The Importance of Work in an Age of Uncertainty

Reviews / Votes

This is an excellent book, and I am not aware of anything similar. Blustein's emphasis is on the eroding experience of work. He manages to do this while maintaining the dignity of his participants and argues for individual, community, national and global actions that can improve work. * Fiona Christie, Fellow of NICEC and researcher at the Decent Work and Productivity Research Centre, Manchester Metropolitan University * "Advances the field with rich qualitative experiences that reflect well-researched psychological phenomenon regarding employment and workplace dynamics. This book is highly accessible and will interest academics and the general public alike." * Choice * In keeping with the effort to mourn and revive the American Dream, the book unfolds as a narrative of promise, fall, and redemption. The book is part qualitative study, part literature review, part memoir, and part manifesto. Blustein does well in attempting to weave the personal, the professional, and the political in the ''psychological view'' that he repeatedly claims to take. * Administrative Science Quarterly * "Builds on [Blustein's] impressive scholarship, but admirably manages to wear its erudition lightly: it is a book from the heart, a labour of love, constituting nothing less than a manifesto in favour of decent work - a goal that is as important as it is increasingly out of the grasp of many in America, and elsewhere." * British Journal of Guidance and Counseling * David Blustein's book on working combines the life stories of people with the centrality of work and its psychological underpinnings in a way that will move the field of vocational psychology forward. This book puts everyday working people and those who need to work front and center in the psychological study of working and in public policy. This book challenged my mind and touched my heart. * Rosie Phillips Davis, Professor, Counseling and Educational Psychology and Research, The University of Memphis * A masterful book that gives compelling human voice and scientific clarity to the powers of work in contemporary human life. * Ruth Kanfer, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Work Science Center, Georgia Institute of Technology * So much of the discussion of the future of work is about machines; David Blustein prefers to focus on humans. This book is the valuable and essential missing piece in a critically important contemporary debate, focusing not on what we do for work, but on what work does for us. * Anne-Marie Slaughter, Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University and CEO, New America *