Title:	The Changing Worlds and Workplaces of Capitalism
Authors:	Seán Ó Riain Felix Behling Rossella Ciccia Eoin Flaherty
Keywords:	Changing Worlds
Issue Date:	2015
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	Recent decades have seen momentous shifts in the organisation of capitalism, including the range of transformations captured under the grand labels of globalisation, financialisation, liberalisation, and post-industrialism. Not surprisingly, the national forms of capitalist political economy are themselves in flux – even though significant differences remain between social democratic, Christian democratic, and liberal economies (among others) the internal dynamics of each of these models of capitalism are being transformed in important ways (Thelen 2014). At the same time, the experience of work in these worlds of capitalism has undergone dramatic changes. Workers often have more autonomy, work more closely with colleagues within and outside their employer’s company, and can exercise more flexibility in organising their work. However, the pressures of work are often more intense, employment is insecure, rewards are uncertain and likely to depend on competition with others, and a general sense of precarity is widespread. These developments have largely been studied in isolation from one another. Macro studies of capitalist economies typically made passing reference to workplaces but assumed that employer and worker interests could be read off a number of key indicators (skill, sector, gender, etc). Micro studies of work and organisation sometimes characterised their workplaces as examples of national work organisation but rarely directly brought the institutional and political features of the national context into the analysis of work itself. The context for the workplace was capitalism itself, conceived as an abstract set of relationships and not as concrete relations taking particular institutionalised forms. This separation of fields was understandable in light of the demands of research and the classic difficulties of bridging macro and micro levels of analysis. While global and national capitalisms and systems of production were relatively stable, the separation was merely unfortunate. However, at a time when economies and workplaces are both under severe pressure and in flux, a new dialogue between political economy and the sociology of work and employment is needed in order to shed light on both these pressures and on the possible recombinations of actors, interests, practices, and institutions that can underpin new and better models of work and economic organisation.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53754
ISBN:	978-1-137-42708-3
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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