ABSTRACT
Introduction No century in human history has experienced so many social transformations and such radical ones as the twentieth century. They, I submit, will turn out to be the most significant events of this century, and its lasting legacy. In the developed free-market countries - only one-fifth of the earth's population, but the model for the rest - work and workforce, society and polity are all, in the last decade of this century, qualitatively and quantitatively different both from those of the first years of this century and from anything ever experienced before in human history: different in their configuration, in their processes, in their problems, and in their structures.
