The Changing Practices of Work

Abstract

Over the past ten years, I have spent a lot of time talking with people about their work: more precisely about their jobs and their employers. What has been striking about these discussions is the force with which people identify significant changes that have taken place in their working lives. Repeatedly I have listened to people recounting how ‘things have changed completely these last ten years’; ‘compared with how things were ten or fifteen years ago I would say the situation is completely different’; some have spoken with dramatic effect about how they ‘wouldn’t have believed possible’ the kind of changes that have taken place. In this, of course, there is some exaggeration and there has been further distortion as sociologists and business commentators have occasionally amplified these accounts. Many things have changed only slightly and within change there is always continuity, but it does seem that at this moment the social organization of western economies is going through a period of quite significant disturbance.