A critique of the prediction that technology will end humans' direct involvement in work. Contentions: a workless world is not without qualification desirable; it is not attainable by technology alone; the end sought does not in and by itself justify present job ending applications. Underlying these contentions: a claim that utopian visions with regard to work function as ideologies. Evidence for this claim derived from revisiting past non-industrial and industrial fantasies regarding a work-free utopia.

The new industrial paradigm Industry 4.0, or smart industry, is at the core of contemporary debates. The public debate on Industry 4.0 typically offers two main perspectives: the technological one and the one about industrial policies. On the contrary, the discussion on the social and organizational effects of the new paradigm is still underdeveloped. The article specifically examines this aspect, and analyzes the change that workers are subject to, along with the work organization, smart digital factories. (...) The study originates from an empirical survey conducted by the author together with a multidisciplinary research group between 2014 and 2015 in some of the largest Italian factories.In particular, the article analyzes the links between digital society, digital culture and Industry 4.0, focusing on the issue of people’s participation in the process of change, within a specific case study from the railway sector.Many elements of the Industry 4.0 paradigm are widespread outside the factory, in society; they are not only technological elements but also cultural. One of the key aspects of the analysis is the question of participation and the “person-centered” culture. The subject is addressed critically by presenting both the RE-personalization processes and the new processes of DE personalization caused by digital automation. (shrink)

Industry involvement in the machine learning (ML) community seems to be increasing. However, the quantitative scale and ethical implications of this influence are rather unknown. For this purpose, we have not only carried out an informed ethical analysis of the field, but have inspected all papers of the main ML conferences NeurIPS, CVPR, and ICML of the last 5 years—almost 11,000 papers in total. Our statistical approach focuses on conflicts of interest, innovation, and gender equality. We have obtained four (...) main findings. (1) Academic–corporate collaborations are growing in numbers. At the same time, we found that conflicts of interest are rarely disclosed. (2) Industry papers amply mention terms that relate to particular trending machine learning topics earlier than academia does. (3) Industry papers are not lagging behind academic papers with regard to how often they mention keywords that are proxies for social impact considerations. (4) Finally, we demonstrate that industry papers fall short of their academic counterparts with respect to the ratio of gender diversity. We believe that this work is a starting point for an informed debate within and outside of the ML community. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the role played by the Geological Survey of Portugal in the emergence and consolidation of geology as a government science in the nineteenth century, within a general policy of control over territory. The period under consideration covers the directorates of its first leaders, Pereira da Costa (1809–1888) and the military engineers Carlos Ribeiro (1813–1882), and Nery Delgado (1835–1908). When the Geological Survey was created in 1857 as part of the Directorate of Geodesic, Chorographic, Hydrographical Works of (...) the Kingdom (Direcção Geral dos Trabalhos Geodesicos, Chorographicos, Hydrographicos do Reino) established at the Ministry of Public Works, Trade and Industry (Ministério das Obras Públicas, Comércio e Indústria), Portugal lacked a geological culture and a tradition in geological research. The Portuguese Geological Survey was to be marked by the idiosyncrasies of the local culture and of the organization of the State. In this paper, the emergence of geology as a government science is analysed, by taking into consideration the structure, organization, and a general overview of contributions to the Survey. A particular emphasis will be given to its subordinate staff—the field assistants—not only because their contributions to the geological knowledge of the country have hitherto been largely ignored, but also because they materialized the only possible way for common people to become involved with geology in nineteenth‐century Portugal. Generally, with only a basic education, field assistants gradually acquired enough expertise to make decisions in the field, and a few of them even became what Nery Delgado termed ‘practical geologists’. The letters in which they reported their work in addition to vivid accounts of less glamorous aspects of fieldwork and its organization provide an image of the country and of its culture by portraying the reactions of civil society to the practice of geology. (shrink)

'This is a very good and important book that is must reading for anyone interested in evolutionary economics and/or the relationship between history and economics. In addition, you get a very well documented and argued interpretation of long run capitalist development from the industrial revolution to the present that will be a standard reference... a first rate contribution to the discussion of how evolutionary economics should develop.' -Journal of Evolutionary Economics 'The book offers numerous insights into particular aspects of technological (...) change... Social theorists and policy advisors today need to be able to understand technological change in relation to cultural, political and economic life, and to situate contemporary developments in a longer term perspective. The authors provide a framework to do exactly that. Their book is a welcome demonstration of the usefulness of historical context for contemporary debates regarding science and technology policy.' -Business History 'A thought-provoking work that is valuable for more than its detailed account of the technological revolutions that shape our economy today. By directing our attention to a perspective outside the current wave, it shapes our thinking about events inside the current wave.' -Academy of Management Review 'This major contribution to economic history is the most impressive and convincing attempt I know to apply the concept of the 'long waves', a basic rhythm of historical development in the era of capitalism, to the entire stretch from eighteenth-century Lancashire to twenty-first-century Silicon Valley. It is also a call for economic history to escape from the handcuffs of narrow retrospective econometrics to the freedom of its vocation: understanding and explaining secular historical transformations.' -Eric Hobsbawm FBA, American Academy of Arts andamp; Sciences, Emeritus Professor of Social and Economic History, Birkbeck College; Author of The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991The Internet and mobile telephones have made everyone more aware than ever of the computer revolution and its effects on the economy and society. 'As Time Goes By' puts this revolution in the perspective of previous waves of technical change: steam-powered mechanization, electrification, and motorization. It argues for a theory of reasoned economic history which assigns a central place to these successive technological revolutions. (shrink)

Changes in knowledge production, increasing interaction between government, universities and industry, and changes in labor markets for doctoral degree holders are forces that have spurred a debate about the organization of doctoral education and the competencies graduates need to master to work as scientists and researchers in a triple helix research context. Recent policy also has supported a redefinition of researcher training with increasing focus on broader skills and relevance for careers outside the university sector. Consequently, it (...) is pertinent to investigate current changes in doctoral education and researcher training. Particularly further knowledge about university–industry collaboration as a context for researcher training is required. With this in mind, this study provides empirical illustrations of how research training carried out in collaborative research contexts is experienced by doctoral students, and offers some insight into antecedent and process factors that are central in shaping PhD students’ research and training experience in collaborative research contexts. Based on the empirical data and a review of existing literature, suggestions for further research are made. (shrink)

Introduction. Non-institutional humanities, philosophical practice, and informal education are “a family like” phenomena that are outside the social institution of science and education and are adjacent to socio-cultural activities and social work. The purpose of the article is to outline the contours of the informal educational creative industry in the postmodern society, which combines non-institutional humanities, philosophical practice, and informal education. Methods. The author uses the methods of autobiographical reflection, comparative analysis, empirical observation and analysis of the (...) primary sources of non-institutional humanities. Scientific novelty of the research. The transition to nonmaterial work of the postmodern era is the reason for the relevance of the area under study. The growing demand of a contemporary for such issues as the meaning of life, happiness, the growth of the precariat, the ousting of philosophy from formal education constitute a new social reality that determines the novelty of the research in the informal educational creative industry. Results. The author classifies non-institutional humanities according to the spheres of its existence and the strategies of subject genesis presented in the teachings. The concept of dedifferentiation is considered as an explanation of the area under study in postmodernism. The specificity of the philosophical approach in the work of a practicing philosopher is considered. Conclusions. The author connects the prospects of the informal educational creative industry with institutionalization in the way of leisure, entertainment, and other personal services. The author makes conclusions about the differences between formal and informal education, and indicates the risks and opportunities for the development of the informal philosophical sector. (shrink)

Post-school education in South Africa mostly takes place within an industrial-age factory environment as has been done for the past 50 years or longer. This is the case despite the fact that the world is on the brink of, or already part of, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, called by some an ‘emerging new world order’. Educating students today like we did it half a century ago has now become education to a ‘quickly vanishing world’. Although one may argue that the (...) content of Theology will not be much affected by the 4IR, it is proposed that the way in which that content is communicated and educated should change drastically. Doing this will prepare our students to become relevant preachers or theologians in the current postmodern society. The proposed model in this article is called an outside-in model – contrasted to the current inside-out model of education – in which our students should be taught to develop a sense of deep learning, to effectively learn and work in and with groups, to use their mobile devices and social media within the environment of education and to discuss new ways of gathering God’s people.The question that each educator should ask themselves nowadays is: Am I really preparing my students for the future that they are facing?Contribution: A new way of teaching Theology in the 4IR is imperative for our students. This article suggests how it could be done. Although this entails willpower and persuading the mostly ‘old’ lecturers in Theology to engage with real technology, it is all about the student, because many of these students will become the lecturers of tomorrow. Our faculties or departments of Theology are therefore urged to fit themselves into the new mould and to train our future theologians in a 4IR way. (shrink)

The cosmetics, detergents and food industries trial development products using healthy human volunteer studies. They also use human tissue for in vitro investigations. Hitherto, the ethics of such work has not been regulated. The UK Human Tissue Act will have legal implications on current arrangements for such studies within the industry, especially with regards to informed consent and seeking ethical review of research proposals. At present, however, it is unclear who will fund ethical review for use of ‘relevant (...) material’ in non-medical research, and on the required status of ethics committees to review such work. The principles behind the sampling, storage and processing of ‘relevant material’ are largely identical whether it be for medical or non-medical investigations. It is argued, therefore, that this is further justification for industry and professional bodies to adopt best practice of ethical review for all studies in ‘grey areas’ outside the scope of regulations. This would follow closely those standards applied to biomedical research. (shrink)

A growing literature documents the existence of individuals who make a living by participating in phase I clinical trials for money. Several scholars have noted that the concerns about risks, consent, and exploitation raised by this phenomenon apply to many (other) jobs, too, and therefore proposed improving subject protections by regulating phase I trial participation as work. This article contributes to the debate over this proposal by exploring a largely neglected worry. Unlike most (other) workers, subjects are not paid (...) to produce or achieve anything but to have things done to them. I argue that this passivity is problematic for reasons of distributive justice. Specifically, it fails to enable subjects to realize what Gheaus and Herzog call “the goods of work”—a failure not offset by adequate opportunities to realize these goods outside of the research context. I also consider whether granting subjects worker-type protections would accommodate this concern. (shrink)

'Take care of the means and the ends will take care of themselves'By the time you are reading this instalment I will have been in my new position as Team Leader for a Community Conservation Project for more than one year. Why I left my previous position will perhaps become clear in this instalment. I may be unsuited to working in institutions that in theory value knowledge and analysis, but in practice become increasingly uncomfortable when the critical analysis is turned (...) inwards. I find I am not alone; witness the prominent case of the response of the World Bank to criticisms from their own former Chief Economist, the Nobel Economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz. His criticism of the International Financial Institutions after years of working with them could not be dismissed as the work of an uninformed outsider and were therefore treated with the disdain due to some one who had 'jumped ship'. (shrink)

Although Henry David Thoreau stands outside the Christian canon, his outlook on the relations among spirituality, ecology, and economy highlights how Christian theologians can develop a theological work ethic in our era of economic and ecological precarity. He can furthermore help theologians counter the pro-work bias in much Christian thought. In Walden, Thoreau shows that the best work is an ascetic practice that reveals and reaps the abundance of nature and connects the person to the immanent (...) divine and thereby glimpsing eternity. Thoreau thus offers the outline of a transformed theology of work even as he challenges Protestant vocationalism in the early industrial era. He is therefore a fitting if challenging guide for formulating a theology of the self as agent and product of work, at a moment when the postindustrial ideal of work that is both meaningful and remunerative seems ever more unattainable while the negative impact of our work on nonhuman nature is ever more apparent. (shrink)

Le pas d'acier was conceived in 1925 at the height of enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution both in Russia and abroad. Prokofiev intended the ballet to `show the new life that had come to the Soviet Union, and primarily the construction effort.' He quotes Yakulov as saying that the ballet would portray `the uplifting influence of organised labour.' (Prokofiev 1991, 278). In its theme and its staging it is a celebration of industry and labour.

On elective students may not always be clear about safeguarding themselves and others. It is important that placements are safe, and ethically grounded. A concern for medical schools is equipping their students for exposure to and response to uncomfortable and/or unfamiliar requests in locations away from home, where their comfort and safety, or that of the patient, may be compromised. This can require legal, ethical, and/or moral reasoning on the part of the student. The goal of this article is to (...) establish what students actually encounter on elective, to inform better preparing students for safe and ethical medical placements. We discuss the implications of our findings, which are arguably applicable to other areas of graduate training, e.g. first medical roles post-qualification. An anonymised survey exploring clinical and ethical dilemmas on elective was issued across 3 years of returning final year elective medical students. Questions included the prevalence and type of potentially unsafe scenarios encountered, barriers to saying ‘no’ in unsafe situations, perceived differences between resource poor and developed world settings and the degree to which students refused or consented to participation in events outside of the ‘norms’ of their own training experience. Three hundred seventy-nine students participated. 45% were asked to do something “not permissible” at home. 27% were asked to do something they felt “uncomfortable” with, often an invasive clinical task. Half asked to do something not usually permissible were “comfortable”. 48% felt it more acceptable to bypass guidelines in developing settings. 27% refused an offer outside their experience. Of interest are reasons for “going along with” uncomfortable invitations, e.g. “emergency”, self-belief in ‘capability’ and being ‘more qualified’ than host-personnel. This “best pair of hands available” merits scrutiny. Adverse scenarios were not exclusive to developing settings. We discuss preparing students for decision-making in new contexts, and address whether ‘home’ processes are too inflexible to prepare students for ‘real’ medical life? Ethical decision-making and communicating reluctance should be included in elective preparation. (shrink)

The focus of the following article is on the use of new robotic systems in the manufacturing industry with respect to the social dimension. Since “intuitive” human–machine interaction (HMI) in robotic systems becomes a significant objective of technical progress, new models of work organization are needed. This hypothesis will be investigated through the following two aims: The first aim is to identify relevant research questions related to the potential use of robotic systems in different systems of work (...) organization at the manufacturing shop-floor level. The second aim is to discuss the conceptualization of (old) organizational problems of human–robot interaction (HRI). In this context, the article reflects on the limits of cognitive and perceptual workload for robot operators in complex working systems. This will be particularly relevant whenever more robots with different “roles” are to be increasingly used in the manufacturing industry. The integration of such complex socio-technical systems needs further empirical and conceptual research with regard to “social” aspects of the technical dimension. Future research should, therefore, also integrate economic and societal issues to understand the full dimensions of new human–robot interaction in industry today. (shrink)

In keeping with the focus of this special section, we concentrate initially on some of the problems of autonomist Marxist concepts such as `immaterial labour', `affective labour' and `precarity' for understanding work in the cultural industries. We then briefly review some relevant media theory (John Thompson's notion of mediated quasi-interaction) and some key recent sociological research on cultural labour (especially work by Andrew Ross and Laura Grindstaff, the latter drawing on Hochschild's concept of emotional labour), which we believe (...) may be more useful than autonomist concepts in developing empirically informed critique. The main body of the article then consists of an ethnographic account of working on one particular television programme, an account that aims to build on these theoretical debates. We analyse how the power to provide exposure or not to individuals in the talent show genre in contemporary television (a feature that derives from the symbolic power of producers to make texts that are then circulated to massive numbers of people) and disputes between commissioners and independent producers about how best to go about doing so (an organizational issue) are registered in the form of stress, anxiety and sometimes poor working relations among project teams of young television researchers (a matter of working conditions and experiences). We especially focus on how additional pressures are borne by these workers because of the requirements to undertake emotional labour, involving the handling of strong emotions on the part of talent show contributors, and to maintain good working relations in short-term project work, requirements generated by the need to ensure future employment. Ultimately, then, we support the view that creative work is `precarious' — but we go beyond the generalizations involved in concepts such as immaterial labour and affective labour to show the specific ways in which precariousness is registered and negotiated in the lives of young workers in one industry. (shrink)

Cross-sectorial, dynamic, and innovative partnerships are essential to resolve the challenges of humankind in the 21st century. At the same time, trust in each other’s integrity and good will is a precondition for the solution of any complex problem, and certainly for the success of the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda. Experience shows that a nation’s economic and social success is at its greatest if, and when, there is cooperation and even cocreation involving a fair division of labor and responsibility (...) among the different societal stakeholders. This paper uses Ralf Dahrendorf’s seminal work on obligations, as well as the European Commission’s Science with and for Society unit’s definition of responsible research and innovation (RRI), to motivate industry responsibilities to make the world a healthier place. (shrink)

Like people born shortly after World War II, the international human rights movement recently had its sixty-fifth birthday. This could mean that retirement is at hand and that death will come in a few decades. After all, the formulations of human rights that activists, lawyers, and politicians use today mostly derive from the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the world in 1948 was very different from our world today: the cold war was about to break out, communism was (...) a strong and optimistic political force in an expansionist phase, and Western Europe was still recovering from the war. The struggle against entrenched racism and sexism had only just begun, decolonization was in its early stages, and Asia was still poor . Labor unions were strong in the industrialized world, and the movement of women into work outside the home and farm was in its early stages. Farming was less technological and usually on a smaller scale, the environmental movement had not yet flowered, and human-caused climate change was present but unrecognized. Personal computers and social networking were decades away, and Earth's human population was well under three billion. (shrink)

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 3-20, February 2022. As graduate labour market conditions have become increasingly challenging, higher education institutions have intensified their focus on ‘employability’ via strategies such as work placements. Focusing on work placements in the media and creative industries, this article identifies and analyses three key discourses that animate the pedagogical literature in these sectors: work placements as facilitating a ‘smooth transition’ to the labour market; work placements (...) as a place in which inequalities in the labour market are produced; and work placements as a space for fostering resilience and adaptation to labour market precarity. The article argues that critiques of inequalities based on race, class or gender are marked by a transformative impulse that is largely absent in critiques of those based on worker precarity. This highlights a need to adopt pedagogies that similarly unnaturalise the economic conditions of neoliberal capitalism to discursively construct work in new, more socially just, ways. (shrink)

Increasing pharmaceutical industry presence in health care research and practice has evoked critical social, political, economic, and ethical questions and concern among health care providers, ethicists, economists, and the general citizenry. The case example presented of the ‘marketization’ of nursing practice not only reveals the magnitude of the purview of the pharmaceutical industry, it demonstrates how that industry imparts effect upon the organization of nursing work, an area of health care professional practice where the ethical polemic (...) of pharmaceutical industry involvement and influence has been largely ignored, and the profession of nursing conspicuously silent. Drawing on a Foucauldian dispositive analysis that troubled the complex apparatus responsible for the production of knowledge and action in the neurology subspecialty of multiple sclerosis (MS), the case discloses how the pharmaceutical industry has created compliance and adherence as clinical imperatives in the practice of MS nursing. The case makes explicit the conscious transformative self‐action undertaken by MS nurses as a result of their subjectivation (marketization) and demonstrates how MS nurses have become pawns in pharmaceutical industry strategic games of power, truth, identity, and wealth creation by turning their clinical practice settings into heterodiscursive spaces of surveillance and persuasion. MS nurses have become instruments of the pharmaceutical industry, and their clinical practices ordered, organized, limited, constrained, and marketized as a result. (shrink)

The transformation from industrial social work to corporate social responsibility points out a definite shift in the realm of social work vis-á-vis goal, objective and priorities of business. Over the past several decades social workers around the world have successfully been able to integrate with the modern production and business processes, particularly in addressing the emergent needs of the industrial population like those arising out of the psychosocial impact of workforce alienation, over-specialization, competitiveness, and stress and fatigue on (...) their life. Over all these years, as there has been a major transformation in defining human beings in the context of business from human resource to human capital, the corporate has also been restructuring its role in revitalizing its human resources alongside taking care of the vast external stakeholders through its new slogan of ‘corporate social responsibility’. But this new configuration lends itself to the process of self-examination and the litmus test remains: Is corporate social responsibility a new area structured to delineate the corporate's idea of greater variety of social services for humankind; or just one more catchphrase used to establish the fact that business houses are doing ‘a lot more’ than mere expansion of industrial social work; or has there been a change in the principal objective and priority of the corporate at the back of starting these programmes—from curbing loss to ‘just making profit’? (shrink)

Discussions on women's work and its private and social value have begun with the history of mankind. But until the Industrial Revolution, great differences between men and women labour haven’t been emerged. After that revolution, as most of values, the worth of women's work has changed. After the Industrial Revolution, mass production and transnational wars have resulted rising both for supply and demand of female labour forces. Then female labour force has come into public area and women have (...) got out from their households for paying jobs. This trend has been similar in Turkey, too. However, discussions about the conditions of women participation in labour force have been continuing. Today, in Turkish society, some surveys show that it is widely accepted that women can work outside the home for paying jobs. The ratio of those saying “women can work outside of their home is acceptable and favourable” reached 85% of the population. But there are still some opposite views. Some opponents concern for traditional values, some others for religious understanding. The main issue is managing domestic responsibilities of women in the household and imagined rules of religion on working outside of the home. In this study, the questions about these issues asked for to the High Council of Religious Affairs in Turkey are embraced within the context of how issues are differentiated from male and female perspectives. (shrink)

The modern way of life is highly dependent upon the production of goods by industrial organizations that are in turn dependent upon their workers for their ongoing operations. Even though more than a century has passed since the dawn of the industrial revolution, many dangerous aspects of work, both physical and mental, remain in the workplace today. Using Buddhist philosophical principles, this paper suggests that although many sources of the problem reside within the larger society, the industrial engineer is (...) still a key factor in bettering work and providing a workplace suitable for their fellow workers. Drawing on these insights, we present a number of work design guidelines that industrial engineers who abide by Buddhist principles could practice to help overcome some of the many sufferings produced by modern work. (shrink)

Although informed consent is a primary mechanism for ensuring the ethical treatment of human participants in research, both federal guidelines and American Psychological Association ethical standards recognize that exceptions to it are reasonable under certain conditions. However, agreement about what constitutes a reasonable exception to informed consent is sometimes lacking. We presented the same protocols to samples of respondents drawn from 4 populations: Institutional review board (IRB) members, managers, employees, and university faculty who were not members of IRBs. Differences in (...) perceptions of IRB members from the other samples with respect to the risks of the protocols without informed consent and on the feasibility of conducting the research in employment organizations are discussed in terms of implications for industrial and organizational psychology research. (shrink)

In the applied sciences and in engineering there is often a significant overlap between work at universities and in industry. For the individual scholar, this may lead to serious conflicts when working on joint university–industry projects. Differences in goals, such as the university’s aim to disseminate knowledge while industry aims to appropriate knowledge, might lead to complicated situations and conflicts of interest. The detailed cases of two electrical engineers and two architects working at two different universities (...) of technology illustrate the kinds of problems individual scholars face in university–business collaborations. These cases are based on qualitative interviews and additional data and demonstrate that, while value conflicts emerge on the organizational level, it is primarily the individual researcher who must deal with such conflicts. This analysis adds to existing studies in two ways: first, it explicitly addresses normative issues framed in terms of ethical and social values, thereby going beyond the common social-science perspective of university–business collaboration. Secondly, it provides qualitative insights, thereby identifying details and issues not apparent in quantitative studies. In particular, it is evident that university–industry collaborations are prone to value conflicts not only in research but also in education and job training. (shrink)

Introduction. The scientific literature notes that in countries with significant revenues from oil and gas production, there is less economic growth. This paradox has been called the «resource curse». The abundance of hydrocarbons negatively affects the domestic political situation: it worsens the quality of public administration, preserves autocratic rule and corruption. The presence of such natural resources significantly increases the threat of armed conflict, civil war. M. Ross stated that the country’s oil and gas wealth prevents women from participating in (...) the official workforce and reduces their political influence. His argument is based on three statements: in low- and middle-income countries, women usually get jobs in low-paid export-oriented factories; preserving these jobs can expand women’s opportunities for self-realization in social and political terms; the presence of significant reserves of oil (or other minerals) in the state makes such traditional branches of industrial industry unprofitable and, more broadly, does not encourage women to work outside the home. As a result, hydrocarbon wealth in low- and middle-income countries tends to close an important path to gender equality. -/- The purpose of the work is to test M. Ross’s hypothesis. The author seeks to get an answer to the following research question: what impact do hydrocarbons have on the level of representation of women in the labor force and the deputy corps of legislatures of the subjects of the Russian Federation? Is there a «gender resource curse»? -/- Methods. Regression analysis has become the method of data analysis. The source of information for panel data is Rosstat data. -/- Scientific novelty of the research. This study contributes to the academic debate on the factors of women’s representation in politics and the economic sphere. -/- Results. The conducted research showed that M. Ross’s thesis about the «oil patriarchy» and the «gender Dutch disease» on the statistical data of the subjects of the Russian Federation has not been empirically verified. -/- Conclusions. The author has outlined several explanations for this result. It is shown that this is due to the difference in the operationalization of the independent variable. Secondly, the analysis is carried out at the subnational level, when revenues from the activities of oil and gas companies go to the federal budget. Finally, there is an impact of socio-cultural factors. (shrink)

I am grateful to have received so many stimulating commentaries from interested colleagues regarding the psychological origins of the Industrial Revolution and the role of evolutionary theory in understanding historical phenomena. Commentators criticized, extended, and explored the implications of the perspective I presented, and I wholeheartedly agree with many commentaries that more work is needed. In this response, I thus focus on what is needed to further test the psychological origins of the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, I argue, in agreement (...) with many commentators, that we need: better data about standards of living, psychological preferences, and innovation rates ; better models to understand the role of resources in driving cultural evolution and the multiple aspects of the behavioral constellation of affluence ; and better predictions and better statistical instruments to disentangle the possible mechanisms behind the rise of innovativeness. (shrink)

In the applied sciences and in engineering there is often a significant overlap between work at universities and in industry. For the individual scholar, this may lead to serious conflicts when working on joint university–industry projects. Differences in goals, such as the university’s aim to disseminate knowledge while industry aims to appropriate knowledge, might lead to complicated situations and conflicts of interest. The detailed cases of two electrical engineers and two architects working at two different universities (...) of technology illustrate the kinds of problems individual scholars face in university–business collaborations. These cases are based on qualitative interviews and additional data and demonstrate that, while value conflicts emerge on the organizational level, it is primarily the individual researcher who must deal with such conflicts. This analysis adds to existing studies in two ways: first, it explicitly addresses normative issues framed in terms of ethical and social values, thereby going beyond the common social-science perspective of university–business collaboration. Secondly, it provides qualitative insights, thereby identifying details and issues not apparent in quantitative studies. In particular, it is evident that university–industry collaborations are prone to value conflicts not only in research but also in education and job training. (shrink)

As researchers, we cannot be outside society and thus activities such as "science," or "objectivity" are striated with procedures for minimizing or celebrating the presence of the researcher in the research product. Our recognition of the situated character of scientific knowledge is the context in which questions about the researchers relation to the group she studies have arisen. The paper begins with a review of the Insider/Outsider debate which circles around the researcher''s relation to those she studies. Where the (...) researcher enters the research site as an Insider - someone whose biography (gender, race, class, sexual orientation and so on) gives her a lived familiarity with the group being researched - that tacit knowledge informs her research producing a different knowledge than that available to the Outsider - a researcher who does not have an intimate knowledge of the group being researched prior to their entry into the group. This paper describes the research issues that arise and the various strategies researchers have used to manage them. The argument then shifts to query the social boundaries implicit in the construction of research Insiders and Outsiders. Reflecting on research that explored mothering for schooling, the article shows that researchers are rarely Insiders or Outsiders. Rather, research is constructed in a relationship with many Others. The interaction of individual biography and social location shape the research relation in complex ways which undercut the common-sense translation of historical familiarity into epistemological privilege. (shrink)

This book evaluates the consequences of economic, social, environmental and cultural change on people living and working within Teesside in the North-East of England. It assesses the lived experiences, working lives, health and cultural perspectives of residents and key stakeholders in the wake of serious de-industralisation in the region. The narrative is embedded within the long-term industrial history of Stockton: an area once dominated by steel, coal and chemical industries. This past still continues to shape its future and influences the (...) ways in which that future is conceived and envisioned. The author explores a 'biography of place' analytical framework to offer a holistic view of the area, which considers the interaction between the social, economic, cultural, visual and environmental legacy of the community, which is firmly grounded in the past, present and future prospects of those who live and work there. (shrink)

Studies of creative industries typically contend that creative work is profoundly precarious, taking place on a freelance basis in highly competitive, individualized and contingent labour markets. Such studies depict creative workers as correspondingly self-enterprising, self-reliant, self-interested and calculative agents who valorise care-free independence. In contrast, we adopt the ‘ethics of care’ approach to explore, recognize and appreciate the communitarian, relational and moral considerations as well as interpersonal connectedness and interdependencies that underpin creative work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with (...) creative workers in a range of marginal socio-cultural contexts, we argue that creative workers cultivate and sustain a diverse array of practices of care arising from an affective concern with the well-being of others. Far from being merely individualistic and crudely competitive actors, creative workers enact practical ethical responsibilities and affectivities towards a range of human and non-human others, including families, local communities and neighbourhoods, colleagues, artistic scenes and their adjacent genres, and surrounding national and linguistic cultures. In emphasizing the fundamental and structuring role of care in contingent labour markets our approach accords with recent trends in the social sciences that ‘affirmatively’—as opposed to ‘negatively’ and ‘suspiciously’—recognize that mutuality, solidarity and affectivity are powerful drivers of action on a par with or even exceeding market-driven self-centredness. (shrink)

This feminist analysis focuses on sexual harassment within a specific category of jobs known as display work, where primarily women’s bodies are commodified and sold to consumers, and often through the conduits of powerful male industry leaders. Using qualitative content analysis methods to analyze 88 subjective, first-person narratives of harassment from 70 models working within the fashion business, I describe how the commodification of bodies interacts with the particular features of the modeling industry—the premium placed on youth, (...) ambiguous industry demands, and the presence of kingmakers—to produce an environment in which opportunities for sexual harassment can proliferate. All these factors impose extreme worker vulnerability costs on predominantly women and ultimately contribute to maintaining gender-based, hierarchical power differentials between men wielding authority within the industry and these models over time. (shrink)

The identification and valorization of unacknowledged, feminized forms of economic productivity has been an important task for feminist theory. In this article, we expand and rethink existing definitions of labour, in order to recognize the essential economic role women play in the stem cell and regenerative medicine industries, new fields of biomedical research that are rapidly expanding throughout the world. Women constitute the primary tissue donors in the new stem cell industries, which require high volumes of human embryos, oöcytes, foetal (...) tissue and umbilical cord blood. Such material is generally given for free in the advanced industrial democracies, constituted as a surplus (‘spare’ embryos) or waste (umbilical cord ‘afterbirth’, cadaveric foetuses, poor quality oöcytes) whose generative powers should not be withheld from others. At the same time, among impoverished female populations in developing nations, such biological material is now often procured through frankly transactional relations, where women undertake risky procedures for small fees. In each case, female bodily productivity is mobilized to support bioeconomic research, yet the economic value involved in these relations is largely unacknowledged. In this article, we consider both the gift economy and the transactional economy for reproductive tissues as a form of labour. In order to fully conceptualize the specificities of feminized productivity in the bioeconomy, we distinguish between earlier feminist theories of reproductive labour and the emerging practices generated by stem cell research, which we term regenerative labour. We consider how historical transformations in the regulation of feminized labour and the technical repertoires of stem cell research renegotiate the productivity limits of female reproductive biology, opening it out to novel and profitable forms of surplus value and enrolling women in complex negotiations over their role in bioeconomic activity. (shrink)

The study of micro-organisms in Britain in the early twentieth century was dominated by medical concerns, with little support for non-medical research. This paper examines the way in which microbes came to have a place in industrial contexts in the 1920s and early 1930s. Their industrial capacity was only properly recognized during World War I, with the development of fermentation processes to make required organic chemicals. Post-war research sponsored by chemical and food industries and the D.S.I.R. established the industrial significance (...) of microbes. The primary focus here is the D.S.I.R. work which aimed to pull microbes away from medical concerns and promote the role of microbes in British industry. (shrink)

Affective shifts have been linked to work attitudes and behaviors recently, but previous researches only focused on affective shift during work, with little attention to affective shifts outside work. Conservation of resources and personality system interaction theories are used to design a 2-week daily dairy study. Participants report how affective shifts outside work affect their subsequent-day task performance, emotional exhaustion, and CWB. As expected, findings indicate that shifts in affect outside work meaningfully (...) impact job performance and work attitudes. That is, when both positive and negative affect upshift outside work, employees perform their tasks better but also experience increased emotional exhaustion. Practical implications and limitations are discussed. (shrink)

The article uses a case study of relationships in American manufacturing industries to demonstrate the utility of documenting the “relational work” that managers do as they negotiate circumstances where either roles or norms are ambiguous. It shows that the explicit identification of the role that relational work plays in those relationships story militates for—and extends, improves upon, and arguably completes—a particular understanding of what economic sociologists should mean when they talk about the “embedding” of the economic in social (...) relations. The article hence shows the utility of jointly using otherwise disparate perspectives in the analysis of interorganizational relationships, and thus contributes to the development of a more unified paradigm in economic sociology. (shrink)

This article argues that annual hours per employed person and per working-age person capture important dimensions of political-economic success that should be weighed against aggregate employment and wealth patterns. It also argues that partisan-driven work-time policies and welfare-regime institutions give rise to diverging Social Democratic, Liberal, and Christian Democratic “worlds” of work time in terms of these two measures. Descriptive statistics for eighteen Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries reveal broad clustering and trends suggestive of the Three (...) Worlds, while panel estimation suggests the influence of partisan and welfare-institutional conditions underlying them. Case study of Finland, the United States, and the Netherlands further illustrates the political process and sequence of the Three Worlds. (shrink)