Introduction: Work and Employment in the 1990s

Abstract

This is a book about work. Thus it is about those activities which are ‘central to our material existence, to our place in the world and in fact to every aspect of human life’ as Sheila Allen puts it in Chapter 3. In a world in which the changing patterns of employment in Europe and beyond, and the continuing recalcitrant high levels of unemployment, are matters of everyday comment by politicians, in the media and elsewhere, it may seem unnecessary to make this point. Yet among sociologists the study of work and employment has become much less fashionable than it was twenty to thirty years ago. Consumption (admittedly previously greatly neglected) is claimed to be more important than production as a source of identity. Questions of cultural change, or the ways in which the social world is constituted through discourse, are seen as more interesting than the operation of labour markets or the nature of the labour process. However, the availability of opportunities for employment, and the conditions under which people are employed, still have more impact on most individuals’ life chances than many other more fashionable concerns.