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This leading, comprehensive text for courses on the sociology of work covers many vital new topics since the last edition (2015), just as it continues to offer foundational writings and discusses different types of jobs, inequality and intersectionality, work and family, and more.New to this edition:• The gig economy and new digital platforms and their effects on how work is organized.• Precarious work and precarious workers, changes that reflect fundamental changes in employment relationships, increased job insecurity, and how people think about their jobs.• The new retail, from customer interactions to a world where consumption is driven by data science.• The latest research on call centers as the archetypal 21st-century workplace, illustrating many important issues about interactive work, transnational workplaces, gender, etc.• The post-pandemic workplace, including essential workers and frontline workers, healthcare work and care workers; job flexibility, and implications for gender, work, and family.

•••Evening Standard's best non-fiction 2021•••'A brilliant, searing exposé of the lies underpinning work'- Owen Jones'Work hard, get paid.'It's simple. Self-evident. But it's also a lie—at least for most of us. For people today, the old assumptions are crumbling; hard work in school no longer guarantees a secure, well-paying job in the future. Far from a gateway to riches and fulfilment,'work'means precarity, anxiety and alienation. Amelia Horgan poses three big questions: what is work? How does it harm us? And what can we do about it? While abolishing work altogether is not the answer, Lost in Work shows that when we are able to take control of our workplaces, we become less miserable, and can work towards the transformative goal of experimenting with'work'as we know it.

In the past, youth has been seen as a transition into the labour market, but today young people's identities are increasingly wrapped up in their value as workers. In this book, young people describe the meaning of work in their own words. Drawing on these narratives, the author reveals how their identities are intertwined with the dynamics of labour and value in post-Fordist capitalism and how social inequalities are manifested through the practices and ethics that young people draw upon to cultivate an economically productive self. Illuminating the rapidly changing social conditions that mould youth identities, this book represents a paradigm shift in our understanding of youth and work.

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS'CHOICE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME, NPR, INSTYLE, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING“A sensational new book [that] tries to figure out whether it's possible to live an ethical life in a capitalist society.... The results are enthralling.” —Associated Press A timely and arresting new look at affluence by the New York Times bestselling author, “one of the leading lights of the modern American essay.” —Financial Times“My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,” Eula Biss writes, “the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.” Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges—in libraries and laundromats, over barstools and backyard fences—she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism. Described by the New York Times as a writer who “advances from all sides, like a chess player,” Biss offers an uncommonly immersive and deeply revealing new portrait of work and luxury, of accumulation and consumption, of the value of time and how we spend it. Ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon, Biss asks, of both herself and her class, “In what have we invested?”

This book explores the relationship between the changing nature of capitalism and the creation of the new worker. In a changing global economy, work - as the activity that structures individuals in capitalism both socially and psychologically - is being undermined. Combining a Gramscian critique of contemporary patterns of capitalist labour control with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Durand examines what kinds of human beings are emerging in and through modern work, or on its margins. Creating the New Worker will be of interest to students and scholars who engage in the sociology and psychology of work, economics, and labour.

Je nach historischer Epoche, räumlichem Kontext und gesellschaftlicher Schicht variiert die Verteilung von Arbeit und Nicht-Arbeit im Lebenslauf. Dieser Band relativiert gängige Vorstellungen von der Normalität des Arbeitens, indem er danach fragt, wie Individuen und Gruppen mit diesen Maßstäben, aber auch mit den Veränderungen in der gesellschaftlichen und ökonomischen Organisation von Arbeit umgehen: Wie reagieren sie, wenn sie den Standards von Normalitätskonzepten oder -fiktionen nicht genügen? Wie kommt es zu Abweichungen, Konkurrenzen und Wandel? Die Beiträger_innen ermöglichen einen multidisziplinär ausgerichteten Blick auf die aktuellen Debatten über Arbeit, Prekarität und sozialen Wandel.

In den letzten drei Jahrzehnten hat sich in Deutschland das Verhältnis von Erwerbsarbeit und Privatleben stark gewandelt. Die traditionelle Verbindung von männlichem Alleinernährermodell und Normalarbeitsverhältnis hat weitestgehend ausgedient. Sowohl Frauen als auch Männer haben heute eine hohe Erwerbsneigung, sie verfolgen vielfältige Karrierepfade und verbinden mit ihrem Beruf mehr als nur den Einkommenserwerb. In der modernen Arbeitswelt treffen sie sowohl auf neuartige Möglichkeiten als auch auf veränderte Anforderungen: Mehr Arbeitszeitflexibilität, hohe Job-Autonomie und Telearbeit auf der einen Seite; hoher Arbeitsdruck, steigende Beschäftigungsunsicherheit und überlange Arbeitszeiten auf der anderen Seite. In diesem Buch wird die Frage untersucht, wie gut Beschäftigten in Deutschland die Abstimmung zwischen Erwerbsarbeit und Privatleben gelingt und welche Arbeitsbedingungen und privaten Lebensumstände dabei hilfreich oder hinderlich sind. Analysiert werden zeit- und belastungsbasierte Vereinbarkeitsprobleme unterschiedlicher Intensitäten unter Berücksichtigung gewandelter beruflicher und außerberuflicher Lebensumstände.

Labor Avoidance is about work, something everyone hates, and something everyone longs to escape. At the same time, human nature is to sustain life that is physical, and thus constant labor is a necessity. This is what humanity, from Eden to our own post-industrial society, has always tried to reduce or avoid by making somebody else do it. Historically, this nature and origin of labor-avoidance is responsible for war, colonialism, slavery, and now, contract employment in market society. This book explores American capitalism and how labor (and the desire to escape it) has become responsible for so much human struggle and misery throughout history.

This book presents an accessible and fascinating account of theoretical debates around identity and work, recent empirical trends and methodological arguments concerning the role of oral testimony and its interpretation. Focusing on three occupational sectors in particular teachers, bank workers and the railway industry it also presents an argument that is both more general than this and theoretically and analytically wide-ranging. The book explores some important questions: how are workers, both in the past and the present juncture, socialised into work cultures? What are the cultural and structural differences with regard the world of work across class, gender, and generation? What are the historical conditions of which these differences play a part? How is the idea of work found in a range of representations, from artistic production to sociological discourse expressed and explored? The development of concepts such as'structures of feeling'and affect, and the weaving in of historical and visual material, make the book important to a wide range of readers including ethnographers, cultural sociologists and narrative researchers. In turn, this book offers an authoritative and sophisticated summary and analysis of work and identity and is an important intervention into mainstream sociology concerns.