Work and Leisure

Postmodern work and leisurePostmodern work and leisure 55Schor’s study is part of a growing wave of arguments which insist that globalisationand deregulation have fundamentally transformed the nature of thecapitalist labour market (see in particular: Lash and Urry 1987; Harvey 1989;Castells 1996, 1997, 1998; Gorz 1999; Beck 2000).These arguments are sometimes grouped together under the category ofpostmodernism. Incidentally, it should be noted that the term postmodernismis probably losing its cachet. If Western society has entered a new epoch,it has done so unevenly. Some economic sectors and social strata haveunquestionably adopted the mobile, flexible, global lifestyles posited bypostmodern authors as the new norm in the West. Others have not. Fullyblown postmodernists are rightly criticised for exaggeration and hyperboleand for not testing their propositions empirically. Nonetheless, the debatearound postmodernism has raised many pertinent issues and themes aboutidentity, power and lifestyle that traditional pluralists and radicals eitherignored or treated insensitively.Regarding the relationship between work and leisure, the main contextualchanges in the market identified by postmodernism are fourfold.The end of FordismAs discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume, Fordism is the method of industrialproduction introduced by Henry Ford to produce a standardised productthat would achieve mass consumption. The system extended the principles ofscientific management devised in the late nineteenth century by F. W. Taylor.It was capital-intensive, involved large-scale plant organised around an inflexibleproduction process with rigid, centralised, hierarchical chains of command.Semi-skilled labour was employed in repetitive, routine tasks. Productswere aimed at protected national markets and the labour process was highlyregulated through collective bargaining. The climax of Fordism was betweenthe late 1940s and early 1970s, when the system was extended to reconstructthe post-war economies of Europe and Japan, but it has gone into relativedecline in the West as a result of decentralisation and the rise of flexibleaccumulation and globalisation.The rise of flexible accumulationFlexible accumulation refers to the capacity of capital to switch investmentaccording to market initiatives. Its increasing economic significance is relatedto the globalisation of production and consumption. Globalisation hastransferred some of the capital intensive production that was once situated inthe capitalist core nations, into the peripheral nations of the world system. Inthe periphery, the labour market is relatively unregulated and the cost of the