Ninety Years in the World of Work in America

Career Development Quarterly, Sept, 2001 by Camille DeBell

Of the top 10 in 1997, 4 were founded between 1902 and 1908: Ford, General Motors, Philip Morris, and Texaco (Primedia, 1998). The 1997 list, however, is already out of date. For example, one third of the Fortune 500 companies that existed in 1980 no longer existed (as independent corporations) in 1990, and one third of the 1990 Fortune 500 have been targeted for hostile takeovers (Whitman, 1999). It is a part of the everyday vocabulary to speak today of mergers, acquisitions, and takeovers--hostile or otherwise--and it is accepted with relative equanimity that the list of largest U.S. corporations may change from year to year.

Summary

Clearly, the Industrial Revolution had already begun to change the world of work when Parsons's (1909) model was first published. Perhaps this is why Parsons urged the reader to obtain "up-to-date" information about the world of work, "the kind that is found in current magazines and papers rather than books" (p. 46). This advice is still timely. The next section focuses on the modern world of work and the factors that make it radically different than it was a century ago.

The New World Economy

Although change was increasingly a part of life in Parsons's day, it was not the type of change experienced today. The world experienced a similar era of globalization from the mid-1800s to the latter 1920s, but it was based on falling transportation costs due to the invention of the railroad, steamship, and automobile. The world at that time was also dominated politically by Great Britain--the United States did not emerge as a world power until after World War I. Still, this period, in the words of Thomas Friedman, "shrank the world from a size large to a size medium" (Friedman, 2000, p. xvii).

Today, the world is a size "small." The world of work today is a product of four forces that have revolutionized the way businesses and nation states operate: globalization of goods and services, the collapse of communist states and the rise of American-style capitalism, domestic deregulation, and technological advances, particularly in information and telecommunications (Whitman, 1999). These four factors helped to shape the current American economy with its focus on providing information and services to the world. (For in-depth discussions of these factors, see Friedman, 2000; Naisbitt, 1984; Offerman & Gowing, 1990; Rifkin, 1995; Whitman, 1999.) Two of these factors, globalization and technology, are briefly illustrated in the next section. Changes in globalization and technology have, in turn, affected where and what kinds of jobs are available to workers; they have also contributed to a quality of instability in businesses. These additional factors are also discussed briefly as follows.

Globalization

Since 1970, there has been a rapid rise in international trade. For example, merchandise exports in the United States (as a share of tradable goods production) rose from 11% in 1960 to more than 31% in 1990 (Whitman, 1999). The globalization that occurred during Parsons's day was large, relative to its time, but it was miniscule compared with today's. In 1900, daily foreign exchange trading was measured in millions of dollars. In the early 1990s, it was measured in billions, and today it is measured in trillions of dollars per day, and rising (Friedman, 2000).