Abstract
Creating the New Worker shows how lean production creates a new kind of worker, someone capable of responding to new organisations of production and work, and asks why some workers withstand this regime better than others. Jean-Pierre Durand sets these questions within a useful critical overview of the transformation of work over the past few decades. The latter is based partly on his many years of research on work and production in France (including Living Labour: Life on the Line at Peugeot France [with N Hatzfeld, 2003] and The Invisible Chain [2007]). This new book draws on Durand’s previous research on the ‘constrained involvement’ now demanded of employees in manufacturing and services, as well as on more recent interviews and observations in the aerospace and automotive industries, office work, job centres, health care, rail transport and advertising. (Durand – with Joyce Sebag – has also been developing a filmic sociology seeking to capture workers’ experiences of some of these changes, although this is not detailed in this book.) Readers most interested in Durand’s distinctive and lively picture of workers and consumers trying to cope with neo-Fordist production can start reading from the middle of the book, for it is the later chapters which provide the context for his analysis of the creation of the new worker in and by changes in the organisation of work, as well as offering examples supporting his main thesis.
The book starts, after a quite brief account of the context, by jumping more directly into the contradictions affecting workers’ scope for action and how this affects their well-being. Durand builds on Gramsci’s identification of ‘the new worker’ in the 1930s, the standardised, disciplined human being who could sustain the pressure of Fordist production; this new worker was constructed not just by new employment policies but also by parallel expectations in the organisation of consumption, including a stable family life and disciplined sexual choices. Rejecting the view that work is now of decreasing importance in people’s lives, Durand analyses the later emergence of a new ‘new worker’, a subject constructed by the needs of lean production around the expectation that they are capable of assuming responsibility and acting autonomously. While this may lead in some cases to more work satisfaction, actually workers following the imprecise meta-rules that limit their resources and spaces of autonomy are rarely able to achieve projected outcomes. Instead, people are forced to rearrange their psyche to adapt to the stresses these new contradictions impose, both in work and as customers using current systems for acquiring goods and services.
In this book, Durand is particularly interested in considering variations in how workers respond to the disjunction between the autonomy/accountability workers are led to expect and the constrained frameworks that make achievement so difficult. The contradictions are integral to the system of production rather than caused by individual incompetence. Adopting a psychoanalytical perspective, Durand argues that individuals who were adequately nurtured as children develop a solid narcissistic base that enables them to be less dependent on their employer’s approval, and thus better able to withstand the inevitable disappointments built into the system, perhaps through other sources of self-confirmation. Others, having a more fragile narcissistic base (perhaps unwanted and sometimes unloved as children), invest so much in their workplace identities that they can be crushed by disavowal or criticism and the failures endemic to the system, leading to suicide in the worst (and apparently all too frequent) cases.
For me, what is interesting is how overtly and systematically the interaction between workers and customers has been rationalised. This aims to increase worker productivity in services by eliminating porosity in the working day. Adapting Goffman (and taking his account of interactions out of the realm of micro-sociology), Durand identifies three stages to workers’ routinised interactions with customers: first, a restructured greeting phase; second, selection from among a fixed set of possibilities for action; and finally, the technological work involved in servicing the client’s query. These elements help one to make sense of the complaints against Kafkaesque consumer relations published in consumer advice columns or online, instead of blaming the workers involved.
In fact, the frustrating clash between the promise of autonomy and the actuality of a constrained (and often disappointing) range of choices is characteristic of the experience of consumers too. Just as the new worker of the 1930s was disciplined in both production and the reproductive sphere (for instance, the presence of inspectors of good behaviour in working-class neighbourhoods), the reshaping of the 21st century worker also takes place in the sphere of consumption. Because rationalisation of the production of services is much more difficult to organise than that of durable goods, the customer or ‘user’ needs to work too, as in the work of putting together the elements of a holiday or dealing with the provider of one’s telephone and Internet service. Indeed, the frustration faced by workers in services, including the use of customer queues to intensify work, is paralleled by the work required of consumers faced with rationalised (not just rationed) service provision in banking, insurance, fast food, airline hubs, social work, and health care.
The book concludes with pessimistic and optimistic versions of what could lie ahead. The pessimistic view consists of a hellfire of all-too-logical cascading responses to crisis, including not just the implacable logic of capital accumulation and a continuing race to the bottom in employment, but also the failure of politicians to deal with climate change, the acceleration of migrant flows, forms of social disintegration and even, quite presciently, the recurrence of pandemics. The rosier scenario, which is less likely, Durand says, is based on the hope that capitalism could switch gears, enabling it to resolve its current contradictions, albeit temporarily. This would actually involve relatively modest reforms, given what is at stake, including proper regulation of financial institutions, green investment, alternative development trajectories in the global south, and more equalitarian social policies.
Although I missed any discussion of the relevance of gender or ethnicity to answering the questions Durand sets, none the less this very readable and provocative book deserves to be widely read by English-language sociologists, not just those in business schools. This includes social scientists interested in understanding the work relations (and class relations) that underwrite workplace health and safety.