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Ireland is a turbulent place. This book engages readers with the contours of transformation of Irish society through a series of distinct episodes and sites where change can be confronted. The content of the book intersects with the boom and bust themes to explore the economic and social implications of the recession. The processes are as diverse as cross-border development, farming knowledges, food movements, and the evolution of traditional Irish music. The modernisation of Irish society during the Celtic Tiger and its subsequent demise was a 'spatial drama' involving transformation in the material landscape and the imaginative representation of the island. The first part of the book explores the revolving intersections of identity politics with place. It tracks the discovery of the ghost estate and the ways in which it has been implicated in debates about the Irish economic crash, complicating ideas of home and community. After a discussion on immigration, the book discusses the role of migrants in filling labour and skill shortages. The second part pays attention to questions of mobility and consumption in urban and rural contexts. The new Irish motorway network, free time, leisure and holidaying in the lives of lone parents during the Celtic Tiger, and the role of National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) are discussed. The third part explores diverse cultural practices and some longstanding representations of Ireland. An autobiographical tour of the pub session, National Geographic's representations of Irish landscape and the current Irish imagination are the key concepts of this part.
With race as a central theme, this book presents racial stratification as the underlying system which accounts for the difference in outcomes of Whites and Blacks in the labour market. Critical race theory (CRT) is employed to discuss the operation, research, maintenance and impact of racial stratification. The power of this book is the innovative use of a stratification framework to expose the pervasiveness of racial inequality in the labour market. It teaches readers how to use CRT to investigate the racial hierarchy and it provides a replicable framework to identify the racial order based on insight from the Irish case. There is a four-stage framework in the book which helps readers understand how migrants navigate the labour market from the point of migration to labour participation. The book also highlights minority agency and how migrants respond to their marginality. The examples of how social acceptance can be applied in managing difference in the workplace are an added bonus for those interested in diversity and inclusion. This book is the first of its kind in Ireland and across Europe to present inequality, racism and discrimination in the labour market from a racial stratification perspective. While this book is based on Irish data, the CRT theoretical approach, as well as its insight into migrant perspectives, poses a strong appeal to scholars of sociology, social justice, politics, intercultural communication and economics with interest in race and ethnicity, critical whiteness and migration. It is a timely contribution to CRT which offers scholars a method to conduct empirical study of racial stratification across different countries bypassing the over-reliance on secondary data. It will also appeal to countries and scholars examining causal racism and how it shapes racial inequality.
increasingly difficult to identify and categorise conclusively different types of policy actor. In particular, the evidence from the UK case was of significant leakage of individuals between these different roles, making the identification of an epistemic community as distinct from policy activists quite difficult. However, there was evidence in both cases of a tendency towards technocratic management of labour migration, reflected in the construction of new, more independent institutional arrangements for the identification and measurement of skills shortages and migration
QPS found employment relatively quickly. On the employer side, we examine how Ireland’s open labour market policy transformed the recruitment strategies of Irish firms: EU enlargement provided management with a readily accessible pool of qualified labour at their own doorstep at a time when labour and skill shortages were particularly acute. As the final section shows, recruitment focused above all on migrants’ presumed good attitude and positive work ethic. Since these were attributes which migrants themselves believed they possessed, Ireland’s goldrush labour
is] reasonably low at the moment although quite a lot of people have part-time jobs or have gone self-employed. (Gareth) Stephanie worries that people work long hours and cannot pay bills. Those in the private sector are concerned about skills shortages. Fawad is deeply concerned about the electrical engineering skills shortage, on a voluntary board to try to attract more graduates, upset that his own children have gone into finance rather than manufacturing, concerned at ‘the more global competitive space’, including China’s huge numbers of graduates. He
pathology in five to ten years’ time, given that ‘new departmental appointments and RAE/REF assessments are driven in part by the Impact Factor (IF) of scientific publications. The highly specialised nature of much plant pathology research means that many publications are of low IF’ (British Society for Plant Pathology, 2012: 2). A key recommendation of the Tree Health and Plant Biosecurity Expert Taskforce (THPBET) set up in November 2012 following the ash dieback outbreak was that ‘key skills shortages’ in this field needed to be urgently addressed. To combat Chalara
other diseases, skills shortages, job shortages, the education system and a host of other concerns, most of which have been dramatically exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Suffused with all of these intense and often collective emotions, twenty-first-century South Africa seems like a particularly fearful place to be. Nonetheless, as I write this preface some years after my return to South Africa, it is clear that life continues amongst these powerful emotional currents. The insecurity of township existence is interspersed
2019 general election. On the contrary, ‘austerity’ and widescale cuts to public spending meant that local authorities and other public-sector bodies had limited resources to ease the pain for these areas, further exacerbating the stark divide between the relatively affluent South East of England and the hard-hit North. In addition to regional tensions, the UK is also beset by a skills shortage in fast
to provide skilled workers is further exacerbated by the growth in the use of temporary labour and the adoption of ‘hire and fire’ practices. The editorial of an engineering management magazine illustrates the problem to good effect: ‘Some of industry has taken a careless approach to its skills base, seeming to believe it can discard and rehire people at whim, as if skills can be switched on and off like a light bulb. They can’t, and the corollary is that skill shortages don’t just occur at times when companies are recruiting: they are long-term too’ (Professional
Olympics in 2012, and its growth strategy is focused on investment in infrastructure, housing and retail developments. There are twelve further and higher education institutes in the area and, given the skills shortages, there has also been some emphasis on an ‘education-led regeneration’. The twelve institutions differed widely, yet each was expected to play a role and be visible in the regeneration process. Various initiatives around skills development were a key action, with impressive work to develop guaranteed progression pathways from further into higher education