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| Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream | 
 enlarge | Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Granta Books
Category: Book
List Price: £9.99
Buy New: £0.01
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 18394
Media: Paperback
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 1862078971
EAN: 9781862078970
Publication Date: March 6, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
A Good Insight to the Underside of the World of Employment September 3, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I spent many years unhappy in jobs before I became self-employed. Since being self-employed I have visited the networking clubs and come into contact with the world of life-coaches, I even had to return to employment briefly which was just as horrible as Barbara Ehrenreich describes. This may be a book about America, but almost all of it is relevant in the UK.
Ehrenreich pinpoints the distorted ideas about how people should behave when seeking jobs. The expectation that people need to be flexible team players, unrelentingly upbeat and amenable. And leave your morals and principles at home please.
I remember once listening to an accountant from a top law firm saying that anyone who wanted to join his firm had to have a 2.1 or above. But when it came to him, he didn't even have a degree. However, things were different now, he maintained. Ehrenreich reveals the stupid ideas about not having gaps in your CV. Having children, taking stock, doing something unconventional - none of these are seen as being quite right for corporations.
My conclusion is you can't fight against it, you have to find people who share your values. For those of us lucky to be out of it, thank the lord.
First class reporting on the destruction of middle class life in the US April 8, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Barbara Ehrenreich has a dry wit. When she decides to go undercover as a white collar professional (first seeking and then fulfilling a job within America's corporate citadel), she finds herself in a world so desperate and surreal that she need only report with her admirable clarity to render it, quite often, funny.
But humour is not her intention, for the most part. Her subject is essentially suffering; the immense human cost of the way American business, especially big business, now approaches staffing at all levels, and the almost totally meaningless responses with which individuals try adapt to it.
Being a white-collar jobseeker is these days proclaimed to be a job in itself. It is also a position in which people are prey to a whole industry of pundits, coaches, purveyors of tips, networking opportunities, boot camps, prayer meetings and therapy groups. Ehrenreich spent over $6,000 during some seven to nine months of intensive searching. All her work, and investment, never yielded so much as an acknowledgement from most of the potential employers she approached.
This is a highly instructive piece of reporting from a world which otherwise really doesn't get represented. The reason is, practically everything else dealing with these realities is determined to ignore their human and social (and, one would think, organisational) costs and simply to provide a programme or set of indicators to people facing the difficulties of what is euphemistically called 'transition.' No-one wants to admit that what is really going on, as with the broader drive of neo-liberal economics (see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-liberalism) is effectively class war. What is both comic _and_ tragic is that the American middle class seems completely unable to perceive the reality of what is being done to it. Educated to think they don't actually have a class-based society, they are naturally perfect victims for a war they literally cannot imagine (but can be sacrificed to).
For a remarkable feat of contemporary anthropology, documenting the rituals and belief systems of a clearly delusional subculture in the mainstream of American society, Ehrenreich deserves major kudos. As a warning of what will almost certainly engulf middle class professionals everywhere sooner or later, she also deserves the gratitude of anyone attempting to understand the world today. It would be unfair to criticize the book for what it doesn't do (and doesn't set out to) - critique and analyse the policies and dogmas with which the attack on middle-class employment is rationalised, or the underlying motives. This is a missing part of the picture here, one which has yet to be documented to my knowledge (except in the general terms presented by Harvey in the work cited above). Bait and Switch is nevertheless a valuable document and ought to be read as a fierce indictment of the indefensible destruction of a way of life and the demoralization of an entire society.
An unexpected pleasure December 10, 2006
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have to admit that I tried to read this book a few months ago and did not manage to get past the first chapter. A couple of days ago, however, a chance encounter with this book while stood musing at the content of my bookcase (in preparation for moving house), found me starting to leaf through, and actually enjoy the experience.
As I read through the book, I was more and more impressed with the effort that Ehrenreich put into her research (not to mention the amount of money she spent along the way). I have no doubt that she put her 'all' into the project and I genuinely shared the peaks and troughs of her jobhunting mission. I was disappointed with the final outcome, wanting her to have found success, but then I suppose the final outcome reflects the true-life experiences of so many of those that she met along the way.
Ehrenreich writes in an engaging style and in this book has portrayed the grim realities of being on the outside of the fortress that is Corporate America, 'with the wolves circling ever closer'.
Recommended read for anyone who is feeling just a little too smug and cosy in their corporate office job, particularly those with company health insurance...
Funny - and scary at the same time.. April 26, 2006
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I only just started reading Ehrenreich's "sequal" to her exploration of blue-collar poverty in USA (Nickel and Dimed), and by chapter 2 I'm already laughing out loud - partly because Ehrenreich's dry and witty humour, even when dealing with not at all funny issues, partly out of despair; as a recent graduate and a seeker of my first professional job, the bizarre world of career coaching, networking events, and personality testing rings a bit too true. Recommended for anyone either pursuing or holding a white-collar corporate job!
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