Changing Contours of Work: Jobs and Opportunities in the New Economy (Sociology for a New Century Series)

Product Description

Changing Contours of Work is an exploration of the American workplace in the larger context of an integrated global economy. Presented with engaging vignettes and rich data, this 
fourth edition shows the reader how the “old economy” is now operating within the “new economy” and how that integration shapes the development of work opportunities.

Authors 
Stephen Sweet and Peter 
Meiksins use an international comparative perspective, revealing the historical transformations of work and identifying the profound effects that these changes have had on lives, jobs, and life chances. This text supports the reader′s understanding of the origins of current problems confronting working people in the new economy, and contributes to a much-needed dialogue about the strategies for liberating workers from poverty, drudgery, discrimination, stress, and exploitation.

Review

“A thorough book, which is one of the best fits for this current course.”
“I believe this book is well organized. I often get positive feedback on my course surveys referring to the text.”
— John Castella

“We adopted it as a department because it had the best overall coverage of contemporary issues explored by our major, was reasonably priced, and was quite readable.”
— Paula B. Voos

“This insightful book offers a clear, concise, and comprehensive introduction to the history, present, and future of work in the U.S. I appreciate the accompanying graphs and charts, as well as it′s engagement with race, class, and gender. The comparisons, both to work conditions in European nations and the global South, are important and eye-opening for my students.”
— Hinda Seif

About the Author

Stephen Sweet is Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology at Ithaca College and formerly the associate director of the Cornell Careers Institute, a Sloan Center for the Study of Working Families. He has written a number of articles on the challenges confronting working families, focusing on the issues of concern to dual career couples across the life course. His studies have appeared in a variety of publications, including the New Directions in Life Course Research, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Innovative Higher Education, The International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, Journal of College Student Development, and Community, Work, and Family. Stephen’s other book with SAGE is The Work-Family Interface. He has also published The Handbook of Work and Family with co-authors Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes and Ellen Ernst Kossek;  Managing Careers in the New Risk Economy, with co-investigator Phyllis Moen; College and Society: An Introduction to the Sociological Imagination, and Data Analysis with SPSS: A First Course in Applied Statistics. Stephen has been the recipient of a Sloan Officers Grant to study the effects of corporate downsizing on dual earner couples.

Peter Meiksins is a Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. He is the author of many articles on the sociology of work, including studies of the work experiences of engineers and part-time work in professional technical occupations and essays on labor process theory, professional work in comparative perspective, and contemporary labor relations. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Work and Occupations, Theory and Society, Economic and Industrial Democracy, Work, Employment and Society, and Sociological Quarterly. He is the author of Putting Work in Its Place: A Quiet Revolution (with Peter Whalley) and of Engineering Labour: Technical Workers in Comparative Perspective (with Chris Smith). Peter’s other books are Rethinking the Labor Process (with Mark Wardell and Tom Steiger) and Rising From the Ashes: Labor in the Age of Global Capitalism (with Ellen Wood and Michael Yates). He and co-investigator Peter Whalley received a major grant from the Sloan Foundation to study “Flexible Work for Technical Professionals.” Peter’s