Soc. Chapter 11

contingent and altervative workforce

those who work in positions that are temporary or freelance or who work as independent contractors (page 334)

resistence strategies

ways that workers express discontent with their working conditions and try to reclaim control of the conditions of their labor (page 339)

service work

work that involves providing a service to businesses or individual clients, customers, or consumers rather than manufacturing goods (page 315)

knowledge work

work that primarily deals with information; producing value in the economy through ideas, judgments, analyses, designs, or innovations (page 317)

telecommuting

working from home while staying connected to the office through communications technology (page 337)

communism

a system of government that eliminates private property; it is the most extreme form of socialism, because all citizens work for the government and there are no class distinctions (page 310)

sweatshop

a workplace where workers are subject to extreme exploitation, including below-standard wages, long hours, and poor working conditions that may pose health or safety hazards (page 348)

union

an association of workers who bargain collectively for increased wages and benefits and better working conditions (page 341)

socialism

an economic system based on the collective ownership of the means of production, collective distribution of goods and services, and government regulation (page 310)

capitalism

an economic system based on the laws of free market competition, privatization of the means of production, and production for profit (page 309)

outsourcing

"contracting out" or transferring to another country the labor that a company might otherwise have employed its own staff to perform; typically done for financial reasons (page 351)

globalization

the cultural and economic changes resulting from dramatically increased international trade and exchange in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (page 345)

independent (or third) sector

the part of the economy composed of nonprofit organizations; their workers are mission driven, rather than profit driven, and such organizations direct surplus funds to the causes they support (page 355)

industrial revolution

the rapid transformation of social life resulting from the technological and economic developments that began with the assembly line, steam power, and urbanization (page 313)

information revolution

the recent social revolution made possible by the development of the microchip in the 1970s, which brought about vast improvements in the ability to manage information (page 315)

alienation

the sense of dissatisfaction the modern worker feels as a result of producing goods that are owned and controlled by someone else (page 315)

agricultural revolution

the social and economic changes, including population increases, that followed from the domestication of plants and animals and the gradually increasing efficiency of food production (page 313)