Given the importance that entrepreneurship and start-up businesses in technology-intensive sectors like life sciences, renewable energy, artificial intelligence, financial technologies, software and others have come to assume in economic development, the access of entrepreneurs to appropriate levels of finance has become a major focus of policymakers in recent decades. Yet, this prominence has led to a variety of policy models across countries and even within countries, as different levels of government have adapted to new challenges by refining or transforming pre-existing institutions and crafting new policy tools. Small Nations, High Ambitions investigates the roots of such policy diversity at the "subnational" level, offering in-depth accounts of the evolution of Quebec's and Scotland's policy strategies in the entrepreneurial finance sector and venture capital more specifically. As compared to other regions and provinces in the United Kingdom and Canada, Quebec and Scottish venture capital ecosystems rely on a high degree of state intervention, either direct (through public investment funds) or indirect (through government-backed, hybrid, or tax-advantaged funds). These two regions can thus be described as "sponsor states," heavily involved in the strategic backing of innovative businesses. Whereas most of the literature on venture capital has focused on economic variables to explain variations in policy models, this book seeks to explain policy divergence in Quebec and Scotland through political and ideological lenses. Its main argument is that the development of venture capital ecosystems in these regions was underpinned by Quebecois and Scottish nationalisms, which induced preferences for policy asymmetry and state intervention.

This book includes a series of papers that mainly discuss the proposition of "double middle-income traps." It analyzes various perspectives of middle-income groups of Russia and China including employment, education, consumption, mobility, social insurance, social values and identity, social and political participation. This book further indicates that the expansion of middle-income groups plays an important role in promoting mass consumption, maintaining continuous and stable economic growth, and overcoming the double middle-income traps. The middle class and middle-income group generally owns higher economic capital and cultural capital and is proved to be the main strength in expanding consumption by many empirical studies. However, the middle class and middle-income group has currently encountered hindrance to upward mobility, life quality, social security and class identity, which prevent the expansion of the middle-income group and improvement of social structure. Through comparing the middle-income groups of these two countries, this book gives us a panoramic view of their social and economic condition. Successfully combining theory and concrete practical guidelines, the book offers a valuable resource for all those active in this dynamic field. The book is important for students, scholars, researchers and professionals in economic and social science fields.

This book presents a novel viewpoint in HR management: in addition to the macroeconomic factors (demographic development, industry 4.0, digitization, etc.) and its micro-political counterparts (shortage of skilled workers, an aging workforce, shortage of MINTs), personnel policy in the highly developed economic regions of the world can increasingly be seen from the third point of view, which is the ego-perspective. The complexity of the economic world 4.0 is manifesting itself for the employees in a working world of unlimited possibilities, offering almost limitless freedom of choice, especially for younger people. Due to this shift in the balance of power, the influence of the employers decreases and is often reduced to countering the pronounced self-confidence of the employees in asserting their expectations with corresponding company incentives. The author emphasizes that dealing with the challenges of this extremely fragile world of work - currently exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic - must by no means be left solely in the hands of overburdened personnel managers. The contribution of the line manager or direct superior is becoming increasingly important. And it is only through close and clearly defined cooperation between the two that the opportunity for effective human resources management lies. This book aims to illustrate this process of division of labor in the individual phases of personnel management.

This volume contains two Open Access Chapters. Volume 64 of Research in the Sociology of Organizations takes stock of research on processes of inter-organizational collaboration and explores new topics that call for inquiry. It shows that inter-organizational collaboration is becoming more varied and fluid. Traditional strategic alliances and consortia are still around, but these are complemented with new forms of collaboration, often enabled by emerging digital technologies. The volume is organized in three parts. The first set of chapters focus on relational dynamics of inter-organizational collaboration. Process views of inter-organizational collaboration investigate the relational embeddedness of interactions, the development and change of relations, and how relationships are constituted as processual phenomena. The second part of this volume addresses organizational dynamics in collaboration processes. Organizations themselves are not stable in any collaboration: just as collaboration is fluid, also organizations continuously change, and intra-organizational dynamics are key to understand external collaboration. Third, this volume addresses new phenomena in the changing landscape of inter-organizational collaboration, thereby laying out directions for future inquiry.

How does an industrial community cope when they are told that closure is inevitable? What if this is only the last in a 200 year long line of threats, insecurities and closure? How did people weather the storms and how do they face the future now? While attempts to regenerate communities are everywhere, we do not often hear from the people themselves just how they managed to create safe collective spaces or how the fall of the whole house of cards brought with it effects which can be felt by young people who never knew the town when it was an industrial heartland. We hear the story of how men and women tried to cope and still want to retain their community in the face of its destruction. What can they and will they have to pass to the next generation and where will that leave the young people themselves, who have nothing to stay for but are unable to leave? This book examines these crucial questions facing post-industrial societies.

Few terms elicit such strong and varied feelings and yet have so little clarity as "democracy." Leaders of large states use "democracy" to designate their nations' public character even as critics and rivals use the term to validate their own political perspectives. In Envisioning Democracy, the editors and contributors address the following questions: What does democracy mean today? What could it mean tomorrow? What is the dynamic of democracy in an increasingly interdependent world? Envisioning Democracy explores these questions amid the dynamic of democracy as a political phenomenon interacting with forms of economic, ethical, ethnic, and intellectual life. The book draws on the work of Sheldon S. Wolin (1922-2015), one of the most influential American theorists of the last fifty years. Here, scholars consider the historical conditions, theoretical elements, and practical impediments to democracy, using Wolin's insights as touchstones in thinking through the possibilities and obstacles facing democracy now and in the future.

Caring in Times of Precarity draws together two key cultural observations: the increase in those living a single life, and the growing attraction of creative careers. Straddling this historical juncture, the book focuses on one particular group of 'precariat': single women in Shanghai in various forms of creative (self-)employment. While negotiating their share of the uncanny creative work ethos, these women also find themselves interpellated as shengnu ('left-over women') in a society configured by a mix of Confucian values, heterosexual ideals, and global images of womanhood. Following these women's professional, social and intimate lives, the book refuses to see their singlehood and creative labour as problematic, and them as victims. It departs from dominant thinking on precarity, which foregrounds and critiques the contemporary need to be flexible, mobile, and spontaneous to the extent of (self-)exploitation, accepting insecurity. The book seeks to understand- empirically and specifically-women's everyday struggles and pleasures. It highlights the up-close, everyday embodied, affective, and subjective experience in a particular Chinese city, with broader, global resonances well beyond China. Exploring the limits of the politics of precarity, the book proposes an ethics of care.

Increasingly flexible labour markets and reforms of old-age pension systems are still ranking high on the political agenda of European countries. This volume investigates whether, and to what extent, the interplay between pension reforms and the spread of 'atypical' employment patterns and fragmented careers has a negative influence uponeconomic security in old age. The volume, therefore, analyzes the flexibility-security nexus by focusing on the post-retirement phase, thus extending the conventional narrow concept of 'flexicurity'. The book also questions whetherreforms of public and private pension schemes compensate or aggravate the risks of increasingly flexible labor markets and atypical employment careers after retirement? Around this overarching research question, the various contributions in the volume employ the same analytical framework in order to map, and then compare, the developments in seven European countries - Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, and the UK - which present different labour market arrangements and various degrees of flexibility, as well as diverse pension systems.

This open access book makes a contribution to our understanding of one of the social challenges facing many western nations i.e. the challenge of an ageing population. It specifically addresses the issue of competence among older employees. Others have studied ageing populations in terms of the economic burden or the pressure on healthcare services and generally view the rising numbers of seniors more as a challenge than an opportunity. In this book, authors discuss ways of gaining positive benefits from our ageing and more experienced work force.

This book presents the first published account in English of Sverre Lysgaard's theory of the 'worker collectivity' - a theory of an informal protective organisation among subordinate employees, which so far has been unknown outside Scandinavia. Lysgaard's theory espouses that workers collectively form a buffer against management to protect themselves from the technical/economic power, which controls their working lives. The authors have returned to the same Norwegian factory Lysgaard studied in the 1950s to carry out ethnographic fieldwork in the 1980s and 2010s, and investigate the changing nature of the production, labour processes and management strategies. Through analysis that extends over 50 years of factory life, this research documents shifting power relations between workers and employers during times of changing institutional structures, globalisation, and worker solidarity. A revised version of the theory is also presented as an answer to some of the uncovered deficiencies in the original framework. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of the sociology of work, labour studies, business management and organisation studies.

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"An important contribution to the contemporary critique of high tech industry."
-- "Contemporary Sociology"

"Offers a lot for the general reader. The authors must be congratulated."
--"International Migration Review"

"Powerful and passionate exposA(c)"
-- "Journal of American Ethnic History"

"An important contribution to the environmental sociology literature."
-- "Choice"

"Powerful, compelling and revealing. Pellow and Park weave a fascinating story of both the historical and current domination of gender, class and race in Silicon Valley."
-- "Alternatives Journal"

"The Silicon Valley of Dreams . . . exposes the numerous inequities that plague the area, from the huge number of temporary workers, the highest per capita in the nation, to the obvious absence of union jobs."
--"Conscious Choice"

"The authors of [this] important [book] share a sense of compassion for and commitment to the struggle of labor, community, civil rights and environmental activists."
--"Los Angeles Times"

""The Silicon Valley of Dreams" provides a progressive intervention into environmental sociology and into public discourse on the relationship between immigration and environment."
-- "American Journal of Sociology"

"Critical reading for students and scholars in ethnic studies, immigration, urban studies, gender studies, social movements and environmental studies, as well as activists and policy-makers working to address the need of workers, communities and industry."
--"Educational Book Review"

Next to the nuclear industry, the largest producer of contaminants in the air, land, and water is theelectronics industry. Silicon Valley hosts the highest density of Superfund sites anywhere in the nation and leads the country in the number of temporary workers per capita and in workforce gender inequities. Silicon Valley offers a sobering illustration of environmental inequality and other problems that are increasingly linked to the globalization of the world's economies.

In The Silicon Valley of Dreams, the authors take a hard look at the high-tech region of Silicon Valley to examine environmental racism within the context of immigrant patterns, labor markets, and the historical patterns of colonialism. One cannot understand Silicon Valley or the high-tech global economy in general, they contend, without also understanding the role people of color play in the labor force, working in the electronic industry's toxic environments. These toxic work environments produce chemical pollution that, in turn, disrupts the ecosystems of surrounding communities inhabited by people of color and immigrants. The authors trace the origins of this exploitation and provide a new understanding of the present-day struggles for occupational health and safety.

The Silicon Valley of Dreams will be critical reading for students and scholars in ethnic studies, immigration, urban studies, gender studies, social movements, and the environment, as well as activists and policy-makers working to address the needs of workers, communities, and industry.

This book brings together various threads of research in the field of gender mainstreaming. It aids in further supporting and understanding the role of gender in health and safety research, practice, and policy. It looks at gender mainstreaming as being recognised as key in cultivating sustainable worker health and working systems due to it being a central component of many international policy initiatives. This book deals with gender mainstreaming being advocated at a policy level, while focusing on the limited recognition and discourse on the issue of gender and its direct and indirect association to workers' health in the field of occupational health and safety. This book addresses problems facing gender-sensitive policies and outlines and reflects upon current best practice principles and practices to support the development and implementation of policies, interventions, and research initiatives.

This book explores the move from manufacturing towards service industry jobs in China's economic development during the 12th Five-Year Plan period. The service industry now makes up the highest proportion of the GDP and employs the largest number of people in China. In the next Five-Year Plan period, it is necessary to actively push forward the strategic transformation by placing emphasis on the service industry to press ahead with system and mechanism reforms and policy innovations and cultivate diverse, sustainable and continuous forces for driving its growth. Efforts are made to upgrade the service industry to better achieve economic and social development in an innovative, coordinated, green, open, and shared way. This book will be of interest to scholars researching China's future.

The book presents a novel theory of how networks of organizations work, what varieties are possible, and how their strengths and weaknesses differ. The argument is illustrated using four case studies in which networks of firms and organizations in defense contracting, biotechnology, health care, and combating crime and disorder are examined. The book will be of major interest to scholars and students of business and management, public management, public policy, and organizational sociology and practicing managers as well.

Focusing on Italy, this book discusses how women negotiate sexuality and social status in a Western sexscape constituted by multifaceted articulations of women's sexuality, commodities and modernity. Drawing from ethnographic research, this book brings together the narratives of Italian and migrant women pole dancing for leisure, women pole and lap dancing for work, as well as women selling sex. By tracing commonalities in women's processes of subjectivation and othering across the non/sex working women divide, the book foregrounds the intersecting structures of oppression under which women negotiate selfhood.

This book describes how international negotiations can be conducted in a structured, professional and effective manner. It also offers recommendations based on examples of successful negotiations from both economically leading countries such as the USA, China and Japan, as well as smaller countries such as the Netherlands, Israel and Morocco. Providing practically relevant experiences from middle and top management positions in different business sectors, the contributors focus on all elements of negotiations, spanning from preparation, execution, strategies and tactics to non-verbal communication and psychological factors. Moreover, the chapters offer detailed introductions to more than 25 countries around the globe, which can be used as a reference guide to doing business in the specific contexts.

The second edition of Leadership offers a unique, highly-applied academic treatise on leadership, uniquely blending a chronological analysis of the last 100 years of leadership theory with exclusive CEO interviews. The case studies, expert insights and other teaching aids are timely and hard hitting, making this textbook relevant, insightful and informative, while a research chapter empowers the reader to competently question the leaders that shape our world. The world has turned on its political and corporate axis since the first edition of Leadership was published, and it became necessary to produce a second edition that fully encapsulated, respected and observed these changes. Numerous new case studies, discussion starters and examples subsequently reflect today's volatile technological, political, financial and social shifts, while exclusive interviews with successful CEOs powerfully blend theory with practice. Readers will learn the importance of navigating leadership in the most testing of times. A new chapter, 'Researching leadership', offers the reader the opportunity to develop significantly as a leadership researcher and to ably question reality in a post-truth world. A self-leadership chapter equips the reader to develop their own leadership capabilities, while retaining the ability to avoid destructive leadership. Ultimately, readers will become empowered to appreciate the complex, intersectional nature of leadership and to learn what it takes to lead in today's politically, technologically and socially tumultuous world. This book will be particularly engaging for students and educators at secondary school, college, undergraduate and postgraduate level, and for leadership/management consultants. While the book's primary role remains as a core text for leadership, management and business modules, it will also be of interest to students on many other courses (e.g. psychology, politics, sociology). Packed with teaching resources which educators will find particularly useful, Leadership is the only textbook of its kind to offer such an applied view of this subject via the inclusion of 12 (mostly CEO) expert insights. The first edition was an "Amazon Hot New Release", so this second edition might also hold interest for a general readership.

This book examines the precision farming revolution in Somerset, England. It reveals the reasons why local farmers invested in autonomous systems and traces the outcomes of adoption. It describes the local and global drivers of the fourth industrial revolution, from world population growth, climatic and ecological crises, profit driven farming and government agri-tech grants, to the Space Race era. A new cultural method of intelligence, ideas and thinking, new organisational and control powers, was precisely what precision farming offered farmers and off-farm firms, who were able to remotely monitor and control natural environments and aspects of on-farm activities. As a result of local farmers opting into precision farming systems the power dynamics of industrial agriculture were reorganised and this book will offer readers an understanding of how and why.

An Economic Philosophy of Production, Work and Consumption presents a new transhistorical framework of defining production, work and consumption. It shows that they all share the common feature of intentional physical transformation of something external to the agent, at some point in time. The book opens with a discussion of various theoretical traditions within economics, spanning mainstream and heterodox perspectives, and problems with production definitions in use today. Next, the author outlines various definitions in a more formal manner and provides a discussion on measurement and the production boundary. Unproductive work is redefined as socially reproductive, i.e. such that would not be performed on a Robinson Crusoe Island. Finally, the volume applies the new conceptual framework to various historical cases and discusses the future of production, work and consumption. This essential volume will be of interest to scholars of economic philosophy and methodology, the history of economic thought, economic history and national accounting. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book analyses the question of the right to the city, informal economies and the non-western shape of neoliberal governance in India through a new analytic: the right to sell. The book examines why and how states attempt to curb, control, and eliminate markets of urban informal street vendors. Focusing on Kolkata, the author provides a theoretical explanation of this puzzle by distilling and analysing the inherent tensions among the constitutive elements of neoliberal governance, namely, growth imperative, market activism, and corporatization, and demonstrates its implications for the formal/informal boundaries of the economy. A useful addition to the existing literatures on the right to the city, informal economies, and the shapes that neoliberalism takes in the non-west, the book provides a non-western counter to accounts of neoliberalism and will be of interest to academics working in the fields of South Asian Studies, Urban Studies, and Political Economy.

This book explores social productivity in work teams on production sites, with an eye toward human welfare. It focuses especially on "sympathy management" by the use of multivariate analysis in a worldwide social survey. Manufacturing production sites have many work teams, and their activities support productivity. Productivity, however, is evaluated only by the production system. Therefore, the social system's sympathy evaluation as teamwork in the work team is completely disregarded by management activity. Management recognizes this social system and must upgrade teamwork as a social system from tacit to explicit knowledge as an appraisal system. Thus, this new paradigm significantly contributes to industrial society beyond conventional management. The work team's social system functions in a production system and affects team productivity. Therefore, it must take a bird's-eye view of social productivity as an overall strategy. Social productivity has two appraisal criteria, the social system's sympathy and the production system's productivity. Increasing explicit knowledge of sympathy as teamwork requires the perspective of human-social science. Social productivity has been verified through global deployment by social research and case studies and contributes to humankind's welfare on sustainable development goals and ISO56000, an innovation management system. Social productivity can also decrease opportunity loss based on ignoring the social system of the work team.

This original analysis of modern Greece's political culture attempts to present a "total social fact"-a coherent and complex representation of Greek socio-political culture-to identify the cultural causes of Greece's recent disastrous economic crisis. Using a culturalist frame inspired by the Yale Strong Program, Marangudakis argues that the core cultural orientations of Greece have determined its politics-Greek secular culture flows out of the religion of Eastern Orthodoxy with its mysticism, icons, and general "ortherworldly-nesses." This theoretical discussion, bringing together Eisenstadt, Michael Mann, Banfield, and Taylor, is complemented by an innovative use of survey data, processed by political scientist and statistician Theodore Chadjipadelis. The carefully deployed quantitative data demonstrate that the culture previously described is actually shared by people living in Greece today. In his sweeping conclusion to this thorough cultural analysis, Marangudakis reflects on the prospects of Greek cultural recovery through the construction of a non-populist civil religion.

This book questions the belief that patronage explains poor governance and weak organizations. Its focus is on high-level political appointees in the Philippines, but its implications for development processes and policy are far-reaching. Patronage stimulates the emergence of democracy and welfare, and constitutes formal organizations. So intimately connected is it with the health of democracy and effective organizations that attempts to eradicate patronage only harm social, organizational and democratic life. In developed societies this has meant a growing Puritanism interspersed with bouts of corruption and moral panic; and, as they seek to maintain effective organizations and vibrant democracies, a mounting desire to project their own anxieties and imperfections onto developing countries.

Crisis Management Strategy, first published in 1993, is an excellent introduction to the theory and practice of crisis management in modern enterprises. Simon Booth examines the conventional approaches followed by many firms in the face of change and crisis. He warns of the dangers of theories which oversimplify the causes of crisis and their possible solutions, and which overlook the individual nature of each firm and its environment. Instead, a dynamic new vision of crisis management is offered, which takes into account different kinds of crisis demanding diverse solutions. The key role of leadership is also evaluated in relation to both internally and externally generated crises. Drawing on case studies of leading firms facing crisis solutions in a variety of environments, this truly international volume will provide valuable insight into the experience of crisis, risk and uncertainty. This title will be of interest to students of business.

This book explores how the changing nature of work intersects with and influences young people's views on their future. As an increasingly precarious service sector overtakes traditional industrial work, vocational education and training (VET) is held up as a panacea for poverty alleviation, youth unemployment and economic growth. However, the views of young people in VET themselves concerning their own work and aspirations have largely been ignored. Based on interviews and focus groups conducted with over 250 young people in VET in Romania, this book examines the types of subjectivities that are generated in the processes by which they try to make sense of future and the meanings of work. In doing so, the author identifies three ideological layers that frame their views: arguing that while the young people interviewed hold 'conventional' aspirations for stability and predictability; they were visibly influenced by neoliberal beliefs in agency, experimentation and short termism. Ultimately, a layer of low expectations crystallises unvoiced concerns over a troubling future. In highlighting young people's voices, this pioneering book calls for a recalibration of the emphasis on VET in Romania. It will appeal to students and scholars of youth studies, the sociology of work, vocational education and training and European studies.