The Transformations of Labour: Knowledge Work and the Legacies of the New Economy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The discourse accompanying political-economic restructuring toward an “information society” since the 1970s has been thick with utopian conjecture, hyperbole, and exaggeration. This talk of democratic workplaces free of hierarchy, collective investment on the part of workers in the destiny of their companies, and the disengagement of economic value from labouring bodies culminated during the delirium of the New Economy period. Five years later, as the debris of that economic model is carted away, critical studies of the flexible economy, the 1990s workplace, and the varieties of knowledge work, or immaterial labour, fuelling these, have begun to add to our understanding of those delirious times and their legacy. What was the structure of the “new” economy? What kinds of labour became dominant within it? How were linguistic, communicative, and affective qualities put to work, and to what processes is that labour currently subject? The books addressed here range from a macroanalysis of the New Economy and its close ties to deepening political and economic inequality (Henwood), to an examination of the restructuring of workplaces and the attempts to de-skill all levels of the knowledge worker hierarchy during the 1990s (Head), to a veritable anthropology of two new-media workplaces spanning the pinnacle and fall of the New Economy (Ross). After the New Economy is Doug Henwood’s third book. The editor and publisher of Left Business Observer and host of a widely followed critical radio show, Henwood has been following political-economic trends and theoretical debates
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".