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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Work & labour
This is a holistic presentation of methods and problems involved in humanizing work. The comments will be of interest to practitioners dealing with work, and should give realism to debates concerned with alienation in the workplace. The theory is described, and the American system is compared with those in place in Western Europe and Japan. This work should be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners in industrial relations, labor problems, organizational behavior, and human resources in general.
Entrepreneurship is the result of various contextual factors in the community, which are shaped by social challenges and business needs. Recent research efforts have focused on the dynamics of communities and how they facilitate entrepreneurship among a diverse group of people and organizations. This book highlights research on the importance of communities and their role in providing an entrepreneurial ecosystem that promotes innovation and business activities. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, it explores what it takes to create an entrepreneurial community that fosters creativity. Sharing valuable insights, it will enhance readers' understanding of how entrepreneurship is formed by and exists in communities.
Career Dynamics in a Global World takes on a major question in the global research and practice of career development and adopts a distinctive approach in response. The authors address the question of how and to what extent a predominant influence of Western thinking about careers interferes with our understanding of careers in other parts of the world. The approach involves identifying career topics for further exploration, recruiting teams of Indian and Western scholars on each topic to share their insights, and laying out those insights to help both careers researchers and practitioners see their significance. As a result, in this remarkable collaboration the reader is invited to compare views on self-awareness and careers from traditional Indian Ayurvedic and alternative Western perspectives, alongside contrasting Indian and Western reports on women stepping off their career ladders, the motivation of social entrepreneurs, the careers of IT workers, MBA holders and management scholars and other topics. Career and cross-cultural researchers and career and HR practitioners will be fascinated by the comparative analysis of career dynamics.
This book is about families who combine home life and income-producing work under the same roof. Based on 899 homeworking households in nine states, the analysis presents detailed information about individual worker and household characteristics; work characteristics for both business owners and wage workers; family functioning types; management behavior; and adjustment strategies used in family life, the community context, and the home-based employment experience over an extended period of time. This is the first publication of a serious longitudinal study of the phenomenon of working from home with historical considerations of how and why so many people are choosing this option. It points to the significantly positive impact at-home workers are having on their families, their neighborhoods, and their communities.
This open access book presents a new generation multi-criteria, multi-stake holder, decision aide, called an "institutional compass". Based on hard data, the compass tells us what quality-direction we are heading in as an institution, region, system or organisation. The quality is not chosen from the usual scalar qualities of: good, neutral and bad. Instead, it is a quality chosen between: harmony, discipline and excitement. None is good in and of itself. We need some of each. The compass marks a new generation in four respects. 1. The representation of the data is intuitive and simple to understand, and therefore can be used to communicate and justify policy decisions. 2. Any data can be included, i.e., none is excluded. This makes the compass tailored to particular situations, voices and contexts. 3. The data includes different time horizons and different types of value: monetary, use, social, sentimental, religious, intrinsic, existential... 4. The process of compass construction can be made inclusive at several junctions. An institutional compass can be extended to evaluate products, add normativity to a systems analysis, reflect world-views such as that of ecological economists or function as an accounting system to manage scarce resources. There are four parts to the book. The first part introduces the general ideas behind the compass. In the second part, the author presents the method for constructing the compass. This includes data collection, data analysis and a mathematical formula to aggregate the data into a single holistic reading. In the third part, the author extends the methodology: to incorporate it into systems science, adding a normative and quality-direction dimension, to use it as a non-linear accounting method and more thoroughly to reflect the philosophy of ecological economists to give a real measure of sustainability. In the fourth part, we see three case studies: one for the World Health Organisation, a second is the use of the compass to label products in a shop and the third is as a regional compass for Hauts-de-France. The book ends with philosophical conclusions. Throughout the book, we see tight arguments, refreshing ideas and a thorough treatment of objectivity in decision making.
The contributions to this timely volume explore the social implications of labour market reforms, and assess the complex relationship between the economic and non-economic aspects of labour institutions. The authors ascertain that labour market systems have important social dimensions, including social benefits and effects on psychological well-being and on social relationships. They go on to argue that the evaluation of reforms should take into consideration this social impact. The book examines the requirements for increased flexibility in contractual associations whilst maintaining social protection and job security. Using new utility criteria, guidelines for evaluating labour market and social protection system reform policies are recommended. It is argued that policy evaluations should consider whether social benefits are compatible with the increased flexibility demanded by the marketplace, taking into account the complex social and cultural rules which affect human behaviour, and the fact that individuals are concerned with issues such as fairness, status and the well-being of their fellow citizens. Policymakers involved in government, international institutions, professional associations for social work and labour relations, unions and employer federations will find this book to be a useful and fascinating read. It will also be of great interest to academics involved in labour economics, industrial relations and industrial economics.
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 reinvigorates the debate about the origins and development of police culture within our changing social, economic and political landscape. An in-depth analysis and appreciation of the police socialisation, identity and culture literature is combined with a comprehensive four-year longitudinal study of new recruits to a police force in England. The result offers new insights into the development of, and influences upon, new police recruits who refer to themselves as a "new breed" of police officer. Adding significantly to the police culture literature, this original and empirically based research also provides valuable insights into the challenges of modern policing in an age of austerity. Scholars of policing and criminal justice, as well as police officers themselves will find this compelling reading.
Informed by in-depth case studies focusing on a wide spectrum of micro and macro post-socialist realities, this book demonstrates the multi-faceted nature of informality and suggests that it is a widely diffused phenomenon, used at all levels of a society and by both winners and losers of post-socialist transition.
The idea of ''vocation'' has fallen out of fashion in twenty-first-century America, replaced with careerism and credentialism. Neither go far in answering the weighty questions of meaning and morality that have always been integral to a vocational pursuit. Kaethe Schwehn and L. DeAne Lagerquist offer perspectives from fourteen professors at St. Olaf College on the value of vocation, showing how a focus on one's calling rather than on success or credentials paves the way for the civic good sought by defenders of liberal arts education. Moving beyond abstract generalities, the essays in Claiming Our Callings exemplify the reflective practices at the heart of liberal arts, for faculty and students alike. Martin E. Marty once said that "The vocation of St. Olaf is vocation,'' and the contributors to this volume draw on their experiences teaching in a range of departments at the College-from biology and economics to history and religion-to reflect on both their calling as professors and their practices for fostering students' ability to identify their own vocations. All are convinced of the continuing value of the liberal arts, particularly in generating exploration of the meaning and purpose of life. These scholars' varied notions of how vocation is best understood and cultivated reveal the differing religious commitments and pedagogical practices present within their college community. Together they demonstrate how the purposes of their own lives intersect creatively with the purposes of higher education and the needs of their students and the world.
This book looks at the UEFA European Championship (Euro 2012) as both a crowning achievement of, and a way to sustain, the urban entrepreneurial strategy of Poznan, Poland. As the host city of the tournament almost 25 years after Poland's transformation from a centrally planned to a market economy in 1989, the author focuses on how the local myths and traditions of resourcefulness were invoked to embed an entrepreneurial urban strategy. The book also observes how the very same tradition of resourcefulness was used by the opposition to challenge the urban policies. Contrary to the authorities' expectations, Euro 2012 triggered a discussion about the extent to which large business- and leisure-oriented urban strategy corresponds to local regime of value. Urban Politics of a Football Mega Event will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of subjects, including anthropology, ethnography, sociology of sport, geography, history, political science and European studies.
Insecure temporary employment is growing in Europe, but we know little about how being in such jobs affects political preferences and behaviour. Combining insights from psychology, political science and labour market research, this book offers new theories and evidence on the political repercussions of temporary jobs.
In this thought-provoking new book, Neala Schleuning searches for the meaning of work in our society. Compellingly written, "Idle Hands and Empty HeartS" studies the politics and economics, as well as the philosophy and art, of work. Schleuning seeks to find out what work is, what it used to be, why we work, and what is wrong with work today. She places ideas about work in their history and culture and offers new ideas about what work should be, and what role it should play in our lives. Schleuning distills all of the central questions having to do with work in our time: why do human beings work; what can we learn about work from history; what is the impact of technology on work; how does work affect our political lives; do women have a different perspective on work; and finally, what is Good Work and how do we create a future in which good work can be realized? Anyone who ever wondered about the role of work in his or her life will find "Idle Hands and Empty HeartS" a source of stimulating ideas.
The public relations profession positions itself as expert in building trust throughout global markets, particularly after crisis strikes. Successive crises have tainted financial markets in recent years. Calls to restore trust in finance have been particularly pressing, given trust's crucial role as lubricant in global financial engines. Nonetheless, years after the global financial crisis, trust in financial markets remains both tenuous and controversial. This book explores PR in financial markets, posing a fundamental question about PR professionals as would-be 'trust strategists'. If PR promotes its expertise in building and restoring trust, how can it ignore its potential role in losing trust in the first place? Drawing on examples from state finance, international lending agencies, trade bodies, financial institutions and consumer groups in mature and emerging financial centres, this book explores the wide-ranging role of PR in financial markets, including: State finance and debt capital markets Investor relations, M&A and IPOs Corporate communications for financial institutions Product promotion and consumer finance Financial trade associations and lobbying Consumerism and financial activism. Far reaching and challenging, this innovative book will be essential reading for researchers, advanced students and professionals in PR, communication and finance.
This volume brings together two hitherto disparate domains of scholarly inquiry: organization and management studies on the one hand, and the study of visual and multimodal communication on the other. Within organization and management studies it has been recognized that organizational reality and communication are becoming increasingly visual, and, more generally, multimodal, whether in digital form or otherwise. Within multimodality studies it has been noted that many forms of contemporary communication are deeply influenced by organizational and managerial communication, as formerly formal and bureaucratic types of communication increasingly adopt promotional language and multimodal document presentation. Visual and Multimodal Research in Organization and Management Studies integrates these two domains of research in a way that will benefit both. In particular, it conceptually and empirically connects recent insights from visual and multimodality studies to ongoing discussions in organization and management theory. Throughout, the book shows how a visual/multimodal lens enriches and extends what we already know about organization, organizations, and practices of organizing, but also how concepts from organization and management studies can be highly productive in further developing insights on visual and multimodal communication. Due to its essentially interdisciplinary objectives, the book will prove inspiring for academics and scholars of management, the sociology of organizations as well as related disciplines such as applied linguistics and visual studies.
This book explores how fishers make the sea productive through their labour, using technologies ranging from wooden boats to digital GPS plotters to create familiar places in a seemingly hostile environment. It shows how their lives are affected by capitalist forces in the markets they sell to, forces that shape even the relations between fishers on the same boat. Fishers frequently have to make impossible choices between safe seamanship and staying afloat economically, and the book describes the human impact of the high rate of deaths in the fishing industry. The book makes a unique contribution to understanding human-environment relations, examining the places fishers create and name at sea, as well as technologies and navigation practices. It combines phenomenology and political economy to offer new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14, Life below water -- .
Across welfare societies we have seen the emergence of policies and norms for work-life balance alongside rising expectations among working parents to be able to participate in employment and caregiving, and to have more time for family life and leisure. Yet despite this value placed upon work-life balance, working parents face increasing work demands, as well as rising numbers of insecure and precarious jobs, both of which produce a deepening sense of economic uncertainty in everyday life, which has been intensified in the current period of financial crises. The agency and capabilities gap addresses these tensions in work-life balance within families, workplace organizations, and policy frameworks. Inspired by Amartya Sen's capabilities approach, this volume considers not just what individuals do, but also their scope of alternatives to make other choices. It includes rich contextualized studies across Western and Eastern European countries and Japan, with a focus on gendered agency inequalities for work-life balance.
The senses are made, not given. This revolutionary realization has come as of late to inform research across the social sciences and humanities, and is currently inspiring groundbreaking experimentation in the world of art and design, where the focus is now on mixing and manipulating the senses. The Sensory Studies Manifesto tracks these transformations and opens multiple lines of investigation into the diverse ways in which human beings sense and make sense of the world. This unique volume treats the human sensorium as a dynamic whole that is best approached from historical, anthropological, geographic, and sociological perspectives. In doing so, it has altered our understanding of sense perception by directing attention to the sociality of sensation and the cultural mediation of sense experience and expression. David Howes challenges the assumptions of mainstream Western psychology by foregrounding the agency, interactivity, creativity, and wisdom of the senses as shaped by culture. The Sensory Studies Manifesto sets the stage for a radical reorientation of research in the human sciences and artistic practice.
Drawing on the heritage of research that demonstrates the thoroughly gendered nature of work organizations, this book explores a key question that, as yet, remains unanswered: how does gendered organizational life affect individuals' identities as they go about their everyday working lives? This question is explored with theoretical insights from disciplines including sociology, geography, history and gender studies interwoven with a major new empirical study of doctors and nurses working in the British National Health Service.
It is over twenty years since scholars began to question the adequacy of the extant career theory for illuminating women's lives. Since then the literature has developed apace. This book contributes to these on-going debates. This book is about women's careers, how they think about and enact their working lives, and how these patterns change, or stay the same, over time. It focuses on seventeen women, based in the same northern English city, working in a variety of occupations, who left their organizational positions to set up their own businesses. In the early 90s they participated in a research study of this career transition, and a decade and a half later were interviewed for a second time. Imagining Women's Careers is based on these accounts. It investigates the women's transition to self-employment and on-going career development; contextual change between the two periods and why, in career terms, this mattered; their experiences of late career and retirement; and the role of others in their career-making. The concept of the career imagination is introduced, defining and delimiting what is possible, legitimate and appropriate in career terms, and prescribing its own criteria for success. In part, the book is about change: women moving from young to middle, or middle to old age; society moving out of and back into recession; an academic literature which has deconstructed and redefined the concept of career itself. However it is also about continuity: enduring relationships, commitments to people and places, deeply held values and identities.
Domestic service has long been one of the largest forms of urban employment across southern Africa. Home economics provides the first comprehensive history of this essential sector in the decades following independence and the end of apartheid. Focusing on Lusaka and drawing wider comparisons, the book traces how Black workers and employers adapted existing models of domestic service as part of broader responses to changing gendered employment patterns, economic decline, and endemic poverty. It reveals how kin-based domestic service gradually displaced wage labour and how women and girl workers came to dominate kin-based and waged domestic service, with profound consequences for labour regulation and worker organising. Theoretically innovative and empirically rich, the book provides essential insights into debates about gender, work, and urban economies that are critical to understanding southern Africa's post-colonial and post-apartheid history. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 8, Decent work and economic growth -- .
This open access book contributes to research on the ascendance of neoliberalism in Canada through the vantage point of professional fundraising in the 1990s and 2000s. Fifty high-ranking fundraisers from across Canada were interviewed through 2008 and 2009 about changes they had witnessed since starting their careers. Fundraising as an occupation was burgeoning in this period in response to the devolution of state responsibility across the major domains of nonprofit activity: education, health care, social services, the arts, recreation, overseas humanitarian activities, and environmental protection. Welfare state retrenchment left the nonprofit and voluntary sector competing for private sources of funding with the help of these newly hired expert staff. As fundraisers worked to instill a culture of philanthropy, while targeting the ultra-rich and advocating for tax-favourable treatment of major gifts, they became both products and promoters of the neoliberal political and cultural reconstruction of Canadian society. This is an open access book.
This book explores the representation of women and their interests in the world of work across four trade unions in France and the UK. Drawing on case studies of the careers of 100 activists and a longitudinal study of the trade unions' struggle for equal pay in the UK, it unveils the social, organizational, and political conditions that contribute to the reproduction of gender inequalities or, on the contrary, allow the promotion of equality. Guillaume's nuanced evaluation is a call to redefine the role of trade unions in the delivering of gender equality, contributing to broader debates on the effectiveness of equality policies and the enforcement of equality legislation.
This book discusses the socio-legal tax state and its relationship to development, inequality and the transnational. 'Fiscal Sociology' commenced in 1918 when Joseph A. Schumpeter examined the links between capitalism and taxation, arguing that fiscal pressures on governments led directly to the development of tax collection, and the burgeoning growth of capitalist economies. The identification of taxation as an important component of capitalism has continued to change the way that theoretical sociologists conceptualise tax. This book documents the history of this literature to provide a summary of the topic for scholars seeking a bridge between taxation law and contextual, historical, and anthropological analyses of the development of the state, more generally. Whilst Schumpeter's insights have been celebrated over the past one hundred years, taxation has slipped from the agenda of many scholarly disciplines, in relation to analyses of poverty, globalisation, and equality. Fiscal Sociology at the Centenary fills this gap. The implications of this literature for taxation law in the United Kingdom, in particular, are considered.
An increasingly important and often overlooked issue in science and technology policy is recognizing the role that philanthropies play in setting the direction of research. In an era where public and private resources for science are strained, the practices that foundations adopt to advance basic and applied research needs to be better understood. This first-of-its-kind study provides a detailed assessment of the current state of science philanthropy. This examination is particularly timely, given that science philanthropies will have an increasingly important and outsized role to play in advancing responsible innovation and in shaping how research is conducted. Philanthropy and the Future of Science and Technology surveys the landscape of contemporary philanthropic involvement in science and technology by combining theoretical insights drawn from the responsible research and innovation (RRI) framework with empirical analysis investigating an array of detailed examples and case studies. Insights from interviews conducted with foundation representatives, scholars, and practitioners from a variety of sectors add real-world perspective. A wide range of philanthropic interventions are explored, focusing on support for individuals, institutions, and networks, with attention paid to the role that science philanthropies play in helping to establish and coordinate multi-sectoral funding partnerships. Novel approaches to science philanthropy are also considered, including the emergence of crowdfunding and the development of new institutional mechanisms to advance scientific research. The discussion concludes with an imaginative look into the future, outlining a series of lessons learned that can guide how new and established science philanthropies operate and envisioning alternative scenarios for the future that can inform how science philanthropy progresses over the coming decades. This book offers a major contribution to the advancement of philanthropic investment in science and technology. Thus, it will be of considerable interest to researchers and students in public policy, public administration, political science, science and technology studies, sociology of science, and related disciplines. |
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