CULTURES OF LABOUR 99societies, the old institutions of the welfare state
that had been such significant contributors to the
reproduction of a stable working class in situhave
been replaced by workfare policies to ‘encourage’
employment participation by ever-larger numbers
of workers, exhorted to ‘get on their bikes’ to
seek employment. The new knowledge societies
are mobile and fast-moving – societies in which
risk takers may be rewarded but where conven-
tional patterns of institutional loyalty have lost
their significance (Sennett, 1998). While, for the
affluent, new forms of work may bring high
rewards and opportunities to construct ‘lifestyle
identities’ through work but also through the
purchase of a range of key consumer goods, for
the less skilled and less able the risk society
entails not mobility and excitement but instead
growing insecurity and uncertainty. But for both
these groups in an increasingly polarized work-
force, it is argued, employment per seseems to
have lost its centrality in the construction of a
sense of self and identity.
In this chapter then I want to interrogate these
claims about the nature and consequences of
economic transformation, assessing their rele-
vance,their generality and their association with
changing spatial divisions of labour. I want to set
the debates about the changing meaning of work
and identity in the context of wider changes in the
global proletariat. In the pages that follow, I con-
trast the post-war era, when employment was
essentially a local matter, with the present day,
when work has become for many a less certain
part of life. My aim, as a geographer, is to link
social to spatial changes in this examination of
the ways in which cultures of labour – the mean-
ings of work for individuals and groups – have
changed as global economic restructuring has had
a differential and uneven impact on the space
economies of different nations. While the main
focus is at the scale of the locality and the nation-
state, I look at the ways in which culture per se
has become a central issue for global corpora-
tions, employing increasingly diverse workforces
as they extend their global reach. At all spatial
scales, however, from the organizational to
global restructuring, in economies in which the
exchange of knowledge and ideas has become
more significant than the production and exchange
of material objects, ‘culture’, in the sense of mean-
ings and symbols, has come to play a growingpart
in understandings of the new space economy
(Lash and Urry, 1994). I want to start therefore by
looking at the consequences of globalization for
the composition of the working class to provide a
wider context for evaluating specific claims about
the declining significance of waged work for
individual and group identities.WORK, IDENTITY AND THE
IMPACT OF GLOBALIZATIONWork, in its widest sense, is all those activities
that are central to our material existence and our
place in the world. Work provides sustenance,
goods for exchange and, in most societies,
income. It makes life possible not only for work-
ers themselves but also for all those people who
are considered too young, too old or too weak or
incapable of working. The activity of working –
labouring – might therefore be defined as the
application of human effort in order to transform
material resources into goods for the use of
individual workers and their households or for
exchange with others. It takes many forms – waged
and unwaged, illegal, informal and voluntary –
and occurs in a wide range of locations – in the
home, in the community and in specialized loca-
tions such as factories and offices. Over the
twentieth century, a larger and larger proportion
of all work in the world was undertaken as part
of capitalist wage relations. Since urban industri-
alization in the west and its spatial extension,
selling labour power in the market has become
the main way of making a living for most of the
world’s population. Thus at the start of the new
millennium the size of the global proletariat is
larger than it has ever been before in world
history. The penetration of capital throughout the
world and the dominance of neoliberal economic
and social policies are leading to the formation of
a global proletariat on a previously unknown
scale. And, as Panitch and Leys (2000) have
argued, this global working class is an increas-
ingly complex and differentiated one. While the
old proletariats of the industrial ‘west’ are expe-
riencing deindustrialization, work intensifica-
tion, casualization and job insecurity, in the
Third World, where the ‘golden age’ of Fordist
social and economic regulation never existed,
industrialization is associated with a growing
urban proletariat working long hours for low pay,
the exploitation of child labour and the growing
participation of women, the denial of union
rights and often state repression. As Panitch and
Leys point out, ‘the working conditions, pay and
social rights of the emerging labour forces [in the
Third World] share much in common with those
of the core capitalisms earlier in the twentieth
century’ (2000: ix). Similarly, David Harvey
(2000) has argued that Marx’s analysis of the
social conditions of nineteenth-century industrial
society has a new relevance at the beginning of
the twenty-first century as gross exploitation of
workers characterizes more and more societies. At
the same time, however, as economic inequalities3029-ch04.qxd 03-10-02 10:30 AM Page 99