ABSTRACT
No one can doubt the significance of globalising processes for employment, workplaces and work over recent decades. This significance is often represented under the sign of the ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘post-industrial society’, where the role of information and knowledge is now given a greater economic significance than ever before. In many spaces around the globe, the nature of work and employment has been transformed over the last twenty to thirty years. One need only look at the industrialisation of China as it has opened its borders for trade, the commercialisation of parts of Kenya as it has responded to International Monetary Fund and World Bank conditions in relation to its debt and the deindustrialisation of large parts of the UK and USA due to declining competitiveness. There are many such examples, not all of which can be explained totally by globalisation processes, but to which the latter has certainly contributed in significant ways. As a result, traditional models of economic development and modernisation with their notions of stages which national economies have to undergo to become developed have been thrown into doubt. The economic order has become both global and more globally competitive and intense through the connections and interconnections which have now become possible. Thus the spaces of work, the types of work and the forms of connection both between workplaces and between workplaces and consumers/clients have become more complex and in many cases stretch across greater distances.
