Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)
[34] The evidence of demoralized Russian workers that my wife and I encountered in the Moscow suburbs can be found closer to home. When I returned from this final trip to the empire, I began studying the demioergoi of the new American economy: middle-level workers whose skills should have earned them a secure place in the "new economy" in formation since the 1990s. ...
The world that their fathers and grandfathers knew was in a way protected from the rigors of competition . Skilled middle-class workers found a place, in twentieth-century corporations, in relatively stable bureaucracies that moved employees along a career path from young adulthood to retirement. The forebears of the people we interviewed worked hard for their achievements; they knew fairly well what would happen to them if they didn't.
It's no longer news that this middle-class world has cracked. The corporate system that once organized careers is now a maze of fragmented jobs. In principle, many new economy firms subscribe to the doctrines of teamwork and cooperation, but unlike the actual practices of Nokia and Motorola, these principles are often a charade. ...
[36]
Still, the trials of the craftsmen of the new economy are a caution against triumphalism. The growth of the new economy has driven many of these workers in America and Britain inside themselves. Those firms that show little loyalty to their employees elicit little commitment in return —Internet companies that ran into trouble in the early 2000s learned a bitter lesson, their employees jumping ship rather than making efforts to help the imperiled companies survive. Skeptical of institutions, new economy workers have lower rates of voting and political participation than technical workers two generations ago; although many are joiners of voluntary organizations, few are active participants. The political scientist Robert Putnam has explained this diminished "social capital," in his celebrated book Bowling Alone, as the result of television culture and the consumerist ethic ; in our study, we found that withdrawal from institutions was tied more directly to people's experiences at work .
If the work people do in new economy jobs is skilled and high pressure, requiring long hours, still it is dissociated labor: we found few among the technicians who believed that they would be rewarded for doing a good job for its own sake. The modern craftsman may hew inside him-or herself to this ideal, but given the structuring of rewards, that effort will be invisible.
