The Politics of Work in an Enterprise Culture: Technology Networks and the Revival of the Inner Cities

Abstract

Although the more recent writings on sustainable development in urban areas have tackled the question of work without lapsing into reveries of medieval contentment, the visualization of the worker's place in a green or a socialist economy remains one fraught with difficulties.' As both the left and the green movement have wrestled with the shifts in the economy from a manufacturing to a service-based economy, the issues have been how best to modernize, how to manage technology, how to deal with the structures surviving from the earlier economic age, and how to foster development.2 Many of the futures envisaged by socialists and green theorists, influenced by William Morris, suggest a resurgence of earlier traditions which privileged specific forms of work in which the worker enjoyed a great degree of autonomy. For instance, Andre Gorz, arguing that a 'post-industrial' age requires new forms of socialism which can accommodate the absence of an industrial working class, quotes, with approval, Rudolf Bahro's The Alternative in Eastern Europe: