DEMOS

The career, as an institution, is in unavoidable decline. Knowledge-based economies are making the stable, linear progression through working life which they embody unachievable for most people. But public policy is still based on the assumption that careers are the most desirable form of employment, and that they can be offered to more and more of us.

In this ground-breaking pamphlet, the authors argue that we are in the early stages of a transformation of working life. The loss of careers creates moral and social risks which must be addressed if community life is to be sustained, and widespread disillusionment and alienation avoided. But responses to this threat must go with the grain of the new economic environment. The authors distinguish two emerging forms of working life - the wired and the entrepreneurial - and offer a new account of entrepreneurship. They argue that our core institutions - from pensions to education - must be radically restructured to support entrepreneurial activity. Such reform is essential to realising the opportunities for fulfilment and productivity which the new economy offers, and to renewing the forms of public and civic life on which progress depends.

Fernando Flores was minister of Finance in the government of Salvadore Allende in Chile, and is founder and Chief Executive Officer of Business Design Associates.

John Gray is Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. He has also published the Demos Book After Social Democracy.