Apathy and Antipathy by Richard Sennett - part 2

2. APATHY & ANTIPATHY: Out of Touch - by Richard Sennett, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Wednesday April 27 2002

A few years ago I was doing field work in California's Silicon Valley. The company I was studying suddenly announced a merger with a competitor; as the office p.a. system triumphantly blared out the financial details, the computer engineers around me got angry. No one had consulted them; the merger made no practical sense; "What are you going to do about it?" I asked. The mood in the lab shifted; the angriest person looked down to his screen and muttered "Nothing, I suppose."

We might expect people in the flashy world of high tech to thrive on change. But in studying the modern work world, I've found something quite different: the flexible organizations in which people work seem often to pursue change for its own sake, to shift irrationally; the bosses of these companies appear not to understand their own businesses -- and yet ordinary employees like those engineers in California are resigned, believing they can do nothing to make things better.

That combination of anger and disconnection appears in other modern organizations: in Britain, for instance, among public-service workers, many of whom have given up fighting against the supposed "reform" of the services and are now simply leaving the teaching professions, social work, or the public health service. In North America as well as Europe, anger mixes with apathy, in the attitudes people harbour toward political institutions. The politicians, too, just don't seem to get it, yet there's nothing you can do about it -- an attitude which accounts in large measure for a steady drop in voting, as well as less and less interest in political news, among young people.

Disenchantment might seem an eternal human sentiment, but disenchantment of these sorts is more specific to our own times. Our parents often labored in big bureaucratic organizations, run top-down military fashion, businesses or public services shaped like a bureaucratic pyramid; political institutions, too, were shaped in this fashion. In our own generation, the bureaucratic pyramid has seemed too solid, too immobile; the shifts of the global economy require mobile, flexible institutions -- in business, but also in the public sector.

The new world of institutions is meant to be flatter and more short-term than the organizations which shaped our parents lives. "Flatter" means fewer layers of bureaucracy; when consultants re-engineer a firm, for instance, the first thing they usually do is look for ways to cut out middle layers between the top managers and the people on the bottom. Making organizations more "short-term" in focus means replacing fixed, repetitive activities by tasks and projects lasting a few months; more, it means dethroning the reign of engrained habits and seniority.

These two principles of organizational change sound great; in practice, however, they have all too frequently run institutions aground. The public services are increasingly muddled, we know only too well, by demands that these institutions must wrest profit from education, sickness, or sheltering the poor. But the ills of institutional "reform" cut deeper.

Flexible, short-term organizations do not inspire much loyalty; they may promise much but actually commit little to those within them. In Silicon Valley, when businesses ran into trouble during the last few years, many employees therefore bolted rather than tried to fix what was wrong -- that what most of my engineers eventually did. Words like "service to the institution" lose their meaning in chameleon institutions; "seniority" may seem an evil, but in attacking people with seniority, the reformers have frequently erased an organization's memory and knowledge base, as well as depriving workers of an identity developed through work.

What has struck me most about the supposed reform of organizations is the view employees have of their bosses or leaders: the conviction that people at the top of these institutions are "out of touch." As the dot-com bubble burst, for instance it seemed evident that both investors and managers were out of touch with reality. In the public sector, managers equally and often "just don't get it" about how schools or hospitals actually work on the ground; their elaborate policy plans frequently misfire, and more than not disempower ordinary people who know what is needed to get from day to day.

But the phrase "out of touch" has a further and perhaps more surprising meaning. It expresses how the reform of institutions is generating new class divisions, new inequalities, in society. In the last decade the wealth gap between the top and the middle in society has widened; in 1980, the top salaries in British corporations were about 20 times those of people in the middle; today they are about 180 times. The great boom of the last generation has throughout North America, Europe, and Japan put enormous wealth into the hands of the top quarter of society, while the wealth of the middle half has stagnated.

The increasing gap between the top and the middle appears in the public sector as well. While British universities have thrown open their doors to a vastly increased body of students, those at the top 20 institutions -- the so-called Russell Group -- will derive much greater wealth benefits from their degrees than will young people attending the hundreds of universities below. In the United States, the medical care available to the top 10% of the population is superb, and state medical provision for the very poor tends to be good; it is the middle-classes which have seen their health-care deteriorate.

The phrases "they are out of touch" or "they just don't get it" refers in part to this material this gap. Modern society is making real advances in dealing with poverty, in part because so much attention has been paid to the plight of the poor; as the top pulls away from the middle class -- a less dramatic story -- the leaders of society become less in touch with ordinary life, have more difficulty imagining its stresses and strains.

This gap is also a matter of language. The categories we use to talk about class too often reflect the institutions of an earlier era, when white collar work seemed to have more status than manual labor, or when doctors saw themselves the equals to lawyers or bankers. The new institutions have jumbled up these distinctions, replacing them by something quite different.

Geography, oddly, counts for more in this global era. A lawyer practicing in Lincoln's Inn has access to a very different set of informal contacts, services, and chances than a lawyer in Bath, so much so that analysts of class now think that living in London is a more important determinant of where you stand in society than it was forty years ago; analysts of the global city phenomenon in both the United States and Europe have come to a similar conclusion. Geography makes for one major difference between being an insider or an outsider, a player or a spectator.

Another, rather elaborate way to express that divide is what the American politician Robert Reich calls symbol creators and symbol consumers, a difference between the metropolitan, educated elite creating the mental tools others use, originating the products others consume. If you think about the computer you know exactly what he means; it's the great material revolution of our time, but only a small elite understand its programmes enough to feel truly in control. Skills, not money nor manners, make this elite. The elite invents the icons which we use, the symbols which we consume.

The writer, politician, and social visionary, the late Liberal peer Michael Young a half-century ago called this new elite a "meritocracy," and predicted that the gap between meritocrats and masses would become ever wider. I think he got the divide between elite and mass right, but "meritocracy" seems to me a somewhat misleading term to describe it. The divide exists due to changes in our organizational life which are not necessarily empowering the smartest, the best, and the brightest. Instead these institutional reforms are empowering a new class of managers who are increasingly isolated from the people, policies and projects they manage.

That's the irony of the "flat" organization, whether public or private. The elite sets the goals, the policy objectives, the results expected and then leaves those below to respond and produces. In place of the thick layers of bureaucracy where there is traffic, discussion, and dispute up and down the institution, the flat organization has a cruder structure; those on the top command and reward but they don't participate. This is exactly why employees below may think the managers are out of it, don't get it. From below, those above appear powerful but not capable; they don't occupy their posts by reason of merit. Indeed, when you destroy levels of seniority, promotion by of virtue of service, and the like, you are likely to get managers who float from organization to organization, possessed of managerial "skills", which are divorced from skill in managing any one particular place, craft, or operation.

For these reasons I think Michael Young got it wrong about the merit in meritocracy, but he certainly got it right about the resentment those in the middle feel for those on top, especially when those on top control information, communication, and symbolic work.

In the United States, television media pundits are often resented and attacked just because they have this power to control the language of politics; nothing better stimulates the anger of ordinary viewers -- and voters -- than attacks on the "liberal media elite;" the key word here is the third, "elite." Like the new corporate elite, these media pundits are seen to be both unknowledgeable and indifferent to those below.

The same is true here of how ordinary students view those at Oxbridge, where it seems that those dwelling among the dreaming spires may shed tears for the plight of immigrants in Brixton, but remain again both unknowledgeable and indifferent to their peers studying in former polytechnics.

Most of all, politicians and business leaders are seen to be on the side of this elite which just doesn't get it, just at those moments when they talk the language of institutional reform. If you have a rich network of professional contacts, or simply are rich, you can easily preach the virtues of innovation; you have the social and material capital to survive if it goes wrong. More ordinary people do not: what seems an opportunity to the elite appears as a possible disaster to those below -- to people worrying about paying their credit cards, or piecing together the money for schools, or who are a month behind on their mortgage payments. The wonderful world of risk is wonderful only to the privileged. It is they who have both pushed and profited from organizational reform.

In saying this, I may sound like just the dyspeptic Old Laborite I am. Certainly the re-engineering of corporate organizations, and the aping of private business in the public sector, have produced muddle and mess. The bureaucratic pyramids of our parents generation worked; they were often more efficient than flexible organizations have proved; institutional reform has sharpened economic and social inequality.

But my real worry is about the apathy and fatalism which these changes can produce. How can we act on our anger rather than lapse, as the engineers in Silicon Valley did, into sullen silence? It's in the class conflict between the elite and the middle that I believe there is some hope for energizing people. During the Great Boom of the 1990's it was possible for corporate and government reformers to argue that everyone would benefit from re-engineering institutions, that flexible, short-term organizations would liberate, innovate, and reward as immobile bureaucracies could not. It was hard a decade ago to be in favor of immobility, against change; in favor of seniority, against merit; in favor of service and loyalty, against entrepreneurship. People in the middle of re-engineered organizations were usually disabled by these oppositions from expressing their discontent.

But now, in the new century, the consequences of organizational reform are clearer: the leaders are likely to benefit most from them, for reasons which have little to do with deserving ever more wealth. This institutional change could beget a new kind of class politics, one in which those in the middle insist that our masters deliver rather than promise. In Britain we are beginning to see this insistance in the realm of the public sector, since reform has so obviously spelt disaster; there is anger but no longer apathy.

That energy is something which I hope will spread into the private and corporate realm. Still, paradoxically, people in the middle cling to the idea you can't demand more of private organizations, that to ask they deliver to ordinary workers is akin to whinging, show a lack of enterprize. But we should recognise that it's not a matter of seeking to return to the past -- rather of asking that when organizations change, they actually deliver, that they benefit the people who live through change. The benefits to ordinary people of the changes we are now demanding of our medical services or our transport , we should also be demanding from the organisations we work for.

I don't think anger and apathy need go hand in hand. The great sociological lesson of the last generation, I think, is that people in the middle of society have to become tough-minded realists about institutional change, and indeed, we are beginning to become so. To believe in the promises of the elite would condemn us only to more resignation about ourselves.