Abstract
This is a book that explores how the nature of work transformed the implications for employment relationships and beyond. It revolves around the ambivalent significance of work, which simultaneously holds a liberating potential and a subjugating load. The book goes beyond mere description and provokes interrogation for several major concerns: How does work provide meaning but also disrupt lives? Whose jobs are secure? Why are Americans working so much?
This second edition is structured into eight parts that go from questioning strongly held assumptions on the normativity of work in Western society (Chapter 1), to maintaining that many detested features of the ‘old economy’ are alive and well (Chapter 2). It examines economic inequality (Chapter 3) and presents a critique of US labour market insecurity (Chapters 4–5). It looks at the impact work has on changing household arrangements (Chapter 6) and on the relevance of race and ethnicity (Chapter 7). Ultimately, the book examines potential solutions to enable influencing meaningful change (Chapter 8).
The text engages with fundamental concepts of the sociology of work and argues that the ‘legacy’ of Taylorism is incorporated into the new economy. The authors question several persistent myths: the notion that flexibility responds primarily to workers’ need to balance work and family or is a progressive response to technological advances, or the idea that an increase in advanced qualifications reflects a real economic need.
The authors provoke readers to interrogate a naive rhetoric of our times and to see work as embedded in complex sets of human relationships. They revisit, for instance, the focus on mobility by considering the limitations it poses on older employees. The text examines overwork by looking at economic, but also at career considerations, workplace cultures and fiscal policies that make long hours cost-effective. Ultimately, the text draws attention to the changing meaning of work: from having a symbolic value, strongly attached to one’s sense of identity and belonging, to an instrumental value – read ‘a way to pay the bills’ (cf. Koeber, 2002).
The overarching message is that the opportunities for decent, stable and meaningful work for both low and higher skilled workers are shrinking. As the tension related to the increased precarity of work builds up, the authors try to map the role of various actors in mobilizing change. They present the potentialities, but mostly the realistic limitations, of the role of individuals, activist groups, trade unions, employers, the US Government and international organizations. The book does not give cliched reasons to be overconfident in our collective capacity to change the status quo. The authors are sceptical of the potential of corporate social responsibility and, also, are not assured that trade unions or activist groups can go beyond awareness raising. Some potential is linked with US governmental regulations and international economic agreements.
Still, in moving towards solutions, the book tends to pass rather easily over some dilemmas linked with the very nature of capitalism. Is it, indeed, possible to use policies to ‘regulate’ the underlying capitalist tenet of profit maximization, given free trade and the race to the bottom? Though the magnitude of the problem is such that one needs to operate with ambivalences, to recognize their inherent limitations (as this book does remarkably well), it is also necessary to go a step further. One such step would be to dismantle the structural conditions that make labour markets as they are in the USA and beyond: insecure, based on the replacement of the industrial workforce with a precarious service sector. It may be that these recent transformations are not unscrupulous deviations that might be somehow disciplined by ‘proper’ policies, but are part and parcel of capitalism (see Winlow and Hall, 2013). The book does not cast doubt on the very ideological underpinning forces driving the economy in a direction that plays on people’s sense of insecurity. ‘It is not only that “managers and captains of industry” consent that “jobs should be insecure”’ (p. 83), but that the system they are acting in is built on this logic. After making a convincing argument for the need for more radical change, readers may like the authors to engage more in this level of analysis. Nevertheless, the book provides many other opportunities for further reflection and critical debate.
Placing notions of job fragility and risk at its core, the book speaks to this particular moment in history. With a captivating dose of realism and critical inquiry, the authors have done an excellent job of introducing some of the most troubling labour market issues of our time. It is an excellent source for upper level undergraduate students and those trying to make sense of recent transformations in the world of work and beyond.