Abstract
The global information society is fundamentally changing many aspects of modern life. One of the areas undergoing the most dramatic change is employment. Important shifts are occurring in the effects of information technologies on production, newly emerging occupational structures, structural unemployment, and so on (Krueger, 1993). Technology changes how we labour. As important as these issues are, there is also a broader question, namely, the implications of this information society for work itself. Here, I am distinguishing labour from work: by labour I mean the conditions under which we act on and with the material world, whereas work means not just what we do to survive, but what we make and create in order to live as humans1. I am addressing the question: what does work mean as a social category: for society as a whole, as an entitlement to economic resources, for the self, and the constitution of identity? My claim is, the consequence of information technology is not merely that we are labouring differently, but rather, the meaning of work is changing. This paper addresses and reflects on some of the implications for labour and work of an information society.
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Keywords
- Information Society
- Employment Relation
- Structural Unemployment
- Wesley Publishing Company
- Radical Political Economy
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Bishop, L. (1997). The global information society: Some reflections on labour and work. In: Berleur, J., Whitehouse, D. (eds) An Ethical Global Information Society. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35327-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35327-2_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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