Work and labour markets

An international comparison of labour markets, migrant professionals and immigration policies, and their interaction in relation to social work.

This volume provides an international perspective on parental leave policies in different countries, goes beyond this to examine a range of issues in depth, and aims to stimulate thinking about possible futures and how policy might underpin them.

EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Led by the disability movement’s concern with the employment choices faced by disabled people, this controversial book uses sociological and philosophical approaches, as well as international examples, to critically engage with possible alternatives to paid work for disabled people.

Social marginalisation due to changing labour markets in a global, knowledge-intensive economy poses a major challenge to international welfare states. Addressing the problem from a citizenship perspective, this book contributes significantly to the understanding of policy problems and the development of appropriate strategies.

This book is the first of its kind to examine the relationship between social exclusion, poverty and the labour market. It challenges long-standing and dominant myths about ‘the workless’ and ‘the poor’, by exploring close-up the lived realities of life in low-pay, no-pay Britain.

Towards a democratic division of labour? starts from the challenge of balancing values of 'equality' and 'freedom' in all sections of modern societies, introducing the Combination Model as a scientific tool for studying the division of professional and family work and for elaborating adequate policy perspectives.

Throughout the European Union, rates of unemployment among young people tend to be higher than among the general population and there is a serious risk of marginalisation and exclusion. This important new book presents the findings of the first comparative study of unemployed youth in Europe using a large and original data set.

Wu integrates the current understanding of motivational factors in shaping proactive workers, through his introduction to attachment theory, and development of it as a theoretical framework. This compelling approach provides academics with a new way of thinking about employee behaviour while also acting as a guide for practitioners and managers.

"Beyond the workfare state" explores equality, discrimination and human rights in relation to employability and 'welfare-to-work' policies bringing together a wide and distinctive range of illustrative studies that gives voice to a variety of potentially marginalised groups.

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.

This compelling book examines parental leave policies in Nordic countries, looking at how these laws encourage men towards life courses with greater care responsibilities. It considers the impact that these policies have had on gender equality and how they have led to a re-gendering of men by promoting ‘caring masculinities’.

Setting a new benchmark for studies of technocracy, this book shows that a solution to the challenge of populism will depend as much on a technocratic retreat as democratic innovation.