Vallas - Work : a critique

polity

Social scientists of widely varying persuasions from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Max Weber to the Chicago School of sociology have long acknowledged the centrality of work in all social and cultural life. They confronted the industrialization process, and were keenly aware of the ways in which industrial capitalism gripped the working lives of peasants, artisans, landowners, and merchants. As it did so, it remade the social landscape, refashioned the temporal rhythms of human experience, and redefined the way that authority, community, gender, and domestic life were all defined. Indeed, it might be said that classical social theory was one sustained debate over the division of labor modernity had wrought, and how it was likely to shape the character of human life.

What of our own era? How are the withering away of manufacturing industries, the spread of digital media, the rise of financial models of work and organizations, and the global mobility of production processes combining to transform our everyday working lives and identities? Has the wish for full-time employment in a stable career now become an exercise in nostalgia? Has a new, post-Fordist, regime of work emerged, with instability and uncertainty constituting permanent features of the economic landscape? And which (if any) of these developments can be submitted to democratic choice rather than to the blind forces of the marketplace? To pose these questions is to acknowledge that long-established assumptions about the nature of work have been disrupted, and that the very concept of work now warrants close and careful deliberation.

Of course, there is no shortage of discussions about work. Yet in the USA, especially, managerial assumptions have proven so powerful as to sideline unsponsored inquiry into the forms that work is beginning to assume. Indeed, at their most extreme, managerial statements about work have become minor industries in their own right, as in the case of Peters and Watermans In Search of Excellence (which has spun off multiple small businesses), Spencer Johnsons Who Moved My Cheese? (now available in a special edition for pre-teens), or Daniel Pinks Free Agent Nation (which invites its readers to regard themselves as their own CEOs). For their part, policy analysts often do address workplace issues, but commonly adhere to a formulaic montage of well-worn solutions. Should unemployment insurance benefits be extended? How will increases in the minimum wage affect the labor market? Dare we consider public works programs, or paid family leave? Unasked are questions about the forces that govern the structure of work organizations, why some jobs are valued so much more highly than others, how stereotypes of the most appropriate workers for a given occupation influence the distribution of opportunities at work, or whether work might begin to reflect the wishes of those who perform it. All too often, questions of agency and choice in the economic realm have been relegated to the personal advice columns in the business section, which unfailingly school their readers in how to compromise with ones boss. Images of muffled dissent and cynicism find expression in such outlets as