Creating the New Worker: Work, Consumption and Subordination

414 Pages·2019·2.965 MB·English

by  Jean-Pierre Durand

Jean-Pierre Durand
CREATING
THE NEW
WORKER
Work, Consumption
and Subordination
Creating the New Worker
Jean-Pierre Durand
Creating the New
Worker
Work, Consumption
and Subordination
Jean-Pierre Durand
University of Évry Paris-Saclay
Évry, France
ISBN 978-3-319-93259-0 ISBN 978-3-319-93260-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93260-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018943278
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No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine
things that can be done. I don’t like work - no man does - but I like what is
in the work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself not
for others - what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere
show, and never can tell what it really means.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899.
Foreword
Jean-Pierre Durand is one of France’s leading labour sociologists and
was amongst the first to introduce the Anglo Saxon labour process
debate, including the work of Michael Burawoy, to a Francophone audi-
ence. In this very refreshing new work, he offers a timely response to
the somewhat tired nature of the debate on management and employee
responses and social forms of labour control in the UK and the USA.
In this highly original work, Durand develops Gramsci’s notion of
the New Worker beyond the Fordian principle of the mass society and
the mass worker. The book’s focus then shifts to the fate of the new
worker in Late Capitalism. A Gramscian critique of contemporary pat-
terns of capitalist labour control and Lacanian psychoanalysis is used to
explore the development of new forms of social subordination as well as
the context for social emancipation. This departure offers an intriguing
background from which to proceed to an updating of Gramsci’s con-
cept for the contemporary world, which, depending on how we look
at it, is certainly a neoliberal one. Durand highlights the ways in which
management and the lighter literature fails to—or does not attempt—
situate the idea of the New Worker in the historical context of neolib-
eral reconstruction. The argument begins with the idea that the New
vii
viii Foreword
Worker is an ambivalent construct which, though undermined by var-
iant patterns of subordination (reflected, inter alia, by workplace indi-
vidual dissent and suicide and extra workplace individual pathologies),
is nevertheless able to contest various neoliberal tropes. While these
tropes are challenged from within contemporary social and economic
cultures, at the same time they shroud worker—management engage-
ments defined, as they always are, by relations of conflict and consensus.
Thus, by accounting for variant patterns of sublimation Durand makes
concrete the changes in the relationships between the evolving nature of
capitalism and the creation of the new woman and the new man.
These changes embrace work and consumption and specifically in terms
of their influence on the ‘subject’. One of Durand’s concerns is to make
sense of the ways in which contemporary models of capitalism and the
‘subject’ have changed over the last three decades. Specifically, what might
be the links between production and consumption in this transformation?
How might we understand the consumption of (in)tangible goods against
the background neoliberal subordination within and beyond work?
In contrast to Boltanski and Chiapello, for example, who see the
1970s as time in which Fordism was reduced and replaced by network
organisations that offered a form of pseudo space for free action, or
actor-centred action, Durand argues quite the contrary. Rather, he sit-
uates subordination not in discursive management agenda trumpeting
a refashioning of (supposedly) oppositional discourses, but rather in
socio-economic, cultural and psychological traps which limit the scope
for oppositional action. These limits result directly from the instantia-
tion of material-organisational structures which act in particular ways
to constrain, by configuring, everyone’s behaviour. Even if one might
argue that the discourses of Fordist rigidity were giving way to flatter
hierarchies, or no hierarchies, the reality is that hierarchy, exclusion,
worker control and social subordination were, and are, being extended:
Fordism, in the sense of dominant class hierarchies, never went away.
This argument, centred on the reconstitution of class subordination,
is the leitmotif of the book. Thus, the notion of the social patterning
of contemporary subordinations is developed through an engagement
in highly pertinent debates on the evolution of management think-
ing, management practices and employee responses with compelling
Foreword ix
empirical examples drawn from a range of sectors including aerospace,
automotives, office work, job centres, rail transport (the SNCF) and
advertising. It is through an exploration of the fate of labour in these
sectors that Durand is able to interpret the increased incidence of work-
place stress in France and elsewhere together with the shocking rise in
work-related suicides. The latter in particular he attributes to new pro-
duction regimes. In the Anglo Saxon literature, the latter are described
typically, and at times uncritically, as forms of lean production. Durand
picks up on the idea he developed in a previous work on patterns of
labour subordination in capitalism using the concept of flux tendu.
What does he mean by flux tendu and in what ways does it vary from
the Japanese concept of just-in-time? Why does the concept of lean pro-
duction appear at the beginning of 1990s and how does it seemingly
resolve a number of problems associated with the crises of Taylorism
and Fordism? What are its main principles? The book addresses these
concepts in order to consider how work organisations and labour pro-
cesses have changed over several decades and the new ways in which
blue and white collar workers are mobilised. In this new organisation,
middle management and supervisors are—like other employees—
committed to other working modalities. They sometimes doubt their
new functions: they live rather insecurely in their new circumstances,
and it is by explaining the social and psychological nature of these inse-
curities that Durand grapples with the trauma of workplace exclusion
with all its social and psychological consequences.
The book concludes by offering us two scenarios: one is the continua-
tion of the current situation with the disasters of ecological destruction,
forced migration and inequality (with a return to urban violence) which
are entirely predictable; the second scenario suggests an enchanted future
when all these questions are resolved by social innovation and the super-
session of capitalism. The question of plausibility is central to his answer.
Edinburgh, Scotland Prof. Paul Stewart
Senior Research Professor,
Sociology of Employment,
Grenoble School of Management
(GEM)—Université Grenoble Alpes
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Gramsci and the New Worker 3
The New Worker Today 7
References 11
2 Lean Management: The Invisible Revolution 13
Historical Reasons for Lean Production’s Emergence
and Diffusion 14
Systemic Efficiency and Lean Production 16
Managing Within an Enclave 34
References 42
3 The New Worker: Fractured Identities and Denied
Recognition 45
Lean Management’s Production of the New Worker 46
The Process of Constructing Identity at Work 69
Recognition at Work 77
References 99
xi
xii Contents
4 The New Worker Dispossessed of Work 103
Logistics as an Example of Industrial Workers Operating
in a Service Activity 104
The Taylorisation of Industrial Design-Related
Intellectual Work 120
The Normalisation of Research and Development 140
References 156
5 The New Worker in Service Activities 159
Revisiting Theoretical Approaches to the Service Sector 161
The Possibility of Non-quality Work in the Service Sector 179
The Hidden Functions of Indicateurs and Personal Appraisals 205
References 228
6 The Impossible Rationalisation of Service Activities 231
Factors Preventing the Rationalisation of Service Activities 233
When Work Is Done by Users and Customers 244
Inventing Piece-Workers in the Service Sector 264
Service Quality’s Inevitable Deterioration 291
References 307
7 Two Scenarios for the Future 311
The Dark Scenario of Social Regression 312
The Bright Scenario of a Rosy Future 353
References 370
8 Conclusion: What Comes After Work 373
References 377
Bibliography 379
Index 395