Building Houses on Sand: Social Protection Systems and Precarious Labour Markets in Middle Income Developing Countries
Since Chile’s transition to democracy, the country has dedicated important effort and...
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Tag: Inequalities
The Capability Approach: Concepts, Measures and Applications
The capability approach developed by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has become an important new paradigm in thinking about development. However, despite its theoretical and philosophical attractiveness, it has been less easy to measure or to translate into policy. This volume addresses these issues in the context of poverty and justice. Part I offers a set of conceptual essays that debate the strength of the often misunderstood individual focus of the capability approach. Part II investigates the techniques by which we can measure and compare capabilities, and how we can integrate them into poverty comparisons and policy advice. Finally, Part III looks at how we can apply the capability approach to different regions and contexts. Written by a team of international scholars, The Capability Approach is a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students concerned with the debate over the value of the capability approach and its potential applications.
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Making Work More Equal: A New Labour Market Segmentation Approach
This book presents new theories and international empirical evidence on the state of work and employment around the world. Changes in production systems, economic conditions and regulatory conditions are posing new questions about the growing use by employers of precarious forms of work, the contradictory approaches of governments towards employment and social policy, and the ability of trade unions to improve the distribution of decent employment conditions. The book proposes a ‘new labour market segmentation approach’ for the investigation of issues of job quality, employment inequalities, and precarious work. This approach is distinctive in seeking to place the changing international patterns and experiences of labour market inequalities in the wider context of shifting gender relations, regulatory regimes and production structures.
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Unequal Britain At Work
This book provides the first systematic assessment of trends in inequality in job quality in Britain in recent decades. It assesses the pattern of change drawing on the nationally representative Skills and Employment Surveys (SES) carried out at regular intervals from 1986 to 2012. These surveys collect data from workers themselves thereby providing a unique picture of trends in job quality.
The book is concerned both with wage and non-wage inequalities (focusing, in particular on skills, training, task discretion, work intensity, organizational participation, and job security), and how these inequalities relate to class, gender, contract status, unionisation, and type of employer. Amid rising wage inequality there has nevertheless been some improvement in the relative job quality experienced by women, part-time employees, and temporary workers. Yet the book reveals the remarkable persistence of major inequalities in the working conditions of other categories of employee across periods of both economic boom and crisis.
Beginning with a theoretical overview, before describing the main data series, this book examines how job quality differs between groups and across time.
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Employment Regimes And The Quality Of Work
The book makes a major new contribution to the sociology of employment by comparing the quality of working life in European societies with very different institutional systems – France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain and Sweden. It focuses in particular on skills and skill development, opportunities for training, the scope for initiative in work, the difficulty of combining work and family life and the security of employment. Drawing on a range of nationally representative surveys, it reveals striking differences in the quality of work in different European countries. It also provides for the first time rigorous comparative evidence on the experiences of different types of employee and an assessment of whether there has been a trend over time to greater polarization between a core workforce of relatively privileged employees and a peripheral workforce suffering from cumulative disadvantage. It explores the relevance of three influential theoretical perspectives, focussing respectively on the common dynamics of capitalist societies, differences in production regimes between capitalist societies and differences in the institutional systems of employment regulation. It argues that it is the third of these – an ’employment regime’ perspective – that provides the most convincing account of the factors that affect the quality of work in capitalist societies. The findings underline the importance of differences in national policies for people’s experiences of work and point to the need for a renewal at European level of initiatives for improving the quality of work.
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