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WORK, says a guru quoted in one of these books, is our “negotiation with death”. That's putting it a bit strong, but work is clearly something that lots of people love to hate. Yet, in the rich world, work has changed dramatically in the past two or three decades, in ways that have got rid of some of its more disagreeable sides, and made what is left more interesting.

The key changes have been the fading of routine manual work and the rise of jobs that make use of networked computers. Many of the more tedious jobs that most people did a century ago—factory work, farm labouring, mining—are almost gone. Robots, not human beings, now mainly man the production line, which symbolised the more oppressive aspects of the machine age.

Instead, as Frank Levy and Richard Murnane point out, jobs have bifurcated: there has been some growth in the simpler service jobs—flipping hamburgers and cleaning offices, say—but a much greater growth of sophisticated work in management, teaching, medicine, engineering and the law. Many of the jobs that have gone were routine clerical tasks, which have been either taken over by computers or outsourced abroad—or both. The networked computer allows such tasks to be structured in a way so they can be done by folk far away from the final customer.

The jobs that remain, say the two economists, are often ones that require complex communication, conveying an interpretation of information rather than just the facts, and making difficult judgments in unpredictable circumstances. Computers, which can cope with simple rule-based jobs, find it far harder to diagnose a sick patient or design a new aircraft. But, by taking over the simple part of many jobs, they improve the productivity of skilled human beings doing complicated things.

Countries must therefore educate their citizens in ways that fit them for such complexities. The trend in pay points the same way: in 1979, a 30-year-old man with a bachelor's degree averaged 17% more than one with a high-school diploma; today, the gap is 50%.

Networked communications are changing the organisations that people work in too. Thomas Malone, an organisational theorist, describes the way that they allow “dramatically more decentralised ways of organising work [to] become at once possible and desirable”. He is impressed by the way Nike outsources all its manufacturing to other companies; and by the example of eBay, from whose auctions perhaps 150,000 people make a living. Both are instances of the new sort of shapes that organisational life may take. He also argues for the emergence of internal markets and of “democracies”—in which decisions are based on the collective wisdom of the many rather than the top-down instructions of a few.

Companies where employees are given more control over their working conditions seem to generate better returns than those that give their people less responsibility. One of the great benefits of information technology in the workplace, says Mr Malone, is to allow workers to make more choices. That in turn will call for different managerial techniques: not so much command-and-control as “co-ordinate-and-cultivate”. Managers must learn to run loose hierarchies in which much of the decision-making power is pushed down the organisation. If they set clear standards and guidelines, then teams of people can undertake a task without centralised control.

Complex communications and loose hierarchies sound much more fun than life on the traditional production line. Russell Muirhead, searching for a new ethic of work, often seems to assume that work is inherently disagreeable and tedious. He wants it to be fulfilling—but not too fulfilling, lest it take over people's lives and squeeze out other interests. He concludes that “the dignity of work comes from the way we show, through it, a determination to endure what is difficult for the sake of discharging our responsibilities and contributing to society.” But that surely is too bleak a view. People work for money, for company and for some sense of achievement.

Indeed, even in a badly run organisation, work can have a certain melancholy pleasure. Take the blistering portrait of life in a big British retail bank (NatWest, now part of the Royal Bank of Scotland, pseudonymously appearing as British Armstrong) by John Weeks, an American professor of organisational behaviour. He found that the bank's staff always described its corporate culture negatively. It was said to be too bureaucratic, too rules-driven, too introverted, too centralised.

He describes various ways used to grouse without appearing too obvious, such as “deniable deprecations”, used to complain about everything from the coffee to career advancement. But the moaning was a ritual. Complaining brought no gains, but, if done in a socially acceptable way, created cohesion among groups of staff. In that respect, networked computers have changed nothing—apart from giving badly managed workers something new to whinge about.

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