Sociology: work & labour

This book analyses fresh empirical evidence which demonstrates the gendered impacts of the new conditionality regime within Universal Credit. Drawing on in-depth interviews with mothers, it offers a compelling narrative and policy recommendations to make the social citizenship framework in the UK more inclusive of women.

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.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. This book provides an accessible analysis of what gender equality means and how we can achieve it by adapting best practices in childcare and long term care policies from other countries.

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.

The important study investigates changes in women's transitions in and out of paid work, comparing Italy and Great Britain across four subsequent birth cohorts from the time they leave full-time education, up to their 40s.

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.

This book explores some of the diverse ways in which work helps to structure the relations between social policy and personal lives. Drawing on a wealth of theory, the authors explore questions that are central to our understanding of how the personal is not only shaped in and through work, but also contributes to social relations at work.

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.

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.

This book examines the urgent workplace challenges we’re facing today with an interdisciplinary and historical analysis that challenges and broadens the scope of existing economic literature. Exploring the current economic proposals to address these issues, it offers ways forward for greater economic social justice and equality at work.

Based upon cross-national case studies of public and private sector workplaces, "Work, families and organisations in transition" illustrates how workplace practices and policies impact on employees' experiences of "work-life balance" in contemporary shifting contexts.

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.