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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Work & labour
What types of jobs are growing: well-paid managerial jobs or low-paid auxiliary jobs, high-end professional jobs or bottom-end service jobs? Can occupational change transform affluent countries into enlarged middle-class societies? Or, on the contrary, are we heading towards a future of increasingly divided class societies? Do changes in the employment structure allow forthcoming generations to move towards more rewarding jobs than those held by their parents - or is downward mobility the more likely outcome? This book throws new light on these timely questions by drawing on extensive evidence of employment data on the pattern of occupational change in Britain, Denmark, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland since 1990. It documents the change in the employment structure, and examines the five underlying driving forces: technology, globalization, education, migration, and institutions. The book discusses whether governments really have no other choice than either occupational upgrading with soaring unemployment or full employment with expanding low-end jobs. The book gives a clear picture of the future of work, skills, and employment in today's Europe, contributing to the debate in economic sociology and labour economics.
While many books provide guidance to the construction of theory, the process of theorizing itself has been addressed far less. The aim of this book is to encourage researchers to reflect upon their subjective theorizing practices and to engage in dialogue about theorizing in organization studies. Drawing on interviews with eight key figures in the field, this book provides guidance for how to theorize, and how to do so well, using the key tools of the theorizers. Providing rich insights, these interviews with Professors David Boje, Barbara Czarniawska, Kenneth Gergen, Tor Hernes, Geert Hofstede, Edgar Schein, Andrew Van de Ven and Karl Weick give an opportunity to learn from some of the most successful theorists in the field of organization studies. By addressing aspects of theorizing which seek to make it a personal and meaningful endeavour, this book goes beyond the sole aim of getting published and encourages the reader to develop their own unique way of theorizing. This book will be an invaluable tool for graduate researchers and scholars looking to refine their theorizing practices in order to produce outstanding theoretical work. Its insights will also be of use for anyone seeking to breathe new life into their work, with its insightful commentary on the practices of successful theorists.
In Crisis, Inequalities and Poverty, Schettino and Clementi provide an empirical and theoretical analysis of the economic breakdown that has characterised the last two decades of capitalist development - from the Lehman collapse to the Covid-19 pandemic - with a particular focus on the impact on poverty and inequality. The book provides a materialist account of the current global crisis of overproduction and looks at the link between capitalist crisis and systemic inequity, making the case through detailed quantification that the principal engine of these structural phenomena is in fact the general law of accumulation of the capitalist mode of production.
Despite decades of efforts to combat homelessness, many people continue to experience it in Canada's major cities. There are a number of barriers that prevent effective responses to homelessness, including a lack of agreement on the fundamental question: what is homelessness? In Multiple Barriers, Alison Smith explores the forces that shape intergovernmental and multilevel governance dynamics to help better understand why, despite the best efforts of community and advocacy groups, homelessness remains as persistent as ever. Drawing on nearly 100 interviews with key actors in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal, as well as extensive participant observation, Smith argues that institutional differences across cities interact with ideas regarding homelessness to contribute to very different models of governance. Multiple Barriers shows that the genuine involvement of locally based service providers, with the development of policy, are necessary for an effective, equitable, and enduring solution to the homelessness crisis in Canada.
Working Mothers in Europe combines comparative perspectives on social policies with analyses of mothers' practices as evidenced in macro data and as explored in country based case studies. Social policy research has emphasised the impact of particular welfare systems and their policies on women's integration into the labour market and the organisation of care and work. However, the authors argue that policies are not the only factor, and, hitherto, we have very little knowledge of the precise interactions between social policies and social practices of individuals and families. In order to accurately grasp the cross-country variation of mothers' work and care arrangements in Europe, this book assembles a comparative approach towards welfare systems and social policies with an analysis of mothers' social practices in several European countries. Exploring the ways in which working mothers manage to combine care responsibilities and paid work on the basis of diverse public and private resources, this book will be invaluable to academics, researchers and students interested in the social sciences. More generally, the book will greatly appeal to those with an interest in women's employment, gender relations and the needs of children as matters that are tackled in the interaction between social policy and individuals.
This volume brings together researchers from a diverse array of academic disciplines - including sociology, organization theory, strategy and psychology - to address the question of what organizations can do to better recognize novel ideas and support their proponents in implementing those ideas. The contributors draw from different theoretical perspectives and empirical papers use both qualitative and/or quantitative methods in their analysis. All contributions speak to a common set of phenomena at the intersection of creativity, innovation, and social evaluation in a variety of cultural fields. In the first section of the volume - searching for novelty - the papers discuss different conceptualizations of novelty and examine the conditions that foster the creation of new ideas or product offerings. In the second section of the volume - seeing novelty - the papers discuss how novelty is evaluated and recognized both within and outside organizations. Papers in the third and final section - sustaining novelty - explore how these evaluations affect the support that novelty receives in its journey to gain legitimacy. Setting an agenda for a more holistic theory on the emergence, evaluation, and legitimation of novelty, this volume showcases how novelty generation, recognition, and legitimation correspond to distinct phases of the journey of novelty, from the moment it makes its appearance in the world to the moment it takes root and propagates.
Vicente Lombardo Toledano was the founder of numerous labour union organisations in Mexico and Latin America between the 1920s to the 1960s. He was not only an organiser but also a broker between the unions, the government, and business leaders, able to disentangle difficult conflicts. He cooperated closely with the governments of Mexico and other Latin American nations and worked with the representatives of the Soviet Union when he considered it useful. As a result he was alternately seen as a government stooge or a communist, even though he was never a member of the party or of the Mexican government administration. Daniela Spenser's is the first biography of Lombardo Toledano based on his extensive private papers, on primary sources from European, Mexican and American archives, and on personal interviews. Her even-keeled portrayal of the man counters previous hagiographies and/or vilifications.
This anthology addresses and analyses the transformation of interconnected spaces and spatial entanglements in the Atlantic rim during the era of the slave trade by focusing on the Danish possessions on the Gold Coast and their Caribbean islands of Saint Thomas, Saint Jan and Saint Croix as well as on the Swedish Caribbean island of Saint Barthelemy. The first part of the anthology addresses aspects of interconnectedness in West Africa, in particular the relationship between Africans and Danes on the Gold Coast. The second part of this volume examines various aspects of interconnectedness, creolisation and experiences of Danish and Swedish slave rules in the Caribbean. *Ports of Globalisationis now available in paperback for individual customers.
Social marginalisation due to changing labour markets in a global, knowledge-intensive economy poses a major challenge to international welfare states. Addressing the problem from a citizenship perspective, this book contributes significantly to the understanding of policy problems and the development of appropriate strategies "Changing labour markets, welfare policies and citizenship" readdresses the question of how full citizenship may be preserved and developed in the face of enduring labour market pressures. It: clarifies the relationship between changing labour markets, welfare policies and citizenship; discusses possible ways in which the spill-over effect from labour market marginality to loss of citizenship can be prevented; specifies this problem in relation to the young, older people, men and women and immigrants; offers theoretical and conceptual definitions of citizenship as a new, alternative approach to empirical analyses of labour market marginalisation and its consequences; and highlights the lessons to be learned from differing approaches in European countries This book provides important insights for academics and students in comparative social policy, sociology
Historians have traditionally seen domestic service as an obsolete
or redundant sector from the middle of the twentieth century.
Knowing Their Place challenges this by linking the early twentieth
century employment of maids and cooks to later practices of
employing au pairs, mothers' helps, and cleaners. Lucy Delap tells
the story of lives and labour within twentieth century British
homes, from great houses to suburbs and slums, and charts the
interactions of servants and employers along with the intense
controversies and emotions they inspired.
'de Janasz and Crossman have drawn on their professional colleagues to provide an impressive collection of ''tried and true'' experiential exercises to help students gain hands-on understanding of human resource management. These useful exercises engage students in the kind of active learning that is essential to apply HRM theories to concrete, practical situations. In reflecting on their experiential learning, students acquire a deeper, more personal knowledge of what HRM is all about. Teaching Human Resource Management: An Experiential Approach is an essential and valuable companion to more standard texts in HRM.' - Thomas G. Cummings, University of Southern California, US 'This pioneering book by de Janasz and Grossman is a terrific resource. It not only covers a wide range and comprehensive set of topics with which all HRM students (and practitioners) need to be familiar. It also offers well-designed experiential exercises that promote students' active engagement with the topic at hand. I would love to take the course that uses this book!' - Gary N. Powell, University of Connecticut and Lancaster University, US 'An experiential approach to the teaching of HRM makes each topic come alive. By actively participating and becoming highly engaged in each exercise, students generate important lessons that tie theory to practice. The exercises in this book enable all of that and they fill an important gap. ''Tried and true'' exercises in 15 key areas of HR, developed by a diverse group of HR scholars, provide choice, flexibility, and comprehensiveness to any HR course or executive education program.' - Wayne Cascio, University of Colorado, Denver, US This book breathes life into the teaching of Human Resource Management (HRM) by creating learning that applies the theoretical aspects of the discipline to meaningful contexts. In this way, readers will be able to better relate theoretical concepts to workplace decisions and dilemmas. The management of human resources (HR) is a critical function contributing to an organization?s competitiveness in ways that are at least as important as the management of financial and capital resources. To that end, it is essential that future managers and HR specialists destined for careers in business, government and not for profit organizations develop key skills and competences in HR. Experiential learning ignites the desire to learn, while revealing the importance and impact of knowledge and skills necessary to analyze and resolve HR-related dilemmas and challenges in contemporary organizations. While many publications provide direction and advice on the teaching of organizational behavior and leadership, it is harder to find accessible books to support the teaching of HR in motivating and grounded ways. The authors include over 65 exercises, activities, and cases for the undergraduate, MBA and executive learning classrooms. HR professors and practitioners will find it of value and students will be left feeling well prepared for the kinds of situations that await them in the field of? - and situations requiring expertise in? - HR.
Skills are frequently in the news and in the public eye in every country. Stories highlight concerns about education and literacy standards, grades, learning by rote, and university students being unprepared for work, as well as debates surrounding internships and apprenticeships, and social exclusion through skills policy. The recent financial crisis has forced education and training to take a back seat, and has caused an increase in youth unemployment. Skill and skilled work are widely considered important for promoting both prosperity and social justice. But how do we define skill? Skills and Skilled Work brings together multiple perspectives- economics, sociology, management, psychology, and political science- to present an original framework for understanding skills, skilled work, and surrounding policies. Focussing on common themes across countries, it establishes the concept and measurement of skill, and investigates the role of employers, workers, and other social actors. It considers a variety of skill problems and how a social response from the government can be understood. Based on the findings of economics, management science, and theories of social determination, it develops a rationale for social intervention beyond market failure. This book weighs up both the prospects and the limitations of what can be achieved for societies with a better emphasis on skills and skilled work, and it promotes the study of skill in modern economies as a distinct sub-field.
This book presents scholarly reflections on women's entrepreneurial propensity and on women's entrepreneurship in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Contributing to a country's innovativeness and competitiveness, women entrepreneurs also promote healthy social and economic growth and act as mentors and role models for younger women. However, the low involvement of women in STEM, which begins at education, affects the share of women entrepreneurs in these fields. The authors address these issues and highlight the output of research studies by bringing together both global and country-specific evidence. Researchers and policymakers interested in advancing women's entrepreneurship, especially in STEM, will particularly benefit from this book.
This book offers a critical reflection on the operation and effects of labour regulation. It articulates the broad goals and extensive potential for it to contribute to inclusive development, while also considering the limits of some areas of regulation and governance. Drawing on both field studies and innovative theoretical perspectives, the contributors reveal an emerging consensus that labour regulation is neither negative nor positive for economic and social outcomes. By comparing the concerns and methodologies of various disciplines, they argue that balanced regulation is essential. Following analysis of how the global financial crisis has increased labour market segmentation, the book addresses the needs of key groups often at the periphery, including young women, workers in the informal economy, migrants and home-care workers. The book argues that effective and efficient labour market regulation can contribute to achieving key policy goals of employment formalization and inclusive labour markets, while also pursuing equitable distribution. An important comparative work, academics and students will find this book to be of exceptional value, particularly those studying law, economics, political science, international relations and development studies. Practitioners and policy-makers from both developed and developing countries will also benefit from the wide range of perspectives. Contributors include: D. Bailey, F. Bertranou, L. Casanova, S. Charlesworth, A. De Ruyter, C. Fenwick, M. Freedland, J. Grundy, B.-H. Lee, R. Rachmawati, J. Rubery, M.I. Syaebani, M.P. Thomas, K. Tijdens, V. Van Goethem, M. Van Klaveren, A.M. Vargas Falla, L.F. Vosko, T. Warnecke
Walking around the commercial streets of New York, San Francisco, Milan, London, or Paris and looking at the succession of multinational chain stores' windows, you can easily forget what country you are in. However, if you hear the small talk among the employees, you hear very different stories. In New York, a 30-year-old woman is worried because she does not know if she will work enough hours to make a living the following week-whereas, in Milan, a mother of the same age knows she will work 20 hours a week but is concerned about whether her contract will be renewed at the end of the following month. Following three years of fieldwork, which included 100 in-depth interviews with front-line retail workers and unionists in New York City and Milan, Front-Line Workers in the Global Service Economy investigates both the lived experiences of salespersons in the "fast fashion" industry-a retail sector made of large chains of stores selling fashion garments at low prices-and the possibilities of collective action and structured forms of resistance to these global trends. In the face of economic globalization and vigorous managerial efforts to minimize labor costs and to standardize the retail experience, mass fashion workers' stories tell us how strong the pressure toward work devaluation in low-skilled service sectors can be, and how devastating its effects are on the workers themselves.
With work spanning management, political science, sociology, public administration and education, James G. March was a founder of organization theory. Honouring his exceptional ability to go beyond the models of rationality so prevalent in much of organizational scholarship, this edited collection builds on March's imaginative, evocative ideas and encourages others to appreciate and explore them. Jim March left his co-authors Herbert Simon and Richard Cyert at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where they had founded what is known as the Carnegie School and moved to California in the mid 1960s. This volume highlights and builds on many of the complements and alternatives to rationality that March articulated once settled at Stanford: a technology of foolishness, garbage can models of decision making, a logic of appropriateness, organizational learning, and a variety of models of chance and luck. Employing a variety of methodological tools including models, laboratory experiments and quantitative and qualitative analysis, the chapters seek to extend our understandings of how decisions happen, how actors behave, how organizations navigate the traps of exploration and exploitation, and how we might contemplate human action in terms of truth, beauty and justice. The volume is a celebration of Jim by his students and colleagues that gives readers a sense of this extraordinary person, poet, sage and scholar.
This selection of John Creedy's essays on labour economics sheds light on the areas of labour mobility, skilled labour markets and trade unions and wages.Among other issues, Professor Creedy discusses: the effects of migration, population ageing and retirement on the labour market the economic analysis of internal labour markets job mobility, earnings and responsibility in skilled labour markets with a particular emphasis on chemists and professional scientists the relationship between trade unions, tax levels and relative wages Labour Mobility, Earnings and Unemployment will be a valuable point of reference for students and scholars of labour economics.
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 Australian workplace continues to become more ethnically diverse as multiculturalism becomes a lived reality on a substantial scale. This change makes it vital to understand exclusionary or discriminatory practices and a detailed investigation of the potential relationship between work stress, acculturation, and its impact on emotional labour for minority group members has not been well researched. The Ethnically Diverse Workplace: Experience of Immigrant Indian Professionals in Australia documents the perceptions and experiences of exclusion after inclusion by Indian immigrants, particularly professionals. Many of the reports of discriminatory practices towards Indian immigrants or their stigmatisation based on accent, skin tone or national origin are anecdotal in nature and this book will seek to explain such practices and their impacts on the Indian immigrant community. The Ethnically Diverse Workplace works to encourage and promote greater awareness and understanding so that immigrant Indian professionals maybe better understood and served in Australia.
While Europe is certainly one of the richest and most educated
areas of the world, some of the challenges faced by the old
continent are staggering: low economic growth, structural
difficulties in the labour market, and increasing international
competition. Politicians and policymakers may advocate different
means of overcoming the potential economic decline of Europe, but
most agree that Europe needs to strengthen human capital, its
ultimate competitive advantage in the world economy.
The economic success of the Roman Empire was unparalleled in the West until the early modern period. While favourable natural conditions, capital accumulation, technology and political stability all contributed to this, economic performance ultimately depended on the ability to mobilize, train and co-ordinate human work efforts. In Work, Labour, and Professions in the Roman World, the authors discuss new insights, ideas and interpretations on the role of labour and human resources in the Roman economy. They study the various ways in which work was mobilised and organised and how these processes were regulated. Work as a production factor, however, is not the exclusive focus of this volume. Throughout the chapters, the contributors also provide an analysis of work as a social and cultural phenomenon in Ancient Rome.
Humanizing LIS Education and Practice: Diversity by Design demonstrates that diversity concerns are relevant to all and need to be approached in a systematic way. Developing the Diversity by Design concept articulated by Dali and Caidi in 2017, the book promotes the notion of the diversity mindset. Grouped into three parts, the chapters within this volume have been written by an international team of seasoned academics and practitioners who make diversity integral to their professional and scholarly activities. Building on the Diversity by Design approach, the book presents case studies with practice models for two primary audiences: LIS educators and LIS practitioners. Chapters cover a range of issues, including, but not limited to, academic promotion and tenure; the decolonization of LIS education; engaging Indigenous and multicultural communities; librarians' professional development in diversity and social justice; and the decolonization of library access practices and policies. As a collection, the book illustrates a systems-thinking approach to fostering diversity and inclusion in LIS, integrating it by design into the LIS curriculum and professional practice. Calling on individuals, organizations, policymakers, and LIS educators to make diversity integral to their daily activities and curriculum, Humanizing LIS Education and Practice: Diversity by Design will be of interest to anyone engaged in research and professional practice in Library and Information Science.
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.
Performance Anxiety analyses the efforts of German elites, from 1890 to 1945, to raise the productivity and psychological performance of workers through the promotion of mass sports. Michael Hau reveals how politicians, sports officials, medical professionals, and business leaders, articulated a vision of a human economy that was coopted in 1933 by Nazi officials in order to promote competition in the workplace. Hau's original and startling study is the first to establish how Nazi leaders' discourse about sports and performance was used to support their claims that Germany was on its way to becoming a true meritocracy. Performance Anxiety is essential reading for political, social, and sports historians alike. |
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