How Social Change is Hyped-Up
There is clearly a general trend towards the ‘new’. Every month, a new technological age, innovative organizational form, or even type of society is announced. This is how consultants market their services, scientists disseminate their research in the mainstream media, and politicians get their various hobby horses into the limelight – by offering their diagnoses of the times.
It used to be that diagnoses of the times were cast in terms that made it possible to see what issue was at stake. There was talk of the ‘industrial society’, ‘service society’, or ‘event society’. Trends such as ‘matrix organization’, ‘lean management’, or ‘business process re-engineering’ were described. But the inclusion of the prefix ‘post-’ in the name of some of these new trends was enough to show that those describing them were less and less able to give their analyses a precise name. Terms like ‘post-industrial society’, ‘post-Fordist enterprise’, or ‘post-bureaucratic organization’ suggest that a fundamental change is going on, but do not say what exactly is changing. And there is a certain unintended irony about those academic conferences that ask what will follow the post-bureaucratic organization or the post-Fordist enterprise.
The current development – the meta-trend in trend research, so to speak – is towards publishing numbered versions of these diagnoses. Thus, we get ‘web 2.0’, in which the cooperation of users is becoming ever more important. There is the ‘development bank 2.0’ and ‘foundation initiatives 3.0’. In the age of ‘industry 4.0’, the connection between businesses through information technology will become more important. The label ‘work 4.0’ informs us that a lot is going to change in the world of work. In light of these diagnoses of our times, which are often financed and promoted by state ministries, we might half expect some government – supported by consultants, trend researchers, and scientists – soon to announce the dawn of ‘society 5.0’.
But in the end, these diagnoses are much like the software updates to which they allude. Just as one might wonder what actually changed from Windows 8.0 to Windows 10.0, or Citavi 4.0 to Citavi 5.0, one might wonder whether some social changes really justify the declaration of a wholly new version. Perhaps it might be more appropriate to opt for just ‘industry 2.2’ or ‘work 2.7.9’.
Admittedly, quite some effort goes into making the latest version appear plausible. Economy 1.0 was the industrial society, in which working conditions were determined by the introduction of the steam engine and mechanical production machinery. Economy 2.0 was characterized by mass production and the welfare state. Economy 3.0 – and at this point we start to see how desperate the search for further versions is – was characterized by first the consolidation and then the reduction of the welfare state. Finally, economy 4.0, according to the currently dominant analysis, is increasingly interconnected, digital, and flexible. But are these trends really all that new?
A core element of the new economy, it is claimed, is the digital connectedness of businesses. The suggestion is that highly automated, networked production and logistics chains are significantly changing the nature of work. This is certainly true, but this diagnosis of the times has been around for a long time, under the name ‘systemic rationalization’. Observers have long noted not only that individual workplaces are having to increase their performance but that the new information and communication technologies are making it possible to automate and rationalize the value-added processes between businesses. Even if, since this analysis was first put forward, storage capacities have become larger, sensors more precise, and the speed of transmission faster, there has not been a fundamental shift in the logic of rationalization.
Other observers have noted that rationalization has also had the effect of splitting the labour market. According to this diagnosis, the ‘digital transformation’ has increased the demand for ‘digital literacy’, and the consequence is the emergence of a ‘dual labour market’. In the lower sections, employment has become precarious. Although employees are for the most part still in normal employment relations, there are more and more people working in atypical and often insecure employment. The emergence of such a dual labour market may appear striking when seen against the background of the very short phase of full employment in the old FRG. But from a broader historical perspective, dual labour markets are the norm under capitalist conditions. In earlier times, the solo self-employed and clickworkers were called ‘day labourers’, and instead of ‘precariat’ one spoke of the ‘lumpenproletariat’. Today, our examples are delivery drivers, web designers, actors, taxi drivers, and petrol station leaseholders, while Karl Marx’s examples were ‘porters, literati, organ grinders, rag pickers, scissors grinders, tinkers’.
Needless to say, it would be wrong to conclude that nothing changed between Marx’s time and our own. Capitalism, a term carefully avoided in most analyses of digitalization, is characterized by a permanent process of change, which is due to the dynamic of production, capital, and labour markets. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that there have really been the kinds of epochal transitions that would justify the talk about fundamentally transformed versions of industry, services, and labour.
Because of the omnipresence of buzzwords such as ‘solo self-employed’, ‘mobile working’, ‘almost full-time part-time’, ‘rush hour of life’, ‘services on demand’, and ‘crowdworking’, we often overlook the fact that the fundamental problem has remained the same ever since the emergence of capitalism: when a business purchases personnel on the labour market, there is no guarantee that the acquired labour power will act in accordance with the business’s needs, and the business therefore always seeks to have as much access to this labour power as possible.
Karl Marx noticed this as well. In Marxist terminology, when a capitalist purchases labour power, this does not automatically mean that all of this labour power is actually used by capital, and the capitalist is therefore always busy thinking up ways of solving this ‘transformation problem’. Systems theory deals with the transformation problem in terms of the individual’s different motivations for membership of and performance in an organization. The very same problem is described by principal–agent theory, generally without references to the Marxist and systems-theoretical discoverers of this phenomenon, and so in a way that may be more acceptable to managers. The agents, in this case the workers, are purchased in order to provide certain services to the principal, the entrepreneur, and with their own interests in mind their tendency is to receive the principal’s payment in return for the smallest possible amount of services rendered. The principal, in turn, engages the help of consultants and scientists to find ways to increase the amount of services rendered.
Despite what the managers of overhyped top companies might say, nothing has really changed regarding this transformation problem. Only the emphases have changed. On the one hand, management tries to use as much of an employee’s labour power as possible, without, however, becoming dependent on him or her. On the other hand, the employees have an interest in not exhausting their labour power completely while nevertheless remaining indispensable to the company, thus increasing their own value. This is based on a process called the (labour) market, which emerged more than 200 years ago.
What has actually changed is the internal rhetoric used by businesses in the exercise of control. Not the omnipresent manager but the market is said to be the universal master: the market notices everything, rewards success without prejudice, and punishes mistakes without mercy. Employees get the impression that failure is not punished by a superior but by the allegedly ‘objective consequences’ of their own doings. Redundancies and the closure of parts of a company are not presented as the intentional decisions of a profit-oriented entrepreneur but as the logical consequence of market processes.
