Michael Dennis
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 368
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"The technological revolution of the late twentieth century evokes images of California's Silicon Valley, NASDAQ traders on Wall Street, and techno-savvy hipsters in Seattle. This revolution played a key role in the global economic shift from industrial to increasingly service-oriented production, known as the New Economy." "Until the 1990s, Virginia and the South had for centuries stood at the center of American global integration. Virginians, like most average Americans, were drawn into the flow of economic changes that fundamentally altered their sense of possibility and eroded the moderate economic security they had achieved in the post-war era. Massive corporate downsizing, re-engineering, and outsourcing would have seemed to move the South from center to the margin of the New Economy." "Proponents of the New Economy argued that in order for companies to fully exploit the new technology, they had to strip away the hierarchical arrangements of an earlier business model. Corporate bureaucracies had to be replaced by adaptability and innovation. Instead of peaceful coexistence with businesses in the same field, companies had to be aggressively competitive. Instead of attachment to old product lines, companies had to be prepared to change gears quickly." "Dennis underpins globalization in local terms, using Virginia in the late twentieth century to illustrate what was at the core of the American experience at the time: the loss of political control by working-class people. The story of job losses, anti-union campaigns, and the rise of conservative Republicans is now Americas story. What we see in Virginia is an "ideology that combined traditional southern conservatism and libertarian economic thinking to sanction the supremacy of the market in social affairs.""--BOOK JACKET.
