The Second Adolescence of the New Economy: China’s Engineers at Work

In 2001, toward the end of my field research for No-Collar (my book about new economy workplaces) (Ross, 2003), I interviewed an employee in an Internet service firm based in downtown Manhattan. The firm was shedding its workforce rapidly, and she fully expected to be let go in the near future. In moments of distraction, she told me that she pried old sewing needles from between the floorboards beneath her. These were leftovers from the garment workers whose toil had directly preceded hers in that same Soho loft space. What, she mused, would her company leave behind? And would her industry follow the garment trade’s fate in being dispersed from its New York base? At that time, even after the worst of the dot-com crash, she said that it seemed indulgent for her, as a Web designer, to speculate in this way. After all, her trade had no more than a few years of history behind it.