The Transformations of Labour

The discourse accompanying political-economic restructuring toward an “information society” since the 1970s has been thick with utopian conjecture, hyperbole, and exaggeration. This talk of democratic workplaces free of hierarchy, collective investment on the part of workers in the destiny of their companies, and the disengagement of economic value from labouring bodies culminated during the delirium of the New Economy period. Five years later, as the debris of that economic model is carted away, critical studies of the flexible economy, the 1990s workplace, and the varieties of knowledge work, or immaterial labour, fuelling these, have begun to add to our understanding of those delirious times and their legacy. What was the structure of the “new” economy? What kinds of labour became dominant within it? How were linguistic, communicative, and affective qualities put to work, and to what processes is that labour currently subject? The books addressed here range from a macroanalysis of the New Economy and its close ties to deepening political and economic inequality (Henwood), to an examination of the restructuring of workplaces and the attempts to de-skill all levels of the knowledge worker hierarchy during the 1990s (Head), to a veritable anthropology of two new-media workplaces spanning the pinnacle and fall of the New Economy (Ross). After the New Economy is Doug Henwood’s third book. The editor and publisher of Left Business Observer and host of a widely followed critical radio show, Henwood has been following political-economic trends and theoretical debates

Capitalism · Economics · Economy · Knowledge economy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Restructuring · Sociology · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Labor Movements and Unions · Law