The Culture of the New Capitalism

A provocative and disturbing look at the ways new economic facts are shaping our personal and social values. The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place.He shows how these changes affect everyday life-how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls the “specter of uselessness” haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving. Reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies that Max Weber once called an “iron cage.” Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and