The global world has entered into a cycle of a systemic depression cycle characterised by extremely weak growth, environmental degradation (for which they bear enormous responsibility), the massive destruction of skilled employment and a crisis of work. Acts of terrorism committed by a few thousand religious fundamentalists and accelerating cross-border migration have strengthened populist and demagogic right-wing voices. Nonsensical ideas are being bandied about by all social classes.
Work, as the activity that structures capitalism both socially and psychologically, is also being undermined, affecting first and foremost the youngest and the oldest jobseekers but also many people who have been forced in mid-career to seek refuge in atypical activities such as self-employment.
Questions raised by these developments include to what extent does a clear perception exists of the radical transformations that humankind faces at present. To what extent does the current situation correspond to the advent of a new type of worker in Gramsci’s sense of the term. More broadly, what kinds of specificities are associated with the new type of worker today. One recurring theme is humankind’s adaptation to whatever conditions of production and consumption prevail at a particular moment. That being the case—and given the portentous Fordian transformations that Gramsci saw as shaping a “new kind of worker and human being”—what remains to be determined are the conditions shaping twenty-first century humankind, construed here as a force capable of creating its own destiny. Above and beyond mere technical innovation, it would also be useful to take a closer look at the anthropological transformations underpinning the dual phenomenon of globalisation and the neoliberal financialisation of the economy. This should provide insight into what kinds of human beings are emerging in and through modern work, or on its margins, where they are unemployed, as embodied in (and transmitted through) the consumption of not only industrial goods but of services as well.
The book starts by highlighting the primacy of human beings’ physical, moral and intellectual adaptation to the demands of work, against a background defined by the ongoing search for greater productive efficiency. This adaptation does not only materialise in people’s place of work or in centres of education and training but also through a multitude of channels active in the private and public spheres of consumption. Understanding this anthropological transformation requires as detailed an analysis as possible of the demands associated with the work and production processes involved in making industrial goods and services. This is because these demands themselves depend on the way new types of workers are being modeled. The present book therefore analyses, on the one hand, the changing needs of work in light of the qualities and competencies that these adaptive employees are supposed to possess, and on the other hand in light of the enthusiasm (or recalcitrance) that men and women manifest when transforming into a new kind of worker who has become a figurehead for a new century.
The book’s introduction returns to Gramsci’s writings, and specifically to when he began scrutinising this topic during the decades following the advent of Fordism. This will be complemented by more recent thinking formulated during the 1970s at a time when Fordism was undergoing major crisis. This will explain also why the book’s reference to the new type of worker excludes developments associated with totalitarian real socialist or fascist regimes (Germany, Italy) that disappeared even as American-style liberal democracies have continued to develop the capitalist order that Gramsci was already talking about nearly a century ago.
Gramsci and the New Worker
Thrown into prison by Mussolini, Antonio Gramsci nevertheless kept himself informed of political and social developments, building up in this way the kind of overview that is a prerequisite for all philosophical thinking. In an article entitled “Americanism and Fordism” (1934), he showed how the US automotive industry needed a workforce characterised by its regularity, stability and discipline in order to satisfy the assembly needs of the Rouge River automobile factory in Detroit. Trying to reduce staff turnover that had reached nearly 300% per annum, Henry Ford suggested a doubling of wages. This had an immediate effect, with staff turnover plummeting to just a few percentage points. Having said that (and as noted by Benjamin Coriat), not all workers enjoyed the highly publicised new wage of $5 a day. Excluded categories were comprised of:
- Workers with fewer than six months of service;
- Workers under the age of 21;
- Women, because Ford wanted them to get married.
Ford also required ‘good morals’, meaning key qualities such as cleanliness and reserve, as well as abstention from tobacco and alcohol. In addition, “gambling was forbidden as was going to bars, especially gentlemen’s clubs” (Coriat 1979, 96). To ensure workers’ quality output and discipline, Ford recruited university experts (sociologists, psychologists, psycho-technicians) and created a sociology department1 replete with inspectors whose main mission was to “check on workers by going into their homes and other places where they spent time to monitor their general behaviour and more particularly how they spent their wages” (Coriat 1979, 96).
Whereas in the early twenty-first century United States, “Assembly line work required factory discipline superior to that characterising the mass of unskilled workers at the time” (Bleitrach and Chenu 1979, 50)—particularly immigrants coming from poor rural European regions—Ford also advocated discipline in the spaces where his workforce reproduced. The ‘high wages’ of $5 a day became
a state instrument used to both select a workforce adapted to the production and labour systems, and also to maintain its stability. In actual fact, high wages became a double edge sword. Workers were supposed to spend then ‘rationally’ to maintain, renew and where possible increase their physical and nervous effectiveness (and not destroy or undermine this). All of which explains Ford’s fight against alcohol, which he viewed as the factor most likely to destroy his workforce. He made this battle into an affair of state. (Gramsci 1979, 700)
In addition to alcohol and its legal prohibition, Gramsci was also questioning here the treatment of sexuality, portrayed as the second enemy of the nervous energy needed for good factory work.
Chasing after women took up too much leisure time. The reason is that these new kinds of industrial workers were repeating, in another form, what peasants were doing back in their villages. The relative stability of peasants’ sexual unions was closely related to the kind of labour system found in the countryside. Peasants would go home after a long tiring day at work, seeking ‘love that was easy and always available’ in the words of Horace, meaning that men had no desire to court any women met by chance. Instead they would love their wife because it was certain that she would be present and not disappear, i.e. not put on any airs and go through the whole show of pretending to have to be seduced (but actually violated) in order for him to possess her. This was tantamount to a mechanisation of the sexual function, although in reality it embodied a new form of sexual union lacking the ‘brilliant colours’ and romantic trappings associated with middle-class (and even ‘lazy Bohemian’) love. Clearly the new industrialism preferred monogamy so workers would no longer waste nervous energy in a disorderly but exciting search for occasional sexual satisfaction. After all, anyone going to work after a night of ‘debauchery’ was unable to perform well. Passion came to be seen as incompatible with the timed productive gestures that perfectly oiled systems needed to succeed.2 (Gramsci 1979, 701)
This new type of worker was largely being (re-)constructed in his private lives under the watchful eye of employers surveilling their morality. The discipline required for the workplace was merged with workers’ domestic lives. Indeed, the family space is where this was supposed to happen. Gramsci took the vision even further, with his premonition that, “Psycho-physical balance is not only external and mechanical but also internalised, with workers suggesting this themselves instead of having it imposed on them from the outside and portrayed as a new form of society characterised by specific and original methods” (ibid., 699). With this early vision of the consumer society (and of uni-dimensional human beings), Gramsci was questioning the harmony and balance between the space of production versus the space of consumption, not in economic terms as the School of Regulation would do four decades later (Aglietta 1977) but from a moral and disciplinary perspective. What he then established was an intrinsic relationship between the demands of production and work, on one hand, and workers’ preparation for such demands through their daily lives, on the other. Clearly this was very different from the idea that workers were being shaped or socially moulded in such a way as to respond to the needs of industry. This is especially so because it was always possible for some individuals to escape the ‘system’ by refusing to take part in it or by abandoning it (albeit at great opportunity cost given the high wages that Ford paid).
At the same time, Gramscian analysis featured a modicum of functionalism with its assertion that to in order further bolster its own development prospects, capitalism produces rules governing workers’ lives. The idea here was that the invisible hand of free competition (or indeed a great Organiser) plan the ideological and moral production of capitalist society in such a way as to sustain efficient, smooth and seamless production for as long as possible.
The reality is a succession of trial and error adjustments tantamount to a kind of self-poïesis or self-organisation (Varela 1988, 61). Recurring critical antinomical resolutions have failed to address fundamental contradictions, explaining in turn a slew of more or less serious crises that the present book will use to contextualise the world of work. In other words, despite the imperfections of the functionalist interpretation, it is still worth analysing to what extent the new type of worker employed by Ford and his successors were being prepared for production activities through their private lifestyles, including as aforementioned through the prohibition of alcohol, a sexuality more or less regulated by marriage, regular working schedules and controlled sleep schedules.
Gramsci’s merit is to have already perceived nearly a century ago the existence of a close relationship between one type of industry (mass industry) and controls placed on workers’ morality and psyches. Another excerpt from his aforementioned text highlighted, for instance, Taylor’s brutal cynicism in trying to discount workers’ professional and distinctively human qualities (the active engagement of their intelligence, imagination and initiative) by reducing production operations to their physical and machine-related aspects alone. Gramsci’s emphasis here was on the close link between production conditions and domestic and neighborhood routines that used a stringent supervisory structure to get workers to adopt a certain behaviour, to wit, stability. The reference was to Fordian habitats, a term used to characterise the sometimes very accelerated construction of dispositions needed to keep people in a state where they could keep their jobs. Much later but under similar conditions, D. Bleitrach and A. Chenu (1979, 45) showed that stability is what makes it possible to capitalise on peoples’ experience or acquire the dexterity needed to achieve expected outcomes. In this sense, Fordian workers became the “trained gorillas” that Taylor had dreamt about a few years before Ford created the conditions where this might happen. Gramsci wrote that, “Hegemony is born in the factory”, with the advent of stable, sober, monogamous and disciplined workers soon becoming a ‘fact of civilisation’. The relevant approach here is therefore anthropological, involving different preparations that while varying depending on the historical era all serve to adapt humans to different modes of production and consumption, thereby transforming them over time.
The New Worker Today
Almost all contemporary research into the sociological, economic or psychological aspects of work highlights the increasing responsibilities that employees are expected to assume as well as their expanding areas of autonomy. These conclusions tend to be applied to all sectors of activity but mainly refer to the qualifications and different functions carried out on factory floors or in offices or warehouses, etc. The vision here is that above and beyond certain very strict rules (that still exist for safety and quality reasons), employees tend to prioritise objectives rather than procedures. Certainly this is the main transformation that the author of the present book conceptualised more than 20 years ago as a “new productive model” or “new productive system” (Boyer and Durand 1997). Clearly a more appropriate description can and should be found, if only because the transformations in question cannot remain new forever. Talking about post-Fordism does not work either, because despite the crisis of a Fordian type of macroeconomic regulation, there is no doubt that productive flow principles have not only spread throughout industry but also permeate the production of goods and services in the form of flux tendu (tight flow) concept that the book’s later chapters will interpret from a social perspective. Nor does the term of post-Taylorism apply here. A few observers may have mistakenly declared that Taylorism is dead but the fact remains that most commentators and analysts (and managers) accept that the principle of a division of labour pitting organisers vs. operatives will survive as an integral part of capitalist logic. At best, “flexible Taylorism” might include feedback mechanisms making it easier to respond to volatile demand. Yet Toyotism is also an insufficient concept, in particular because it is too closely tied to a mobilisation regime that is very specific in both geographical (Japan) and historical (post-World War II) terms, and relates to one particular industry, namely the automobile. In short, there is at this level a kind of taxonomical vacuum affecting understanding of an object that is itself relatively well-defined, at least in production and work organisation terms, and in terms of the employee mobilisation regime that is so closely associated with it. This explains why the present book intends to rely on the construct of a new productive model (or system). In the absence of anything better, it might be referred to, albeit imperfectly, as a neo-Fordian construct.
Returning to the debate about employees’ increased responsibilities or extended autonomy, it is important to point out that this tends nowadays to relate to the scope of the autonomy in question and to the responsibilities that workers are being given. Most findings from work in this field focus on the control and management of autonomy. Questions at this level include what means managers use to ensure work’s quantitative and qualitative outcomes using the reporting or evaluation tools at their disposal; the secondary or unexpected effects of these tools; and whether greater responsibility and autonomy are necessary for production into a new mobilisation regime (or both at once). The present book will seek to transcend these debates or formulate them differently, mobilising the approach that Gramsci initiated and focusing on the creation of the new types of workers required for a particular production system (Fordian, in his studies). This starts with work situations in companies but also public authorities.3 The goal is to discover which demands are associated with which productive systems (understood here as ensembles comprised of physical and intellectual resources and management paradigms) and their effects on employees. The idea here is that employees:
- Must be capable of showing initiative and assuming responsibility, meaning coping w...