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The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism By Richard Sennett ( W. W. Norton & Company )
Release Date: 2000-01
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Product Description
In The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett, "among the country's most distinguished thinkers . . . has concentrated into 176 pages a profoundly affecting argument" (Business Week) that draws on interviews with dismissed IBM executives, bakers, a bartender turned advertising executive, and many others to call into question the terms of our new economy. In his 1972 classic, The Hidden Injuries of Class (written with Jonathan Cobb), Sennett interviewed a man he called Enrico, a hardworking janitor whose life was structured by a union pay schedule and given meaning by his sacrifices for the future. In this new book--a #1 bestseller in Germany--Sennett explores the contemporary scene characterized by Enrico's son, Rico, whose life is more materially successful, yet whose work lacks long-term commitments or loyalties. Distinguished by Sennett's "combination of broad historical and literary learning and a reporter's willingness to walk into a store or factory [and] strike up a conversation" (New York Times Book Review), this book "challenges the reader to decide whether the flexibility of modern capitalism . . . is merely a fresh form of oppression" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
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Amazon.com Review
In the brave new world of the "flexible" corporation, Richard Sennett observes, workers at all levels are regarded as wholly disposable, and they have responded in kind, ceasing to think in terms of any long-term relationship with the organizations they work for. This, he argues, has tremendous negative consequences for workers' emotional and psychological well-being. Even in menial jobs, we extract much of our self-image from the idea of a "career"--a life narrative rendered intelligible by specific loyalties, which is to some degree self-invented but also in some respects predictable. Innovations like "flextime" and bureaucratic "de-layering" seem to promise more freedom to define one's career, but in fact they create jobs in which there's less freedom than ever to be had. The Corrosion of Character is a short, anecdotal book, and while one might wish that it included a discussion of the social and psychological costs of the sheer increase of work time in the average worker's week, Sennett has created a pithy, disturbing picture of the cost of the corporate world's much-vaunted new efficiencies. --Richard Farr
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 Should have been better.
This should have been a better book. It focuses too much on downsizing (which is important, but is a different topic) and not enough on how actual people experience work inside corporations. I don't really disagree with anything Sennett says, but would like a richer insight into how people are actually working these days. Fear of layoffs is part of it, but how work today impacts people socially and psychologically is equally important. I'd recommend Lilian Rubin's Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family as one example of the kind of rich insight I'm talking about. Her book is out of date, but is still exemplary of how to do social/cultural work. Sennett caught the theory bug, which is alarming. Stay focused on what real people say, not what theorists say.
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 How Instability and Superficiality Destroy the Inner Meaning of Work ( phillyblogger )
Transient consultants have replaced entrenched bureaucrats. Teams and teamwork have replaced adversarial labor/management and individual ego-driven rivalries. Knowledge gleaned from marketing studies has replaced knowledge gained from every day experience. New machines have made the once complex extremely simple, and the once dangerous safely sanitized. Companies that were once entrenched ethnic enclaves are now look more closely like America.
While not totally disapproving, the author looks at these and other current developments and finds them wanting. Work no longer generates the kind of passionate commitment it once did, and he cannot blame the workers, because their employers no longer show the loyalty they once did. In newly created world of permanent transience, little is cumulative, and the only test is who can do the best job now according to given specifications, with little concern for the past or for the future. Individual personal character is corroded--gradually destroyed--because sacrificing for the future makes little sense and virtues like loyalty to coworkers and one's employer are unrewarded, unexpected, and unappreciated.
The author finds the new arrangements are more about glib superficial agreements rather than the creation of authentic human relationships. Teams focus on short-term ends, with leaders who play down their authority and assume the falsely modest role of facilitators. A more adversarial assertion of self-interest and opinion would in the long run serve the companies better, as people bind together from honest discussion and disputes, the author asserts.
The author's individual chapters are each in themselves excellent essays: they are entitled Drift, Routine, Flexible, Illegible, Risk, The Work Ethic, Failure, and The Dangerous Pronoun. The most profound chapters are perhaps those on (1) risk, which documents the odds against success and the difficulty many people have adjusting to this reality; (2) the work ethic, which shows how it is undermined in many different ways by transience in co-workers and authority structures; and (3) failure, which shows both its commonality and the difficulties workers have in dealing with it and crafting a successful future because it is often experienced more as a personal reckoning than as a result of powerful institutional and competitive forces undermining their best efforts.
The author adds statistical tables which document the decline of manufacturing and the rise of personnel and computer and data processing services; declining employment and the rise of wage inequality; lower productivity growth in the U.S. than in France, Germany, Japan; the steady decline in union membership as a percentage of the workforce and its plateau in actual number of workers covered; the rising percentage of women from 22 to 44 in the workforce and the declining percentages of workers in other generational categories; the rising number of workers on flexible schedules; the rising number of workers using computers; the generally falling earnings that job switchers get; the slow rise in jobs requiring a college degree; and the great rise in percentage and numbers within the labor movement of public sector workers.
The strength of the author's approach is that he mixes analysis of anecdotes with scholarly research touching on both workers and working conditions and life in general. The author not only brings a lot of fresh material to the analysis of corporate working conditions, but he provides original and creative analysis to familiar material so that we see it with new significance in new contexts.
No one should consider taking a corporate job, or a job in a large organization, without reading this book. It is sociology at its best, both the critiquing economic trends and relating them to lives of individuals who are both representative and compelling. The author's writing is gripping, passionate, and thought-provoking. He manages simulaneously the difficult tasks of both synthesizing past scholarhip and breaking new ground extremely well.
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 fight against "de-characterization" ( ineke90 )
An important book, in which some of the undesirable effects of the ways our every-day working lives are organized are put under scrutiny and criticized. All those who want to continue to work with real human beings rather than with post-modern robots should read this book.
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 Sympathetic to workers' problems but you may find little new here ( calmly )
A doctor warned me once that people weren't built for rapid mentally jumping from one thing to another and that hi-tech companies tended to use people up. Sennett's warning came quite late.
Sennett's findings seem well intended but not surprising at all to anyone who has worked in hi-tech. I suspect many other workers have noticed the consequences of the "new" capitalism. Similarly, there seems nothing wrong with trying to simplify what is happening by noting a few key characteristics and values. Sennett's observations on the exploitation of "teamwork", although familiar, are welcome. "Risk", "failure", "flexibility" , it all can become as manipulative as political speech about "liberty", "democracy" and "free markets".
However, the 176 pages seem like 20. Despite footnotes, Sennett seems to be writing as if he were the first observer of capitalism, entirely out of character for the profound author of "The Hidden Injuries of Class:. The exact nature of the impact on character in this newer book seems largely unestablished. The efforts of unions, albeit sparse with hi-tech, goes unnoticed. The real consequences on real lives becomes an apparent gentlemenly philosophical exercise. How carefully he closes: "But I do know a regime which provides human beings no deep reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy". If there were, in this book, more sociological and less anecdotal support for such a claim, "The Corrosion of Character" might be worth your reading. As it is, you may well know it yourself.
Sennett does note at the end a "fear of the resurgence of unions". I didn't see that Sennett provided any pointers on where to seek help apart from an abstract appeal to community. Instead of watching your own character corrode, one possibility is seeking out a union on the Web (such as the Industrial Workers of the World).
This book was a big disappointment as I had read Sennett before and been quite impressed, so I may now have expected a lot. It may still be that for some readers this book will help identify for them what is troubling about their work and serve as a basis for discussion of work problems with others.
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Yes, but... ( aifan )
I don't know yet if I learned something I didn't knew from this book. The examples Sennett gives are really entertaining; so much that I think maybe he should follow the Clifford Geertz road (or a more mainstream Barbara Ehrenreich one!). It was also refreshing to listen to old classic names as Smith, some old greek and that one of the Encyclopedia (ah, yes, Diderot). The use of the classics was especially good in Sennett's discussion of character and work, from antiquity passing by Christendom, Calvinism and reaching Weber's 'wordly ascetism' (Ch. 6: The Work Ethic). The rest of the book is not very innovative for the informed sociologist (but I loved the shot in the last chapter against those neo-tocquevillian communitarians Putnam style). So I don't know if recommend this book to you or not. It brings some interesting ideas about the relation of labor structure to character, but mostly does not go deep enough in each facet of the subject. Each chapter could be expanded to be a book in itself, and maybe Sennett's intention was to let us to do it! About those reviewers that are in favour of late-capitalism oppression: enjoy your 'happy life' because nobody's safe. Maybe next year it will be your turn. Anyway we will help you; that is the problem of being from the Left... we care.
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