Wing-kwong Tsang

1. EDM 6210Education Policy and SocietyLecture 12Education Policy and Social Integration:Individualization & the Debate on the Death of Social Class Wing-kwong Tsang

2. Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization and Beyond Status and Class • The process of individualization • “Modernization does not just lead to the formation of a centalized state power, to concentrations of capital and to an ever more tightly woven web of division of labor and market relationship, to mobility and mass consumption, and so on. It also leads …to a triple ‘individualization’:disembedding, removal from historically prescribed social forms and commitments in the sense of traditional contexts of dominance and support (the ‘liberating dimension’); the loss of traditional security with respect to practical knowledge, faith and guiding norms (the ‘disenchantment dimension’); and …re-embedding, a new type of social commitment (the ‘control’ or ‘reintegration dimension’). (Beck, 1992, p. 128)

4. Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization and Beyond Status and Class • The process of individualization

5. Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization and Beyond Status and Class • The process of individualization • Beck’s definition of individualization: “‘Individualization’ means, first, the disembedding and, second, the ‘re-embedding’ of industrial society ways of life by new ones, in which the individuals must produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves. Thus the name ‘individualization’, disembedding and re-embedding …do not occur by chance, nor individually, nor voluntarily, nor through diverse types of historical conditions, but rather all at once and under the general conditions of the welfare in developed industrial labour society, as they have developed since the 1960s in many Western industrial countries.” (Beck, 1994, p.13)

6. Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization and Beyond Status and Class • The process of individualization • Zygmunt Bauman’s definition of individualization: “’Individualization’ consists of transforming human ‘identity’ from a ‘given’ into a task and changing the actors with the responsibility for performing that task and for the consequences (also the side-effects) of their performance. ….Human being are no more ‘born into’ their identities. … Needing to become what one is the feature of modern living - and of this living alone. …Modernity replaces the heteronomic determination of social standing with compulsive and obligatory self-determination.” (Bauman, 2000, p. 31-2)

7. Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization and Beyond Status and Class • The process of individualization • Institutionalized ‘beds’ - identity bases - for the re-embedment of modern individuals • ‘Beds’ in capital market, e.g. occupations, professions, social-class positions, etc. • ‘Beds’ in institution of marriage and family, husband, wife, father, mother, etc. • ‘Beds’ in modern political arenas, e.g. citizens, members of new social movements, such as environmentalists, feminist, anti-gloabizationists, etc

8. Instrumental Identity Modern Identity national- citizenship identity Class identity Gender identity Achieved Identity Constructed Identity Given Identity Essential Identity Local-ethnic traditional Identity Primordial Identity

9. Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization and Beyond Status and Class • Individualization in Informational Age &Liquid Times • “What distinguished the ‘individualization’ of yore from the form it has taken in ‘risk society’ …. No ‘beds’ are furnished for ‘re-embedding’, and such beds as might be postulated and pursued prove fragile and often vanish before the work of ‘re-embeddment’ is complete. There are rather ‘musical chairs’ of various size and style as well as of changing numbers and positions, which prompt men and women to be constantly on the move and promise no ‘fulfilment’, no rest and no satisfaction of ‘arriving’, of reaching the final destination, where one can disarm, relax and stop worrying.” (Bauman, 2000, p. 33-34)

11. Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization and Beyond Status and Class • Periodization of individualization • Individualization in Reformation: In the Enlightenment in Europe, individuals were liberated from the Church and then from the Christian worldview and resumed and achieved the identity of the modern men. • Individualization in industrial capitalism: In the process of industrialization, commodification and capitalization , democratization, and urbanization in the 18 to 19th centuries, individuals were disembidded from traditionally ascribed identities of families and clans, local communities and villages, religious groups, guilds, etc. and re-embedded into achieved identities of citizens, factory workers and union members, professionals, etc.

12. Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization and Beyond Status and Class • Periodization of individualization • Individualization in informational-global capitalism: In the Informational-global age, individuals are disembedded from identities of national citizenship and social class and re-embed into identities of global migrants or citizens, employees of multi-national corporations, or even any free-floating identities in the internet.

13. Modern Identity Hyper-linked Identity Liquid Identity in Liquid Life national- citizenship identity Class identity Gender identity Achieved Identity Virtual Identity Given Identity Local-ethnic traditional identity Primordial Identity

14. Changes in Class Structure in Late Modernity • Beck’s thesis of structural contradiction in late-modern society • Persistence of social inequality • Waning of class effects: Questions concerning inequality are no longer perceived and political handled as class struggles.” (Beck, 2006, p. 143) • Thesis of beyond status and class: “Individualization actually leads to a dissolution of lifeworlds associated with class and status group subculture."

16. Changes in Class Structure in Late Modernity • Structural changes in late-modern scoiety contributing to further individualization of class structure in industrial capitalism • The emergence of the “New Classes” • The emergence of the managerial class in private sector: As (i) corporate ownerships are transformed into shareholderships and (ii) ownerships of means of production are further divided into legal/nominal shareholdership and the managerial power control over use of means of production in actual production process; there constitutes a class of managers who are employees and yet have direct control over the process of production in private sector.

17. Changes in Class Structure in Late Modernity • Structural changes in late-modern society contributing to further individualization of class structure in industrial capitalism • The emergence of the “New Classes” • The emergence of the class of technocrat and bureaucratin public sector: As state apparatuses expand, employees who manage the technocratic and bureaucratic know-how of governmental and public agencies increase substantially.

18. Changes in Class Structure in Late Modernity • Structural changes in late-modern society …. • The emergence of the knowledge class: As information technology spreads and knowledge production replaces manufacturing industries to become the core section of wealth accumulation in knowledge economy, there emerges a new class of know as “symbolic analysts” (coined by Robert B. Reich). The employments of the symbolic analysts may include scientists and researchers; programmers, designers, engineers, marketer and advertisers, consultants in enterprise management, ecology, public relation, etc.

19. Changes in Class Structure in Late Modernity • Structural changes in late-modern society … • The emergence of the McProletariats: It refers to “new proletariats” who are unskilled and poorly paid service workers employed in outsourced centers. Its “reigning symbol is the McDonald’s worker, decked out in the colors of the corporate chain, working near the minimum wage without basic benefits, repetitively performing carefully monitored simple task.” (Kingston, 2000, p. 184)

20. Changes in Class Structure in Late Modernity • The emergence of the cybertariats: Cybertariat is coined by Ursula Huws in her collection of essays entitled The Making of a Cybertariat (2003) to indicate growing number of low-level, routine, non-manual office workers who are aligned by numbers of structural changes in office work into a common class position, comparable to proletariat in industrial capitalism. These structural changes include • Automation and digitalization of productive process of traditional manufacturing industries have given rise to growing number of routine non-manual workers, who fall between the class divisions between bourgeois and proletariats in orthodox Marxist’ sense.

21. Changes in Class Structure in Late Modernity • The emergence of the cybertariats: …. • Changes in marketing strategies in regard to customization of manufacturing goods and provision of after-sale services have given rise to another large number of non-manual white-collar workers. • Growth of service industries ranging from life-insurance sales to tourist guide or from website designer to image consultants has boosted yet another sector of non-manual labor. • Automation and digitalization of clerical, information-processing and filing work and the shift from Fordist to “information-intensified” noe-Fordist management have not only expanded the population of white collar workers but also “disaggregated”, “unbundled” and made outsourcing of white-collar work possible. (Huwa, 2003)

22. Changes in Class Structure in Late Modernity • The emergence of the cybertariats: • The development of global telecommunication has made office work “delocalizable”, i.e. it can be outsource to any part of the world. As a result, it has put white collar workers in developed countries in a global labor market and in competition with clerical workers in third world countries. Taken together, these changes have constituted a relegating or downward mobility effects on white-collar workers, i.e. making of a cybertariat.

23. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity • Globalization and denationalizationof class relation in capitalism • In informational-global capitalism, bourgeoisie as a class are no longer restrained by borders of nation state. They and their production lines are practically globally mobile.

24. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity • Globalization and denationalizationof class relation in capitalism…. • Proletariat or more general wage laborers are fragmented into various or even antagonistic sectors. They range from executive workers in multi-national corporations, “core labor force” of information-global economy made up of information-based managers and “symbolic analysts” to “disposable labor force” that can be automated and/or hired/fired/off-shored. • Proletariat as a class has not only been fragmented economically but they have been dismantled geographically. They range from worldwide recruited experts to nationally or even locally pit-downed unskilled manual workers. • As a result, antagonistic class relations, not to mention class struggles, are practically unable to constitute.

25. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity • Globalization and polarization effect of class situations among wage labor: As Robert B. Reich underlines, globalization does not only insert relegating effect on working class in general but also insert elevating or upward mobility on the upper-strata of the knowledge class, in Reich’s own term symbolic analysts. It is because knowledge or skills possess by symbolic analysts are now put onto the global market for sale. As a result, any knowledge and skills that of really profitable or marketable will be auctioned globally. That explains “why the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.” (Reich, 1996)

27. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity • Disorganization effects of welfare state on the communal ties of working class (Beck, 2006): Policy effects of welfare state: Social policies of welfare state have caused the traditional working class communities built around manufacturing plants hard to sustain. These social policies include • public housing policies, which uproot working class families from their working class locality; • universal education policies, which not only changes the class habitus of working class students, but also provide them with chances for upper mobility from the working-class origins.

28. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity • Disorganization effects of welfare state on the communal ties of working class (Beck, 2006): Policy effects of welfare state: • other social-wages policies, which substantively improve the living standards of the working-class households.

29. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity • The emergence of flexible work and flexible family • “The very concept of a jobis changing. In the years after World War II, industrial societies constructed the ideal of a full-time, secure job working thirty years for one company with ever-rising real wages. Pay in this job would be high enough that within American family households, only the man had to work. His wife could stay at home, raising the children and managing the household. The ideal of secure work and increasing consumption was matched by government policies that constructed social security (old-age pension, unemployment insurance, and health insurance) largely around the ideal of a men and very little paid work for women is going by the boards, and the new information technology is only one cause of change. The simplest description of the nature of this transformation is increased flexibility.” (Carnoy, 2000, p.64-65)

31. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity • The emergence of flexible work and flexible family • Flexibility in work implies: • Flexible in work schedule as well as work duration • Flexible in work locations as well as positions • Flexible in work conditions, flexibility has replaced fixed-term contract and long-term commitment between employers and employees • “With increased competition in the globalized economy and the rapidly rising capacity to use ‘world time’ to enhance productivity, the very best workers are now those who never sleep, never consume, never have children, and never spend time socializing outside of work.” (Carnoy, 2000, p. 143)

32. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity • The emergence of flexible work and flexible family • Fundamental contradiction in functions of flexible family “What result is a serious social contradiction: the new workplace requires even more investment in knowledge than in the past, and family are crucial to such knowledge formation, especially for children but also for adults. The new workplace, however, contributes to greater instability in the child-centered nuclear family, degrading the very institution crucial to further economic development.” (ibid, p.110)

33. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity • The advent of the culture of consumerism • The proliferation of mass consumption, mass communication and mass media has spawned the culture of consumerism. As a result, the culture of work ethics has been replaced by aesthetics of consumption and populism.

34. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity • The advent of the culture of consumerism… • Zygmunt Bauman's thesis of the culture of consumerism: According to Bauman, the culture of consumerism bears the following definitive features • Hedonism: Consumption as need-satisfaction was replaced by consumption as desire-creation, i.e. "desire does not desire satisfaction. To the contrary, desire desires desire." (Bauman, 1998, p. 25) • Ephemeralism: "Consumer goods are meant to be used up and to disappear; the idea of temporariness and transitoriness is intrinsic to their very denomination as objects of consumption" (Bauman, 1998, P.28)

35. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity • The advent of the culture of consumerism • Zygmunt Bauman's thesis of the culture of consumerism: • Instantaneousness: "Ideally, the consumer's satisfaction ought to be instant, and this in a double sense. Consumed goods should bring satisfaction immediately, requiring no delay, no protracted learning of skills and no lengthy groundwork; but the satisfaction should end the moment the time needed for their consumption is up, and that time ought to be reduced to a bare minimum." (Bauman, 1998, p. 25) • Fetishism: From consumption of commodity to collection of commodity; from consumption as act of desire-satisfaction to consumption (or possession) as identification of status and life style.

36. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity • The advent of the culture of consumerism • Class identification and class culture, which nurture and precipitate in work life has been eroded if not totally replaced by ephemeral identification of consumer goods, taste and style in ever changing culture of consumerism.

37. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity • The rise of networked individualism and cyber-balkanization • Manuel Castells indicates in his work The Internet Galaxy that identity is the information age can be characterized as network individualism. “Networked individualism is a social pattern, not a collection of isolated individuals. Rather, individuals build their networks, on-line and off-line, on the basis of their interests, values, affinities, and projects.” (Castells, 2001, p. 131) It is basically a virtual identity in the virtual community of the Internet in self discretion. • This self-selecting virtual identities have also posed significant to formation of the cultural-spatial based identity of social class.

38. Learning to Labor in Global-Informational Capitalism: Reproduction and Resistance Theories Revisited • Paul Willis' three waves of 'bottom-up' responses of foot soldiers of modernity • Willis construes subordinate and working-class students' educational attainment paths in post-WWII England as helpless foot soldiers in the long front of modernity. • Willis makes the distinction between • 'top-down' practices and initiatives of planners and decision-makers in education policies and • 'bottom-up' responses of working-class youths in schooling system • Willis relates his ethnographic studies of youth cultures to three waves of bottom-up responses to educational changes in English society.

40. Learning to Labor in Global-Informational Capitalism: • First wave responses to "competitive modernization" and universal schooling: • Willis' ethnographic studies of working-class 'lads' in the 1970s (1977) Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs. • Working-class students waged forceful resistance to school culture in form of anti-intellectual, anti-authority and hard-tough masculine counter-culture. • However, Willis underlined that the lads were in fact faced with double entrapment of schooling and work, in which education achievement seemed to be the only way out.

41. Learning to Labor in Global-Informational Capitalism: • Second wave responses to "deindustrialization" or postindustrial modernity: • Willis and his collaborators published The Youth Review in 1988. It reported a studies of youth cultures in the in 1980s UK. • Willis et al. reported that "In the early 1980s UK became the first industrialized country to experience massive losses of the manual industrial work that has previously available to the working classes. …Form the point of view of the working class, work opportunities have shifted away from well to reasonably paid skilled or semi-skilled industrial work to much lower-paid service and out-of-research white-collar work." (Willis, 2006, p. 511)

42. Learning to Labor in Global-Informational Capitalism: • Second wave responses to "deindustrialization" or postindustrial modernity: • Report on the waning culture of the working-class lads • "The dominant experience of the young unemployed is one of very limited sociability. They are isolate and homebound, traversing acres of boredom by themselves or in conflict with parents for whom their enforced dependence is often wholly unwelcome. The young unemployed have more free time than any other social group but, ironically, they are excluded from leisure activities, which overwhelmingly now require consumption and commercial power." (Willis, 2006, p. 512)

43. Learning to Labor in Global-Informational Capitalism: • Second wave responses to "deindustrialization" or postindustrial modernity: • Report on the waning culture of the working-class lads • "The pride, depth, and independence of a collective industrial cultural tradition, forged from below and neither reliant on patronage nor punished for its cultural impertinence, is giving way to the regulated indignities of becoming client to a reprimanding state." (Willis, 2006, p. 513)

44. Learning to Labor in Global-Informational Capitalism: • Second wave responses to "deindustrialization" or postindustrial modernity: • Report on the waning culture of the working-class lads • "Forms of working-class masculinity are being thrown into crisis…, uprooted from their secured and central lodgings within proletarian relations of manualism, 'pride in the job', and breadwinner power. …The anti-mentalism of the counter-school culture cannot be securely cloaked in traditional proletarian masculinity. Antimentalism loses the counterpoint with a viable predictable future in manual work." (Willis, 2006, p. 514)

45. Learning to Labor in Global-Informational Capitalism: • Third wave response to "commodity and electronic culture" • In 1990, Willis and another group of collaborators published yet another ethnographic study entitled Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young.

46. Learning to Labor in Global-Informational Capitalism: • Third wave response to "commodity and electronic culture" • The advent of the commodity and electronic culture: "New global electronic forms of communication are sideling old sensuous communities — face-to-face interactions with known others — with now literally hundreds of TV channels available through digitalization. …The postmodern cultural epoch is characterized by this qualitative expansion of commodity relations form the meeting of physical needs — food, warmth, and shelter — to the meeting and inflaming of mental, emotional, expressive, and spiritual needs and aspiration." (Willis, 2006, p. 515)

47. Learning to Labor in Global-Informational Capitalism: • Third wave response to "commodity and electronic culture" • Evaporating of working-class identity among youths in the face of the "Common Culture" of consumerism: "At the level of culture, young people are becoming less defined by neighborhood and class than they are by these new relations of commodity and electronic culture. …Most young working-class people in the UK would not thank you now for describing them as working class. They find more passion and acceptable self-identity through music on MTV, wearing baseball caps and designer shoes, and socializing in fast-food joints than they do through traditional class-based cultural forms." (Willis, 2006, p. 515)

48. Learning to Labor in Global-Informational Capitalism: • Third wave response to "commodity and electronic culture" • “Young and working-class people are caught up in the front line of engagement. They acculturate the materials of commodified culture almost as a matter of cultural life and death, not least because they find themselves with ever-diminishing inherited folk cultural resources and with little or no access to legitimate and bourgeois form of cultural capital.” (Willis, 2006, 536)

49. Learning to Labor in Global-Informational Capitalism: • Third wave response to "commodity and electronic culture" • “While the continuing educational question for first wave modernization concerns whether state education is a means of liberation or ideological confinement for the unprivileged majority, the late modernist question for the same social group concerns whether the commodification and electrification of culture constitute a new form of domination or a means for opening up new fields of semiotic possibility. Are the young becoming culturally literate and expressive in new ways, or are they merely victims of every turn in cultural marketing and mass media manipulation?” (Willis, 2006, p. 517)

50. Lecture 12Education Policy and Social Integration:Individualization and the Debate on the Death of ClassEND