I LOVE social science. Yummy, yummy stuff. The following are excerpted from Self, Social Structure and Beliefs, Chapter 4: The Glass Cage, by Yiannis Gabriel:

"Both approaches mark radical departures from core Weberian themes. Sennett offers a sophisticated reading of the Protestant ethic to highlight its degeneration into meaningless, frenetic workaholic activity, which fails to feed identity narratives. Ritzer's core thesis is that postmodernity has created a counterpoint to modernity: reenchantment, albeit at a cost, in lieu of rational disenchantment. Both authors agree that for different reasons, new capitalism increases freedom at the price of insecurity, meaninglessness, and isolation. Another eminent Weberian commentator, Smelser, has taken a more nuanced view, arguing that all societies, including ours, are characterized by a fundamental ambivalence between independence and dependence. [....] He captures the nervous, transient qualities of what he calls "the age of temporariness, the age of intermittency, or the perhaps the age of sequential bonding" (1998b: 180). Unlike Sennett, however, he views short-term bonds, like more traditional bonds, as generating ambivalence , as set of "powerful, persistent, unresolvable, volatile, generalizable, anxiety-provoking" emotions that are a feature of the human condition (177)" (64).

"To be sure, today's capitalism deploys subtler, more pervasive, and more invasive strategies of control, including cultural and ideological controls (emphasizing the importance of customer service, quality, and image; affirming the business enterprise as an arena for heroic or spiritual accomplishments, etc.), structural controls (continuous measurement and benchmarking, flatter organizational hierarchies, etc.), technological controls (electronic surveillance of unimaginable sophistication), spatial controls (open-plan offices, controlled access), and so forth than it did a generation ago. Those influenced by the work of Foucault have developed the idea of discursive controls that operate through language, labeling, classification, and so forth, which are invisible but unyielding (many cites). In spite of such formidable disciplinary mechanisms, today's workplace creates, if anything, greater possibility of voice [...], with employees displaying a bewildering array of responses that qualify, subvert, disregard, or resist managerial calls for flexibility. At times they comply willingly, grudgingly or ritualistically, at other times fear and insecurity dominate their responses, but frequently they show ingenuity in supplanting and contesting management discourses, turning them into objects of amusement, cynicism, or confrontation" (65).

"The demise of the iron cage of rationality can be seen as leading to a different form of entrapment, and entrapment not as rigid as that effected by traditional bureaucracy but one that affords greater ambiguity and irony, a glass cage perhaps, an enclosure characterized by total exposure to the eye of the customer, the fellow employee, the manager. The very visibility of the cage to the unforgiving gaze places severe limits on the overt control that managers are able to exercise, with employees frequently finding themselves in the position of children capable of embarrassing their parents in the presence of strangers. Why a glass cage? Undoubtedly, the glass cage suggests the chief quality of Foucault's Panopticon, that curious combination of Catholic obsession with the omnipotent eye of God and Protestant preoccupation with clean efficiency. Like the Panopticon, the glass cage acts as a metaphor for the formidable machinery of contemporary surveillance, one machine that deploys all kinds of technologies, electronic, spatial, psychological, and cultural. Appearances are paramount; image is what people are constantly judged by" (66).

"In this glass cage, new fashion trends can be spotted, new badges can be identified, new lifestyles can be explored, and new identities can be experimented with. Viewing the spaces of consumption as glass cages in their own right highlights the subtle forms of coercion, enticement and control exercised over the consumer under the illusion of choice and freedom. Like the docile queues of Disneyland, once enticed into the cathedrals of consumption, consumers are captive. They have no choice but to observe, to look, to desire, to choose, and to buy. [....] Of course, glass cages look quite different to those outside; they look shiny, glamorous, and full of enticing objects. Those denied access, through their lack of resources, mobility, looks, or whatever, feel truly excommunicated. To them, being inside the cage represents real freedom. [....] For those on the inside of the cage, on the other hand, the hungry faces of those outside is a constant reminder that there are far worse places in which to be." (68).