The shift from manufacturing- to service-based economies has often been accompanied by the expansion of low-wage and insecure employment. Many consider the effects of this shift inevitable. ...InDisintegrating Democracy at Work, Virginia Doellgast contends that high pay and good working conditions are possible even for marginal service jobs. This outcome, however, depends on strong unions and encompassing collective bargaining institutions, which are necessary to give workers a voice in the decisions that affect the design of their jobs and the distribution of productivity gains.
Doellgast's conclusions are based on a comparative study of the changes that occurred in the organization of call center jobs in the United States and Germany following the liberalization of telecommunications markets. Based on survey data and interviews with workers, managers, and union representatives, she found that German managers more often took the "high road" than those in the United States, investing in skills and giving employees more control over their work. Doellgast traces the difference to stronger institutional supports for workplace democracy in Germany. However, these democratic structures were increasingly precarious, as managers in both countries used outsourcing strategies to move jobs to workplaces with lower pay and weaker or no union representation. Doellgast's comparative findings show the importance of policy choices in closing off these escape routes, promoting broad access to good jobs in expanding service industries.
Service Science Daskin, Mark S
2011, 2011., 2010, 2011-07-15
eBook
A comprehensive treatment on the use of quantitative modeling for decision making and best practices in the service industriesMaking up a significant part of the world economy, the service sector is ...a rapidly evolving field that is relied on to dictate the public's satisfaction and success in various areas of everyday life, from banking and communications to education and healthcare. Service Science provides managers and students of the service industries with the quantitative skills necessary to model key decisions and performance metrics associated with services, including the management of resources, distribution of goods and services to customers, and the analysis and design of queueing systems.The book begins with a brief introduction to the service sector followed by an introduction to optimization and queueing modeling, providing the methodological background needed to analyze service systems. Subsequent chapters present specific topics within service operations management, including:Location modeling and districtingResource allocation problemsShort- and long-term workforce managementPriority services, call center design, and customer schedulingInventory modelingVehicle routingThe author's own specialized software packages for location modeling, network optimization, and time-dependent queueing are utilized throughout the book, showing readers how to solve a variety of problems associated with service industries. These programs are freely available on the book's related web site along with detailed appendices and online spreadsheets that accompany the book's 'How to Do It in Excel' sections, allowing readers to work hands-on with the presented techniques.Extensively class-tested to ensure a comprehensive presentation, Service Science is an excellent book for industrial engineering and management courses on service operations at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. The book also serves as a reference for researchers in the fields of business, management science, operations research, engineering, and economics.This book was named the2010 Joint Publishers Book of the Yearby the Institute of Industrial Engineers.
The rise to prominence of the service sector - heralded over half a century ago as the great hope for the twenty-first century - has come to fruition. In many cases, employment in the service sector ...now outnumbers that in manufacturing sectors, and it is accepted that in all developed countries, the service sector is the only one in which employment will grow in future. The reasons for this is the subject of much controversy and debate, the outcomes of which are not merely of academic interest but of decisive importance for economic policy and the quality of working and living conditions in future.
In order to examine these various arguments, research teams from eight European countries worked together for three years on a comparative study of the evolution of service sector employment in EU member states. They also investigated working and employment conditions in five very different service industries (banking, retailing, hospitals, IT services and care of the elderly) in a number of countries, and the results of their research are presented in this informative new collection, of interest to students academics and researchers involved in all aspects of industrial economics.
"Working in the Service Sector provides a valuable overview of the European Service Sector, brings together a considerable range of perspectives, and sets an impressive benchmark for comparative studies of work and organizations in terms of depth, focus, and theoretical outlook" Industrial Relations Review
Gerhard Bosch is Professor for sociology at the university Duisburg-Essen and Vice President of the Institute for Work and Technology. He is an expert on labour market policy, working time and employment policy.
Steffen Lehndorff is an economist and Director of the Working Time and Work Organisation Research Unit at the Institute of Work and Technology (Institut Arbeit und Technik, IAT), Gelsenkirchen / Germany. His major research interests include international comparative studies of employment and working-time structures and regulation and of working time, work organisation and industrial relations in services and manufacturing.
List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Service Economies Part I: Different Service Societies in Europe 2. Measuring Economic Tertiarisation 3. The Incidence of New Forms of Employment in Service Activities 4. Why Do Countries Have Such Different Service-Sector Employment Rates? 5. Services and the Employment Prospects for Women Part 2: The Organization of Service Work 6. The Family, The State, and Now The Market 7. The Reluctant Nurses 8. Work Hard, Play Hard? 9. Work Organisation and The Importance of Labour Markets in The European Retail Trade 10. Lean Banking Part 3: Common Challenges 11. The Shaping of Work and Working Time in The Service Sector 12. The Delegation of Uncertainty 13. Can Trade Unions Meet The Challenge? 14. Diversity and Regulation of Markets for Services
High speed rail (HSR) services shorten space-time distances between cities and induce the reallocation of production resources between regions (cities). Based on the data of 25 cities in China's ...Yangtze River Delta region during 1995–2014, this paper uses the (continuous) difference-in-differences model to investigate the influence of HSR on urban service industry agglomeration. The results show that HSR has a positive effect on the urban service industry agglomeration of the cities located along the rail lines. Compared with cities not located along the rail lines, HSR does not weaken the service industry agglomeration of the medium and small-sized cities that are also situated along the rail lines and around the core city. The service intensity of HSR, which is measured by train service frequency, also exhibits a significant effect on the service industry agglomeration of those cities located along the rail lines. Higher levels of HSR service intensity have a greater effect on urban service industry agglomeration. In addition, we further subdivide the category of service industry into producer service, consumer service, and public service industries. We find that HSR has a significant impact on producer service industry agglomeration, but HSR's influences on consumer service industry and public service industry are insignificant.
•We explore the effect of high speed rail (HSR) on service industry agglomeration.•We construct the traditional and continuous difference-in-differences (DID) models.•HSR promotes the service industry agglomeration of the cities with HSR services.•Higher HSR service intensity has a greater effect on service industry agglomeration.•HSR has a significant influence on producer service industry agglomeration.
WTO - Trade in Services Wolfrum, Rüdiger; Stoll, Peter-Tobias; Feinäugle, Clemens
2008, Letnik:
6
eBook
This volume will be a valuable reference tool for the WTO community as a whole, as well as for professionals and researchers, who deal with one of the sectors concerned, e.g. financial services and ...telecommunications.
Making Care Count Duffy, Mignon
2011, 20110217, 2011-02-17, 20110101
eBook
There are fundamental tasks common to every society: children have to be raised, homes need to be cleaned, meals need to be prepared, and people who are elderly, ill, or disabled need care. Day in, ...day out, these responsibilities can involve both monotonous drudgery and untold rewards for those performing them, whether they are family members, friends, or paid workers. These are jobs that cannot be outsourced, because they involve the most intimate spaces of our everyday lives--our homes, our bodies, and our families.
Mignon Duffy uses a historical and comparative approach to examine and critique the entire twentieth-century history of paid care work--including health care, education and child care, and social services--drawing on an in-depth analysis of U.S. Census data as well as a range of occupational histories. Making Care Count focuses on change and continuity in the social organization along with cultural construction of the labor of care and its relationship to gender, racial-ethnic, and class inequalities. Debunking popular understandings of how we came to be in a "care crisis," this book stands apart as an historical quantitative study in a literature crowded with contemporary, qualitative studies, proposing well-developed policy approaches that grow out of the theoretical and empirical arguments.
The managed heart Hochschild, Arlie Russell
2012., 20120227, 2012, 2012-03-31
eBook
In private life, we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotion work," just as we manage our outer expressions of feeling through surface acting. In trying to ...bridge a gap between what we feel and what we "ought" to feel, we take guidance from "feeling rules" about what is owing to others in a given situation. Based on our private mutual understandings of feeling rules, we make a "gift exchange" of acts of emotion management. We bow to each other not simply from the waist, but from the heart. But what occurs when emotion work, feeling rules, and the gift of exchange are introduced into the public world of work? In search of the answer, Arlie Russell Hochschild closely examines two groups of public-contact workers: flight attendants and bill collectors. The flight attendant's job is to deliver a service and create further demand for it, to enhance the status of the customer and be "nicer than natural." The bill collector's job is to collect on the service, and if necessary, to deflate the status of the customer by being "nastier than natural." Between these extremes, roughly one-third of American men and one-half of American women hold jobs that call for substantial emotional labor. In many of these jobs, they are trained to accept feeling rules and techniques of emotion management that serve the company's commercial purpose. Just as we have seldom recognized or understood emotional labor, we have not appreciated its cost to those who do it for a living. Like a physical laborer who becomes estranged from what he or she makes, an emotional laborer, such as a flight attendant, can become estranged not only from her own expressions of feeling (her smile is not "her" smile), but also from what she actually feels (her managed friendliness). This estrangement, though a valuable defense against stress, is also an important occupational hazard, because it is through our feelings that we are connected with those around us. On the basis of this book, Hochschild was featured in Key Sociological Thinkers, edited by Rob Stones. This book was also the winner of the Charles Cooley Award in 1983, awarded by the American Sociological Association and received an honorable mention for the C. Wright Mills Award.
Recognizing Gigerenzer's (1991) dictum that scientists' tools are not neutral (tools-in-use influence theory formulation as well as data interpretation), this article reports theory and examines data ...in ways that transcend the dominant logics for variable-based and case-based analyses. The theory and data analysis tests key propositions in complexity theory: (1) no single antecedent condition is a sufficient or necessary indicator of a high score in an outcome condition; (2) a few of many available complex configurations of antecedent conditions are sufficient indicators of high scores in an outcome condition; (3) contrarian cases occur, that is, low scores in a single antecedent condition associates with both high and low scores for an outcome condition for different cases; (4) causal asymmetry occurs, that is, accurate causal models for high scores for an outcome condition are not the mirror opposites of causal models for low scores for the same outcome condition. The study tests and supports these propositions in the context of customer assessments (n=436) of service facets and service outcome evaluations for assisted temporary-transformations of self via beauty salon and spa treatments. The findings contribute to advancing a nuanced theory of how customers' service evaluations relate to their assessments of overall service quality and intentions to use the service. The findings support the need for service managers to be vigilant in fine-tuning service facets and service enactment to achieve the objective of high customer retention.
Abstract
American policymakers have long focused on work as a key means to improve economic wellbeing. Yet, work has become increasingly precarious and polarized. This precarity is manifest in low ...wages but also in unstable and unpredictable work schedules that often vary significantly week to week with little advance notice. We draw on new survey data from The Shift Project on 37,263 hourly retail and food service workers in the United States. We assess the association between routine unpredictability in work schedules and household material hardship. Using both cross-sectional models and panel models, we find that workers who receive shorter advanced notice, those who work on-call, those who experience last minute shift cancellation and timing changes, and those with more volatile work hours are more likely to experience hunger, residential, medical, and utility hardships as well as more overall hardship. Just-in-time work schedules afford employers a great deal of flexibility but at a heavy cost to workers’ economic security.
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