Social Theory For A Changing Society

Pierre Bourdieu, James S. Coleman, Zdzislawa Walaszek Coleman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000311945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"There is in modem society a structural change that underlies many of the social changes with which the conference was concerned. My argument here will be that this is a qualitative change in the way society is organized, a change with many implications. I will call this a change from primordial and spontaneous social organization to constructed social organization (see Coleman 1990, Chapters 2, 3, and 24 for an extended examination of this change). The common definitions of these terms contain some hint of what I mean, but I will describe the change more fully to ensure that it is clearly understood.
By primordial social organization I mean social organization that has its origins in the relationships established by childbirth. Not all these relations are activated in all cultures, but some subset of these relations forms the basis for all primitive and traditional social organization. From these relations,
more complex structures unfold. For example, from these relations come families; from families come clans; from clans, villages; and from villages, tribes, ethnicities, or societies."

Part One
Changes in Technology and Organizational Responses

1
Moebius-Strip Organizations and Open Labor Markets: Some Consequences of the Reintegration of Conception and Execution in a Volatile Economy

Charles Sabel

The Vicissitudes of the Sociology of Work

Not so long ago, but in an easily forgotten time, the sociology of work was often seen as an academic master key to understanding industrial society. Grasp of the controlling logic of higher throughput, capital intensive, and intricately connected production systems was thought a necessary and sufficient condition for understanding the changing organization of work and the corporation and their effects—reformist or revolutionary, according to the angle of analysis—on the way managers, workers, and trade unions of various kinds formulated their respective claims to authority. So pervasive was the belief in the connection between a determinate logic of technological progress on the one hand and organizational change and self-understanding on the other that business historians canonizing the rise of a new science of corporate management and Marxists conjecturing the emergence of collective revolutionary subjects—now skilled, now unskilled—in the same corporations understood that they were speaking a differently accented version of a single lingua franca.¹

Today that lingua franca is fast becoming a dead language, for obvious reasons. Technology is commonly regarded as permissive rather than constraining: as much a tool for the realization of changing human ends as a machine imposing its rhythms on its tenders. Corporations, buffeted by markets that have become more volatile in part because technology is proving so malleable, are desperately trying to reduce their risks by transforming dedicated or special-purpose resources into general-purpose ones—whenever, that is, they cannot simply transform fixed into variable costs. In the process, they are inventing organizational forms whose complexity and mutability often threaten to overwhelm those who design and execute them as well as the sociologists and economists who struggle to understand their constitutional principles. Work now refers to such disparate and rapidly changing experiences that it is at least as reasonable to treat the word as a popular shorthand for survival as to regard it as a category of activity that gives similar contours to our different understandings of life.

There have been two contrary responses to the breakdown of the linguistic whole. One is an effort to articulate separate languages for understanding at least some of the pieces. These investigations of diverse technological trajectories, patterns of work, and forms of corporate governance often produce a vertiginous experience of diversity as the constitutive fact of social life.² Caricatured, the view is that societies consist of contradictory institutions whose historically specific heterogeneity is a precondition for survival in a changing environment. Context and contingency—national, local, or corporate—suddenly explain most things in a world with no grand rhythm or reason.

The second response is the search for new generalities amidst the apparent ruins of the old. The task here is to understand which parts of—and to whose benefit—the mass-production system and the vast areas of state and quasi-public institutions on which it rested would have to change in order to accommodate the demands of any of the many variously probable economic and political environments. This response can end in the intoxicating vision of a world not gone to pieces but, rather, stood on its head. In this view, universal materializing machines replace product-specific capital goods; small and effortlessly recombinable units of production replace the hierarchies of the mass-production corporation; and the exercise of autonomy required by both the machines and the new organizations produces a new model producer whose view of life confounds the distinction between the entrepreneurial manager and the socialist worker-owner.³ Contingency and context determine only whether and in what precise way particular nations, regions, or firms manage the necessary handstands.

The aim of this chapter is to adumbrate a sociology of work or production that does justice to the prudent version of these caricatures: to account, that is, for the diversity and similarity of efforts to adjust to the new competitive environment. It advances two principal arguments. The first is that a strategy of responding to turbulent markets by deploying general-purpose resources (or, in an equivalent formulation, the reintegration of conception and execution) must itself be hedged and complemented by deployment of less flexible ones. It is the shifting relationship between the core strategy and its hedges and complements, the argument runs, that creates the impression of unruly variety. One consequence of these risk redistribution strategies is the emergence of production structures that blur hierarchical distinctions within firms, the boundaries between them, and the boundary between firms in a particular area and the public and private institutions of the local society. I will call such production structures meta-corporations or Moebius-strip organizations: meta-corporations because they are designed to be easily redesigned⁴ and Moebius-strip organizations because, as with a looped ribbon twisted once, it is impossible to distinguish their insides from their outsides. Another consequence is a constant reordering of versatile and rigid technologies that reflects, among other things, guesses about the longevity of the parts of a product in relation to the whole as well as uncertainty about those guesses.

The second argument concerns the effects of these organizational and technological ambiguities on the labor market. The claim is that the spread of the new production structures creates demand for skilled labor while undermining the fixity of any particular job. Workers under these circumstances must acquire skills, including the ability to cooperate in particular settings in order to be employable, yet cannot rely on long-term relations with any single employer. To learn what they need to learn in order to move from job to job in an economy in which boundaries between firms and between firms and society are blurring, they must join various networks that cross company lines and reach from the economy into social and family life. I will call this situation an open labor market to distinguish it from craft labor markets, which are based on traditional connections to particular materials or processes, and the internal labor markets of the mass-production industry, which are based on long-term employment in clearly bounded corporations. Because of Groucho Marx's notorious fascination with ambivalent attractions, I will refer to the employees' experience of open labor markets as the creation of Groucho Marx identities.

So great are the mutual benefits of flexibility in the world of fluid organizations and open labor markets I am about to describe that it may almost seem as if coercion in any form has no place within it. But flexibility, of course, creates or depends on vulnerability of the most diverse kinds, and vulnerability invites the exercise of power by the less vulnerable. Nor is there any reason to think that those excluded from the emergent flexible economies will accept exclusion without a fight. In the conclusion, therefore, I underscore the novel aspects of conflicts within the new economy and between its beneficiaries and others—above all, the significance of the radical disjuncture between these two kinds of struggle.

The Meta-Corporation: Reconciling Learning and Monitoring

This section begins with a sketch of a new form of organization that hedges its risks not through portfolio diversification into unrelated activities but by learning to move rapidly from declining markets or market segments to prosperous ones in the same or related industries. The precondition of this strategy is increased internal flexibility, and its consequence is the opening of the borders between corporations and between the economy and local society. But flexibility and openness create new problems of coordination. The second part of the section, therefore, argues that responses to these vulnerabilities are consistent with the reintegration of conception and execution and depend on overcoming the distinction—traditional in theories of organization of the firm—between learning and monitoring or trust and control. For reasons of space, I limit discussion in this section to large firms in the manufacturing sector.⁵ But the argument developed here applies to large service-sector firms, particularly in banking, insurance, and retail merchandising.⁶ Nor is it vitiated by the current wave of mergers and acquisitions. On the contrary: Incomplete as it is, the evidence to date suggests that in the United States, at least, the redeployment of assets expedites the redistribution of operating authority described below.⁷ Elsewhere I have presented convergent arguments regarding the organization of small- and medium-sized firms (Sabel 1989).

Market Fragmentation and the Logic of Development Costs

Imagine a world in which technology and consumer tastes are in continual but not spasmodic flux. Consumers are always wanting new kinds of cars but are unlikely to abandon them all in favor of bicycles. Products and processes constantly appear that are superior to current ones in many ways, but it is rare for the improvements to be so great that existing goods simply lose all utility, Consumers are willing to pay a premium above the price for standard goods for differentiated products that satisfy their particular wants. Implicitly, they evaluate their purchases as would users of investment goods: not by considering absolute cost but by comparing the ratio of price to performance, understood precisely as the capacity to meet particular wants. Because of advances in flexible process technologies, it is possible to reduce the cost differential between standard and specialized goods so much that increasing numbers of investment-minded consumers are willing and able to pay the premium for the latter. As they do so, they reduce the market for standard goods, raising costs to mass producers and forcing them ultimately to find ways to differentiate their own products—thus aiding in the improvement of flexible process technologies, further reducing the cost differential for customized goods, and setting the stage for further repetitions of the cycle.

In a world of stable markets, firms use dedicated or product-specific resources—special-purpose machines and semi-skilled workers—to mass produce standard goods. Their chief problem is the amortization of the fixed costs of these resources. But under the circumstances just described, the corporation's main problem is the reduction of development time and costs.⁸ By assumption, product runs are short, and physical investment goods (as opposed to the computer programs that often control them) can be reused because their flexibility dramatically reduces retooling expenses. Hence, development costs are a rapidly increasing share of production costs. By the same assumption, goods are only marketable for a short period before successor products reduce their value. By any comprehensive accounting measure, therefore, it is pointless to reduce development costs unless development times can be reduced as well.

To reduce the burden of development costs, it is necessary to reintegrate the conception and execution of production plans in the sense of redefining both as joint problems that must be solved simultaneously. Designs are only commercially viable if they facilitate manufacture at acceptable costs; profitable investment in small-batch manufacturing depends on an understanding of design sufficient to make well-informed estimates of the range of flexibility required to produce several generations of a product in all its variants. Because the problems are linked in this way, solutions to one suggest solutions to the other, and the expense of solving the joint problem can be reduced. From this, it follows that conception and execution must be concurrent rather than sequential activities, with efforts to realize plans leading to their refinement and these refinements facilitating their realization. Development costs and time can thus be simultaneously reduced because the same process that makes possible more efficient use of underutilized expertise also speeds its flow. A good illustration of these principles is the production of low-budget, or—as they are called in the trade—fast-track, Hollywood films. Shooting often begins before the screenplay is complete; each day's work on the set advances the story line for the text. In the mid-1980s, average development time for a new car was 48.2 months for Japanese producers and 60.4 months for U.S. car makers. Development work in Japanese automobile firms proceeds analogously (see Clark et al. 1987, pp. 729-776; Fujimoto 1989).

At the limit, the drive to reduce development costs will lead to a blurring of the boundaries between, and the hierarchical distinctions within, firms. The first step is the administrative decentralization of the corporation. Responsibility for design, manufacture, and sale of a narrowly defined range of products (small copiers, headlights as opposed to taillights, large turbines, and the like) is assigned to quasi-independent operating units. The corporation often becomes, in effect, a holding company that makes strategic decisions, raises capital, allocates it among the operating units, and periodically monitors general performance. By rotating promising managers through different kinds of jobs in different operating units, headquarters also forms a corporate elite that understands the needs of the concern as a whole. The corporate planning, accounting, research, and technical staffs are cut to the bone, if not disbanded or reorganized as wholly owned subsidiaries that must sell their services to other operating units or outside firms. Thus, the corporation becomes more a federation of companies than a single organizational entity.⁹

A typical next step is for the operating units to reduce the risk, cost, and time of designing new products by seeking partners who take substantial responsibility for defining and manufacturing key components or aggregates of companies—modules—of the final product. Collaborative arrangements allow the firm to learn from its partners' experiences in their own and other industries without assuming responsibility for their survival; make it possible to shift direction rapidly should there be a truly revolutionary technical breakthrough; and—above all—concentrate scarce investment funds on exploring those technologies that at any moment define the integrity of the firm and its products.¹⁰

Prominent examples of this kind of collaborative manufacturing are computer "systems" firms such as Sun Microsystems, a leading California maker of engineering workstations. Sun designs its own microprocessor (which is manufactured by several "process specialists"), writes software linking many commercially available components, and assembles the final product.¹¹ Many major automobile firms now develop the electronic control mechanisms that regulate engines, brakes, and the relationship between these and other components of the car in collaboration with external suppliers. Many plan to or already enlist suppliers in the design and production of modules such as seats, instrument panels, brakes, doors, or bumpers.¹²

At the limit, problems of reducing development costs for successive models shade into the problem of maintaining the firm's long-term innovative capacity: its ability to learn of and profit from ideas that do not square with its organizational habits. Collaborative manufacturing grows out of and reinforces the assumption that it is no longer possible to distinguish between incremental improvements in product and process technologies and radical breakthroughs or even to determine the relevance of research in one specialized area for work in another. Clues to great advances in one field can be found in apparently routine development work or apparently distant research in another area. A large firm might, therefore, complement its new supplier relationships with a minority ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: Constructed Social Organization
• PART ONE CHANGES IN TECHNOLOGY AND ORGANIZATIONAL RESPONSES
• PART TWO CHANGES IN CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS AND CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
• PART THREE CHANGES IN SYSTEMS OF SOCIAL CONTROL
• PART FOUR NEW POLITICAL BOUNDARIES AND NEW POLITICAL FORMS
• About the Book and Editors