are increasing, questions about the cultural
meanings of work and its diversity have also
become more important.
But work, as well as being a necessary part of
earning a living, also bestows status, companion-
ship, forms of solidarity with co-workers and a
sense of meaning and identity on those who
labour in particular ways in different organiza-
tions, institutions and localities. As more and
more people are drawn into waged labour their
connections to each other, to the organizations in
which they labour and to the locality are also
changing. Work, which was once a local affair in
which people tended to be employed in the local-
ity in which they lived, often in locally owned
firms, now links people across increasingly
extended spaces, regions and nations, sometimes
involving physical movement across space, of
both labour and capital, but also linking workers
in particular locations into new networks of
ownership. The new global proletariat is therefore
increasingly complex and diverse. It not only
combines what Panitch and Leys (2000) term the
old and new working classes but also mixes them
up spatially, bringing them into physical contact
with each other as well as connecting them
through ownership patterns. Labour, as well as
capital, has become more mobile. Thus in the
core economies of the old industrial west, for
example, there is a growing reliance on migrant
labour from the Third World to run key urban
services as well as work in sweated conditions in
basic manufacturing industries such as textiles,
clothing and electronics. Parts of these same
industries, however, have relocated to the border
regions in Third World economies, to export
processing zones in South East Asia or the
maquiladoras of the US/Mexico border, for
example, where labour costs are lower. Thus the
old and the new working classes are spatially
contiguous in western metropolises but also
spatially differentiated by the dispersal of work-
ers in a particular sector, or employees of a sin-
gle multinational company, across the spaces of
national economies, raising new questions for
managers and for labour organizers. In the ‘new
economy’ too – in the financial services and
information processing industries, for example –
the geographic reach of contemporary capitalist
organizations has expanded and so managers,
workers and organizers, whether in ‘old’ or
‘new’ sectors or economies, have to cope with
cultural and linguistic diversity, whether in nego-
tiating agreement and compliance or in organiz-
ing or defusing resistance. Significant social,
local and national differences in customs –
beliefs and cultures among a workforce that is
increasingly diverse, as women, children, rural tourban migrants, ethnic minorities, refugees, asylum
seekers and economic migrants enter labour
markets previously dominated, in the west at
least, by men – mean that ‘cultural’ understanding
and connections have a growing salience in
‘economic’ organization. Divisions of labour
now cross, or are negotiated over, diverse and
multiple cultural and linguistic spaces and so
new ways of drawing in and constructing
co-workers and of managing cultural differences
among them are important in multinational
spaces. Globalization is therefore not an abstract
process, based on undifferentiated labour power,
but is affected by as well as affects social and
cultural processes, the meanings of waged work,
and the subjectivities of workers themselves. I
want, then, to look at how culture has been
defined and its relationship to current analyses of
this transition to a more complex and differenti-
ated global workforce.DEFINING CULTURE: FROM A
FIXED TO A MUTABLE DEFINITIONSociologists, economic anthropologists and
historians have long recognized that work in
all its various forms and settings plays a central
role in shaping people’s view of the world and
their sense of themselves as individuals and
members of a group. As the influential historian
E.P. Thompson (1967; 1980; 1991) has docu-
mented, the customs and cultures of the workers
in early modern England were transformed by
industrialization as attempts to synchronize
labour and impose the discipline of clock time
were resisted with greater or lesser degrees of
success in different sectors and different loca-
tions. The definition of culture in many of the
earlier studies of work is now being challenged,
even though earlier analysts recognized that its
definition was a complex and contested question
(Williams, 1976; 1981). In general, it was asso-
ciated with the development of particular ways
of life, customs and social meanings in a clearly
defined place or locality, be this an organiza-
tion or a community. In recent writings, however,
whether by social theorists, anthropologists,
cultural and literary theorists, historians, socio-
logists or geographers, the concept of culture has
been the subject of innovative redefinition, in
part influenced by the very flows of people,
money and ideas across space outlined above,
which have disrupted previous connections
between territory, cultural beliefs and customs.
Thus, as social anthropologist George Marcus
has argued, the idea of culture has100 THE CULTURE OF ECONOMY3029-ch04.qxd 03-10-02 10:30 AM Page 100