Introduction
This book first took shape in my mind as little more than a study of occupational shifts in the United States. I was interested in the structure of the working class, and the manner in which it had changed. That portion of the population employed in manufacturing and associated industries—the so-called industrial working class—had apparently been shrinking for some time, if not in absolute numbers at any rate in relative terms. Since the details of this process, especially its historical turning points and the shape of the new employment that was taking the place of the old, were not clear to me, I undertook to find out more about them. And since, as I soon discovered, these things had not yet been clarified in any comprehensive fashion, I decided that there was a need for a more substantial historical description and analysis of the process of occupational change than had yet been presented in print.
The more I read in the formal and informal literature of occupations, the more I became aware of a contradiction that marks much of the current writing in this area. On the one hand, it is emphasized that modern work, as a result of the scientific-technical revolution and “automation," requires ever higher levels of education, training, the greater exercise of intelligence and mental effort in general. At the same time, a mounting dissatisfaction with the conditions of industrial and office labor appears to contradict this view. For it is also saidsometimes even by the same people who at other times support the first viewthat work has become increasingly subdivided into petty operations that fail to sustain the interest or engage the capacities of humans with current levels of education; that these petty operations demand ever less skill and training; and that the modern trend of work by its “mindlessness" and “bureaucratization" is “alienating” ever larger sections of the working population. As generalizations, these two views cannot easily be harmonized. On the other hand, I was not able to find in the vast literature any attempt to reconcile them by careful specification of the manner in which various occupations have evolved, perhaps in contrast to one another.
Thus my interests began to broaden to include the evolution of labor processes within occupations as well as the shifts of labor among occupations. And as both these varieties of change became gradually clearer in my mind, I was led into the search for the causes, the dynamic underlying the incessant transformation of work in the modern era. In particular, this led me to include in my investigation the evolution of management as well as of technology, of the modern corporation as well as of changes in social life. Before long I found
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