New Capitalism, New Isolation - flexible cities of strangers

From LMD, February 2000:

NEW CAPITALISM, NEW ISOLATION
A flexible city of strangers

Once people used to come to the city in search of anonymity, diversity and
the freedom to meet others. Cities were also places of collective struggle
and solidarity. Now, just as the workplace is affected by a new system of
flexible working, so the city, too, risks losing its charm as businesses and
architecture become standardised and impersonal. 
by RICHARD SENNETT * 

Cities can be badly-run, crime-infested, dirty, decaying. Yet many people
think it worth living in even the worst of them. Why? Because cities have
the potential to make us more complex human beings. A city is a place where
people can learn to live with strangers, to enter into the experiences and
interests of unfamiliar lives. Sameness stultifies the mind; diversity
stimulates and expands it.
The city can allow people to develop a richer, more complex sense of
themselves. They are not just bankers or roadsweepers, Afro-Caribbeans or
Anglo-Saxons, speakers of English or of Spanish, bourgeois or proletarian:
they can be some or all of these things, and more. They are not subject to a
fixed scheme of identity. People can develop multiple images of their
identities, knowing that who they are shifts, depending upon whom they are
with. That is the power of strangeness: freedom from arbitrary definition
and identification.
Writer Willa Cather was haunted in small-town America by the fear that her
lesbianism would be discovered. When she finally arrived in New York's
Greenwich Village in 1906, she wrote to a friend: "At last, in this
indecipherable place, I can breathe". In public, city dwellers may don an
impassive mask, act cool and indifferent to others on the street; but in
private, they can be aroused by these strange contacts, their certainties
shaken by the presence of others.
These virtues are not inevitable. One of the big issues in urban life is how
to make the complexities that a city contains interact - so that people
become truly cosmopolitan - and how to turn crowded streets into places of
self-knowledge, not fear. The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has
referred to "the neighbourliness of strangers", a phrase that captures the
aspiration we should have in designing our cities.
Architects and planners are faced with new challenges. Globalisation has
transformed production which now allows people to work more flexibly, less
rigidly and makes them experience the city differently.
In the 19th century the German sociologist Max Weber compared modern
business organisations to military organisations. Both worked on the
principle of a pyramid, with the general or boss at the apex and the
soldiers or workers at the base. The division of labour minimised
duplication and gave each group of workers at the base a distinct function.
In this way the corporation executive at the apex could determine how the
assembly line or back office functioned, just as the general could
strategically command platoons far from his command post. And as the
division of labour progressed, the need for different kinds of workers
expanded far more rapidly than the need for more bosses.
In industrial production, Weber's pyramid became embodied in Fordism, a kind
of military micro-management of a worker's time and effort which a few
experts could dictate from the top. It was graphically illustrated by
General Motors' Willow Run automobile plant in the United States, a
mile-long, quarter-mile wide edifice in which raw iron and glass entered at
one end and a finished car emerged at the other. Only a strict, controlling
work regime could coordinate production on this giant scale. In the white
collar world, the strict control by corporations like IBM in the 1960s
mirrored this industrial process.
A generation ago businesses began to revolt against the Weberian pyramid.
They sought to " de-layer "organisations, to remove levels of bureaucracy
(using new information technologies in place of bureaucrats) and destroy the
practice of fixed-function work, substituting instead teams which work
short-term on specific tasks. In this new business strategy, teams compete
against one another, trying to respond as effectively and quickly as
possible to goals set by the top. Instead of each person doing his or her
own particular bit in a defined chain of command, function is duplicated:
many different teams compete to do the same task fastest and best. The
corporation can thus respond more quickly to changing market demands.
The apologists for the new world of work claim it is also more democratic
than the old military-style organisation. But that is not so. The Weberian
pyramid has been replaced by a circle with a dot in the centre. At the
centre, a small number of managers make decisions, set tasks, judge results;
the information revolution has given them more instantaneous control over
the corporation's workings than in the old system, where orders often
modulated and evolved as they passed down the chain of command. The teams
working on the periphery of the circle are left free to respond to output
targets set by the centre, free to devise means of executing tasks in
competition with one another. But no freer than they ever were to decide
what those tasks are.
In the Weberian pyramid of bureaucracy, rewards came for doing your job as
best you could. In the dotted circle, rewards come to teams winning over
other teams. The economist Robert Frank calls it the winner-take-all
organisation; sheer effort no longer produces reward. This bureaucratic
reformulation, Frank argues, contributes to the great inequalities of pay
and perks in flexible organisations.
No long term
The mantra of the flexible work-place is "no long term". Career paths have
been replaced by jobs which consist of specific and limited tasks; when the
task ends, the job is often over. In the high-tech sector in Silicon Valley,
California, the average length of employment is now about eight months.
People constantly change their working associates: modern management theory
has it that the "shelf life" of a team ought to be at most a year.
This pattern does not dominate the work-place at present. Rather, it
represents a leading edge of change, what businesses ought to become: no-one
is going to start a new organisation based on the principle of permanent
jobs. The flexible organisation does not promote loyalty or fraternity any
more than it promotes democracy. It is hard to feel committed to a
corporation which has no defined character, hard to act loyally to an
unstable institution which shows no loyalties to you. Business leaders are
now finding that lack of commitment translates into poor productivity and to
an unwillingness to keep corporate secrets.
The lack of fraternity that comes from "no long term" is rather more subtle.
Task-work puts people under enormous stress; and recriminations among losing
teams mark the final stages of working together. Again, trust of an informal
sort takes time to develop; you have to get to know people. And the
experience of being only temporarily in an organisation prompts people to
keep loose, not to get involved, since you are going to exit soon.
Besides, this lack of mutual engagement is one of the reasons it is so hard
for trade unions to organise workers in flexible industries or businesses as
in Silicon Valley; the sense of fraternity as a shared fate, a durable set
of common interests, has been weakened. Socially, the short-term regime
produces a paradox. People work intensely, under great pressure, but their
relations to others remain curiously superficial. This is not a world in
which getting deeply involved with other people makes much sense in the long
run.
Flexible capitalism has precisely the same effects on the city as it does on
the workplace itself: superficial, short-term relations at work, superficial
and disengaged relations in the city. It appears in three forms. The most
self-evident is physical attachment to the city. Rates of geographic
mobility are very high for flexible workers. Temps are the single
fastest-growing sector of the labour market. Temporary nurses, for example,
are eight times more likely to move house in a two-year period than are
single-employer nurses. In the higher reaches of the economy, executives
frequently moved as much in the past as they do in the present. But the
movements were different in kind; they remained within the groove of a
company, and the company defined their "place", the turf of their lives, no
matter where they were on the map. It is just that thread which the new
work-place breaks. Some specialists in urban studies have argued that, for
this elite, style of life in the city matters more than their jobs, with
certain zones - gentrified, filled with sleek restaurants and specialised
services - replacing the corporation as an anchor.
Skin architecture
The second expression of the new capitalism is the standardisation of the
environment. A few years ago, on a tour of New York's Chanin Building, an
art-deco palace with elaborate offices and splendid public spaces, the head
of a large, new-economy corporation remarked: "It would never suit us.
People might become too attached to their offices. They might think they
belong here."
The flexible office is not meant to be a place where you nestle in. The
office architecture of flexible firms requires a physical environment which
can be quickly reconfigured - at the extreme, the "office" can become just a
computer terminal. The neutrality of new buildings also results from their
global currency as investment units; for someone in Manila easily to buy or
sell 100,000 square feet of office space in London, the space itself needs
the uniformity and transparency of money. This is why the style elements of
new-economy buildings become what US architectural critic Ada Louise
Huxtable calls "skin architecture": the surface of the building dolled-up
with design, its innards ever more neutral, standard, and capable of instant
refiguration.
Alongside skin architecture, we have the standardisation of public
consumption - a global network of shops selling the same commodities in the
same kinds of spaces whether they are located in Manila, Mexico City or
London. It is hard to become attached to a particular Gap or Banana
Republic; standardisation breeds indifference. Put it another way. The
problem of institutional loyalties in the work-place - now beginning to
sober up managers once blindly enthusiastic about endless corporate
re-engineering - finds its parallel in the urban public realm of
consumption. Attachment and engagement with specific places is dispelled
under the aegis of this new regime. Cities cease to offer the strange, the
unexpected or the arousing. Equally, the accumulation of shared history, and
so of collective memory, diminishes in these neutral public spaces.
Standardised consumption attacks local meanings in the same way the new
work-place attacks ingrown, shared histories among workers.
The third expression of the new capitalism is less visible to the eye.
High-pressure, flexible work profoundly disorients family life. The familiar
press images - neglected children, adult stress, geographic uprooting - do
not quite get to the heart of this disorientation. It is rather that the
codes of conduct which rule the modern work world would shatter families if
taken home from the office: don't commit, don't get involved, think
short-term. The assertion of "family values" by the public and politicians
has a more than right-wing resonance; it is a reaction, often inchoate but
strongly felt, of the threats to family solidarity in the new economy. The
prominent American social critic Christopher Lasch drew the image of the
family as a "haven in a heartless world". That image takes on a particular
urgency when work becomes at once more unpredictable and more demanding of
adult time. One result of this conflict, by now well-documented in regard to
middle-aged employees, is that adults withdraw from civic participation in
the struggle to solidify and organise family life; the civic becomes yet
another demand on time and energies in short supply at home.
The 'passive beloved'
That leads to one of the effects of globalisation on cities. The new global
elite, operating in cities like New York, London and Chicago, avoids the
urban political realm. It wants to operate in the city but not rule it; it
composes a regime of power without responsibility.
In Chicago in 1925, for example, political and economic power went hand in
hand. Presidents of the city's top 80 corporations sat on 142 hospital
boards, accounted for 70% of the trustees of colleges and universities. Tax
revenues from 18 national corporations in Chicago formed 23% of the city's
municipal budget. By contrast, in New York now, few chief executives of
global firms are trustees of its educational institutions and none sit on
the boards of its hospitals. And it has been well documented how footloose
multinational companies like Rupert Murdoch's News Corp manage largely to
avoid paying taxes, local or national.
The reason for this change is that the global economy is not rooted in the
city in the sense of depending on control of the city as a whole. It is
instead an island economy, literally so within the island of Manhattan in
New York, architecturally so in places like Canary Wharf in London, which
resemble the imperial compounds of an earlier era. As sociologists John
Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells have shown, this global wealth does not
trickle down or spread out very far beyond the global enclave.
Indeed, the politics of the global enclave cultivates a kind of indifference
to the city which Marcel Proust, in an entirely different context, called
the "passive beloved" phenomenon. Threatening to leave, go anywhere in the
world, the global firm is given enormous tax breaks to stay - a profitable
seduction made possible by the firm appearing indifferent to the places
where it touches down. In other words globalisation poses a problem of
citizenship in cities as well as nations. Cities can't tap into the wealth
of these corporations, and the corporations take little responsibility for
their own presence in the city. The threat of absence, of leaving, makes
possible this avoidance of responsibility; and we lack the political
mechanisms to make unstable, flexible institutions contribute fairly for the
privileges they enjoy in the city.
All this has an impact on urban civil society which rests on a compromise
based on mutual dissociation. That means the truce of leaving one another
alone, the peace of mutual indifference. This is one reason why, on the
positive side, the modern city is like an accordion easily able to expand to
accommodate new waves of migrants - the pockets of difference are sealed. On
the negative side, mutual accommodation through dissociation spells the end
of citizenship practices - which mean understanding divergent interests - as
well as a loss of simple human curiosity about other people.
At the same time, the flexibility of the modern workplace creates a sense of
incompleteness. Flexible time is serial - you do one project, then another
unrelated one - rather than cumulative. But there is no sense that, because
something is missing in your own life, you should turn outward to others,
toward that "neighbourliness of strangers".
That suggests something about the art of making better cities today. We need
to overlay different activities in the same space, as family activity once
overlay working space. The incompleteness of capitalist time returns us to
the issue which marked the very emergence of the industrial city. A city
which broke apart the domus - that spatial relation which had, before the
coming of industrial capitalism, combined family, work, ceremonial public
spaces and more informal social spaces. Today, we need to repair the
collectivity of space to combat the serial time of modern labour. 

* Professor of sociology at the London School of Economics