Pringle, 1989; 1998), which also document the
ways in which the social meaning of work and
the cultures of production are connected to
gender divisions of labour. It has been argued, for
example, that women managers tend to be less
bureaucratic than male managers, challenging
traditional structures, although not always
successfully changing them (Marshall, 1984; 1995).
In studies of ‘caring’ occupations, analysts have
shown how the management of emotions, or the
emotional relations involved in caring for
children or for the elderly, affects relationships
not only between employees and service con-
sumers but also between employees and employers.
Interesting new work about the conflicts
between, for example, women who employ
domestic workers, often to facilitate their own
participation in waged work, is exploring the
limits to classic accounts of the exploitation of
workers by employees (Anderson, 2000).NEW FORMS OF WORK,
NEW CULTURES OF LABOUR?In this section, I want to turn to a set of theoreti-
cal arguments about the links between the trans-
formation of work, social identity and cultures of
labour at the end of the twentieth century that
unfortunately have, in the main, ignored the
excellent empirical studies of the culture of
different types of work reviewed above.
One of the most significant features of contem-
porary advanced industrial economies is the pre-
dominance of employment in the service sector,
and there is now a huge literature delineating the
shift from manufacturing dominance, the spatial
distribution of services, conditions of employ-
ment and the nature of work in different work-
places, as well as a literature about new forms of
‘flexible’ industrial production (see, for example,
Aglietta, 1979; Allen, 1992; Amin, 1994;
Christopherson, 1989; Daniels, 1995; Lash and
Urry, 1994; Lipietz, 1987; Piore and Sabel, 1984;
Pollert, 1988; Standing, 1999). One of the
common lines of agreement in this vast array of
studies is that service-dominated economies are
marked by significant and growing labour market
inequalities (Bauman, 1998; Pinch, 1993; Sassen,
1991). Despite debates about the extent and
causes of this inequality, it seems that a service-
dominated economy is one that takes a bifurcated
form, with the most rapid expansion of employ-
ment occurring at the top end in well-paid occu-
pations that demand educational and professional
credentials and, at the bottom end, often entry-
level jobs and occupations which are poorly paid,unskilled and offering little job security and few
work-related benefits (Fine and Weiss, 1998;
Nelson and Smith, 1999; Newman, 1999).
Even in the most well-paid occupations of the
new service economy, job security and perma-
nent employment are becoming less common.
Older hierarchical and bureaucratic institutional
structures with almost guaranteed progression
and promotion are increasingly being displaced
by new forms of internal organization, often
based on team work. Middle management is
being replaced by ‘horizontal’ groups and
‘empowered’ employees, for example, and promo-
tion is often related to individualized performance-
based measures. In both older and newer
high-status occupations – banking and finance,
dot.com companies, the legal profession, busi-
ness services – the products being exchanged
increasingly consist of information and advice.
Indeed the social theorist Castells (2000a) has
identified the onset of a new form of capitalism
that he terms informationalism or informational
capitalism in which workers are either ‘self-
programmable labour’ – highly educated and able
to retrain and adapt to new tasks and processes –
or ‘generic labour’ – exchangeable, disposable
and usually unskilled (Castells, 2000b).Work as a performance?In the new informational economy, designated
rather fancifully by others as ‘weightless’ (Coyle,
1997) or as ‘living on thin air’ (Leadbeater,1999),
work in the elite occupations has become a
matter of producing a convincing performance,
rather than being based on clearly defined rules
and practices. Work, in other words, has become
an elaborate game of pretence and a spectacle in
which, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has
suggested, ‘bosses do not really expect employ-
ees to believe that they mean what they say –
they wish only that both sides pretend to believe
that the game is for real, and behave accordingly’
(1998: 35). Thus work itself is as much about the
cultural production of employees as about the
material production of goods and services. In his
aggregate assessment of western economic
change, Bauman has also argued that as the
nature of work itself has changed for many to
become discontinuous and flexible, employment
no longer acts as the basis for the building of a
lifelong identity in the same way as it did in an
earlier era – whether this era is termed modernity
or Fordism. Previously, Bauman claims, ‘the
fixed itinerary of work-career and the prerequi-
sites of lifelong identity construction fit each
other well’ (1998: 27) (although it is important to106 THE CULTURE OF ECONOMY3029-ch04.qxd 03-10-02 10:30 AM Page 106