Comments on: Books About Work

By: Jeff Sallaz

Jeff Sallaz — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:23:15 +0000

I always teach Fast Food, Fast Talk by Robin Leidner. It discusses the technical and ethical dilemmas of applying Taylorist principles to service encounters. She herself worked at McDonalds and as door-to-door salesperson for the research.

Rivethead by Ben Hamper is a great first-person, non-academic account of life on the auto assembly line.

By: srp

srp — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:02:00 +0000

American Steel by Richard Preston, about Nucor and its pioneering plate-casting plant, gives a good feel for what life is like for “hot-metal” men.

Crime as Work by Peter Letkemann–1960s armed robbers, burglars, and safecrackers describe their work lives.

The Stars are not Enough,by Joseph Hermanowicz on the careers of physicists, based on in-depth interviews with 60 subjects.

Bringing the Heat by Mark Bowden–the work lives of professional football players.

The Silicon Eye by George Gilder on a startup trying to develop a revolutionary imaging technology.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder on the product-development team for a 1970s minicomputer at Data General.

By: brayden

brayden — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:06:42 +0000

Robert Jackall’s Moral Mazes is a good read. The theme of his book resonates with the MacIntyre book, although in the end Jackall is more critical of the moral quandary that corporations create for managers than MacIntyre would appear to be.

By: REW

REW — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:18:17 +0000

_Working_ by Studs Terkel

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:21:05 +0000

Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener

James Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat”

By: MT

MT — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:55:01 +0000

Reading about work is still better than working…

By: Andre Sammartino

Andre Sammartino — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 07:50:13 +0000

The novels of David Lodge give a reasonable insight into the world of academic work (well, the politics and personality aspects of university departments any way).