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Product details
- ISBN 9780300119923
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 140 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 28 Feb 2007
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A provocative and disturbing look at the ways new economic facts are shaping our personal and social values.
The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life—how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls the “specter of uselessness” haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving.
Reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies that Max Weber once called an “iron cage.” Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience. Sennett examines a more durable form of selfhood, and what practical initiatives could counter the pernicious effects of “reform.”
The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life—how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls the “specter of uselessness” haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving.
Reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies that Max Weber once called an “iron cage.” Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience. Sennett examines a more durable form of selfhood, and what practical initiatives could counter the pernicious effects of “reform.”
Richard Sennett teaches sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the London School of Economics. His publications include The Corrosion of Character and Respect in a World of Inequality.
