ABSTRACT
The mythology of the new economy communicates various messages about employment and labour. Essentially, setting aside the minority of high-tech jobs already discussed earlier, it propagates a notion of full employment impelled by the growth in services. This growth is, in turn, the result of the general prosperity that is itself produced by the diffusion of ICTs, and it requires labour to be as flexible and mobile as possible, particularly in connection with the extraordinary innovative power of the new technologies. These two notions – growth in services and labour flexibility – are linked in more than one way. First, the new growth cannot, according to its own discourse, guarantee full employment without labour flexibility and mobility. Second, as we shall see, in the Anglo-Saxon model that serves as a reference point, the dualism of service jobs is organised around the dualism of the flexible organisation, However, we shall also see that there is nothing inevitable about this: there are examples in the here and now of alternative, non-dualistic models in which the development of the service sector can be seen to go hand in hand with a high level of organisational flexibility.
