Sociology: work & labour

Based on up to date qualitative and ethnographic research, and using a Foucauldian theoretical approach, this book examines youth education-to-work transitions in the UK and demonstrates how different employability schemes work in practice for young people from varying social and regional backgrounds.

A first in utilising transnational migration studies as a new theoretical framework in management and organization studies, this book presents a much-needed new concept for understanding people, work and organizations in a world on the move while attending to growing inequality associated with work in changing societies.

By rethinking the role of ideas and morality in policy changes, this book illustrates how the moral economy of activation leads to a permanent behaviourist testing of the unemployed in public debate as well as in local job centres.

Outsourcing of domestic work in the UK has been steadily rising since the 1970s, but little research has considered White British women. This book argues that outsourced domestic cleaning can either be done as mental and manual skilled work or as manual and ‘natural’ emotional/affective labour, depending on the work conditions.

This book brings together leading international authors from a number of fields to provide an up to date understanding of part-time work at national, sector, industry and workplace levels.

What’s wrong with work shows that how workers are treated has wide implications beyond the lives of workers themselves.

Recognising gender, race, class and global differences, the book considers the ways formal work is often dependent on informal work and concludes by considering what might make work better.

This volume provides an international perspective on parental leave policies in different countries, goes beyond this to examine a range of issues in depth, and aims to stimulate thinking about possible futures and how policy might underpin them.

This important book takes readers behind the closed doors of elite employers to reveal how class affects who gets to the top. Drawing on 200 interviews across four case studies - television, accountancy, architecture, and acting – it explores the complex barriers facing the upwardly mobile.

With contributions from over 90 authors and more than 60 individual contributions this collection summarises the findings of a large-scale EU funding project on Strategic Transitions for Youth Labour in Europe (STYLE).

This book is the first to go inside women’s work and family lives in a year of working flexibly. The private labours of going part-time, job sharing, and home working are brought to life with vivid personal stories, concluding that there is an opportunity to make employment and family life work better together.

Poverty Propaganda debunks many popular myths and misconceptions about poverty and its prevalence, causes and consequences. In particular, it highlights the role of ‘poverty propaganda’ in sustaining class divides in perpetuating poverty and disadvantage in contemporary Britain.

This edited volume investigates the changing patterns of labour market and unemployment policies in EU member states during the period since the politics of austerity took hold in 2010.