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Despite recent interest in the effects of restructuring and redesigning the work place, the link between individual identity and structural change has usually been asserted rather than demonstrated. Through an extensive review of data from field work in a multi-national corporation Catherine Casey changes this. She knows that changes currently occurring in the world of work are part of the vast social and cultural changes that are challenging the assumptions of modern industrialism. These events affect what people do everyday, and they are altering relations among ourselves and with the physi

1. Critical reflections on economy and society -- 2. A liberal economy of knowledge -- 3. Work now : the forces of production -- 4. A new economy for education -- 5. Labour markets, organizations and the utility of education -- 6. Critical dilemmas for work, education and workers -- 7. Citizens and society, work and education.

Economy, Work and Education: Critical Connections addresses effects of neoliberal capitalism in particular regard to work and education. The book elaborates key aspects and problems of generalized policy models of knowledge-based economies and learning societies in contexts of liberalized firm action, accelerated competitiveness and labor market flexibility. It discusses limits and paradoxes of higher skilled, knowledge-based economies which include significant disparities in labor market absorption of higher level skills, a deterioration of qualitative conditions of work and a re-subordination of workers. This volume provides a research-intensive crossing of these fields to contribute a closer disciplinary and scholarly dialogue between interested thinkers across fields who too often must labor and converse apart. It offers the vantage point afforded by traversing old boundaries and exploring concerns shared by many scholars and researchers in international circles in pursuit of social and cultural innovation in the governance of work and education and advancing wider social debate.

AbstractDiscussions about organizations and learning continue to attract critical interest. Since the emergence in the 1970s of the notion of the "learning organization," notions of systems' learning, knowledge management and lifelong learning have progressively entered into the debates. Earlier debates, which drew on education and psychology fields as well as organization and management studies, frequently explored plural objectives for learning occurring within organizational and workplace arenas. They included emphasis on workers' as well as managerial interests in various forms and objectives of learning. Latter debates on organizational learning appear predominantly shaped by a distinctive economic rationality and management interest. This article, from a sociological vantage point, reviews key thematic issues and critically explores some current questions in regard to organizations and learning. It proposes that a prevailing economic model in accordance with generalized policy objectives evident across the advanced economies for a neo‐liberalized "knowledge‐based economy" and "learning society" poses a particular set of contemporary issues and problems. The current juncture may, however, stimulate further innovation in models of learning organizations that widen agenda and prospects for learning.

Die Verfasserin verbindet kritische Forderungen nach besseren politischen und wirtschaftlichen Arbeitsbedingungen mit der Diskussion um Bürgertum und Effektivität. Ihrer Meinung nach legt der politische Diskurs der EU viel Gesicht auf Partizipation, lebenslanges Lernen und soziale Kohäsion. Diese recht attraktiven Zielsetzungen werden jedoch durch die gegenwärtigen Arbeitsmarktbedingungen konterkariert und durch eine Industriepolitik, die die Arbeiter unterdrückt und ihre volle Beteiligung als Bürger in zunehmend demokratischen Gesellschaften verhindert. Dabei können lebenslanges Lernen und Bildungsarbeit innovative Antworten auf die gegenwärtige Situation hervorbringen. Revitalisierte politische Bildung und eine EU-Politik für erweiterte Bildung und Ausbildung können eine Vision und praktische Wege zur effektiven Demokratisierung von Unternehmen und Gesellschaft eröffnen. (ICE).

Der Beitrag stellt Überlegungen zum Spannungsfeld Arbeit, Staatsbürgerschaft und Coporate Social Responisibility an. Nach einleitenden Anmerkungen zum Europäischen Sozialmodell und seinem Schlüsselkonzept von "welfare citizenship" widmet sich der Beitrag der Debatte zur Sozialen Staatsbürgerschaft. Der Beitrag setzt sich vor diesem Hintergrund anschließend mit den Entwicklungen in Richtung industrieller und organisationeller Demokratie auseinander und wirft einen Blick auf wissensbasierte Ökonomien, lernende Organisationen und der Unternehmensnachfrage. Hier geht der Beitrag auf Entwicklungen und Modelle ein und diskutiert Fragen der Partizipation. Eine gesonderte Betrachtung erfährt anschließend die Corporate Social Responsibility, bevor der Beitrag abschließend einige Antworten zu geben versucht, in deren Mittelpunkt die Staatsbürgerschaft als soziales Modell steht (ICA2).

A predominant economic and managerial discourse drives imperatives for a 'knowledge-based' economy, now widely espoused by economic leaders in much of the developed world. Demands for ever-modernizing ef.ciencies, production growth and competitive advantage encourage heightened emphasis on knowledge-rich production and innovation. They stimulate strategic managerial and organizational contingencies, labour market .exibility and deregulated markets, and weaken existing norms and processes in the social regulation of work. At the same time, political calls for a 'learning society' or a 'knowledge society' to accompany a knowledge-based economy gain much attention. They include demands for lifelong learning, for learning organizations and greater worker learning and skills development at work. This article critically examines the knowledge-based economy discourse and its formulation of worker and organizational learning. It argues that alternative conceptualizations of organizational learning that recognize workers' cultural and non-material demands may stimulate resources for culturally innovative practices. In particular, the article considers ways in which learning economy discourses may be strategically utilized by trade unions, worker educators and other workplace actors in a revitalization of the sociocultural regulation of work.

Bureaucracy is challenged and examined from almost all quarters in organizational analysis. As part of wide debate over postmodern cultural theorizations there is now much debate over the viability and retention of bureaucratic forms of organization. It is often argued that bureaucracies have been displaced by more rapid-response entrepreneurial and strategic configurations. Yet we can observe examples of bureaucracy that deliberately select, repress, discard or restore elements of bureaucratic norms and values. This article proposes that there is emergent evidence of a raft of new activities occurring in contemporary bureaucratic organizations, which challenge our conceptions of bureaucratic organization. The article draws attention to some unconventional practices, many of which involve the invocation of alternative sources of authority and legitimacy. It raises questions for the implications of an apparently counter-rational, counter-bureaucratic, re-enchantment impulse. The analytic, interpretive exploration of these questions draws bureaucratic organization back into society and social analysis.

This article critically examines primary processes and effects of the so-called "new organizational culture" that is organized on the principles and practices of Total Quality Management (and its variations) and increasingly practiced in corporate organizations in the 1990s. The paper specifically analyzes the effects of the organizational cultural practices of "family" and "team" on the employee and discusses their role in corporate discipline, integration, and control. Data are drawn from field research conducted in a large multinational corporation and the analyses and interpretive propositions are informed by a critical social psychoanalytic perspective. The paper disputes the conventional view that the practices of the "new culture" and its purported reform of the hierarchical, specialized, conflict-ridden workplaces of traditional industrial organizations "empower" employees and provide "meaningful" relationships in the workplace. It is argued, on the contrary, that these new "designer" cultural practices serve as processes of regulation, discipline, and control of employee subject selves.

This article argues that the new corporate culture currently being constructed in the corporate institution of work has wide social implications. The interplay of post-industrial technologies, new organizational practices and wider social influences is effecting changes in corporate production and culture. In particular, the integration of knowedge and work tasks and employee flexibility enabled by the `smart' technologies is generating new forms of work organization and blurring occupational boundaries. It is argued that the deliberate reconstruction of corporate culture deconstructs the culture of industrial workplaces as it simultaneously attempts to compensate for the loss of forms of social solidarity typical of industrialism. Industrial corporate culture is replaced with a designer., `simulated' culture that requires and produces a shift in employee identification and industrial solidarities. This empirically based interpretive essay discusses some of the social effects of the corporate reconstruction of culture and its displacement of a primary locus of industrial society's social solidarity. It proposes the emergence of a post-industrial, `post-occupational' social solidarity.