Volume 54, Number 13 · August 16, 2007
They're Micromanaging Your Every Move
By Simon Head
The Social Life of Information
by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Harvard Business School, 320 pp., $25.95
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Owl Books, 248 pp, $13.00 (paper)
The Culture of the New Capitalism
by Richard Sennett
Yale University Press, 214 pp, $25.00
The digital revolution of the 1990s seemed to mark a definitive break with the manufacturing economy that had thrived in the United States since the late-nineteenth century. With the pervasive use of information technology (IT) by banks, insurance companies, hospitals, clinics, even warehouses and retail stores, the era of industrial mass production in the United States faded into the past. Also redundant were the blue-collar workers who had manned the old assembly lines. With 80 percent of the American workforce now employed in white-collar service industries, economists assumed that there was no longer any need for a large industrial proletariat with limited skills, passively taking orders from above.
Review, 4184 words
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