本書簡介

Fully revised and updated, this third edition is a valuable, wide-ranging reference tool that meets the ever-increasing demand for timely, accurate, and accessible information on the rapidly changing world of labor. Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM) provides the general reader, as well as the expert, with concise explanations and analysis of the data on the world’s labor markets.
Harvesting vast information from international data repositories, and regional and national statistical sources, this important reference work offers data for over 200 countries for the years 1980, 1990, 1995, and the latest available subsequent five years. KILM employs an expanded, up-to-date range of 20 key labor market indictors allowing researchers to compare and contrast between economies and within regions across time. Using statistical data on the labor force, employment, unemployment, underemployment, educational attainment of the workforce, wages and compensation, productivity and labor costs, labor market flows, and poverty and income distribution as market indicators, it enables users to access the most current information available. Maps and graphics are used throughout to highlight key points.

From: http://www.amazon.com/

本書置於總圖書館4F科技資料區，歡迎讀者來館借閱，請點選館藏目錄

本書簡介

Bringing together for the first time sexual and industrial labour as the means to understand gender, work and class in modern Japan and Korea, this book shows that a key feature of the industrialisation of these countries was the associated development of a modern sex labour industry. Tying industrial and sexual labour together, the book opens up a range of key questions: In what economy do we place the labour of the former comfort women? Why have sex workers not been part of the labour movements of Korea and Japan? Why is it difficult to be working-class and feminine? What sort of labour hierarchies operate in hostess clubs? How do financial crises translate into gender crises? This book explores how sexuality is inscribed in working-class identities and traces the ways in which sexual and labour relations have shaped the cultures of contemporary Japan and Korea. It addresses important historical episodes such as the Japanese colonial industrialisation of Korea, wartime labour mobilisation, women engaged in forced sex work for the Japanese army throughout the Asian continent, and issues of ethnicity and sex in the contemporary workplace. The case studies provide specific examples of the way gender and work have operated across a variety of contexts, including Korean shipyard unions, Japanese hostess clubs, and the autobiographical literature of Korean factory girls. Overall, this book provides a compelling account of the entanglement of sexual and industrial labour throughout the twentieth century, and shows clearly how ideas about gender have contributed in fundamental ways to conceptions of class and worker identities.

From: http://www.amazon.com/

本書置於總圖4F科技資料區，歡迎讀者來館借閱，請點選館藏目錄

本書簡介

This volume analyses poverty and welfare reform within a context of low-wage work and the contours of the labour market that welfare recipients are entering. It aims to bring labour into the discussion of welfare reform and creates a bridge between the domains of labour and welfare.

From: http://www.amazon.com/

本書置於總圖4F科技資料區，歡迎讀者來館借閱，請點選館藏目錄

本書簡介 by John C Burnham

So, what is a profession? The modern French word is general, referring to the civil status of having an occupation, such as being an artisan or even unemployed. The German Beruf carries the idea of the Latin “vocation”a calling to which one responds by professing. After finding no word in his language, a Japanese researcher declared that the term was parochial, only making sense in European history since late medieval times. Different then in time and place, the concept of the profession has evolved, and Burnham’s intriguing thesis is that it can be understood only through a historical, if not a historiographical, approach.

And fascinating it is, to study the writing of medical history with this question in mind. We can trace no less than the rise and fall of the medical profession.

From the 17th century onwards, medical historiography can be followed as it defines, redefines, and revises the idea of professionthe one influencing the other. Physicians have always had a habit of writing the history of medicine in an attempt to understand what medicine is. To begin with, “Great Doctors” dominated, as “Great Ideas” do so now. The first key concept of the profession is the idea of a body of knowledgespecial learning that represents the joint stock, the defining and proved possession of the professional. The discoveries of scientific medicine contributed to this, redefining the professional as one who had particular expertise as well as knowledge. Gradually, the sense of belonging to a group created a collective noun: the profession was a social entity. Group standards reinforced exclusivity, disqualifying outsidersthus institutions grew, and ethical and behavioural considerations developed.

In 1804 the professional was “distinguished for liberal knowledge, and honourable from the rank assigned in society.” By 1912, “professional” included an inquiring mind, hard work, tolerance of adversity, and not charging the poor. Learned, practical, disciplined, altruisticperhaps the Flexnerian definition of the professional holds good for many today.

But by the 1960s a wave of anti-establishment anger hit the professions, and expertise itselfthe original basis for professional authoritycame under attack from books such as The Tyranny of the Experts: How Professionals Are Closing the Open Society: “The failure of the professions has become increasingly apparent … the professions justify themselves as organised efforts to assure that society’s vital needs are met … [they] are unmet, and the organised professions seem perversely or arrogantly opposed to change.” Thus, Freidson asked the question Are Professions Necessary? (1984) and asserted that “societal trends, both technological and ideological, are rendering the concept of profession obsolete.”

Undoubtedly, professions evolve according to changing economic and social circumstances. Whether the professions have suffered (or should suffer) irretrievable decline is arguable, but definitely topical. What seems certain, however, is that the concept of professionalism continues to intrigue, remaining historical and local, ambiguous and even contradictorylike the writing of history itself.

From: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/319/7215/1011/a

本書置於總圖4F科技資料區，歡迎讀者來館借閱，請點選館藏目錄

本書簡介

The goal of the editors in this volume is to build on, and empirically flesh out, the feminist argument that law cannot be thought of as simply a determining force in the defining of ‘woman;’ it must be thought of as a site of struggle. The editors and contributors explore and analyze law as a ‘gendering practice,” assuming that law is a practice that interacts with other practices to produce meanings about gender.

From: http://www.amazon.com/

本書置於總圖2F人社資料區，歡迎讀者來館借閱，請點選館藏目錄

本書簡介

At the end of 1997, Korea was hit by a major financial and economic crisis, which resulted, among other things, in a huge rise in unemployment. The event caught the country’s labour and social institutions unprepared, so that many workers and their families were hit hard.

The economy has now turned the corner. This book shows that government labour and social policies, together with improved basic workers’ rights, have helped minimise the costs of the crisis while also contributing to overcome it. However, this book also highlights the need for further actions in these areas in order to pave the way for a healthy, socially-sustainable economic performance and argues the case that the momentum of reform should not be slowed.

From: http://www.oecdbookshop.org/

本書置於總圖書館4F科技資料區，歡迎讀者來館借閱，請點選館藏目錄

本書簡介

This study hypothesizes that the permanent employment system in Japan declined during the country’s economic downturn in the 1990’s. Contrary to expectation, the study finds that employment duration did not decrease, but increased especially for older workers in larger firms.

From: http://www.amazon.com/

本書置於總圖書館4F科技資料區，歡迎讀者來館借閱，請點選館藏目錄

本書簡介

This book critically examines the new issues and new politics regarding migration in the era of globalisation from a majority world perspective. It examines the current shifts in the global political economy and the effects it has, for example, in relation to rural displacement. When and how does this lead to national and/or transnational migration? We need to examine the ways in which migration is cut across and impacts on the generation of racism and xenophobia in the west. The issue of remittances by migrants to the ‘developing’ nations needs careful study as does the controversial issue of ‘brain drain’ versus ‘brain gain’ through migration. The growing importance of trafficking for forced labour has now been taken up by various international bodies but is it the new normality or simply an unfortunate side effect of globalisation to be overcome through legislation? Migration is becoming increasingly gendered in its composition and flows but also in the receiving countries where men and women do very different jobs. We can predict the increasing racialization and gendering of migration but how will the state and society respond to these shifts?

From: http://www.amazon.com/

本書置於總圖2F人社資料區，歡迎讀者來館借閱，請點選館藏目錄

內容簡介

《創造歷史》處理的是社會科學的核心問題：結構與行動之間的關係。

　　作者廣泛援引了古典馬克思主義、英美分析哲學與許多重要的史學著作，企圖論證：行動者從自身的社會結構之中獲得力量，並藉由這樣的力量來「創造歷史」。換言之，結構在為行動者設下限制的同時，也賦予行動者改變自身處境的能力。

　　本書處理的素材不僅廣泛而且深入，從分析哲學所發展出來的「正統的行動者」概念、柯恩（G. A. Cohen）的「正統歷史唯物論」，到以艾爾斯特（Jon Elster）、羅默（John Roemer）為代表的理性選擇馬克思主義，再到班雅明（Walter Benjamin）與沙特（Jean-Paul Sartre）的重要著作，作者皆有條不紊地整合入分析架構，並以大量的歷史素材，充實社會理論，避免一般社會理論著作過於抽象的毛病。

Library Journal

Kennedy (women’s studies, Univ. of Arizona) and Beins (M.A., women’s studies) have here collected 20 academic papers, most of which emerged from a conference in 2000 that grappled with the implications of the institutionalization of women’s studies within the academy despite the ambiguities surrounding the field. The pieces focus on five issues: the proper “subject” of women’s studies (e.g., women, gender, identity, or hierarchy?); politics of alliance and difference; interdisciplinary studies; activism; and feminist pedagogy. The writers, who represent programs across North America, draw upon decades of experience to consider actual practice; theoretical perspectives; globalization (both of scholarship and of feminist activism); intersectionality with respect to race, nation, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability; queer studies; Chicana studies; anti-Semitism and Jewish women’s studies; and the utility of existing paradigms in women’s studies for American Indian tribal women. Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Evelynn Hammond discuss “the only organized sites for black women’s studies in the United States”-programs located in historically black colleges. These thought-provoking but abstruse essays will have only an academic audience. Recommended for academic libraries.-Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
( June 01, 2005 ; 0-8135-3619-7 ; 978-0-8135-3618-7 )

Choice

Powell (Univ. of Liverpool) argues that aging is a social construct. It is true that the image of the elderly, ranging from wise leaders to decrepit burdens, varies from culture to culture. However, Powell may have overstated his case. It cannot be denied that the body goes through transitions as years pass. Whether or not this should be called degeneration is a matter of social values. Society affects those changes because they can be modified, but not as yet stopped or reversed, by technology and life-style. Values also dictate whether those transitions should be embraced or minimized. In modern times, retirement gives the elderly a mixed message. They can enjoy their leisure, but they are no longer socially useful. In societies where the elderly were revered, life was shorter and seniors were often middle-aged by contemporary standards. In recent times, people have lived longer and the rate of aging appears to have slowed. It is a social choice whether to encourage “aging gracefully” or try to extend youth. Not fostering automatic retirement may help in both prolonging life and building a sense of purpose. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. Y. R. Magrass University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
( September 01, 2006 ; 0-7425-1954-6 ; 978-0-7425-1953-4 )