1. Fundamental Questions about Knowledge Work from the Perspective of Humanities Scholars, and Vice Versa (A Starter Set)

• Supplementary Resources for Class
• Other Works Mentioned in Class ( = especially recommended)
  • Additional Business Literature
    • Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1985)
    • Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1993)
  • General Resources on Knowledge Work
    • Fritz Machlup
      1. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962)
      2. Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution, and Economic Significance, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton U. Press)
      • I. Knowledge and Knowledge Production (1980)
      • II. The Branches of Learning (1982)
    • Martin Ryder, (U. Colorado, Denver), Sociology of Knowledge Page
  • Theory of the Mid-20th-Century "White Collar" Class
    • Jürgen Kocka, White Collar Workers in America, 1890-1940: A Social-Political History in International Perspective, trans. Maura Kealey (London: SAGE, 1980)
    • C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951)
    • Richard Sobel, White Collar Working Class: From Structure to Politics (New York: Praeger, 1989) (on the developing "proletarianization" of white collars)
  • Theory of the "New Class"
    • Palinurus page on "Professional / Managerial / Technical 'New Class'" (Alan Liu)
    • Daniel Bell, "The New Class: A Muddled Concept," Society (Jan.-Feb. 1979)
    • Val Burns
      • "Class Structure and Political Ideology," Insurgent Sociologist 14, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 5-46
      • "The Discovery of the New Middle Class," Theory and Society 15, no. 3 (1986): 317-49
    • Guglielmo Carchedi, "Class Politics, Class Consciousness, and the New Middle Class," Insurgent Sociologist 14, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 111-30
    • Barbara and John Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class," Radical America, Part 1, 11 (March-April 1977): 7-31; Part 2, 11 (May-June 1977): 7-22
    • Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1989)
    • Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era (New York: Seabury, 1979)
      • An online synopsis (Society of Social Research Page, U. Chicago)
    • Andrew Ross, "Defenders of the Faith and the New Class," in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 209-32
    • Erik Olin Wright
      • Classes (London: Verso, 1985)
      • Erik Olin Wright et al., The Debate on Classes (London: Verso, 1989)
  • Theory of "Professionals"
    • Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976)
    • Philip Elliott, The Sociology of the Professions (New York: Herdern and Herder, 1972)
    • Eliot Freidson, Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1986)
    • W.J. Reader, Professional Men: The Rise of the Professional Classes in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Basic, 1966)
  • Theory of "Intellectuals"
    • Palinurus page on Intellectuals (Alan Liu)
    • Pierre Bourdieu, "The Corporation of the Universal: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World," Telos 81 (1989): 99-110
    • Philip Elliott, "Intellectuals, the 'Information Society' and the Disappearance of the Public Sphere," in Media, Culture, and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Collins, et al., (London: Sage, 1986), pp. 105-15
    • Seymour M. Lipset, "American Intellectuals: Their Politics and Status," in Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, ed. Seymour M. Lipset, pp. 332-71
    • Philip Rieff, On Intellectuals: Theoretical Studies, Case Studies (Garden City, NY: Anchor /Doubleday, 1969)
    • Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage / Random House, 1994)
    • Philip Schlesinger, "In Search of the Intellectuals: Some Comments on Recent Theory," in Media, Culture, and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Collins, et al., (London: Sage, 1986), pp. 84-104
  • The Academic Intellectual
    • Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993)
    • Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988)
    • Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Noonday / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987)
    • John Guillory
      • "Literary Critics as Public Intellectuals: Class Analysis and the Crisis of the Humanities," in Rethinking Class, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Myron T. Gilmore (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 107-49
      • "Preprofessionalism: What Graduate Students Want," Profession 1996 (New York: MLA, 1996), pp. 91-99 (argues that the current "preprofessionalism" of literature graduate students under the gun of the sparse job market--as attested by the perceived need to publish and give papers--is an extreme form of the "phantasmic" desires of the literature profession generally, caught as it is in the paradox between its long-term decline in social centrality and its imitation/internalization of mainstream organizational and productivity norms; also links the present hyper-politicization of literary studies to its social marginality)
    • Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (New York: Verso, 1993)
    • Jeffrey Williams, "The Romance of the Intellectual and the Question of Profession," in Henry A. Giroux with Patrick Shannon, eds., Education and Cultural Studies: Toward a Performative Practice (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 49-64
  • The Function of the Contemporary University (very selective list drawn from the Palinurus bibliography on Contemporary Reflections on the University (see also the "Featured Controversies" section of Palinurus)
    • Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994) (esp. Chap. 8, "A Taxonomy of Teacher Work")
    • Michael Berube and Cary Nelson, Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (New York: Routledge, 1995)
    • Resources on the Dearing Report (UK) (the 1997 report that initiated the legislative agenda in Britain to restructure higher education) (Alan Liu)
    • James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, "The Market-Model University: Humanities in the Age of Money" (1998) | Bibliography
    • Todd Gitlin, "The Liberal Arts in an Age of Info-Glut" (1998) ("When information piles up higgledy-piggledy—when information becomes the noise of our culture—the need to teach the lessons of the liberal arts is urgent") (Chronicle of Higher Education)
    • John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993)
    • Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984)
    • J. Hillis Miller, Black Holes (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999)
    • Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997)
    • Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996)
    • Langdon Winner (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), "The Handwriting on the Wall: Resisting Technoglobalism's Assault on Education" (1997)

Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (1993):

When someone asks us for a quick definition of business reengineering, we say it means 'starting over.' It doesn't mean tinkering with what already exists or making incremental changes that leave basic structures intact (p. 31)

Peter F. Drucker, Managing in Turbulent Times (1980):

Innovation means, first, the systematic sloughing off of yesterday. (p. 60)

Daniel Bell, The Coming of Postindustrial Society (1973):

[See Table 1-1 on p. 117 (in reader)]

Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Community (1996):

 . . . I propose what I believe to be a potentially useful . . . definition of the network enterprise: that specific form of enterprise whose system of means is constituted by the intersection of segments of autonomous systems of goals. Thus, the components of the network are both autonomous and dependent vis-à-vis the network, and may be a part of other networks, and therefore of other systems of means aimed at other goals. The performance of a given network will then depend on two fundamental attributes of the network: its connectedness, that is its structural ability to facilitate noise-free communication between its components; its consistency, that is the extent to which there is sharing of interests between the network's goals and the goals of its components. (p. 171)

William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone, The Virtual Corporation (1992):

The empowerment of employees, combined with the cross-disciplinary nature of virtual products, will demand a perpetual mixing and matching of individuals with unique skills. These individuals, as their talents fit, will coalesce around a particular task, and when that task is completed will separate to reform in a new configuration around the next task. The effect will be something like atoms temporarily joining together to form molecules, then breaking up to form a whole new set of bonds. (pp. 198-99)

Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations (1991):

[See pp. 178-79 (in reader)]

Are you a "symbolic analyst" or member-in-training of the New Class?

What is the role of the university in the age of Knowledge Work?