Examines the ongoing process of how labor and work are understood in the contemporary marketplace Offers important sociological, political, and economic analysis of labor, management, organization, and work as a social phenomena Contributions from key scholars across an array of disciplines

The transition from school to work is recognized by developmental psychologists as a significant phase in maturation of young people. In the 1990s the likelihood that the transition might be delayed by a period of prolonged unemployment was greater than any time since the 1930s. The psychological consequences of such a delay need to be understood because they may be damaging to both the individual and to society, particularly if they are long-lasting. Such an understanding is essential for the development of sound policy in relation to youth unemployment. Originally published in 1993, Growing up with Unemployment describes a major longitudinal study of a large group of South Australian school leavers through the 1980s. It assesses the scale and context of the problem and reviews the methods and theories that have been developed to study the psychological impact of unemployment. It also looks at those factors which may contribute towards helping young people cope with it, such as financial security, social support and being involved in constructive activities with other people. The authors also examine how we might be able to predict future unemployment and understand the relationship between it and alcohol consumption, smoking and drug use. This book describes a major study with important implications for employment policy, as well as future theory and research. This title will be interesting historical reading for students of psychology and social policy, policy makers and all those who deal with young people.

Over the past 50 years the global labour market is transforming from reliable employment to low-wage and unstable informal and precarious jobs. This ineluctable shift is a consequence of the concentrated application of neoliberalism since the 1980s, as capitalism is converting standardised labour markets in the developed Global North into contingent and informal labour. Platform Labour and Global Logistics: A Research Companion examines the most important developments and features of global logistics and the emergence of the platform economy through historical comparative chapters and case studies. Part I surveys the logistics revolution and its impact on labour in key sectors of the global economy and probes the viability of the platform as a generator of economic and financial growth and innovation. The chapters of Part 1 offer a fulsome analysis and critique of the economic and technical reconfiguration brought on by neoliberal capitalism and the diffusion of the platform and logistics as a feasible model into the future. Part II examines labour restructuring from standardized to informal work through the platform and information technology, and the political and environmental challenges to labour. Part III provides global case studies on the informal economy through case studies of crucial economies where the platform has become dominant, and Part IV examines how the platform has contributed to geographic mobility and labour migration, and the consequences on workers. Platform Labour and Global Logistics: A Research Companion presents a unique contribution to the political economy literature through highlighting the significance of the impact of the platform and logistics on the working class and potential challenges from labour across the world. This book is intended for academics, researchers and students studying technological innovation, global supply chains, labour restructuring, and worker resistance.

Over the past 50 years the global labour market is transforming from reliable employment to low-wage and unstable informal and precarious jobs. This ineluctable shift is a consequence of the concentrated application of neoliberalism since the 1980s, as capitalism is converting standardised labour markets in the developed Global North into contingent and informal labour. Platform Labour and Global Logistics: A Research Companion examines the most important developments and features of global logistics and the emergence of the platform economy through historical comparative chapters and case studies. Part I surveys the logistics revolution and its impact on labour in key sectors of the global economy and probes the viability of the platform as a generator of economic and financial growth and innovation. The chapters of Part 1 offer a fulsome analysis and critique of the economic and technical reconfiguration brought on by neoliberal capitalism and the diffusion of the platform and logistics as a feasible model into the future. Part II examines labour restructuring from standardized to informal work through the platform and information technology, and the political and environmental challenges to labour. Part III provides global case studies on the informal economy through case studies of crucial economies where the platform has become dominant, and Part IV examines how the platform has contributed to geographic mobility and labour migration, and the consequences on workers. Platform Labour and Global Logistics: A Research Companion presents a unique contribution to the political economy literature through highlighting the significance of the impact of the platform and logistics on the working class and potential challenges from labour across the world. This book is intended for academics, researchers and students studying technological innovation, global supply chains, labour restructuring, and worker resistance.

Popular discussions of professional women often dwell on the conflicts faced by the woman who attempts to ""have it all"", raising children while climbing up the corporate ladder. Yet for all the articles and books written on this subject, there has been little work that focuses on the experience of African American professional women or asks how their perspectives on work-family balance might be unique. Raising the Race is the first scholarly book to examine how black, married career women juggle their relationships with their extended and nuclear families, the expectations of the black community, and their desires to raise healthy, independent children. Drawing from extensive interviews with twenty-three Atlanta-based professional women who left or modified careers as attorneys, physicians, executives, and administrators, anthropologist Riche J. Daniel Barnes found that their decisions were deeply rooted in an awareness of black women's historical struggles. Departing from the possessive individualistic discourse of ""having it all"", the women profiled here think beyond their own situation - considering ways their decisions might help the entire black community. Giving a voice to women whose perspectives have been underrepresented in debates about work-family balance, Barnes's profiles enable us to perceive these women as fully fledged individuals, each with her own concerns and priorities. Yet Barnes is also able to locate many common themes from these black women's experiences, and uses them to propose policy initiatives that would improve the work and family lives of all Americans.

As was the case in many other countries, it was only in the early years of this century that Greek and Turkish labour historians began to systematically look beyond national borders to investigate their intricately interrelated histories. The studies in Working in Greece and Turkey provide an overdue exploration of labour history on both sides of the Aegean, before as well as after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Deploying the approaches of global labour history as a framework, this volume presents transnational, transcontinental, and diachronic comparisons that illuminate the shared history of Greece and Turkey.

Pastoralism has shaped livelihoods and landscapes on the African continent for millennia. Mobile livestock husbandry has generally been portrayed as an economic strategy that successfully met the challenges of low biomass productivity and environmental variability in arid and semi-arid environments. This volume focuses on the emergence, diversity, and inherent dynamics of pastoralism in Africa based on research during a twelve-year period on the southwest and northeast regions. Unraveling the complex prehistory, history, and contemporary political ecology of African pastoralism, results in insight into the ingenuity and flexibility of historical and contemporary herders.

This book examines the lives of Irish women between 1890 and 1914, tracing the shift of their labour out of the fields and into the home. Joanna Bourke shows how their position within the employment market deteriorated: married women came to be increasingly dependent on their husbands' earnings, while economic opportunities for unmarried and widowed women collapsed. More and more women devoted all their productive enterprise to performing housework. In this thoroughly documented and carefully argued study, Dr Bourke analyses the crucial elements in this change: the coincidence of sectoral shifts in the employment market, increasing investment in the rural economy, and the growth of a labour-intensive household sector. Controversially, she argues that Irish women welcomed their altered role, finding housework preferable to many of the other options available to them.

This leading, comprehensive text for courses on the sociology of work covers many vital new topics since the last edition (2015), just as it continues to offer foundational writings and discusses different types of jobs, inequality and intersectionality, work and family, and more. New to this edition: * The gig economy and new digital platforms and their effects on how work is organized. * Precarious work and precarious workers, changes that reflect fundamental changes in employment relationships, increased job insecurity, and how people think about their jobs. * The new retail, from customer interactions to a world where consumption is driven by data science. * The latest research on call centers as the archetypal 21st-century workplace, illustrating many important issues about interactive work, transnational workplaces, gender, etc. * The post-pandemic workplace, including essential workers and frontline workers, healthcare work and care workers; job flexibility, and implications for gender, work, and family.

This leading, comprehensive text for courses on the sociology of work covers many vital new topics since the last edition (2015), just as it continues to offer foundational writings and discusses different types of jobs, inequality and intersectionality, work and family, and more. New to this edition: * The gig economy and new digital platforms and their effects on how work is organized. * Precarious work and precarious workers, changes that reflect fundamental changes in employment relationships, increased job insecurity, and how people think about their jobs. * The new retail, from customer interactions to a world where consumption is driven by data science. * The latest research on call centers as the archetypal 21st-century workplace, illustrating many important issues about interactive work, transnational workplaces, gender, etc. * The post-pandemic workplace, including essential workers and frontline workers, healthcare work and care workers; job flexibility, and implications for gender, work, and family.

'A breath of fresh air' - Norman Finklestein Workers in the Global South are doomed through economic imperialism to carry the burden of the entire world. While these workers appear isolated from the Global North, they are in fact deeply integrated into global commodity chains and essential to the maintenance of global capitalism. Looking at contemporary case studies in India, the Philippines and South Africa, this book affirms the significance of political and economic representation to the struggles of workers against deepening levels of poverty and inequality that oppress the majority of people on the planet. Immanuel Ness shows that workers are eager to mobilise to improve their conditions, and can achieve lasting gains if they have sustenance and support from political organisations. From the Dickensian industrial zones of Delhi to the agrarian oligarchy on the island of Mindanao, a common element remains - when workers organise they move closer to the realisation of socialism, solidarity and equality.

How do markets function? Who creates, shapes and organizes them? And what do they mean for the relationship between labor and capital? Marketization examines how the state and capital use markets to discipline the working class. Ian Greer and Charles Umney provide a comprehensive overview of the European political economy, from the European Commission to the workplace, to show how neoliberal principles translate into market mechanisms and reshape the lives of workers. Drawing on dozens of conversations with policymakers, administrators, businesses, workers, and trade unionists across many European countries, Greer and Umney unpack marketization. They go beyond liberal theories that see markets as natural forms of economic organization and broad-brush left critiques of neoliberalism, looking behind the scenes in the current European political economy to examine the practicalities of how markets are created and manipulated by employers, policymakers and bureaucrats in pursuit of greater profitability. Far from leading to greater freedom, these processes often override the rights of individuals, degrade the status and security of workers, and undermine democratic accountability.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Trouble in the workplace - whether it is bullying, harassment or stress - is always in the headlines. Yet, in many discussions, the research and statistics that are cited prove unreliable. This book summarizes the largest specialist research programme on ill-treatment in the workplace so far undertaken. It provides a powerful antidote to half-truths and misinformation and offers a new way of conceptualizing trouble at work, moving the discussion away from individualized explanations - and talk of 'bullies' and 'victims' - towards the workplace characteristics that cause trouble at work. The biggest problems arise where organisations fail to create a workplace culture in which individuals really matter. Paradoxically, these are often the organizations which are well-versed in modern management practices.

Critical examination of the concept of 'embeddedness', the core concept of an Economic Sociology of Law. Combines insights from law, sociology, economics, and psychology. Ground-breaking study into the prioritization throughout society of interests and voices that align with doctrinal understandings of law and neoclassical understandings of economics. Will appeal to socio-legal scholars and others with interests in the intersection of law, economics and sociology.

The characteristics, nature, determinants, and size of the informal economy differ from country to country. While much research has been carried out in the context of advanced economies, less attention has been given to developing countries, especially those in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) nations. This is one of the first books to investigate Islamic finance's stance on the informal economy and to discuss it from an OIC perspective. It covers the various definitions, historical development, types, and determining factors behind the shadow economy and the reasons for people's preference to join and stay in the informal economy. Similarly, different theories are discussed in detail, thus providing a deeper understanding of the subject matter. The book examines the indicators of the informal sector, such as unemployment, regulation, and taxation, and the effect of financial development and the role of financial inclusion in informal economy in the case of OIC countries compared to non-OIC countries. It defines the main features of the informal economy and discusses their implications for policy formation and implementation. Additionally, the author provides guidance on Islamic finance's role in the informal economy and offers policy recommendations in order to bring more people into the formal economy. The book presents deep and specialist knowledge on the shadow economy as well as facts and figures pertaining to OIC countries, and, as such, will open the door for future research in this important but understudied field, especially from an Islamic finance angle. It can be used as a comprehensive guide for students, academics, and researchers of Islamic studies, development economics, political economy, public policy, law, sociology, and anthropology.

While organisations become more and more global, they also become more and more dispersed and virtual. This challenges the sense of a shared organisational identity and the ability of employees to communicate personally held knowledge. To address these challenges this book offers an innovative multidisciplinary approach to knowledge communication in global organisations. The book develops a multidisciplinary analytical lens through which to understand employee identity formations and knowledge communication practises. Using detailed analyses of interviews from a real organisation, the book builds an understanding of how 21st century employees make sense of a virtual organisational reality characterised by multiple simultaneous projects and virtual, dispersed teams. These analyses are conducted using a new discourse analysis method for analysing research interviews, Discursive Sensemaking Analysis. Using these methods and findings, researchers, project managers and HR professionals will be able to analyse their own organisations to discover how employees make sense of the complexity of 21st century global organisations.

Creative hubs have become a cornerstone of economic and cultural policy with only the barest amount of discussion or scrutiny. This volume offers the first interrogation of creative hubs, with ground-breaking critical writing from a combination of established scholars and new voices. Looking across multiple sites trans-nationally, and combining theoretical and empirical reflections, it asks: what are creative hubs, why do they matter, and are they making the world a better place? Creative Hubs in Question discusses creative hubs in relation to debates about creative cities, co-working spaces and workers' co-operatives. Featuring case studies from Argentina to the Netherlands, and Nigeria to the UK, the contributions address how hubs are situated in relation to projects of equality and social justice, and whether and in what ways they change the experiences of the creatives who work in them. Drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives including sociology, geography, economics, media and communications, culture and creative industries, critical policy studies, gender studies, race and ethnicity, and urban studies, this collection will be of interest to policy makers, academics, scholars, students and practitioners across these fields.

In this book the author aims to describe the path from Information Technology to Information Management and Information Governance. This path allows organizations to identify IT Business Value and take advantage of it. The book synthesizes the main approaches that have emerged in recent years, compares these approaches along multiple variables, and finally proposes an advanced and new approach to Information Governance, based on the concept of Organizational Absorptive Capacity. Furthermore, the book presents a new approach to Information Management: the SIGMA (Strategic Information Governance Modelling and Assessment) approach. The new approach is centered on information as a key factor allowing integration between IT applications, organizational capabilities and business strategy. In particular, the Absorptive Capacity concept is presented and discussed: this concept represents the ability of an organization to maintain and absorb the potential of information and IT investments. After having presented and discussed the model, we also provide the reader with a brief presentation of how the SIGMA approach should be applied in companies. The book adopts a scientific approach to ensure methodological rigour; however, it is also concrete and describes problems from the viewpoints of managers, adopting a clear and easy-to-understand language in order to capture the interest of top managers and graduate students.

This book weaves a social, economic and cultural history of Australia with rare first-hand accounts of the lived experience of change related to farming and agriculture. It provides a rich sociology of how living on the land has changed throughout Australia's history. The book investigates the complex effects of the state on everyday life, using an historical agricultural case study of place to explore long-running sociohistorical processes of change examined through both a macro and micro sociological lens. This provides a multi-faceted perspective from which to examine economic, social and cultural transformations in each of these contexts and change is examined through multiple sites of expression: public policy and the role of the state; colonial processes of dispossession; social and cultural systems of value; economic change and its consequences; farming practices and lived experience; neoliberalism and globalisation and their social impacts; community decline and trends toward corporate and foreign land ownership. Each of these transformations impact upon lived experience and everyday life and this book provides grounded insight into exactly this relationship and process.

'Shanzhai' from Cantonese slang, refers to the production of fake goods in China, which enjoy an anti-authoritarian-like dissemination across the global market. Starting with mobile phones, now fashion brands are subverted in this way, with many women at the helm of design and production. Fashioning China looks at the women designers simultaneously subverting and reinforcing the nationalist-developmentalist, masculinist and technocratic dream of brands that are 'Made in China'. Broadening the digital labour debate beyond typical masculine and techno-utopic readings, Sara Liao studies the precarious practices of women trying to create sustainable and creative lives, vividly illustrating a fashion culture that exists online as a significant part of the digital economy. Drawing on material from interviews, participant observation, archives, policy documents, films and advertisements, Liao takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the topic, charting out the politics of intellectual property rights, globalisation, technocracy, patriarchy and nationalism in a non-Western context.

This book looks at the historical and contemporary impact of minority immigrant and ethnic communities on the built and social environment in Australian cities, rural and regional areas. The emphasis is on the changing social use of these buildings - places of worship, ethnic clubs and community associations, immigrant restaurants and retail outlets, museums, memorials and landmarks and other places and spaces created by immigrant communities - rather than on their architectural merit. These places and spaces are sites of bridging and bonding social capital, of social interaction between immigrant communities and their local communities. In both the Australian cities and the 'bush' (an Australian colloquial term for non-metropolitan dwellers), the book investigates how the places built and used by minority ethnic communities have transformed Australian life in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. In Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, the book investigates the historical development of Chinatowns and their contemporary dynamics.

The nature, institutional foundations, and issues surrounding the apparent success of Chinese business networks is examined in this book. Major concepts such as guanxi, xinyong and gangqing, exploring the nature of trust, relationships and sentiments in Chinese business networks, are re-examined. A significant amount of literature has been devoted to the study of Chinese business, and it largely falls into two broad schools: the culturalist approach, arguing for an essentialist formulation to explain success and the market approach, suggesting that there is nothing inherently unique about Chinese business. This book critiques both these approaches and argues, based on primary data collected in various countries, and with case studies of a large number of Chinese businesses, that another approach, the institutional embedded approach, provides a better explanation for the success, and failure of Chinese business and Chinese business networks.

Most European countries have experienced labour market reforms at varying times leading to extended working life and a postponement of retirement age. This book provides a gender perspective on the impact of extended working life on the different dimensions of well-being, the factors which can limit extended working life, and the working conditions of older workers. Over the course of 11 chapters the book explores factors that can limit access to paid work or affect working conditions for older workers, including care for dependent individuals, negative stereotypes surrounding aged workers and poor health. It also investigates differences in working conditions for older workers by gender compared to other groups of workers and across European countries including case-studies from Austria, France, Spain, Poland, Croatia, Albania and Turkey. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of social policy, sociology, gender studies and labour studies more broadly.

Foresight for Organizations will acquaint the reader with various foresight methods and tools, to show the reader how these methods are used, what the pitfalls are and how the methods relate to each other. This innovative volume offers the reader the ability to carry out a study of the future by him- or herself and apply the results in a decision-making strategy process. The author addresses the following methods: scenarios, trend analysis, the Delphi method, quantitative trend extrapolation, technology assessment, backcasting and roadmapping; the most relevant and popular methods that also cover the range of approaches from predictive, via normative to explorative. Every chapter also contains references to additional literature about the methods being discussed. This book is essential reading for researchers, academics and students in the areas of Community Development, Sociology of organizations, Change management, Social entrepreneurship, Sustainable development and participative planning.

Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London explores a largely obscured marketplace of motherhood that provided ways for women to manage the stigma of illegitimacy and their respectable identities within Victorian and Edwardian society. It focuses on the extent of women's 'dirty work', when maternal problem management was fundamental to the general maintenance of respectability and, by extension, to Empire and Civilisation. Despite its intrigue, history has struggled to understand and represent an uncomfortable but significant artefact of Western modernising society: 'baby-farming'. During a period when ideologies of respectability and civilisation arguably mattered most, the 'right' kind of parenthood - especially motherhood - became paramount. As the 'wrong' offspring could jeopardise a woman's chances of being respectable, a wholesale, informal, and somewhat clandestine marketplace emerged that catered to various maternal difficulties. Within this marketplace, a pregnancy or newborn child who may have compromised a woman's respectability could be 'disposed' of through different means, for a fee. From the Victorian period to the present, the commercialised maternal practices associated with baby-farming have become firmly established within collective consciousness as being synonymous with child murder, female pathology, and 'infanticide for hire'. This book provides a revised, far more complex, and nuanced narrative history which reveals all that was associated with baby-farming - including all possible outcomes - to be entirely natural, rational, and even necessary products of their time; an understandable outcome of the period's 'civilising offensive'. Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, history, and gender studies.