Employer Engagement. Making active labour market policies work by Jo Ingold (Editor); Patrick McGurk (Editor)Active labour market policies aim to assist people not in work to move into employment through a range of interventions including job search, preparation, training and in-work support and development. While policies, programmes and scholarship predominantly focus on jobseekers’ engagement with these initiatives, this book is the first text to shed light on the employer’s perspective. Bringing together renowned scholars from social and public policy and human resource management, the book draws on empirical research, comparative case studies and real-life examples from practice, providing a comprehensive analysis of this under-explored issue. This go-to resource will inform HRM and public policy scholarship and promote collaborations between the disciplines.
ISBN: 9781529223002
Publication Date: 2024
Care by Mark GaravanWe are in a crisis of care, one that needs an immediate response. This crisis is experienced in both our everyday lived experiences and in our interactions with the formal health and care systems. Due to factors such as inequality, isolation, ecological breakdown, and a society increasingly demarcated by winners and losers, we feel ourselves to be in a careless world. Our sense of community and solidarity has become eroded. At the same time, the capacity of the care system to respond to these growing needs has become more and more limited due to various resource deficits. Behind these difficulties lies the causal impact of neoliberal economics and ideology. How then might we revive our commons of care? How to access better care? To address our growing crisis of care, this book proposes two immediately achievable reforms.
ISBN: 9781782056119
Publication Date: 2024
Data Rules. Reinventing the market economy by Cristina Alaimo; Jannis Kallinikos; Michael Power (Foreword by)new social science framework for studying the unprecedented social and economic restructuring driven by digital data.
Digital data have become the critical frontier where emerging economic practices and organizational forms confront the traditional economic order and its institutions. In Data Rules, Cristina Alaimo and Jannis Kallinikos establish a social science framework for analyzing the unprecedented social and economic restructuring brought about by data. Working at the intersection of information systems and organizational studies, they draw extensively on intellectual currents in sociology, semiotics, cognitive science and technology, and social theory. Making the case for turning “data-making” into an area of inquiry of its own, the authors uncover how data are deeply implicated in rewiring the institutions of the market economy.
The authors associate digital data with the decentering of organizations. As they point out, centered systems make sense only when firms (and formal organizations more broadly) can keep the external world at arm's length and maintain a relative operation independence from it. These patterns no longer hold. Data transform the production of goods and services to an endless series of exchanges and interactions that defeat the functional logics of markets and organizations. The diffusion of platforms and ecosystems is indicative of these broader transformations. Rather than viewing data as simply a force of surveillance and control, the authors place the transformative potential of data at the center of an emerging socioeconomic order that restructures society and its institutions.
ISBN: 9780262547932
Publication Date: 2024
Extracting Accountability. Engineers and corporate social responsibility by Jessica SmithHow engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries attempt to reconcile competing domains of public accountability.
The growing movement toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) urges corporations to promote the well-being of people and the planet rather than the sole pursuit of profit. In Extracting Accountability, Jessica Smith investigates how the public accountability of corporations emerges from the everyday practices of the engineers who work for them. Focusing on engineers who view social responsibility as central to their profession, she finds the corporate context of their work prompts them to attempt to reconcile competing domains of accountability—to formal guidelines, standards, and policies; to professional ideals; to the public; and to themselves. Their efforts are complicated by the distributed agency they experience as corporate actors: they are not always authors of their actions and frequently act through others.
Drawing on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, Smith traces the ways that engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries accounted for their actions to multiple publics—from critics of their industry to their own friends and families. She shows how the social license to operate and an underlying pragmatism lead engineers to ask how resource production can be done responsibly rather than whether it should be done at all. She analyzes the liminality of engineering consultants, who experienced greater professional autonomy but often felt hamstrung when positioned as outsiders. Finally, she explores how critical participation in engineering education can nurture new accountabilities and chart more sustainable resource futures.
ISBN: 9780262542166
Publication Date: 2021
Transforming School Food Politics Around the World by Jennifer E. Gaddis (Editor); Sarah A. Robert (Editor); Silvia Federici (Foreword by)How to successfully challenge and transform public school-food programs to emphasize care, justice, and sustainability, with insights from eight countries across the Global North and South.
School food programs are about more than just feeding kids. They are a form of community care and a policy tool for advancing education, health, justice, food sovereignty, and sustainability. Transforming School Food Politics around the World illustrates how everyday people from a diverse range of global contexts have successfully challenged and changed programs that fall short of these ideals. Editors Jennifer Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert highlight the importance of global and local struggles to argue that the transformative potential of school food hinges on valuing the gendered labor that goes into caring for, feeding, and educating children.
Through accessible and inspiring essays, Transforming School Food Politics around the World shows politics in action. Chapter contributors include youths, mothers, teachers, farmers, school nutrition workers, academics, lobbyists, policymakers, state employees, nonprofit staff, and social movement activists. Drawing from historical and contemporary research, personal experiences, and collaborations with community partners, they provide readers with innovative strategies that can be used in their own efforts to change school food policy and systems. Ultimately, this volume sets the stage to reimagine school food as part of the infrastructure of daily life, arguing that it can and should be at the vanguard of building a new economy rooted in care for people and the environment.
ISBN: 9780262548113
Publication Date: 2024
Violence Against Women During Coronavirus by Naomi Pfitzner; Kate Fitz-Gibbon; Sandra Walklate; Silke Meyer; Marie SegraveThis open access book brings together leading international violence researchers to examine the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on experiences of, and responses to, domestic and family violence. In April 2020 the United Nations predicted that for every three months the COVID-19 lockdowns continued an additional 15 million cases of domestic violence would occur worldwide, termed the "shadow pandemic". Drawing on empirical work situated within an international context, this book presents evidence alongside country specific case studies to provide a global exploration of how women’s insecurity increased during this global health crisis at the same as their access to support services reduced. It provides a timely analysis of the degree to which the pandemic and associated government restrictions impacted on women’s experiences of violence with particular attention to changes in its prevalence and severity, and in system and service responses to women’shelp-seeking. In addition, the differential impacts of the pandemic in relation to the experiences of priority cohorts, including violence experienced by children and temporary migrant women is also explored. The key focus is on the nature, extent, and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on service delivery, accessibility of support, and access to justice for women experiencing domestic and family violence.
ISBN: 9783031293559
Publication Date: 2023
The Limits of Consent. Sexual assault and affirmative consent by Lisa Featherstone; Cassandra Byrnes; Jenny Maturi; Kiara Minto; Renée Mickelburgh; Paige DonaghyThis open access book examines the ways that consent operates in contemporary culture, suggesting it is a useful starting point to respectful relationships. This work, however, seeks to delve deeper, into the more complicated aspects of sexual consent. It examines the ways meaningful consent is difficult, if not impossible, in relationships that involve intimate partner violence or family violence. It considers the way vulnerable communities need access to information on consent. It highlights the difficulties of consent and reproductive rights, including the use (and abuse) of contraception and abortion. Finally, it considers the ways that young women are reshaping narratives of sexual assault and consent, as active agents both online and offline. Though this work considers victimisation, it also pays careful attention to the ways vulnerable groups take up their rights and understand and practice consent in meaningful ways.