James Gee - The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism

James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull
and Colin Lankshear

First published in Sydney, Australia 1996 by
Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd

Published 1996 by Westview Press

Published 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull and Colin Lankshear, 1996

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data available upon request

Set in 10/12 Times by DOCUPRO, Sydney

ISBN 13: 978-0-8133-3261-1 (pbk)

Change is a leading motif of our times. A new world is being born, dominated by a new global capitalism sometimes called post-capitalism now that visible socialist alternatives appear to have collapsed. It is a world fuelled by fiercer competition than ever before and by unprecedented high technology. It is a world, too, that ought to concern all of us, not just those in business or concerned with economics. And so we threeall people primarily concerned with language, learning, and literacyturn our attention here to the new work order of the new capitalism. In the pages that follow we investigate the new work order and how it impacts on the social practices of language, learning and literacyand they on it. We look at how human lives, human identities, and human possibilities are shaped and circumscribed within our distinctly new times. And we ask how education may help prepare us for tackling the deep challenges and problems generated by the new capitalism.

Before we say why we wrote this book and who we hope reads it, let us turn briefly to the question: How did this new world come to be? The short account (Madrick 1995) is this. Starting in the nineteenth century, and going well into the twentieth, the United States built itself into the worlds dominant economic power thanks to its space and natural resources, its huge internal market, its mastery of mass production, and its growing global power. After World War II other developed countries began for the first time to compete seriously with the United States, using its own favored methods, namely standardization and mass production. Increasingly, however, fierce competition for markets and, yet more importantly, scientific and technological advances led to the fragmentation of the mass market into a myriad of sub-markets or niche markets.

Technological changes allowed goods to be customized while still being produced in large numbersthat is, to be dovetailed into the (often newly created) identities of specific types of consumers. And there was no shortage of competitors wanting to create and enter these niche markets as a new form of competitive advantage. In the act, they initiated the decline of the mass market and the business strategies that went with it. So-called mass customization loses some of the advantages of scope (of the market) and scale (of production) of the old mass market and leads, after a while, to less or at least harder earned profit. At the same time, social, political, and technological changes allowed far more people and countries to compete with each other for the same jobs and the same markets. Finally, increased information has allowed consumers, at least in the developed world, to take full advantage of the competition, driving each competitor to produce the highest quality for the best price, or see their business go elsewhere. In the end, the big (mass market) pieformerly controlled by the United Stateshas been cut into ever smaller pieces with ever fiercer competition over each piece.