Recently, I met someone in an airport whom I hadn’t seen for years. I had interviewed his father a quarter century ago when I wrote a book about blue-collar workers in America, The Hidden Injuries of Class. The father, Enrico, worked as a janitor but had high hopes for his boy, a bright kid just entering adolescence. In the airline lounge, the son, Rico, looked as if he had fulfilled his father’s dreams. He carried a computer in a smart leather case, dressed in a suit I couldn’t afford, and sported a signet ring with a crest.

Enrico had spent years cleaning toilets and mopping floors, without complaining. His work had one purpose, the service of his family. It had taken him 15 years to save the money for a house, which he purchased in a suburb near Boston, cutting ties with his old Italian neighborhood because the suburbs were better for the kids.

What struck me most about Enrico and his generation was how linear time was in their lives: year after year of working in jobs that seldom varied from day to day. The seniority rules of his union about pay and the regulations organizing his government pension provided a scaffolding for his life. Achievement was cumulative. Enrico and his wife, Flavia, checked the increase in their savings every week, and measured their domesticity by the various improvements they made to their ranch house. Though he was only 40 when I met him, Enrico knew precisely when he would retire and how much money he would have.

Enrico’s life made sense to him as a linear narrative. He experienced the years as a dramatic story moving forward repair by repair, interest payment by interest payment. The janitor felt he had become the author of his life.

This narrative provided him a sense of self-respect. But Enrico hardly wanted his son Rico to repeat his own life. The American dream of upward mobility for the children powerfully drove my friend. "I don’t understand a word he says," Enrico boasted to me several times when Rico was at work on math.

Now, thanks to the encounter at the airport, I had a chance to see how things had turned out for Enrico’s son. I took the seat next to Rico and settled in for a long flight from New York to Vienna. Rico has fulfilled his father’s desire for upward mobility. Whereas Enrico had an income in the bottom quarter of the wage scale, Rico is in the top 5%. Yet Rico’s is not an entirely happy story.

After graduating from a local university in electrical engineering, Rico went to business school in New York. There he married a fellow student, a young woman from a better family. School prepared the young couple to move and change jobs frequently, and they’ve done so. In 14 years at work, Rico has moved four times.

Rico began as a technology adviser to a venture-capital firm on the West Coast, in the early, heady days of the developing computer industry in Silicon Valley. He then moved to Chicago, where he also did well. The next move was for the sake of his wife’s career—Rico sees her as an equal working partner. Rico kept basically the same salary and left the hotbeds of high-tech activity for a more retired, if leafy, office park in Missouri.

The uncertainties of the new economy caught up with the young man. While his wife, Jeannette, was promoted, Rico was downsized—his firm was absorbed by a larger one that had its own analysts. So the couple made a fourth move, back East to a suburb outside New York. Jeannette now manages a big team of accountants, and he has started a small consulting firm.

Prosperous as they are, the very acme of an adaptable, mutually supportive couple, Rico often fears that he is on the edge of losing control over his life.

When Rico told his peers he was going to start his own consulting firm, most approved; consulting seems the road to independence. But he has fallen subservient to the schedules of people who are in no way obliged to respond to him. Like other consultants, he wants to work in accordance with contracts setting out just what the consultant will do. But these contracts, he says, are largely fictions. A consultant usually has to tack one way and another in response to the whims of those who pay. Rico has no fixed role that allows him to say to others, "This is what I do. This is what I am responsible for."

At first, I was not prepared to shed many tears for this American Dream couple. Yet as dinner was served and Rico began to talk more personally, my sympathies increased. His fear of losing control, it developed, went much deeper than worry about losing power in his job. He feared that the way he has to live in the modern economy has set his emotional, inner life adrift.

Rico said he and Jeannette have made friends mostly with the people they see at work and have lost many friendships during their moves. Rico looks to electronic communications for the sense of community that Enrico enjoyed when he attended meetings of the janitors’ union, but the son finds communications on-line short and hurried. "It’s like with your kids," he says. "When you’re not there, all you get is news later."

Although communities today are not empty of sociability or neighborliness, no one in them becomes a long-term witness to another person’s life.

The fugitive quality of friendship and local community forms the background to the most important part of Rico’s worries, his family. Like Enrico, Rico views work as his service to the family; unlike Enrico, Rico finds that his job interferes with achieving the end. At first I thought he was talking about the all-too-familiar conflict between work time and time for family. I tried to reassure him. "You aren’t being fair to yourself," I said. "The fact you care so much means you are doing the best for your family you can." I had misunderstood.

As a boy, Rico had felt smothered by the small-minded rules that governed Enrico’s life as a janitor but, as a father himself, he is haunted by the fear of a lack of ethical discipline. He wants to set an example of resolution and purpose for his son and daughters. But he worries that he cannot offer his work life as an example. The qualities of good work are not the qualities of good character.

The gravity of this fear comes from a gap separating Enrico’s and Rico’s generations. Business leaders and journalists emphasize the global marketplace and the use of new technologies as the hallmarks of the capitalism of our time. This misses another dimension of change: new ways of organizing time, particularly working time.

The most tangible sign of that change might be the motto, "No long term." In work, the traditional career progressing step by step through the corridors of one or two institutions is withering. So is the deployment of a single set of skills through the course of a working life. Today, a young American with at least two years of college can expect to change jobs at least 11 times in the course of working and change his or her skill base at least three times. The fastest-growing sector of the American labor force is people who work for temporary-job agencies.

An executive for AT&T says the very meaning of work is changing: "‘Jobs’ are being replaced by ‘projects’ and ‘fields of work.’"

Management wants now to think of organizations as networks. "Network-like arrangements are lighter on their feet," sociologist Walter Powell declares. "They are more readily decomposable or redefinable than the fixed assets of hierarchies." This means that promotions and dismissals tend not to be based on clear, fixed rules, nor are work tasks crisply defined. The network is constantly redefining its structure.

For all these reasons, Enrico’s experience of long-term, narrative time is no longer possible. And Rico is finding that the new work experience doesn’t work as a guide to personal character.

"No long term" is a principle that corrodes trust, loyalty, and mutual commitment. Trust can, of course, be a purely formal matter, as when people rely on another to observe the rules of a game. But, usually, deeper experiences of trust are informal, as when people learn on whom they can rely when given a difficult task. The short time frame of modern institutions limits the ripening of informal trust.

Given the typically short, weak ties associated with teamwork in institutions today, John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor, counsels the young to enter consulting rather than becoming "entangled" in long-term employment. Institutional loyalty is a trap in an economy where "business concepts, product designs, competitor intelligence, capital equipment, and all kinds of knowledge have shorter, credible life spans."

Transposed to the family realm, "No long term" means keep moving, don’t commit yourself, and don’t sacrifice. Rico erupted on the plane, "You can’t imagine how stupid I feel when I talk to my kids about commitment. It’s an abstract virtue to them; they don’t see it anywhere." He means the children don’t see commitment practiced in the lives of their parents or their parents’ generation.

Similarly, Rico hates the emphasis on teamwork and open discussion once those values are transposed to the intimate realm. Practiced at home, teamwork is destructive, marking an absence of authority in raising children. He and Jeannette, he says, have seen too many parents who have talked every family issue to death for fear of saying, "No!" They have seen, as a result, too many disoriented kids.

Rico’s values are no simple matter of nostalgia. He disliked the rigid parental rule he suffered at Enrico’s hands. He would not return to the linear time that ordered Enrico’s and Flavia’s existence even if he could have done so. He looked at me with a certain disgust when I told him that, as a college professor, I have job tenure for life. He treats uncertainty and risk-taking as challenges at work. As a consultant, he has learned to be an adept team player.

But these forms of flexible behavior have not served Rico in his roles as a father or as a member of a community. Rico is caught in a trap. How can long-term purposes be pursued in a short-term society?

What is missing is a narrative that could organize his conduct. Narratives are more than simple chronicles of events. They give shape to the forward movement of time, suggesting reasons why things happen, showing their consequences. Enrico had a narrative for his life, linear and cumulative, a narrative that made sense in a highly bureaucratic world. Rico lives in a world marked instead by short-term flexibility and flux. This world does not offer much, either economically or socially, in the way of narrative. Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connections.

Through most of human history, people have accepted that their lives will shift suddenly because of wars, famines, or other disasters. What’s peculiar about uncertainty today is that it exists without any looming historical disaster. Instead, it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism. Instability is meant to be normal. Perhaps the corroding of character is an inevitable consequence. "No long term" disorients action over the long term and loosens bonds of trust and commitment.

I think Rico knows he is both a successful and a confused man. The flexible behavior that has brought him success is weakening his own character in ways for which there exists no practical remedy.

Excerpted from Corrosion of Character by Richard Sennett. Copyright © 1998 by Richard Sennett. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.