ECONOMY and

WORK
Historical and Economic Changes
 Pre-Colonial United States: Hunting and Gathering Societies

• Some of the earliest forms of economy in the

Americans was in the Naïve American Societies.
• Hunting and gathering societies, had to be
highly mobile, relocating for food and weather
conditions. The division of labor revolved around
survival.
• Horticultural societies were based on
domestication of animals, farming and
generating a surplus of resources.
• They had more permanent settlements and a
greater diversification of labor.
The Agricultural Revolution:
• The social and economic changes,
including population increases, that
followed from the domestication of
plants and animals and the gradually
increasing efficiency of food production.
• Better farming and ranching techniques allowed larger groups
to thrive and remain in one location for longer periods of time.
• Food production was greatly increased by new innovations in
farming and animal husbandry, the invention of new types of
plows and mechanized seed spreaders and new techniques of
crop rotation, and selective breeding.
 The Industrial Revolution:
• The rapid transformation of social life resulting from the
technological and economic developments that began
with the assembly line, steam power, and urbanization
• The Industrial Revolution was a time of rapid
technological, social, and economic change that almost
completely transformed life in modern times.
• With more mechanized machinery such as the steam
engine and the cotton gin, the American economy
moved from manual labor to machine manufacturing.
The nineteenth century brought steam-powered ships
and railways, the internal combustion engine, electrical
power generation, and new tools and appliances.
• With the shift to a manufacturing economy,
vast numbers of people migrated into the cities
from rural areas in search of work. Not only
were working conditions changed but also the
lives of workers due to discoveries in science
and medicine, access to dependable food and
water sources, and labor protection laws
 The Information
Revolution:
• the recent social revolution made possible by the
development of the microchip in the 1970s, which
brought about vast improvements in the ability to
manage information
• The performance of microprocessors in capacity and
speed has continued to increase according to Moore's law
(doubling every eighteen months to two years).
• Other technologies associated with the Information
Revolution include computer networking, digital media,
satellite and cable broadcasting, and telecommunications.
• The Information Revolution brought a profound shift from
an economy based on the production of goods to one
based on the production of knowledge and services.
 INFORMATION
REVOLUTION
Knowledge Workers:
• those who work primarily with information
and who create value in the economy
through their ideas, judgments, analyses,
designs, or innovations
• Knowledge produce with their heads rather
than with their hands. Some examples of
knowledge work include advertising,
engineering, marketing, product
development, research, science, urban
planning, and web design.
VANESSA
 Service Workers:
• those whose work involves providing a service to
businesses or individual clients, customers, or
consumers rather than manufacturing goods
• Services may entail the distribution or sale of
goods from producer to consumer (wholesaling or
retailing) or transformation in the process of
delivering goods (the restaurant business), or no
goods at all (massage therapy).
• All service work has a focus on serving and
interacting with people. Service work can be
found in banking, consulting, education,
entertainment, health care, insurance,
investment, legal services, and tourism.
 ECONOMIC SYSTEM:
COMPARING CAPITALISM
and SOCIALISM
 Capitalism:
an economic system based on the laws of free market
competition, privatization of the means of production,
and production for profit In its purest form, values for
goods and services are derived solely by the market
relationship between supply and demand.
• Owners of the means of production, must employ
workers to make products or perform services to
generate a profit. Workers sell their labor to
capitalists for a wage.
• ** Under capitalism, workers must sell their labor to
capitalists for a wage.
• A capitalist economy encourages efficiency through
technological innovation, expansion of markets, and
reduction of production costs.
 Socialism:
an economic system based on the collective
ownership of the means of production, collective
distribution of goods and services, and
government regulation of the economy

• Under socialism, there are no private for-profit transactions. Socialism

seeks to meet the basic needs of all citizens rather than encouraging
profits for some individuals over others.
• In socialism, a central and usually highly bureaucratic government
regulates all aspects of the economy including ownership of resources
and means of production, regulation of lending policies, interest rates,
and currency values.
• In communism, the most extreme form of socialism, the government
owns everything and all citizens work for the government and are
considered equal, with no class distinctions.
• ** Under socialism, workers are not at risk of extreme poverty and class
division as they might be with in a capitalist society.
The Nature of Industrial and Post
Industrial Work
 INDUSTRIAL WORK
• Industrialization has changed how people work.

** The proletariat, or workers, in an industrial economy possess

only one thing of economic value, and that is their time, which
they sell to capitalists who own the means of production. (What
about their creative talent, experience, or skill?)

• Marx believed that workers were alienated from the product of

their labor, from their own productivity, from their fellow
workers, and from human nature.

** Workers feel no personal satisfaction in producing goods that

are owned and controlled by someone else.
** The worker under capitalism cannot feel the satisfaction of the
joy and fulfillment found in the process of production in pre-
capitalist societies.
 Work
• Social theorists of the Industrial Age, like Karl Marx,
could not have predicted how technological
innovation would transform work and the economy
or how available consumer credit would become.
• Workers can now buy things they can't currently
afford, materially improving their everyday lives.
• Service work, as the dominant form of employment
in the post industrial economy, often involves
direct contact with clients, customers, patients, or
students by those rendering the service.
• In service work, situations arise when the worker's
concerns, standards, and expectations conflict with
those of clients.
• At the same time, service workers are also subject
SHARLENE
 Post-Industrial Knowledge Work

• Intellectual or information work is

increasingly common while manual labor is
increasingly rare.
• While many technologies purport to increase
productivity and save time, the average
workers are working more hours in a week
than their pre- Information Age
predecessors.
• Another important feature of the Information Age
is a greatly diminished importance of place. More
and more workers are telecommuting. They stay
at home rather than commute to the office.
• Benefits for workers include flexible work
schedules, fewer traffic delays, parking problems,
and less time wasted commuting. Businesses get
increased productivity and fewer sick days.
• However, there is still much debate about the
positives and negatives of telecommuting.
Employees must demonstrate their
accomplishments more concretely and
brainstorming requires face-to-face interaction.
 Individual and Collective Resistance Strategies: How Workers Cope

Resistance strategies: ways that workers express

discontent with their working conditions and try to
reclaim control of their labor
 Individual Resistance
• Bureaucratic organizations are found in almost every
sector of the economy. Weber highlighted the rational,
impersonal, and coldly efficient nature of this form of
social organization.
• Employees often feel the lack of autonomy in their
everyday work lives since they are often under different
types of surveillance or their customer interactions are
scripted.
• Workers may try to regain some control of their
environment by placing pictures of their family on their
desk, adding a potted plant to their work space, or
putting their own spin on the scripts they follow.
Collective Resistance
Strategies: Unions
• A union benefits workers in various ways and serves
to counterbalance the power of employers. It is an
association of workers who come together to improve
their economic status and working conditions.
• Unionized workers may threaten to stage a
temporary walkout or strike to express their
grievances and force management to negotiate.
• Unions have a long history in the US and were
influential in passing child labor laws, establishing an
eight- hour work day and a five-day work week, and
in increasing workplace safety.
• Some states have "right-to-work" laws that prohibit
workplaces from making union membership a
CARLA JEAN
 Globalization, Economics and Works
• Globalization: the cultural and economics changes
resulting from dramatically increased international
trade and exchange in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries.
• International trade
o Shallow integration: the flow of goods and services that characterized
international trade until several decades ago.
o Deep integration: companies that are multi-national with major decision-
making, production and/or distribution branches of a particular company spread
all over the world.
• Transnational Corporation: firms that purposefully
transcend national borders so that their products can
be manufactured, distributed, marketed, and sold from
basis all over the world. (Coca Cola, General Electric)
• Global SweatShops: a workplace where workers are
subject to extreme exploitation, including below-
standard wages, long hours, and poor working
conditions, that may post health or safety hazards.
• Outsourcing: “contracting out” or transferring to
another country the labor that a company might
otherwise have employed its own staff to perform;
typically done for financial reasons
 ALTERNATE WAYS OF
WORKING
• Professional Socialization in Unusual
Fields
Anyone in a new position confronts an unfamiliar set of
expectations and 1 workplace norms that must be learned
so the new person can fit into the environment. This is
referred to as professional socialization.
This may be especially difficult in an unusual field such
as mortuary science, working on an Alaskan fishing boat,
or exotic dancing.
 The Contingent Workforce:
Temps, Freelancers, and Independent Contractors

• Jobs that provides a 40-hour work week with vacations,

health and retirement benefits are becoming
increasingly rare.
• During the last couple of decades, contingent work has
become an alternative to long-term, full-time
employment and has grown three times faster than
traditional jobs.
 The Third Sector and
Volunteerism
• Many organizations engage in social welfare, social
justice, and/or environmental services. Typically these
are churches, schools, hospitals, philanthropic
foundations, art institutions, scientific research
centers, and a multitude of other organizations, both
permanent and temporary.
• They are private, rather than the government,
organizations and are devoted to serving the general
welfare, not their own financial interests.