ABSTRACT
Standard economic models of work pluck it out of culture and history to make it placeless and timeless. Culture permeates work in beliefs concerning which organizations of work are feasible, effective, and/or desirable; classifications of work as good or bad; grading of work’s products; expectations about proper behavior of bosses and subordinates; standards of proper rewards for effort; and much more. Even worker-friendly, anti-determinist accounts of industrial organization commonly suppose that managers design organizations from scratch within constraints set by existing technologies. The literature on job change itself—radical, conservative, and noncommittal alike—emits an astonishingly determinist tone, suggesting that technology pursues an inexorable logic which managers and workers can do no more than resist, subvert, mitigate, or adapt to. Changes in the organization of capital such as the spread of joint-stock companies and the expansion of credit likewise had fundamental, if indirect, effects on the character of work.
