This chapter investigates tax payments and self-making amongst Romanian migrants in London. Vicol demonstrates how taxation is a mode of anchoring oneself in a moral order premised on self-sufficiency. Although the UK’s mainstream media cast Romanian migrants through tropes of welfare dependency, Romanian self-narrations as hard working, taxpaying subjects enabled interlocutors to constitute themselves as good migrants. However, becoming a taxpayer in practice was also an exercise in a particular type of bureaucratic literacy. A host of digital barriers, language deficiencies, and unhelpful bureaucrats drove many to seek out private consultants who made a business of helping their co-nationals decode their obligations to HM Revenue and Customs. Thus, this chapter also explores taxpaying as a technical exercise of making oneself legible through the language of the fiscal authority. Taxation becomes part of the making of the migrant subject. It is about the paradoxical ways in which a digitising state premised on self-reliance prompts affirmations of independence at the level of discourse, while simultaneously generating new networks of dependency in practice.

This chapter explores the reasons why workers would stay in or run from a factory, as well as the traps and perceived appeal of temporary employment and day labor jobs. It discusses the role of employment service agencies and their networks of job intermediaries in sustaining factories’ power and control over workers and in making workers more vulnerable and more susceptible to informal and temporary employment.

Existing conceptualizations of thriving at work are dominated by White Eurocentric hegemonic beliefs. This is done by focusing on individual experiences and workplace resources and privileging universalisms over pluralistic, local, and regional understandings. Many individuals and communities across the globe are engaged in precarious work, operate in informal economies, and lack the opportunity to gain equal access to resources. With fairness as the foundation to thriving, I have expanded on existing conceptualizations on thriving at work by restoring multiple perspectives, centering decent work as a basic goal, and by including an ecological systems perspective. Thriving workplaces require equitable opportunities for self-determination available for all.

The concluding chapter wraps up the various arguments and pieces of evidence presented in this book in favor of our peace formula. Overall, the first take-home message to be highlighted is the need for smart idealism – as neither the cold-hearted egotist nor the naïve idealist will be able to curb conflict. Secondly, it is again stressed which concrete policies are key to making a difference, creating a synthesis of the various points of the previous chapters. In particular, we emphasize the key role of a democratic voice, security warranties, promoting productive work, fostering trust and reconciliation, accelerating a well-managed green energy transition and stepping up international coordination across a variety of issues. The final point is that since we are all affected by conflict, we should all be part of the solution. It turns out that several studies have found that pressure from the public opinion matters, both in the implementation of policies and in preventing atrocities. There is a job to be done, so let us work together to make a change.

This chapter starts off by explaining that we are in the midst of a critical historical juncture with a record number of wars and conflicts around the world, calling for urgent action. Next, we discuss in depth three common but disastrous misconceptions, namely that shady deals leaving autocrats in power can bring peace, that “buying” peace through simple cash transfers works, and that charm offensives and communication efforts suffice to do the job. Drawing on a number of examples, the book highlights the pitfalls of these common misconceptions before turning to success stories. Illustrated by examples of the successful postwar reconstruction of Germany and Japan, the fall of apartheid in South Africa and democratization of Uruguay, Chile and Peru, the chapter then formulates the key components of what is called the peace formula – a set of key policies that constitute crucial ingredients for a successful and lasting pacification process. Finally, it is stressed that to counter distorted incentives for peace we need smart idealism – pairing good intentions with evidence-based policy knowledge.

This chapter shows that a series of public policies have the potential to boost citizens’ perspectives for finding work and thereby foster incentives for peace. The first prominent policy is to invest in education. A more educated population generates countless benefits, one of which is the prospect of obtaining better jobs. Fundamentally, more meaningful employment raises the opportunity cost of giving up paid work to join an armed rebellion. Furthermore, physical capital (money) can more easily be stolen than human capital (knowledge). Hence, investing cash in building classrooms means that trying to topple the state will become less lucrative. Next, it is spelled out how better health leads to both a longer time horizon and a higher opportunity cost of conflict. This, in turn, makes long-run (peaceful) investments more appealing and reduces the scope for short-term appropriation and looting. Finally, a series of labor market policies are assessed, stressing the role of good jobs in making it less attractive to leave work and go to war. Empirical evidence from a variety of contexts is presented.

This chapter describes how copyright evolved from a right in books, to a right in ’original works’. The chapter considers whether ’works’ are things (the ’metaphysical question’).

“’Flung out of Space’: Class and Sexuality in American Literary History" explores the relationship between class and queer sexuality in American literary history, suggesting how neither of these histories can be understood without accounting for the other. Reading literary texts such as Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” alongside queer theory and LGBTQ history, Lecklider suggests how class structures queer literature throughout American history, particularly since the 19th century. Particularly emphasizing how labor structures desire, this chapter argues that working-class sexualities – and their intersections with race and gender – must be taken seriously in order to fully appreciate both the contributions of queer literature and the legibility of labor in American history.

This chapter offers a succinct introduction to Goethe and his work and gives an overview of the essays which make up the collection.

As an undergraduate Morris was enthralled to read the work of John Ruskin, especially The Stones of Venice (1851–53). This book would profoundly influence Morris’s thinking for the rest of his life. The Kelmscott Press would publish a chapter from it – ‘The Nature of Gothic’ – in 1892. Morris developed Ruskin’s argument that the Gothic craftsman of the Middle Ages achieved pleasure in his work as a result of creative freedom and collaborative effort denied him by the factory system of industrial capitalism. Although Ruskin’s values were deeply rooted in Toryism and Christian morality, Morris accommodated Ruskin’s ideas and simultaneously embraced socialism. In 1883, Morris told an audience in the hall of University College, Oxford that he was ‘a member of a socialist propaganda’. Ruskin, seated on the platform throughout the lecture, reportedly rose at the end to praise Morris as ‘the great conceiver and doer, the man at once a poet, an artist, and a workman, and his old and dear friend’. This chapter describes the nature of the relationship between Morris and Ruskin and considers the significance, extent and limitations of his influence.

This chapter investigates how the idea of ‘service’ narrates the shifting (and sometimes consistent) ways in which actors have been understood on and off the British stage since the Second World War. ‘Service’ is a word often used casually by critics and theatre workers alike, but it contains a multitude of sometimes contradictory meanings, revealing of the peculiar social status of actors in Britain. The chapter argues that the combination of an idealist sense of service, inherited from the nineteenth century stage with the rhetoric of national duty during the war, promoted the increasing professionalisation among actors in Britain since 1945. The idea of the actor as public servant or member of the professional classes was complicated, however, by the longstanding association of actors with bohemianism, producing an ambiguous class identity for the acting profession. It is this class anxiety and ambivalence, complicated by post-war ideas of national service, that is the concern of this chapter. Finally, the chapter proposes that the rhetoric of service and the cultures of bohemianism have functioned as forms of mystification that disavow the actor’s status as a waged worker.

Many people can continue to work with mild cognitive impairment and sometimes even with dementia. This will depend on the requirements of the job, and the worker with cognitive impairment may need accommodation to succeed. Remarkably, there has been relatively little research on this topic.

How much exercise does it take to walk off an average single-person-sized chocolate bar? More than you might want to acknowledge, even though you probably already know that. No chocolate bar is calorie-free, and if you are an average-sized woman in the UK, eating a 100-gram chocolate bar will take around two hours of walking to burn off. In this chapter, I examine the idea that people put on excess weight because they don’t get enough physical activity. Most people in Western societies don’t get out enough, so why stigmatize a person with obesity for not being physically active? Sure, physical activity is great, especially for reducing stress, staying happy, and lowering blood pressure and other risk markers of chronic disease, but not especially so for burning calories and keeping body weight down. The best thing about regular exercise is that it helps you burn off and keep off the wrong kind of fat, the kind that can make you long-term ill. It also helps you eat to your energy requirement more closely than if you don’t exercise.

Chapter 5 considers the ways in which Piers Plowman attempts to translate a Franciscan form-of-life into vernacular, worldly terms. While the Franciscan forma vitae details the way of living for each brother, from his clothing to his daily activities to the correction of his faults, Piers Plowman details the means of making a living in an inappropriable world. I argue that the poem asks these questions by way of its sustained meditation on the meaning and nature of labour as the continual payment of an unpayable debt. Langland explores the value and meaning of labour most explicitly in and through the three figures in the poem who are most closely linked with Franciscanism, and who court most dangerously the charges of idleness and default: Rechelesnesse, Nede, and the Dreamer himself. As this chapter shows, the irreducibly ambiguous nature of these three figures, who mix truth with half-truth and misunderstanding, who aspire to the ideals taught by Holy Church, Patience, Kynde, and Conscience, but who embody an all-too-human failure to attain them, encapsulates the poem’s interpretive inappropriability.

This chapter considers the major causes of mortality and morbidity for adults and describes the significant burden of these non-communicable diseases, their risk factors and potential public health action. While the conditions discussed are relevant to other age groups, those included – cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, mental health problems and long COVID – have particular relevance for the large proportion of the population of working age. This chapter also focuses on specific actions or policies which can be employed to address each of these non-communicable diseases.

This brief chapter examines how narratives are useful in work psychology. Narratives can be used for everything from career planning to worker relations and ideas around job identity. People often want to identify with the organisation they work for, and successful identification can be positive in terms of satisfaction and productivity. If there is a shared narrative between workers and managers, then the organisation is likely to be more successful. Narrative is a useful device for examining the nature and progress of careers, and activities such as appraisal can enhance these narratives.