TY - JOUR
AU - Kapur,, Sandeep
AB - How will the modern information revolution alter our personal lives and society? How will it affect the nature of work and managerial control within firms? What does it bode for the future of capitalism? Daniel Cohen tackles these questions and some others in this thought‐provoking monograph. Cohen argues, quite plausibly, that we cannot appreciate the full significance of a new technology without understanding its interactions with the organisation of work and its relationship with consumer society. To put this in a historical context, he reviews the twentieth century phenomena of mass consumerism, facilitated in part by the standardisation of production, and its implications for the nature of work. He asks, ‘How could a century in which humans were largely free of the oppression of famine and in which they received education and universal health care have conceived such a dehumanising environment as the assembly line?’ For him, ‘Taylorism was characterised by excluding from the very production process in which he or she was intended to be the main character’. He views the political events of 1968 as an inevitable reaction to the dehumanised state, when young people came to reject the world of their parents. He believes that the origins of the modern information age (and the computer revolution, in particular) can be traced to the new order that emerged after 1968. As he puts it, ‘it was through computer science that students raised in the anti‐establishment culture of the 1960s American campus would find a way to shatter the world of standardisation created by their parents’. The information age has come to enshrine the fervent hope that we can roll back the monotony of standardisation. New technology offers ways to customise production and to personalise consumption, but this surge of individualism runs in to the problem that our consumption basket includes many goods and services that we consume collectively. Healthcare and education, for instance, are intrinsically social goods, whose consumption cannot be personalised. Besides, while twentieth century mass production enabled most people in developed societies to satisfy their material needs, in a world where consumption needs are increasingly defined relative to others’ lifestyles, growing prosperity has not diminished the hunger for more consumption. At the same time, at the workplace, specialisation has given way to an environment in which each worker must perform a wide range of tasks, with growing emphasis on versatility and flexibility of skills. In this era of polyvalence, the search for efficiency has led, inevitably, to intensification of work with the attendant risks of excessive stress and burnout in a ‘24/7’ workplace. The financial revolution of the 1980s was an aspect of this drive for greater efficiency. Firms were restructured ostensibly to add value, but the value creation was usually achieved through repudiation of the implicit contracts that had entitled the existing workforce to a range of benefits. Downsizing, for instance, took away the job security that generations of workers had come to rely on. In the author’s opinion, the growing dominance of finance capital and the steady devaluation of human capital will create a need for new forms of social protection of the latter. The second part of the monograph asks that perennial question, can capitalism survive? Cohen believes that excessive concern with so‐called terterisation – the displacement of manufacturing by services – is not very illuminating. If within the sphere of manufacturing we include the services that support production, the share of such activity in aggregate employment has remained rather stable in the twentieth century. Likewise, if we were to aggregate all intermediation activity as a sector, its share too has shown remarkable stability. In terms of employment shares, the striking change is the displacement of agriculture by the activities that involve production of human capital (education and health). Similarly, the concern that technology will lead to unemployment on a massive scale may be exaggerated. History is replete with cases where innovations that seemingly threatened employment, eventually augmented demand for labour, often in spheres of activity spawned by the innovation. More pertinently, Cohen believes that the growing disparity between the hyper‐productive male baby boomers and other segments of the labour force: women, the young, and the elderly, carries the risk of another social explosion. This is a serious piece of work. First published in French in 2000, it offered a critical challenge to the prevailing technological euphoria about the information age. After the collapse of the over‐exuberant dot.com boom, and after the realisation that many of the claimed miracles of the new capitalist order were often based on fraudulent accounting, this careful examination of the new nature of capitalism makes interesting reading. The style is engaging, with bold brush‐strokes and insightful examples from the history of cinema and television, among other spheres of human activity. The long sweep of history adopted in the discourse is quite illuminating. But in the end the monograph shares a common, and possibly inevitable, characteristic of many such pieces of work: it poses lots of interesting questions without providing the answers. © Royal Economic Society 2004
TI - Our Modern Times: The New Nature of Capitalism in the Information Age
JF - The Economic Journal
DO - 10.1111/j.1468-0297.2004.00258_2.x
DA - 2004-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/our-modern-times-the-new-nature-of-capitalism-in-the-information-age-phXvSq6ci4
SP - F537
VL - 114
IS - 499
DP - DeepDyve
ER -