Capitalizing labor: What work is worth and why, from the New Deal to the new economy

This dissertation charts intellectual changes in the way work is valued---both politically and socially---from the 1930s to the present day. It employs both historical and interepretivist methodologies in order to examine the instantiation of a public vision of work during the work relief programs of the New Deal and the supplanting of those ideas with human capital theory in the 1950s and 1960s. It then turns to several challenges to the limited vision of labor propounded by human capital theorists, namely, programs for displaced factory workers and displaced homemakers in the 1970s and the campaign for comparable worth in the 1980s. It concludes with an examination of the rise of the knowledge worker in the latter half of the twentieth century. It argues that the "capitalization of labor"---the ideological construction of work as a form of capital---has had significant and damaging effects on our work and our politics.