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The seventh edition of Sociology, Work and Organisation is outstandingly effective in explaining how we can use the sociological imagination to understand the nature of institutions of work, organisations, occupations, management and employment and how they are changing in the twenty-first century. Intellectual and accessible, it is unrivalled in the breadth of its coverage and its authoritative overview of both traditional and emergent themes in the sociological study of work and organisation. The direction and implications of trends in technological change are fully considered and the book recognises the extent to which these trends are intimately related to changing patterns of inequality in modern societies and to the changing experiences of individuals and families. Key features of the text are: clear structure; 'key issue' guides and summaries with each chapter; identification of key concepts throughout the book; unrivalled glossary and concept guide; rich illustrative snapshots or 'mini cases' throughout the book. This text engages with cutting-edge debates and makes conceptual innovations without any sacrifice to clarity or accessibility of style. It will appeal to a wide audience, including undergraduates, postgraduates and academics working or studying in the area of work and the organisation of work, as well as practitioners working in the area of human resources and management generally.

AbstractEntrepreneurs are of great interest inside and outside the academic world. But there are considerable ambiguities and confusions about the nature of entrepreneurship among members of the public and entrepreneurship scholars alike, with the latter typically failing to locate entrepreneurial activities fully in their historical and societal contexts. Even work in the sociology of entrepreneurship is achieving less than might be expected in this respect. To overcome these problems it is helpful to return to basic sociological principles associated with Durkheim, Weber and Wright Mills and work with two newer sociological concepts; those of 'institutional logics' and 'situated creativity'. Working in this way encourages us to drop entirely the analytical concept of 'entrepreneur' and to study, instead, 'entrepreneurial action'– a concept which enables us to appreciate the relationship between the making of adventurous, creative or innovative exchanges in societies and both the organisational and the societal/institutional/historical settings in which these comes about – for better or worse.

Alongside many significant changes, there are considerable continuities between the work activities and work institutions of the 21st century and those of earlier periods studied by the sociology of work. These continuities are easily neglected if we get too taken up with what is allegedly 'new' in the world which we study or if we constantly seek new theoretical 'directions' or 'turns'. A successful future sociology of work needs to achieve a balance between attention to change and continuity, both in what it looks at empirically and in the devices it uses in its analyses and theorizing as well as in its communication beyond the academy. The idea of the sociological imagination, which brings together American Pragmatist thinking with the European ideas of Weber and Marx can help considerably in reinvigorating the sociology of work.

To study and better understand people's working lives and organizational involvement in the context of their whole lives and in the context of the societal culture in which they have grown up and now live, it is helpful to bring together three key concepts of narrative, identity work and the social construction of reality. Such a move can be connected to the abandonment of widely used but limiting concepts, such as that of`managerial identity'. The essentially sociological nature of this move also provides an antidote to the equally limiting tendency towards the `narrative imperialism' which is associated with the idea of the `narrative self'. The value of the suggested theoretical framing and its linking of narrative, identity work and social construction is demonstrated by the close analysis of a large private autobiography of a former manager. This individual's identity work simultaneously uses discursively available narratives and creates new narratives (many small stories being embedded in one large life story), all within the framework of history, social structure and culture.

Social science research can play a valuable role in enabling people to understand how their personal predicaments relate to the broader structures and historical circumstances in which they arise. This was argued by Wright Mills (1970, originally 1959) with his concept of the sociological imagination, a notion of considerable relevance to the identity issues which arise in relation to organizational involvement. Using a rare combination of ethnographic, autobiographical and interview research material, a close examination is made of two managers' identity work and the part played in this by their involvement in one specific organization in particular structural and historical circumstances. In the course of carrying out this study the concept of `identity work' has been developed and refined. This incorporates a clear analytical distinction between internal personal `self-identities' and external discursive `social-identities' with social-identities being seen as a link or bridge between socially available discourses and self-identities. `Managerial identities' take their place among the multiplicity of social-identities to which any particular manager may relate in both their `inward facing' and their `outward facing' identity work.

Ethical and moral aspects of the work of managers are given less direct attention in the literature than we might expect given the growing attention being paid to business ethics more generally. Theoretical analysis together with an account of one self-avowedly ethically sensitive senior manager is used to argue that corporate managers may be less 'morally mute' than they are often alleged to be. Managers - 'strategic' ones at least - necessarily deal with ethically sensitive pressures coming from the various constituencies with which an organization strategically exchanges. In this, there is scope for individual managers (who are, themselves, resource-dependent constituencies) to bring to bear their personal ethical preferences on decisions and to mediate corporate priorities. The extent to which managers generally recognize this scope and exploit opportunities to adopt 'ethically assertive' as opposed to 'ethically reactive' orientations is an important question for detailed research.

The story of Caroline and Terry is a tale of a manager and a participant-observer researcher. It is also a tale of organizational politics, gender relations and the relationships between human resource managers and other managers. The story is in part a fiction. But, at the same time, it is a piece of social-science writing. It is `made up' but it is also `true'. It uses imagination but is also theoretically informed and draws upon research fieldwork. The story demonstrates how ethnographic research accounts can be written in a way that bridges the genres of creative writing and social science. This `ethnographic fiction science' has eight characteristics, four of which give it a fictional dimension and four of which make it social scientific.