Sociology Work

After his wife’s death, retired cop Walter "Pops" Washington has made a home for his ex-felon son in his sprawling, rent-controlled, Riverside Drive apartment. Will a long-simmering feud with the NYPD cause him to lose his home and the family he’s built there?

Check out HowExpert Guide to Phlebotomy to learn about blood draws, lab work, panels, plasma, tests, and the profession of a phlebotomist.

In her refreshing and forthright voice, Anne-Marie Slaughter returns with her vision for what true equality between men and women really means and how we can get there. She uncovers the missing piece of the puzzle, presenting a new focus that can reunite the women's movement and provide a common banner under which both men and women can advance and thrive.

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” This phrase, arguably Thomas Edison’s most famous quote, has been drilled into the minds of generations of Americans. A fairly straightforward iteration of the idea that innovation, discovery, and ingenuity are the result of drive and grit above all, it has also come to represent much darker myths: that hard work always leads to success and that achievement is the product of individuals and not communities.

We have always been told that work defines us, and serves as the foundation of our dignity as human beings. So why, all over the world, are more and more people quitting their jobs? In recent years, we have had several opportunities to ask ourselves whether the life we are living is the one we truly desire. For many, the answer has been no. This is due to a growing unwillingness to submit to the toxic and vexatious rules imposed by many work contexts. Even prior to the pandemic, a survey conducted in 140 countries revealed that 80 percent of the employed population disliked their jobs.

Clean water, paved roads, public transit, electricity and gas, sewers, waste processing, telecommunication, even the Internet—all this infrastructure is what makes cities work and powers our lives, often seamlessly and silently. Virtually everything we do and consume depends on infrastructure. Yet, most people have no idea how these systems work. How is water treated? How do cities manage rainwater? Why do traffic jams exist? How is electricity generated and distributed? What happens to trash after it is picked up? How does the Internet work?

Low-wage workers make up the largest group of employed parents in the United States, yet scant attention has been given to their experiences as new mothers and fathers. Work Matters brings the unique stories of these diverse individuals to light. Drawing on years of research and more than fifteen hundred family interviews, Maureen Perry-Jenkins describes how new parents cope with the demands of infant care while holding down low-wage, full-time jobs, and she considers how managing all of these responsibilities have long-term implications for child development.

It’s hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether it’s genuinely a new invention or just a new toothbrush. But in this manifesto on the state of American work, historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell argue that our way of thinking about and pursuing innovation has made us poorer, less safe, and — ironically — less innovative. Drawing on years of original research and reporting, The Innovation Delusion shows how the ideology of change for its own sake has proved a disaster.

Silicon Valley is known for its lavish perks, intense work culture, and spiritual gurus. Work Pray Code explores how tech companies are bringing religion into the workplace in ways that are replacing traditional places of worship, blurring the line between work and religion and transforming the very nature of spiritual experience in modern life.

Mara Kardas-Nelson's We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky is a story about unintended consequences, blind optimism, and the decades-long ramifications of seemingly small policy choices. The book is rooted in the stories of women borrowers in Sierra Leone, West Africa, whose narratives are set against the rise of Yunus's vision that tiny loans would "put poverty in museums," as well as a deep history of modern international development.

In Work Mate Marry Love, Harvard Business School professor and former Barnard College president Debora L. Spar offers an incisive and provocative account of how technology has transformed our intimate lives in the past, and how it will do so again in the future. Surveying the course of history, she shows how marriage as we understand it resulted from the rise of agriculture, and that the nuclear family emerged with the industrial revolution. In their day, the street light, the car, and later the pill all upended courtship and sex.

As the labor market continues to exploit workers by offering precarious, low-paid, and temporary jobs, for some, duality offers much-needed flexibility and staves off poverty. This book illustrates contemporary accounts of individuals taking extraordinary risks to hold jobs in both sex industries and non-sex work employment. It also opens a dialogue about how sex industries are stratified in the UK in terms of race and culture against the backdrop of Brexit. Debunking stereotypes of sex workers, this book makes an invaluable contribution to discourses about work, society, and policy.

Employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy - sometimes in coercive ways. Using a diverse array of evidence, including national surveys of workers and employers, as well as in-depth interviews with top corporate managers, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez's Politics at Work explains why mobilization of workers has become an appealing corporate political strategy in recent decades.

With the exception of sleep, humans spend more of their lifetimes on work than any other activity. It is central to our economy, our society, and the family. It underpins our finances and our sense of meaning in life. Given the overriding importance of work, we need to recognize a profound transformation in the nature of work that is significantly altering lives: the incoming tidal wave of shadow work. Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations.

The work-family conflict that mothers experience today is a national crisis. Women struggle to balance breadwinning with the bulk of parenting, and stress is constant. Social policies don't help. Of all Western industrialized countries, the US ranks dead last for supportive work-family policies: No federal paid parental leave. The highest gender wage gap. No minimum standard for vacation and sick days. Can American women look to European policies for solutions?

Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being "passionate about your work" as an affective project that encourages people to endure trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and mend disappointments with our experiences of work. Tracking the rise of passion in nineteenth-century management to trends like gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance, Hong argues that the ideal of passionate work sustains a condition of cruel optimism.

By the end of World War I, the skyrocketing divorce rate in the United States had generated a deep-seated anxiety about marriage. This fear drove middle-class couples to seek advice, both professional and popular, in order to strengthen their relationships. In Making Marriage Work, historian Kristin Celello offers an insightful and wide-ranging account of marriage and divorce in America in the 20th century, focusing on the development of the idea of marriage as "work."

Today's ways of working are not working - even for professionals in "good" jobs. Responding to global competition and pressure from financial markets, companies are asking employees to do more with less, even as new technologies normalize 24/7 job expectations. In Overload, Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen document how this new intensification of work creates chronic stress, leading to burnout, attrition, and underperformance. "Flexible" work policies and corporate lip service about "work-life balance" don't come close to fixing the problem.

National Book Critics Circle Award finalist David R. Dow confronts the reality of his work on death row when his father-in-law is diagnosed with lethal melanoma, his beloved Doberman becomes fatally ill, and his young son begins to comprehend the implications of mortality. "Every life is different, but every death is the same. We live with others. We die alone".

In a wide-ranging narrative that takes us from a downsized marketing executive in Massachusetts, to a father of three in Appalachia finding purpose and meaning working in a convenience-store chain, to an unemployed autoworker retraining in "advanced manufacturing", Shell reveals how work is essential to our flourishing and pyschological well-being - and how so many of the avenues to well-paid and meaningful work will be challenged in the years ahead.