The civilizing process has increased the distance between behavior and the impulse life of the animal body.

We know how to punish retailers and manufacturers that don't provide quality and value. But we're lousy at fighting effectively for what we really need - reliable insurance policies; affordable health care; safe, healthy food.

As information technology restructures the work situation, it abstracts thought from action.

Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

Earlier generations of machines decreased the complexity of tasks. In contrast, information technologies can increase the intellectual content of work at all levels. Work comes to depend on an ability to understand, respond to, manage, and create value from information.

The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker's body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers' intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.

Computerization brings about an essential change in the way the worker can know the world and, with it, a crisis of confidence inthe possibility of certain knowledge.