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The empirical study of individuals'life-course is one of the most promising areas of research within sociology today. Increased availability of large-scale longitudinal data and improved statistical methods have made it possible to address theoretically relevant questions about events such as entrance into the labour market, job mobility, divorce and death.This book consists of studies capturing the life-course from the cradle to the grave. The research questions include long-term consequences of childhood conditions; family formation and school-careers; work and parental leave; gender discrimination in job promotion; divorce and occupational career; persistence in poverty; and the intriguing question of why the highly educated tend to survive everyone else.The studies shed light on the relation between family and work, on gender inequality, social class differences, welfare state redistribution, and labour market processes. They do this in a particular context, namely Sweden in the post-war period that is, during the decades that formed one of the most advanced welfare states in modern history. One chapter provides a descriptive account of institutional and life-course change in Sweden during that period.Most authors use the Swedish level-of-living surveys, a unique data set providing ample opportunity to study social processes in a longitudinal perspective. The book will, therefore, be of relevance to those with interests in the Swedish welfare state as well as those with theoretical and reseacrh interests in the reproduction of inequality

This book investigates death as part of contemporary everyday experience and practices. Through a cultural sociological lens, it studies death as it remains constantly at the edge of our consciousness, shaping the ways in which we move through social reality. As such, Death Matters is a significant contribution to death studies, going beyond traditional parameters of the field by addressing the cultural omnipresence of death.The contributions analyse several death-related meaning-making processes, arguing that meanings emerging from culturally shared narratives, social institutions, and material conditions, are just as important as'death practices'in understanding the role of death in society. Drawing on the related themes of places of absence and presence, disease and bodies, and persons and non-persons, the authors explore a variety of areas of social life, from haunting to celebrity deaths, to move the notion of death from the margins of social reality to ongoing everyday life.This far-reaching collection will be of use to scholars and students across death studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, culture, media and communication studies.

Recent years have witnessed major changes to the workplace across Europe. The speed of these changes requires constant monitoring and reappraisal. In this book, recent trends are analyzed and their consequences discussed, within a socio-historical context which also reveals underlying patterns of continuity. The trends analyzed include: � the presence of high rates of endemic unemployment and underemployment, particularly amongst the young � the growth of insecure and precarious employment � sweeping changes to the regulation of and organization of work � the diminution in the availability of manual work and the growth of white-collar service-sector jobs � the growing participation of women in paid employment � the introduction of new organizational forms and new forms of management � the accelerating use of IT � the growth in demand for educational and vocational qualifications by employers � the increasing influence of European legislation on work, retirement, health, safety, etc � the growing importance of voluntary-sector work The contributors to the volume present both primary research and a wide-ranging survey and analysis of recent major contributions in the field. Detailed empirical material is included from Belgium, Finland, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the EU more generally. Thus, the book aims to provide a current overview of the nature of work from a pan-European perspective, illuminated by up-to-the-minute field research.

In recent years European states have turned toward more austere political regimes, entailing budget cuts, deregulation of labour markets, restrictions of welfare systems, securitization of borders and new regimes of migration and citizenship. In the wake of such changes, new forms of social inclusion and exclusion appear that are justified through a reactivation of differences of race, class and gender.Against this backdrop, this collection investigates contemporary understandings of history and cultural memory. In doing so, the reader will join the leading European contributors of this title in examining how crisis and decline in contemporary Europe trigger a selective forgetting and remodelling of the past. Indeed, Austere Histories in European Societies breaks new paths in scholarship by synthesising and connecting current European debates on migration, racism and multiculturalism. In addition to this, the authors present debates on cultural memory and the place of the colonial legacy within an extensive comparative framework and across the boundaries of the humanities and social sciences. This book will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities, particularly in European studies, memory studies, sociology, postcolonial studies, migration studies, European history, cultural policy, cultural heritage, economics and political theory.

This book offers a general theoretical framework for approaching innovation and entrepreneurship, using practical and up-to-date examples to demonstrate three different levels of innovation and entrepreneurship: the macro-level, which concerns the impact of innovation activity on economic growth and production systems; the meso-level, which concerns the relations between firms, research institutes and governmental bodies and their role in innovation activity; and the micro-level, which concerns the dynamics of innovations within firms and organisations. Providing a critical overview of existing research and demonstrating the importance of a transdisciplinary framework for studies of innovation and entrepreneurship, the author advances a general concept of'collective entrepreneurship'that emphasises the social and collaborative nature of innovation and entrepreneurship, thus shedding light on processes of innovation and entrepreneurship as active practices of social construction. As such, it will appeal to scholars of economic sociology, political science, economic geography and economists, as well as those with interests in innovation policy.

A major challenge in studies of environmental governance is dealing with the diversity of the people involved at multiple levels – villagers, development agents, policy-makers, private resource users and others – and taking seriously their aspirations, conflicts and collaborations. This book examines this challenge in two very disparate parts of our world, exploring what gender-equality, resource management and development mean in real terms for its inhabitants as well as for our environmental futures.Based on participatory research and in-depth fieldwork, Arora-Jonsson studies struggles for local forest management, the making of women's groups within them and how the women's groups became a threat to mainstream institutions. Insights from India, consistently ranked as one of the most gender-biased countries, are compared with similar situations in the ostensibly gender-equal Sweden. Arora-Jonsson also analyzes how dominant ideas about the environment, development and gender equality shape the spaces in which women and men take action through global discourses and grassroots activism.Questioning the conventional belief that development brings about greater gender equality and more efficient environmental management, this volume scrutinizes how environmental imaginations are key to crafting gender relations. It shows gender to be at the heart of environmental negotiations while at the same time making a case for environmental sensibilities as integral to gender relations. At the confluence of development, environmental and gender studies, the book contributes to a much-needed dialogue between these fields, proposing new futures in environmental management.

Les entreprises françaises évoluent non seulement sous l'effet du changement économique et social mais aussi des mutations technologiques. Les outils changent autant que l'environnement organisationnel et sociétal, les modalités de travail des professionnels et les professionnels eux-mêmes. Douze jeunes chercheurs livrent leurs analyses.

What is the relationship between texts and ethics? Who decides the ethics of a text, the writer or the reader? What happens to ethics in texts that portray dreams or psychoses? Is violence always inherently unethical? In dealing with others is violence to both them and oneself ever completely avoidable?Textual Ethos Studies does not attempt to provide definitive answers to these questions so much as to be a springboard to the further discussion of ethics in relation to specific texts. The essays illustrate varying perspectives — ranging from the philosophical to the psychoanalytical to the linguistic — that can be used to localize how texts engage or invite an engagement with ethics. Twenty scholars representing Asia, Europe, Israel, North America, and South Africa highlight the complex relationship between cultural context and ethics, and between the ethical and the unethical. Several essays deal with the study of atypical texts that represent different attitudes toward the violent, the disordered, the traumatized, the psychotic, and the sentimental in order to encourage — or provoke — further discussion of the relevance of these types of texts to ethics.