From Tellers To Sellers

The country chapters present detailed analyses of the findings, and the conclusion assesses the role of markets technology, and institutions in employment relations and discusses the interpretive frameworks that help make sense of their change and variation across countries."--BOOK JACKET.

Bill Dunn considers and contests accounts of globalization and post-Fordism that see structural economic change in the late Twentieth-century as having fundamentally worsened the conditions and weakened the potential of labour. Including a comparative survey of restructuring in four major industries; automobiles, construction, microelectronics and finance, the book suggests the timing of change and its complex and contradictory nature undermine structural explanations of labour's situation. It redirects attention towards labour's political defeats and own institutional shortcomings.

This Palgrave Pivot explores the recent financial crisis from a new perspective. Reflecting on 40 years of banking experiences, the book will open new avenues to understanding banking and comment on possible ways to rehabilitate banking organisations. In 1965 the Bank of Ireland received a consultancy report from McKinsey & Company, which heralded a new phase in banking practice and organisation. In the years that followed, the Bank of Ireland opened up its once traditional culture to outside influences changing the way work was done and workers were viewed. Direct competition was introduced alongside specialisation of roles, and hence college education was identified as the way to meet demands of the market and bankers began to develop a full suite of products to keep customers loyal. The once professional bank manager who was a guardian of good practice eventually became absorbed into the needs of the leviathan organisation. The end result is an unimaginable and interlinked financial crisis in 2008 that swept across Ireland and the globe. This book explores banking organisation and practice as it transforms and across the period from 1960 to 2018. It argues that organisational goals over individual responsibility paved the pathway towards crisis. Organisationally, anxiety and fear of failure took the place of certainty and stability. While the financial crisis is coming to an end, banking organisations remains fragile and prone to influences that may lead them towards a path of continuous cycles of boom and bust. Such a state has the potential to create an unending cycle of boom and bust and the end of stability and the institution of banking. This book shines a light on that and will be of interest to banking and finance researchers, students, and practitioners.

This wide-ranging and comparative text reviews the major theoretical and substantive debates on social inequality in Europe. It provides a valuable dual focus on European society and individual societies while placing Europe in its wider global context. Demonstrating the continued importance of national difference within Europe, the author argues that nonetheless the European Social Model has softened social inequalities such as those of wealth and income distribution, social class, gender and possibly even ethnicity. However these achievements are now being undermined, partially by the European Union itself. The book also challenges conventional wisdom on Europe’s alleged need for immigration and highlights the UK’s distinctiveness within Europe, explaining the country’s uneasy relation to the European project. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Politics, European Societies, Social Policy and Comparative Studies.

People’s work orientations and attitudes to paid work are highly important for the welfare of any country. Still, little is currently known about how such attitudes are distributed among different countries, men and women, classes, occupations, age groups and so on. Even less is known about how work orientations have changed during the dramatic social transformations of economies and labour markets during recent decades. What happened, for example, to work orientations in Iceland when the country went bankrupt? The answer is quite surprising. Or, is it true that work is losing its position in people’s lives in Western world? What is the relationship between people’s attitudes to work and the way they actually behave on the labour market? This timely book deals with these questions – and more – presenting fresh knowledge on changes in work orientations in many countries. It is based on genuine theoretical arguments and thorough empirical studies, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. It is a great source of new knowledge on work orientations and changes in attitudes to work.

Explaining difficult concepts in plain English with a breezy style, this third edition has new material covering new tax laws, retirement savings strategies, a chapter on identity theft, and question-and-answer sidebars.