Mark Tomlinson – författare

This masterly new study presents the first large-scale empirical analysis of the changes in British work experiences and employment relationships between the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on the Employment in Britain surveya national survey providing the richest source of evidence to date about individuals' experience of employmentit examines the impact of new technologies, the emergence of new management policies, the changing forms of employment contract, and the growth of job insecurity on people's experience of employment. The authors focus on the implications these developments have for the ways in which skills and work tasks have been changing, the nature of control at work, the degree of participation in decision-making, and the flexibility demanded at work. They assess whether there has been a tendency towards either a polarization or convergence of employment experiences between men and women, and between occupational classes. They offer fresh insight into how the changing quality of work in recent years has affected employee's involvement in their jobs and organizations, the stress they experience at work, and the propensity for absenteeism and staff turnover. While the study provides strong evidence of a marked trend towards upskilling, the authors take issue with the argument that a new type of employment relationship is emerging, arguing instead that the restructuring of the employment relationship has, in fact, reinforced traditional lines of division in the workforce.

This masterly new study presents the first large-scale empirical analysis of the changes in British work experiences and employment relationships between the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on the Employment in Britain surveya national survey providing the richest source of evidence to date about individuals' experience of employmentit examines the impact of new technologies, the emergence of new management policies, the changing forms of employment contract, and the growth of job insecurity on people's experience of employment. The authors focus on the implications these developments have for the ways in which skills and work tasks have been changing, the nature of control at work, the degree of participation in decision-making, and the flexibility demanded at work. They assess whether there has been a tendency towards either a polarization or convergence of employment experiences between men and women, and between occupational classes. They offer fresh insight into how the changing quality of work in recent years has affected employee's involvement in their jobs and organizations, the stress they experience at work, and the propensity for absenteeism and staff turnover. While the study provides strong evidence of a marked trend towards upskilling, the authors take issue with the argument that a new type of employment relationship is emerging, arguing instead that the restructuring of the employment relationship has, in fact, reinforced traditional lines of division in the workforce.

The structure and regulation of consumption and demand has recently become of great interest to sociologists and economists alike, and at the same time there is growing interest in trying to understand the patterns and drivers of technological innovation. This book, newly available in paperback, brings together a range of sociologists and economists to study the role of demand and consumption in the innovative process.The book starts with a broad conceptual overview of ways that the sociological and economics literatures address issues of innovation, demand and consumption. It goes on to offer different approaches to the economics of demand and innovation through an evolutionary framework, before reviewing how consumption fits into evolutionary models of economic development. Food consumption is then looked at as an example of innovation by demand, including an examination of the dynamic nature of socially-constituted consumption routines.The book includes a number of illuminating case studies, including an analysis of how black Americans use consumption to express collective identity, and a number of demand–innovation relationships within matrices or chains of producers and users or other actors, including service industries such as security, and the environmental performance of companies. The involvement of consumers in innovation is looked at, including an analysis of how consumer needs may be incorporated in the design of high-tech products. The final chapter argues for the need to build an economic sociology of demand that goes from micro-individual through to macro-structural features.This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 9, Industry, innovation and infrastructure.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

While 90% of the 135 million infants born in the world each year live in low-income or developing countries, in a recent survey only 4% of the articles in 12 major international infancy and developmental journals were found to address the experience of infants living in the developing world. Yet, in conditions of extreme poverty and instability, conditions characteristic of Africa, the pressures on parents differ markedly from those facing parents in communities that are typically the focus of research in child development. This timely book addresses the dearth of literature in this area.There is an increasing awareness of the need for a broader knowledge base regarding infant and child development. One of the consequences of this awareness is a burgeoning interest in research in the field in Africa. The recent World Health Organization report `Social Determinants of Health’ has focused the interest of the academy on factors outside traditional medicine, on the social determinants of later problems and the profound inequities that exist as a result of poverty and how these impact on infant and child development. This volume will sit squarely within this context and will offer a broad contextualised understanding of the factors that impact upon infant and child development in Africa. Unlike other works on the subject it is Africa-wide in its scope, with case studies in Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi and South Africa.Recommended for: Academics, students and practitioners in psychology, including developmental psychology, child clinical psychology, developmental psychopathology, psychiatry, human ecology, and those in schools of education. It will also be of interest to nurses and paediatricians, health workers and for those interested in early childhood development.

Contains everything that a project team needs to know about the development and deployment of Web services with the IBM WebSphere product family. Included will be examples for all development artifacts in a format that can be reused in the reader�s project. It combines the authors� own practical experiences with consolidated information on the latest product capabilities in a unique approach that allows the book to be easily accessible to a broad spectrum of readers. Finding a balance between a euphoric/optimistic and down-to earth/realistic view on the subject, this book will be an essential part of every Web service developer�s bookshelf.