Essays and case studies on "the problems of organizing and new models of unionism ... in the context of women's work culture, multiracial workplaces, contingent and part-time work, and participatory innovations to improve service and experience of work simultaneously."--Back cover.

The rise to prominence of the service sector - heralded over half a century ago as the great hope for the twenty-first century - has come to fruition. In many cases, employment in the service sector now outnumbers that in manufacturing sectors, and it is accepted that in all developed countries, the service sector is the only one in which employment will grow in future. The reasons for this is the subject of much controversy and debate, the outcomes of which are not merely of academic interest but of decisive importance for economic policy and the quality of working and living conditions in future. In order to examine these various arguments, research teams from eight European countries worked together for three years on a comparative study of the evolution of service sector employment in EU member states. They also investigated working and employment conditions in five very different service industries (banking, retailing, hospitals, IT services and care of the elderly) in a number of countries, and the results of their research are presented in this informative new collection, of interest to students academics and researchers involved in all aspects of industrial economics.

Everyday, we are bombarded with advertising images of the smiling service worker. The book is written with the aim of focusing beneath the surface of these fairy tale images, to seek out and understand the reality of service workers experience. Within the sociology of work and related literatures, there are an increasing number of empirical studie

Information technology has been touted as a boon for productivity, but measuring the benefits has been difficult. This volume examines what macroeconomic data do and do not show about the impact of information technology on service-sector productivity. This book assesses the ways in which different service firms have selected and implemented information technology, examining the impact of different management actions and styles on the perceived benefits of information technology in services.

Work and Society provides a comprehensive investigation of the major trends in work and employment. The changing social order and its impact upon the labour market in recent years, alongside the huge changes brought about by new technology and globalization are considered.

Knowledge Workers in the Information Society addresses the changing nature of work, workers, and their organizations in the media, information, and knowledge industries. These knowledge workers include journalists, broadcasters, librarians, filmmakers and animators, government workers, and employees in the telecommunications and high tech sectors. Technological change has become relentless. Corporate concentration has created new pressures to rationalize work and eliminate stages in the labor process. Globalization and advances in telecommunications have made real the prospect that knowledge work will follow manufacturing labor to parts of the world with low wages, poor working conditions, and little unionization. McKercher and Mosco bring together scholars from numerous disciplines to examine knowledge workers from a genuinely global perspective.

Providing a thorough overview of the political nature and dynamics of the world of work, labour and employment, this timely Handbook draws together an interdisciplinary range of top contributors to explore the interdependent relationship between politics and labour, work and employment. The Handbook explores the purpose, roles, rights and powers of employers and management, workers and unions, states and governments in the age of globalised neo-liberalism.

After a quarter of a century of market reform, China has become the workshop of the world and the leading growth engine of the global economy. Its immense labour force accounts for some twenty-nine per cent of the world's total labour pool but all too little is known about Chinese labour beyond the image of workers toiling under appalling sweatshop conditions for extremely low wages. Working in China introduces the lived experiences of labour in a wide range of occupations and work settings. The chapters of this book cover professional employees such as engineers and lawyers, service workers such as bar hostesses, domestic maids and hotel workers, and industrial workers in a variety of factories. The mosaic of human faces, organizational dynamics and workers' voices presented in the book reflect the complexity of changes and challenges taking place in the Chinese workplace today. Based on extraordinary and thorough field research, this book will have a wide readership at undergraduate level and beyond, appealing to students and scholars from a myriad of disciplines including Chinese studies, labour studies, sociology and political economy.

Polls tell us that most Americans_whether they earn $20,000 or $200,000 a year_think of themselves as middle class. As this phenomenon suggests, "middle class" is a category whose definition is not necessarily self-evident. In this book, historian Daniel

Building the E-Service Society is a state-of-the-art book which deals with innovative trends in communication systems, information processing, and security and trust in electronic commerce, electronic business, and electronic government. It comprises the proceedings of I3E2004, the Fourth International Conference on E-Commerce, E-Business, and E-Government, which was held in August 2004 as a co-located conference of the 18th IFIP World Computer Congress in Toulouse, France, and sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). The book contains recent results and developments in the following areas: E-Government: E-Government Models and Processes, E-Governance, Service Provisioning. E-Business: Infrastructures and Marketplaces, M-Commerce, Purchase and Payment. E-Commerce: Value Chain Management, E-Business Architectures and Processes, E-Business Models.