The Meaning of Work in the New Economy PDF Download

Author: C. Baldry
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230210643
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This book analyzes the multiple levels of meaning which people attach to work today, and the role of work in people's lives. By looking at call centres and software development, the book evaluates some of the claims made for the knowledge economy and argues that defining the work-life boundary is a constant problem for many workers

Author: Ilana Gershon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226833224
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Finding a job used to be simple. You’d show up at an office and ask for an application. A friend would mention a job in their department. Or you’d see an ad in a newspaper and send in your cover letter. Maybe you’d call the company a week later to check in, but the basic approach was easy. And once you got a job, you would stay—often for decades. Now . . . well, it’s complicated. If you want to have a shot at a good job, you need to have a robust profile on LinkdIn. And an enticing personal brand. Or something like that—contemporary how-to books tend to offer contradictory advice. But they agree on one thing: in today’s economy, you can’t just be an employee looking to get hired—you have to market yourself as a business, one that can help another business achieve its goals. That’s a radical transformation in how we think about work and employment, says Ilana Gershon. And with Down and Out in the New Economy, she digs deep into that change and what it means, not just for job seekers, but for businesses and our very culture. In telling her story, Gershon covers all parts of the employment spectrum: she interviews hiring managers about how they assess candidates; attends personal branding seminars; talks with managers at companies around the United States to suss out regional differences—like how Silicon Valley firms look askance at the lengthier employment tenures of applicants from the Midwest. And she finds that not everything has changed: though the technological trappings may be glitzier, in a lot of cases, who you know remains more important than what you know. Throughout, Gershon keeps her eye on bigger questions, interested not in what lessons job-seekers can take—though there are plenty of those here—but on what it means to consider yourself a business. What does that blurring of personal and vocational lives do to our sense of our selves, the economy, our communities? Though it’s often dressed up in the language of liberation, is this approach actually disempowering workers at the expense of corporations? Rich in the voices of people deeply involved with all parts of the employment process, Down and Out in the New Economy offers a snapshot of the quest for work today—and a pointed analysis of its larger meaning.

Author: José-Luis Álvarez-Galván
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443838179
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book examines the impact of outsourcing on workers and their employment conditions in the new economy. To do so, the call centre industry in Mexico City is analysed through a large number of in-depth interviews with workers and managers, available statistics and visits to leading firms in the sector. The case of call centres is paradigmatic as it is often seen as a flag-ship industry of the new economy, rapidly growing and subject to high pressures for costs reduction. The Mexican experience is crucially relevant to understand employment conditions in a weak institutional setting where labour protection is low and business competition intense. Overall, outsourcing has gained popularity as a mechanism to deal with the uncertainty of increasingly challenging business environments. Nonetheless, the practice of outsourcing also raises important concerns. This book identifies those managerial practices which have a substantial impact on workers and their employment conditions such as: job designs; customer segmentation; non-standard contracts; intensified supervision; union avoidance; limited career opportunities; and strict social divisions in the workplace. These findings also suggest that a number of practices that were common in the ‘old’ economy are still dominant in the organisation of work in the twenty-first century. The book is a useful reference for scholars and students concerned with employment and labour studies, economic development, and globalisation.

Author: Simon Head
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195179838
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This text provides an examination of the business practices which led to the economic boom of the 'new economy' in the later half of the 1990s and into the 21st century.

Author: Stephen Sweet
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1483358267
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
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.

Author: David H. Autor
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262367742
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Why the United States lags behind other industrialized countries in sharing the benefits of innovation with workers and how we can remedy the problem. The United States has too many low-quality, low-wage jobs. Every country has its share, but those in the United States are especially poorly paid and often without benefits. Meanwhile, overall productivity increases steadily and new technology has transformed large parts of the economy, enhancing the skills and paychecks of higher paid knowledge workers. What’s wrong with this picture? Why have so many workers benefited so little from decades of growth? The Work of the Future shows that technology is neither the problem nor the solution. We can build better jobs if we create institutions that leverage technological innovation and also support workers though long cycles of technological transformation. Building on findings from the multiyear MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, the book argues that we must foster institutional innovations that complement technological change. Skills programs that emphasize work-based and hybrid learning (in person and online), for example, empower workers to become and remain productive in a continuously evolving workplace. Industries fueled by new technology that augments workers can supply good jobs, and federal investment in R&D can help make these industries worker-friendly. We must act to ensure that the labor market of the future offers benefits, opportunity, and a measure of economic security to all.

Author: Seppo Poutanen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137527021
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
This book provides a thorough and novel examination of the gendered nature of innovations in the new economy. It tracks the contemporary shift from heavy industry to game industry and how this has altered relationships between gender, identity, corporate culture, creative work, and the future of business. Through empirical research and theoretical analysis, the authors present their own carefully contextualized cases and conceptual frameworks relating themes of innovation and gender to recent theories concerning globalization and transnationalism. This wide-ranging and interdisciplinary text provides readers with insightful entries on what innovations are and the ways innovation processes become gendered. It explores the business landscape based on creative work and offers a wealth of information for scholars of entrepreneurship, management, sociology, cultural studies, and communication.

Author: Adam Davidson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385353537
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The brilliant creator of NPR's Planet Money podcast and award-winning New Yorker staff writer explains our current economy: laying out its internal logic and revealing the transformative hope it offers for millions of people to thrive as they never have before. Contrary to what you may have heard, the middle class is not dying and robots are not stealing our jobs. In fact, writes Adam Davidson—one of our leading public voices on economic issues—the twenty-first-century economic paradigm offers new ways of making money, fresh paths toward professional fulfillment, and unprecedented opportunities for curious, ambitious individuals to combine the things they love with their careers. Drawing on the stories of average people doing exactly this—an accountant overturning his industry, a sweatshop owner's daughter fighting for better working conditions, an Amish craftsman meeting the technological needs of Amish farmers—as well as the latest academic research, Davidson shows us how the twentieth-century economy of scale has given way in this century to an economy of passion. He makes clear, too, that though the adjustment has brought measures of dislocation, confusion, and even panic, these are most often the result of a lack of understanding. The Passion Economy delineates the ground rules of the new economy, and armed with these, we begin to see how we can succeed in it according to its own terms—intimacy, insight, attention, automation, and, of course, passion. An indispensable road map and a refreshingly optimistic take on our economic future.

Author: Judy Fudge
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1847312152
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Globalisation, the shift from manufacturing to services as a source of employment, and the spread of information-based systems and technologies have given birth to a new economy, which emphasises flexibility in the labour market and in employment relations. These changes have led to the erosion of the standard (industrial) employment relationship and an increase in precarious work - work which is poorly paid and insecure. Women perform a disproportionate amount of precarious work. This collection of original essays by leading scholars on labour law and women's work explores the relationship between precarious work and gender, and evaluates the extent to which the growth and spread of precarious work challenges traditional norms of labour law and conventional forms of legal regulation.The book provides a comparative perspective by furnishing case studies from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Quebec, Sweden, the UK, and the US, as well as the international and supranational context through essays that focus on the IMF, the ILO, and the EU. Common themes and concepts thread throughout the essays, which grapple with the legal and public policy challenges posed by women's precarious work.

Author: Samantha K. Ammons
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1784416290
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
This volume will focus on innovative research examining how the nature of paid work intersects with family and personal life today. This collection of cutting-edge research will be instrumental in shaping the next wave of work-family scholarship.