BiblioVault - Books about Work

Faith, Hope, and Jobs

Welfare-to-Work in Los Angeles

Stephen V. Monsma and J. Christopher Soper

Georgetown University Press, 2006

A front-burner issue on the public policy agenda today is the increased use of partnerships between government and nongovernmental entities, including faith-based social service organizations. In the wake of President Bush's faith-based initiative, many are still wondering about the effectiveness of these faith-based organizations in providing services to those in need, and whether they provide better outcomes than more traditional government, secular nonprofit, and for-profit organizations. In Faith, Hope, and Jobs, Stephen V. Monsma and J. Christopher Soper study the effectiveness of 17 different welfare-to-work programs in Los Angeles County—a county in which the U.S. government spends 14% of its entire welfare budget—and offer groundbreaking insight into understanding what works and what doesn't.

Monsma and Soper examine client assessment of the programs, their progress in developing attitudes and resources important for finding self-supporting employment, and their experience in finding actual employment. The study reveals that the clients of the more explicitly faith-based programs did best in gaining in social capital and were highly positive in evaluating the religious components of their programs. For-profit programs tended to do the best in terms of their clients finding employment. Overall, the religiously active respondents tended to experience better outcomes than those who were not religiously active but surprisingly, the religiously active and non-active tended to do equally well in faith-based programs.

Faith, Hope, and Jobs concludes with three sets of concrete recommendations for public policymakers, social service program managers, and researchers.

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Families and Work

Naomi Gerstel

Temple University Press, 1987

Emphasizing gender inequality in the past and present, this book analyzes the connections between work and family that produce conflict and change at home and in the marketplace.

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Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography

Tamara M. Brown

Temple University Press, 2013

Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography exposes the intimate relationship between ethnographers as both family members and researchers. The contributors to this exciting volume question and problematize the “artificial divide” between work and family that continues to permeate writing on ethnographic field work as social scientists try to juggle research and family tensions while “on the job.”

Essays relate experiences that mirror work-family dilemmas that all employed parents face, and show how deeply personal experiences affect social scientists’ home life and their studies. Bringing together voices of various family members—pregnant women, mothers, fathers, and children—Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography demonstrates how the mixture of work and family in this particular occupation has raised questions—both practical and theoretical—that relate to race, class, and gender.

Contributors include: Chris Bobel, Erynn Masi de Casanova, Randol Contreras, C. Aiden Downey, Tanya Golash-Boza, Steven Gold, Sherri Grasmuck, Barbara Katz Rothman,

Jennifer Reich, Leah Schmalzbauer, Gregory Smithsimon, and the editors.

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Fassbinder

The Life And Work Of A Provocative Genius

Christian Braad Thomsen

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

Feminist Futures of Work

Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy

Payal Arora

Amsterdam University Press, 2023

The future of work is at the centre of debates related to the emerging digital society. Concerns range from the inclusion, equity, and dignity of those at the far end of the value chain, who participate on and off platforms, often in the shadows, invisible to policymakers, designers, and consumers. Precarity and informality characterize this largely female workforce, across sectors ranging from artisanal work to salon services to ride hailing and construction. A feminist reimagining of the futures of work—what we term as “FemWork” —is the need of the day and should manifest in multiple and various forms, placing the worker at the core and drawing on her experiences, aspirations, and realities. This volume offers grounded insights from academic, activist, legal, development and design perspectives that can help us think through these inclusive futures and possibly create digital, social, and governance infrastructures of work that are fairer and more meaningful.

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Fighting For Time

Shifting Boundaries of Work and Social Life

Cynthia Fuchs Epstein

Russell Sage Foundation, 2004

Though there are still just twenty-four hours in a day, society's idea of who should be doing what and when has shifted. Time, the ultimate scarce resource, has become an increasingly contested battle zone in American life, with work, family, and personal obligations pulling individuals in conflicting directions. In Fighting for Time, editors Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and Arne Kalleberg bring together a team of distinguished sociologists and management analysts to examine the social construction of time and its importance in American culture. Fighting for Time opens with an exploration of changes in time spent at work—both when people are on the job and the number of hours they spend there—and the consequences of those changes for individuals and families. Contributors Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson find that the relative constancy of the average workweek in America over the last thirty years hides the fact that blue-collar workers are putting in fewer hours while more educated white-collar workers are putting in more. Rudy Fenwick and Mark Tausig look at the effect of nonstandard schedules on workers' health and family life. They find that working unconventional hours can increase family stress, but that control over one's work schedule improves family, social, and health outcomes for workers. The book then turns to an examination of how time influences the organization and control of work. The British insurance company studied by David Collinson and Margaret Collinson is an example of a culture where employees are judged on the number of hours they work rather than on their productivity. There, managers are under intense pressure not to take legally guaranteed parental leave, and clocks are banned from the office walls so that employees will work without regard to the time. In the book's final section, the contributors examine how time can have different meanings for men and women. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein points out that professional women and stay-at-home fathers face social disapproval for spending too much time on activities that do not conform to socially prescribed gender roles—men are mocked by coworkers for taking paternity leave, while working mothers are chastised for leaving their children to the care of others. Fighting for Time challenges assumptions about the relationship between time and work, revealing that time is a fluid concept that derives its importance from cultural attitudes, social psychological processes, and the exercise of power. Its insight will be of interest to sociologists, economists, social psychologists, business leaders, and anyone interested in the work-life balance.

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Filming for the Future

The Work of Louis van Gasteren

Patricia Pisters

Amsterdam University Press, 2016

Louis Van Gasteren was one of the most prolific filmmakers in the history of the Netherlands, with a resume that includes nearly eighty documentaries and two feature films - to say nothing of artworks and books.

Filming for the Future offers an extended exploration of Van Gasteren's work and audio-visual world. Patricia Pisters introduces us to a filmmaker who always had his camera ready and was relentless in filming a wide range of topics and events of national and international importance. Fascinated by technology, deeply engaged with politics, and intensely occupied by the traumatic effects of war, Van Gasteren assembled an unparalleled record of life in twentieth-century Amsterdam and beyond. Filming for the Future will be an invaluable source of documentation and analysis of one of the key filmmakers of our time.

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Finding Jobs

Work and Welfare Reform

David Card

Russell Sage Foundation, 2000

Do plummeting welfare caseloads and rising employment prove that welfare reform policies have succeeded, or is this success due primarily to the job explosion created by today's robust economy? With roughly one to two million people expected to leave welfare in the coming decades, uncertainty about their long-term prospects troubles many social scientists. Finding Jobs offers a thorough examination of the low-skill labor market and its capacity to sustain this rising tide of workers, many of whom are single mothers with limited education. Each chapter examines specific trends in the labor market to ask such questions as: How secure are these low-skill jobs, particularly in the event of a recession? What can these workers expect in terms of wage growth and career advancement opportunities? How will a surge in the workforce affect opportunities for those already employed in low-skill jobs? Finding Jobs offers both good and bad news about work and welfare reform. Although the research presented in this book demonstrates that it is possible to find jobs for people who have traditionally relied on public assistance, it also offers cautionary evidence that today's strong economy may mask enduring underlying problems. Finding Jobs shows that the low-wage labor market is particularly vulnerable to economic downswings and that lower skilled workers enjoy less job stability. Several chapters illustrate why financial incentives, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), are as essential to encouraging workforce participation as job search programs. Other chapters show the importance of including provisions for health insurance, and of increasing subsidies for child care to assist the large population of working single mothers affected by welfare reform. Finding Jobs also examines the potential costs of new welfare restrictions. It looks at how states can improve their flexibility in imposing time limits on families receiving welfare, and calls into question the cutbacks in eligibility for immigrants, who traditionally have relied less on public assistance than their native-born counterparts. Finding Jobs is an informative and wide-ranging inquiry into the issues raised by welfare reform. Based on comprehensive new data, this volume offers valuable guidance to policymakers looking to design policies that will increase work, raise incomes, and lower poverty in changing economic conditions.

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The Fish Factory

Work And Meaning For Black And White Fishermen

Barbara Jean Garrity

University of Tennessee Press, 1995

Focusing on the menhaden fishermen of the southern coastal regions, The Fish Factory is an engaging and insightful exploration of what work means to different social groups employed within the same industry.

Since the nineteenth century, the menhaden industry in the South has been traditionally split between black crews and white captains. Using life histories, historical research, and anthropological fieldwork in Reedville, Virginia, and Beaufort, North Carolina, Barbara Garrity-Blake examines the relationship between these two groups and how the members of each have defined themselves in terms of their work. The author finds that for the captains and other white officers of the menhaden vessels—men “born and bred” for a life on the water—work is a key source of identity. Black crewmen, however, have insisted on a separation between work and self; they view their work primarily as a means of support rather than an end in itself.

In probing the implications of this contrast, Garrity-Blake describes captain/crew relations within both an occupational context and the context of race relations in the South. She shows how those at the bottom of the shipboard hierarchy have exercised a measure of influence in a relationship at once asymmetrical and mutually dependent. She also explores how each group has reacted to the advent of technology in their industry and, most recently, to the challenges posed by those proclaiming a conservationist ethic.

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Food and Work in the Americas

Susan Levine and Steve Striffler, special issue editors

Duke University Press

This special issue challenges historians to think about food and labor by considering how not only producing but acquiring, preparing, eating, and enjoying food are central to working-class life and capitalist transformation. Its essays bring labor history into closer conversation with the interdisciplinary perspectives of food studies to explore how broadly and deeply food experiences and working lives shape one another. Contributors trace this relationship through a series of case studies from across the Americas, including discussions of Native American life during the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, African American food workers in the early twentieth century, Puerto Rican sugarcane workers under US imperialism, and the politics of fair trade.

Susan Levine is Professor of History and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program. Steve Striffler is the Doris Zemurray Stone Chair in Latin American Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans. He is the author of In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900–1995, also published by Duke University Press.

Contributors: William Bauer, Sarah Besky, Sandy Brown, Rachel Herrmann, Felicia Kornbluh, Susan Levine, Sarah Lyon, Vanessa May, April Merleaux, Liesl Orenic, Sara Ries, Steve Striffler

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Frankie and Johnny

Race, Gender, and the Work of African American Folklore in 1930s America

By Stacy I. Morgan

University of Texas Press, 2017

Winner, Wayland D. Hand Prize, American Folklore Society, 2018

Originating in a homicide in St. Louis in 1899, the ballad of “Frankie and Johnny” became one of America’s most familiar songs during the first half of the twentieth century. It crossed lines of race, class, and artistic genres, taking form in such varied expressions as a folk song performed by Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly); a ballet choreographed by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone under New Deal sponsorship; a mural in the Missouri State Capitol by Thomas Hart Benton; a play by John Huston; a motion picture, She Done Him Wrong, that made Mae West a national celebrity; and an anti-lynching poem by Sterling Brown.

In this innovative book, Stacy I. Morgan explores why African American folklore—and “Frankie and Johnny” in particular—became prized source material for artists of diverse political and aesthetic sensibilities. He looks at a confluence of factors, including the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and resurgent nationalism, that led those creators to engage with this ubiquitous song. Morgan’s research uncovers the wide range of work that artists called upon African American folklore to perform in the 1930s, as it alternately reinforced and challenged norms of race, gender, and appropriate subjects for artistic expression. He demonstrates that the folklorists and creative artists of that generation forged a new national culture in which African American folk songs featured centrally not only in folk and popular culture but in the fine arts as well.

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From Welfare to Work

Judith M. Gueron

Russell Sage Foundation, 1991

From Welfare to Work appears at a critical moment, when all fifty states are wrestling with tough budgetary and program choices as they implement the new federal welfare reforms. This book is a definitive analysis of the landmark social research that has directly informed those choices: the rigorous evaluation of programs designed to help welfare recipients become employed and self-sufficient. It discusses forty-five past and current studies, focusing on the series of seminal evaluations conducted by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation over the last fifteen years. Which of these welfare-to-work programs have worked? For whom and at what cost? In answering these key questions, the authors clearly delineate the trade-offs facing policymakers as they strive to achieve the multiple goals of alleviating poverty, helping the most disadvantaged, curtailing dependence, and effecting welfare savings. The authors present compelling evidence that the generally low-cost, primarily job search-oriented programs of the late 1980s achieved sustained earnings gains and welfare savings. However, getting people out of poverty and helping those who are most disadvantaged may require some intensive, higher-cost services such as education and training. The authors explore a range of studies now in progress that will address these and other urgent issues. They also point to encouraging results from programs that were operating in San Diego and Baltimore, which suggest the potential value of a mixed strategy: combining job search and other low-cost activities for a broad portion of the caseload with more specialized services for smaller groups. Offering both an authoritative synthesis of work already done and recommendations for future innovation, From Welfare to Work will be the standard resource and required reading for practitioners and students in the social policy, social welfare, and academic communities.

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Future of Work

Designing the Creative Space of Tomorrow

University of Cincinnati School of Architecture and Design

University of Cincinnati Press, 2019