Cultural Contradictions of Flexible Capitalism

As Richard Sennett points out in his stimulating book, The Corrosion of Character , Marx was not the first to suggest that the factory system was dehumanizing and alienating. Nor was Daniel Bell first to spot the effects of capitalism on values and moral character. Sennett argues that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations , for all the optimism expressed in the pin factory discussion early in the book, turns progressively darker as Smith considers the effects of boring routine on the moral and intellectual character of workers. In what Sennett calls “one of the grimmest passages of The Wealth of Nations , Smith writes:

“In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour . . . comes to be confined to a few very simply operations; frequently to one or two . . . . The man whose whole life is spend in performing a few simple operations . . . generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

Sennett’s book, however, focuses not on the effects of factory work on character but on the moral effects of recent moves toward “flexible” capitalism. He summarizes this new capitalism in the phrase “No long term.” Instead of following a career path within a company, today’s worker, with minimal education, “can expect to change jobs at least eleven times in the course of working, and change his or her skill base at least three times during those forty years of labor.” Instead of careers, employees are given projects, and their employment may last only until the project is complete. It is a sign of the times that “the fastest-growing sector of the American labor force . . . is people who work for temporary job agencies.” A friend who owns a family business recently told me of an employee who retired after a career that started in 1946. It was like hearing he had found a living brotosaurus.

Flexible capitalism also involves the breakdown of hierarchical structures: “Corporations have sought to remove layers of bureaucracy, to become flatter and more flexible organizations. In place of organizations as pyramids, management now wants to think of organizations as networks.” And these networks are constantly dissolving and recombining.

Sennett wonders what effect these new structures will have on moral values such as commitment, loyalty, and trust. Can trust be nurtured if one never works for a single company more than a few years? Sennett also notes the tension between a family’s need for structure, hierarchy, authority, and permanence, and the economy’s increasing corrosion of those very things. What does a man who changes jobs every other year teach his children about loyalty? In a “liquid” economy of this sort, how are permanent things embodied in work? One option is to distinguish more radically between the values of the market and the values of home, but that widens a chasm that modern economic life dug more than a century ago, a chasm better bridged than widened.

Years ago, I read Otto Scott’s history of Black & Decker, and was struck by the almost pastoral interest that owners and managers took in the personal and professional development of their employees. Are there ways to achieve something similar within the constraints of flexible capitalism?