Volume Introduction

The eighty-six articles that have been summarized for this volume present an in-terweaving of observation and theory that will be of use to the many people who are concerned about the topic of work and about its future in a time of rapid globalization and technical change. It is relevant to workers in general, including those who care about the evolution of unions; to people who are involved in a wide variety of work-related policy issues; and to journalists who write on allied subjects. It also has an important function for scholars. We expect this volume to be read and used in classes by labor economists, as well as by scholars in related fields who want an efficient means of surveying the writings that are most likely to lead toward new understandings of work in the twenty-first century. While the editors have come to this material primarily via the discipline of economics, we believe that students and scholars in such related fields as political theory, sociology, history, anthropology, and philosophy will find this a good introduction to what contemporary economics can contribute to an understanding of the changing nature and conditions of work. We also believe that economists have much to gain by exploring, in this format, the frontiers of their own field, along with some of the most relevant work from neighboring disciplines. The series, Frontier Issues in Economic Thought, has developed a unique format for providing access to the topics it covers. In this volume, for example, summaries of eighty-six articles, along with nine Overview Essays, tell an intriguing story about the forces affecting our working lives and the interrelations between production, labor organization, and technology. The editors of The Changing Nature of Work have taken pains to present this material in nontechnical language. We hope that this will make this volume widely accessible. At the same time, we believe that, in order to understand what is happening in the world, it is necessary to do more than look at the facts. Indeed, it is rarely possible to " look only at the facts " ; we understand what we see by supplying, from our mental models of the world, some kind of interpretation. The function of theory is to provide a framework for such interpretation. Hence many of the articles summarized here are theoretical, in the sense that they attempt to see the underlying patterns in accumulated …