ABSTRACT

The rhetoric of public discourse has been focused on recovery from recession, 'getting the economy moving' and creating a new 'enterprise culture' to replace state controls and supposed inefficiency. The question arises, as to how well these attempts at engineered social change have coped with the renewed segmentation by gender and race which have flowed from economic re-organization. The salience of gender and race have in particular broadened our perspectives and added to our analytical repertoire. Age and the importance of locale are other examples of this growing sophistication. Rather, 'the enterprise culture' is best regarded as a construct which has served to rationalize and thereby sustain political values of individualism, personal autonomy and supposed freedom from corporatist control. As firms radically restructured to survive, they dramatically altered the labour process and the form in which work would be available. 'Flexible', part-time labour grew at the expense of more stable, full-time employment.