Three Lectures on Post-Industrial Society
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A noted economist analyzes the upheavals caused by revolutions in technology, labor, culture, financial markets, and globalization.
In this pithy and provocative book, noted economist Daniel Cohen offers his analysis of the global shift to a post-industrial era. If it was once natural to speak of industrial society, Cohen writes, it is more difficult to speak meaningfully of post-industrial “society.” The solidarity that once lay at the heart of industrial society no longer exists. The different levels of large industrial enterprises have been systematically disassembled: tasks considered nonessential are assigned to subcontractors; engineers are grouped together in research sites, apart from the workers. Employees are left exposed while shareholders act to protect themselves. Never has the awareness that we all live in the same world been so strong—and never have the social conditions of existence been so unequal. In these wide-ranging reflections, Cohen describes the transformations that signaled the break between the industrial and the post-industrial eras. He links the revolution in information technology to the trend toward flatter hierarchies of workers with multiple skills—and connects the latter to work practices growing out of the culture of the May 1968 protests. Subcontracting and outsourcing have also changed the nature of work, and Cohen succinctly analyzes the new international division of labor, the economic rise of China, India, and the former Soviet Union, and the economic effects of free trade on poor countries. Finally, Cohen examines the fate of the European social model—with its traditional compromise between social justice and economic productivity—in a post-industrial world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Social inequality is at the center of this illuminating, and notably brief, collection of three lectures on the post-industrial world. French author and professor of economics Cohen (Globalization and Its Enemies) has a surprisingly easy-to-read style, as in a statement from the conclusion: "we can interpret industrial society as an asymmetric marriage between highly endowed people (engineers) and less well-endowed ones (workers). The engineers gain from this arrangement if the workers are 'nice.'" He has impressive knowledge of how each country affects many others, demonstrated in his refusal to speak in generalizations or platitudes: "To speak of a single European social model covering the United Kingdom, Sweden, Italy, and France makes virtually no sense." It's that careful detail in considering each separate economy that makes this book a small but substantial gem, especially in the standout piece "The New World Order," which cagily explores the nineteenth century's "first globalization" in order to explain "the new international division of labor." This slim volume will make an important addition to any economics buff's personal or professional library.