Thanks for down learning the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.

I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, this week we're taking a look at the changing nature of work and the work ethic

as it obtains at the end of the 20th century.

Has our understanding of the nature and function of work really changed so radically since the beginning of the century.

I'm joined by the sociologist Professor Richard Senate whose book The Corrosion of Character,

the personal consequences of work in the New Capitalism, has just been published. He is currently a visiting The in his college Oxford. He's just published a book called Conversation and is

currently conducting research and experiments into the future work and

Melanie Phillips is a columnist on the Sunday Times, currently working on a book

about the sex change state, which will discuss the division of work.

Richard Tenet, can we start with you?

What's really new about work now in the 1990s and why do you think it's worse as it were than it were before?

Well I think what's new is that the time frame of work is shortening.

Businesses and, indeed, government is short-term task businesses and government agencies being reorganized.

So the short-term task-oriented labor is I don't know if it's depressing but it does create a problem which is how are people to

organize their work to realize long-term purposes, how are they to practice traditional work ethic like delayed

gratification in the short-term world.

And I think these are problems that can be solved or at least dealt with, but we need to have a

conversation about what the realities of this flexible work place actually due to people's experience on the job.

You're talking largely about what we can call the Western world here, aren't you?

I am.

What you could call the industrialized manufacturing technological world.

...