The Last Good Job in America: Work and Education in the New Global Technoculture / Edition 1

by Stanley Aronwitz

Overview

Money, jobs, careers, training—all are topics often overheard in the conversation of middle-class Americans. One of the nation's leading critics of education, the world of work, and the labor movement, Stanley Aronowitz shows how new technologies, labor, and education all are deeply intertwined in our culture and everyday lives. This book reflects Aronowitz's thinking at a time when globalization has brought these connections to broad public attention.

Aronowitz argues for the decline of "the job" as the backbone, along with family, of American society. Despite high employment, low wages and job insecurity leave many families at or below the poverty line. The career instability previously experienced mostly by blue-collar workers has spread to middle managers and high-level executives caught in the rapid movement of capital and technologies. In light of these facts, Aronowitz argues for a new social contract between employers and workers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780742509757
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	08/27/2001
Series:	Critical Perspectives Series: A Book Series Dedicated to Paulo Freire
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.22(w) x 9.26(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

The Nation has described Stanley Aronowitz as "a larger-than-life" figure who has vigorously defended American labor through his public speeches, organizing, and academic writings. He lives in Manhattan, where he is distinguished professor of sociology and cultural studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Part 1 Accelerated Lives Chapter 2 No Time for Democracy? Time, Space, and Social Change Chapter 3 The Last Good Job in America Chapter 4 The End of Bohemia Part 5 Education and Democracy Chapter 6 Thinking Beyond "School Failure:" Freire's Legacy Chapter 7 Violence and the Myth of Democracy Chapter 8 Higher Education as a Public Good Chapter 9 Education for Citizenship: Gramsci's "Common School" today Part 10 Culture, Identity, and Democracy Chapter 11 The Double Bind of Race Chapter 12 Race Relations in the Twenty-First Century Chapter 13 Between Nationality and Class Part 14 Changing Theories of the State Chapter 15 Globalization and the State Chapter 16 Capitalism and the State: Marcuse's Legacy Chapter 17 Onto-history and Epistemology Part 18 Jobs in a Globalized Technoculture Chapter 19 On Union Democracy Chapter 20 Unions as a Public Sphere Chapter 21 "New Men of Power:" The Lost Legacy of C. Wright Mills

Editorial Reviews

A hearty omnivore of knowledge, Aronowitz can barely be matched in the craft of opinion-making. In these essays he is at his very best, offering a range of political commentary that gives you the big picture without sacrificing analytic detail.

Andrew Ross

The recognition that contemporary neo-liberal technoculture is beset with a plethora of severe social, economic, and moral problems is, in itself, no profound revelation. In The Last Good Job in America, however, Stanley Aronowitz addresses these issues with extraordinary urgency, clarity, and intellectual depth. For those holding a somewhat different vision of social utopia from that propelling neo-liberal technoculture, then, this veritable tour-de-force offers significant hope, moral inspiration, and political encouragement. Indeed, The Last Good Job in America affords labor and academics with a strategic blueprint to create a more equitable and just society.

Journal Of Educational Thought(Jet)

Even those of us who do not think of Aronowitz as one of our own, however, have much to learn from books like The Last Good Job in America. The book covers an astonishingly broad territory. Aronowitz's pessimism is pervasive, brilliantly articulated, and anything but vague.

Industrial and Labor Relations Review

The Last Good Job in America provides a wake up call for those who believe that class is either an outdated category or who want to define it through the narrow prism of rigid orthodoxies. Stanley Aronowitz both rescues class from these pitfalls and offers one of the most expansive, insightful, and complex renderings of its significance for rethinking the meaning of a revitalized democracy. Not only does Aronowitz engage the history of class as a conceptual and political category, he also constructs a brilliant analysis of how class is lived through a wide range of social relations and institutions. This is a profoundly important book that offers a new language and interdisciplinary approach to appropriating class as part of a wider effort to challenge the so called irreversible logic of global capitalism while reclaiming the promise of democracy as a site of struggle and possibility.

Henry A. Giroux

This book makes a clearly defined contribution...

Contemporary Sociology

The recognition that contemporary neo-liberal technoculture is beset with a plethora of severe social, economic, and moral problems is, in itself, no profound revelation. In The Last Good Job in America, however, Stanley Aronowitz addresses these issues with extraordinary urgency, clarity, and intellectual depth. For those holding a somewhat different vision of social utopia from that propelling neo-liberal technoculture, then, this veritable tour-de-force offers significant hope, moral inspiration, and political encouragement. Indeed, The Last Good Job in America affords labor and academics with a strategic blueprint to create a more equitable and just society.

Journal of Educational Thought(Jet)