Jörg Flecker - Böcker

Public services throughout Europe have undergone dramatic restructuring processes in recent years in connection with liberalization and privatization. While evaluations of the successes of public services have focused on prices and efficiency, much less attention has been paid to the impacts of liberalization and privatization on employment, labor relations, and working conditions. This book addresses this gap by illustrating the ways in which liberalization has contributed to increasing private and foreign ownership of public services, the decentralization of labor relations has amplified pressure on wages, and decreasing employment numbers and increasing workloads have improved productivity partly at the cost of service quality. Examining diverse public-service sectors including network industries, public transportation, and hospitals, and using international case studies, Privatization of Public Services covers a wide range of aspects of service provision, with particular emphasis on companies and workers. The result is a unique picture of the changes created by the liberalization processes in Europe.

This book investigates the interplay of the recent transformation of working life and the growing appeal of political right-wing populism and extremism in Europe. It explores the individual and collective reactions and the strategies people develop in order to come to terms with socio-economic change. It raises the question of whether, and to what extent, changes in the employment system and in working life contribute to making people receptive to xenophobia, nationalism and racism. Based on an eight country study using both quantitative and qualitative research methods, this volume makes a significant contribution to the deeper understanding of the subjective reactions to socio-economic change and its political reverberations.

This edited volume seeks to enhance our understanding ofthe concepts of space and place in the study of digital work. It argues thatwhile digital work is often presented as 'placeless', work always takes placesomewhere with a certain degree of local embeddedness. Contributors to thiscollection address restructuring processes that bring about delocaliseddigital work and point out limitations to dislocation inherent in the workitself, and the social relations or the physical artefacts involved.Exploring the dynamics of global value chains and shiftsin the international division of labour, this book explores the impact thesehave on employment and working conditions, workers' agency in shaping andcoping with changes in work, and the new competencies needed in virtualorganisational environments. Combining different disciplinary perspectives,the volume teases out the spatial aspects of digital work at different scalesranging from team level to that of globalproduction networks.