The Harms of Work: An Ultra-Realist Account of the Service Economy

Description

Using data from a long-term ethnographic study of the service economy, it investigates the reorganisation of labour markets and the shift from security to flexibility, a central function of consumer capitalism. It highlights working conditions and organisational practices which employees experience as normal and routine but within which multiple harms occur. Challenging current thinking within sociology and policy analysis, it reconnects ideology and political economy with workplace studies and uses examples of legal and illegal activity to demonstrate the multiple harms within the service economy.

Dr Anthony Lloyd is Co-Director at the Teesside Centre for Realist Criminology and Senior Lecturer in Criminology & Sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Humanities & Law, Teesside University. His research interests include work and employment, labour markets and the leisure and service economy, consumer culture, social harm, critical criminology, youth identity and transitions, political economy, debt, social theory, class cultures, and social change. He researches broadly on the topics of work and leisure, most recently investigating the lives of young men and women engaged in low-paid service sector jobs in the North East. He has published work in this area, including his first book, Labour Markets and Identity on the Post-Industrial Assembly Line (Ashgate, 2013).

"Drawing on original and insightful ethnographic research, this book is indispensable for academics, practicioners and policy makers interested in the harms associated with contemporary service work. A compelling and thought-provoking read." Sam Scott, University of Gloucestershire