Work for human needs

Lecture №13

Theme «Social organization of a work»

Work for human needs

Work has always been the life-sphere where visionaries have thought it possible for social relations to develop beyond the control of the state. It is the modern counterweight to the nation-state for radical thinkers. This was true for the political economy of Adam Smith and the historical materialism of Karl Marx. Both believed the source of value was work. For Smith the exchange of products depended on the prior social division of labour. For Marx production depended on the social relations of capital and labour. Each minimised the role of the state, to be the watchdog in the first case and to be the instrument of class rule in the second. Both believed that in work society revealed its nature: as exchange for Smith, as co-operation for Marx.

For both work placed human beings in relation to nature, both their own and what was outside them. Any collective activity, whether in exchange or co-operation, therefore served to realise human nature. Political economy, later to be called economics, began as a modern theory of society distinct from both Christian and classical theories. It came to be known as the theory of civil society.

Ironically the autonomy of the institutional order which arose from economic activity was precisely what challenged the state authorities in the nineteenth century. Theorists of civil society like Adam Ferguson knew full well it was intrinsically a class society. The division of labour meant the growth of distinct occupations and professions which were independent of the state. As Marx observed, it was their growth which led to the overthrow of the old regime in France in the French Revolution of 1789. The threat which the new class of workers posed to the state and bourgeois order in the nineteenth century was what prompted the Western response of welfare statism or corporatism. The state was meant to represent society and institutions were shaped to serve it. In the Soviet Union and its satellites this dominance of the state was even more acute as supposedly the Russian Revolution resulted in the triumph of the mass of the people.

The twentieth century was dominated by the question of how far the state should control the social organisation of work, whether totally as in communism or fascism or partially as in the Western parliamentary democracies. Even in the latter state control has grown to the point where its share of gross national product, the total sum of goods and services, is between 40 and 60 per cent

This is an upside-down world compared with the time of Smith or Marx, where state now equates with society and what was society has become ‘private’ and even anti-social. The very rich place their funds in enclaves outside nation-state boundaries so that a recent estimate suggests a third of their wealth is in accounts on small islands. Ironically the very term ‘society’ remains current as the high society, the interpersonal social relations, of the owners of wealth.

In the workplace where employers and workers confronted each other the state sought to damp down the ever-likely prospect of disruption to production. The mechanisms which were devised to contain disputes and provide for partnership, arbitration or trade union representation have been called the institutionalisation of conflict, to reflect the assumption on both sides that a degree of conflict was inevitable and had to be managed.

The modern battle about class interests and the state was the focus both of inter-state conflict in the Cold War and ideological conflict between left and right within nation-states. The two conflicts reinforced each other in the sense that the contestants within the state sought support from the other side. In a sense, the Cold War explained the close interest of the Western state in what were known as industrial relations and promoted state involvement. At the same time it drew attention away from the deep transformation of social relations which were taking place in work.

New service occupations and new technology, the informatisation of work, the decline of the old smokestack industries, the entry into what is sometimes called the post-Fordist era, has seen a decline in the opposition between the people, understood as workers, and the state. Economics itself has developed the new institutionalism which emphasises practices in the firm and the wider culture. It reflects the shift in the balance of power in society away from the state and towards the institutions of work. In the new working practices of the contemporary economy types of social relations develop which make the older state institutionalisation of class relations in the workplace irrelevant.

This is where the idea of stakeholding is relevant as it seeks to fill the place vacated by old-style industrial relations. The purposes of work in serving and fulfilling human needs can once again find a central place among human values, not as the functional requirement of nation-state society nor even just of the particular organisation. Work is involved in every institutional area, production often of very intangible things, for which skill and expertise is necessary. It relates people to the world in the broadest sense, to their physical and cultural environment, but also equally as well to other people. Only when policy-makers, employers and managers recognise that people are involved in social relations beyond the scope of their planning has society achieved its proper place in relation to the state and economy.

Workers have families, volunteers have jobs, donors have social status, political party members live in communities, and political leaders have ethnicity. These are not freely disposable involvements. They go to constitute the person’s social identity, represent opposition to schemes as well as the source of movements which no one controls. They are, in short, the facticity, the day-to-day reality of society.

These social relations also provide the basis for economic activity. Max Weber’s famous thesis was that capitalism obtained a big boost from Protestant religious ideas on work. ¹¹ Often Weber’s thesis has been used to illustrate the importance of ideas. But it also shows that work predates capitalism. It has to. It is universal.

Work involves effort, a striving to make some part of the world meet what you and other people need or want. It engages with an environment, including other people too. It regularly uses tools and technology, but they are not essential to the idea of work. In this sense we know of no time in history where people haven’t worked.

My definition of work is controversial. For it runs counter to another widespread modern myth. This is the idea that work was somehow brought to new peaks of intensity, if it was not actually invented, in the modern period in the West. People world-wide, outside the modern West, were held to be either lazy or so set in traditional ways of doing things that they could do them unthinkingly and without effort.

Unfortunately professional sociologists have tended to use Weber’s theory to reinforce the self-image of modernity that only under Western capitalism did people begin to do real work. Students of pre-modern societies have long recognised that work is intrinsic to the human condition. As Marshall Sahlins has put it ‘no anthropologist today would concede the truth of the imperialist ideology that the natives are congenitally lazy’. Another anthropologist, Raymond Firth, explicitly challenged the myth when he pointed to the way the New Zealand Maoris made great use of proverbs to spur on the lazy.

We can even take an example from the present day of a preliterate people who have become a byword for the ravages of Western civilisation on ancient cultures. Colin Turnbull’s studies of the Ik people of northern Uganda depict a disintegrating society in which selfishness is the main survival strategy. Yet when the Ik worked on making spears it was done with great care and precision and showed fine craftsmanship. It was here too that a minimal degree of co-operation was achieved. But there is also the literary evidence. The ancient Israelites’ book of Exodus commanded them to labour for six days.

The fact that work has been an intrinsic aspect of the human condition encouraged Thorstein Veblen, the great exposer of the idleness and waste of what he called the leisure class, to write of ‘the instinct of workmanship’. The idea that there are inherent deep satisfactions in work also underpinned Karl Marx’s account of alienated labour under capitalism. It prompted him to dream of times past and to come when work might once again express our true nature. But it was the realities Marx exposed of work in the modern period, grinding labour in the workplace, which came to dominate views of the nature of work. Weber’s picture of the joyless self-discipline of the Puritan went to reinforce these views. He depicted the motives which could sustain such a process. No wonder his image of the ‘iron cage’ seemed to fit the idea of modern work.

Of all the civilisations which have been the victim of Western misinterpretation of motivation to work none has been more unjustly treated than China. It became a modernist cliché, from the seventeenth century onwards, that this was a society in which culture had stood still and no one would work to improve their condition. Only in the last decade has it dawned on the West that it has seriously misunderstood the culture of Eastern countries. The main reason for this late realisation was the economic success in the 1980s—first of the Japanese and then of other countries, the Eastern Tigers, bordering China—which has challenged the world economic dominance of North America and Europe.

For Asian countries owe nothing to a Protestant ethic. They have common cultural roots in the ethic of Confucius, the Chinese sage, adviser to rulers, who lived 500 years before Christ. We can read to this day what he said about work:

Tzu-lu asked about government. The Master said, ‘Encourage the people to work hard by setting an example yourself.’ Tzu-lu asked for more. The Master said, ‘Do not allow your efforts to slacken’.

Of the great world ethical systems the Confucian was distinctive for seeking to bind study and skills together. In the notion of competence in rituals there was a very real demonstration of the importance of combining the two. For Confucius the learning of the scholar could only be worth while when expressed as useful skills. Let us be hard-headed about this. The motives of the Chinese scholars were not disinterested. Their society was overwhelmingly a two- or at best three-class one, of peasants, landlords and officials. The officials undertook a long and arduous education. They sought to persuade owners and peasantry of its worth and to bind the classes together in one harmonious whole. In that sense the status order of the society governed supply of positions which were open to competition and motivated to work. In fact Western economists have acknowledged how important this basic sociological factor is for the economy. Where work is devoted to obtaining positional goods then there isn’t much growth.

One of the greatest transformations of the present time is that there is a new combination of mental and manual activity. This operates not, as in ancient civilisations, as co-operation between classes, but in the transformation of the work of the masses. The result is that the division of older societies between mental and manual labour has broken down. The main theme in the analysis of work in society in the old modern period was first the division of labour between different specialised occupations and then later class conflict rather than co-operation.

Now the old dividing lines are blurred. The farmer and the gardener today will also have their paper qualifications, reflecting periods working for examinations as well as with soil. This also involves the development of new kinds of work and the decline of the massive concentrations of workers in the smokestack production plants of the modern age. Service jobs replace those in manufacturing. The computer-aided graphic designer replaces the artist, the draughtsman and the toolmaker simultaneously and never comes near a factory gate. We see it in the new agriculture where the lone farmer may engage in capital intensive farming with no employees.

Such a person may also be working independently on his or her own behalf. It is not ‘political correctness’ to speak of ‘his or her’ in this context. The gender divides in occupations are increasingly blurred, even as old boundaries between occupations disappear. Yet the sex of a person is as relevant as ever for chances of long-term success. How many students are female? About 50 per cent. How many professors are female? About 4 per cent. So what’s going on? Where did all the women go?

The academic world is no different from many others—medicine, management, law among them—in that advantages accrue to those who can work continuously in the one sphere. Women take time out of those spheres, not to be idle but to do something very demanding of time, care and skill; namely, rearing children.

Still, overwhelmingly, world-wide, childcare is thought of as women’s work, and as more and more women are drawn into working for money their disadvantaged position in the marketplace becomes more obvious. Not surprisingly women are more and more reluctant to have children as it is obvious that they lose earning chances as a result.

Public responses to this situation in the West range from advocating a return to home and hearth for women to campaigning for equal rights for men to care for children, or for wages for housework. These strategies are taken up by different people as personal lifestyle options—‘traditional woman’ or ‘new man’—and contribute to the continuing development of diversity of household and family arrangements.

For most people there are now trade-offs to be made between domestic labour and work for money. With couples there are decisions to be made about who does more unpaid work and who does paid work, since there are no longer straightforward gender divisions for work at home or in a workplace. ‘Going out to work’ is not the only way to earn a living. The woman writer, potter, or physiotherapist may work for money at home while her partner looks after their children. These are not easy arrangements to make and Ray Pahl has shown how the domestic division of labour has become an arena for interpersonal conflict as well as for personal development beyond the old gender boundaries.

When we put all these contemporary changes together we can see that in some ways work has recovered the place it had before the modern age—necessary for life, a way of living, a source of effort and of satisfaction, with no guarantees in any respect. Contemporary work is insecure too, in a risky world, just as is pre-modern work in a very different environment. But our sense of continuity or return to a past ought also to alert us to what is really new. Hardly anywhere in the world anymore can people work to be self-sufficient and independent of a market for what they make and do.

After a period in which the main trend seemed to be towards the reduction of everyone to being unskilled labourers we have entered a time when personal capital has become fundamental to livelihood. That capital is to be of course counted in terms of savings, pensions

and homeownership in part, then in terms of possessions, tools, and facilities. But more important than any of these is personal cultural capital: qualifications, skills acquired through education, training and experience. This is capital which can itself be acquired through work and is necessary for further work. It is the basis of what some sociologists call ‘knowledge society’. Paradoxically we are now more aware than ever of what we don’t know, how far we are exposed to hazards knowledge has helped to create. We will consider knowledge society’s counterpart, ‘ignorance society’, in the next lecture.

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