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This updated edition provides an ideal teaching text for first-year university and college courses.
The contributors investigate how the large scale structures of capitalism and the local social relations of workplaces and organizations shape each other. They argue for a new integration of political economy and the sociology of work and organizations.
In this major new book leading sociologists, economists, and social psychologists present their highly original research into changes in jobs in Britain in the 1980s. Combining large-scale sample surveys, personal life-histories, and case studies of towns, employers, and worker groups, their findings give clear and often surprising answers to questions debated by social and economic observers in all advanced countries. Does technology destroy skills or rebuild them? How does skill affect the attitudes of employees and their managers towards their jobs? Are women gaining greater skill equality with men, or are they still stuck on the lower rungs of the skill and occupational ladders? The book...
The book is the first major study to examine the implications of differences in welfare regimes for the experience of unemployment in Europe. It is concerned with three central questions about the way such regimes affect the experience of unemployment. The first is how far they protect the quality of life of unemployed people with respect to living standards and the experience of financial hardship. The second is their role in mediating the impact of unemployment on the individual's longer-term position in the labour market, addressing the issue of how far they help to prevent progressive marginalization from the employment structure as a result of motivational change, skill loss or the grow...
Is wealth the same as happiness? How is the quality of life to be evaluated, measured, and most importantly, achieved? The authors provide provocative and engaging answers to these questions in this new, multidisciplinary and pragmatic approach to an important area of social research. Taking the individual as the point of departure, the authors consider both objective circumstances and their subjective impact on people's lives. Prominent authors from an array of different academic disciplines discuss the quality of life as viewed from their distinctive perspectives: these include the psychology of subjective well-being, destitution and basic needs, the environment, women and the family, illness and health, employment and work, and the role of the state.
"In this exemplary piece of historical sociology, Biernacki demonstrates tremendous theoretical and methodological sophistication as well as the talents of a gifted social historian. He skillfully weaves together theory and history to creatively address central debates in the social sciences."--Ronald Aminzade, author of "Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830-1871" "A work of major significance in comparative-historical sociology, the sociology of culture, labor history, sociological theory, and the history of economic thought. It is in a class by itself."--Sonya O. Rose, author of "Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England" "A major intellectual event in cultural sociology and labor history. Biernacki's theoretical and methodological sophistication, his lucid style, and his wonderfully detailed empirical research make this book very special."--William Sewell, Jr., author of "Work and Revolution in France"
Robert Lane offers evidence that the major premises of market economics are mistaken.
This book breaks new ground by bringing together recent research into the determinants of marginalization risks for the unemployed and research into new social policies for combating marginalization. It examines the major controversies about how far entrapment in unemployment is due to resource constraints, motivational problems, or skill deficiency. It examines the forms that new policies have taken, the way they vary between EU countries, and the effects they have had on the life experiences of the unemployed. Its central concern is how far the new policies developed in the 1990s, in particular the spread of activation and welfare-to-work policies, address the major sources of vulnerabilit...
In this concluding volume of his trilogy on social theory, W. G. Runciman applies to the case of twentieth-century English society the methodology (distinguishing reportage, explanation, description, and evaluation) and theory of the preceding two volumes. Volume III shows how England's capitalist mode of production, liberal mode of persuasion, and democratic mode of coercion evolved in the aftermath of the First World War from what they had been since the 1880s, but then did not, in turn, evolve significantly following the Second World War. The explanation rests on an analysis of the selective pressures favouring some economic, ideological, and political practices over others in an increasingly complex environment, neither predictable nor controllable by policy-makers. This is supported by a graphic account of the changes themselves and how they were experienced by different segments of English society.