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From anxieties over work-life balance and entangling technologies, to celebrations of cool jobs and great places to live, quality of life frames the ways we enhance our lives and legitimate social change today. But how does the idea of quality of life envision the greater good, and what gets lost as a result? This book provides the critical framework for understanding the idea’s contexts and tensions that are conspicuously missing in popular discussions, professional activities, and scholarly research on quality of life. With multiple case studies taken across North America and Europe, it provides a sociological perspective on the contradictory ways we talk about and pursue quality of life...
An incisive analysis of the transformation of paid and unpaid work in contemporary Canada.
A healthy work-life balance has become increasingly important to people trying to cope with the pressures of contemporary society. This trend highlights the fallacy of assessing well-being in terms of finance alone; how much time we have matters just as much as how much money. The authors of this book have developed a novel way to measure 'discretionary time': time which is free to spend as one pleases. Exploring data from the US, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden and Finland, they show that temporal autonomy varies substantially across different countries and under different living conditions. By calibrating how much control people have over their time, and how much they could have under alternative welfare, gender or household arrangements, this book offers a new perspective for comparative cross-national enquiries into the temporal aspects of human welfare.
This book develops a new theoretical framework for studying the corruption, disintegration, and renewal of democracy: what it is, how it begins, and where in society it plays out. Näsström argues that modern democracy is a sui generis political form animated and sustained by a spirit of emancipation.
This is the first volume to treat the idea of positive freedom in detail and from multiple perspectives.
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Some chapters were previously published.
A timely manifesto for a feminist post-work politics Does it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you’re confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete – cooking, cleaning, looking after the kids, and so on. In this ground-breaking book, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek lay out how unpaid work in our homes has come to take up an ever-increasing portion of our lives – how the vacuum of free time has been taken up by vacuuming. Examining the history of the home over the past century – from running water to white goods to smart homes – they show how repeated efforts to reduce the burden of this work have faced a variety of barriers, challenges, and reversals. Charting the trajectory of our domestic spaces over the past century, Hester and Srnicek consider new possibilities for the future, uncovering the abandoned ideas of anti-housework visionaries and sketching out a path towards real free time for all, where everyone is at liberty to pursue their passions, or do nothing at all. It will require rethinking our living arrangements, our expectations and our cities.
"A compelling analysis of time, care, and social inequality told through the lens of pregnant low-wage service workers and their efforts to access safety net prenatal care in New York City"--
A vibrant, growing movement of radical protest is sweeping North America in opposition to high-stakes capitalism and the appalling environmental desecration that accompanies it. At once entertaining, shocking and inspiring, Underminers is the monkey-wrencher's guide to navigating and subverting the industrial machine, showing how symbolic protestors can become real activists; reconnected to one another, and co-creators of a viable future.