Book Description:
'Money, jobs, careers, training all are topics often overheard in the conversation of middle class Americans today. One of the nation's leading critics of education, the world of work, and the labor movement, Stanley Aronowitz has, over three decades, shown how new technologies, labor, and education all are deeply intertwined in our culture and everyday lives. This new book reflects Aronowitz's latest thinking at a time when globalization has brought these connections to broad public attention. Aronowitz argues for the decline of the job' as the backbone, along with family, of American society. Even at a time of high employment, low wages and job insecurity leave many families at or below the poverty line. The career instability previously experienced mostly by blue collar workers has now spread to middle managers and high level executives caught in the rapid movement of capital and technologies. Today's world, he argues, calls for a new social contract between employers and workers. While many writers emphasize the 'new social spaces' opened up by communications technologies, Aronowitz looks more deeply to find subtle shifts also taking place in our more familiar and conventional social worlds. The decline of 'bohemia' among the intelligentsia of Greenwich Village and other similar urban communities is caused not only by changing financial and urban forces but also by shifting patterns of communication among its inhabitants. Similar changes in everyday uses of time and patterns of work also reflect ways in which individuals today have diminished control over space and time. While these social changes begin in home and community, ultimately they limit the 'political space' available to most citizens. Aronowitz shows how and why these changes must be met with a stronger awareness among working Americans of new forms of democratic participation.'
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