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\"Since the early 1980s, a vast number of jobs have been created in the affluent economies of the industrialized world. Many workers are doing more skilled and fulfilling jobs, and getting paid more for their trouble. Yet it is often alleged that the quality of work life has deteriorated, with a substantial and rising proportion of jobs providing low wages and little security, or requiring unusually hard and stressful effort. In this unique and authoritative formal account of changing job quality, economist Francis Green highlights contrasting trends, using quantitative indicators drawn from public opinion surveys and administrative data. In most affluent countries average pay levels have risen along with economic growth, a major exception being the United States. Skill requirements have increased, potentially meaning a more fulfilling time at work. Set against these beneficial trends, however, are increases in inequality, a strong intensification of work effort, diminished job satisfaction, and less employee influence over daily work tasks. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Demanding Work shows how aspects of job quality are related, and how changes in the quality of work life stem from technological change and transformations in the politico-economic environment. The book concludes by discussing what individuals, firms, unions, and governments can do to counter declining job quality.\" Forschungsmethode: deskriptive Studie; empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch. (author's abstract, IAB-Doku).

In May and June of 1968 a dramatic wave of strikes paralyzed France, making industrial relations reform a key item on the government agenda. French trade unions seemed due for a golden age of growth and importance. Today, however, trade unions are weaker in France than in any other advanced capitalist country. How did such exceptional militancy give way to equally remarkable quiescence? To answer this question, Chris Howell examines the reform projects of successive French governments toward trade unions and industrial relations during the postwar era, focusing in particular on the efforts of post-1968 conservative and socialist governments. Howell explains the genesis and fate of these reform efforts by analyzing constraints imposed on the French state by changing economic circumstances and by the organizational weakness of labor. His approach, which links economic, political, and institutional analysis, is broadly that of Regulation Theory. His explicitly comparative goal is to develop a framework for understanding the challenges facing labor movements throughout the advanced capitalist world in light of the exhaustion of the postwar pattern of economic growth, the weakening of the nation-state as an economic actor, and accelerating economic integration, particularly in Europe.

Even faced with overwhelming evidence that tobacco threatens human health, along with economic developments undermining their status as independent producers, North Carolina tobacco farmers view tobacco production in ways congruent with a moral economy. A shift from independent to contract production of tobacco and the dismantling of government price supports have challenged this moral economy, converting tobacco producers into a quasi—working class dependent on tobacco companies while leading to fewer tobacco farms and an increase in the average tobacco farm's size. These changes signal a shift away from a moral economy of tobacco, although moral-economic dimensions remain. Producers today emphasize different moral dimensions of economic behavior, such as producing quality human beings, than during earlier eras, when moral-economic actors pressed for state intervention in economic crises. Moral-economic principles are not restricted to either non-Western or historical peoples but, rather, influence economic production and ideology in advanced capitalist settings today.

The sociological study of economic activity has witnessed a significant resurgence. Recent texts have chronicled economic sociology's nineteenth-century origins while pointing to the importance of context and power in economic life, yet the field lacks a clear understanding of the role that concepts at different levels of abstraction play in its organization. Economic Sociology fills this critical gap by surveying the current state of the field while advancing a framework for further theoretical development.

Students of management are nearly unanimous (as are managers themselves) in believing that the contemporary business corporation is in a period of dizzying change. This book represents the first time that leading experts in sociology, law, economics, and management studies have been assembled in one volume to explain the varying ways in which contemporary businesses are transforming themselves to respond to globalization, new technologies, workforce transformation, and legal change. Together their essays, whose focal point is an emerging network form of organization, bring order to the chaotic tumble of diagnoses, labels, and descriptions used to make sense of this changing world. Following an introduction by the editor, the first three chapters--by Walter Powell, David Stark, and Eleanor Westney--report systematically on change in corporate structure, strategy, and governance in the United States and Western Europe, East Asia, and the former socialist world. They separate fact from fiction and established trend from extravagant extrapolation. This is followed by commentary on them: Reinier Kraakman affirms the durability of the corporate form; David Bryce and Jitendra Singh assess organizational change from an evolutionary perspective; Robert Gibbons considers the logic of relational contracting in firms; and Charles Tilly probes the deeper historical context in which firms operate. The result is a revealing portrait of the challenges that managers face at the dawn of the twenty-first century and of how the diverse responses to those challenges are changing the nature of business enterprise throughout the world.

Ainda sem tradução no Brasil, o livro A mobilidade ambígua - Espaço, tempo e poder no cume da sociedade contemporânea, de autoria da socióloga italiana Laura Gherardi, é o resultado de um esforço teórico-metodológico no estudo dos sentidos da mobilidade na sociedade contemporânea. Com um universo de mais de 50 entrevistas com executivos, professores globais e artistas de renome internacional, realizadas nas cidades de Paris, Londres e Milão, o livro propõe uma análise da mobilidade nos termos de uma nova ética social do chamado \"capitalismo avançado\". Com o intuito de superar a antinomia dos esquemas clássicos oriundos da tradição marxista ou weberiana, Gherardi explora as possibilidades de uma análise das diferenciações sociais no seio da atual configuração do capitalismo, a partir da análise da relação entre poder e ritmo. O argumento central da autora aponta no sentido de uma ressignificação da noção de \"mobilidade\": antes colocada como repertório crítico pelos movimentos de contestação do capitalismo, a mobilidade se torna um elemento central na cosmologia de valores do capitalismo avançado e \"por projetos\". Assim, cooptada pelas forças as quais visava destruir, a mobilidade disciplinada, organizada e controlada passa a constituir uma ética social do chamado \"novo espírito do capitalismo\", repercutindo de forma ambígua no dia-dia dos indivíduos que vivenciam essa experiência de forma dúbia, ora como um recurso, ora como um imperativo, no contexto de um mundo conexionista. Not yet translated in Brazil, the book \"The ambiguous mobility - Space, time and power on the top of contemporary society,\" by the Italian sociologist Laura Gherardi, is the result of a theoretical and methodological effort towards understanding the meanings of mobility in contemporary society. Based on over 50 interviews with executives, global professors and world-renowned artists, held in the cities of Paris, London and Milan, the book proposes an analysis of mobility in terms of a new social ethic in the so-called \"late capitalism\". In order to overcome the antinomy of classical analyzes derived from Marxist or Weberian tradition, Gherardi explores the possibilities of studying social differentiations within the current configuration of capitalism, based on the analysis of the relationship between power and pace. The central argument of the author points towards a redefinition of the concept of 'mobility': initially set as a critical repertoire by anti-capitalist movements, mobility becomes a central element in the cosmology of values of late capitalism and \"per project\" capitalism. Thus co-opted by the forces which it once sought to destroy, the disciplined, organized and controlled mobility becomes integrated to a social ethic of the \"new spirit of capitalism\" and ambiguously affects the daily lives of individuals who live this experience in a dubious way, sometimes as a resource, sometimes as an imperative in the context of a connections driven world.

Among the first anthropologists to work in Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery had built up a significant base of ethnographic and historical expertise when the major political transformations in the region began to take place. In this collection of essays dealing with the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism and the different forms that may replace it, she explores the nature of socialism in order to understand more fully its consequences. By analyzing her primary data from Romania and Transylvania and synthesizing information from other sources, Verdery lends a distinctive anthropological perspective to a variety of themes common to political and economic studies on the end of socialism: themes such as \"civil society,\" the creation of market economies, privatization, national and ethnic conflict, and changing gender relations. Under Verdery's examination, privatization and civil society appear not only as social processes, for example, but as symbols in political rhetoric. The classic pyramid scheme is not just a means of enrichment but a site for reconceptualizing the meaning of money and an unusual form of post-Marxist millenarianism. Land being redistributed as private property stretches and shrinks, as in the imaginings of the farmers struggling to tame it. Infused by this kind of ethnographic sensibility, the essays reject the assumption of a transition to capitalism in favor of investigating local processes in their own terms.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction References

This third paper in the persons in relation series was first delivered as a keynote presentation in Athens in the spring of 2006, at an international conference in the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, organised by the University–s Department of Psychology, the Greek Association for Counselling, and the European Association for Counselling.

This introductory chapter briefly examines the nature of popular music in contemporary society and music's link to workplace cultures and workplace resistance. It uses Christopher Small's “musicking” to denote social practices that involve music. Understanding the meaning of popular music in the factory can help develop knowledge about the nature of the use and role of popular music in contemporary advanced capitalism. In studying social practices of hearing and using contemporary popular music in monotonous social structures, the chapter also uses concept of multitonous musicking, which involves a way of using music to be both with and against a monotonous social structure. It is a dialectical form of musical practice that is rooted in the context of the monotonous social structure. It is also a form of musicking that allows the enactment of the social order within the monotonous while also allowing the expression of a spirit of resistance to that social order.