Most contemporary organizations use management teams to manage and coordinate their businesses at all levels of the organizational hierarchy. Management teams typically set overall goals, strategies, and priorities, making vital organizational decisions. They discuss issues, solve problems, offer advice, and ensure various processes and units are aligned and interact efficiently. Although management teams are vital for overall organizational performance, research indicates that they are largely underused and less effective than their potential would suggest for value creation. This book provides a research-based and practical model of the characteristics of effective management teams. It looks in depth at each factor of the model, discusses the supporting research, provides examples of how the factors influence the work and effectiveness of management teams, and shares tips and tools for successfully working with management team development. It provides researchers, academics, and students of organizational behavior with an overview of the variables that empirical research has found to be robustly related to management team effectiveness and will enable leaders and management consultants to develop more effective management teams.

Who were the women who fought back at Grunwick and Gate Gourmet? Striking Women gives a voice to the women involved as they discuss their lives, their work and their trade unions. Striking Women is centred on two industrial disputes, the famous Grunwick strike (1976-78) and the Gate Gourmet dispute that erupted in 2005. Focusing on these two events, the book explores the nature of South Asian women's contribution to the struggles for workers' rights in the UK labour market. The authors examine histories of migration and settlement of two different groups of women of South Asian origin, and how this history, their gendered, classed and racialised inclusion in the labour market, the context of industrial relations in the UK in the two periods and the nature of the trade union movement shaped the trajectories and the outcomes of the two disputes. This is the first account based on the voices of the women involved. Drawing on life/work history interviews with thirty-two women who participated in the two disputes, as well as interviews with trade union officials, archival material and employment tribunal proceedings, the authors explore the motivations, experiences and implications of these events for their political and social identities.

Despite improvements, women remain concentrated in particular occupational sectors and roles. Are current patterns a function of external limitations on initial ambitions, or do women simply prefer distinct types of work? There is a wealth of literature relating to gendered occupational segregation, but comparatively little accounting for how work choices are made from the individual's perspective. Including case studies of firefighting and teaching, this book offers a qualitative exploration of girls and women's reported journeys toward their work choices.

This book examines common issues and concepts concerning women in non-traditional, male dominated occupations. It explores the question of whether these women are the agents of change or are instead changed themselves. It provides a statistical examination and theoretical analysis of occupational sex segregation in the UK, the rest of the EU, and the US. It provides a more in-depth understanding of women's work lives through the experiences of the women themselves in four occupations; management, academia, engineering, and the priesthood.

In many countries, the number of people working beyond pension age is increasing. This volume investigates this trend in seven different countries, examining the contexts of this development and the consequences of the shifting relationship between work and retirement.

Does flexible working really provide a better work-life balance? Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, flexible working has become the norm for many workers. This volume offers an original examination of flexible working using data from 30 European countries and drawing on studies conducted in Australia, the US and India. Rather than providing a better work-life balance, the book reveals how flexible working can lead to exploitation, which manifests differently for women and men, such as more care responsibilities or increased working hours. Taking a critical stance, this book investigates the potential risks and benefits of flexible working and provides crucial policy recommendations for overcoming the negative consequences.

Bringing together essays, research studies and other material written over the past two decades, this book traces through them a history of political and intellectual debates on the left and in cultural studies, around central issues of education, labour and the youth question. An argument is made for linking the cultural, structural and autobiographical dimensions of the youth question in order to engage educationally with the burden of representation which young people are made to carry via race, class and sexuality in the postmodern world. The book includes three major unpublished pieces and an introduction which discusses the nature of the collection, and sets it in both a personal and political context.

This book describes findings of a survey-based qualitative research study conducted among Detroit employers in the auto industry to evaluate explanations for why blacks are no longer catching up with whites in terms of wages, income and employment. A key finding is the fact that black employers were more likely to hire black workers, but both black and white employers with largely black workforces pay significantly lower wages than employers with largely white workforces. This wage difference is the organizing element of subsequent study chapters that address locational considerations, differences in recruitment and hiring practices among firms and possible differences in skill requirements among black and white-owned firms, and/or differences in skill-related worker characteristics among employees.

'All in all, the chapters of the volume provide insightful material 'about how different forms of precarious work are linked to speci?c institutional changes in the labour market and laws governing it but also how they are linked to each other'. . . Situated in the ?eld of Global Labour Studies, the volume goes beyond one of the most central weaknesses of the discipline: its optimistic bias. By systematically including cases in which trade failed or chose not to engage in the organization of precarious workers, the contributions pave the way to a deeper understanding of the challenges within this ?eld.' - British Journal of Industrial Relations With the renaissance of market politics on a global scale, precarious work has become pervasive. This edited collection explores the spread across a number of economic sectors and countries worldwide of work that is invariably insecure, dirty, low-paid, and often temporary and/or part-time. The first part of this cross-disciplinary book analyses the different forms of precarious work that have arisen over the past thirty years in both the Global North and South. These transformations are captured in ethnographically orientated chapters on sweatshops, day labour, homework, Chinese construction workers unpaid contract work, the introduction of insecure contracting into the Korean automotive industry, and the insecurity of Brazilian sugarcane cutters. The case studies all shed light upon how the nature of work and the workplace are changing under the pressures of neoliberal capitalism and what this means for workers. In the second part the editors and contributors then detail some of the ways in which precarious workers are seeking to improve their own situations through their efforts to counter the growth of precarity under neoliberal capitalism, efforts that involve collectively exploring forms of resistance to work restructuring and the failures of traditional trade unions to fully engage with precarious work's growth. Illustrating the impacts of the expansion of precarious work, this book will appeal to students, academics and those generally interested in the issues of the global economy, the reworking of labour markets, the impacts of neoliberal capitalism and ethnographies of the working poor in various parts of the world. Contributors include: L.L.M. Aguiar, M.J. Barreto, S. Chauvin, J. Cock, B. Garvey, M. Gillan, D. Hattatoglu, A. Herod, L. Huilin, K. Joynt, R. Lambert, P. Ngai, J. Tate, M. Thomas, E. Webster, A. Yun

This book examines a wide range of migration patterns which have arisen, and exposes the tensions and difficulties including:
* legal and empowerment issues
* cultural and language diversities and barriers
* the impact of live-in employment.
The book features case studies taken from Europe, South and North America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa and uses original fieldwork using quantitative and qualitative methods.

eBook available with sample pages: 020345250X

In this introductory text for A level students and undergraduates, Jane Pilcher covers the main issues debated about women in Britain today. Subjects covered include:

* women and gender: sociological perspectives
* education and training
* women and paid work
* household work and caring
* love and sexuality
* crime and punishment
* politics and participation.

Providing a clear sociological analysis of central debates and an introduction to the main theoretical arguments as well as including discussions of further areas of interest, such as women and the media, and the body, this text will provide an invaluable resource for all students in sociology and womens studies and will be of interest to all those wishing to know more about contemporary society in Britain.

Presenting an innovative concept and approach for organization management, this book serves to document an organization's journey towards the ultimate goal of learning organization. This book also shares the experience on how a OL framework built on established learning theories, could be used effectively, overcoming many of the barriers in a real industrial setting. Utilizing a ready-to-use tool called Project Action Learning (PAL) to analyze real life case studies, the authors introduce a framework that allows teams of people to work and learn over the course of business projects. Equal emphasis is placed on the achievement of pre-set project outcomes and the learning objectives of the participants. In addition, a long term organizational learning strategy is put forward and the necessary supporting infrastructure, in the form of four 'PAL Pillars', is described. The concepts and development of the PAL driven Organizational Learning model are inspired by and grounded in, Western and Eastern business philosophies and case studies which offer important insights into the management of organizations who are keen to develop sustainable business practices.

In a much-publicized and much-maligned 2003 New York Times article, "The Opt-Out Revolution," the journalist Lisa Belkin made the controversial argument that highly educated women who enter the workplace tend to leave upon marrying and having children. Women Who Opt Out is a collection of original essays by the leading scholars in the field of work and family research, which takes a multi-disciplinary approach in questioning the basic thesis of "the opt-out revolution." The contributors illustrate that the desire to balance both work and family demands continues to be a point of unresolved concern for families and employers alike and women's equity within the workforce still falls behind. Ultimately, they persuasively make the case that most women who leave the workplace are being pushed out by a work environment that is hostile to women, hostile to children, and hostile to the demands of family caregiving, and that small changes in outdated workplace policies regarding scheduling, flexibility, telecommuting and mandatory overtime can lead to important benefits for workers and employers alike. Contributors: Kerstin Aumann, Jamie Dolkas, Ellen Galinsky, Lisa Ackerly Hernandez, Susan J. Lambert, Joya Misra, Maureen Perry-Jenkins, Peggie R. Smith, Pamela Stone, and Joan C. Williams. Listen to Bernie D. Jones on WPYR Radio: Mothers and the delicate work-family balance

This volume contains 15 essays devoted to a number of multifaceted issues regarding how public policy affects worker well-being. Of the 15 chapters, the first two are the more general, dealing with overall earnings distribution and overall changes in welfare policy. The remaining chapters examine specific aspects of human welfare. They cover: fertility, disability, minimum wage, pension wealth, human capital investment, migration, health, and earnings. The book culminates with four chapters relating to gender and the family. Ultimately, determining who works, how much is earned, and how these earnings get distributed define the components of individual and social welfare. The topics covered in this volume shed light on these questions.

Feminising the Market discusses the role of the European Community, in particular the Single European Market, and shows how it is having an important impact on women's working lives. As well as documenting women's employment throughout Europe, the book addresses issues of key importance for women in Europe. These include how the European Community has developed policies that positively benefit women, the way that women are influencing change at the European level, and the impact that this is having at the national level.

Organizations Evolving offers a unique theoretical framework for understanding organizational emergence, persistence, change, and decline. Synthesizing and integrating six paradigmatic approaches to organization theory, this updated and revised third edition presents an evolutionary view that provides a unified understanding of modern organizations and organization theory. Key features of the third edition include: A sophisticated analytic comparison of six major approaches to understanding modern organizations and their evolution An interdisciplinary focus, drawing extensively from sociology, social psychology, economics, history, management and entrepreneurship research Supplementary materials from academic journals and the popular press, and multi-media resources in an online companion Extensive case examples that illustrate key evolutionary processes Study questions designed for extended and reflective learning. Offering key insights and critical learning opportunities, this book is crucial reading for classes covering macro-organizational behaviour and the sociology of organizations. Students of management studies and entrepreneurship, particularly those with a focus on organization theory, will also benefit from its interdisciplinary approach.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.