Month: December 2017

We Can Reimagine and Reinvent Our Society in 2018

The places we live is where we can find our power…

The Revolution Where You Live

The place where we live is where we can find our power.

I’ve been writing a year-end column for YES! for years. Previously, my aim was to find the strands of hope from the past year that can be woven into new possibilities in the next year.

But as I sat down to write this column, on one of the darkest days of the year, I realized that this year will be different. This column will not be a list of hopeful trends. It’s too late to think we can make incremental tweaks to our current systems and be OK. Corporations and the ultra-wealthy will not share their wealth, and if we continue current practices of extraction and pollution, all life will be threatened.

The 2016 election showcased two destructive political directions: white supremacist nostalgia on the Trump side and coziness with corporate capitalism on the Clinton side. The Trump…

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ILR Call for Papers, Industry and Organization Studies

SAGE Business and Management INK

The ILR Review features a special series on Industry and Organization Studies in partnership with the Industry Studies Association (ISA). Submit today!

ILR_72ppiRGB_powerpointThe ILR Review has published the top, peer-reviewed theoretical and empirical research on work and employment relations for more than 65 years. Published five times a year, ILR features international and interdisciplinary research that advances new theory, presents novel empirical work, and informs organizational and public policy. It is published by the Cornell University ILR School, and is fully indexed in RePEc.

For more details click here.

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/wfr.

You will need to create an account in order to submit your manuscript. The system will notify you once we receive the manuscript and have sent it out for review.

Don’t forget to sign up for email alerts through the journal homepage so you never miss the latest research.

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Solidarity and the Gig Economy – by Peter Hall-Jones

new ideas

New Unionism Network blog

Solidarity and the gig economy

by Peter Hall-Jones

Gig economyIt’s a credit to the tireless efforts of Professor Guy Standing that the word ‘precariat’ has made its way into most English dictionaries. In case you’re not up to speed (and who is these days?) it means: “the class of people who are poor and do not have secure jobs” (Cambridge Dictionary). Sure, there has been a bit of debate around whether this group is a separate ‘class’, but nobody disputes that the phenomenon itself is very real.

Almost 40% of young workers in the OECD are in non-standard work, such as contract or temporary work, or involuntary part-time employment (more). At global level the picture is even more disturbing: more than 60% of workers worldwide, predominantly women, are in temporary, part-time or short-term jobs in which wages are falling (ILO 2015).  Of the top 20 global…

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On Being Blind in Higher Education

blind in the academy

Planet of the Blind

I’m a blind college teacher. There should be nothing remarkable about this. Yet my daily presence haunts the academy. At all three universities where I’ve held tenure I’ve met obstacles to my participation in everything from meetings, classroom teaching, library research, online systems, even simple sporting events. All these basic things have been largely blocked.

Bad as these stumbling blocks are, and I promise you they’re lousy, what’s worse is the extraordinary degree of ableism I’ve met over the course of my roughly thirty year teaching career. Setbacks are one thing, perhaps even to be expected (at least initially) but prejudicial behavior is worse and I’ve experienced it over and over again. I’m a well known blind person. I have managed despite these problems to achieve “senior status”—that necrotic term for full professors.

Yet I’m not a full professor at all. I’m essentially a steerage passenger on a luxury liner…

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Waif and Stray on a Hot Christmas Day: Lawless Reflections

The Activist History Review

by Dr. Ann Lawless

Australian Decembers are often hot—really hot—and sometimes best spent at a beach or shady park cooling down; or in chilly air-conditioned indoor spaces for shelter from the swelter; or spent adjacent to a cooling pool, billabong, dam, lake, or river. There may well be swimming, splashing, paddling, and water fights. One should dodge the sunburn and heat fatigue yet glory in the Australian outdoor culture. And December the 25th?

Christmas day is readily conflated and confusing: it is both a Christian festival, a national public holiday, and a family gathering. As a holiday it is rarely regarded as a chance to rest, recover, and recuperate from the exhausting build-up period in the hot hazy days before Christmas.

Christmas is a hot topic indeed in Australia. It has both public and private domains, family insiders and outsiders, freeloading and reciprocity, and the joy and pain of…

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Case in Point: Interacting in the Bossless Workplace

ooooh

SAGE Business and Management INK

[The following post is re-blogged from SAGE Connection. Click here to view the original article.]

Case in point imgSometimes it’s companies—not just their employees— that don’t want bosses. At W. L. Gore & Associates, a manufacturing company, no employee is hired as anyone else’s boss. Instead, employees support each other and work together in what can be called a “lattice” organizational structure; leaders are not assigned authority at Gore but are selected based on their merits and ability to earn followers.

Delving deeper into the company’s innovative structure, Terje Grønning wrote a case study about it for SAGE Business Cases, titled “Working Without a Boss: Lattice Organization With Direct Person-to-Person Communication at W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc.” The case study examines how the lattice organizational structure compares to more established structures, the communication challenges it faces, and more. Curious about the topic, we interviewed Terje for our Case In Point…

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