This book takes a fresh look at the issue of job quality, analyzing employer behaviour and discussing the agenda for policy intervention. Between 1997 and 2002, more than twelve million new jobs were created in the European Union and labour market participation increased by more than eight million. Whilst a good deal of these new jobs have been created in high-tech and/or knowledge-intensive sectors providing workers with decent pay, job security, training and career development prospects, a significant share of jobs, particularly in labour-intensive service sector industries fail to do so. This volume provides new perspectives on this highly debated and policy relevant issue.

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.

This highly readable and authoritative book on the social economics of job quality comes at a critical time as policy-makers, employers and unions seek to rebuild jobs after the economic crisis. The team of authors are leading experts on European employment trends and policy and have produced an excellent study that proposes a new index of job quality for Europe. Given its depth and breadth of coverage of theory and already existing indicators, the book is likely to be a landmark study. Readers will enjoy the engaging review of past and present works of classical political economy and behavioural economics and will benefit from the expert critical appraisal of more than 20 existing proposals for job quality indices. Most importantly, the authors design and test a new European Job Quality Index that provides a reliable and coherent measure of five critical dimensions of the character of contemporary jobs. Measuring More than Money is a much-needed analysis that will interest both specialists and anyone concerned about job quality. The proposed indicator deserves to be adopted and will enable policy-makers to make good their commitment to sustainability and equality across Europe by monitoring and responding to a good job quality measure. Damian Grimshaw, University of Manchester, UK Is a job a job? If you looked at unemployment data, you would think so. But economists since Adam Smith know that jobs differ in quality: difficulty or pleasure of doing it. Thus they tend to assume that market would equalize wage per unit of difficulty of a job, and that they do not need to worry about intrinsic job quality. Rafael de Bustillo shows that this wrong and that in an era of plenty for many (although not for all), the challenge is to create high-quality jobs and to find ways of comparing them in terms of fulfillment afforded to workers. The book thus addresses a new and growing field of study: for it certainly matters if we are happy or unhappy in an activity that takes almost one-third of our lives and often defines who we are. Branko Milanovic, World Bank and University of Maryland, US This is a book every labour economist or sociologist interested in job quality should read. It provides a well written overview of the depth and breadth of this field, presenting a systematic review of this complex multidimensional concept and discussing more than twenty of the indicators currently in use. The volume goes beyond the current literature by developing a sound, empirically tested Job Quality Index for the European Union. It was definitely a pleasure reading this volume. Kea Tijdens, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Mainstream economics traditionally restricts the analysis of the labour market to purely monetary factors, such as earnings, leaving aside many other characteristics that might affect the desirability of certain jobs. By contrast, this unique volume explores the alternatives and problems faced by researchers in quantifying and measuring a broader notion of job quality. The contributors expertly explore the different approaches to measurement and analyze both the advantages and disadvantages of the various methods within a European context. Job quality is a crucial link between the economy and well-being. This original book proves that it can and should be measured, proposing a theoretically based multidimensional Index of Job Quality that is tested in the EU member States. The index proves particularly useful to measure the differences in job quality by country, occupation, gender and age. Based on solid theory and data, this book will prove essential for postgraduate students, researchers and academics of labour economics, sociology, industrial relations, and European studies as it presents a coherent discussion of the concept and components of job quality, and of the difficulties of measuring it. The book also proposes a new aggregate index of job quality that can contribute to the evaluation of European employ

This book brings together the best of current global research on the measurement and understanding of international differences in well-being

Award-winning psychologist Peter Warr explores why some people at work are happier or unhappier than others. He evaluates different approaches to the definition and assessment of happiness, and combines environmental and person-based themes to explain differences in people's experience. A framework of key job characteristics is linked to an account of primary mental processes, and those are set within a summary of demographic, cultural, and occupational patterns. Consequences of happiness or unhappiness for individuals and groups are also reviewed, as is recent literature on unemployment and retirement. Although primarily focusing on job situations, the book shows that processes of happiness are similar across settings of all kinds. It provides a uniquely comprehensive assessment of research published across the world. Initial chapters explore the several meanings of happiness and the ways in which those have been measured by psychologists. The construct includes pleasure, satisfaction and subjective well-being, and unhappiness has been studied in terms of dissatisfaction, strain, anxiety, and depression. The impacts of principal environmental features on these experiences are reviewed through an analogy with vitamins in relation to physical health—beneficial only up to a point. However, environmental effects are not fixed. Influences on happiness from within the person are examined in terms of principal thinking patterns, personality styles, and cultural backgrounds. Differences are explored between groups (men and women, older and younger people, employees who are full-time and part-time, and so on), and processes of person-environment fit are placed within an overall framework which emphasizes the impact of variations in personal salience. The book is written primarily for academic readers, including senior undergraduates, graduate students, teachers, and researchers in fields of Industrial/Organizational Psychology, Management, Human Resources, and Labor Studies. However, the topic's centrality in many professions makes it important also to a wider readership.

Robbins/Judge provide the research you want in the language your students understand; accompanied with the best selling self-assessment software, SAL. Some topics include management functions; the social sciences; helping employees balance work and other responsibilities; improving people skills; improving customer service; motivational concepts; communication; power and politics; conflict and negotiation; culture; and stress management. Globally accepted and written by one of the most foremost authors in the field, this is a necessary read for all managers, human resource workers, and anyone needing to understand and improve their people skills.