Ciudadanía, Reconocimiento y Distribución, tres conceptos fundamentales para la definición social del trabajo. El concepto se había eclipsado desde los años sesenta y reaparece en los noventa con inusitada energía. La desmaterialización y fragmentación de la ciudadanía vuelve a tratarse como tema fundamental justo en el momento en el que resulta ya inocultable la pérdida de coherencia y la minimización del sistema de garantías de la red de derechos laborales y de bienestar que se consideraban asociados, inseparablemente, del trabajador contemporáneo; figura identificada, e idéntica en el modo de regulación fordista maduro, al ciudadano normalizado.

CONTENIDO: Proceso de trabajo y objeto de consumo: las transformaciones del modo de vida material entre el fordismo y el postfordismo - Macro y microcorporatismo: las nuevas estrategias de la concertación social - Necesidades, ingobernabilidad y ciudadanía - La crisis del estado del bienestar nacional y las regiones vulnerables. Paradojas de la globalización y transformaciones de la ciudadanía - El mito del fin del trabajo - El avance del determinismo tecnológico y la crisis de la sociedad del trabajo. Una interpretación sobre el relativo declive de la sociología del trabajo.

The wide-ranging European perspectives brought together in this volume aim to analyse, by means of an interdisciplinary approach, the numerous implications of a massive shift in the conception of ‘work’ and the category of ‘worker’. Changes in the production models, economic downturn and increasing digitalisation have triggered a breakdown in the terms and assumptions that previously defined and shaped the notion of employment. This has made it more difficult to discuss, and problematise, issues like vulnerability in employment in such terms as unfairness, inequality and inadequate protection. Taking the ‘deconstruction of employment’ as a central idea for theorising the phenomenon of work today, this volume explores the emergence of new semantic fields and territories for understanding and regulating employment. These new linguistic categories have implications beyond language alone: they reformulate the very concept of waged employment (including those aspects previously considered intrinsic to the meaning of work and of being ‘a worker’), along with other closely associated categories such as unemployment, self-employment, and inactivity.

In order to examine what kind of policies can produce a positive relationship between social justice and economic efficiency, this book emphasises the need for a holistic approach, which includes not only labour recognised by the market but also informal labour.

Exploring the expansion of the penal system in Spain during the first 40 years of democracy, this book puts forward the importance of studying punishment from a sociological perspective and examines the neoliberal penality thesis. Today, Spain has more police officers and more people in prison than 50 years ago and a tougher penal code than that which existed at Franco’s death; however, crime has not increased for three decades, while most of the hardening of the penal system has occurred after its stabilisation. Studying the development of penality in Spanish democracy, this book explores Loïc Wacquant’s proposal that the expansion of the penal system should be understood as a characteristic of neoliberalism. It examines the parallel and reciprocal development of three policies in relation to the gradual implementation of neoliberal ideas and highlights how the evolution of the labour market, social policies, and the penal system are linked to one another and to neoliberal ideas related to the sacralisation of the utilitarian individual and the role of the state. Advocating for a sociological study of state punishment and contributing to a better understanding of the implementation of neoliberal policies, Neoliberalism and Punishment will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, and politics.

In The Politics of Social Inclusion and Labor Representation, Heather Connolly, Stefania Marino, and Miguel Martínez Lucio compare trade union responses to immigration and the related political and labour market developments in the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The labor movement is facing significant challenges as a result of such changes in the modern context. As such, the authors closely examine the idea of social inclusion and how trade unions are coping with and adapting to the need to support immigrant workers and develop various types of engagement and solidarity strategies in the European context. Traversing the dramatically shifting immigration patterns since the 1970s, during which emerged a major crisis of capitalism, the labor market, and society, and the contingent rise of anti-immigration sentiment and new forms of xenophobia, the authors assess and map how trade unions have to varying degrees understood and framed these issues and immigrant labor. They show how institutional traditions, and the ways that trade unions historically react to social inclusion and equality, have played a part in shaping the nature of current initiatives. The Politics of Social Inclusion and Labor Representation concludes that we need to appreciate the complexity of trade-union traditions, established paths to renewal, and competing trajectories of solidarity. While trade union organizations remain wedded to specific trajectories, trade union renewal remains an innovative, if at times, problematic and complex set of choices and aspirations.