The 1990s were years of turmoil and transformation in American work experiences and employment relationships. Trends including the growth of contingent labor, the erosion of the stable employment contract, the restructuring of jobs and companies, and the emergence of opportunity-enhancing employee participation programs reconfigured occupations, career paths, and labor market opportunities. Vicki Smith analyzes this shift, asking how workers navigated their way across the divide between bad jobs and good jobs, between jobs organized hierarchically and jobs requiring greater worker involvement, and between temporary and stable work.
Crossing the Great Divide uses original case study data from four diverse organizational settings around the country. Smith compares the situations of nonunionized, white-collar workers at a photocopy service firm; unionized blue-collar workers in a wood-products processing factory; temporary assemblers and clerical workers in a high-tech firm; and unemployed managers, technical workers, and professionals participating in a job search club.
The very different experiences revealed in Crossing the Great Divide highlight the way diverse new relationships between companies and their employees play out in workplaces, where new forms of work organization simultaneously create opportunity, instability, and risk for workers. Smith's goal is to construct a new framework of employment that accommodates the unpredictability and turbulence of the 21st century, but that is also "characterized at its core by attachment, reward, protection, commitment, and dignity."
Vicki Smith is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Managing in the Corporate Interest: Control and Resistance in an American Bank.
What People are Saying About This
Ruth Milkman
In Crossing the Great Divide, Vicki Smith documents the resignation of workers to a corporate-controlled economic order in which they are inherently disposable commodities. At the same time as she uncovers a lack of solidaristic social movements and other alternatives that challenge the status quo, Smith depicts the almost desperate desire of workers to find meaning and hope in the workplace. Fascinating and beautifully written, I can't think of another book like this. —(Ruth Milkman, University of California, Los Angeles)
Ruth Milkman
In Crossing the Great Divide, Vicki Smith documents the resignation of workers to a corporate-controlled economic order in which they are inherently disposable commodities. At the same time as she uncovers a lack of solidaristic social movements and other alternatives that challenge the status quo, Smith depicts the almost desperate desire of workers to find meaning and hope in the workplace. Fascinating and beautifully written, I can't think of another book like this.
Contemporary Sociology - Beth A. Rubin
I am glad to include this book alongside the other recent accounts of the variety of work experiences in the new country. Similarly, I will undoubtedly point my students to this book for rich description of some of the felt consequences of working in the new economy.
Arne L. Kalleberg
Crossing the Great Divide provides a textured understanding of workers' diverse responses to work reorganization in the New Economy. The case studies presented in this book illustrate vividly how risk, uncertainty and opportunity interact to shape workers' enduring connections to employment institutions in contemporary U.S. society. —(Arne L. Kalleberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Stephen R. Barley
The changing nature of employment relations in the United States in the late twentieth century is not only a topic of considerable importance in industrial relations, organization studies, and economics; it is a topic that concerns the average American as well. With its original approach and engaging prose, Crossing the Great Divide will prove to be one of the most important books ever written on the subject.
