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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Work & labour
The current globalized economy is able to produce diverse commodities and distribute these across vast distances. However, the workforce which underpins these networks experiences vast inequalities in income and working conditions. As an academic field, global labour studies seeks to understand how different forms of employment sustain uneven patterns of consumption at a global scale, and how the inequalities in working conditions are created and maintained. This lively and accessible book explores these structures and forces that shape lives across the world. Maintaining a consistent focus on questions of power, networks, space and livelihoods, this book opens up key issues and concepts such as global production networks, changing labour market dynamics, forced labour, contemporary migration trends and new labour organizations. This approach provides an integrated framework to further analyse the social contexts of work on a global scale. With suggested readings at the end of each chapter, Global Labour Studies is an essential text for undergraduate courses on global labour issues in the fields of geography, politics, sociology, labour studies and international development.
This is a holistic presentation of methods and problems involved in humanizing work. The comments will be of interest to practitioners dealing with work, and should give realism to debates concerned with alienation in the workplace. The theory is described, and the American system is compared with those in place in Western Europe and Japan. This work should be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners in industrial relations, labor problems, organizational behavior, and human resources in general.
This book explores the role of capital and labor migration in the expansion of the capitalist world-system. It presents comprehensive case studies on various historical periods of hegemony recognized by world-system theory: the Dutch hegemony (1625-1675), British hegemony (1815-1873), and US hegemony (1945-1970). Moreover, the book identifies an earlier period of economic dominance in Western Europe when merchant-bankers from Florence dominated the regional wool trade in the early thirteenth century. In these four intervals of dominance, i.e., from the medieval period to the late twentieth century, capital and labor migration formed the basis of capitalist development in the hegemonic core states as well as in peripheral regions under their economic and political influence. In turn, the book analyzes the migration patterns associated with the rise of hegemony from the perspectives of class relations between employers and workers, technological advances at the workplace, economic cycles, and state policies on labor migration. It concludes with a projection that heightened migration will continue to characterize the capitalist world system, especially as many poor and displaced populations in peripheral regions resort to migration for survival. Accordingly, it appeals to scholars in the fields of politics, sociology, history, anthropology, and economics who are interested in globalization and world-system analysis.
The situation of young people in Europe has been significantly impacted by recent changes that have taken place in the job market. Young people's life trajectories and transitions to adulthood are increasingly less linear, more segmented, and more reversible, with a rise in unemployment and the NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) phenomenon. This book aims to investigate the youth policies implemented in Europe and how they are integrated in the socio-economic contexts of the various member states and their welfare regimes, educational systems, and skills markets. A significant number of young adults neither study nor work, and live in a constant state of discouragement and inactivity, giving up on their search for job opportunities. The strategic choices implemented at the European level in response to this problem promote ALMPs (Active Labour Market Policies), including the creation of the Youth Guarantee Program, which is examined here both at the European level and, specifically, in the Italian context.
European countries have faced profound changes in family structures and family forms over the last few decades. This volume provides insights from eleven European countries with varying welfare state arrangements, exploring the extent to which the intergenerational transmission of attitudes, resources and values matter with regard to the economic self-sufficiency of young people. Drawing on in-depth interviews with three generations of family members, the contributors show how intergenerational transmission happens and what the effects of these transmission processes are. The book reveals that family members serve as role models to younger family members and influence their career and educational aspirations, and that there are specific family value orientations and parental approaches which support economic self-sufficiency in younger generations. Intergenerational Transmission of Economic Self-Sufficiency will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including social work, sociology, psychology and political sociology.
This book is about families who combine home life and income-producing work under the same roof. Based on 899 homeworking households in nine states, the analysis presents detailed information about individual worker and household characteristics; work characteristics for both business owners and wage workers; family functioning types; management behavior; and adjustment strategies used in family life, the community context, and the home-based employment experience over an extended period of time. This is the first publication of a serious longitudinal study of the phenomenon of working from home with historical considerations of how and why so many people are choosing this option. It points to the significantly positive impact at-home workers are having on their families, their neighborhoods, and their communities.
Nonprofit organizations are conventionally positioned as generators of social and cultural forms of capital for the common good. As such they occupy a different space to other types of organizations such as corporate firms that exist primarily to generate economic capital for private owners/shareholders. Recent years, however, have seen professionalization promoted widely by funders, policy-makers and nonprofit practitioners across the globe. At the same time, there has been an increasing cross-over of employees from private and public bodies into nonprofits. But do such shifts open up space for the wholesale importation of managerialism into and commercialization of the nonprofit sphere? Are nonprofits at risk of being reconstituted as primarily economic entities, serving the interests of a leadership elite? How are such changes in an organization's trajectory brought about? What are the consequences for trustees, staff, members and the nature of managerial work? The authors engage with critical questions such as these through a unique insider account of one professional institute experiencing unprecedented changes that challenge its very reason for being. Drawing on a three-year ethnography, they narrate organizational inhabitants' struggles in their search for purpose and analyze the myriad of changes within different aspects of organizing including structure, strategizing, pay and reward, governance and leadership. The book will enable readers to reframe and rethink organizational change as a process involving power, persuasion and authority, and will be of value to researchers, students, academics and practitioners interested in managerial work and organizational change in non-profit organizations.
This book describes the early career outcomes for female creative graduates in Australia and the UK. It applies the international UNESCO model of the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) to national graduate destination survey data in order to compare creative women's employment outcomes to those of men, as well as non-creative graduates. Chapters focus on opportunities for creative and cultural work, including salaries, geographic mobility, graduate jobs, underemployment, and skills transferability. The model covers a broad range of cultural and creative domains such as heritage, the performing arts, visual arts and craft, publishing and media industries, fashion, architecture and advertising. The book's purpose is to provide an informed discussion and empirical report to key stakeholders in the topic, such as academic researchers, teachers and students, as well as cultural sector organisations and education departments.
Challenging the simplistic story by which feminism has become complicit in neoliberalism, this book traces the course of globalization of women's economic empowerment from the Global South to the Global North and critically examines the practice of empowering low-income women, primarily migrant, indigenous and racialised women. The author argues that women's economic empowerment organizations become embedded in the neoliberal re-organization of relations between civil society, state and market, and in the reconfiguration of relations between the personal and the political. Also examined are the contractual nature of institutional arrangements in neoliberalism, the ontological divide between economy and society, and the marginalisation of feminist economics that persists in the field of women's economic empowerment. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of social sciences, gender studies, sociology, and economics. This book is based on the author's doctoral dissertation at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
This handbook explores feeling like an 'imposter' in higher education and what this can tell us about contemporary educational inequalities. Asking why imposter syndrome matters now, we investigate experiences of imposter syndrome across social locations, institutional positions, and intersecting inequalities. Our collection queries advice to fit-in with the university, and authors reflect on (not)belonging in, with and against educational institutions. The collection advances understandings of imposter syndrome as socially situated, in relation to entrenched inequalities and their recirculation in higher education. Chapters combine creative methods and linger on the figure of the 'imposter' - wary of both individualising and celebrating imposters as lucky, misfits, fraudsters, or failures, and critically interrogating the supposed universality of imposter syndrome.
For more than a century, the corporation has shaped our thinking of organizations. This deeply institutionalized form is still regarded as both the iconic business organization and the core structural unit of our economic order. Today, however, it stands at a crossroads. Economic, social, and environmental failures of the recent past as well as misconduct and scandals are widely associated with deficits of the corporate form and its governance. The Corporation engages with current issues of the corporation as an institutionalized organizational form, approaching the concept from the backgrounds of organization theory, law, and economics, combining different theoretical views and empirical approaches. This volume addresses the corporation's entanglement with capitalism, examines a spectrum of constitutive features and purposes of the corporate form, offers historical perspectives on its emergence, and provides reflections on its future development. Encouraging you to rethink the corporation, each contribution also adds to the conceptual development of the corporate form as the iconic business organization.
The Covid, climate and cost of living crises all hang heavy in the air. It's more obvious than ever that we need radical social and political change. But in the vacuum left by defeated labour movements, where should we begin? For longtime workplace activist Ian Allinson, the answer is clear: organising at work is essential to rebuild working-class power. The premise is simple: organising builds confidence, capacity and collective power - and with power we can win change. Workers Can Win is an essential, practical guide for rank-and-file workers and union activists. Drawing on more than 20 years of organising experience, Allinson combines practical techniques with an analysis of the theory and politics of organising and unions. The book offers insight into tried and tested methods for effective organising. It deals with tactics and strategies, and addresses some of the roots of conflict, common problems with unions and the resistance of management to worker organising. As a 101 guide to workplace organising with politically radical horizons, Workers Can Win is destined to become an essential tool for workplace struggles in the years to come.
Marginalized Women and Work in 20th- and 21st-Century British and American Literature and Media examines the intricate relationship between marginalized women and work through critical essays about representations of women's work in non-canonical literary writings, mass media, and popular culture. Covering a broad range of texts including Paule Marshall's fiction, Natasha Trethewey's poetry, and the Netflix series Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker, among others, , this collection takes an intersectional approach in order to shed light on the definition and meaning of marginalized women's work and the value of their labor in the capitalistic economic systems of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
This book presents an original contribution to the study of care and care work by addressing pressing issues in the field from a Latin American and intersectional perspective. The expansion of professional care and its impacts on public policies related to care are global phenomena, but so far the international literature on the subject has focused mainly on the Global North. This volume aims to enrich this literature by presenting results of research projects conducted in five Latin American countries - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay -, and comparing them with researches conducted in other countries, such as France, Japan and the USA. Latin America is a social space where professional care has expanded dramatically over the past twenty years. However, unlike Japan, USA and European countries, such expansion took place in a context of heterogeneous and poorly structured markets, in societies which stand out for its reliance on domestic workers to provide care work in the household as paid workers, in both formal and informal arrangements. CareandCareWorkers: A Latin American Perspective will be a useful tool for sociologists, anthropologists, social workers, gerontologists and other social scientists dedicated to the study of the growing demand for care services worldwide, as well as to decision makers dealing with public policies related to care services. "Society cannot function without the unpaid (and poorly and informally paid) work of caregivers. Having the data - and this book presents this data - allows public policy to be based on the realities rather than on the prejudices, habits, or structural injustices of a previous time about gender roles, class, ethnicity, race, migrant status. (...) This volume not only presents the data, then, but also shows how some countries have begun to innovate to provide solutions to the problem that some people are overburdened by care while others do little of it. (...) Scholars and activists in Latin American countries lead the way in showing both how resistance remains and how to innovate. So the rest of the world has much to learn from this volume." - Excerpt from the Foreword by Professor Joan C. Tronto
Interdisciplinary Dialogues on Organizational Paradox is a two-part volume exploring how paradox theory benefits from interdisciplinary theorizing and how we might go about undertaking such research. The chapters draw from four disciplinary realms: beliefs, physicality, expression, and social structure. Unique commentaries from thought leaders expand and assess the focal pieces of each volume. Part B: Investigating Social Structures and Human Expression continues the exploration of the why, how and where of interdisciplinary research within paradox theory by looking specifically at the realms of social structure - from logic and Luhmann, to historical analysis - and expression - from linguistics, to the maths and poetry of Spencer-Brown, to jazz. The chapters are complemented with reflective commentaries from Charles Hampden-Turner and Ann Langley. The collection ends with an examination of where the interdisciplinary foundations for organizational paradox theory arose via conversations with seminal paradox scholars.
Entrepreneurship is the result of various contextual factors in the community, which are shaped by social challenges and business needs. Recent research efforts have focused on the dynamics of communities and how they facilitate entrepreneurship among a diverse group of people and organizations. This book highlights research on the importance of communities and their role in providing an entrepreneurial ecosystem that promotes innovation and business activities. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, it explores what it takes to create an entrepreneurial community that fosters creativity. Sharing valuable insights, it will enhance readers' understanding of how entrepreneurship is formed by and exists in communities.
This book explores stakeholders' perspectives, their practices, and engagement with enacting the employability agenda in the context of a rapidly changing world. It explains the need for developing graduate employability under socioeconomic, cultural, and political pressure exposed to the higher education sector. Largely framed within Bourdieu's concepts of social field, habitus, and capital, it explores international stakeholders' perspectives and experiences with graduate employability agenda in different contexts, which serves as a point of reference for the adoption of such initiatives. Based on empirical evidence, the authors develop a new graduate employability framework seeing it as a lifelong process, denote the relationships between types of employability capital, and shed light on the consequences of different strategies to translate employability capital to employment and career outcomes. Overall, this book generates both theoretical and practical insights which help to advance employability programs, better prepare the future workforce, and anticipate turbulence in the labour markets.
Informed by in-depth case studies focusing on a wide spectrum of micro and macro post-socialist realities, this book demonstrates the multi-faceted nature of informality and suggests that it is a widely diffused phenomenon, used at all levels of a society and by both winners and losers of post-socialist transition.
This volume offers new, convincing empirical evidence on topical risk- and risk management-related issues in diverse settings, using an interdisciplinary approach. The authors advance compelling arguments, firmly anchored to well-accepted theoretical frameworks, while adopting either qualitative or quantitative research methodologies. The book presents interviews and surveys with risk managers to gather insights on risk management and risk disclosure in practice. Additionally, the book collects and analyzes information contained in public reports to capture risk disclosure and perceptions on risk management impacts on companies' internal organization. It sheds light on financial and market values to understand the effect of risk management on actual and perceived firm's performance, respectively. Further, it examines the impacts of risk and risk management on society and the economy. The book improves awareness and advances knowledge on the complex and changeable risk and risk management fields of study. It interweaves among topical, up-to-date issues, peculiar, under-investigated contexts, and differentiated, complementary viewpoints on the same themes. Therefore, the book is a must-read for scholars and researchers, as well as practitioners and policy makers, interested in a better understanding of risk and risk management studies in different fields.
In this thought-provoking new book, Neala Schleuning searches for the meaning of work in our society. Compellingly written, "Idle Hands and Empty HeartS" studies the politics and economics, as well as the philosophy and art, of work. Schleuning seeks to find out what work is, what it used to be, why we work, and what is wrong with work today. She places ideas about work in their history and culture and offers new ideas about what work should be, and what role it should play in our lives. Schleuning distills all of the central questions having to do with work in our time: why do human beings work; what can we learn about work from history; what is the impact of technology on work; how does work affect our political lives; do women have a different perspective on work; and finally, what is Good Work and how do we create a future in which good work can be realized? Anyone who ever wondered about the role of work in his or her life will find "Idle Hands and Empty HeartS" a source of stimulating ideas.
This book is aimed both at researchers and advanced students of Central Asia, the space of the former USSR, and the foreign policy of Russia and China. The authors adopt a sociological approach in understanding how power structures emerged in the wake of the Soviet collapse. The independencies in Central Asia did not happen as a consequence of a nationalist struggle, but because the USSR imploded. Thus, instead of the elites being replaced, the same Soviet elites who had competed for power in the previous system continued to do so in the new one, which they had to build, adapting themselves and the system to their needs. Additionally, unlike in the immense majority of the independent states that emerged from decolonization, the social movements and capacity to mobilize the people were very weak in the new Central Asian states. For this reason, the configuration of the new systems was the product of a competition for power between a very small number of elites who did not have to answer to the people and their demands. Thus, the new power regimes acquired a strong neopatrimonial component. Analyzing the structure of societies, economies and polities of post-socialist states, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Central Asia, to sociologists, and to scholars of China's rise.
This open access book comparatively analyses intergenerational social mobility in immigrant families in Europe. It is based on qualitative in-depth research into several hundred biographies and professional trajectories of young people with an immigrant working-class background, who made it into high-prestige professions. The biographies were collected and analysed by a consortium of researchers in nine European countries from Norway to Spain. Through these analyses, the book explores the possibilities of cross-country comparisons of how trajectories are related to different institutional arrangements at the national and local level. The analysis uncovers the interaction effects between structural/institutional settings and specific individual achievements and family backgrounds, and how these individuals responsed to and navigated successfully through sector-specific pathways into high-skilled professions, such as becoming a lawyer or a teacher. By this, it also explains why these trajectories of professional success and upward mobility have been so exceptional in the second generation of working-class origins, and it tells us a lot also about exclusion mechanisms that marked the school and professional careers of children of immigrants who went to school in the 1970s to 2000s in Europe - and still do.
In times of globalization, digitalization and demographic change, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us the fragility and complexity of the world of work. It represents the peak of a process of change in the world of work in economic, social, socio-political and individual psychological terms. This book outlines how effective and future-oriented human resource management can look like in times of demographic and technological change on the one hand and the immediate and lasting effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the other hand. It provides the tools for effective human resource management, summarized in the following seven success factors: demographic-oriented recruitment, strength-oriented workforce deployment, age-appropriate HR development, new generation contract, family and gender, the vital employee, management of interests and expectations. The aim of the book is not only to provide solutions to problems caused by the changing world of work and the pandemic, but also to show how success factors can emerge from these inevitable phenomena. It will be of interest to professionals in the field of human resource management.
The second of two volumes bringing together researchers from an array of disciplines including sociology, organization theory, strategy, and organizational behaviour, Entrepreneurialism and Society: Consequences and Meanings addresses the question of how entrepreneurship has transformed from an organizing activity into an ideology that is changing society. The authors investigate how the transformed meanings of entrepreneurship are causal in new social phenomenon such as organizational misconduct and driving inequality, but also how it may offer a promise to resolve those issues. Examining into the role of organizations in society, Entrepreneurialism and Society invigorates academic research by developing new perspectives on how entrepreneurs and their organizations shape our social world.
Focusing on the demands of the new innovative, sustainable and inclusive rural development paradigm, the monograph raises the discussion regarding new approaches and success factors that are vital in current rural socio-economic development and policy transformations. The bottom-up policymaking, self-organization, creative use of knowledge in rural areas, and many other rural innovations are aligned in this book with new social movements' theories, which help disclose, explore and explain the rural development paradigm shift. Rural development forces of the 21st century center on the agents of change - rural population, and, surprisingly - urban population(!), and the political debate concerning EU Common Agricultural Policy and European Green Deal, illustrated with multiple case studies. This book will be of interest to a broad audience of readers, keen on scientific, political, and practical issues of innovations in rural areas and their future development pathways. The monograph is authored by a team of scholars from the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, Institute of Economics and Rural Development, Department of Rural Development. |
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