An intriguing consideration of this bewildering “liminal in-between time in the history of work.”
An entrepreneur and business consultant shows how the world of work is being remade—and so rapidly that in some respects it’s unrecognizable.
Even before the pandemic, Hobsbawm observes, transformational shifts were occurring in three areas that had implications for intellectual and office work: politics, “specifically the issues of inequality and sustainability”; society, with the largest cohort of workers being Generation Z but mingling generations on either side; and technology, with a shift to what’s called the metaverse, “where virtual reality becomes far more real in our lives than we ever thought possible.” The pandemic accelerated the recognition that people didn’t need to work in an office on a regular schedule, and that in turn sped up the “increasing backlash against work”—work, that is, that did not have a clear purpose and wasn’t life-enhancing in some way. As Hobsbawm observes, such work is generally simple, at least in its conception: We’re going to fix this problem; we’re going to build this. Yet offices have grown complex, mostly due to the proliferation of complexity-making middle managers who aren’t needed in a world of remote work, wherein “much management energy will need to go into fresh challenges: scheduling hybrid working, reframing the measuring of performance.” In this matter, writes the author, corporations must reframe both their approaches to human resources, returning the “human” to the equation, and their relationships with their employee: “The onus should be less on the employee having their performance evaluated and more about the organization being asked: how are we performing for you?” There may be institutional resistance to such changes, but, Hobsbawm warns, the genie is out of the bottle. Those Gen Z and millennial workers simply aren’t going to show up to places that treat them like cogs in an outdated machine.
An intriguing consideration of this bewildering “liminal in-between time in the history of work.”Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-541-70193-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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