New Work Order

Management today keeps talking up the "new work order," a vocabulary of shared decision-making, staff empowerment, and team leadership. Its supporters say it will make jobs more fulfilling, value difference more fully, and spread knowledge more evenly through the organization. James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear examine that promise and argue that the new workplace is producing widening gaps between people, between countries, and between continents.

The authors also look closely at the partnerships forming between companies, educators, and psychologists. They suggest these alliances may serve a hidden capitalist purpose, one that aims to keep existing power arrangements intact rather than build a genuinely different way of organizing work. The book is a provocative look at global capitalism in the information age and at how it shapes language, literacy, learning, and people's chances in life.

It is written for students of education, business, sociology, sociolinguistics, and communication studies.