of firms and organizations, the nature of the
labour movement and everyday forms of inter-
action in the workplace, behaviour on the shop-
floor and in the office as well as entry to the
clubs and meetings of professional associations
and the trade unions, albeit with important local
and regional variations depending in part on the
nature of dominant forms of employment and the
history and traditions of the locality (see, for
example, Walby, 1989). But work was perceived
and theorized as an issue about men, about class
rather than gender (Grint, 1998), as the conven-
tional division of labour that developed as an
ideal in Victorian industrial capitalism continued
to dominate the structures and institutions of
twentieth-century western economies. And work
was taken for granted as both a right and a duty
of men, indeed as an essential attribute of their
very masculinity. It was their rightful place in the
world of work that distinguished men from
women.
In the second half of the twentieth century,
however, these assumptions and relationships
began to be disrupted both in theoretical debate
and in empirical shifts. First, a much heralded
and welcomed reduction in the significance of
employment was identified by sociologists as a
new, more leisured and increasingly middle-
class workforce began to replace the traditional
working class (Bell, 1960; 1973). However, only
a decade or so later analysts began to regret the
apparent demise of the working class (Gorz,
1982), ruing the consequences for left-wing
politics (Hobsbawm, 1981). By the 1990s, a differ-
ent set of regretful consequences began to be
documented. The traditional solidarity and
stability of local working-class culture, which
had been replaced by a more mobile and ambiti-
ous middle class without roots, apparently with
adverse consequences for both individuals and
society (Bauman, 1998; Beck, 2000; Sennett,
1998; 1999) as an aestheticized bourgeois neglec-
ted its familial and communal responsibilities
(Putnam, 2001). In all instances, however, these
grand statements turned out to be less a general
trend than specific changes in the place of men in
the labour market and the place of work in some
men’s lives. For women, for example, the last
decades of the twentieth century marked grow-
ing, rather than declining, significance of waged
labour in their lives (Crompton, 1999) and inter-
nationally, of course, as I outlined earlier, the
size of the global working class is at its maximum.
Fears of the end of the working class are a specifi-
callywestern preoccupation.
But for a time, between 30 and 40 years ago,
in the industrial economies of the west, it did
seem that employment was set to become lesssignificant, both as a filler of time and as a
measure of social meaning. Leisure, and activi-
ties associated with consumption, it was argued,
would replace work or production as the centre
of life and meaning. In 1961, for example,
Ferdynand Zweig discerned the emerging outlines
of a new leisure society, in which individuals
would work less and have more time for leisure
and pleasure, producing a more civilized view of
the future in which hardship and want, at least for
the majority, would diminish in an increasingly
affluent society. Some years later, developing the
theme of growing affluence, Goldthorpe and his
coworkers (1968), in a study of car workers in
Luton, also intimated that family life and domes-
tic concerns had as much significance for the
newly affluent male workers as their working
lives. The commitment to workplace activities
and to solidaristic forms of organization, they
suggested, would decline, despite their pre-
dictions being almost immediately challenged by
industrial unrest in the car plant where they
undertook their empirical research.
Indeed, as with so many social predictions, real-
ity turned out to be different. At the beginning of
a new century, waged work has come to play an
even more significant part in the space economy,
the social structure, and the pattern of life chances
and income inequalities than it did in previous
decades in advanced industrial societies such as
the USA and the UK. For growing numbers of
people, for men as well as for women, in the old
industrial economies, as well as in the Third
World, waged work is now more central to their
material existence and to their sense of selves as
an individual and a member of a local community
than it has been for many years. In Great Britain,
as well as the USA, for example, not only does
waged work endow income and social status but,
increasingly, participation in the labour market is
regarded as an essential aspect of full membership
of the nation-state and as the legitimate way of
gaining eligibility to social and income benefits
from the state. In these societies, individuals are
expected to be in work and indeed, larger than
ever numbers of the population are employed.
Participation rates in the UK, for example, are
currently at 75 per cent of all those of working age
and the Labour government, now in its second
term, has plans to increase this proportion.
Employment participation in the old industrial
economies of the west is also increasingly varied
and undertaken in a wide range of circumstances
(Cully et al., 1999; Greg and Wadsworth, 1999).
For example, working hours have become less
predictable, as has participation over the life cycle.
In Great Britain, the old assumption that
employment entails a job for life, often for a102 THE CULTURE OF ECONOMY3029-ch04.qxd 03-10-02 10:30 AM Page 102