Our Modern Times: The New Nature of Capitalism in the Information Age
本书探讨信息革命如何改变个人生活、社会及资本主义未来，强调理解新技术需结合工作组织与消费社会的关系，并回顾20世纪大众消费主义及其对工作本质的影响。
How will the modern information revolution alter our personal lives and society? How will it affect the nature of work and managerial control within firms? What does it bode for the future of capitalism? Daniel Cohen tackles these questions and some others in this thought‐provoking monograph. Cohen argues, quite plausibly, that we cannot appreciate the full significance of a new technology without understanding its interactions with the organisation of work and its relationship with consumer society. To put this in a historical context, he reviews the twentieth century phenomena of mass consumerism, facilitated in part by the standardisation of production, and its implications for the nature of work. He asks, ‘How could a century in which humans were largely free of the oppression of famine and in which they received education and universal health care have conceived such a dehumanising environment as the assembly line?’ For him, ‘Taylorism was characterised by excluding from the very production process in which he or she was intended to be the main character’. He views the political events of 1968 as an inevitable reaction to the dehumanised state, when young people came to reject the world of their parents.