Products

Contains two groups of archival materials. One group includes lecture notes from courses given at the University of Wisconsin by Edwin E. Witte and Robert Lampman on the economic role of government. The second group includes papers from a conference on the history of 20th century heterodox economics.

With This Ring is the 19th volume of the series Contemporary Studies in Sociology from their Sociology collection, edited by

R.Robin Miller.

This volume is part of an annual series which brings together studies of current issues in the former USSR and Eastern Europe, providing coverage of both domestic and international developments. It is designed to bridge the gap between specialist research and journalistic accounts.

This book addresses key issues regarding the nexus of work and family in society at the beginning of the 21st century. For many families, the "balancing act" brings rewards as well as concerns. Employers and governments struggle with whether and how to assist in achieving balance. The work presents original research that addresses the challenges in meeting work and family obligations. Each chapter provides policy recommendations that many help achieve better work-family balance, changes in work-family attitudes, conditions leading to firms' adopting policies to support work-family balance, and studies of child outcomes in dual earner families.

This volume contains 13 new and important never before published chapters covering aspects of the employer-employee relationship. The volume is focused at the academic audience, but is also geared to government and business policy makers worldwide. The chapters use data from the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle-East to answer a number of vital labor market questions. These include: Why has part-time work increased so dramatically in the 15 European Union countries? What changes in retirement behavior will be expected as countries change pension laws? Why do firms often use fixed-term instead of long-term employment contracts? How do employee work interruptions affect occupational choice? Why do both employers and employees often prefer additional fringe benefits to wage increases? Do academic certifications really signal higher worker quality? How is an individual's work ethic influenced by others in residential neighborhoods? And, why do risky jobs often pay lower wages when one might expect employees need better remuneration to take dangerous jobs?

"Worker Participation: Current Research and Future Trends, Volume 16 of Research in the Sociology of Work", offers cutting edge research on the character and implications of workplace participation. Written by some of the leading scholars in the sociology of workplace transformation and alternative organizations, the chapters here examine various outcomes, causes, and consequences related to participation programs and worker democracy today. Topics include ways in which participation schemes are socially constructed and negotiated; the meanings that workers attach to opportunities for involvement in the workplace; practice, participation, and consent in alternative organizations such as cooperatives and collectives; and theoretical treatments that call for new ways of thinking about workplace participation. Methodologically pluralist and concerned less with specific productivity effects of worker participation, this volume highlights the social structural, social constructionist, and meta theoretical dimensions of worker participation and democratic organizations in the twenty-first century. The global, 24/7 economy and the organizational changes it has generated have enormous implications for the organization, experience and use of time in (and out of) the workplace. In addition to eroding the boundary between home and work, creating time pressures both within and outside of the workplace, the need for businesses to compete in a 24/7 global economy has re-problematized time in the workplace. Drawing on sociology, labor economics, organizational behavior and social history, the papers in this volume examine either empirically or theoretically, a variety of aspects of time in the workplace. Contributors to this volume examine issues surrounding the distribution of and struggle over work hours and how these vary across a number of factors including race, class, occupation and other structural components of work. They examine temporal structures within organizations including inequities in flexible scheduling, entrainment and work teams, polychronicity, and how changing temporal structures affect professionalism and expertise. They also consider the way in which changing uses and organization of work time, in the context of economic instability and globalization, affect the difficulties of reconciling work and family. At the more micro-level, the papers consider individuals' perceptions and constructions and intersubjective constructions of time. To varying degrees, the authors speak to the policy implications or strategies for managing new times. Taken as a whole, these papers shed light on the way in which globalization and the emergence of a 24/7 economy have altered the ways, times, and meanings of time at work. "Research in the Sociology of Work" is now available online at ScienceDirect full-text online of volumes 10 onwards. This book examines various worker participation models and evaluates the success of their outcomes. It adopts a variety of methods and highlights the different dimensions of worker participation.

How do technology, public works projects, mental health, race, gender, mobility, retirement benefits, and macroeconomic policies affect worker well-being? This volume contains fourteen original chapters utilizing the latest econometric techniques to answer this question. The findings include the following: technology gains explain over half the decline in U.S. unemployment and over two-thirds the reduction in U.S. inflation; universal health coverage would reduce U.S. labor force participation by 3.3 per cent; blacks respond to regional rather than national changes in schooling rates of return, perhaps implying a more local labor market for blacks than whites; employee motivation enhances labor force participation, on-the-job training, job satisfaction and earnings; male and female promotion and quit rates are comparable once one controls for individual and job characteristics; public works programs designed to increase a worker's skills do not always increase reemployment; and, U.S. pension wealth increased about 20 per cent - 25 per cent over the last two decades.

This volume contains 15 essays devoted to a number of multifaceted issues regarding how public policy affects worker well-being. Of the 15 chapters, the first two are the more general, dealing with overall earnings distribution and overall changes in welfare policy. The remaining chapters examine specific aspects of human welfare. They cover: fertility, disability, minimum wage, pension wealth, human capital investment, migration, health, and earnings. The book culminates with four chapters relating to gender and the family. Ultimately, determining who works, how much is earned, and how these earnings get distributed define the components of individual and social welfare. The topics covered in this volume shed light on these questions.

How do workers fare in a continually changing labor market? This volume contains fifteen original scientific papers each examining how socio-economic changes affect worker wellbeing. Among the findings are: most increases in female labor force participation occur among women with high husbands' earnings, dispelling the myth that shrinking husbands' relative earnings cause women's work activities to rise; increased globalization equalizes pay between but expands pay within corporate establishments; high quality colleges widen the earnings distribution for top earners but only negligibly affect earnings for low wage earners; mathematical success depends on school quality more so than verbal learning; and adult daughters who visit ailing parents daily in a nursing home decrease their annual labor supply by about 1,000 hours implying a welfare loss of 180,000 dollars. Findings are: physical and/or sexual abuse appear to afflict over 30 per cent of the population leading to a 15 per cent drop in employment probability and a 32 per cent loss in wages; and, training workers in an entirely new occupation raises an employee's wage growth while training workers in the same occupation decreases their wage growth, at least during the Russian economy's recent transition.

The global, 24/7 economy and the organizational changes it has generated have enormous implications for the organization, experience and use of time in (and out of) the workplace. In addition to eroding the boundary between home and work, creating time pressures both within and outside of the workplace, the need for businesses to compete in a 24/7 global economy has re-problematized time in the workplace. Drawing on sociology, labor economics, organizational behavior and social history, the papers in this volume examine either empirically or theoretically, a variety of aspects of time in the workplace. Contributors to this volume examine issues surrounding the distribution of and struggle over work hours and how these vary across a number of factors including race, class, occupation and other structural components of work. They examine temporal structures within organizations including inequities in flexible scheduling, entrainment and work teams, polychronicity, and how changing temporal structures affect professionalism and expertise. They also consider the way in which changing uses and organization of work time, in the context of economic instability and globalization, affect the difficulties of reconciling work and family. At the more micro-level, the papers consider individuals' perceptions and constructions and intersubjective constructions of time. To varying degrees, the authors speak to the policy implications or strategies for managing new times. Taken as a whole, these papers shed light on the way in which globalization and the emergence of a 24/7 economy have altered the ways, times, and meanings of time at work. This book series is available electronically online.

This study is composed of a series of theoretical reflections inspired by empirical research into the ethical dilemmas of life in contradiction-ridden postmodern America. Adopting a phenomenological orientation toward their own situated, lifecourse experience, the authors dedicate chapters to subjects such as hospital birth, special education, Gen X, community-based anti-crime policy, public intellectuals, and mass death. Drawing primarily from the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory, and inspired in particular by Theodore W. Arno's post-war aphorism, "wrong life cannot be lived rightly", this volume seeks to contribute to the project of an empirical critical theory (sociology) as a postmodern ethic.