Chris Mathieu - Böcker

The aim of this Handbook is to produce an interdisciplinary and international benchmark text for anyone wanting to understand job quality. Job quality matters and has long and continually done so, even if the terminology used to describe it has, and continues, to vary. Debate about the future of work and job quality in the twenty-first century centres on the impact of the new digital technologies of the putative fourth industrial revolution. This debate compounds existing concerns about the restructuring of employment and, importantly, a worrying proliferation of poor-quality jobs, often within the context of neo-liberal political-economic hegemony since the early 1980s or the economic crisis that followed the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s. Job quality is offered as a solution to challenges such as health, welfare, productivity, innovation, economic competitiveness, democracy and democratic participation, Bildung/cultivation, societal equality, individual and collective quality of life, and environmental sustainability. As job quality is a key factor in addressing these and the other challenges, it needs to be understood in all its complexity in terms of what it affects as well as what affects it. This Handbook draws together into a single volume: first, an explicit focus on job quality both as a significant factor in and of itself and as producing instrumental effects on a range of other processes and outcomes; second, a catalogue of the diverse range of multiple contributions and applications related to job quality; and third, the complexity and multiple interpretations of the concept of job quality. Each chapter provides distinct responses to the question of why job quality matters, coupled to a contention about for whom or for what job quality matters most. As the chapters with their respective answers and arguments attest, there are a range of ways in which job quality is relevant to an equally broad range of social, economic, and political concerns.

Comprising original empirical studies of career-making in the creative sector, this book takes in theatre, music, film, TV, visual arts, fashion design, and architecture as creative industries. This format facilitates comparative analysis of central features of career-making within as well as across both specific industries and national contexts. The book is at the forefront and intersection of contemporary career research and research on work in creative industries / the cultural economy, intertwining both subjective and objective approaches to and dimensions of career. The contributors move beyond the dichotomies that have characterized recent career theory and work on creative industries to examine factors that facilitate and restrict horizontal and vertical mobility. Spanning a diverse range of case studies, from German theatre to Danish fashion, this book is a valuable reference for scholars of the creative and cultural industries and important reading for thoser interested in careers more generally.

This book comprises current, original, empirical studies of career-making in theatre, music, film, TV, visual arts, fashion design, and architecture from Asia, Europe, and North America. This format facilitates comparative analysis of central features of career-making within as well as across both specific industries and national contexts. The studies empirically and theoretically analyze issues such as career management, temporality, location, recognition processes, competition, uncertainty, gender, chance-arbitrariness, education-to-work transition, mediators, the ‘individualization’ of careers, and collaboration partnerships. The book is at the forefront and intersection of contemporary career research and research on work in creative industries / the cultural economy, intertwining both subjective and objective approaches to and dimensions of career. The book moves beyond the dichotomies that have characterized recent career theory and work on creative industries in terms of ‘boundarylessness-boundedness’ and ‘good and bad work’ to examine the factors that facilitate and restrict horizontal and vertical mobility, sometimes simultaneously and paradoxically, and the trade-offs involved, and the simultaneous positive and negative dimensions of given phenomena. The chapters also analyze the operation and significance of various formal and informal recognition processes from the macro state level down to minute interpersonal interaction that are central to career-making in creative industries.