Twenty-five years ago the sociologist Ray Pahl

(1984) suggested that the changing nature of

work was one of the key issues facing industrial

societies. At the start of the new millennium his

claim retains its relevance as the future of work –

both waged and unwaged – is a key issue of

debate across the social sciences as well as in

more popular arenas. There seems to be a grow-

ing anxiety about the nature of work, a sense that

it is becoming less significant and less certain in

providing meaning, as well as income, in

advanced industrial societies – a less central

element in the social construction of identity.

There is no doubt that in the last three decades

or so, in the advanced industrial west, there have

been huge changes in the nature, form, distribu-

tion and location of waged work – changes so

significant that a common claim has developed

across the disciplines that there has been a trans-

formation in these industrial societies ‘since

around 1973’ (Harvey, 1989). The terms used to

distinguish the complex set of changes that com-

prise the transformation vary: they include a

suggested shift from a modern to a postmodern

society, from a first to a second or reflexive

modernity, and from a Fordist to a post-Fordist

or a risk society. In each description of the trans-

formation, however, changes in the nature of

work and employment are a key defining charac-

teristic. In the modern or Fordist regime that

dominated economies such as the USA and the

UK after the Second World War, mass produc-

tion, mass labour and mass consumption resulted

in a uniform or standard and masculinized work-

ing class, whose entitlement to work and to a

living wage was supported by collective bargain-

ing, relatively strong trade unions, Keynesian

macro-economic policies and state welfare

provision. In this period paid work was the prime

source of identity for men who, in their role as

breadwinners, were expected to support their

dependants, usually women and children. This

world was one of relative stability, at least for the

more skilled members of the proletariat, charac-

terized by a high degree of temporal and spatial

standardization in, for example, work contracts

and pay rates. Spatial stability was enhanced

through local links between the cultures of work

and the workplace, and those of family and

community. Consequently geographically specific

local cultures and ways of living were dis-

cernible, where industrial traditions based on

specific industries were deeply implicated in the

development of spatially identifiable family

obligations, class and gender relations and politi-

cal beliefs (McDowell and Massey, 1984; Thrift

and Williams, 1987).

These older ways of living have disintegrated in

the face of economic restructuring and global

shifts in the nature and distribution of work since

the mid 1970s. Work – in the sense of waged

labour – has, according to key theorists, become

flexible, destandardized, detraditionalized and

individualized (Bauman, 1998; Beck, 1992; Beck

et al., 1994; Lash and Urry, 1994; Sennett, 1998).

The old certainties of Fordism have been replaced

by a fragmented and plural employment system

characterized by ‘highly flexible, time-intensive,

and spatially decentralized forms of deregulated

paid labour’ (Beck, 2000: 77). This new system is

based on networks rather than bureaucratic hier-

archies in knowledge-based or informational

economies in which highly skilled and individual-

ized workers, able to take risks, construct mobile

portfolio careers, and less skilled workers become

increasingly redundant or replaceable. In western

4

Cultures of Labour – Work, Employment, Identity

and Economic Transformations

Linda McDowell

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