Measuring More Than Money

This highly readable and authoritative book on the social economics of job quality comes at a critical time as policy-makers, employers and unions seek to rebuild jobs after the economic crisis. The team of authors are leading experts on European employment trends and policy and have produced an excellent study that proposes a new index of job quality for Europe. Given its depth and breadth of coverage of theory and already existing indicators, the book is likely to be a landmark study. Readers will enjoy the engaging review of past and present works of classical political economy and behavioural economics and will benefit from the expert critical appraisal of more than 20 existing proposals for job quality indices. Most importantly, the authors design and test a new European Job Quality Index that provides a reliable and coherent measure of five critical dimensions of the character of contemporary jobs. Measuring More than Money is a much-needed analysis that will interest both specialists and anyone concerned about job quality. The proposed indicator deserves to be adopted and will enable policy-makers to make good their commitment to sustainability and equality across Europe by monitoring and responding to a good job quality measure. Damian Grimshaw, University of Manchester, UK Is a job a job? If you looked at unemployment data, you would think so. But economists since Adam Smith know that jobs differ in quality: difficulty or pleasure of doing it. Thus they tend to assume that market would equalize wage per unit of difficulty of a job, and that they do not need to worry about intrinsic job quality. Rafael de Bustillo shows that this wrong and that in an era of plenty for many (although not for all), the challenge is to create high-quality jobs and to find ways of comparing them in terms of fulfillment afforded to workers. The book thus addresses a new and growing field of study: for it certainly matters if we are happy or unhappy in an activity that takes almost one-third of our lives and often defines who we are. Branko Milanovic, World Bank and University of Maryland, US This is a book every labour economist or sociologist interested in job quality should read. It provides a well written overview of the depth and breadth of this field, presenting a systematic review of this complex multidimensional concept and discussing more than twenty of the indicators currently in use. The volume goes beyond the current literature by developing a sound, empirically tested Job Quality Index for the European Union. It was definitely a pleasure reading this volume. Kea Tijdens, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Mainstream economics traditionally restricts the analysis of the labour market to purely monetary factors, such as earnings, leaving aside many other characteristics that might affect the desirability of certain jobs. By contrast, this unique volume explores the alternatives and problems faced by researchers in quantifying and measuring a broader notion of job quality. The contributors expertly explore the different approaches to measurement and analyze both the advantages and disadvantages of the various methods within a European context. Job quality is a crucial link between the economy and well-being. This original book proves that it can and should be measured, proposing a theoretically based multidimensional Index of Job Quality that is tested in the EU member States. The index proves particularly useful to measure the differences in job quality by country, occupation, gender and age. Based on solid theory and data, this book will prove essential for postgraduate students, researchers and academics of labour economics, sociology, industrial relations, and European studies as it presents a coherent discussion of the concept and components of job quality, and of the difficulties of measuring it. The book also proposes a new aggregate index of job quality that can contribute to the evaluation of European employ

Is poverty inevitable? No, says author Paul Godfrey. More than Money shows how organizations can win the fight against poverty and create prosperity for people at the base of the pyramid in the developing and developed world. This book presents a novel framework that shows how five types of interrelated capital—institutional, human, social, organizational, and physical—enable development and sustainable growth. In addition to a widely-applicable model, Godfrey provides principles to guide application. Core chapters articulate each specific form of capital and provide examples of how it contributes to the triple bottom line. Not just a theoretical examination of poverty, More than Money delivers timely advice to organizations that produce goods and services, implement policies, and create meaningful change on the ground. This book will guide social innovators and entrepreneurs in business, government, and civil society settings as they create a vision, assemble a team of strong partners, and effectively measure social innovation.

More than Money details the theory and practical experiences of people and social entrepreneurs who have realised that having a lack of money should never be a barrier to fulfilling one's objectives.Over centuries, individuals have used other forms of capital to live out their dreams and now should not be an exception given the huge challenges we face in society.Pierre Bourdieu, the famous sociologist of our time lamented on the way society focused and depended on money that was finite while being ignorant of other forms of capital that could be used to actualize one's dreams, this book builds on his work and that of others.More than Money gives individuals the tools to navigate their way out of debt and lack through an understanding of, and the use of different types of capitals.This book will enable people most especially social entrepreneurs to overcome the challenges affecting humanity in the developed and developing world by allowing them to be creative in financing their objectives. Poverty, malnutrition and a lack of basic goods and services in society can be skilfully tackled with the use of other forms of capitals and not just by money. Capitals such as social, human, cultural, symbolic and environmental capital can replace money in addressing various needs.It is time for us not to be constrained by a lack of money but by understanding that there are other ways of making that dream come true. Capital Literacy is a pragmatic answer to most of the financial challenges a person or community may face.

This book redefines the meaning of risk, and asks business students to look at risk in a new way. A consciousness-raising book and a how-to, Albion helps MBA students give themselves permission to be who they really want to be in order to create a meaningful life.

In this pioneering work, Paul R. Abramson and Ronald Inglehart show that the gradual shift from Materialist values (such as the desire for economic and physical security) to Post-materialist values (such as the desire for freedom, self-expression, and the quality of life) is in all likelihood a global phenomenon. Value Change in Global Perspective analyzes over thirty years worth of national surveys in European countries and presents the most comprehensive and nuanced discussion of this shift to date. By paying special attention to the way generational replacement transforms values among mass publics, the authors are able to present a comprehensive analysis of the processes through which values change. In addition, Value Change in Global Perspective analyzes the 1990-91 World Values Survey, conducted in forty societies representing over seventy percent of the world's population. These surveys cover an unprecedentedly broad range of the economic and political spectrum, with data from low-income countries (such as China, India, Mexico, and Nigeria), newly industrialized countries (such as South Korea) and former state-socialist countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. This data adds significant new meaning to our understanding of attitude shifts throughout the world. Value Change in Global Perspective has been written to meet the needs of scholars and students alike. The use of percentage, percentage differences, and algebraic standardization procedures will make the results easy to understand and useful in courses in comparative politics and in public opinion. Paul R. Abramson is Professor of Political Science, Michigan State University. Ronald Inglehart is Professor of Political Science and Program Director, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.