Searching for a job has been an everyday affair in both modern and past societies, and employment a concern for both individuals and institutions. The case studies in this volume investigate job search and placement practices in European countries, Australia, and India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors explore how looking for work becomes a means by which participants (individuals, placement agents, trade unions, municipalities, administrations, state authorities, and schools) articulated specific interests, perspectives, and agendas. Taking an exploratory approach, the chapters illustrate different approaches to the history of employment and job searching, ranging from organizational and regulatory histories to the analysis of practices and autobiographical accounts. In the process, they uncover the interrelations of search practices and attempts to arrange placement services.

From the traditional craft hiring hall to the Web site Monster.com, a multitude of institutions exist to facilitate the matching of workers with firms. The diversity of such Labor Market Intermediaries (LMIs) encompasses criminal records providers, public employment offices, labor unions, temporary help agencies, and centralized medical residency matches. Studies of Labor Market Intermediation analyzes how these third-party actors intercede where workers and firms meet, thereby aiding, impeding, and, in some cases, exploiting the matching process. By building a conceptual foundation for analyzing the roles that these understudied economic actors serve in the labor market, this volume develops both a qualitative and quantitative sense of their significance to market operation and worker welfare. Cross-national in scope, Studies of Labor Market Intermediation is distinctive in coalescing research on a set of market institutions that are typically treated as isolated entities, thus setting a research agenda for analyzing the changing shape of employment in an era of rapid globalization and technological change.

More workers are crossing national borders to look for jobs than ever before. Many migrants seek overseas employment with the help of agents or intermediaries. These "merchants of labour" include relatives who finance a migrant's trip, provide housing and arrange for a job abroad; public employment services; and private recruitment agencies. They also comprise an insalubrious underworld of smugglers and traffickers. The agents who recruit and deploy migrant workers are at the heart of the evolving migration infrastructure, i.e. the network of business and personal ties that is creating a global labour market. This book highlights best practices in the activities and regulation of these merchants of labour as well as innovative strategies to protect migrant workers, underlining the contribution of ILO standards. It covers a broad range of national and regional experiences and puts "merchants of labour" in the wider context of changing employment relationships in globalizing labour markets. The papers it contains are an important contribution to understanding a major mechanism facilitating the growth of the migrant labour force.

Unfree labor has not disappeared from advanced capitalist economies. In this sense the debates among and between Marxist and orthodox economic historians about the incompatibility of capitalism and unfree labor are moot: the International Labour Organisation has identified forced, coerced, and unfree labor as a contemporary issue of global concern. Previously hidden forms of unfree labor have emerged in parallel with several other well-documented trends affecting labor conditions, rights, and modes of regulation. These evolving types of unfree labor include the increasing normalization of contingent work (and, by extension, the undermining of the standard contract of employment), and an increase in labor intermediation. The normative, political, and numerical rise of temporary employment agencies in many countries in the last three decades is indicative of these trends. It is in the context of this rapidly changing landscape that this book consolidates and expands on research designed to understand new institutions for work in the global era. This edited collection provides a theoretical and empirical exploration of the links between unfree labor, intermediation, and modes of regulation, with particular focus on the evolving institutional forms and political-economic contexts that have been implicated in, and shaped by, the ascendency of temp agencies. What is distinctive about this collection is this bi-focal lens: it makes a substantial theoretical contribution by linking disparate literatures on, and debates about, the co-evolution of contingent work and unfree labor, new forms of labor intermediation, and different regulatory approaches; but it further lays the foundation for this theory in a series of empirically rich and geographically diverse case studies. This integrative approach is grounded in a cross-national comparative framework, using this approach as the basis for assessing how, and to what extent, temporary agency work can be considered unfree wage labor

The sports agent has become a highly significant figure in contemporary sport business. The role of the agent is essential to our understanding of labour markets and labour relations in an increasingly globalised sports industry. Drawing on extensive empirical research into football around the world, this book explains what agents do, how their role has changed, and why this is important for future sport business. Offering analysis from economic, legal, social and historical perspectives, the book explores key topics such as: the history of sports agents including the emergence of the modern agent in US sport typologies and demographic profiles of agents in football valuations and organisational analysis of leading European agents and agencies relations between agents and clubs future directions for research into sports agents. Focusing on the major European leagues, this book goes further than any other in illuminating an important but under-researched aspect of contemporary sport business. It is a valuable resource for any student, researcher or policy-maker with an interest in sport business, sport management, sport policy, the economics of sport or labour economics.

This special issue of Studies in Law, Politics and Society examines a broad range of European case studies to consider the crucial role played by intermediaries, such as companies and lawyers, in the legal system.

From award-winning economic historian Sanford M. Jacoby, a fascinating and important study of the labor movement and shareholder capitalism Since the 1970s, American unions have shrunk dramatically, as has their economic clout. Labor in the Age of Finance traces the search for new sources of power, showing how unions turned financialization to their advantage. Sanford Jacoby catalogs the array of allies and finance-based tactics labor deployed to stanch membership losses in the private sector. By leveraging pension capital, unions restructured corporate governance around issues like executive pay and accountability. In Congress, they drew on their political influence to press for corporate reforms in the wake of business scandals and the financial crisis. The effort restrained imperial CEOs but could not bridge the divide between workers and owners. Wages lagged behind investor returns, feeding the inequality identified by Occupy Wall Street. And labor’s slide continued. A compelling blend of history, economics, and politics, Labor in the Age of Finance explores the paradox of capital bestowing power to labor in the tumultuous era of Enron, Lehman Brothers, and Dodd-Frank.

Based on a four-year research project which highlights the important role of community organisations as intermediaries between community and culture, this book analyses the role played by cultural intermediaries who seek to mitigate the worst effects of social exclusion through engaging communities with different forms of cultural consumption and production. The authors challenge policymakers who see cultural intermediation as an inexpensive fix to social problems and explore the difficulty for intermediaries to rapidly adapt their activity to the changing public-sector landscape and offer alternative frameworks for future practice.

Island Southeast Asia was once a thriving region, and its products found eager consumers from China to Europe. Today, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia are primarily exporters of their surplus of cheap labor, with more than ten million emigrants from the region working all over the world. How did a prosperous region become a peripheral one? In The Making of a Periphery, Ulbe Bosma draws on new archival sources from the colonial period to the present to demonstrate how high demographic growth and a long history of bonded labor relegated Southeast Asia to the margins of the global economy. Bosma finds that the region’s contact with colonial trading powers during the early nineteenth century led to improved health care and longer life spans as the Spanish and Dutch colonial governments began to vaccinate their subjects against smallpox. The resulting abundance of workers ushered in extensive migration toward emerging labor-intensive plantation and mining belts. European powers exploited existing patron-client labor systems with the intermediation of indigenous elites and non-European agents to develop extractive industries and plantation agriculture. Bosma shows that these trends shaped the postcolonial era as these migration networks expanded far beyond the region. A wide-ranging comparative study of colonial commodity production and labor regimes, The Making of a Periphery is of major significance to international economic history, colonial and postcolonial history, and Southeast Asian history.

This new book analyses the strategies, usages and wider implications of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms in the culture and communication industries that are reshaping economic, organizational and social logics. Platforms are the object of considerable hype with a growing global presence. Relying on individual contributions coordinated by social media to finance cultural production (and carry out promotional tasks) is a significant shift, especially when supported by morphing public policies, supposedly enhancing cultural diversity and accessibility. The aim of this book is to propose a critical analysis of these phenomena by questioning what follows from decisions to outsource modes of creation and funding to consumers. Drawing on research carried out within the ‘Collab’ programme backed by the French National Research Agency, the book considers how platforms are used to organize cultural labour and/or to control usages, following a logic of suggestion rather than overt injunction. Four key areas are considered: the history of crowdfunding as a system; whose interests crowdfunding may serve; the implications for digital labour and lastly crowdfunding’s interface with globalization and contemporary capitalism. The book concludes with an assessment of claims that crowdfunding can democratize culture.