Overview

The twenty-first century workplace compels Americans to be more flexible, often at a cost to their personal well-being. In The Disrupted Workplace, Benjamin Snyder examines how three groups of American workers construct moral order in a capitalist system that demands flexibility. Snyder argues that new scheduling techniques, employment strategies, and technologies disrupt the flow and trajectory of working life, transforming how workers experience time. Work can feel both liberating and terrorizing, engrossing in the short term but unsustainable in the long term. Through a vivid portrait of workers' struggles to adapt their lives to constant disruption, The Disrupted Workplace mounts a compelling critique of the price of the flexible economy.

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9780190203498

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Reviews

The Disrupted Workplace is a disturbing tour de force! Across diverse occupations, Snyder shows how we get absorbed in insane work patterns that render us insensitive to mounting insecurity and inequality - until it's too late. This book sends the sociology of work into a new orbit. --Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley This thought-provoking book wrestles with the concept of time that must be revised in the context of today's global flexible capitalism, in which our labour concepts are unfit for purpose. We need a new politics of time, and Snyder's book is an important first step in that endeavour. --Guy Standing, author of The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class Contemporary work has a distinct feel to it, an arrhythmic quality that amounts to a subtle but profound shift in human experience. Like the best sort of phenomenology, The Disrupted Workplace parses the logic of experience, and in doing so renders that experience more accessible to us. Such a clarification is indispensable for anyone who would critique contemporary capitalism, or imagine better ways of arranging work. Very few works of social science manage to establish such a revelatory connection between social analysis and the first person perspective, as Snyder has done. --Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

The Disrupted Workplace is a disturbing tour de force! Across diverse occupations, Snyder shows how we get absorbed in insane work patterns that render us insensitive to mounting insecurity and inequality - until it's too late. This book sends the sociology of work into a new orbit. --Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley This thought-provoking book wrestles with the concept of time that must be revised in the context of today's global flexible capitalism, in which our labour concepts are unfit for purpose. We need a new politics of time, and Snyder's book is an important first step in that endeavour. --Guy Standing, author of The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class Contemporary work has a distinct feel to it, an arrhythmic quality that amounts to a subtle but profound shift in human experience. Like the best sort of phenomenology, The Disrupted Workplace parses the logic of experience, and in doing so renders that experience more accessible to us. Such a clarification is indispensable for anyone who would critique contemporary capitalism, or imagine better ways of arranging work. Very few works of social science manage to establish such a revelatory connection between social analysis and the first person perspective, as Snyder has done. --Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work Snyder is interested in studying the history of the flexible workplace, the most common one since the 1970s, where improvisation is preferred over planning. Snyder summarizes the history and calls attention to the effects of this flexible capitalism on workers, production, and society. He also tries to understand the relationship of the workplace as experienced by workers and the moral order in each workplace. The details he provides help readers understand the impact of work on the rest of their lives. Snyder analyzes the effect of disruption, which he sees as a cultural straightjacket. He advocates sustainability, not anti-disruption, and this work helps readers understand important elements of todays workplace. Recommended. --Choice Through its examination of the micro-level consequences of large-scale economic forces, The Disrupted Workplace will spark readers' imaginations by shedding new light on the pleasures and costs of flexible capitalism. --British Journal of Sociology

Author Information

Benjamin H. Snyder is Lecturer in Sociology & Social Policy at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

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