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This chapter analyzes the mental health care needs and service use for caregivers involved with the child welfare system, who experience symptoms of depression warranting a psychiatric diagnosis. Noteworthy findings include the high rate of caregiver depression, a 40% rate that greatly exceeds both the rate of depression in the general population and the rate for female welfare recipients; and the large gap between need for mental health care and reported use of such care for serious depression. An unusual feature of the chapter is the highly innovative use of NSCAW longitudinal data to group depressed caregivers into the categories early recovery, recovered and relapsed, and delayed recovery, in order that these caregivers' use of mental health services may be compared. It also reports a number of sobering consequences of caregivers' depressive illnesses for children and the role that mental health services may play in affecting those consequences. The chapter provides a model discussion of clinical and practice implications emerging from these empirical findings.

This chapter addresses occupational health and safety issues frequently encountered among workers in common occupations: artists, performers, construction trades, public safety personnel (police, firefighters, emergency medical technicians), office workers, service workers, transport workers, waste handlers, welders.

This chapter examines the economy of familiarity that runs through constructions of customer service workers in India. Like the economy of difference, the economy of familiarity occurs when familiarity is put to work by “involving circuits of production, exchange and consumption.” In the case of the Indian customer service industry, familiarity works to create an “imagined kinhood” between workers in India and those in the West. Such a kinhood is enacted through the notion of professionalism, which is actualized in work processes in India through processes of control. This chapter explores the labor processes through which Western work norms are enacted in Indian call centers. It shows that becoming an ideal transnational customer service worker involves a constant process of enacting, revisioning, and resisting distinctions between the West and India, modern and backward, progressive and traditional. Finally, it argues that Indians are positioned as a model workforce for transnational service work through a well-orchestrated public relations machinery.

This chapter examines the ways in which national interests are defined and nationalisms exercised through calls between Indian customer service agents and Western customers. Through training and work process, the difference between India and the West is enacted to allow Indians to be “understood” by Westerners. Overall, this difference is constructed not only in terms of language and culture but also in terms of nationalist policies and histories. Before discussing how nationalist discourses are expressed in relation to Indian customer service work at call centers, this chapter considers how Indian customer service workers are distanced in terms of their physical location. It also looks at the dramatic shift from locational masking to the open acknowledgment of work in India in the context of Western debates on outsourcing occurring between 2003 and 2004.

This chapter examines the language training undertaken by prospective customer service agents in India before they are allowed to interact with Western customers. Language training is justified in terms of the need for Western clients to understand and be understood by workers, but it also serves to establish a starting point of difference, where all Indians, irrespective of their location, background, or education, are deemed deficient in their use of English. This chapter considers the processes through which India's customer service workers are constructed as “different” from Westerners. It explains how Indian call center agents are embodied through their voices, and are known as those who speak a strange and corrupted form of the English language. It argues that becoming a transnational customer service worker involves “sounding right”; this has been termed “aesthetic labor.”

This book has explored the authenticity work of customer service workers in India, revealing the proactive, conscious, and continual negotiation of sameness and difference that characterizes the transnational service economy. It has shown how authenticity work sheds light on the work of establishing legitimacy in the context of colonial histories and transnational economic relations. It has considered how authenticity work requires Indian customer service agents to be phone clones—simultaneously similar and different from their Western customers. The book concludes by discussing the notion of authenticity in relation to the microprocesses of economic globalization. It argues that call center agents suffer from a gaping hole in regulatory entitlements in the context of contemporary neoliberalism, such as employer violations of their terms of employment.

This chapter examines the paradoxical effects of transnational organic coffee certification processes on service workers in Oaxaca, Mexico. It focuses on the service workers’ role of accommodating their local “agri-cultural” practices according to the transnational certification standards. Aspects of certified agricultures monitoring, including audit chain practices and management technologies, are discussed, as are advantages of certified agricultural production, including better livelihoods for farmers and skill development for the workforce. A case study from the coffee producers’ confederation of Oaxaca, Mexico presents paradoxes of product certification, including structural contradictions in the certification procedures and the impact of the procedure on the performances of service workers.

This chapter charts the growth of the Vulcan Society in both numbers and stature during the postwar era. Led by Wesley Williams’ protégé, Robert Lowery, this second generation of Black firefighters rapidly expanded the organization’s size, civic engagement, public profile, and influence within the FDNY and Democratic politics by the early 1960s.

Chapter 3 explores the organizational structures and practices that govern Indian IT workspaces and the mechanisms through which value is extracted from software labour. Drawing on interviews and workplace observations, it describes the panoptical and ‘process-driven’ management systems that are employed in these ‘software factories’ to exert control over the labour process as well as the time and knowledge of IT workers, practices that reflect the re-Taylorization of work in the ‘new economy’ as well as the flexibilization and individualization of labour. The chapter highlights the routinization and rationalization of IT work, the fashioning of software engineers into customer-oriented and self-governing service workers, and the responses of IT professionals to these modes of control and subjectification.

This chapter demonstrates how motivation and strategy may have more to do with failure and success across all sectors of workers than previously thought. Most academics have long assumed that organizing the unorganized might be possible only among low-wage service workers. The case study of Smithfield Foods returns the focus to the private sector, to the organization of the world’s largest pork production facility, in rural North Carolina—the state with the lowest rate of unionization in the United States. The workers there are mostly men, and the employer had encouraged and exploited racial and ethnic tensions among them so profoundly as to turn the plant into a de facto Jim Crow enclave. It was in this unpromising context that the workers in a traditional private-sector factory were organized into a strong union that achieved a stunning win.

This book explores the lived space of Silicon Valley by focusing on the experiences and aspirations of local youth as well as the educational, social, cultural, and political contexts that shape their daily lives and strategies of aspiration management. It considers how experiences of social contradiction shape patterns of subjectification and agency involved in processes of social reproduction within Silicon Valley's social landscape. It examines the process of aspiration formation among youth from divergent class, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, with particular emphasis on the children of the region's low-wage service workers and those of its highly skilled tech and service professional classes. This chapter discusses how Silicon Valley's polarization of wealth and local increased cost of living during the 1990s sharpened social, economic, and cultural divides along lines of race, ethnicity, and class. It also analyzes the rise of a techno-civilizing process in Silicon Valley and concludes with an overview of the book's scope.

This conclusion discusses the transformatory potential of public participation, and its capacity to contribute to a process of political renewal. It argues that the aspirations highlighted may need to be tempered by an awareness of the institutional practices that constrain agency or produce a loss of trust. It emphasises the power of official discourses to define and delimit notions of ‘the public’ and of ‘legitimate participants’, and suggest ways in which such meanings are contested and negotiated. It examines how relationships and identities are shaped in the context of power inequalities, as well as the tensions present when those engaged in autonomous collective action are engaged in dialogue with public bodies. It also shows new insights into the dilemmas experienced by public service workers exposed to new encounters with the public. The case studies in this book highlight a set of issues and raises a series of questions that might productively be addressed in future policy and practice. It argues that public participation can help to equip people to become better at dialogue with others, enabling a greater understanding of different perspectives and a respect for others' positions.