a groundbreaking presentation of the complex relationship between society, culture, and the work sphere.

Morf looks closely at current efforts to increase productivity as they are practiced within organizations, demonstrating that most are doomed to failure because they neglect to address the basic problem. He presents an interactive systems view of the relationship between work and life and between job and worker, a perspective familiar to the Japanese, but largely ignored in the United States. This interactive systems view leads Morf to a consideration of the positive effects of well-designed work on the personality and long-term productivity of the worker, an approach which must be taken, he argues, if the United States is to regain its standing in world markets. Finally, Morf offers a systematic set of strategies for reintegrating people and jobs, ranging from importing selected ideas and practices on worker participation from abroad, to traditional methods of organizational development and job design. An important contribution to the human resources literature, this book brings a new voice to the debate over America's increasingly troublesome productivity levels.

Considerable social changes are underway as more women, particularly mothers, enter and remain in paid employment. The authors explore these changes (which include an increase in dual-earner families, declining fertility, and growing problems of work-life 'balance'), both comparatively and specifically in a number of European countries (Britain, France, The Netherlands, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Portugal). Original survey data, and qualitative evidence, is deployed in a series of cutting-edge chapters written by national and international experts.

This book provides a novel approach to unemployment as a contested political field in Europe and examines the impact of welfare state regimes, conceived as political opportunity structures specific to this field, public debates and collective mobilizations in unemployment politics.

Women's work in South Asia often remains invisible in official statistics and development research. This is partly due to the inadequacy of the national data systems and partly because existing sociocultural constraints restrict women's participation in economic activities outside the domain of the family. The pattern of female labour participation in South Asia has distinct spatial dimensions which cannot be explained in terms of economic rationale alone; the region-specific context defining women's roles remains vitally important. This book integrates different scales of analysis and methodologies with indigenous and Western contributors combining macro and micro studies. Highlighting the 'public' and 'private' domains of women's work, the book discusses both the inadequacies of nationally published data at an aggregate level and regional and locally-induced religious, cultural and societal constraints on gender relations. Setting contextually specific studies within a broader geographical framework, Women and Work in South Asia explores the real connection between female autonomy and economic independence.

This edited collection brings together research findings from a wide range of academics investigating equal opportunities and managing diversity. It explores the impact of gender, race/ethnicity, disability and age on employment opportunities and examines theoretical issues underlying the experience of discrimination. Based on original research, each chapter analyzes a different facet of equality and diversity and draws out the policy implications. The chapters adopt a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze cases from various countries, highlighting differences and similarities in the formulation and implementation of equality and diversity policies.

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.

This text explores the impact of race and racism in different occupational spheres within the labor market. It reexamines a number of central assumptions about segregation within the labor market and applies the concept of social closure to the analysis of the position of ethnic minority workers within the labor market. Key themes in the book include the effectiveness of equal opportunity and affirmative action policies and the extent to which employment practice has been significantly altered.