People at Work: Life, Power, and Social Inclusion in the New Economy

by Marjorie L. DeVault

Overview

People at Work is noted sociologist Marjorie L. DeVault’s groundbreaking collection of original essays on the complexities of the modern-day workplace. By focusing on the lived experiences of the worker, not as an automaton on an assembly line, but as an embodied human of flesh and bone, these essays offer important insight on the realities of the workplace, and their effects on life at home and in communities. With contributions from some of today’s top scholars, each essay is a detailed case study of a different aspect of the working world.
Compelling, lively, and sometimes chilling, the contributors address issues from disability rights to immigrant labor, welfare reforms to budget cuts, competition to personal motivations. Each one valuable on its own, the essays in People at Work combine to illuminate the hurdles that workers of all backgrounds struggle with and, more broadly, the impact of change on workers’ lives in the new, increasingly global, economy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814720042
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2008
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Marjorie L. DeVault is Professor of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She is the author of Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research and Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     vii
Introduction   Marjorie L. DeVault     1
Ideologies of the Neoliberal Economy
"Hell on My Face": The Production of Workplace Il-literacy   Nancy Jackson   Bonnie Slade     25
Institutional Technologies: Coordinating Families and Schools, Bodies and Texts   Alison I. Griffith   Lois Andre-Bechely     40
The Promises and Realities of U.S. Microenterprise Development   Nancy C. Jurik     57
Work, Disability, and Social Inclusion: The Promise and Problematics of EU Disability Policy   Rannveig Traustadottir     74
Mobile Bodies: Incorporation Without Inclusion
Flexible Hiring, Immigration, and Indian IT Workers' Experiences of Contract Work in the United States   Payal Banerjee     97
Economic Restructuring and the Social Regulation of Citizenship in the Heartland   Nancy A. Naples     112
The Fictional Worlds of "Unencumbered Workers"
Training for Low-Wage Work: TANF Recipients Preparing for Health-Care Work   Brenda Solomon     141
Women's Lives, Welfare's Time Limits   Ellen K. Scott   Andrew S. London     157
Personal Responsibility in Professional Work: The Academic "Star" as Ideological Code   Catherine Richards Solomon     180
"Use What You Have, Be ThankfulYou Have It": Work and the Promise of Social Inclusion for Students with Disabilities   Katrina Arndt     203
Fiscal Discipline: The Texts of Public-Sector Budget Cutting
Exploring Problematics of the Personal-Responsibility Welfare State: Issues of Family and Caregiving in Welfare-to-Work and Medicaid Consumer-Directed Care Programs   Frank Ridzi     223
The "Textualized" Student: An Institutional Ethnography of a Funding Policy for Students with Special Needs in Ontario   Yvette Daniel     248
(Dis)continuity of Care: Explicating the Ruling Relations of Home Support   Marie Campbell     266
Conclusion   Marjorie L. DeVault     289
References     303
Contributors     333
Index     339

Editorial Reviews

"DeVault has successfully organized these very diverse papers into a coherent collection that examines the way the everyday experiences of people are shaped by wider systems . . . the book is eminently readable and it makes a valuable contribution to professional as well as scholarly literature."

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare

"DeVault's brilliant introduction transforms our understanding of work in contemporary North America. The collection as a whole, particularly the institutional ethnographies, expand and deepen her re-vision. A magnificent volume!"

Dorothy E. Smith