Essays and case studies on "the problems of organizing and new models of unionism ... in the context of women's work culture, multiracial workplaces, contingent and part-time work, and participatory innovations to improve service and experience of work simultaneously."--Back cover.
Chapter 1 Introduction -- part Part I Different service societies in Europe -- chapter 2 Measuring economic tertiarisation -- chapter 3 The incidence of new forms of employment in service activities -- chapter 4 Why do countries have such different service-sector employment rates -- chapter 5 Services and the employment prospects for women -- part PART II The organisation of service work: an analysis of five sectors -- chapter 6 The family, the state, and now the market -- chapter 7 The reluctant nurses -- chapter 8 Work hard, play hard -- chapter 9 Work organisation and the importance of labour markets in the European retail trade -- chapter 10 Lean banking -- part Part III Common challenges -- chapter 11 The shaping of work and working time in the service sector -- chapter 12 The delegation of uncertainty -- chapter 13 Can trade unions meet the challenge -- chapter 14 Diversity and regulation of markets for services.
Everyday, we are bombarded with advertising images of the smiling service worker. The book is written with the aim of focusing beneath the surface of these fairy tale images, to seek out and understand the reality of service workers experience. Within the sociology of work and related literatures, there are an increasing number of empirical studie
The rise to prominence of the service sector - heralded over half a century ago as the great hope for the twenty-first century - has come to fruition. In many cases, employment in the service sector now outnumbers that in manufacturing sectors, and it is accepted that in all developed countries, the service sector is the only one in which employment will grow in future. The reasons for this is the subject of much controversy and debate, the outcomes of which are not merely of academic interest but of decisive importance for economic policy and the quality of working and living conditions in future. In order to examine these various arguments, research teams from eight European countries worked together for three years on a comparative study of the evolution of service sector employment in EU member states. They also investigated working and employment conditions in five very different service industries (banking, retailing, hospitals, IT services and care of the elderly) in a number of countries, and the results of their research are presented in this informative new collection, of interest to students academics and researchers involved in all aspects of industrial economics.
Work and Society provides a comprehensive investigation of the major trends in work and employment. The changing social order and its impact upon the labour market in recent years, alongside the huge changes brought about by new technology and globalization are considered.
Knowledge Workers in the Information Society addresses the changing nature of work, workers, and their organizations in the media, information, and knowledge industries. These knowledge workers include journalists, broadcasters, librarians, filmmakers and animators, government workers, and employees in the telecommunications and high tech sectors. Technological change has become relentless. Corporate concentration has created new pressures to rationalize work and eliminate stages in the labor process. Globalization and advances in telecommunications have made real the prospect that knowledge work will follow manufacturing labor to parts of the world with low wages, poor working conditions, and little unionization. McKercher and Mosco bring together scholars from numerous disciplines to examine knowledge workers from a genuinely global perspective.
Providing a thorough overview of the political nature and dynamics of the world of work, labour and employment, this timely Handbook draws together an interdisciplinary range of top contributors to explore the interdependent relationship between politics and labour, work and employment. The Handbook explores the purpose, roles, rights and powers of employers and management, workers and unions, states and governments in the age of globalised neo-liberalism.
Polls tell us that most Americans_whether they earn $20,000 or $200,000 a year_think of themselves as middle class. As this phenomenon suggests, "middle class" is a category whose definition is not necessarily self-evident. In this book, historian Daniel
Despite recent interest in the effects of restructuring and redesigning the work place, the link between individual identity and structural change has usually been asserted rather than demonstrated. Through an extensive review of data from field work in a multi-national corporation Catherine Casey changes this. She knows that changes currently occurring in the world of work are part of the vast social and cultural changes that are challenging the assumptions of modern industrialism. These events affect what people do everyday, and they are altering relations among ourselves and with the physical world. This valuable book is not only a critcal analysis of the transformations occurring in the world of work, but an exploration of the effects of contemporary practices of work on the self.
Internationally renowned experts assess the role of retail work in modern industrial economies in Retail Work. Chapters are arranged thematically to capture four aspects of retail work: the nature of work and the shop floor; work across the supply chain and the wider productive system; the skills used in retailing; and workers as a collectivity.