How firms are structured, the management practices they develop, as well as the way in which workers and managers interact can have wider implications for both the performance of the firm and the well-being of its workers. This volume contains ten original articles that investigate aspects related to workplace practices and productivity.

The effective utilization of available resources is a pivotal factor for production levels in modern business environments. However, when resources are limited or in excess, this effects organizational success, as well as the labor market. The Handbook of Research on Unemployment and Labor Market Sustainability in the Era of Globalization is a comprehensive reference source for the latest scholarly research on the socio-economic dynamics of unemployment and the development of new policies to assist in regulating the global labor market. Highlighting innovative approaches and relevant perspectives, such as outsourcing, trade openness, and employment protection, this publication is ideally designed for policy makers, professionals, practitioners, graduate students, and academics interested in emerging trends for labor market development.

This book examines the evolution of Australian unemployment law and policy across the past 100 years. It poses the question 'How does unemployment happen?'. But it poses it in a particular way. How do we regulate work relationships, gather statistics, and administer a social welfare system so as to produce something we call 'unemployment'? And how has that changed over time? Attempts to sort workers into discrete categories – the 'employed', the 'unemployed', those 'not in the labour force' – are fraught, and do not always easily correspond with people's working lives. Across the first decades of the twentieth century, trade unionists, statisticians and advocates of social insurance in Australia as well as Britain grappled with the problem of which forms of joblessness should be classified as 'unemployment' and which should not. This book traces those debates. It also chronicles the emergence and consolidation of a specific idea of unemployment in Australia after the Second World War. It then charts the eventual unravelling of that idea, and relates that unravelling to the changing ways of ordering employment relationships. In doing so, Inventing Unemployment challenges the preconception that casual work, self-employment, and the 'gig economy' are recent phenomena. Those forms of work confounded earlier attempts to define 'unemployment' and are again unsettling our contemporary understandings of joblessness. This thought-provoking book shows that the category of 'unemployment', rather than being a taken-for-granted economic variable, has its own history, and that history is intimately related to our changing understandings of 'employment'.

This book explores the career experiences of Generation A, the half-million individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who will reach adulthood in the next decade. With Generation A eligible to enter the workforce in unprecedented numbers, research is needed to help individuals, organizations, and educational institutions to work together to create successful work experiences and career outcomes for individuals with ASD. Issues surrounding ASD in the workplace are discussed from individual, organizational, and societal perspectives. This book also examines the stigma of autism and how it may affect the employment and career experiences of individuals with ASD. This timely book provides researchers, practitioners, and employers with empirical data that examines the work and career experiences of individuals with ASD. It offers a framework for organizations committed to hiring individuals with ASD and enhancing their work experiences and career outcomes now and in the future.

In recent years, globalization and the expansion of information technologies have reshaped managerial practices, forcing multinational firms to adjust business practices to different environments and domestic companies to adjust to their foreign competitors. In International Differences in the Business Practices and Productivity of Firms, a distinguished group of contributors examines the phenomenon of widespread differences in managerial practices across firms, establishments within firms, and countries. This volume brings together eight studies that combine qualitative and quantitative insider analysis of business practices such as the use of teams, incentive pay, lean manufacturing, and quality control, revealing the elements that determine which practices are adopted and why. International Differences in the Business Practices and Productivity of Firms offers a much-needed model for measuring the productivity and performance of international firms in a fast-paced global economy.

Young People and Long-Term Unemployment examines the consequences of long-term unemployment for the personal, social, and political lives of young adults aged 18–34 across four European cities: Cologne (Germany), Geneva (Switzerland), Lyon (France), and Turin (Italy). Adopting a multidimensional theoretical framework aiming to bring together insights based on the contextual (macro), organizational (meso), and individual (micro) levels, and combining quantitative and qualitative data and analyses, it reaches a number of important conclusions. First, our study shows that the experience of long-term unemployment has a negative impact on different dimensions of young people’s lives. When compared to employed youth, unemployed youth are less satisfied with their lives, more isolated, and less independent financially. Second, however, there are important variations across the four cities. This means that, in spite of widespread retrenchments, in some places the welfare state still acts as a buffer against unemployment. Third, although young unemployed people participate in politics equally if not slightly more than employed youth, the young unemployed are often disconnected from politics. This is so even when they have important grievances to express in the face of high youth unemployment, precarious working conditions, and grim future perspectives on the labor market. This book will be useful for scholars interested in unemployment politics and youth politics, researchers and teachers in political science, sociology, and social psychology.