Books about Kalleberg from Amazon.com

John Edwards puts a seminal issue back on the map, presenting blueprints for ending poverty in America

"This is one of the great moral issues of our time. The day after Katrina hit, new government statistics showed that 37 million Americans live in poverty, up for the fourth year in a row."—Senator John Edwards

Is poverty a fact of life? Can the wealthiest nation in the world do nothing to combat the steadily rising numbers of Americans living in poverty—or the 50 million Americans living in "near poverty"? Senator John Edwards and some of the country's most prominent scholars, businesspeople, and community activists say otherwise.

Published in conjunction with one of the country's leading anti-poverty centers, Ending Poverty in America brings together some of America's most respected social scientists, including William Julius Wilson, Katherine S. Newman, and Richard B. Freeman, alongside journalists, neighborhood organizers, and business leaders. The voices heard here are both liberal and conservative, and tackle hot-button issues such as job creation, schools, housing, and family-friendly social policy.

The contributors explain why poverty is growing and outline concrete steps that can be taken now to start turning the tide. In a political landscape seemingly bereft of daring and forward-thinking ideas, this new book lays out a path toward eliminating poverty in America—a template for a renewed public debate for an issue of intense urgency.

Contributors include: Jared Bernstein, Anita Brown-Graham, Carol Mendez Cassell, Richard Freeman, Angela Glover-Blackwell, Jacob Hacker, Harry Holzer, Jack Kemp, Glenn Loury, Ron Mincy, Katherine S. Newman, Melvin Oliver, Dennis Orthner, David Shipler, Beth Shulman, Michael Stegman, Elizabeth Warren, William Julius Wilson..
Price: $11.04 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this provocative new study of American workers, sociologist Arne Kalleberg examines the consequences of "mismatched" workers or the lack of fit between people and their jobs. Most people now expect their paid work to be broadly fulfilling and enable them to satisfy the need for challenging work, meaningful relationships, and financial success. Kalleberg shows how these expanding expectations of work are leading to a growing number of mismatches between employees and their jobs. Each chapter frames a different type of mismatch and describes how the poor fit between individuals and their employers have negative consequences for workers and their families. In addition to giving readers a fresh way to think about how people work, The Mismatched Worker also suggests social polices and strategies that might alleviate worker dissatisfaction and simultaneously make organizations more efficient..
Price: $6.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Though there are still just twenty-four hours in a day, society's idea of who should be doing what and when has shifted Time, the ultimate scarce resource, has become an increasingly contested battle zone in American life, with work, family, and personal obligations pulling individuals in conflicting directions. In "Fighting for Time," editors Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and Arne Kalleberg bring together a team of distinguished sociologists and management analysts to examine the social construction of time and its importance in American culture.

"Fighting for Time" opens with an exploration of changes in time spent at work—both when people are on the job and the number of hours they spend there—and the consequences of those changes for individuals and families. Contributors Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson find that the relative constancy of the average workweek in America over the last thirty years hides the fact that blue-collar workers are putting in fewer hours while more educated white-collar workers are putting in more. Rudy Fenwick and Mark Tausig look at the effect of nonstandard schedules on workers' health and family life. They find that working unconventional hours can increase family stress, but that control over one's work schedule improves family, social, and health outcomes for workers. The book then turns to an examination of how time influences the organization and control of work. The British insurance company studied by David Collinson and Margaret Collinson is an example of a culture where employees are judged on the number of hours they work rather than on their productivity. There, managers are under intense pressure not to take legally guaranteed parental leave, and clocks are banned from the office walls so that employees will work without regard to the time. In the book's final section, the contributors examine how time can have different meanings for men and women. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein points out that professional women and stay-at-home fathers face social disapproval for spending too much time on activities that do not conform to socially prescribed gender roles—men are mocked by coworkers for taking paternity leave, while working mothers are chastised for leaving their children to the care of others.

"Fighting for Time" challenges assumptions about the relationship between time and work, revealing that time is a fluid concept that derives its importance from cultural attitudes, social psychological processes, and the exercise of power. Its insight will be of interest to sociologists, economists, social psychologists, business leaders, and anyone interested in the work-life balance..
Price: $22.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Much of the hoopla surrounding quality circles, teams, and high-performance work systems has been based on anecdotes and very thin evidence It has not been established that those employee involvement strategies amount to anything more than another series of management fads or ruses designed to get more out of workers without giving them anything in return. This revelatory book, written by some of the skeptics, lays some of the suspicion to rest.

Based on their visits to 44 plants and surveys of more than 4,000 employees, Eileen Appelbaum, Thomas Bailey, Peter Berg, and Arne L. Kalleberg concluded that companies are indeed more successful when managers share knowledge and power with workers and when workers assume increased responsibility and discretion.

The study of steel, apparel, and medical electronics and imaging plants revealed much. In self-directed teams, workers were able to eliminate bottlenecks and coordinate the work process. In task forces created to improve quality, they communicated with individuals outside their own work groups and were able to solve problems. Expensive equipment in steel mills operated with fewer interruptions, turnaround and labor costs were cut in apparel factories, and costly inventories of components and medical equipment were reduced.

And what did the employees think? The worker survey showed that jobs in participatory work systems often provide more challenging tasks and more opportunities for creativity. Employees in apparel had higher hourly earnings; those in steel had both higher hourly earnings and higher job satisfaction. Workers in more participatory settings were no more likely than others to report heavy workloads or excessive demands on their time. They were, however, less likely to report involuntary overtime or conflict with co-workers, and were more likely to be satisfied with their surroundings.

Manufacturing Advantage provides the best assessment available of the effectiveness of high-performance work systems. Freestanding chapters near the end of the book provide full documentation of research data without interrupting the narrative flow..
Price: $12.60 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Aage Sorensen was an influential intellectual presence who was one of the world's leading authorities on social stratification and the sociology of education. His research sought to understand the structures, dynamics and mechanisms that underlie inequalities in industrial societies by focusing on how individuals' attainments are shaped by characteristics of a society's or organization's opportunity structure, on the one hand, and individuals' education, experience and other human capital resources, on the other. He emphasized inequalities associated with education and schooling, class, and stratification outcomes such as income and occupational status. Within these general foci, he tackled the study of phenomena as diverse as rates of learning in elementary school reading groups and promotion patterns in large industrial corporations.

The chapters of this volume illustrate some of the major themes that characterized Aage's research; these topics are also likely to constitute important concerns for future efforts to understand structured social inequality in society. These themes include: the development of explicit dynamic models to account for observed patterns of education, career, and labor market outcomes; aspects of educational inequality such as school effects and learning opportunities; issues related to intragenerational mobility and careers; and the role of rents in generating structural inequality..
Price: $50.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

CD. Poetry. "SNAKE HISS is a collection of sound works by poets on the occasion of the first anniversary of THE TRANSCENDENTAL FIEND, an online journal of poetry and poetics, art and criticism; the works in this collection were produced by contributors to the journal. During the bleak end of winter 1999, the poets read, played, performed, or personified their work using whatever devices they had at their disposal, resulting in a direct poetry of sound as various as the works and personalities of the individual artists." --Garret Kalleberg. Featuring poetic works by Alan Gilbert and Garret Kalleberg, Lisa Jarnot, Marcella Durand, Jonathan Skinner, Duncan Dobbelmann, Daniel Machlin and Serena Jost, Jen Hofer, Laird Hunt, Cole Swensen, Jesse Glass, Heather Fuller, Anselm Berrigan and Heather Ramsdell..
Price: $18.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]