ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the future of work, focusing on the advantages of each approach in understanding four types of issues: the role of the economic structure within society; the technical and organizational dimensions of work; the nature of working relationships, and the qualitative and experiential aspects of work within the industrial division of labour. The 1980s and 1990s was a period in which the rapid growth in state-funded employment during the 1960s and 1970s was checked and reversed. The main protagonists of the first narrative account are Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. These differences in both their own substantive analyses, and in the later interpretation of their work derive in part from the intellectual ancestry of the concepts they use. In his analysis of the capitalist labour process of the mid-nineteenth century, Marx identifies two aspects of the productive forces; the practical organization of work, and the economic relationships which constitute the labour process.
