Rating: 
Summary: Humanistic insight into the changed world of work
Review: This is a highly readable book, informed by academic insights but not over scholarly. Its merit is that it makes you think-particularly by the chapter segmentations. Its scope is wide for a small book-employment,the nature of jobs, the career..Throughout Sennett provides a powerful counterblast to the rhetoricians of the right and also demonstrates the indifference of big business and politicians. His perspective on the Davos summits is beautifully written and acute. While respecting the advice of another reviewer concerning Hezenberg et al, I do not believe the books should be compared. 'New Rules' is a book largely about employment and does not attempt to assess matters of meaning and identity at work. Sennett does this admirably. I think his target audience is the layperson not the academic and reading this book can be a rewarding experience
Rating: 
Summary: A fixation with failing...
Review: This little book by Sennett is a well done, interesting case description mingled with theoretical analyses about some problems and afflictions of present time capitalism, that is run by a randomic system of a totally free market idolatry, forgetting the sensible advices by Rousseau, later on Goethe, yet later Keynes and Galbraith, about the social function of entrepreneurship.The book is interesting to read, as the author tells various stories that will have us bear in mind for a long time in our memory of his warnings, about the insecurities of present management theories and practices, that need a visible hand of a modernized State to avoid greater problems, so that the "invisible hand" of the market can continue on helping humanity, and not putting its fingernails out to scratch it. This is a book on economics and management, but it will also be a book on sociology and socio-psychology. In reading it I often recalled some books by Erich Fromm, his analyses of the present society. The bibliography is most comprehensive and the authors research within the core of IBM, during its critical years, most enlightening, even for IBM strategists. The studies are done within the USA, but other books have given me the indication that similar problems of social psychological unrest exist all over the world now. (French novels by Michell Houellebecq, Particules Ellementaires and La Extension du Domaine de la Lutte)
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