Richard Sennett. Handbook of Sociology. Editor: Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek, Bryan Turner. Sage Publications. 2005.
By one of history’s ironies, the collapse of the Soviet empire coincided in the West with a renewed scholarly interest in Marxian propositions about labor and the relation of work to class and class consciousness. In part this coincidence occurred because in the last generation capitalism itself has profoundly changed, and the durable legacy of Marx, analytic rather than remedial, seemed to offer sharp tools for an explanation. This renewed radical tradition cannot alone suffice, however, to understand the most radical features of the new capitalism, changes which affect the interpretative activities and subjective experiences of workers.
A simple but profound insight moved Marx: social groups are formed by powers external to themselves. The sociological starting point here is that domination begets differentiation. This insight contests the natural separations of talent or the elective affinities of identity, as a basis for sorting people into different classes; instead it insists that top-down classification is an arbitrary operation conducted for the benefit of those on top, absorbed and naturalized among those below so as to impede their free action and sap their will to resist.
Many recent writings on work take this starting point as their own, even if the writers do not label themselves Marxists. The ‘integrative functions’ of work, so emphasized in Parsonian sociology in the mid-twentieth century, are played down by these writers, while the dissonances produced by arbitrary differentiation are emphasized. For writers as different as Michele Lamont, Robert Howard and Erik Olin Wright, the labor process itself generates arbitrary differentiation; for others, again as varied as Arlie Hochschild and Judy Wajcman, gender does so; still others, like William Julius Wilson, emphasize race; and finally ‘culturalists’ like Katherine Newman, Caitlin Zaloom and myself, emphasize communal and urban sources of dissonance at work. (This list is meant to be illustrative rather than inclusive.)
Traditional Marxian writings on labor emphasized oppression, and that emphasis frequently degraded into an ethos of victimology, the oppressed viewed as passive, their powers of resistance viewed as weak so long as resistance did not take the political form of seeking regime-change. All the writers cited above have sought to avoid the error of victimology, focusing instead on arbitrary differentiation as a problem which individuals and groups have to work out in everyday experience.
Alejandro Portes has, in recent writings on class, tried to articulate this anti-victimization emphasis in a systematic way. He focuses on what could be called ‘lateral’ as well traditional hierarchical forms of class difference. Portes’s intensive research on immigration has led him to explore how groups seemingly in roughly the same material condition can use resources like religious ties or shared migratory paths to create quite distinctive associations, with different practical outcomes for themselves or their children. Lateral class conflict—as between Koreans and blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans—may be the result. But the focus is on agency, the focus both of the groups studied and of their student.
One theoretical source for looking at the agency of the working class is the writings of Pierre Bourdieu; as much as he was obsessed by the formation of inequality via social and cultural capital, he equally stressed the agency of all social actors within the social field. Still, mixing in new elements of gender, race, ethnicity, social and cultural capital into the old-fashioned analysis of class poses a large issue: what happens to labor as a measure of class, and of the behavior which follows from class inequality? The sociological break with both Marxism and Parsonian functionalism might occur by arguing that these forces of gender, race, or ethnicity serve as the sources of arbitrary differentiation. Another way of relating work to class would look at changes in the organization of work itself; by doing so, the very importance of laboring could be affirmed.
Whereas theorists of ‘late’ capitalism from Ernest Mandel to Fredric Jameson still return to the images of market exchange which dominated classical Marxism, the labor process has been in fact reorganized by forces that are new rather than late: notably the information revolution, bureaucratic ‘flexible’ restructuring, the emphasis on shareholder value rather than profitability, and—most controversially—the replacement of national imperialism by firm globalization. The argument here would be that class changes its meaning due to such changes in the organization of work.
Immigration again provides an illustration. Modern patterns of immigration are circulatory rather than linear, immigrants in the global economy establishing multi-country networks based on family, clan, or religion rather than leaving one locality to resettle permanently in another. The immigrants who can participate in these dynamic flows themselves tend to be entrepreneurial and adaptive, able to cope with dislocations built into the modern economy; they form a contrast to poor people rooted to local communities who are likely to suffer from their very immobility. Here, then, is a new divide between classes of people, and it is complex, more than a contrast of the mobile and the rooted. Those who are committed to finding work globally make use of that commitment in small-scale affective networks; in their lives there is the primacy of the experience of flexible labor, but work is not an end in itself.
The point is worth insisting upon because one strand of thinking about modern work wants to argue that labor matters less and less in the subjective and emotional constitution of modern individuals. One thread in this strand is the argument derived from Veblen, then Theodor Adorno, then Guy Debord that leisure, media and consumption activities now dominate mass society; another thread is the argument that work itself consists increasingly of a series of episodes, of a short-term portfolio of tasks, which yield no deeper or coherent sense of self: an argument put forward with sadness by Jeremy Rifkin and in a celebration of its postmodernity by Charles Leadbeater.
These views run counter to simple fact as well as to modern social forces. Juliet Schor has documented the ways in which the sheer time people spend at work has increased dramatically in the last generation, as has the ‘contingent time’ of commuting to and from jobs. Were work truly to be losing its subjective value, unemployed workers blessed with permanent unemployment support should be happy individuals; as Claus Offe has shown, in Germany those able-bodied workers lacking work suffer greatly from alcoholism, stress, and other psychological disorders, even though the welfare state keeps them in cash; the same data obtain in Scandinavia. We have only to reflect that most adults, now women as well as men, spend most of their conscious hours engaged in work-related activities to doubt that the labor they do is an emotionally neutral subject to them.
One intellectual labor which lies before modern researchers on work concerns consciousness, both the interpretative understanding of work itself and of class consciousness which work inspires. This intellectual inquiry has a political edge.
In my view, the changes in modern work have eroded both the critical grasp of workers on what they do, and a clear view of the place of work in the larger social structure. Rather than ‘false consciousness’, workers suffer from an occlusion of vision, and this is because modern capitalism is itself an increasingly illegible system. The task incumbent upon us is to try to explain to the people we study why it is so difficult to ‘read’ the work they do.
Sociologists often treat ‘consciousness’ as a representational event. Social representations are more than mirrors; as in paintings some elements are highlighted, others obscured but still, these are in intent reflections: something other than consciousness itself is meant to be presented.
Consciousness can, however operate in a way that breaks out of the confines of representational intent. Here there is a dialectic between tacit and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge concerns habits, routines and taken-for-granted assumptions which oil the daily social machine. We can be conscious of the behavior and beliefs which have taken form in the tacit realm, and such awareness tends to consist of representing what we are doing. Explicit knowledge can take a further, self-critical step when these behaviors and beliefs go wrong. Then consciousness addresses what is problematic, difficult, resistant, irregular.
The world of Fordist labor elaborated knowledge of the tacit and representative sort. It did so through the articulation of work bureaucracy. When Weber spoke of ‘rationalized bureaucracy’, he meant to convey its clarity of design, and so of interpretation. In visual terms, we could depict bureaucratic rationality as a pyramid, with clear places at each horizontal slice of the pyramid, and each place allotted a fixed function. Such Fordism dominated white-collar as well as industrial labor for much of the past century, structured public agencies as well as private corporations, dominated the efforts of socialist institution-builders as strongly as those of executives creating multinational businesses.
The ‘organization man’, or more incisively, David Riesman’s ‘other-directed individual’, is the logical outcome of this bureaucratic rationalization, conscious of who he or she is by virtue of one’s place in an organization. The tacit rules of organizational behavior define the working self, as the evolution of bureaucracy in the first two-thirds of the past century tended toward ever-greater elaboration, ever-greater definition of form.
This self-representational, rationalized realm tended to create a categorical class-consciousness which subsumed the self. When strikes and conscious knowledge of a more critical sort appeared, the focus of struggle was ‘getting a fair share’ within the system, demands for equity and inclusion, worries about belonging and not belonging to the established order. The issue of membership oriented class consciousness: we might think, how could it be otherwise? Precisely the profound changes in work organization in the latter third of the twentieth century, however, have shown it could be otherwise.
It is the institutional hierarchy which has come apart in the past 30 years. In the effort to make private businesses more responsive to changing markets, layers of bureaucrats have been stripped away from organizations, the functions of those who remain have been de-routinized, and the corporations themselves have become more chameleon-like in business focus. The effort to make institutions more flexible is not itself new, but the technologies of the information revolution plus the global sweep of labor and capital flows give this effort a distinctively contemporary edge. Moreover, the effort to dismantle the Weberian pyramid has a public side, as the old bureaucratic apparatus of welfare provision both West and East is challenged as rigid, unresponsive, sclerotic.
Proponents of this institutional revolt claim it will lead to greater democracy, but so far, no greater equality has marked institutions of a more flexible sort. Nor do journalistic images of casino capitalism, or Scott Lash’s analysis of ‘the end of organized capitalism’, really capture how it works. What Portes shows us—and he is not alone; writers like Bennett Harrison, Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells compose the fuller picture—is instead a new regime of control. In contrast to the Weberian pyramid, we may imagine the flexible institutions shaped like a wheel: from a hub of power, spokes radiate out to the periphery where the mass labors. At the hub, there is a coordination of capital flows and market activities on a global scale, unknown to earlier ages. The new technologies of information make possible control of the periphery from the center on a daily, indeed an hourly basis; the ‘spokes’ transmitting power are strong. The chaotic aspects of this regime—which are certainly real—emerge on the institutional periphery.
Here illegibility of structure reigns, and for quite concrete reasons: the flux of outsourcing; the frequent recomposition of teams, both in composition and in purpose; the creation of internal markets within organizations in which winners may move rapidly closer to the center but losers are frequently dismissed—there are rewards neither for pure effort nor for dogged service in new economy businesses. One way to understand the structure of instability is Bennett Harrison’s; he argues there is a split in the new bureaucracy between command and response, commands from the hub being exigent, while those on the receiving end, on the periphery, are left ‘free’ to obey—that is, how to respond becomes their own problem. John Gray argues this split evinces an evasion of responsibility and hands-on involvement on the part of the powerful. Whereas the Weberian pyramid resembled a controlled military operation, Harrison and Gray imagine a new kind of regime in which you command, then depart. Those left behind all too often cannot make out what they are supposed to do, in order to obey.
Changes in the new economy and in the public sector embody a different kind of bureaucratic time than that of the Weberian pyramid, an institutional experience of time which profoundly disorients both tacit routines and representational knowledge of institutions themselves. This time is short-term in character: a short-term profit horizon in the private sector, a short-term of care in the public sector. Short-term institutional time creates a particular kind of illegibility. As I have argued (in my book, The Corrosion of Character, 1998), short-term social relations tend toward confusion; they also tend toward superficiality. Institutional loyalties become weak, as are fleeting relationships among peers. Moreover, short-term institutional time weakens risk-taking on the periphery; people without power do not know what will happen if they stick their necks out without support, and so tend to focus on the possible losses rather than the gains entailed by risk. Strategic planning is always difficult under uncertain conditions; however, the institutions of the new economy do not think well, and often not at all, about long-term survival. A focus on short-term results may not be fatal for those at the hub amply provisioned with financial and social capital when failure occurs; the inability to plan defensive action and resistance can be disastrous for those who lack these resources.
For such reasons, consciousness of where one belongs, to what group one belongs, is obscured; this institutional reality is hard to read. The nineteenth-century idea of false consciousness tended to put the blame on the reader of an established social text, whereas flexible institutions prevent clear readings. Over the past decade, I have interviewed people who work in a variety of flexible bureaucracies both public and private; they are hard put to describe the form of the institutions they inhabit, and this is particularly true on the peripheries of institutions, where job definitions, peer groupings and measures of competence shift from year to year, sometimes month to month. Modern bureaucracy is a hermeneutic puzzle, especially hard to solve by those on the receiving end of commands. The realm of tacit knowledge shaped by routine has become fragmented and weak.
What sort of critical self-consciousness might these changes inspire? Portes answers this question by quoting the remark of Maréchal Ney, who, when asked about his family, replied ‘Madame, I am my own ancestor.’ Maréchal Ney, who was a far more astute military strategist than Napoleon himself, meant in his riposte that by his talents he had created a position for himself in society, indeed, created himself.
In a way the marshal invokes a founding trope of entrepreneurial capitalism, and indeed of modernity itself. The riposte unfolded in novels of the nineteenth century, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, stories of self-made men and women—but these socially mobile individuals were not our contemporaries. In the world of the nineteenth-century entrepreneur, there was a fixed sociological ladder to climb, manners as well as money were defined on each rung; mass consumption and mass media had not yet thrown their veils over inequality. In Stendhal’s novel, for example, Julian Sorel quickly learns just how he has to re-adjust his clothing, his speech, his bodily comportment each time he takes a step up. Class consciousness consisted in reading this legible social text; radical consciousness in reading the plain text critically.
Ideologically, ‘I am my own ancestor’ is the mantra of every new economy business; it is the reform of client consciousness sought by the reformers of the welfare state. But it has lost its nineteenth-century legibility.
To be sure, very few of the new-economy denizens I have interviewed long for the age of rigid bureaucracy, and that lack of longing shows in their behavior. Evincing little loyalty to the corporations in which they work—in businesses that evidence little loyalty to them—these employees in high-tech firms, financial services, or new media are almost impossible to organize through traditional unions. The world in which they struggle for survival seems to have thrived on endless revision and self-willed organization; if they have not thrived—and the majority have not—their resulting problems seem to be their own to solve, if at all; they are certainly insoluble by collective effort.
In the views of Bennett Harrison and John Gray, the operations of the new economy have abandoned the mass of individuals on the receiving end of command to self-creation. ‘Abandoned’ is the keyword; hub-power abjures involvement with the periphery. Self-creation is all you have left when you lack institutional power. In particular, the shortening time-framework of institutional life has thrust people back on their own strategic and emotional resources, but this short, amorphous experience of institutional time obscures critical thinking about institutional form and history.
It will not do to label this condition ‘individualism’. The strong effort to network, to forge informal alliances in new-economy institutions, signals the recognition of the need for mutually supportive relationships; the difficulty, as Manuel Castells points out, is that the farther from the center you are, the more limited in scope and the more fragile in function become your networks. Moreover, most of the peripheral people I and my colleagues have interviewed are well aware that as individual actors they hardly have the same chances as those in the hub. There is consciousness of differentiation; people are well aware they have been left to their own devices, ‘abandoned’ in Harrison’s sense. The problem is that such consciousness does not prompt the impulse to solidarity with others. Again, this cannot be ascribed to passivity or a failure on the part of peripheral workers: class solidarity is difficult to imagine, and to practice, when there are no solid institutions against which to react. The problem of people on the periphery is that they know they are on their own, but not what to do about it.
In sum, students of the culture of work confront a crisis of representation in the world of work itself. There is class consciousness in the new capitalism in the sense of awareness of domination and subordination, but the new order of work, power and profit takes advantage of its own illegibility of structure. The defeat of Weberian rationality inflicts a wound on the understandings peripheral people have of their own condition.