The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

by Richard Sennett

Overview

A Business Week Best Book of the Year.... "A devastating and wholly necessary book."—Studs Terkel, author of Working

In The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett, "among the country's most distinguished thinkers . . . has concentrated into 176 pages a profoundly affecting argument" (Business Week) that draws on interviews with dismissed IBM executives, bakers, a bartender turned advertising executive, and many others to call into question the terms of our new economy. In his 1972 classic, The Hidden Injuries of Class (written with Jonathan Cobb), Sennett interviewed a man he called Enrico, a hardworking janitor whose life was structured by a union pay schedule and given meaning by his sacrifices for the future. In this new book-a #1 bestseller in Germany-Sennett explores the contemporary scene characterized by Enrico's son, Rico, whose life is more materially successful, yet whose work lacks long-term commitments or loyalties. Distinguished by Sennett's "combination of broad historical and literary learning and a reporter's willingness to walk into a store or factory [and] strike up a conversation" (New York Times Book Review), this book "challenges the reader to decide whether the flexibility of modern capitalism . . . is merely a fresh form of oppression" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Praise for The Corrosion of Character: "A benchmark for our time."—Daniel Bell "[A]n incredibly insightful book."—William Julius Wilson "[A] remarkable synthesis of acute empirical observation and serious moral reflection."—Richard Rorty "[Sennett] offers abundant fresh insights . . . illuminated by his concern with people's struggle to give meaning to their lives."—[Memphis] Commercial Appeal

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393078527
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/07/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	931,368
File size:	477 KB

About the Author

Richard Sennett’s books include The Corrosion of Character, Flesh and Stone, and Respect. He was the founding director of the New York Institute for the Humanities and now teaches sociology at New York University and at the London School of Economics.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Drift

    Recently I met someone in an airport whom I hadn't seen for fifteen years. I had interviewed the father of Rico (as I shall call him) a quarter century ago when I wrote a book about blue-collar workers in America, The Hidden Injuries of Class. Enrico, his father, then worked as a janitor, and had high hopes for this boy, who was just entering adolescence, a bright kid good at sports. When I lost touch with his father a decade later, Rico had just finished college. In the airline lounge, Rico looked as if he had fulfilled his father's dreams. He carried a computer in a smart leather case, dressed in a suit I couldn't afford, and sported a signet ring with a crest.

    Enrico had spent twenty years by the time we first met cleaning toilets and mopping floors in a downtown office building. He did so without complaining, but also without any hype about living out the American Dream. His work had one single and durable purpose, the service of his family. It had taken him fifteen years to save the money for a house, which he purchased in a suburb near Boston, cutting ties with his old Italian neighborhood because a house in the suburbs was better for the kids. Then his wife, Flavia, had gone to work, as a presser in a dry-cleaning plant; by the time I met Enrico in 1970, both parents were saving for the college education of their two sons.

    What had most struck me about Enrico and his generation was how linear time was in their lives: year after year of working in jobs which seldom varied from day to day. And along that line of time, achievement was cumulative: Enrico and Flavia checked the increase in their savings every week, measured their domesticity by the various improvements and additions they had made to their ranch house. Finally, the time they lived was predictable. The upheavals of the Great Depression and World War II had faded, unions protected their jobs; though he was only forty when I first met him, Enrico knew precisely when he would retire and how much money he would have.

    Time is the only resource freely available to those at the bottom of society. To make time accumulate, Enrico needed what the sociologist Max Weber called an "iron cage," a bureaucratic structure which rationalized the use of time; in Enrico's case, the seniority rules of his union about pay and the regulations organizing his government pension provided this scaffolding. When he added to these resources his own self-discipline, the result was more than economic.

    He carved out a clear story for himself in which his experience accumulated materially and psychically; his life thus made sense to him as a linear narrative. Though a snob might dismiss Enrico as boring, he experienced the years as a dramatic story moving forward repair by repair, interest payment by interest payment. The janitor felt he became the author of his life, and though he was a man low on the social scale, this narrative provided him a sense of self-respect.

    Though clear, Enrico's life story was not simple. I was particularly struck by how Enrico straddled the worlds of his old immigrant community and his new suburban-neutral life. Among his suburban neighbors he lived as a quiet, self-effacing citizen; when he returned to the old neighborhood, however, he received much more attention as a man who had made good on the outside, a worthy elder who returned each Sunday for Mass followed by lunch followed by gossipy coffees. He got recognition as a distinctive human being from those who knew him long enough to understand his story; he got a more anonymous kind of respect from his new neighbors by doing what everyone else did, keeping his home and garden neat, living without incident. The thick texture of Enrico's particular experience lay in the fact that he was acknowledged in both ways, depending in which community he moved: two identities from the same disciplined use of his time.

    If the world were a happy and just place, those who enjoy respect would give back in equal measure the regard which has been accorded them. This was Fichte's idea in "The Foundations of National Law"; he spoke of the "reciprocal effect" of recognition. But real life does not proceed so generously.

    Enrico disliked blacks, although he had labored peaceably for many years with other janitors who were black; he disliked non-Italian foreigners like the Irish, although his own father could barely speak English. He could not acknowledge kindred straggles; he had no class allies. Most of all, however, Enrico disliked middle-class people. We treated him as though he were invisible, "as a zero," he said; the janitor's resentment was complicated by his fear that because of his lack of education and his menial status, we had a sneaking right to do so. To his powers of endurance in time he contrasted the whining self-pity of blacks, the unfair intrusion of foreigners, and the unearned privileges of the bourgeoisie.

    Though Enrico felt he had achieved a measure of social honor, he hardly wanted his son Rico to repeat his own life. The American dream of upward mobility for the children powerfully drove my friend. "I don't understand a word he says," Enrico boasted to me several times when Rico had come home from school and was at work on math. I heard many other parents of sons and daughters like Rico say something like "I don't understand him" in harder tones, as though the kids had abandoned them. We all violate in some way the place assigned us in the family myth, but upward mobility gives that passage a peculiar twist. Rico and other youngsters headed up the social ladder sometimes betrayed shame about their parents' working-class accents and rough manners, but more often felt suffocated by the endless strategizing over pennies and the reckoning of time in tiny steps. These favored children wanted to embark on a less constrained journey.

    Now, many years later, thanks to the encounter at the airport, I had the chance to see how it had turned out for Enrico's son. In the airport lounge, I must confess, I didn't much like what I saw. Rico's expensive suit could have been just business plumage, but the crested signet ring--a mark of elite family background--seemed both a lie and a betrayal of the father. However, circumstances threw Rico and me together on a long flight. He and I did not have one of those American journeys in which a stranger spills out his or her emotional guts to you, gathers more tangible baggage when the plane lands, and disappears forever. I took the seat next to Rico without being asked, and for the first hour of a long flight from New York to Vienna had to pry information out of him.

Rico, I learned, has fulfilled his father's desire for upward mobility, but has indeed rejected the way of his father. Rico scorns "time-servers" and others wrapped in the armor of bureaucracy; instead he believes in being open to change and in taking risks. And he has prospered; whereas Enrico had an income in the bottom quarter of the wage scale, Rico's has shot up to the top 5 percent. Yet this is not an entirely happy story for Rico.

    After graduating from a local university in electrical engineering, Rico went to a business school in New York. There he married a fellow student, a young Protestant woman from a better family. School prepared the young couple to move and change jobs frequently, and they've done so. Since graduation, in fourteen years at work Rico has moved four times.

    Rico began as a technology adviser to a venture capital firm on the West Coast, in the early, heady days of the developing computer industry in Silicon Valley; he then moved to Chicago, where he also did well. But the next move was for the sake of his wife's career. If Rico were an ambition-driven character out of the pages of Balzac, he would never have done it, for he gained no larger salary, and he left hotbeds of high-tech activity for a more retired, if leafy, office park in Missouri. Enrico felt somewhat ashamed when Flavia went to work; Rico sees Jeannette, his wife, as an equal working partner, and has adapted to her. It was at this point, when Jeannette's career took off, that their children began arriving.

    In the Missouri office park, the uncertainties of the new economy caught up with the young man. While Jeannette was promoted, Rico was downsized--his firm was absorbed by another, larger firm that had its own analysts. So the couple made a fourth move, back East to a suburb outside New York. Jeannette now manages a big team of accountants, and he has started a small consulting firm.

    Prosperous as they are, the very acme of an adaptable, mutually supportive couple, both husband and wife often fear they are on the edge of losing control over their lives. This fear is built into their work histories.

    In Rico's case, the fear of lacking control is straightforward: it concerns managing time. When Rico told his peers he was going to start his own consulting firm, most approved; consulting seems the road to independence. But in getting started he found himself plunged into many menial tasks, like doing his own photocopying, which before he'd taken for granted. He found himself plunged into the sheer flux of networking; every call had to be answered, the slightest acquaintance pursued. To find work, he has fallen subservient to the schedules of people who are in no way obliged to respond to him. Like other consultants, he wants to work in accordance with contracts setting out just what the consultant will do. But these contracts, he says, are largely fictions. A consultant usually has to tack one way and another in response to the changing whims or thoughts of those who pay; Rico has no fixed role that allows him to say to others, "This is what I do, this is what I am responsible for."

    Jeannette's lack of control is more subtle. The small group of accountants she now manages is divided among people who work at home, people usually in the office, and a phalanx of low-level back-office clerks a thousand miles away connected to her by computer cable. In her present corporation, strict rules and surveillance of phones and e-mail disciplines the conduct of the accountants who work from home; to organize the work of the back-office clerks a thousand miles away, she can't make hands-on, face-to-face judgments, but instead must work by formal written guidelines. She hasn't experienced less bureaucracy in this seemingly flexible work arrangement; indeed, her own decisions count for less than in the days when she supervised workers who were grouped together, all the time, in the same office.

    As I say, at first I was not prepared to shed many tears for this American Dream couple. Yet as dinner was served to Rico and me on our flight, and he began to talk more personally, my sympathies increased. His fear of losing control, it developed, went much deeper than worry about losing power in his job. He feared that the actions he needs to take and the way he has to live in order to survive in the modern economy have set his emotional, inner life adrift.

    Rico told me that he and Jeannette have made friends mostly with the people they see at work, and have lost many of these friendships during the moves of the last twelve years, "though we stay 'netted.'" Rico looks to electronic communications for the sense of community which Enrico most enjoyed when he attended meetings of the janitors' union, but the son finds communications on-line short and hurried. "It's like with your kids--when you're not there, all you get is news later."

    In each of his four moves, Rico's new neighbors have treated his advent as an arrival which closes past chapters of his life; they ask him about Silicon Valley or the Missouri office park, but, Rico says, "they don't see other places"; their imaginations are not engaged. This is a very American fear. The classic American suburb was a bedroom community; in the last generation a different kind of suburb has arisen, more economically independent of the urban core, but not really town or village either; a place springs into life with the wave of a developer's wand, flourishes, and begins to decay all within a generation. Such communities are not empty of sociability or neighborliness, but no one in them becomes a long-term witness to another person's life.

    The fugitive quality of friendship and local community form the background to the most important of Rico's inner worries, his family. Like Enrico, Rico views work as his service to the family; unlike Enrico, Rico finds that the demands of the job interfere with achieving the end. At first I thought he was talking about the all too familiar conflict between work time and time for family. "We get home at seven, do dinner, try to find an hour for the kids' homework, and then deal with our own paperwork." When things get tough for months at a time in his consulting firm, "it's like I don't know who my kids are." He worries about the frequent anarchy into which his family plunges, and about neglecting his children, whose needs can't be programmed to fit into the demands of his job.

    Hearing this, I tried to reassure him; my wife, stepson, and I had endured and survived well a similarly high-pressure life. "You aren't being fair to yourself," I said. "The fact you care so much means you are doing the best for your family you can." Though he warmed to this, I had misunderstood.

    As a boy, I already knew, Rico had chafed under Enrico's authority; he had told me then he felt smothered by the small-minded rules which governed the janitor's life. Now that he is a father himself, the fear of a lack of ethical discipline haunts him, particularly the fear that his children will become "mall rats," hanging out aimlessly in the parking lots of shopping centers in the afternoons while the parents remain out of touch at their offices.

    He therefore wants to set for his son and daughters an example of resolution and purpose, "but you can't just tell kids to be like that"; he has to set an example. The objective example he could set, his upward mobility, is something they take for granted, a history that belongs to a past not their own, a story which is over. But his deepest worry is that he cannot offer the substance of his work life as an example to his children of how they should conduct themselves ethically. The qualities of good work are not the qualities of good character.

As I came later to understand, the gravity of this fear comes from a gap separating Enrico and Rico's generations. Business leaders and journalists emphasize the global marketplace and the use of new technologies as the hallmarks of the capitalism of our time. This is true enough, but misses another dimension of change: new ways of organizing time, particularly working time.

    The most tangible sign of that change might be the motto "No long term." In work, the traditional career progressing step by step through the corridors of one or two institutions is withering; so is the deployment of a single set of skills through the course of a working life. Today, a young American with at least two years of college can expect to change jobs at least eleven times in the course of working, and change his or her skill base at least three times during those forty years of labor.

    An executive for ATT points out that the motto "No long term" is altering the very meaning of work:

In ATT we have to promote the whole concept of the work force being contingent, though most of the contingent workers are inside our walls. "Jobs" are being replaced by "projects" and "fields of work."

Corporations have also farmed out many of the tasks they once did permanently in-house to small firms and to individuals employed on short-term contracts. The fastest-growing sector of the American labor force, for instance, is people who work for temporary job agencies.

    "People are hungry for [change]," the management guru James Champy argues, because "the market may be 'consumer-driven' as never before in history." The market, in this view, is too dynamic to permit doing things the same way year after year, or doing the same thing. The economist Bennett Harrison believes the source of this hunger for change is "impatient capital," the desire for rapid return; for instance, the average length of time stocks have been held on British and American exchanges has dropped 60 percent in the last fifteen years. The market believes rapid market return is best generated by rapid institutional change.

    The "long-term" order at which the new regime takes aim, it should be said, was itself short-lived--the decades spanning the mid-twentieth century. Nineteenth-century capitalism lurched from disaster to disaster in the stock markets and in irrational corporate investment; the wild swings of the business cycle provided people little security. In Enrico's generation after World War II, this disorder was brought somewhat under control in most advanced economies; strong unions, guarantees of the welfare state, and large-scale corporations combined to produce an era of relative stability. This span of thirty or so years defines the "stable past" now challenged by a new regime.

    A change in modern institutional structure has accompanied short-term, contract, or episodic labor. Corporations have sought to remove layers of bureaucracy, to become flatter and more flexible organizations. In place of organizations as pyramids, management wants now to think of organizations as networks. "Networklike arrangements are lighter on their feet" than pyramidal hierarchies, the sociologist Walter Powell declares; "they are more readily decomposable or redefinable than the fixed assets of hierarchies." This means that promotions and dismissals tend not to be based on clear, fixed rules, nor are work tasks crisply defined; the network is constantly redefining its structure.

    An IBM executive once told Powell that the flexible corporation "must become an archipelago of related activities." The archipelago is an apt image for communications in a network, communication occurring like travel between islands--but at the speed of light, thanks to modern technologies. The computer has been the key to replacing the slow and clogged communications which occur in traditional chains of command. The fastest-growing sector of the labor force deals in computer and data-processing services, the area in which Jeanette and Rico work; the computer is now used in virtually all jobs, in many ways, by people of all ranks. (Please see Tables 1 and 7 in the Appendix for a statistical portrait.)

    For all these reasons, Enrico's experience of long-term, narrative time in fixed channels has become dysfunctional. What Rico sought to explain to me--and perhaps to himself--is that the material changes embodied in the motto "No long term" have become dysfunctional for him too, but as guides to personal character, particularly in relation to his family life.

    Take the matter of commitment and loyalty. "No long term" is a principle which corrodes trust, loyalty, and mutual commitment. Trust can, of course, be a purely formal matter, as when people agree to a business deal or rely on another to observe the rules in a game. But usually deeper experiences of trust are more informal, as when people learn on whom they can rely when given a difficult or impossible task. Such social bonds take time to develop, slowly rooting into the cracks and crevices of institutions.

    The short time frame of modern institutions limits the ripening of informal trust. A particularly egregious violation of mutual commitment often occurs when new enterprises are first sold. In firms starting up, long hours and intense effort are demanded of everyone; when the firms go public--that is, initially offer publicly traded shares--the founders are apt to sell out and cash in, leaving lower-level employees behind. If an organization whether new or old operates as a flexible, loose network structure rather than by rigid command from the top, the network can also weaken social bonds. The sociologist Mark Granovetter says that modern institutional networks are marked by "the strength of weak ties," by which he partly means that fleeting forms of association are more useful to people than long-term connections, and partly that strong social ties like loyalty have ceased to be compelling. These weak ties are embodied in teamwork, in which the team moves from task to task and the personnel of the team changes in the process.

    Strong ties depend, by contrast, on long association. And more personally they depend on a willingness to make commitments to others. Given the typically short, weak ties in institutions today, John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor, counsels the young to work "on the outside rather than on the inside" of organizations. He advocates consulting rather than becoming "entangled" in long-term employment; institutional loyalty is a trap in an economy where "business concepts, product designs, competitor intelligence, capital equipment, and all kinds of knowledge have shorter credible life spans." A consultant who managed a recent IBM job shrinkage declares that once employees "understand [they can't depend on the corporation] they're marketable." Detachment and superficial cooperativeness are better armor for dealing with current realities than behavior based on values of loyalty and service.

    It is the time dimension of the new capitalism, rather than high-tech data transmission, global stock markets, or free trade, which most directly affects people's emotional lives outside the workplace. Transposed to the family realm, "No long term" means keep moving, don't commit yourself, and don't sacrifice. Rico suddenly erupted on the plane, "You can't imagine how stupid I feel when I talk to my kids about commitment. It's an abstract virtue to them; they don't see it anywhere." Over dinner I simply didn't understand the outburst, which seemed apropos of nothing. But his meaning is now clearer to me as a reflection upon himself. He means the children don't see commitment practiced in the lives of their parents or their parents' generation.

    Similarly, Rico hates the emphasis on teamwork and open discussion which marks an enlightened, flexible workplace once those values are transposed to the intimate realm. Practiced at home, teamwork is destructive, marking an absence of authority and of firm guidance in raising children. He and Jeannette, he says, have seen too many parents who have talked every family issue to death for fear of saying "No!," parents who listen too well, who understand beautifully rather than lay down the law; they have seen as a result too many disoriented kids.

    "Things have to hold together," Rico declared to me. Again, I didn't at first quite get this, and he explained what he meant in terms of watching television. Perhaps unusually, Rico and Jeannette make it a practice to discuss with their two sons the relation between movies or sitcoms the boys watch on the tube and events in the newspapers. "Otherwise it's just a jumble of images." But mostly the connections concern the violence and sexuality the children see on television. Enrico constantly spoke in little parables to drive home questions of character; these parables he derived from his work as a janitor--such as "You can ignore dirt but it won't go away." When I first knew Rico as an adolescent, he reacted with a certain shame to these homely snippets of wisdom. So now I asked Rico if he too made parables or even just drew ethical rules from his experience at work. He first ducked answering directly--"There's not much on TV about that sort of thing"--then replied, "And well, no, I don't talk that way."

    Behavior which earns success or even just survival at work thus gives Rico little to offer in the way of a parental role model. In fact, for this modern couple, the problem is just the reverse: how can they protect family relations from succumbing to the short-term behavior, the meeting mind-set, and above all the weakness of loyalty and commitment which mark the modern workplace? In place of the chameleon values of the new economy, the family--as Rico sees it--should emphasize instead formal obligation, trustworthiness, commitment, and purpose. These are all long-term virtues.

    This conflict between family and work poses some questions about adult experience itself. How can long-term purposes be pursued in a short-term society? How can durable social relations be sustained? How can a human being develop a narrative of identity and life history in a society composed of episodes and fragments? The conditions of the new economy feed instead on experience which drifts in time, from place to place, from job to job. If I could state Rico's dilemma more largely, short-term capitalism threatens to corrode his character, particularly those qualities of character which bind human beings to one another and furnishes each with a sense of sustainable self.

By the end of dinner, both of us were wrapped in our own thoughts. I had imagined a quarter century ago that late capitalism had achieved something like a final consummation; whether there was more market freedom, less government control, still the "system" entered into people's everyday experience as it always had, through success and failure, domination and submission, alienation and consumption. Questions of culture and character fell for me into these familiar categories. But no young person's experience today could be captured by these old habits of thought.

    Rico's talk about his family had also set him, evidently, to thinking about his ethical values. When we retired to the back of the cabin to smoke, he remarked to me that he used to be a liberal, in the generous American sense of caring about the poor and behaving well to minorities like blacks and homosexuals. Enrico's intolerance of blacks and foreigners shamed his son. Since going to work, though, Rico says he has become a "cultural conservative." Like most of his peers, he loathes social parasites, embodied for him in the figure of the welfare mother who spends her government checks on booze and drugs. He has also become a believer in fixed, Draconian standards of communal behavior, as opposed to those values of "liberal parenting" which parallel the open-ended meeting at work. As an example of this communal ideal Rico told me that he approves the proposal current in some conservative circles to take away the children of bad parents and put them in orphanages.

    My hackles rose and we debated furiously, smoke rising above us in a cloud. We were talking past each other. (And as I look over my notes, I see Rico also a bit enjoyed provoking me.) He knows his cultural conservatism is just that--an idealized symbolic community. He has no real expectation of shutting children up in orphanages. He has certainly had little adult experience of the conservatism which preserves the past; for instance, other Americans have treated him each time he has moved as though life is just beginning, the past consigned to oblivion. The cultural conservatism to which he subscribes forms a testament to the coherence he feels missing in his life.

    And as concerns the family, his values are no simple matter of nostalgia. Rico in fact disliked the actual experience of rigid parental rule such as he suffered at Enrico's hands. He would not return to the linear time which ordered Enrico and Flavia's existence even if he could; he looked at me with a certain disgust when I told him that as a college professor, I have job tenure for life. He treats uncertainty and risk-taking as challenges at work; as a consultant he has learned to be an adept team player.

    But these forms of flexible behavior have not served Rico in his roles as a father or as a member of a community; he wants to sustain social relations and to offer durable guidance. It is against the severed ties at work, willful amnesia of his neighbors, and the specter of his children as mall rats that he asserts the idea of lasting values. And so Rico has become caught in a trap.

    All the specific values he cited are fixed rules: a parent says no; a community demands work; dependence is an evil. The vagaries of circumstance are excluded from these ethical rules--random vagaries are what, after all, Rico wants to defend against. But it's difficult to put such timeless rules into practice.

    That difficulty appears in the language Rico uses to describe his moves the last fourteen years around the country. Though many of these moves have not been of his own desiring, he seldom used the passive voice in recounting the events. For instance, he dislikes the locution "I was downsized"; instead, when this event broke up his life in the Missouri office park, he declared, "I faced a crisis and I had a decision to make." About this crisis he said, "I make my own choices; I take full responsibility for moving around so much." This sounded like his father. "Taking responsibility for yourself" was the most important phrase in Enrico's lexicon. But Rico didn't see how to act on it.

    I asked Rico, "When you were downsized in Missouri, why didn't you protest, why didn't you fight back?"

    "Sure, I felt angry, but that doesn't do any good. There was nothing unfair about the corporation's making its operation tighter. Whatever happened, I had to deal with the consequences. Would I ask Jeannette to move, one more time, for me? It was bad for the kids as well as her. Should I ask her? Who should I write a letter to about that?"

    There was no action he could take. Even so, he feels responsible for this event beyond his control; he literally takes it into himself, as his own burden. But what does "taking responsibility" mean? His children accept mobility as just the way of the world; his wife is in fact grateful that he has been willing to move for her sake. Yet the statement "I take responsibility for moving around so much" issues from Rico as a defiant challenge. By this point in our journey, I understood that the last thing I should reply to this challenge was "How could you hold yourself accountable?" It would have been a reasonable question and an insult--you don't really matter.

    Enrico had a somewhat fatalistic, old-world sense of people being born into a particular class or condition of life and making the very best of what is possible within those constraints. Events beyond his control, like layoffs, happened to him; then he coped. As this bit of sparring I've just quoted may make clear, Rico's sense of responsibility is more absolute. What he draws attention to is his unbending willingness to be held accountable, to that quality of character, rather than to a particular course of action. Flexibility has pushed him to assert the sheer strength of will as the essence of his own ethical character.

    Assuming responsibility for events beyond one's control may seem a familiar friend--guilt--but this would wrongly characterize Rico, at least as he appeared to me. He is not self-indulgently self-accusing. Nor has he lost his nerve, faced with a society which seems to him all in fragments. The rules he flames for what a person of good character should do may seem simplistic or childish, but again this would be to judge him wrongly. He is in a way a realist; it would indeed have been meaningless for him to write a letter to his employers about the havoc they had introduced into his family. So Rico focuses on his own sheer determination to resist: he will not drift. He wants to resist particularly the acid erosion of those qualities of character, like loyalty, commitment, purpose, and resolution, which are long-term in nature. He affirms timeless values which characterize who he is--for good, permanently, essentially. His will has become static; he is trapped in the sheer assertion of values.

    What is missing between the polar opposites of drifting experience and static assertion is a narrative which could organize his conduct. Narratives are more than simple chronicles of events; they give shape to the forward movement of time, suggesting reasons why things happen, showing their consequences. Enrico had a narrative for his life, linear and cumulative, a narrative which made sense in a highly bureaucratic world. Rico lives in a world marked instead by short-term flexibility and flux; this world does not offer much, either economically or socially, in the way of narrative. Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connections. Creative destruction, Schumpeter said, thinking about entrepreneurs, requires people at ease about not reckoning the consequences of change, or not knowing what comes next. Most people, though, are not at ease with change in this nonchalant, negligent way.

    Certainly Rico doesn't want to live as a Schumpeterian man, though in the brute struggle for survival he has done well. "Change" means just drift; Rico worries that his children will drift ethically and emotionally--but as with his employers, there is nothing like a letter he can write to his children which will guide them through time. The lessons he wants to teach them are as timeless as is his own sense of determination--which means his ethical precepts apply to any and all cases. Change's confusions and anxieties have bred in him this swing to the opposite extreme; perhaps this is why he cannot hold up his own life as an illustrative tale to his children, perhaps why, in listening to him, one has no sense of his character unfolding, or his ideals evolving.

I've described this encounter because Rico's experiences with time, place, and work are not unique; neither is his emotional response. The conditions of time in the new capitalism have created a conflict between character and experience, the experience of disjointed time threatening the ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives.

    At the end of the fifteenth century, the poet Thomas Hoccleve declared in The Regiment of Princes, "Alias, wher ys this worldes stabylnesse?"--a lament that appears equally in Homer or in Jeremiah in the Old Testament. Through most of human history, people have accepted the fact that their lives will shift suddenly due to wars, famines, or other disasters, and that they will have to improvise in order to survive. Our parents and grandparents were filled with anxiety in 1940, having endured the wreckage of the Great Depression and facing the looming prospect of a world war.

    What's peculiar about uncertainty today is that it exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism. Instability is meant to be normal, Schumpeter's entrepreneur served up as an ideal Everyman. Perhaps the corroding of character is an inevitable consequence. "No long term" disorients action over the long term, loosens bonds of trust and commitment, and divorces will from behavior.

    I think Rico knows he is both a successful and a confused man. The flexible behavior which has brought him success is weakening his own character in ways for which there exists no practical remedy. If he is an Everyman for our times, his universality may lie in that dilemma.

Table of Contents

	Preface	9
1.	Drift: How personal character is attacked by the new capi alism	15
2.	Routine: An evil of the old capitalism	32
3.	Flexible: The restructuring of time	46
4.	Illegible: Why modern forms of labor are difficult to understand	64
5.	Risk: Why risk-taking has become disorienting and depressing	76
6.	The Work Ethic: How the work ethic has changed	98
7.	Failure: Coping with failure	118
8.	The Dangerous Pronoun: Community as a remedy for the ills of work	136
Appendix	Statistical Tables	149
	Notes	159
	Index	167

What People are Saying About This

William Wilson

Incredibly insightful.

Studs Terkel

A devastating and wholly necessary book.

Editorial Reviews

Near the beginning of The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett states that he intended to write a long essay rather than a short book. He has succeeded in doing both. . . The treatment is thoughtful, blessedly free of sociological jargon and animated by warm human sympathy. -- Wall Street Journal

Peter L. Berger

I see no economic solutions in [Corrosion of Characters]....A sobering book. -- Literary Review

George Walden

....Sennett...thinks the wrenching changes of late 20th-century capitalism are having subtle but profound consequences that will endure far into the next century....[and that] Americansdenied the satisfaction of order and rootedness in the workplacewill finally begin to rebuild them from scratch in the rest of their lives. —The New York Times Book Review

Alan Ehrenhalt

Thoughtful, blessedly free of sociological jargon and animated by warm human sympathy.

Wall Street Journal

A profoundly affecting argument as to what we are doing to ourselves as we reshape our work.

Business Week

Provocative...illuminating.

The New York Times

The roots of a modern tragedy are exposed. Today's workplace is not what it once was. Gone are the days of corporate loyalty and rewarding seniority found in the immediate post-WWII work environment. Today the rapidity of change impedes attempts to even describe the contemporary norm, and when dynamism becomes normal, Sennett (Flesh and Stone) worries about the impact the new workplace has on the people who work there. The belief that work is closely related to character has deep roots in Western society, and in an era where capitalism is evolving far more rapidly than human beings, there is good reason to worry. That a capitalist economy involves change, or uncertainty, or risk, is nothing new. Entrepreneurs have long driven the economy forward, in part, by embracing these conditions as the cost of potentially realizing large rewards. Today, however, conscious risk-takers have no monopoly on uncertainty; it's 'woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism,' and risk has become 'a daily necessity shouldered by the masses.' Through interviews, observations, and statistics set against the background of a similar study undertaken 25 years ago, Sennett captures the tension this creates between contemporary work and human life. What is the place of commitment, sacrifice, caring for others, and looking beyond immediate personal satisfaction when work requires setting such archaic notions aside? In essence, there is a dissonance over time. The constancy associated with good character is directly at odds with the realities of the contemporary workplace: 'the conditions of time in the new capitalism.'

Kirkus Reviews