The Corrosion of Character

The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

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by Richard Sennett

W. W. Norton and Co.

Due/Published December 1999, 176 pages, paper

ISBN 0393319873

Drawing on interviews with dismissed IBM executives in Westchester, New York, bakers in a high-tech Boston bakery, a barmaid turned advertising executive, and many others, Sennett explores the disorienting effects of the new capitalism. He reveals the vivid and illuminating contrast between two worlds of work: the vanished world of rigid, hierarchical organizations, where what mattered was a sense of personal character, and the brave new world of corporate re-engineering, risk, flexibility, networking, and short-term teamwork, where what matters is being able to reinvent yourself on a dime. In this timely and essential essay, Sennett enables us to understand the social and political context for our contemporary confusions, and he suggests how we need to re-imagine both community and individual character in order to confront an economy based on the principle of 'no long-term.'

Review

In his 1972 work (co-written with Jonathan Cobb), The Hidden Injuries of Class, Richard Sennett interviewed and looked at the life of Enrico, a janitor in the Boston area. Though, Enrico had little opportunity or hopes of career advancement his future was set for him: his union pay schedule let him know how much he could expect to get for his raises, and he could see the day when he could retire and collect his pension. In other words, Enrico knew the narrative of his life, it was one dedicated to sacrifices for the future, (i.e., the education of his children) and one that gave him a sense of satisfaction. For his son Rico, it is a quite a different story. Though more successful than his father in monetary terms, his narrative is far more uncertain, ultimately giving him a far more precarious sense of his future, family, and own sense of identity. In the past ten years or so, Rico has had to move jobs and cities four different times in order to keep pace with the new demands of a more flexible and global economy. Further fraying the sense of stability is a business world of today characterized by consultants and outsourcing, arrangements that stress short rather than long-term committements. This new world not only troubles Rico but Richard Sennet as well, he writes, “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 idenity and life history in a society composed of episodes and fragments...short-capitalism threatens to corrode...character particularly those qualitites of character which bind human beings to one another and furnishes each with a sense of sustainable self.”

Richard Rorty says, “Sennett argues convincingly, that the steadily increasing insecurity experienced by workers is making it impossible for them to achieve a moral identity…The Corrosion of Character is a remarkable synthesis of acute empirical observation and serious moral reflection.”