Richard Sennett on The Culture of the New Capitalism
Richard Sennett has been one of the foremost thinkers of our current times whose thoughts on the changing nature of work, the flux of the institutions and its effects on the men who inhabit them has enriched anyone who was looking for a deeper understanding of the times that we live in. He has been exploring these topics
over the past thirty years from "The Hidden Injuries of Class" written in 1972 , "The Corrosion of Character, The Personal Consequences Of Work in the New Capitalism" and now "The Culture of New Capitalism". Sennett has as the main thread of this book the evolution of capitalism and its institutions from the advent of industrial age through the age of industrial bureaucracies modeled on standing armies to the modern information age.
Richard Sennett starts his book with the quote from Marx "All that is solid melts into air". This would be the defining words on the instability of the age with its market upheavals, the sudden rise, collapse and movement of factories, the mass migration of workers seeking better jobs or any jobs. But this Schumpeterian "Creative destruction" was not to last for long. Over a period of a hundred years from 1860 to 1970 this free market capitalism was to be tamed and transformed into a social capitalism of vast bureaucratic corporations. The bureaucratic corporation according to Max Weber had its origin when the organizing principles of the Prussian military were borrowed to business and other institutions of civil society. The bureaucratic corporation provided for each worker a particular place and each place a defined function. According to Weber the greatest contribution of this "Iron Cage" would be the gift of organized time. People could work on a long term strategy for their lives.At an individual level this facilitated individuals to plan their lives." It became possible, for instance , to define what the stages of a career ought to look like, to correlate long term service in the firm to specific steps of increased wealth. Many manual workers could for the first time plan to buy a house". In the broader cultural realm of social relationships Sennett makes an insightful observation." All Social relationships take time to develop. A life narrative in which the individual matters to others require an institution with lifetime longevity". The institutional framework of the bureaucratic organization caters and facilitates to this aspect of human social need.
But this bureaucratic organization of Weber's time is slowly unraveling. Some of the visible changes can be seen in the end of life term employment, the waning of careers spent within a single institution and more importantly the decline in moral prestige attached to work that is fixed and stable. One of interesting terms that Sennett uses is "Personal drift". In the absence of institutions on which to anchor themselves people face a life of drifting in isolation, moving from one work task to another. This according to Sennett is the defining cultural difference between the cultures of the old social capitalism and the new capitalism. Sennett then attempts to find out the reason for the rise of this new capitalism. He identifies three broad trends that have caused this new capitalism to take-off. Firstly he identifies the breakdown of the Breton Woods agreements in the 1970's and the unleashing of a vast tide of global capital that was no longer held back by national barriers. Secondly he mentions a decided change in the attitude of capital to the institutions that it is invested in. The time horizon on which this new capital expected its return was lower. The capital of the older age was inextricably tied long term with the institution that it was invested in and it expected its return in the form of long term dividends.Thirdly was the influence of technology and automation. The growth of communication technology meant that that information could pass in an unambiguous and thorough manner in a corporation. Instructions from the top could go to the bottom without the need for any modulation. Executives at the top could get information on the performance of the units in the bottom at real time. The spread of automation meant that many of routine non specialized work could be done by machines. This meant that organizations could shed jobs that were routine.Technological ability and capacity means that inclusion of the masses , the social element of social capitalism can wither.The idealized new self of the worker has also changed from one who was dependable and did his work well to somebody who is constantly learning. This is because technology constantly keeps workers on their toes making once solid dependable jobs either redundant or making the skill involved in the job go away.
After having identified the historical and material processes that have driven the trend to this "New Capitalism", Sennett looks at the new institutional realities of the modern corporate institution. Sennett comes across an institution that is very short term task oriented with the organization in a state of constant flux, the organization swelling and contracting according to the task that has to be done.Another institutional reality according to Sennett is the centralization of power and the social inequality within organization. I would believe it is here that things become a little blurred and Sennett's arguments a little shaky. Since the organizations of the New Capitalism are not really social, it would be inaccurate to describe the power differentials within an organization as social inequality. A more apt description would be to describe that the organization can look at people and their roles from a spectrum of indifference to recognition. Often individual roles and people can move across this spectrum with the changing flux of what is thought as the business need of the hour. In a cutting edge high tech organization, even an engineer at the base of the organization can have a role which is treated with recognition. There is no great distance between a Zuckerberg of Facebook and a nerdy engineer in his organization other than one of great difference in material wealth.On the other hand the example cited by Sennett of the relationship between a Milan fashionista and her Thai Shoe maker is characterized not only by indifference but the shoemaker can never move into a role of recognition. This distinction points to a trend for us to reflect. Why are two set of worker experiences in the modern capitalist organization so very different. That would ask us to reflect on the identities of the workers themselves. Are identities of workers themselves as professionals, craft workers and "cog in the wheel" technologically de-skilled working class matter in the developing social inequality. A social inequality which is not embedded in the organization as such but more deeply structurally built in the construct of social relationships in society as such. Sennett then goes on to identify the three social deficits of the structurally changed organization as low institutional loyalty, diminishment of informal trust among workers and weakening of institutional knowledge. For anybody who has either worked or been exposed to the culture of any modern day corporation this is not a surprise.
Lastly Sennett tries to understand the effect that the flexible workplace has on the workers themselves.This is a topic that Sennett explored in his other book "The Corrosion of Character". The crux of Sennett's argument is that in a flexible organization , workers are not able to form stable fixed identities that are central to formation of a "moral" character.In Sennett's words "The time-engine driving the Protestant Ethic is delayed gratification in the present for the sake of long-term goals. Delayed gratification makes possible self-discipline.This work requires a certain kind of institution to be creditable.It has to be stable to deliver the future rewards.Its managers have to remain in place as witnesses to your performance" . Is Sennett overextending his arguments here. Since identities are always relational, to speculate on the identity of a worker is to enter the realm of the ontological . It would raise questions of , does an individual need a "life-time" framework for a healthy work identity. How much has the human condition evolved for a stable versus a flexible identity. Are there innate differences in human personality that would make some of us thrive in a flexible environment (not just labor in the cutting edge for whom Sennett makes exceptions). But instinctively many of us especially the non-ambitious sort seem to understand and agree with Sennett that a general ambiguity of character sets upon in an environment of flexible and uncommitted work organizations.
Since this book is a compilation of lectures, Sennett moves to a related but separate topic of talent and the specter of uselessness. It covers an subject that has been written about by many political and economic commentators.Sennett brackets under the specter of uselessness the job losses wrought to migration of jobs to low cost nations, automation and the more general discrimination of the aged.Sennett does not have any direct suggestions but rather enumerates the problem. Sennett then goes on to define modern capitalism's definition of talent. He takes two terms which define people talents craftsmanship and meritocracy. He elaborates on an understanding of craftsmanship and its uneasy fit with the capitalism of new age. Craftsmanship needs a depth that institutions based on short term transactions do not breed. But this again would be an argument with holes. Many of the technological innovations characteristic of our age come out of a spirit of craftsmanship practiced by its engineers and workers. This reminds me of one anachronistic blue collar job that has survived to the present day with its craftsmanship features intact. This is the job of the London cab driver and their examination called "The Knowledge".The amount of information that has to be learnt to master this test is so vast that neurologists have found that the hippo-campus, the part of the brain responsible for spatial navigation is significantly larger for a London cabby than the general human population. On an average an individual spends four years of an all consuming learning to qualify. This would be for Sennett an example of Craftsmanship symbolizing the values of an epoch gone by. Today an individual with Google on a Samsung smartphone could more or less find his way out. He probably could not do it with the ease or efficiency of the London cab driver but in a strictly utilitarian way he can. In other words the invulnerability and essentiality of the London cabby is no longer there. Is Craftsmanship lost here. Not in the real world yet for the London Cabby but potentially yes. But there has been craftsmanship gained in the extraordinary sophistication and potency of the smart phones, the complex networks, algorithms and servers that make the complicated search of a Google map possible. This raises another question. Is an epochal understanding really the way to look at an issue as complex as craftsmanship.
Sennett then looks at politics of the modern age under the title "Consuming Politics". Sennett makes a comparison between the politics in the age of of new capitalism to the marketing of a product. This is the chapter where i found Sennett taking a too convoluted and rambling approach to drive home his conclusion. Sennett argues that the modern day citizen becomes a "consumer of politics faced with pressures to buy". And just what are the marketing tactics that the consumer faces. Modern marketing makes the buying of products a "Self-consuming passion". A Self-consuming passion according to Sennett is a passion that burns it out by its own consumption.In a Self-consuming passion imagination is strongest in anticipation and grows ever weaker through use. Branding and Potency are two ways the self-consuming passion is made desirable. Branding works by "gold plating", which is a term used by marketers to exaggerate minor differences on a common platform.Potency is endowing commonplace objects a potential beyond what is rational. He takes the example of an iPod which can store millions of songs even though a human user would never be able to use it for more than a few hundred songs.Potency arouses a passion, which often cannot deliver what it promises to do. Sennett sees a similar thinking working in modern day politics. The consumer-citizen is driven from progressive politics to a passive receptive state which translates into, being offered political platforms that resemble product platforms, gold-plated differences between political ideologies and asked to discount the "twisted timbers of humanity" (as Immanuel Kant called us). By progressive politics Sennett means a polity in which all citizens believe they are bound together in a common project. While any casual observer of modern day American media and politics would agree with this conclusion, has Sennett got his horse and cart in the wrong order. Sennett's observation is that individuals are enervated by their participation in the institutions and markets of new capitalism that they no longer are able to create a progressive political environment. The cultural values of work and consumption seep into the domain of politics as well. But could it be the other way around, something that Sennett alludes to in the end of the chapter. Could it be the overwhelming political consensus in Anglo-American countries for a neo-liberal democratic regimes that favor limited government. When politics loses its moral prestige and importance, the corollary that follows is political leaders are reduced to a role where they have to market themselves akin to selling soap.
The last chapter titled " Social capitalism in our time" is Sennett's suggestion for progressive politics to find its way into relevance. Sennett looks at some interesting efforts to create "parallel institutions" which try to give workers a sense of continuity a narrative. One of them has been the way some unions have moved away from their traditional role to become community based groups that provide a sense of emotional security. He mentions about the Dutch system of "Job sharing". This allows every one to have some work and nobody is fully unemployed. The purpose of all this for Sennett is " All these efforts address a hard reality. insecurity is not just an unwanted consequence of upheavals in the market; rather, insecurity is programmed into the new institutional model". In the realm of the usefulness Sennett suggest a return to progressive politics. For Sennett a truly progressive politics would "seek to strengthen the State as an employer, rather than hive-off public service work to private companies. Another suggestion that Sennett makes is for "care" work to be monetarily supported. Sennett ends his book with a hope that borders on a schadenfreude about the new system "Since people can anchor themselves in life only by trying to do something well for its own sake, the triumph of superficiality at work, in schools and in politics seem to be fragile. Perhaps, indeed , revolt against this enfeebled culture will constitute our next fresh page". Altogether a very readable book.
over the past thirty years from "The Hidden Injuries of Class" written in 1972 , "The Corrosion of Character, The Personal Consequences Of Work in the New Capitalism" and now "The Culture of New Capitalism". Sennett has as the main thread of this book the evolution of capitalism and its institutions from the advent of industrial age through the age of industrial bureaucracies modeled on standing armies to the modern information age.
Richard Sennett starts his book with the quote from Marx "All that is solid melts into air". This would be the defining words on the instability of the age with its market upheavals, the sudden rise, collapse and movement of factories, the mass migration of workers seeking better jobs or any jobs. But this Schumpeterian "Creative destruction" was not to last for long. Over a period of a hundred years from 1860 to 1970 this free market capitalism was to be tamed and transformed into a social capitalism of vast bureaucratic corporations. The bureaucratic corporation according to Max Weber had its origin when the organizing principles of the Prussian military were borrowed to business and other institutions of civil society. The bureaucratic corporation provided for each worker a particular place and each place a defined function. According to Weber the greatest contribution of this "Iron Cage" would be the gift of organized time. People could work on a long term strategy for their lives.At an individual level this facilitated individuals to plan their lives." It became possible, for instance , to define what the stages of a career ought to look like, to correlate long term service in the firm to specific steps of increased wealth. Many manual workers could for the first time plan to buy a house". In the broader cultural realm of social relationships Sennett makes an insightful observation." All Social relationships take time to develop. A life narrative in which the individual matters to others require an institution with lifetime longevity". The institutional framework of the bureaucratic organization caters and facilitates to this aspect of human social need.
But this bureaucratic organization of Weber's time is slowly unraveling. Some of the visible changes can be seen in the end of life term employment, the waning of careers spent within a single institution and more importantly the decline in moral prestige attached to work that is fixed and stable. One of interesting terms that Sennett uses is "Personal drift". In the absence of institutions on which to anchor themselves people face a life of drifting in isolation, moving from one work task to another. This according to Sennett is the defining cultural difference between the cultures of the old social capitalism and the new capitalism. Sennett then attempts to find out the reason for the rise of this new capitalism. He identifies three broad trends that have caused this new capitalism to take-off. Firstly he identifies the breakdown of the Breton Woods agreements in the 1970's and the unleashing of a vast tide of global capital that was no longer held back by national barriers. Secondly he mentions a decided change in the attitude of capital to the institutions that it is invested in. The time horizon on which this new capital expected its return was lower. The capital of the older age was inextricably tied long term with the institution that it was invested in and it expected its return in the form of long term dividends.Thirdly was the influence of technology and automation. The growth of communication technology meant that that information could pass in an unambiguous and thorough manner in a corporation. Instructions from the top could go to the bottom without the need for any modulation. Executives at the top could get information on the performance of the units in the bottom at real time. The spread of automation meant that many of routine non specialized work could be done by machines. This meant that organizations could shed jobs that were routine.Technological ability and capacity means that inclusion of the masses , the social element of social capitalism can wither.The idealized new self of the worker has also changed from one who was dependable and did his work well to somebody who is constantly learning. This is because technology constantly keeps workers on their toes making once solid dependable jobs either redundant or making the skill involved in the job go away.
After having identified the historical and material processes that have driven the trend to this "New Capitalism", Sennett looks at the new institutional realities of the modern corporate institution. Sennett comes across an institution that is very short term task oriented with the organization in a state of constant flux, the organization swelling and contracting according to the task that has to be done.Another institutional reality according to Sennett is the centralization of power and the social inequality within organization. I would believe it is here that things become a little blurred and Sennett's arguments a little shaky. Since the organizations of the New Capitalism are not really social, it would be inaccurate to describe the power differentials within an organization as social inequality. A more apt description would be to describe that the organization can look at people and their roles from a spectrum of indifference to recognition. Often individual roles and people can move across this spectrum with the changing flux of what is thought as the business need of the hour. In a cutting edge high tech organization, even an engineer at the base of the organization can have a role which is treated with recognition. There is no great distance between a Zuckerberg of Facebook and a nerdy engineer in his organization other than one of great difference in material wealth.On the other hand the example cited by Sennett of the relationship between a Milan fashionista and her Thai Shoe maker is characterized not only by indifference but the shoemaker can never move into a role of recognition. This distinction points to a trend for us to reflect. Why are two set of worker experiences in the modern capitalist organization so very different. That would ask us to reflect on the identities of the workers themselves. Are identities of workers themselves as professionals, craft workers and "cog in the wheel" technologically de-skilled working class matter in the developing social inequality. A social inequality which is not embedded in the organization as such but more deeply structurally built in the construct of social relationships in society as such. Sennett then goes on to identify the three social deficits of the structurally changed organization as low institutional loyalty, diminishment of informal trust among workers and weakening of institutional knowledge. For anybody who has either worked or been exposed to the culture of any modern day corporation this is not a surprise.
Lastly Sennett tries to understand the effect that the flexible workplace has on the workers themselves.This is a topic that Sennett explored in his other book "The Corrosion of Character". The crux of Sennett's argument is that in a flexible organization , workers are not able to form stable fixed identities that are central to formation of a "moral" character.In Sennett's words "The time-engine driving the Protestant Ethic is delayed gratification in the present for the sake of long-term goals. Delayed gratification makes possible self-discipline.This work requires a certain kind of institution to be creditable.It has to be stable to deliver the future rewards.Its managers have to remain in place as witnesses to your performance" . Is Sennett overextending his arguments here. Since identities are always relational, to speculate on the identity of a worker is to enter the realm of the ontological . It would raise questions of , does an individual need a "life-time" framework for a healthy work identity. How much has the human condition evolved for a stable versus a flexible identity. Are there innate differences in human personality that would make some of us thrive in a flexible environment (not just labor in the cutting edge for whom Sennett makes exceptions). But instinctively many of us especially the non-ambitious sort seem to understand and agree with Sennett that a general ambiguity of character sets upon in an environment of flexible and uncommitted work organizations.
Since this book is a compilation of lectures, Sennett moves to a related but separate topic of talent and the specter of uselessness. It covers an subject that has been written about by many political and economic commentators.Sennett brackets under the specter of uselessness the job losses wrought to migration of jobs to low cost nations, automation and the more general discrimination of the aged.Sennett does not have any direct suggestions but rather enumerates the problem. Sennett then goes on to define modern capitalism's definition of talent. He takes two terms which define people talents craftsmanship and meritocracy. He elaborates on an understanding of craftsmanship and its uneasy fit with the capitalism of new age. Craftsmanship needs a depth that institutions based on short term transactions do not breed. But this again would be an argument with holes. Many of the technological innovations characteristic of our age come out of a spirit of craftsmanship practiced by its engineers and workers. This reminds me of one anachronistic blue collar job that has survived to the present day with its craftsmanship features intact. This is the job of the London cab driver and their examination called "The Knowledge".The amount of information that has to be learnt to master this test is so vast that neurologists have found that the hippo-campus, the part of the brain responsible for spatial navigation is significantly larger for a London cabby than the general human population. On an average an individual spends four years of an all consuming learning to qualify. This would be for Sennett an example of Craftsmanship symbolizing the values of an epoch gone by. Today an individual with Google on a Samsung smartphone could more or less find his way out. He probably could not do it with the ease or efficiency of the London cab driver but in a strictly utilitarian way he can. In other words the invulnerability and essentiality of the London cabby is no longer there. Is Craftsmanship lost here. Not in the real world yet for the London Cabby but potentially yes. But there has been craftsmanship gained in the extraordinary sophistication and potency of the smart phones, the complex networks, algorithms and servers that make the complicated search of a Google map possible. This raises another question. Is an epochal understanding really the way to look at an issue as complex as craftsmanship.
Sennett then looks at politics of the modern age under the title "Consuming Politics". Sennett makes a comparison between the politics in the age of of new capitalism to the marketing of a product. This is the chapter where i found Sennett taking a too convoluted and rambling approach to drive home his conclusion. Sennett argues that the modern day citizen becomes a "consumer of politics faced with pressures to buy". And just what are the marketing tactics that the consumer faces. Modern marketing makes the buying of products a "Self-consuming passion". A Self-consuming passion according to Sennett is a passion that burns it out by its own consumption.In a Self-consuming passion imagination is strongest in anticipation and grows ever weaker through use. Branding and Potency are two ways the self-consuming passion is made desirable. Branding works by "gold plating", which is a term used by marketers to exaggerate minor differences on a common platform.Potency is endowing commonplace objects a potential beyond what is rational. He takes the example of an iPod which can store millions of songs even though a human user would never be able to use it for more than a few hundred songs.Potency arouses a passion, which often cannot deliver what it promises to do. Sennett sees a similar thinking working in modern day politics. The consumer-citizen is driven from progressive politics to a passive receptive state which translates into, being offered political platforms that resemble product platforms, gold-plated differences between political ideologies and asked to discount the "twisted timbers of humanity" (as Immanuel Kant called us). By progressive politics Sennett means a polity in which all citizens believe they are bound together in a common project. While any casual observer of modern day American media and politics would agree with this conclusion, has Sennett got his horse and cart in the wrong order. Sennett's observation is that individuals are enervated by their participation in the institutions and markets of new capitalism that they no longer are able to create a progressive political environment. The cultural values of work and consumption seep into the domain of politics as well. But could it be the other way around, something that Sennett alludes to in the end of the chapter. Could it be the overwhelming political consensus in Anglo-American countries for a neo-liberal democratic regimes that favor limited government. When politics loses its moral prestige and importance, the corollary that follows is political leaders are reduced to a role where they have to market themselves akin to selling soap.
The last chapter titled " Social capitalism in our time" is Sennett's suggestion for progressive politics to find its way into relevance. Sennett looks at some interesting efforts to create "parallel institutions" which try to give workers a sense of continuity a narrative. One of them has been the way some unions have moved away from their traditional role to become community based groups that provide a sense of emotional security. He mentions about the Dutch system of "Job sharing". This allows every one to have some work and nobody is fully unemployed. The purpose of all this for Sennett is " All these efforts address a hard reality. insecurity is not just an unwanted consequence of upheavals in the market; rather, insecurity is programmed into the new institutional model". In the realm of the usefulness Sennett suggest a return to progressive politics. For Sennett a truly progressive politics would "seek to strengthen the State as an employer, rather than hive-off public service work to private companies. Another suggestion that Sennett makes is for "care" work to be monetarily supported. Sennett ends his book with a hope that borders on a schadenfreude about the new system "Since people can anchor themselves in life only by trying to do something well for its own sake, the triumph of superficiality at work, in schools and in politics seem to be fragile. Perhaps, indeed , revolt against this enfeebled culture will constitute our next fresh page". Altogether a very readable book.
Labels: Review of Sociology
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