Book review: Angela Lait, Telling Tales: Work, Narrative and Identity in a Market Age

Abstract

Angela Lait Telling Tales: Work, Narrative and Identity in a Market Age Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, £65 hbk, (ISBN: 9780719085222), 224 pp. The core argument in Telling Tales is that middle-class professional public servants face a fundamental conflict: market culture is incompatible with the public sector service ethos through which much of their satisfaction of work is derived. Telling Tales contributes a literary critique of late-capitalist writing to the debates around the impact of work alienation on individual well-being.