Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Labor & Industrial Relations

• mangement...

Andrew Gordon goes to the core of the Japanese enterprise system, the workplace, and reveals a complex history of contest and confrontation. The Japanese model produced a dynamic economy which owed as much to coercion as to happy consensus. Managerial hegemony was achieved only after a bitter struggle that undermined the democratic potential of postwar society. The book draws on examples across Japanese industry, but focuses in depth on iron and steel. This industry was at the center of the country's economic recovery and high-speed growth, a primary site of corporate managerial strategy...

Jorge Bonilla is hospitalized with pneumonia from sleeping at the restaurant where he works, unable to afford rent on wages of thirty cents an hour. Domestic worker Yanira Juarez discovers she has labored for six months with no wages at all; her employer lied about establishing a savings account for her. We live in an era of the sweatshop reborn.

In 1992 Jennifer Gordon founded the Workplace Project to help immigrant workers in the underground suburban economy of Long Island, New York. In a story of gritty determination and surprising hope, she weaves together Latino immigrant life...

Small business has captured the imagination of both the popular press and politicians. The tradition that has created sympathy for the small entrepreneur has been strengthened in recent years by images of small firms as dynamic, growing, and flexible and of large firms as struggling, outdated, and intractable in the face of changing competitive environments. There is, it appears, an added fervor for America's support of "the little guy."

Employers Large and Small draws on existing data and new research to create a more complete picture of the roles of large and small...

Because the world has long seen Sweden as a pioneer of democratic socialism, the success or failure of social experiments there has had momentous impact on the development of similar programs elsewhere. Now, in this penetrating inquiry undertaken by one of Sweden's leading political scientists, the problems and practices of Swedish trade unions are fully revealed.

Leif Lewin is interested in finding answers to several central questions: How democratic are Sweden's unions? How are they governed? How have they avoided the institutional inequities that plague some American unions? What...

Socializing Security examines the early movement for worker-security legislation in the United States. It focuses on a group of academic economists who became leading proponents of social insurance and protective labor legislation during the first decades of the twentieth century. These economists--including John R. Commons and Richard T. Ely--founded the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL). As intellectuals and political activists, they theorized about the social efficiency of security legislation, proposed policies, and drafted model bills. They campaigned vigorously...

As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play,...

In the United States, less than one worker in five is currently in a labor union, while in Sweden, virtually the entire workforce is unionized. Despite compelling evidence for their positive effects, even the strongest European unions are now in retreat as some policymakers herald the U.S. model of market deregulation. These differences in union power significantly affect workers' living standards and the fortunes of national economies. What explains the enormous variation in unionization and why has the last decade been so hostile to organized labor? Bruce Western tackles these questions...

Before the intifada began, Joost Hiltermann had already looked at local organizations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and seen there the main elements that would eventually be used to mobilize the Palestinian masses. In the first comprehensive study of these organizations, Hiltermann shows how local organizers provided basic services unavailable under military rule, while recruiting for the cause of Palestinian nationalism.

We live in an age of economic paradox. The dynamism of America's economy is astounding--the country's industries are the most productive in the world and spin off new products and ideas at a bewildering pace. Yet Americans feel deeply uneasy about their economic future. The reason, Paul Osterman explains, is that our recent prosperity is built on the ruins of the once reassuring postwar labor market. Workers can no longer expect stable, full-time jobs and steadily rising incomes. Instead, they face stagnant wages, layoffs, rising inequality, and the increased likelihood of merely temporary...

In this classic interpretation of the 1930s rise of industrial unionism, Gary Gerstle challenges the popular historical notion that American workers' embrace of "Americanism" and other patriotic sentiments in the post-World War I years indicated their fundamental political conservatism. He argues that Americanism was a complex, even contradictory, language of nationalism that lent itself to a wide variety of ideological constructions in the years between World War I and the onset of the Cold War. Using the rich and textured material left behind by New England's most powerful textile...

How can America's information technology (IT) industry predict serious labor shortages while at the same time laying off tens of thousands of employees annually? The answer is the industry's flexible labor management system--a flexibility widely regarded as the modus operandi of global capitalism today. Global "Body Shopping" explores how flexibility and uncertainty in the IT labor market are constructed and sustained through concrete human actions.

Drawing on in-depth field research in southern India and in Australia, and folding an ethnography into a political economy...