Unequal Time

Unequal Time
Author: Dan Clawson
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2014-07-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 161044843X

Life is unpredictable. Control over one’s time is a crucial resource for managing that unpredictability, keeping a job, and raising a family. But the ability to control one’s time, much like one’s income, is determined to a significant degree by both gender and class. In Unequal Time, sociologists Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel explore the ways in which social inequalities permeate the workplace, shaping employees’ capacities to determine both their work schedules and home lives, and exacerbating differences between men and women, and the economically privileged and disadvantaged. Unequal Time investigates the interconnected schedules of four occupations in the health sector—professional-class doctors and nurses, and working-class EMTs and nursing assistants. While doctors and EMTs are predominantly men, nurses and nursing assistants are overwhelmingly women. In all four occupations, workers routinely confront schedule uncertainty, or unexpected events that interrupt, reduce, or extend work hours. Yet, Clawson and Gerstel show that members of these four occupations experience the effects of schedule uncertainty in very distinct ways, depending on both gender and class. But doctors, who are professional-class and largely male, have significant control over their schedules and tend to work long hours because they earn respect from their peers for doing so. By contrast, nursing assistants, who are primarily female and working-class, work demanding hours because they are most likely to be penalized for taking time off, no matter how valid the reasons. Unequal Time also shows that the degree of control that workers hold over their schedules can either reinforce or challenge conventional gender roles. Male doctors frequently work overtime and rely heavily on their wives and domestic workers to care for their families. Female nurses are more likely to handle the bulk of their family responsibilities, and use the control they have over their work schedules in order to dedicate more time to home life. Surprisingly, Clawson and Gerstel find that in the working class occupations, workers frequently undermine traditional gender roles, with male EMTs taking significant time from work for child care and women nursing assistants working extra hours to financially support their children and other relatives. Employers often underscore these disparities by allowing their upper-tier workers (doctors and nurses) the flexibility that enables their gender roles at home, including, for example, reshaping their workplaces in order to accommodate female nurses’ family obligations. Low-wage workers, on the other hand, are pressured to put their jobs before the unpredictable events they might face outside of work. Though we tend to consider personal and work scheduling an individual affair, Clawson and Gerstel present a provocative new case that time in the workplace also collective. A valuable resource for workers’ advocates and policymakers alike, Unequal Time exposes how social inequalities reverberate through a web of interconnected professional relationships and schedules, significantly shaping the lives of workers and their families.

The Unequal Hours

The Unequal Hours
Author: Linda Underhill
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1999-01-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780820320403

After spending most of her life in the city, Linda Underhill moved to rural Allegany County, New York, in 1989 and observed a successful citizens' protest against a low-level nuclear waste dump near her home. Having always thought the environmental movement applied mainly to the wilderness, Underhill began writing to voice the essence of what her neighbors were trying to preserve in their own backyards. Her essays describe elements of the natural world: wind, water, ice, fire, trees. The title essay concerns the "unequal hours" of the changing seasons, while other essays explore a nature preserve, a garden, backyard wildlife, and a hot air balloon ride. Deliberately choosing settings close to home, she shows that one does not have to go on a wilderness voyage to appreciate the natural world. The Unequal Hours brings to our attention the sudden, intense experiences of reality that Virginia Woolf called "moments of being" by using the events of everyday life as a way to explore what the natural world means to ordinary people. Like the sudden moments of illumination in haiku, the "moments of being" Underhill describes are rooted in the ordinary, but they reveal the extraordinary.

Unequal and Unrepresented

Unequal and Unrepresented
Author: Kay Lehman Schlozman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691203687

How American political participation is increasingly being shaped by citizens who wield more resources The Declaration of Independence proclaims equality as a foundational American value. However, Unequal and Unrepresented finds that political voice in America is not only unequal but also unrepresentative. Those who are well educated and affluent carry megaphones. The less privileged speak in a whisper. Relying on three decades of research and an enormous wealth of information about politically active individuals and organizations, Kay Schlozman, Henry Brady, and Sidney Verba offer a concise synthesis and update of their groundbreaking work on political participation. The authors consider the many ways that citizens in American democracy can influence public outcomes through political voice: by voting, getting involved in campaigns, communicating directly with public officials, participating online or offline, acting alone and in organizations, and investing their time and money. Socioeconomic imbalances characterize every form of political voice, but the advantage to the advantaged is especially pronounced when it comes to any form of political expression--for example, lobbying legislators or making campaign donations—that relies on money as an input. With those at the top of the ladder increasingly able to spend lavishly in politics, political action anchored in financial investment weighs ever more heavily in what public officials hear. Citing real-life examples and examining inequalities from multiple perspectives, Unequal and Unrepresented shows how disparities in political voice endanger American democracy today.

Unequal Childhoods

Unequal Childhoods
Author: Annette Lareau
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2011-08-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0520271424

This book is a powerful portrayal of class inequalities in the United States. It contains insightful analysis of the processes through which inequality is reproduced, and it frankly engages with methodological and analytic dilemmas usually glossed over in academic texts.

America Unequal

America Unequal
Author: Sheldon Danziger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1995
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780674018112

The authors challenge the view that restraining government social spending and cutting welfare should be our top domestic priorities. Instead, they propose policies that would reduce poverty by supplementing the earnings of low-wage workers and increasing the employment prospects of the jobless.

Unequal City

Unequal City
Author: Chris Hamnett
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2003
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780415317313

Examines some of the dramatic economic and social changes that have taken place in London over the last forty years, describing how this has had major consequences for both the social structure and the built environment of London.

The Unequal City

The Unequal City
Author: John Rennie Short
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2017-07-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351987267

In recent years there has been intense scholarly and public interest in the changing nature of cities. Cities around the world have seen an increase in population and capital investments in land and building, a shift in central city populations as the poor are forced out, and a radical restructuring of urban space. The Unequal City tells the story of urban change and acts as a comprehensive guide to the Urban Now. A number of trends are examined including: the role of liquid capital; the resurgence of population; the construction of megaprojects and hosting of global megaevents; the role of the new rich; and the emergence of a new middle class.

Unequal America

Unequal America
Author: Anthony DiMaggio
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2020-12-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000258378

This book examines Americans and their beliefs about the class divide in the United States. It argues that Americans’ beliefs about class and the economic divide develop through a multistep process. Economic affluence influences the development of worldview, measured in terms of ideology, partisanship, and self-identified class consciousness. Class consciousness in turn affects how people look at political and economic issues. This book is intended for scholars and students at every level who study inequality from a political, economic, or sociological position, along with general readers with a growing interest in and awareness of the effects of inequality on our democracy, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the resulting economic contraction, and the protests over racial injustice erupting throughout the world in 2020.

Created Unequal

Created Unequal
Author: James K. Galbraith
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 376
Release: 1998
Genre: Income distribution
ISBN: 0684849887

A much needed examination of the size of out paychecks, "Created Unequal", written by one of the nation's most respected economists, demonstrates why the government--not "technology"--is responsible for exploding wage inequality.

Unequal Pay for Women and Men

Unequal Pay for Women and Men
Author: Heather Joshi
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2001
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262600392

The book is the result of an extensive study of the relative wages of British men and women between 1978 and 1991. Using two large and extremely detailed longitudinal data sets, one of women and men born in 1946, and the other of women and men born in 1958, the authors examine the evolution of the pay gap over time and evaluate the success of policies designed to establish equal pay.