Download Free The Work Of A Century Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Work Of A Century and write the review.

Thomas J Watson Sr’s motto for IBM was THINK, and for more than a century, that one little word worked overtime. In Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company, journalists Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm, and Jeffrey M. O’Brien mark the Centennial of IBM’s founding by examining how IBM has distinctly contributed to the evolution of technology and the modern corporation over the past 100 years. The authors offer a fresh analysis through interviews of many key figures, chronicling the Nobel Prize-winning work of the company’s research laboratories and uncovering rich archival material, including hundreds of vintage photographs and drawings. The book recounts the company’s missteps, as well as its successes. It captures moments of high drama – from the bet-the-business gamble on the legendary System/360 in the 1960s to the turnaround from the company’s near-death experience in the early 1990s. The authors have shaped a narrative of discoveries, struggles, individual insights and lasting impact on technology, business and society. Taken together, their essays reveal a distinctive mindset and organizational culture, animated by a deeply held commitment to the hard work of progress. IBM engineers and scientists invented many of the building blocks of modern information technology, including the memory chip, the disk drive, the scanning tunneling microscope (essential to nanotechnology) and even new fields of mathematics. IBM brought the punch-card tabulator, the mainframe and the personal computer into the mainstream of business and modern life. IBM was the first large American company to pay all employees salaries rather than hourly wages, an early champion of hiring women and minorities and a pioneer of new approaches to doing business--with its model of the globally integrated enterprise. And it has had a lasting impact on the course of society from enabling the US Social Security System, to the space program, to airline reservations, modern banking and retail, to many of the ways our world today works. The lessons for all businesses – indeed, all institutions – are powerful: To survive and succeed over a long period, you have to anticipate change and to be willing and able to continually transform. But while change happens, progress is deliberate. IBM – deliberately led by a pioneering culture and grounded in a set of core ideas – came into being, grew, thrived, nearly died, transformed itself... and is now charting a new path forward for its second century toward a perhaps surprising future on a planetary scale.
From hairdressers and caregivers to reproductive workers and power-suited executives, images of women's labor have powered a fascinating new movement within twenty-first-century European cinema. Social realist dramas capture precarious working conditions. Comedies exaggerate the habits of the global managerial class. Stories from countries battered by the global financial crisis emphasize the patriarchal family, debt, and unemployment. Barbara Mennel delves into the ways these films about female labor capture the tension between feminist advances and their appropriation by capitalism in a time of ongoing transformation. Looking at independent and genre films from a cross-section of European nations, Mennel sees a focus on economics and work adapted to the continent's varied kinds of capitalism and influenced by concepts in second-wave feminism. More than ever, narratives of work put female characters front and center--and female directors behind the camera. Yet her analysis shows that each film remains a complex mix of progressive and retrogressive dynamics as it addresses the changing nature of work in Europe.
"Over the last ten years this book has become the definitive text in an emergent field: teachers, librarians, students, artists, and readers turn to the expertise contained on these pages every day."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This book offers a much-needed study of the Victorian novel's role in representing and shaping the service sector's emergence. Arguing that prior accounts of the novel's relation to the rise of finance have missed the emergence of a wider service sector, it traces the effects of service work's many forms and class positions in the Victorian novel.
Frost reclaims the forgotten history of a group of West Africans, the Kru, who as ship’s laborers and seafarers contributed greatly to British colonial trade with West Africa. "Ms. Frost provides us with an interesting account of this exceptionally mobile group of Africans... she is able to connect the past with the present not only by using archival material but also recently conducted interviews."—International Migration Review
Beginning in the 18th century, a turning point in labour history as work encountered an industrialising modernity, this book explores how different forms of work have been valued up to the present day. Focusing on the cultural, intellectual, social and political implications of wages, the chapters in this collection historicise the labour market, conceiving it as complex system of social relations which evolve through time and differ according to space. They show how the level of wages and other forms of remuneration reflect not only marginal productivity and scarcity but also the nature of work relations and wider political, social and economic circumstances. With examples ranging across several centuries and different parts of the globe, it shows how wages are influenced by the specific organization and processes of work, conflict and power, social status and hierarchies between workers, custom and identity, family structure and professional ethics, ideology, politics and policy. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches The Value of Work since the 18th Century also addresses two interlinked questions; how did theoretical interpretations and techniques of wage measurement emerge and evolve, and to what extent does this matter in understanding the social and political history of work?
In My Century the great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the terrible twentieth century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, My Century describes the artistic, sexual, and political experimentation—in which Wat was a major participant—that followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the world. But Wat’s book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his wife and young son, of his confinement in the Soviet prison system, of the night when the sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision of “the devil in history.” “It was then,” Wat writes, “that I began to be a believer.”
The West suffers from intense work pressure, longer and less well paid hours. This text is a sociological analysis of the relationship between overwork and unemployment. The only possible response, the author claims, is a renewal of the working class struggle.
By 2015, China may well have the world's largest economy. In The Chinese Century, Oded Shenkar shows how China is restoring its imperial glory by infusing modern technology and market economics into a non-democratic system controlled by the Communist party and bureaucracy. Shenkar shows why China's quest for global success differs radically from predecessors such as Japan, India, and Mexico... why it represents a fundamental restructuring of the global business system... and why it will transform the roles of participants in the global economy. He previews tomorrow's new competitive ground rules, terms of employment, and consumption patterns, and shows how Chinese ascendancy is redrawing political, economic, and social battle lines. Learn why the U.S. is most vulnerable to China's ascent... how China's disregard for intellectual property creates sustainable competitive advantage... how China's growth impacts global businesses and individual purchasing decisions. Above all, Shenkar shows what you must do to survive and prosper in "The Chinese Century."