The New Spirit of Capitalism

A major study of the organization of contemporary capitalism—already a classic.

This major new work examines the structure of capitalism and how it has been reorganized since the 1960s. Via an unprecedented examination of management texts the authors find that employers are using the language of 1968 counterculture to drive through new work practices and more successful and subtle forms of exploitation. They argue that from the middle of the 1970s onwards, capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist work structure and developed a network-based form of organization that was founded on employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace—a 'freedom' that came at the cost of material and psychological security. In a work that is already a paradigm-shifting classic, Boltanski and Chiapello show how the new spirit triumphed thanks to a remarkable recuperation of the Left's critique of the alienation of everyday life. This epoch-defining work is as important and as sweeping in scope as Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism and Hardt and Negri's Empire.