The Context of Change: Employment, Class and Gender

Abstract

‘The nature of work and industrial organization is truly changing with unnerving speed’ (Kumar, 1995, p. 201). Krishan Kumar’s comment on the shift to a postmodern society captures a perception popularly held and reflected in many discussions and representations of work, in the media, in journalistic reportage and in academic publications. But how is work really changing? A bewildering array of possibilities is offered. Some have prophesied a major collapse of work, bringing mass unemployment; only by grasping opportunities to rethink radically the link between work and the rest of life, for example by redistributing the limited amount of necessary work fairly among the population, will the threat of a permanently unemployed ‘underclass’ be averted (Jenkins and Sherman, 1979; Gorz, 1982; Handy, 1984). In contrast, others have presented an idyllic picture of a twenty-first century in which most work is of a professional kind or in which we are all engaged in selling expert services to each other. Some predict continued degradation or deskilling of jobs and the tightening of the bureaucratic organizational hold over the individual, while others suggest that jobs will be enriched and enlarged and that organizations will become more democratic with flattened hierarchies. Management gurus such as Tom Peters (1987; 1992) and theorists of post-Fordism alike present bureaucratic organizational forms as counter-productive, arguing that companies must be formless or at least free-form, continually adapting themselves in order to respond to the vagaries of the market as it reflects new, more specialized and diversified consumer demands.