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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Work & labour
Discover what challenges lie ahead for occupational therapists Single women receiving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) often find themselves tangled in difficulties because of current changes in welfare reform, including workfare. Women's Immersion in a Workfare Program: Emerging Challenges for Occupational Therapists describes the journey of six single mothers in workfarea proactive alternative to conventional welfareand their emergence with unique talents and perseverance to balance motherhood and work in the face of adversity. This compassionate and informative text uses the participants' own authentic voicesin poems, plays, and narrativesto tell their stories of survival and success in this unique governmental program. Women's Immersion in a Workfare Program: Emerging Challenges for Occupational Therapists first provides a socio-historical overview to place the issues in context, and then comprehensively reviews the interaction between barriers to work and self-sufficiency, including kinship systems, mental health issues, complying with workfare, family role strain, and psychological well-being. The research findings examine how the women receiving TANF experience the mandatory work program as preparation for transition into the workforce, how the women fit the mandatory program into their daily life, and how the women feel about the transition into the workforce. Topics discussed in Women's Immersion in a Workfare Program: Emerging Challenges for Occupational Therapists include: welfare reform history of single mothers transition to self-sufficiency experience of workfare qualitative research methodology surviving adversity impact of welfare reform on children Women's Immersion in a Workfare Program: Emerging Challenges for Occupational Therapists is a revealing, at times moving text for occupational therapists, nurses, social workers, welfare reform professionals, researchers, educators, and students.
Building on his previous book, The Customer's Victory, François Dupuy outlines ways to manage a change process. Using practical examples from new case studies and discussion of current theories of organizational change, this book explains how true organizational change can be effected in both private businesses and public organizations. With a strong pedagogical format, case studies and a helpful glossary of terms, this is an invaluable guide both for managers having to deal with change implementation and for students and researchers of change management.
Anyone who has ever had a job has probably experienced work-related stress at some point or another. For many workers, however, job-related stress is experienced every day and reaches more extreme levels. Four in ten American workers say that their jobs are very or extremely stressful. Job stress is recognized as an epidemic in the workplace, and its economic and health care costs are staggering: by some estimates over $ 1 billion per year in lost productivity, absenteeism and worker turnover, and at least that much in treating its health effects, ranging from anxiety and psychological depression to cardiovascular disease and hypertension. Why are so many American workers so stressed out by their jobs? Many psychologists say stress is the result of a mismatch between the characteristics of a job and the personality of the worker. Many management consultants propose reducing stress by redesigning jobs and developing better individual strategies for coping with their stress. But, these explanations are not the whole story. They don t explain why some jobs and some occupations are more stressful than other jobs and occupations, regardless of the personalities and coping strategies of individual workers. Why do auto assembly line workers and air traffic controllers report more job stress than university professors, self-employed business owners, or corporate managers (yes, managers )? The authors of "Work and Mental Health in Social Context" take a different approach to understanding the causes of job stress. Job stress is "systematically "created by the characteristics of the jobs themselves: by the workers occupation, the organizations in which they work, their placements in different labor markets, and by broader social, economic and institutional structures, processes and events. And "disparities" in job stress are "systematically" determined in much the same way as are other disparities in health, income, and mobility opportunities. In taking this approach, the authors draw on the observations and insights from a diverse field of sociological and economic theories and research. These go back to the nineteenth century writings of Marx, Weber and Durkheim on the relationship between work and well-being. They also include the more contemporary work in organizational sociology, structural labor market research from sociology and economics, research on unemployment and economic cycles, and research on institutional environments. This has allowed the authors to develop a unified framework that extends sociological models of income inequality and status attainment (or allocation) to the explanation of non-economic, health-related outcomes of work. Using a multi-level structural model, this timely and comprehensive volume explores what is stressful about work, and why; specifically address these and questions and more: -What characteristics of jobs are the most stressful; what characteristics reduce stress? -Why do work organizations structure some jobs to be highly stressful and some jobs to be much less stressful? Is work in a bureaucracy really more stressful? -How is occupational status occupational power and authority related to the stressfulness of work? -How does the segmentation of labor markets by occupation, industry, race, gender, and citizenship maintain disparities in job stress? - Why is unemployment stressful to workers who don t lose their jobs? -How do public policies on employment status, collective bargaining, overtime affect job stress? -Is work in the current Post (neo) Fordist era of work more or less stressful than work during the Fordist era? In addition to providing a new way to understand the sociological causes of job stress and mental health, the model that the authors provide has broad applications to further study of this important area of research. This volume will be of key interest to sociologists and other researchers studying social stratification, public health, political economy, institutional and organizational theory. "
Child labor greatly contributed to the cultural and economic success of the British Victorian theatrical industry. This book highlights the complexities of the battle for child labor laws, the arguments for the needs of the theatre industry, and the weight of opposition that confronted any attempt to control employers.
This study follows over 200 women making employment and family choices during their first decade after college graduation. Based on interview responses, the authors organize the women into four life choice categories: Careerists, Homemakers, Breadwinners, and Nesters. Using models of adult change as well as extensive quotes and empirical analyses, the authors identify the facilitators and barriers for each alternative. Women relate the consequences of each choice for themselves, their spouses, and their children. While each group faced unique problems, in all groups, women were satisfied with career and family aspects of their choices if they followed their individual values, found supportive friends, coworkers and spouses, and if they worked in those rare challenging jobs in family-supportive organizations. The book explores the ways women, spouses, counselors, and employers can facilitate satisfying life choices and how to anticipate the questions each group faces in their next decade.
In this volume the authors present an alternative approach to the history of Gypsies and Travelling Groups in Western-Europe. By focusing on processes of social construction, stigmatization and categorization, they offer new insights into the development of government policies towards itinerants in general and the ethnicization of some of these groups in particular. They analyze the Western images and representations of Gypsies and other itinerant groups, at the same time focusing on their functions for the labor market. By doing so, they add a new chapter to the field of social history.
This significant book explains how work-life balance is being destroyed because individuals fail to link their work effort with its adverse environmental effects and the personal costs they impose. The burgeoning literature dealing with work-life balance suggests that the developed world is more interested in this issue today than at any other time in the recent past. Provocative and insightful, Work, Leisure and the Environment presents a rigorous explanation based on economic theory as to why contemporary societies suffer from over-work and work-life imbalance, asserting that they are both the cause and effect of environmental degradation. The author focuses upon a fundamental flaw in contemporary market economies that causes individuals to unknowingly reduce their well-being by working and consuming excessively, while enjoying inadequate leisure time. It is argued that this inability to correctly assess the benefits derived from their work effort causes individuals to place unreasonable and unsustainable demands on the environment. By ignoring the environmental destruction that accompanies work effort, its benefits are overestimated and, as a consequence, individuals voluntarily choose to work longer hours than they should. This engaging volume will have widespread appeal amongst researchers and policymakers interested in the environment, consumerism and labour markets and will also be an invaluable reference tool for studies into leisure and work-life balance.
"Home Front" examines the gendered exploitation of labor in the household from a postmodern Marxian perspective. The authors of this volume use the anti-foundationalist Marxian economic theories first formulated by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff to explore power, domination, and exploitation in the modern household.
This book addresses changes in socio-economic systems. To do so, it employs the evolutional approach, which views changes in socio-economic systems from an evolutionary standpoint connecting the past, present and future, and focuses on preventing sudden, high-risk changes. The changes in socio-economic systems are also studied with the help of the system approach, which calls for assessing complex economic subjects, characterized by the sustainable connections between their elements, as socio-economic systems. Combining these two approaches in the context of studying the changes in socio-economic systems is unprecedented in modern economic science. The book studies various issues that cover both fundamental aspects of the system organization of economy and management and applied aspects of managing changes in socio-economic systems. The target audience of the book includes scholars and experts whose work involves studying the dynamic process of modern socio-economic systems' development. The scientific conclusions and practical recommendations that the book provides can be applied to the development and implementation of state economic policy in various countries around the world.
In third world countries an increasing number of people have been drawn into the process of industrialization as wage workers. Only when confronted with their practices, strategies and struggles can the competing and contradictory policies they face at the level of capital and state be explained. Consequently, the empirical analyses here presented cover the limits set by workers to exploitation in workshop production, ethnicity as a workers' strategy, the role of workers' absenteeism and turnover, and labour strategies in a situation of recession and de-industrialisation. Using a historical approach labour migration, union strategy for democratisation, and the world-scale pattern of labour unrest are studied as outcomes of social conflict. Some of the chapters in this book focus on single events in a factory, others on a branch or a region in a long-time perspective. They all contribute to an empirical and theoretical investigation of the impact of industrial workers' actions on societies in transition. They also share the same urge to look beneath the surface in order to find the unnamed, and to understand how they make history.
In 1979, serious research was just beginning on the connections between stratification outcomes and organizations. Data suitable for investigating these connections were scarce, and the general wisdom was that they would remain scarce--since organizational case studies were seen as the only means of gathering linked individual and organizational data. The case study approach does allow one to link the two types of data, but gathering such data on more than a few organizations is prohibitively expensive and difficult, and having only a few organizations limits g- eralizability. To help solve this problem, we developed the idea of a survey of a random sample of several thousand employed individuals, followed by a second survey of their several thousand employing or- nizations. This method, we reasoned, would provide us with a gen- alizable, simple random sample of individuals, coupled with a weighted random sample of organizations (weighted, of course, by size of orga- zation). An added benefit would be that these valuable data could be gathered by a survey organization for the price of two simple surveys. It was not an easy idea to sell. We developed it into a proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF), and though the reviewers were o- erwise sympathetic, they were almost unanimous in their contention that such a survey would not work because "obviously" the great maj- ity of respondents would refuse to reveal exactly who their employers were.
This book presents racial stratification as the underlying system that accounts for the differential in outcomes in the labour market. It employs critical race theory to discuss the operation, research, maintenance and impact of racial stratification. Making innovative use of a stratification framework to expose the pervasiveness of racial inequality, this book teaches readers how to use critical race theory to investigate the racial hierarchy and develop a race consciousness. Using Ireland as a case study, Ebun Joseph examines how migrants navigate the labour market and respond to their marginality. While based on a study of Ireland, Joseph's theoretical approach and insight into migrant perspectives will appeal to readers interested in social justice, diversity and inclusion, race and ethnicity, and critical whiteness and migration. -- .
Traditional approaches to vocational rehabilitation, such as skills training classes, job clubs, and sheltered employment, have not been successful in helping people with severe mental illness gain competitive employment. Supported employment, in which clients are placed in jobs and then trained by on-site coaches, is a radically new conceptual approach to vocational rehabilitation designed for people with developmental disabilities. The Individual Placement and Support (IPS) method utilizes the supported employment concept, but modifies it for use with the severely mentally ill. It is the only approach that has a strong empirical research base: rates of competitive employment are 40% or more in IPS programs, compared to 15% in traditional mental health programs. The third volume in the Innovations in Practice and Service Delivery with Vulnerable Populations series, this will be extremely useful to students in psychiatric rehabilitation programs and social work classes dealing with the severely mentally ill, as well as to practitioners in the field.
Public accountants are being attacked from all sides. Stock and bond holders, the United States Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, clients, and even members of the profession itself, all accuse accountants of failing in their watchdog duties as auditors and of approving financial statements that follow questionable accounting rules. Academic as well as other critics fault the profession for failing to innovate, particularly in respect to accounting for the effects of inflation. The attacks often take the form of litigation that has resulted in the payment of hundreds of millions of dollars in damages by firms and their liability insurers. This situation is not unique to the United States. Similar attacks can be observed in Canada, the United Kingdom, and other countries. Indeed, the viability of the external audit is today in question, as public accountants increasingly seek to avoid potentially ruinous engagements and diversify into other activities. Drawing on his long and extensive experience as both practitioner and academic, the author traces the history of accounting and auditing, analyzing the factors---domestic and international---that have led to the contemporary problems of the profession. He prescribes measures that can and should be taken in order to restore public accounting to its former status and esteem. He proposes major changes in federal and state legislation, the current system of accountancy education and training, accounting and auditing standard setting, and existing models of historical financial reporting. In addition, he presents a blueprint for a new type of financial report designed to improve the utility of financial statements for investment decisions.
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.
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.
As the rich have got richer and households have become busier, demand for commoditized household services has increased. While much is known about maids and nannies, this book is distinctive in focusing on masculinized domestic services. Through two case-studies - Polish handymen in the UK and the households that employ them and Mexican jardineros in the USA - the book demonstrates how, by outsourcing, householders can mitigate the "father time-bind" arising from tensions between new expectations for involved fathering, economic expectations regarding working hours, and a highly gendered and neo-liberal social policy regime, and shows how the consequences of this reaches beyond the households into the lives of the migrant men who work for them. Through the focus on male domestic work, the book identifies distinctly gendered understandings of domestic work and care, and shows how these influence the differential economic value of and emotional attachment to different forms of domestic work, and the gendered identities of those supplying and buying these services. In doing so, the book reveals much about the dynamic and varied understandings of masculinity.
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.
Despite the availability of some formal legal remedies, women attorneys rarely sue their employers, and often do not challenge discriminatory behavior. This book explores this seemingly contradictory situation, where lawyers fail to employ the legal system on their own behalf. By exploring attorneys' use of legal discourse in an Internet community, Baumle examines whether the law can in fact serve as a useful tool to challenge inequality. The Internet community itself provides a protected, semi-anonymous forum in which to engage in such discourse, thereby subverting many of the barriers that currently exist to challenging gender inequality in the legal practice.
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.
The world changes like the patterns in a kaleidoscope: trends expand, contract, break up, melt, disintegrate and disappear, while others are formed. Change - as opposed to stasis - is our normal condition, the only certainty in our lives, hence the need to create tools that provide organizations with the means to tackle change and navigate complexity. We must accept the reality of constant change and be prepared for a heavy shift in perspective: interconnection versus separation, acceleration versus linearity and discontinuity versus continuity. Anticipating the future requires more than the traditional predictive models (forecasting) based on the forward projection of past experiences. Advanced methods use anticipation logic (foresight) and build probable scenarios taking into account weak signals, emerging trends, coexisting presents and potential paths of evolution. Corporate foresight is fundamental to interpret and lead change. The two cornerstones of foresight are organization and management. As concerns organization, the authors advocate the separation of research (oriented to the market of tomorrow) from development (oriented to the market of today), the establishment of a foresight unit and the concentration of research activities mainly on the acquisition and recombination of external know-how. As regards management, after an overview of state-of-the-art literature on forecasting methods, the authors propose the implementation of a "future coverage" methodology, which enables companies to measure and verify the consistency between trends, strategic vision and offered products. These organizational and managing tools are then tested in a case study: the Italian company Eurotech SpA, a leader in the ICT sector.
The Nordic welfare states have found themselves in the firing line
of post-industrial developments, resulting in fundamental changes
in societal institutions at all levels. In particular, changes in
the labour market and family, reinforced by processes of migration
and international market integration, have presented the welfare
states with new social needs to attend to. This book critically
explores responses to changing social risks across areas such as
structural unemployment, entrepreneurship, immigration, single
parenthood, education and health. It explores critical changes in
the structure of the Nordic welfare states and the social policy
strategies for alleviating social risks. While the Nordic countries
are shining in most international comparisons, such changes and
their wider implications have often been overlooked in the
literature. The book raises the question whether certain risks are
even being evoked actively through new social policies instating
incentive structures concomitant with policy goals in order to
encourage certain behaviour among citizens.
In Why Leaders Fail and What it Teaches Us About Leadership Willem Fourie helps us make sense of leaders’ failures and why our expectation of leadership infallibility is misguided Whereas some leadership failures can be rectified, others lead to the failure of teams, organisations or institutions. Using cutting-edge research and reflective practices, Fourie explores leaders’ failure at these personal, interpersonal, group, organisational levels and beyond. He explores five factors that cause leaders to fail:
The author shows that our heroic bias – the expectation that leaders should be exceptional, charismatic individuals with a higher level of agency than other people – in many contexts increases the chances of leaders failing. The book offers readers with the tools to understand and respond to leader failure, distilled into seven lessons for post-heroic leaders. This is an ideal book for students and researchers in leadership, leadership development and management as well as professionals seeking to enhance their leadership skills.
This book explores the extent to which a transformation of public employment regimes has taken place in four Western countries, and the factors influencing the pathways of reform. It demonstrates how public employment regimes have unravelled in different domains of public service, contesting the idea that the state remains a 'model' employer. |
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