Everything harder than everyone else

This book presents new theories and international empirical evidence on the state of work and employment around the world. Changes in production systems, economic conditions and regulatory conditions are posing new questions about the growing use by employers of precarious forms of work, the contradictory approaches of governments towards employment and social policy, and the ability of trade unions to improve the distribution of decent employment conditions. Designed as a tribute to the highly influential contributions of Jill Rubery, the book proposes a ‘new labour market segmentation approach’ for the investigation of issues of job quality, employment inequalities, and precarious work. This approach is distinctive in seeking to place the changing international patterns and experiences of labour market inequalities in the wider context of shifting gender relations, regulatory regimes and production structures.

Building on earlier work, this text combines theoretical perspectives with empirical work, to provide a comparative analysis of the electoral systems, party systems and governmental systems in the ethnic republics and regions of Russia. It also assesses the impact of these different institutional arrangements on democratization and federalism, moving the focus of research from the national level to the vitally important processes of institution building and democratization at the local level and to the study of federalism in Russia.

“What are you waiting for?” Stop wasting your time” “You will die alone,” “You will miss the train and stay on your own! “. These are just some of the questions and warnings that single women hear on an everyday basis. In a similar vein, single women are constantly being asked whether they are ‘‘still single,’’ or being bid to get married next or soon. Still, soon, ever-after, waste of time, waiting, how long, when, all these form part of the rich language of time.

Table for one is the first book to consider the profound relationship between singlehood and social time. Drawing on a wide range of cultural resources – including web columns, blogs, advice columns, popular clichés, advertisements and references from television and cinema, Kinneret Lahad challenges the conventional meaning-making processes of singlehood and Time and raises pertinent questions about how people conceptualize their lives alone and with others.

Lahad’s unique approach gives us the opportunity to explore singlehood through temporal concepts such as waiting, wasting time, timeout or age and accelerated aging. Other temporal categories which are examined throughout this book as the life course, linearity and commodification of time enable a new consideration of dominant perceptions about collective clocks, schedules, and the temporal organization of social life in general. By proposing this new analytical direction, this book seeks to rework some of our common conceptions of singlehood, and presents a new theoretical arsenal with which the temporal paradigms which devalue and marginalize single women and women’s subjectivies in general are reassessed and subverted.