Skilled workers historically have been ambivalent toward automation, knowing that the bodies it would augment or replace were theoccasion for both their pain and their power.

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

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.

I've lived in a preindustrial (rural Argentina) as well as an industrial world. You experience a different sense of time in a community that works the land. Human relationships aren't professionalized or contractualized; family and friends take primacy. Life has much more continuity than discontinuity. There's a great deal of poetry in everyday life.

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.

Authority is the spiritual dimension of power because it depends upon faith in a system of meaning that decrees the necessity of the hierarchical order and so provides for the unity of imperative control.

If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamicsthat present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.