Occupations, Professions, and Work

For decades, the idea that more education will lead to greater individual and national prosperity has been a cornerstone of developed economies. Indeed, it is almost universally believed that college diplomas give Americans and Europeans a competitive advantage in the global knowledge wars. Challenging this conventional wisdom, this book forces us to reconsider our deeply held and mistaken views about how the global economy really works and how to thrive in it. Drawing on cutting-edge research based on a major international study, the chapters show that the competition for good, middle-class jobs is now a worldwide competition—an auction for cut-priced brainpower—fueled by an explosion of higher education across the world. They highlight a fundamental power shift in favor of corporate bosses and emerging economies such as China and India, a change that is driving the new global high-skill, low-wage workforce. Fighting for a dwindling supply of good jobs will compel the middle classes to devote more time, money, and effort to set themselves apart in a bare-knuckle competition that will leave many disappointed. The chapters urges a new conversation about the kind of society we want to live in and about the kind of global economy that can benefit workers, but without condemning millions in emerging economies to a life of poverty. The book is a radical rethinking of the ideas that stand at the heart of the American Dream. It offers an expose of the realities of the global struggle for middle class jobs, a competition that threatens the livelihoods of millions of American and European workers and their families.

This book is the culmination of research over a period of 25 years. It highlights the relation between the rocks from which India's great capital city is constructed and the people who sacrifice to turn them into a useful form. The result is an interesting account of the lifeworld of some of the poorest and most forgotten people: the stone quarry workers. The book describes the material conditions of their poverty and exploitation as well as their aspirations and poetic expressions. It is a major contribution to the anthropology of labour in the informal sector of a globalized Indian economy and society. In producing a field study of a labour settlement barely thirty kilometres from the heart of Delhi, the urban mainstream society gets to see a world that lies beyond its boundaries. The workers are in themselves fragmentary and fortuitously organized around the themes of class and labour, who represent their consciousness by means of protest and conformity. Despite the workers' varying accounts of their personal lives, the narrative constructs labour in relation to wider society. Labour is intertwined with society in relations of necessity, contingency, reflexivity, and expediency.