All firms wrestle with restructuring, involving consolidation of mergers and acquisitions on the one hand, and fragmentation through outsourcing and spin-offs on the other. Through an in-depth investigation into the organizational strategies of Japanese corporate management and union leaders in Japan, Mari Sako explores the issue of 'organizational boundaries' that arises from such restructuring. Examining the strategy and structure of both businesses and trade unions, the book draws upon empirical evidence drawn from interviews conducted at Toyota and Matsushita and their respective unions. It examines their respective strategies in coping with organizational boundaries against the backdrop of changing labour markets, and, in the process, challenges widely held notions about Japanese corporate and union structures. Mari Sako goes on to explore the implications of these relationships in other advanced industrial countries for corporate restructuring, jobs, and labour market flexibility.

This book offers a distinctive analysis of the relations and interplay between the internal activities of firms, their changing boundaries, and increasing reliance on networks and alliances with other firms. The contributors offer a blend of theoretical and empirical studies; they are based on a set of related perspectives in modern economics, including transaction cost economics, competence and resource-based theories of the firm, evolutionary economics and the theories of foreign direct investments and the multinational enterprise. The unifying concern shared by the different studies is the need to model firm behaviour and inter firm cooperative activities in terms of knowledge growth and competence building rather than merely in terms of cost-reduction; they emphasize learning processes and dynamic efficiency rather than efficient allocation of given resources.

Though there are still just twenty-four hours in a day, society's idea of who should be doing what and when has shifted. Time, the ultimate scarce resource, has become an increasingly contested battle zone in American life, with work, family, and personal obligations pulling individuals in conflicting directions. In Fighting for Time, editors Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and Arne Kalleberg bring together a team of distinguished sociologists and management analysts to examine the social construction of time and its importance in American culture. Fighting for Time opens with an exploration of changes in time spent at work—both when people are on the job and the number of hours they spend there—and the consequences of those changes for individuals and families. Contributors Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson find that the relative constancy of the average workweek in America over the last thirty years hides the fact that blue-collar workers are putting in fewer hours while more educated white-collar workers are putting in more. Rudy Fenwick and Mark Tausig look at the effect of nonstandard schedules on workers' health and family life. They find that working unconventional hours can increase family stress, but that control over one's work schedule improves family, social, and health outcomes for workers. The book then turns to an examination of how time influences the organization and control of work. The British insurance company studied by David Collinson and Margaret Collinson is an example of a culture where employees are judged on the number of hours they work rather than on their productivity. There, managers are under intense pressure not to take legally guaranteed parental leave, and clocks are banned from the office walls so that employees will work without regard to the time. In the book's final section, the contributors examine how time can have different meanings for men and women. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein points out that professional women and stay-at-home fathers face social disapproval for spending too much time on activities that do not conform to socially prescribed gender roles—men are mocked by coworkers for taking paternity leave, while working mothers are chastised for leaving their children to the care of others. Fighting for Time challenges assumptions about the relationship between time and work, revealing that time is a fluid concept that derives its importance from cultural attitudes, social psychological processes, and the exercise of power. Its insight will be of interest to sociologists, economists, social psychologists, business leaders, and anyone interested in the work-life balance.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book draws on legal, HRM, occupational psychology and economic perspectives to innovatively explore the conflicts and blurring boundaries affecting the Gig Economy in terms of the worker, employee identity, status and relationships, and team and career management.

As politicians debate how to address the estimated eleven million unauthorized immigrants residing in the United States, undocumented youth anxiously await the next policy shift that will determine their futures. From one day to the next, their dreams are as likely to crumble around them as to come within reach. In Shifting Boundaries, Alexis M. Silver sheds light on the currents of exclusion and incorporation that characterize their lives. Silver examines the experiences of immigrant youth growing up in a small town in North Carolina—a state that experienced unprecedented growth in its Latino population in the 1990s and 2000s, and where aggressive anti-immigration policies have been enforced. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interview data, she finds that contradictory policies at the national, state, and local levels interact to create a complex environment through which the youth must navigate. From heritage-based school programs to state-wide bans on attending community college; from the failure of the DREAM Act to the rescinding of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA); each layer represents profound implications for undocumented Latino youth. Silver exposes the constantly changing pathways that shape their journeys into early adulthood—and the profound resilience that they develop along the way.

This in-depth exploration of the organizational strategies of Japanese corporate management and union leaders considers the issue of the 'organizational boundaries' which arise from the restructuring following mergers, acquisitions, outsourcing and spin-offs.