The Culture of the New Capitalism
It is often hard to explain – to oneself and to others – why you are drawn to one particular writer, especially when the books are non-fiction. Fiction is easier, at least in some respects, because you may begin to identify with the characters, and want to know more about them. Biographies can be engaging, too. But broader based academic studies are more likely to ensnare you if there is a compelling underlying story, whether it’s about cosmology, class or computers. Is this why I find Richard Sennett’s books so interesting? I don’t really know, but I think it might be a combination of style and subject: style, because he often writes in a conversational way, as if he’s sitting across from you; subject, because he manages to take contemporary issues and use them to carefully build an insightful explanatory framework. He’s not a magician, but he does have a way with words.
Back in 2004, Richard Sennett was invited to give the Castle Lectures for Ethics, Politics and Economics at Yale University. The Castle Lectures had become part of the university’s program as a result of an endowment by John Castle, who had given this endowment to recognise one of his ancestors, the Reverend James Pierpoint, one of the initial founders of the university. The lectures are “intended to promote reflection on the moral foundations of society and government and to enhance understanding of ethical issues facing individuals in our complex modern society”. The result, the series published as The Culture of the New Capitalism, is Sennett at his best.
Following a brief Introduction, the book comprises his four lectures, looking in turn at Bureaucracy; Talent (and the Specter of Uselessness); Consuming Politics; and Social Capitalism in Our Time. It is a sociological study of the influence of what was described as the ‘New Economy’ on relationships, an influence that was leading corporations to become more diffuse, unstable, and ‘distributed’. Sennett wanted to show the differences between the rigid bureaucracy of traditional companies, with their pyramid structure and defined roles ensuring individuals knew their place and planned their futures , as opposed to modern corporations which provided no long-term stability, benefits, social capital, or interpersonal trust. As he saw it, current capitalism had created the ‘modern corporation’. This he described as an institution employing too many people, thereby creating an environment in which employees had to constantly adapt and prove themselves to be ‘assets’ or be tossed out.
It wasn’t an encouraging perspective. As he observed: “Today … the emphasis is on flexibility. Rigid forms of bureaucracy are under attack, as are the evils of blind routine. Workers are asked to behave nimbly, to be open to change on short notice, to take risks continually, to become ever less dependent on regulations and formal procedures. This emphasis on flexibility is changing the very meaning of work … In attacking rigid bureaucracy and emphasizing risk, it is claimed, flexibility gives people more freedom to shape their lives. In fact, the new order substitutes new controls rather than simply abolishing the rules of the past—but these new controls are also hard to understand. The new capitalism is an often illegible regime of power.”
As you might expect, coming more than thirty years after he first began writing, these lectures bring together a number of themes to be found in his work. The articulate maverick had become a distinguished professor. However, that might imply his critique had now softened, and his comments were less acerbic. Neither of those things were true. Indeed, in various ways and quite clearly Sennett remains a maverick.
That he was a maverick was evident in one of his first books, The Uses of Disorder: Personal identity and city life (1970) in which he wanted to upset what he saw as careless thinking, doing so by explaining in the Introduction that the “jungle of the city, its vastness and loneliness, has positive human value”:
“… there appears in adolescence a set of strengths and desires which can lead in themselves to a self-imposed slavery; that the current organization of city communities encourages men to enslave themselves in adolescent ways; that it is possible to break through this framework to achieve an adulthood whose freedom lies in its acceptance of disorder and painful dislocation; that the passage from adolescence to this new, possible adulthood depends on a structure of experience that can only take place in a dense, uncontrollable human settlement—in other words, in a city” (page xvii).
It is an insightful thesis, one which explores the view that many people remain stuck in perpetual adolescence, and what he saw as a new puritanism was pressing on peoples’ sense of identity through the implementation of planning. This led him on to think of the city as an anarchic system, and from there his critique expanded to address what he saw as ‘hidden injuries of class’. This was part of his broader theme, which was focussed on the changes taking place in society and the way it is organised, changes with profound consequences.
One central issue that concerned him was that urban workers were “aware of the momentous change in their lives the decline of the old neighbourhoods has caused; these working people of Boston are trying to find out what position they occupy in America as a whole… For the people we interviewed, integration into American life meant integration into a world with different symbols of human respect and courtesy, a world in which human capabilities are measured in terms profoundly alien to those that prevailed in the ethnic enclaves of their childhood.” His theme was dignity and respect, values he saw as under threat.
What his early work had made clear was that Richard Sennett was clearly independently minded, wanting to combine the roles of historian, essayist, and sociologist. However, there was more than that. Perhaps the best description of his approach is that he is a public intellectual. As a historian his focus had been on developing a specific line of argument rather examining historical knowledge in a broader and more detailed fashion. However, his preferred writing style is the extended essay, and this supports an intellectual style which is more concerned with social criticism or social commentary, rather than the development of social theory. “As a public intellectual he doesn’t attempt sustained political analysis. The result is a descriptive and compelling narrative style, one designed to make us think.”
For me, one of his major contributions was The Corrosion of Character (1998) where he explores the impact of new (flexible) capitalism on the experience of workers – and uses his by now almost familiar documentary approach, drawing on examples from people’s lives, and making links with different historical moments, writers and ways of thinking. He argues that the system of power inherent in modem forms of flexibility consists of three elements: “discontinuous reinvention of institutions; flexible specialization of production; and concentration of without centralization of power’”(page 47). One of the conclusions he reaches is that the experience of flexible capitalism is arousing a longing for community.
“All the emotional conditions we have explored in the workplace animate that desire: the uncertainties of flexibility; the absence of deeply rooted trust and commitment; the superficiality of teamwork; most of all, the spectre of failing to make something of oneself in the world, to “get a life” through one’s work. All these conditions impel people to look for some other scene of attachment and depth.” (1998: 138)
According to the writer Marina Warner, Richard Sennett has a great ability to re-invent himself (Benn 2001). The more of his work you read, it is clear he tends to take on different personae in his books. His philosophical orientation alters too, as Boyd Tonkin comments:
“In a previous interview, Sennett described himself to me as “an old-fashioned humanist and, I suppose, an old-fashioned democratic socialist”. Now he adds to this profession of lightly-worn faith an intellectual calling-card: “I am a pragmatist. That’s my philosophical church.” “The pragmatist movement from [William] James and [John] Dewey to Richard Rorty, Amartya Sen and myself is about discovering what people are capable of doing,” he explains. “It tries to understand social injustice and oppression by finding something positive that has been suppressed.” (Tonkin 2008)
There are a number of recurring themes in Sennet’s work, in his essays on class, capitalism, craft and the city. Several of his critiques are wonderful stand-alone contributions, written over five decades: these include The Uses of Disorder, Authority, and Respect in a World of Inequality; The Hidden Injuries of Class (with Jonathan Cobb); and The Corrosion of Character. His whole body of work has offered a wealth of insights and understanding about the experiences of working-class employees within current and newly emerging forms of capitalism. Another series, including The Craftsman, Together, and Building and Dwelling provides the benefits of his searchlight-like examination and analysis of the ‘working experience’ today, and the importance of personal investment in workplace activities.
This takes us back to The Culture of the New Capitalism. The book is a sociological study of the influence of the New Economy on human relationships. Sennett describes the ways in which the transformations that have taken place in postmodern capitalism have pushed corporations to become more diffuse, unstable, and decentered. Contrasted with the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy described by Max Weber – those pyramid-like corporate structures in which individuals knew their place and planned their futures – modern corporations provide no long-term stability, benefits, social capital, or interpersonal trust.
Sennett first looks at bureaucracy in early capitalism. Most businesses were short lived and unstable. However, in the latter half of the 19th century, major businesses were modelled on predictable military lines where all roles were defined and career progression could be mapped out. This new model was aimed at social inclusion, that most would start at the base of the company pyramid, then to hopefully progress over time to end up near the top.
Modern capitalism looks at this model with disdain – based on the perspective that too many superfluous people are employed for an organisation to remain competitive and that people should constantly adapt and prove themselves to be assets. The inevitable consequence of this view is that in large modern businesses the majority of workers face uncertainty and find it difficult to conceive of work providing a meaningful life narrative. Further, more recent decades have seen and increasing emphasis on mechanisation and the concomitant need for upskilling, both for managers as well as for their subordinates, and all facing the possibility of obsolescence. Concepts such as craftmanship and a focus on ‘getting the job right’ are seen as wasteful and somewhat obsessive.
At the same time, the modern corporation is constantly demanding new areas of expertise. Capitalism’s need for ‘potential’ is increasingly reflected in the education system. Tests like SATS favour superficial and adaptive reasoning rather than deeper introspection on the meaning of things. Finally, comparisons are made between branding and politics. Products such as cars are physically very similar, but branding creates differences on minor issues revolving around appearance and emotion. Sennett views this same ‘gold-plating’ process as having a largely negative influence on modern politics where presentation is key.
A change in current institutional structures has accompanied short-term, contract or episodic labour. Corporations have sought to remove layers of bureaucracy, to become flatter and more flexible organizations. In place of organisations constructed as pyramids, “management now wants to think of organizations as networks … 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 …Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connections. Creative destruction … requires people at ease about not reckoning the consequences of change, or not knowing what comes next” …
In work, the traditional career progressing step by step through the corridors of one or two institutions is gradually withering away; so too Sennett argues is the deployment of a single set of skills through the course of a working life “An executive for ATT points out that the motto ‘no long term’ is altering the very meaning of work. ‘In ATT we have to promote the whole concept of the work force being contingent … “Jobs” are being replaced by “projects” … ‘No long term’ is a principle which corrodes trust, loyalty and mutual commitment … Detachment and superficial co-operativeness are better armor for dealing with current realities than behaviour based on values of loyalty and service … ‘No long term’ means keeping moving, don’t commit yourself, and don’t sacrifice …”
Sennett suggest that perhaps the most alarming aspect of these demands for flexibility is their impact on personal character . As he sees it, character is especially likely to develop as a function of the long-term elements of our emotional experience. “Character is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through the pursuit of long-term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratification for the sake of a future end.”
It is as a reaction to all this that Sennett focusses on craftsmanship, an approach that he identifies as ‘an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake’ (2008: 9). However, he reminds us that the craftsman often faces ‘conflicting objective standards of excellence; the desire to something well for its own sake can be impaired by competitive pressure, by frustration, or by obsession’ (op.cit.). S/he conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking and this ‘evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem-solving and problem finding’.
Is there a place for craftmanship today? In his perspective, there are several aspects to retaining a craftsman-like approach, including: skills formed in bodily practices; technical understanding developed through the powers of imagination, and motivation mattering more than talent. To all this, Sennett adds his view that cooperation is a craft. It draws on “the skill of understanding and responding to one another in order to act together, but this is a thorny process, full of difficulty and ambiguity and often leading to destructive consequences” Given this focus is on ‘responsiveness to others, such as listening skills in conversation, and on the practical application of responsiveness at work or in the community’ he argues that responsiveness is less an ethical disposition but emerges from practical activity. Is he just being nostalgic? I like to think he is setting a path to make work meaningful and rewarding.
