MACMILLAN The New Normal of Working Lives: Critical Studies in Contemporary Work and Employment (Dynamics of Virtual Work)

This critical, international and interdisciplinary edited collection investigates the new normal of work and employment, presenting research on the experience of the workers themselves. The collection explores the formation of contemporary worker subjects, and the privilege or disadvantage in play around gender, class, age and national location within the global workforce. Organised around the three areas of: creative working, digital working lives, and transitions and transformations, its fifteen chapters examine in detail the emerging norms of work and work activities in a range of occupations and locations. It also investigates the coping strategies adopted by workers to manage novel difficulties and life circumstances, and their understandings of the possibilities, trajectories, mobilities, identities and potential rewards of their work situations. This book will appeal to a wide range of audiences, including students and academics of the sociology of work and labor history, and those interested in understanding the implications of the ‘new normal’ of work and employment. Review “A super collection of essays offering a vivid account of the politics of labour and life amidst the rapidly changing tempos and terrains of contemporary work. Exploring the ‘new normal’ of the rise of more creative, knowledge-led and digitized workplaces - yet ones more coupled to work individualization, precariousness and discontinuity – the contributors to this volume tease out the tensions between the promise of work both today and tomorrow, and the persistence of those exclusions and inequalities and that have long pervaded labour organisations and processes.” (Prof. Mark Banks, CAMEo Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies, University of Leicester, UK) From the Back Cover This critical, international and interdisciplinary edited collection investigates the new normal of work and employment, presenting research on the experience of the workers themselves. The collection explores the formation of contemporary worker subjects, and the privilege or disadvantage in play around gender, class, age and national location within the global workforce. Organised around the three areas of: creative working, digital working lives, and transitions and transformations, its fifteen chapters examine in detail the emerging norms of work and work activities in a range of occupations and locations. It also investigates the coping strategies adopted by workers to manage novel difficulties and life circumstances, and their understandings of the possibilities, trajectories, mobilities, identities and potential rewards of their work situations. This book will appeal to a wide range of audiences, including students and academics of the sociology of work and labor history, and those interested in understanding the implications of the ‘new normal’ of work and employment. About the Author Stephanie Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at the Open University, UK. Her interdisciplinary research on identification and a complex gendered subject is internationally recognised. She has also authored and edited popular textbooks on discourse analysis and qualitative research. Susan Luckman is Professor of Cultural Studies and Associate Director of Research and Programs of the Hawke EU Centre for Mobilities, Migrations and Cultural Transformations at the University of South Australia.