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This book is an effort to make sense of work opportunity—as it was in the twentieth century and as it is today—and how it influences lives on and off the job. When we began writing the first edition of this book, we thought this would be a straightforward endeavor. First, we intended to discuss the “old economy” and the types of opportunities present when most of the labor force was employed in jobs critical to mass production industrial work. Then we were going to write about the emerging “new economy” and the ways new technologies, new organizations, new jobs, a new workforce, and globalization are transforming work. Our unique contribution would be to show the ways that current policies and practices, designed to correspond with needs in the old economy, fail to address the present-day concerns.

When we wrote the first edition, we spent well over a year blocking out chapters, going back into the research literature, writing chapter drafts, restructuring our arguments, and rewriting. With all of these efforts, we faced a recurring problem, namely, that our observations about the old economy kept intruding into what we wanted to say about the new economy, and vice versa. Our work in that first year would have been far easier if we had recognized then what was to become a central theme of this book: the old economy has not been replaced by a new economy; the old economy is operating within the new economy.

Once we understood the overlap of the old and new economies, we realized that our thesis would have to be modified, as would the structure of our project. The story of the old and new economies is one of common social forces that shape the development of work opportunity. Many features of the old economy, although sometimes in new forms, are central to the dynamics of the new. Our conclusion is that concerns facing workers today result from structural lags that have forestalled the implementation of effective responses to changes in the ways work is performed and from enduring failures to address the problems of inequality that developed in the old economy.

In the years that followed the publication of the first edition, the global economy tanked, and the housing bubble burst. Job insecurity expanded, homes were lost, and working families experienced compounded strains. But not everything that happened was bad. There were some important expansions in workers’ rights, such as increased opportunity to file discrimination suits and expanded opportunities for working women to breastfeed their children. There is now greater access to health care as well. But perhaps the biggest story, in respect to work and opportunity, concerns the reckless decisions made to serve the interests of those at the very top of the opportunity ladder and the consequences those decisions had on almost everyone else. The economic recovery left behind large numbers of working families, who continue to struggle to make ends meet and live in precarious conditions. And while the affluent have become ever richer, tax laws have been rewritten to further concentrate wealth at the top. The observations we presented in the previous editions remain largely the same, but we provide new and updated statistics, as well as reviews of scholarly research, that show how opportunity divides have continued to expand, rather than contract. It is abundantly clear that the new economy, even in the context of an economic recovery, is not working for everyone.

In the chapters that follow, our goals are to identify the contours of work and how they have changed over time, considering both short-term changes that may have occurred over the course of the preceding decades, as well as the longer-term development of modern ways of organizing work. Our analysis relies primarily on the research of sociologists, but also on that of labor historians, economists, and journalists. Our goal is not to offer comprehensive histories of work, or to detail the experiences of all groups in the workforce, but to document the processes that shape work opportunity and how opportunities have been divided in the United States along class, gender, and racial lines. To do this, we adopted a comparative perspective, placing our analysis of opportunity and policy in the United States alongside the somewhat different realities of work in Western Europe and elsewhere. We also compare the experience of workers laboring today with those laboring in the mid-twentieth century and earlier, and we explore the American workplace in the larger context of an integrated global economy and emerging global networks of trade.

Chapter 1, “Mapping the Contours of Work,” offers an introduction to the sociology of work and the unique contributions sociological analysis brings to the understanding of the changing economy. Our concern in this chapter is not so much to detail the nature of work in the new economy, or how changes in work have happened, but rather to indicate what needs to be examined if one is to understand work, society, and social change today. To do this, we outline observations sociologists have made about the ways culture, social structure, and agency shape the opportunity to work and the careers of workers. We introduce this chapter by describing the challenges faced by six workers laboring in the new economy. These individuals illuminate the diversity of workers’ experiences and how the transition to a new economy is affecting career prospects and introducing distinct strains into family lives.

Chapter 2, “New Products, New Ways of Working, and the New Economy,” considers the changing patterns of what is produced and how production occurs. In this chapter, we consider the implications of concerns such as deindustrialization, the rise of service sector employment, and changing organizational designs and technologies. The primary question we consider here is the extent to which the new economy differs from the old economy in respect to what is created and the labor processes and practices involved in production. This chapter is designed primarily to illuminate why we have concluded that the old economy operates within a new economy.

Chapter 3, “Economic Inequality, Social Mobility, and the New Economy,” examines the economic returns received from work and how work opportunity gives shape to the class structure of society. The analysis reveals sobering signs that economic transformations are contributing to a divided economy, one that sustains a two-tiered division between good jobs and bad jobs and one that is funneling substantial shares of the returns of work to a privileged elite. We also consider how the movement of “good jobs” from the United States affects the life chances of workers in emerging economies, as well as more peripheral areas of the global economy.

Chapter 4, “Whose Jobs Are Secure?” and Chapter 5, “A Fair Day’s Work? The Intensity and Scheduling of Jobs in the New Economy,” consider how security and time commitments to work have changed. We first show the ways work designs in the new economy are contributing to widening job insecurity. Our interest here is not just to detail the extent of risk present today, but also to show how social policies implemented in the old economy set workers up to bear the burden of risk, often at the expense of their families and careers. Chapter 5 extends this history of the present by examining trends in the time spent working and the intensity of work. Here, we discuss the question of why American workers are working more than they did in the past, more than workers in almost every other society, and in many instances, more than they want to. We also consider the implications of work in a 24/7 economy and the impact nonstandard schedules have on family lives.

Chapter 6, “Gender Chasms in the New Economy,” examines the issue of gender inequalities at work. We revisit the fundamental question of what constitutes work and why women’s contributions to society are commonly defined as something other than “real work” or not worthy of compensation commensurate to that received by men. We also consider the extent to which gender inequalities are disappearing in the new economy and detail why many inequalities persist. We conclude this chapter by examining the approach to handling care work in the United States, how it departs from the approaches used in Western Europe, and its impact on both the quality of care and women’s life chances.

Chapter 7, “Race, Ethnicity, and Work: Legacies of the Past, Problems in the Present,” examines the proposition that race might be of declining significance in the new economy. We show that racial inequalities persist but that there are important differences in the ways various minority groups have responded to, and are being treated in, the new economy. We also detail the dominant reasons why racial and ethnic inequalities exist today. Because race continues to be a major policy concern, we consider two of the most pressing debates: the controversies about affirmative action programs and the impact of immigration on opportunity structures.

Chapter 8, “Reshaping the Contours of the New Economy,” outlines what needs to change if work is to become a positive experience for all and how opportunities might be distributed more equitably in the new economy. Basing our recommendations on what has been done in other developed societies, we try to offer realistic goals that, if fulfilled, would enhance opportunity and life quality. We also acknowledge that the dehumanizing, unjust aspects of work in the new economy are unlikely to change by themselves and that positive steps must be taken to promote improvements. A variety of agents—including individuals, interest groups, unions, corporations, and government entities—will all need to play a role in reshaping work. In the end, we suggest that government intervention will be the key to bringing the expectations of employers in line with what should be expected of workers. Its level of engagement will hinge on the ability of individuals, activist groups, and unions to exert sufficient pressures.

Our hope is that this book will help readers to understand the origins of current problems confronting working people in the new economy. Beyond this, we hope this book will contribute to a much-needed dialogue about the strategies for liberating workers from poverty, from drudgery, from discrimination, from stress, and from exploitation.