Sociology: work & labour

This book casts light on the empirical relationship between labour market deregulation through non-standard contracts and the three main dimensions of worker security: employment, income and social security.

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.

Drawing on ethnographic studies of precarious work in Africa, this innovative book discusses their implications for labour of how globalisation and digitalisation are drivers for structural change. It explores the role of digital technology in new business models, and ways in which digitalization can be harnessed for counter mobilisation.

This interdisciplinary work connects the transformation of India’s labour market with changes in health and health problems to offer an analysis that is unprecedented in scope and depth.

It is impossible to view the news at present without hearing talk of crisis: the economy, the climate, the pandemic. This book asks how these larger societal issues lead to a crisis with work, making it ever more precarious, unequal and intense. Experts diagnose the nature of the problem and offer a programme for transcending above the crises.

A challenge to the assumption that there is appropriate employment available for people who are expected to retire later and the gender-neutral way the expectation for extending working lives is presented in most policy-making circles.

With welfare to work programmes under intense scrutiny, this book ranges widely across Europe to review existing policies and explore future ones. It shows how many schemes do not adequately address social rights and lived experiences, and consider alternatives based on theories of non-domination.

Highlighting what can be learned from individual experiences, the book analyses the changing welfare and labour market policies which shape the lives of working carers in Finland, Sweden, Australia, England, Japan and Taiwan.

Since the 1960s a major mental health crisis has emerged among Western working populations. Through a study spanning several decades, this book uses an original framework to capture the history and developments of mental vulnerability in working life.

At a time when worker shortages have emerged as a global challenge, this highly original book bridges migration and labour studies to examine worker mobility and its management. This will be a valuable resource for both scholars and practitioners.

This book conducts an in-depth investigation of one of the largest and longest-established insurance industries in Europe: British life insurance. The author draws on over 40 oral history interviews to trace how the sector is changed since the 1970s, a period characterised by rampant financialisation and neoliberalisation.

Drawing on interviews with Amazon workers and original empirical data, this book explores how different working conditions estrange and alienate workers, and how, despite these, workers find ways to organize and express their agency. This is an important analysis of work on the digital shop floor for the scholars of platform economy.