You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The authors are proud sponsors of the 2020 SAGE Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award—enabling graduate students and early career faculty to attend the annual ASA pre-conference teaching and learning workshop. Changing Contours of Work is an exploration of the American workplace in the larger context of an integrated global economy. Presented with engaging vignettes and rich data, this Fourth Edition shows the reader how the "old economy" is now operating within the "new economy" and how that integration shapes the development of work opportunities. Authors Stephen Sweet and Peter Meiksins use an international comparative perspective, revealing the historical transformations of work and identifying the profound effects that these changes have had on lives, jobs, and life chances. This text supports the reader′s understanding of the origins of current problems confronting working people in the new economy, and contributes to a much-needed dialogue about the strategies for liberating workers from poverty, drudgery, discrimination, stress, and exploitation.
In the Third Edition of Changing Contours of Work: Jobs and Opportunities in the New Economy, Stephen Sweet and Peter Meiksins once again provide a rich analysis of the American workplace in the larger context of an integrated global economy. Through engaging vignettes and rich data, this text frames the development of jobs and employment opportunities in an international comparative perspective, revealing the historical transformations of work (the “old economy” and the “new economy”) and identifying the profound effects that these changes have had on lives, jobs, and life chances. The text examines the many complexities of race, class, and gender inequalities in the modern-day workplace, and details the consequences of job insecurity and work schedules mismatched to family needs. Throughout the text, strategic recommendations are offered to improve the new economy.
Engineers, often perceived as central agents of industrial capitalism, are thought to be the same in all capitalist societies, occupying roughly the same social status and performing similar functions in the capitalist enterprise. What the essays in this volume reveal, however, is that engineers are trained and organized quite distinctly in different national contexts. The book includes case studies of engineers in six major industrial economies: Japan, France, Germany, Sweden, Britain and the United States. Through a comparison of these six cases, the authors develop an approach to national differences which both retains the place of historical diversity in the experience of capitalism and accommodates the forces of convergence from increasing globalisation and economic integration. Contributions from: Boel Berner, Stephen Crawford, Kees Gispen, Kevin McCormick and Peter Whalley.
Using interviews with technical professionals from a wide range of employment settings, examines the difficult path traversed by people who choose to work less than the standard, forty-hour week and refutes the popular myth of the customized work schedule as a return to traditionalism among women. Shows that most of these workers, male and female, young and old remain strongly committed to their jobs, but wish to combine work with other activities they value just as highly. Argues that these professionals are challenging the accepted view of time requirements for careers in organizations and they are also helping to shape a new agenda for the future of the workplace: to transform their individual successes into a normal practice of customized work time.
Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that with the collapse of Communism the theoretical project of Marxism and its critique of capitalism is more timely and important than ever. Current intellectual fashions of the left which emphasise 'post-modern' fragmentation, 'difference', contingency and the 'politics of identity' can barely accommodate the idea of capitalism, let alone subject the capitalist system to critique. In this book she sets out to renew the critical programme of historical materialism by redefining its basic concepts and its theory of history in original and imaginative ways, using them to identify the specificity of capitalism as a system of social relations and political power. She goes on to explore the concept of democracy in both the ancient and modern world, examining the concept's relation to capitalism, and raising questions about how democracy might go beyond the limits imposed on it by capitalism.
An account of conflicts within engineering in the 1960s that helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history. In the late 1960s an eclectic group of engineers joined the antiwar and civil rights activists of the time in agitating for change. The engineers were fighting to remake their profession, challenging their fellow engineers to embrace a more humane vision of technology. In Engineers for Change, Matthew Wisnioski offers an account of this conflict within engineering, linking it to deep-seated assumptions about technology and American life. The postwar period in America saw a near-utopian belief in technology's beneficence. Beginning...
While paying tribute to Harry Braverman for launching the research field known as the labor process, this book neither eulogizes nor castigates his work. Rather, it takes stock of the field, showing its blend of qualitative and quantitative methodologies and revealing its diverse contributions to the sociology of work, organizations, and stratification. Both U.S. and British authors use this venue as an opportunity to rethink and reinvigorate the labor process field, yet they maintain an intellectual commitment to the spirit with which Braverman wrote his work. They focus on aspects central to the labor process perspective, including management strategies, technology, innovations in the workplace, the value of labor, and control and resistance.
The first to systematically compare Caucasians, African Americans, and Asian Americans in engineering, this study of the career attainment and mobility of engineers in the United States tells how these three groups fare in the American engineering labor market and what they can look forward to in the future. The numbers of black and Asian engineers recently have grown at a much faster rate than the number of Caucasian engineers. With a projected steady increase in engineering jobs and demographic shifts, this trend should continue. Yet, recent writings on the engineering profession have said little about career mobility beyond graduation. This book identifies and explores key issues determining whether minorities in the US will attain occupational equality with their Caucasian counterparts. Highlighting implications for theory, policy making, and the future of the profession, Doing Engineering offers important insights into labor, race and ethnicity that will be of interest to anyone studying stratification in a wide range of professional occupations.
A pioneering study of the relations between gender and technology.
Bodies in Revolt argues that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) could humanize capitalism by turning employers into care-givers, creating an ethic of care in the workplace. Unlike other feminists, Ruth O'Brien bases her ethics not on benevolence, but rather on self-preservation. She relies on Deleuze's and Guttari's interpretation of Spinoza and Foucault's conception of corporeal resistance to show how a workplace ethic that is neither communitarian nor individualistic can be based upon the rallying cry "one for all and all for one."