In Our Time - Work in the 20th Century

Episode Date: November 26, 1998

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the changing nature of work practices and the work ethic as it pertains at the end of the 20th century. Has our understanding of the nature and function of work really changed so radically since the beginning of the century? How can the past inform the future in the rapidly changing work environment? Has technology usurped craftsmanship, or is this no more than a superficial reading of an increasingly complex scene?With Professor Richard Sennett, visiting professor, London School for Economics and author of The Corrosion of Character - the Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism; Theodore Zeldin, historian and Fellow of St Anthony’s College, Oxford; Melanie Phillips, columnist on The Sunday Times and currently working on a book about The Sex Change State.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, this week we're taking a look at the changing nature of work and the work ethic as it obtains at the end of the 20th century. Has our understanding of the nature and function of work

really changed so radically since the beginning of the century? I'm joined by the sociologist Professor Richard Senate, whose book The Corrosion of Character, the personal consequences of work in the new capitalism, has just been published. He's currently a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. By the historian Theodore Zeldin, who's a fellow of St. Antonin's College, Oxford,

he's just published a book called Conversation, and he is currently conducting research and experiments into the future of work. And Melanie Phillips, who's a columnist on the Sunday Times, currently working on a book about the sex change state, which will discuss the division of work. Richard Tennett, can we start with you? What's really new about work now in the 1990s, and why do you think it's worse, as it were, than it were before?

Well, I think what's new is that the time frame of work is shortening. Businesses and, indeed, government agencies being reorganized, so the short-term task-oriented labor is replacing, obviously, jobs for life, but even long associations with companies which themselves are long in business. I don't know if it's depressing, but it does create a problem, which is how are people to organize their work to realize long-term purposes, how are they to practice traditional work ethic like delayed gratification, in a short-term world. And I think these are problems that, that can be solved or at least dealt with,

but we need to have a conversation about what the realities of this flexible work place actually do to people's experience on the job. You're talking largely about what we can call the Western world here, aren't you? I am. You're talking about what you could call the industrialized manufacturing technological world.

That's just to set it where we are. But from your book, which is case studies of different people and you interview with them, it comes out quite clearly that you think that the long-term employment, with one firm in one place for one time, doing a craft which developed your sense of self-respect and integrated you with your fellows.

And when a Greek baker was a Greek baker who could really bake a Greek loaf and so on, those days have now gone, they press buttons in the same bakery. That that was a good world, and what we've got is a far less satisfactory world. You're very clear about that. Right. Well, I wouldn't, I mean, it was a world that suffered from routine,

but it was a world that had been with us for long enough that people knew how to particularly working class people knew how to extract something of it personally. This is this great change in work which has happened in the last 30 years to middle class people is something that's new. And we don't know how to, as it were, ride the beast. There have always been periods of great uncertainty in capitalism. I mean, it comes with the territory. But I think this is an era that's unusual in that uncertainty and risk have been pursued with a kind of positive vengeance. There's also been a greater willingness now than there was a century ago to displace middle-aged workers in favor of the young.

These are basic changes and emphasis which are problems that have to be addressed in some way. As a historian, Theodore Zolden, would you say, as I might, say. They're actually over the last 200 years. Work has been switched around. People in bulk have been thrown off the land and out of factories and there's been a great deal of uncertainty and what Richard Tend is talking about may be a refined version and a local version, but it's been going on for a long time.

Absolutely. I agree with this and your suggestion that now we're in a greater hurry than we were in the past, but there are people from the continent who came to Britain in the 18th century He said the English gentleman is a terrible man. He's always running around and you can never stop him. He's too busy to say hello. And I think perhaps it is not in the work itself that we have a problem. It is in people's ambitions.

Our aspirations are different now. In other words, we are educating people. And of course they're more curious and they want to do many more things in life. They want to have seven lives. And therefore we have to invent new kinds of jobs to satisfy them. I think when coming in here, you said we are the two romantics of Britain. We are. And the romanticism has two sides of it.

One is to admire the past. But you don't admire the past, but you do suggest that when people knew where their careers were leading and so on, life was easier when you could start a career and go to the end of it. But the whole of modern history is about the children of such people running away. from that kind of rigid formula and wanting more adventure. I just wonder whether you may be overstating the centrality of the workplace to these great changes that you're talking about, because what you're talking about is, you know, lack of stability, the collapse of attachments, the erosion of the nature of commitment and trust.

Now, I don't disagree for a moment. Those things are contemporary phenomena, but it seems to me they're more generally rooted outside work. I mean, for example, one of your case history is this RICO chap that you refer to laments the collapse of parenting. And you seem to be implying that the collapse of stability and attachments at work is somehow responsible. But the collapse of parenting is to do with the erosion of authority generally. The erosion of hierarchy at work, the sense of progression, is part of surely a more general trend in which we think that in the interest of democracy, it's wrong to have a hierarchy of values.

We've all got to be equal. On the other hand, you don't mention what to me is one of the great changes and very threatening to men, which is the erosion, the willed collapse, if you like, of the role of the man as Bridwinter, the idea that men and women equally must participate in the workplace, even if women have nine children at home. As Melvin has rightly said, men and women work together in fields in the past. And then there was this middle-class period of... of one or two centuries,

when men said, okay, we can earn enough and you stay at home and wear nice clothes. And now this has come to an end. I mean, I'm worried about phrases like the collapse of parenting. I'll come back to Richard said it in a minute. People with huge families in traditionally industrial districts, I'm not being sentimental, but a man who went down a coma didn't have much time for parenting.

A person in the steelworks didn't have much time for parenting and so on and so forth. People who worked on the land in the rural poverty over what is now the Western world for hundreds and hundreds of people, didn't have much time for parenting. I think the collapse of parenting, to use that phrase, it'd take a very short-term perspective, but I must come back to Richard Salon.

What I have found in the people I've talked to is that the relation between their family and their work is not a neat fit. The man I interviewed whom you mentioned is someone who wants to teach his children how to make commitments and how to delay gratification. He wants to teach them disciplined in their schoolwork

and loyalty to the family and so on. But they don't see that is something he practices in his own life. He's a consultant. He moves from job to job, task to task. He doesn't profit by commitment, nor does he practice self-discipline. I think that economic conditions that underlie work today are very different and produce instabilities in a very different form than the kind of ruptures that... Can you refine that or a little?

Give us a better take on that? In the 30s, the late 20s, early 30s, there was what we call the offshoring of production now, sudden movement of a chip factory, which is suddenly shut down because it's cheaper to make chips in Burma and ship the chips back here. That kind of quick change of offshoring basic labor

was just not as pronounced. the rug gets pulled out of people in much more unpredictable ways now. And there's a good and a bad side to that. This new flexible capitalism has opened up incredible opportunities for working class people in the third world. And conversely, those opportunities have diminished the prospects for workers in this world. It's a very different change. the technologies of communication and firms

were nothing in the 20s to what they are today when on the computer screen you know what's happening worldwide at a glance From the research that you're doing at the moment, Theodore Zellon, do you find the changes as marked and as significant as suggested by Richard Senate? Well, you know, he quotes the American statistic that an American would expect to change jobs 11 times

and change skills three times in a lifetime. Well, this is exactly what a laborer would have done in the 19th century. And it is surprising how the working class who have no particular skills put their hand to anything. But the main dissatisfaction I have with your argument is that you're looking at it in a, from sort of unhappy point of view, saying things aren't happening well, you know, you don't like what's going on, you don't like this poor man who's a consultant. But you can look at it the other way and say here we have young people who are not satisfied with the way the world is working and who are trying to invent something different.

And I am very struck by the possibility of doing new things. For example, one of your bogies is the corporation which sacks people. But when you talk to people in this is an answer to your question, I talk to corporation people, they are obsessed by having a good image. they want to be seen to be of service to the community and what they do at the moment is to get a brand consultant who will tell them, put an advertisement up, they could do something completely different. They could say we are a corporation with an enormous amount of skill and knowledge

and we could use that knowledge for the public good and we could become a kind of educational institution. Isn't it one of the things that's happened that the instability and insecurity that the working class always have taken for granted, has simply progressed into the middle classes and that we're finding people who have command of the media and culture, people like yourself in academia,

are themselves feeling the chill winds of insecurity for the first time and have constructed a whole edifice of a great cultural change. But actually, as far as I can see, the figures show that among over 35s, I think, both in America and here, there is just as much stability as there ever was. But I do think you have a point that there is, a general cultural collapse of attachment and commitment. But to go back to your RICO chap,

surely it's more important that a child is brought up with the two parents committed to each other. Those are the lessons that are really important. The fact that the father is working as a consultant, it does actually matter if the father isn't on hand. That's not the point. The child knows that the father is committed to the child, the father is committed to the mother. It's that collapse at home, which is much more significant to the collapse of this idea of trust and commitment and negotiation and relationships are difficult and problem-solving and all the rest of it. Let's assume that there are changes because we could play games about whether it's changed or. We could even play games about the state of Madrid, this being new for the middle classes.

You only have to read Vanity Ferd to show the middle classes of a collapsing and rising. One of the first things I was taught about history at Oxford, the gentry is always rising and the gentry is always falling in England, and that's the story of England for a long time. So let's just forget that. And let's say it is new now. Let's work on that hypothesis for the rest of the program. So where does that take us?

Now, Theodore Zeldin, you've come back with Socrates, is the answer to this, haven't you? Well, what I've said is that the desire of people today is to be understood and to have someone who would listen to them and to be recognized as people who are worthy of respect. And you have to start with this rather than talking about the structures of industry and so on. You have to reconstruct the way we function. creating jobs to suit people as they are now instead of trying to fit them into jobs

which they don't like and which are too boring or which do not allow them to become better people. May I say, I took your book a slightly different way, which is what I've had people say to me over and over again is that there is no real talk at work. That it is very difficult, although people are constantly nattering on

about communication, actually telling and getting a boss to listen when you said this is the wrong way to do this is impossible. My answer to that is that you cannot learn to talk at work because there are all sorts of constraints at work which stop you speaking honestly to your boss. Like power. Like power. And the way to learn to talk is at home. And I'm saying that the originality of our times is that men and women are now equal and equally

or trying to become equal. And the conversation between men and women is the great revolutionary force in our time. You actually do stress that. I'd like to bring out to the listeners how strongly you stress it and how well that point is made. And you say that when Socrates, let us say, introduced, not discovered, the art of cross-examination, really,

that made thought clearer because individuals worked together instead of working apart from it. Monologue was replaced by dialogue and dialogue led to discovery. Is that what you're saying? Yes. And I'm saying that in modern times, we're trying to go further. We're trying to say, what can men and women do together?

And what they can do above all is to give each other courage. The great missing bit in Richard's book is the courage. How can one get beyond the present situation? I took what you were saying to be about more than conversation. There's more a call for an expression of human sympathy, an engagement with experience, an engagement with other people, a kind of reaching out a sort of transformative experience, which I, you know, found very engaging as an argument.

But I wonder whether you're being a little optimistic about the sort of society we're living in, because it seems to me that we're actually talking against each other, that we have a kind of adversarial culture in which we're all sort of in groups and not seeking to talk to each other, but seeking to drown each other out. I mean, there's a great deal of name-calling now.

You know, we categorise people, we call them phobes of one kind or another, both in terms of national and sexual identity, and this is all designed to shut down a conversation in order that our group, whatever we define, it wins over the other group. So we're moving away from a society in which we're all trying to talk to each other.

What you're describing is something very traditional that people argue and people try to win the argument. So when I come here, I see that Richard and I have slight disagreement, but I would like put those disagreements aside and say, what can we do together? But do you think we're now in a more cooperative society in which we are all increasingly? No, we're not in such a society. Have you got to make such a society?

Can I come back to something you said, Richard Saundersh. I think, well, I thought it was very interesting. It seems to me that one can work on the hypothesis that work has changed, maybe not massively and maybe not radically if it has changed, and will change more. And the centrality it had in people's lives, the necessity it was for people. That is one of the big changes. And there's a sentence here which took my fancy.

You said the qualities of good work and not the qualities of good. character. Now, could you take us through that? If you're a good craftsman, that doesn't make you a good human being, and in the modern workplace giving satisfaction, I found this over and over again, the people who really took satisfaction from their jobs were not people who were necessarily well with other workers, you know? They weren't people who were cooperative and so on. They tended to be rather inwardly turned people who liked focusing on a task and getting it done and moving on to something else.

And that's very well rewarded in flexible corporations. They aroused enormous antipathy in other people who felt that the competence put the others to shame. They tended to be rather inward turning. And in some sense, that has always been a problem in labor. It's just that its terms have changed now. It is that people who are good at doing things quickly and focusing on a very specific task

rather than being leaders of others tend or being cooperative with others tend to succeed. What do you think about this relationship of work to character theater? I don't agree. I think the what makes... It's so difficult. And I've always thought of you as a friend.

We are friends. I mean, I like what you do. And let me just say what I think. What makes work character building is whether one gives satisfaction to others. If one is seeking a direction for work to take, it is how to do what one does should be of use to others. That's ideally. Yes.

That's not how the real world works. No, no, no. But now the modern idea in retailing or anything else is customer satisfaction. And they're giving enormous amount of effort to try and reach down so that you talk to your customer. I agree they do it very superficially, and there is much to be done, but I believe that it is possible to encourage those kind of firms

to get beyond their superficial work and to establish better relations with individual customers, and this will happen. Melanie, where does the... Where does the division of labour argument come in between what Richard and Theodore I mean saying? Well, it doesn't really come in at all at the moment, which is why I'm trying to sort of get it in.

I mean, Theodore... Well, that's my rather clumsy way of saying, let's get to that subject. Theodore says, you know, men and women have always worked side by side, shoulder to shoulder in the fields. I mean, I think that's true of some societies at some times, but I don't think it's a sort of universal.

And certainly, in recent experience, in recent centuries, there has been a division between men and women, and the point of division is when women have children. And I do think there is a very important difference between the way women and men see work. And I say this division occurs at the point of which they have children. Because it seems to me that work is a way of both bolting men into a family, a sort of bargain between a man and a woman. But also work seems to me to give a man his sense of identity in a way that it doesn't give

a woman. Ultimately, a woman, you know, if she has children, that is sufficient. I'm not saying there aren't many women now, and I am one, who work and have children for whom work is very important. But the bottom line is that if you deprive a man of work, it does something to him, which it does not do to a woman. And I think that is true now and probably always has been true. I can see, just as a matter of interest, I can see through into the, from this studio, into the control room. And I've got three women shaking their heads of what you're saying, Melanie. So where does that take you?

Well, they all disagree. And we're all, you know, having a... But that's because we're all career women. You have several identities. Yes, but this idea that is now commonplace, that we're all unisex individuals, and we all play exactly the same roles, not complementary roles, but exactly identical roles,

at home and at work. That is what public policy is now predicated on, that men have got to turn themselves into new men and be at home hands-on caring. If they're not at home, hands-on caring for their children, they're not being parents, which is standing on its head, the idea that a man brings to parenting

and to the home, a complementary role. And simultaneously, the idea that women have to work at all times, and otherwise they don't have self-respect, they don't have the respect of anybody else, even if they have children at home, which leaves unresolved a question of who looks after the children. I'd like to push this idea of division of labour a bit further,

because division of labour means specialisation, and I think this is what has got us into difficulties. And women are pioneering a multiplicity of employers, as well as home caring and so on. And this is something which has a future, it seems to me, when we can all do several different jobs. And so the outlook, far from being negative, as you suggest, I think points to something. But the problem with this is that many women don't like that.

I mean, career women in this studio may all be straddling these two separate spheres. But studies show that, in fact, a traditional family, the reviled traditional family where there is a clear separation of, roles is actually where the two individuals, the man and the woman, are happiest, that there are terrible tensions set up in trying to straddle two spheres, and that, you know, the working mother actually copse it all. I mean, you say, you know, multiplicity of roles, and you bet the working mother, you know, is playing at least two roles simultaneously. Well, I think lots of us are playing lots of different roles. I go back to an earlier point

made by Theodore Zolden, that one of the liberations, I think, for the emphasis, for certain fortunate people is the capacity to lead several lives. I didn't. think that only applies to women and I think that that is one of the real But my point is really about men. That is freedom, isn't it? But my point is really about men and the centrality of work from male identity. And I'm worried about polls that prove who's

happier than anybody else. I've never known a poll much of happiness with any, within an accuracy of 100% frankly. Don't say studies have shown. Well, I think in some way what you're saying is economic reality is going to eclipse. It is very difficult now

in both Britain and the United States. since certainly in Germany and France, for a middle-class family to survive on one income. It isn't a question about traditional versus modern. This is a great change in the labor market the last 20 years, that women stay employed full-time in middle-class women in the labor market after they have children. That's not a choice. It's a necessity.

and because it's something that has to happen, given the economic conditions we live in, to think about differentiating roles between men and women and the family is going to have to take on a new configuration too. But isn't one of the reasons why two incomes are now necessary is because male wages have been driven down, and one of the reasons why they're driven down is the influx of women into the market? Not really. Not economically. male wages have stagnated, and women's wages in certain kinds of labor also beginning to stagnate as well. It's much more complicated than that. It isn't that the women have sort of batted men over the head, middle-class women, by entering the job market.

But even if we're true in the past, even if what you say were true, which I'm afraid it isn't, the reality we have now is that most adults, whether they're men or women, are going to spend most of their conscious hours working. This is an improvement from the time when a family could not survive unless the children worked from the age of seven. Yes, we have to remember that.

Can I just come to a conclusion by saying you are both academics and Melanie writes about these things. Are you doing anything more than trying desperately to catch up to what's going on and going before you, that work is changing so fast, that the division of labour,

and it's going on at different paces and different rates in different part of the world. One of the things that, a subtext of your book sort of says, well, it would better wear it like this. And your book of conversation says, well, why don't we do this? And Mellon is saying, well, it would better be like this. Have you a hope of changing things by thought?

Yes, I'm actually doing something. I've got into firms, and I found a firm would say, do what you like with our firm, use it as a laboratory, and I am trying to do it. And I'm trying to create things in my work on the French millennium, which will change people's lives. Well, that's a straight answer, theatre.

I asked those, was it complicated? Bang, okay, right, what about you, Richard? I don't think I'm changing people's lives. But you do think that actually a change in the capitalist system would be... But I'm just saying, is it sort of almost out of control? No, I don't believe that. I actually think that what we're going to see is a period in which corporations begin to reconsider the long term and to think more long term rather than short-term profits are into their stock price. And at that moment, I think we'll begin to be able to sort out a little more what this kinds of flexible work is like.

I know this only have I work with unions which are also paralyzed organizations I'm not pessimistic about this I think we have a problem in the way workers are organized and we have to learn how to solve it

the way earlier generations did one thing that's odd about your book in a way is interesting is that this chap Rico's father who worked as a janitor and did tremendously well and saved up for his family and looked after him has a great deal of self-respect

and his son who did masses of things as well, and it has very little self-respect at all. So it's, in a sense, to do with self-regard as much to do the actual work you're doing. Absolutely. Success is not self-respect. I mean, it's a cliche, but one of those cliches that happens to be true.

I think this lack of self-respect is to do with the lack of the feeling that one's actually producing anything. And increasingly, I think, as has been said before, people are stopping producing and they're talking instead. and despite Theodore's advocacy of a proper conversation, I think that's somebody who makes her living from words,

both written and oral. I think that can only be regretted. But how do you get self-respect, except by getting a sense that other people find what you say worthwhile? You get it from other people, not from yourself, ultimately. Thank you very much to Richard Senor, Theodore Zeldin, and Melanie Phillips. Next week I'll be joined by the historian Simon Chalmers and Antonio Fraser.

discussing the study of history in the last decade of this century. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.