Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy

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."

About the Author :
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.

Review :
Crossing the Great Divide is an expos' of the downside of the risk in the new economy. Vicki Smith argues that 'temporariness and risk' have become intertwined with workers' expectations of opportunity and advancement, which were understood in the days of the old economy as the rewards for hard work or even dedication. - Gina Neff, Columbia University (Dissent) Each of the participants in Smith's four studies must cope with the contradictions faced by those whose jobs may be at risk but who also face new opportunities at the same time, and she explores how workers attempt to cross 'the great divide' and take advantage of the 'new economy.'. - David Rouse (Booklist) Providing a welcome change of direction... Vicki Smith's book argues convincingly that we should not take a romantic view of work in the age of mass production.... Her research has thrown up a plausible conclusion that today's booming US employment market with its 'turbulence, decentral-isation, variation, and unpredictability' offers many workers what they see as an opportunity... 'to invest themselves in their work.'. - Robert Taylor (Financial Times) Smith examines how different groups of workers acquire the skills, know-how, cultural and human capital, and mental aptitudes that might help them reap the benefits of the new economy. (Choice) There is a growing literature on globalization, employment restructuring, and the postindustrial workplace. Much of that work may already be obsolete, however, as recent evidence suggests that both the cynics and the optimists are wrong—or, at least, only partly right. Crossing the Great Divide is among the first books that tackle this complexity head on and, in the process, provides students and researchers with new ways to think about employment in the 21st century. - Amy S. Wharton, Washington State University (American Journal of Sociology)