Following increased integration in global economic networks, some of India's informal sectors have expanded drastically in recent decades and are employing an increasing number of the country's working population. This book presents a powerful critique of the simplified representations that portray workers' politics in this informal sector as marked by low levels of class consciousness, limited abilities for resistance, and ruled by 'primordial' relations of caste, kinship and patronage. This study will be of interest to students of economy, politics, sociology and social anthropology as well as scholars of development studies.

First published in 1947, this book examines the climate surrounding life and labour in Britain in the nineteenth century. Fay analyses the international and local political structures affecting the way the British lived and worked, as well as the role played by social reformers such as Robert Owen.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest region in the world. But its current status has skewed our understanding of the economy before colonization. Rönnbäck reconstructs the living standards of the population at a time when the Atlantic slave trade brought money and men into the area, enriching our understanding of West African economic development.

What does it mean to be an academic today? What kinds of experiences do students have, and how are they affected by what they learn? Why do so many students and their teachers feel like frauds? Can we learn to teach and research in ways that foster hope and deflate pretension? Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices addresses these big questions, discussing the challenges of teaching and researching in the contemporary university, the purpose of research and its fundamental value, and the role of the academy against the background of major changes to nature of the university itself. Drawing on a range of international media sources, political discourse and many years’ professional experience, this volume explores approaches to teaching and research, with special emphasis on the importance of collegiality, intellectual honesty and courage. With attention to the intersection of large-scale institutional changes and intellectual shifts such as the rise of transdisciplinarity and the development of a pluralist curriculum, this book proposes the pursuit of more ethical, compassionate and critical forms of teaching and research. As such, it will be of interest not only to scholars of cultural studies and education, but to all those who care about the fate of the university as an institution, including young scholars seeking to join the academy.

This book offers a critical and timely account of how labour law has become a means for protecting employers rather than workers. The past few decades have witnessed something of a ‘silent revolution’ in the traditional protective role that labour law has played in the lives of workers. While this transformation has been overt in the realm of the market and at the level of the legislature, the role of the judiciary in this process remains significantly under-studied. Focussing on Australia, but drawing also on material from New Zealand, the UK and Canada, this book investigates how the common law has intervened to shape labour law in the image of commercial contract, determining disputes and defining legal issues by ignoring the realities of working life. Under this new conception of labour law, industrial relations between workers and employers are rarely reciprocal or relational. Rather, they are determined by the legal meaning and purpose of the contract of employment, drafted by lawyers for the benefit of employers and their human resources departments. Having demonstrated how approaches to contractual formalist legal reasoning have redefined labour law, this book goes on to propose an array of innovative legal and policy strategies to restore the protective role of labour law to the employment relationship. Scholarly, but also accessible to students, this book will appeal to those with interests in labour law, contract law and sociolegal studies.