ABSTRACT
This chapter explores key features in an ongoing, systemically driven transformation of work, beginning with the Industrial Revolution. It is also important to note that the focus of these discussions is on formal employment, rather than the sphere of unpaid work. Unfolding initially in Britain from the 1780s to 1850s, industrialization is associated with what Polanyi has called a disembedding of production and the economy from society, with immense consequences for the organization and experience of work. Polanyi begins by observing that pre-market-based economic forms were embedded in traditional societies. The successes of Fordism and Taylorism were not total, but did much to extend economic disembedding across and beyond industrial production during the twentieth century. The chapter focuses on the economic system and the communities/social relationships in which this operates, and also explores how contemporary trends inform individual identities.
