Changing Patterns of Work: post- Fordism ?

1. Changing Patterns of Work: post-Fordism?

2. Fordism as work • Consolidated, larger firms • Elimination of independent suppliers (average size of US firms went from 6 to 84 employees 1881 to 1929) • Moving assembly line • De-skilling • Mass production • Abstract labour (Marx)

3. 1881-1929 • average size of US firms went from 6 to 84 employees. • Longeivity of medium-sized businesses + 300% • Longeivity of small businesses (less than 10 employees) – 50%.

4. Fordism as culture • Monitoring of workers’ lives • Large firms, trade unions, corporate membership • Mass consumption

5. The ‘Thirty Glorious Years’ (1945-75) • High levels of employment • Manufacturing, heavy industry, growth in services • Large public and private bureaucracies (W.H. Whyte, Organization Man) • Institutionalisation of class conflict (Dahrendorf) • Welfare state, job security • ‘capitalism without losers’

6. Sennett: bureaucratic respect in the workplace • Incorporation of large numbers of people • ‘an institution gives people stability: instead of the experience of free fall, or moving jerkily or aimlessly forward in time, the individual is given a sustained place in the world’ (Respect, p.165) • The large firm as a sort of welfare agency (e.g. IBM in 70s and 80s: training schools, health care, housing loans, golf courses for employees); a sense of corporate membership for employees. • Spread of an ethos of service from state bureaucracies to private companies. • ‘climbing the steps of the bureaucracy can become a way of life. If the iron cage is a prison, it can also become a psychological home’ (Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, p. 32). • Alienation plus a measure of security/stability.

7. Institutions relief people of the burden of choice • this is a vital claim, a clue to Sennett’s whole argument: bureaucracy makes things easier for us, and not only in terms of security, predictability, routine: the suggestion is that you can make a ‘way of life’ out of a routine. And one of the reasons that you can do that is that institutions ‘work’ in so far as they have their own routines, into which the activities of an individual can fit – within institutions we can have ways of life that make sense to us because they make sense to other people : they are recognisable to other people. Sennett is suggesting that ‘a way of life’ is NOT something you can easily invent for yourself.

10. Post-fordism (Toyotism)as work • Just-in-time production • Complex supply chains (component parts in small workshops) and sub-contracting • ‘Flexible accumulation’ • Frequent retraining/upgrading • New technologies don’t do the jobs that human beings can do, they do the jobs that human beings cannot do.

11. Post-Fordism enhances the role of the large firm (Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean (1994) • 1992 (US) Firms with less than 100 employees • 98.4% of all companies • 38.6% of all jobs • 34.3% of all sales revenue Firms with more than 500 employees • 0.03% of all companies • 47% of all workers • 53% of all sales revenue

12. Combination of large-scale and decentralisation • large firms more technological innovative than small ones • Globalisation benefits companies with a global reach • Large firms are the flexible ones: from private bureaucracies (with bureaucratic respect for workers) to downsized, ‘de-layered’ networks of suppliers (Japan’s keiretsu, Italy’s fashion industry) • Blurring of boundary between primary and secondary labour markets (large firms pursue total quality without a social compact with workforce) • Number of ‘core’ jobs pared down, while there is ‘chronically contingent’, part-time working for all but the most educated in core jobs • relocation of ‘back offices’ to business parks (low pay, rigid terms of employment)

13. Post-fordism as civilization? • Proliferation of consumer choice (promotion of anomie) • aesthetic self-fashioning and re-fashioning (selling of lifestyle not product) • Market-led, not state-led growth • Work/family reversals? • Schizophrenia instead of alienation • Postmodern design and architecture?

14. Decline of craft ‘In all forms of work, from sculpting to serving meals,' people identify with tasks which challenge them, tasks which are difficult. But in this flexible workplace, with its polyglot workers coming and going irregularly, radically different orders coming in each day, the machinery is the only real standard of order, and so has to be easy for anyone, no matter who, to operate. Difficulty is counterproductive in a flexible regime. By a terrible paradox, when we diminish difficulty and resistance, we create the very conditions for uncritical and indifferent activity on the part of the users’ (Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, p.72)

15. ‘It is a commonplace that modern identities are more fluid than the categorical divisions of people in the class-bound societies of the past. "Fluid" can mean adaptable. But in another train of associations, fluid also implies ease; fluid motion requires that there be no impediments. When things are made easy for us, as in the labor I've described, we become weak; our engagement with work becomes superficial, since we lack understanding of what we are doing’ (Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, p.74

16. Making a biography for ourselves in a fluid society • If ‘careers’ become unpredictable, jerky, how do we stitch the different elements of it together? • Can we each make our lives a work of art? • Can we each become our own financial advisor? • What’s wrong with dependency? • Should we want to do such a thing?

17. An alternative view: work can be a haven from the burdens of family life • Taylorisation of family life (imperative of organisation) • Work, not family, as a haven in a heartless world • ‘In this new model of family and work life, a tired parent flees a world of unresolved quarrels and unwashed laundry for the reliable orderliness, harmony, and managed cheer of work. Emotional magnets beneath home and workplace are in the process of being reversed’ (Hochschild, The Time Bind, p.44)

18. ‘In a previous era, men regularly escaped the house for the bar, the fishing hole, the golf course, the pool hall, or, often enough, the sweet joy of work. Today, as one of the women who make up 45 percent of the American workforce, Linda Avery, overloaded and feeling unfairly treated at home, was escaping to work, too. Nowdays, men and women both may leave unwashed dishes, unresolved quarrels, crying tots, testy teenagers, and unresponsive mates behind to arrive at work early and call out, "Hi, fellas, I'm here!“’ (Hochschild, A. The Time Bind, p.39)

19. ‘The social life that once might have surrounded her at home she now found at work. The sense of being part of a lively, larger, ongoing community-that, too, was at work. In an emergency, Linda told me, she would sacri­fice everything for her family. But in the meantime, the everyday emergencies she most wanted to attend to, that challenged rather than exhausted her, were those she encountered at the factory. Frankly, life there was more fun’.

20. The New Ruthless Economy (Simon Head) • There is no post-Fordism, just a transfer of Taylorism into service industries (customer service, health care) • Standardisation, simplification, measurement of tasks, rapid ‘business processes’

21. An alternative view to Hochschild’s: work is not a haven of any sort • Time: short-term relationships, improvised life narratives • Talent: we are no longer in a culture where the threat is one of de-skilling but of obsolete character of current skills; retraining, which is the opposite of craftsmanship • How to let go of the past? • ‘the cultural ideal required in new institutions damages many of the people who inhabit them’, and so we need a new life narrative (what does this mean?)

22. The curse of ‘human potential’ • ‘tests of potential ability show just how deeply under the skin a knowledge system can cut. Judgments about potential ability are much more personal in character than the judgments of achievement. An achievement compounds social and economic circumstances, fortune and chance, with self. Potential ability focuses only on the self. The statement ‘you lack potential’ is more devastating than ‘you messed up’’ (Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, p.123).

23. The paradox of human potential • Achievement-based culture has room for trial-and-error. • Human potential based culture wants instant results

24. Work and consumption • The idea of ‘human potential’ affects the culture of work. • The return of abstract labour (transferable skills, frequent retraining, non-specialisation) (e.g. The Office, Armstrong and Miller, ‘What’s my job’?) • Parallel to this runs the consumption of • lifestyles (not products) • potency: huge cars, powerful computers etc.