Part analysis of contemporary change and part vision of the future, post-Fordism lends its name to a set of challenging, essential and controversial debates over the nature of capitalism's newest age. This book provides a superb introduction to these debates and their far-reaching implications, and includes key texts by post-Fordism's major theorists and commentators.

Drawing on empirical research, this book provides an innovative exploration of youth and work, showing how youth identities are connected with the dynamics of labour and value in contemporary capitalism.

This critical, international and interdisciplinary edited collection investigates the new normal of work and employment, presenting research on the experience of the workers themselves. The collection explores the formation of contemporary worker subjects, and the privilege or disadvantage in play around gender, class, age and national location within the global workforce. Organised around the three areas of: creative working, digital working lives, and transitions and transformations, its fifteen chapters examine in detail the emerging norms of work and work activities in a range of occupations and locations. It also investigates the coping strategies adopted by workers to manage novel difficulties and life circumstances, and their understandings of the possibilities, trajectories, mobilities, identities and potential rewards of their work situations. This book will appeal to a wide range of audiences, including students and academics of the sociology of work and labor history, and those interested in understanding the implications of the ‘new normal’ of work and employment.

There is no doubt that significant socio-economic changes have occurred over the last twenty years in the UK and other advanced capitalist societies. Consequently, Fordism, a bureaucratic, hierarchical model of industrial development has matured into Post-Fordism, with its greater emphasis on the individual, freedom of choice and flexibility, generating fresh debate and analysis. Towards a Post-Fordist Welfare State represents leading authors from a number of disciplines - social policy, sociology, politics and geography - who have played a key role in promoting and criticising Post-Fordist theorising and presents a thorough examination of the implications of applying Post-Fordism to contemporary restructuring of the British welfare state. The work will appeal to a wide-ranging readership providing the first social policy text on Post-Fordism. It will be key reading for undergraduates, postgraduates and lecturers in social policy and administration, sociology, politics and public sector economics

As modern societies become increasingly individualistic, this fascinating book examines how we can maintain and revive local communities and community life. It demonstrates how the major developments and processes of our time, notably globalization, post-industrialism and de-traditionalization, contribute to this individualism to the detriment of community life. The author examines how community is a necessary and important component of human life and discusses possible ways in which to arrest its decline. In this regard, strategies geared to fostering trust and social capital are outlined as the basis for reinvigorating community life. The volume provides a coherent and distinct analysis of community as well as offering concrete policy prescriptions to counter the excessive individualism of our times. In both the nature and scope of its analysis, it offers a unique contribution to an extremely important issue in the contemporary period, one that increasingly preoccupies politicians, academics and ordinary citizens.

Fully updated and revised, the second edition of New Learning explores the contemporary debates and challenges in education and considers how schools can prepare their students for the future. New Learning, Second Edition is an inspiring and comprehensive resource for pre-service and in-service teachers alike.

The paradigm of mass production has given way to radically new forms of organizing industrial production based primarily on the need to foster continuous redesign of products and processes in the face of intensified competition. This change, which is designed to engender continuous adaptive learning in production systems, requires considerable organizational flexibility. The mass production systems constructed in the early post-war period foundered in the face of new forms of competition which put a premium on learning and flexibility.

This collection analyzes shifting relationships between gender and labour in post-Fordist times. Contingency creates a sexual contract in which attachments to work, mothering, entrepreneurship and investor subjectivity are the new regulatory ideals for women over a range of working arrangements, and across classed and raced dimensions.

The New Hollywood boom of the late 1960s and 1970s is celebrated as a time when maverick directors bucked the system. Against the backdrop of counterculture sensibilities and the prominence of auteur theory, New Hollywood directors such as Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola seemed to embody creative individualism. In Post-Fordist Cinema, Jeff Menne rewrites the history of this period, arguing that auteur theory served to reconcile directors to Hollywood’s corporate project. Menne traces the surprising affinities between auteur theory and management gurus such as Peter Drucker, who envisioned a more open and flexible corporate style. In founding production companies, New Hollywood filmmakers took part in the creation of new corporate models that emphasized entrepreneurial creativity. For firms such as Kirk Douglas’s Bryna Productions, Altman’s Lion’s Gate Films, the Zanuck-Brown Company, and BBS Productions, the counterculture ethos limbered up the studio system’s sclerotic production process—with striking parallels to how management theory conceived of the role of the individual within the firm. Menne offers insightful readings of how films such as Lonely Are the Brave, Brewster McCloud, Jaws, and The King of Marvin Gardens narrate the conditions in which they were created, depicting shifting notions of work and corporate structure. While auteur theory allowed directors to cast themselves as independent creators, Menne argues that its most consequential impact came as a management doctrine. An ambitious rethinking of New Hollywood, Post-Fordist Cinema sheds new light on the cultural myth of the great director and the birth of the “creative economy.”