The Corrosion Of Character – A Review

The Corrosion of Character

The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

A Review

By Alan Danesh

The Corrosion of Character

The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

By RICHARD SENNETT

W. W. Norton & Company

New York London

In Memory of Isaiah Berlin

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“Today the phrase ‘flexible capitalism’ describes a system which is more than a permutation on an old theme. 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, and so the words we use for it. ‘Career,’ for instance, in its English origins meant a road for carriages, and as eventually applied to labor meant a lifelong channel for one’s economic pursuits. Flexible capitalism has blocked the straight roadway of career, diverting employees suddenly from one kind of work into another. The word ‘job’ in English of the fourteenth century meant a lump or piece of something which could be carted around. Flexibility today brings back this arcane sense of the job, as people do lumps of labor, pieces of work, over the course of a lifetime.” (Source: The Corrosion of Character, Preface)

“It is quite natural that flexibility should arouse anxiety: people do not know what risks will pay off, what paths to pursue. To take the curse off the phrase ‘capitalist system’ there developed in the past many circumlocutions, such as the ‘free enterprise’ or ‘private enterprise’ system. Flexibility is used today as another way to lift the curse of oppression from capitalism. 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.” (Source: Ibid. Preface)

“Perhaps the most confusing aspect of flexibility is its impact on personal character. The old English speakers, and indeed writers going back to antiquity, were in no doubt about the meaning of ‘character’: it is the ethical value we place on our own desires and on our relations to others. Horace writes that the character of a man depends on his connections to the world. In this sense, ‘character’ is a more encompassing term than its more modern offspring ‘character’ is a more encompassing term than its more modern offspring ‘personality,’ which concerns desires and sentiments which may fester within, witnessed by no one else.” (Source: Ibid. Preface)

“At the dawn of industrial capitalism, though, it was not self-evident that routine was an evil. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it seemed that repetitive labor could lead in two quite different directions, one positive and fruitful, the other destructive. The positive side of routine was depicted in Diderot’s great Encyclopedia, published from 1751 to 1772; the negative side of regular labor-time was portrayed most dramatically in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Diderot believed routine in work could be like any other form of rote learning, a necessary teacher; Smith believed routine deadened the mind. Today, society sides with Smith. Diderot suggests what we might lose by taking his opponent’s side.” (Source: Ibid. p. 25)

“Whereas Adam Smith was a moralist of sympathy, the political economists who followed him focused on a different ethical value. To Mill, flexible behavior begets personal freedom. We are still disposed to think it does; we imagine being open to change, being adaptable, as qualities of character needed for free action—the human being free because capable of change. In our own time, however, the new political economy betrays this personal desire for freedom. Revulsion against bureaucratic routine and pursuit of flexibility has produced new structures of power and control, rather than created the conditions which set us free.” (Source: Ibid. p. 37)

“The system of power which lurks in modern forms of flexibility consists of three elements: discontinuous reinvention of institutions; flexible specialization of production; and concentration of without centralization of power. The facts which fall under each of these categories are familiar to most of us, rather than arcane; it is harder to assess the personal consequences of these facts.” (Source: Ibid. p. 37)

“The French banker Michel Albert draws out the contrast between answers by dividing the political economies of the advanced nations into a ‘Rhine’ model and an ‘Anglo-American’ model. The first has existed for nearly a century in the Netherlands, Germany, and France: in it labor unions and management share power, and the welfare apparatus of the government provides a comparatively tightly woven safety net of pensions, education, and health benefits. This Rhine model has served Italy, Japan, Scandinavia, and Israel as well.

The other model, the ‘Anglo-American,’ refers to the condition of Great Britain and America today, rather than to the past. This model gives free-market capitalism greater scope. While the Rhine model emphasizes certain obligations of economic institutions to the polity, the Anglo-American model stresses the state bureaucracy’s subordination to the economy, and thus is willing to loosen the safety net provided by government.

The Rhine regimes tend to put the brakes on change when their less powerful citizens suffer, while the Anglo-American regime is more inclined to pursue changes in work organizations and practices even though the weak might pay a price. The Rhine model is somewhat friendly to government bureaucracy, while the Anglo-American operates on the principle that government is guilty until proven innocent.” (Source: Ibid. p. 42)

“For older workers, the prejudices against age send a powerful message: as a person’s experience accumulates, it loses value. What an older worker has learned over the course of the years about a particular company or profession may get in the way of new changes dictated by superiors. From the institution’s vantage point, the flexibility of the young makes them more malleable in terms of both risk-taking and immediate submission.” (Source: Ibid. p. 74)

“Flexible corporate practice, as well as current government labor policy in Britain and the United States, is based on the assumption that rapid change of skills is the norm. In fact, historically, the discarding of people with ‘old’ skills usually has occurred slowly.” (Source: Ibid. p. 75)

“Laurie Graham found people oppressed in a particular way by the very superficiality of the fictions of teamwork. Peer pressure from other workers on her work team took the place of bosses cracking the whip in order to move the cars as fast as possible along the assembly line; the fiction of cooperating employees served the company’s relentless drive for ever greater productivity.

After an initial period of enthusiasm, a coworker told her, ‘I thought this place would be different with its team concept and all, but management is just trying to work people to death.’” (Source: Ibid. p. 88)

“The most persuasive practical proposals I’ve heard for coping with the problems of the new capitalism focus on the places where it operates. Modern corporations like to present themselves as having cut free from the claims of place; a factory in Mexico, an office in Bombay, a media center in lower Manhattan—these appear as mere nodes in the global network. Today, localities, cities, or  nations fear that if they exercise their sovereignty, for instance by imposing taxes or restraining summary firings, a corporation could as easily find another island in the network, a factory in Canada if not Mexico, an office in Boston if not Manhattan. From fear of provoking IBM to leave  altogether, many localities in the Hudson Valley held back from challenging its decision to devastate the work lives of citizens like the programmers.” (Source: Ibid. p. 107)

“In early capitalism, as Albert Hirschmann has shown, trust in business relations arose through open acknowledgment of mutual dependence—which is not quite the same as an honorable relation between strong and weak, but still a recognition that alone one is insufficient to support oneself. Jacques Savary, the seventeenth-century author of Le parfait négotiant, declared that divine providence wills ‘that men would trade together and so that the mutual need which they have to help one another would establish ties of friendship among them.'” (Source: Ibid. p. 110)

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