Work and Employment

This book offers insights into the argument that capitalist society damages human health and well-being. Drawing on and bringing Marx’s theory of alienation forward to the present day, it uniquely links it to well-being.

Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The gender pay gap is economically irrational and yet stubbornly persistent. Focusing on the finance industry which is known for its gender pay disparity, this book explores the efforts being made to fix gendered inequities in the workplace and the factors stalling progress for the future.

The impacts of austerity and welfare reform on work and employment relations are explored in this perceptive assessment. This book highlights the role of trade unions and social movements in challenging the insecurities and inequalities imposed by work-focused welfare policies such as Universal Credit and proposes progressive new paths for welfare.

Governments worldwide assume that national competitiveness can be improved by developing workforce skills. This book critically examines this 'high skills' vision at both policy and practice levels. It challenges an oversimplified policy rhetoric that underestimates the complexity of the processes involved in developing a skilled workforce.

This volume challenges the idea of wage employment as the global norm, comparing lived experiences of ‘ordinary work’ across conceptual and geographical boundaries and opening up new possibilities for how work, income, identity and care might be woven together differently.

Spanning the UK, North America and Australia, this comparative study brings maternal workers’ politicized voices to the centre of contemporary debates on class, work and gender.

The book illustrates why social reproduction needs to be at the centre of a critical theory of work, care and mothering for post-pandemic times.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book reframes the debate about children’s work and harm in rural Africa with the aim of shifting research, public discourse and policy so that they better serve the interest of rural children and their families.

Based on field material collected from 2020 to 2022 in Sweden, this book tells a composite story of the everyday work of public sector workers that maintained the welfare infrastructure during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is impossible to view the news at present without hearing talk of crisis: the economy, the climate, the pandemic. This book asks how these larger societal issues lead to a crisis with work, making it ever more precarious, unequal and intense. Experts diagnose the nature of the problem and offer a programme for transcending above the crises.

This book brings together leading international authors from a number of fields to provide an up to date understanding of part-time work at national, sector, industry and workplace levels.

In this pioneering work, expert scholars offer new thinking on proactivity by examining how emotion can drive employees’ proactivity in the workplace and how, in turn, that proactivity can shape one’s emotional experiences.

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.