In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Culture of the New Capitalism
  • Christopher Newfield
Richard Sennett . The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. 214 pp. ISBN 0-300-10782-X, $25.00 (paper).

Richard Sennett is among the most prominent sociologists of work and labor in the English-speaking world, and he has written another in his recent series of books on how major changes in corporate culture are effecting the personal experience and social outlook of workers of various kinds. Given the importance of his focus on human impacts in a time when most economic discussion is about technology and money, it is hard to pass up this book. At the same time, it is equally hard to believe that one will learn anything new. We now know by heart the progressive-humanist narrative about current economic trends. Could Sennett's new version of this narrative go beyond lamenting the victims of global capitalism to imagining effective changes in it? At this point in history, the question is no longer whether most work has been degraded, for this is widely admitted. The question remaining within the liberal American narrative [End Page 816] is whether this degradation is necessary and ultimately good (Thomas F. Friedman) or unnecessary and bad (Louis Uchitelle).

The book is strongest as a weaving together of known trends, and it starts well with a strong first chapter on contemporary bureaucracy. Sennett argues that business's much-touted reforms of its rigid military-style pyramids have meant a reduction of managerial responsibility without a true flattening or dispersal of control. Management asks employees in "cutting-edge" companies to thrive as continuously adaptable switching points in a shifting network organization, and although they must be to a greater extent self-supporting, they are not self-governed. Management imposes shareholder-oriented financial goals and retains powers of enforcement, restructuring, termination, and resource deployment; employees face long hours, job insecurity, continuous adaptation, and low levels of control, leading to odd fusions of resourcefulness and resignation. Governments now imitate rather than counter or supplement businesses, setting technical goals and monitoring performance but taking no responsibility for guiding or funding their achievement. The result, for Sennett, is widespread "social deficits"—low loyalty, low trust, and low institutional knowledge—to which employees have adapted all too well. The best adapters are the young, who have learned to fuse creativity with conformity. The middle-aged organization man of the 1950s has become the entrepreneurial flunky of the 2000s.

Chapter 2 focuses on the human costs of these changes and in particular on the widespread experience of "uselessness." Sennett traces this primarily to two things: the skills economy does not need very many elite workers, and it has replaced craftsmanship with meritocracy, hence favoring the flexible organization's definition of merit as learning new skills at the expense of the craft idea of being great at an existing one. Sennett rightly insists that global business depends on high levels of craft in low-cost, as well as high-cost, countries even as it is unwilling to acknowledge or pay the sticker price for this. Chapter 3 links consumerism's endless desire to the failure of participatory politics, and the final chapter offers three solutions: a renewed sense of "narrative movement" for people's lives, "usefulness," and craftsmanship.

Despite its good elements, the book stays within the confines of the lament. Although the text is about the impact of economics on people, it is impersonal, and its amalgamated, unattributed, and decontextualized quotations keep the analysis at a distance from the efforts of ordinary employees to address the structures Sennett critiques. The haphazard notes suggest Sennett's similar detachment from today's worldwide renaissance in the analysis of global capitalism. [End Page 817] The style is clear but complacent, and it is unfortunate that, as everything hangs on a correct analysis of capitalism now, Sennett repeatedly traces his intellectual bearings to his experience of capitalism then, during his formation in the 1960s.

Here, we get closer to the conceptual problem, which is connected to a fatalism not unlike that of the new capitalist cadres Sennett describes. In this state of mind, Sennett treats global capitalism...

pdf

Share