The Culture of the New Capitalism / Edition 1

by Richard Sennett

Overview

A provocative and disturbing look at the ways new economic facts are shaping our personal and social values.
 
The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life—how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls the “specter of uselessness” haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving.
 
Reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies that Max Weber once called an “iron cage.” Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience. Sennett examines a more durable form of selfhood, and what practical initiatives could counter the pernicious effects of “reform.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300119923
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	01/31/2007
Series:	The Castle Lectures in Ethics, Politics, and Economics
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Richard Sennett teaches sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the London School of Economics. His publications include The Corrosion of Character and Respect in a World of Inequality.

Editorial Reviews

"A fairly successful economy does not produce much in the way of contentment. Are there seismic rumbles that might cause cracks on the surface? Richard Sennett thinks so. Read on."—Robert M. Solow, Institute Professor Emeritus, M.I.T.

Robert M. Solow

Reflective, studded with sharp insights, moving with grace between big ideas and specific cases. This is vintage Sennett.”—Douglas W. Rae, author of City:Urbanism and Its End

Douglas W. Rae