The global context for workplace change.
It is frequently argued that the "changing shape of work", as Brown (1997) describes it, cannot be fully understood without being placed within the broader context of the reported changes in the nature of economic relations and production. These changes frame a new "problem" that nations, companies, and workers must respond to. .
Since the late 1970s, it is argued, the operation of the economies of most Western industrialised nations have displayed sufficient discontinuity with the period immediately preceding it, for us to need new ways to speak of this "epochal" change (Hall and Jacques, 1989), period of "historical disjuncture" (Hyman, 1990), sea-change in the surface appearance of capitalism" (Harvey, 1990: 189), or just "something dramatic" (Hirst and Zeitlin, 1991: 1). .
The period from the late 1940s to the beginning of the 1970s is described as a sort of "Golden Age" with high economic growth rates, rising personal incomes, and increasing standards of living. The translation into English of selections from Antonio Gramsci's prison notebooks (1971), led many Anglo-American commentators to draw on Gramsci's concept of "Fordism" (his description of American production processes in the middle part of the twentieth century) to name this earlier period and apply the term "post-Fordist" to its" successor. From the mid-1970s onwards, it has been argued, the institutions either supporting Fordism or characteristic of this mode of production and consumption apparently progressively broke down, were weakened or abolished. Both Offe (1996) and Lash and Urry (1987) typify this as a transition from "organised" to "disorganised capitalism" involving major changes in the social, cultural, economic and political characteristics of Western societies. Thus, the period since the 1970's is both "qualitatively and quantitatively different from that typical of most of the twentieth century.
