The Competent Public Sphere: Global Political Economy, Dialogue and the Contemporary Workplace

The Competent Public Sphere Global Political Economy, Dialogue and the Contemporary Workplace John Michael Roberts Th...

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The Competent Public Sphere Global Political Economy, Dialogue and the Contemporary Workplace

John Michael Roberts

The Competent Public Sphere

Also by John Michael Roberts THE AESTHETICS OF FREE SPEECH REALISM, PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE (co-authored) AFTER HABERMAS: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere (co-edited) CRITICAL REALISM AND MARXISM (co-edited) REALISM, DISCOURSE AND DECONSTRUCTION (co-edited)

The Competent Public Sphere Global Political Economy, Dialogue and the Contemporary Workplace John Michael Roberts Brunel University, UK

© John Michael Roberts 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN-13: 978-0-230-00873-1 ISBN-10: 0-230-00873-9

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 18

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

1

Introducing Competence and the Public Sphere

1

2

The New Economy

18

3

The New Economy as the Fetish of Financialisation

29

4

The Competent Public Sphere of the New Economy

68

5

Democracy and Participation in the Competent Public Sphere

89

6

Silencing the Thematic Utterances of Workers

109

7

Trade Unions, Participation, and the Proletarian Public Sphere

128

Conclusion: Towards a Socialist Public Sphere

151

8

Bibliography

180

Index

201

v

Acknowledgements There have been several people who have assisted and helped me along the way while writing this book. First, my immediate family has been as always a great source of inspiration and I owe them a huge debt. Next, I would like send thanks to Myria Georgiou, Peter Lunt, Monica Degen, Teela Sanders and Peter Wilkin. A special note of appreciation also goes out to Colin Cremin for friendship and discussion. I also owe Colin a large debt of gratitude for reading and commenting on the book manuscript. In addition I would like to thank Olivia Middleton at Palgrave and Shirley Tan at Expo Holdings who both provided much needed advice and encouragement. And finally I would like to send huge thanks to Mary and also thanks to her family. This book is dedicated to you, Mary.

vi

1 Introducing Competence and the Public Sphere

Introduction As this is a book about the contemporary workplace public sphere in the global political economy we require first a sense of what the public sphere actually means. The aim of this introductory chapter is to gain this sense and from here to develop an initial understanding of the dominant ideological form that the public sphere has taken in the workplace; an ideological form that will be termed the ‘competent public sphere’. Broadly speaking, ‘competence’ is part of a recent managerial configuration known as ‘knowledge management’. An important element of knowledge management is the space it gives over to exploring the global political economy and contemporary workplace through ‘intangible’ traits such as ‘trust’, ‘empowerment’, ‘personal action plans’, ‘emotions and feelings’, ‘journey of self-discovery’, ‘working as a community and as a family’, and so on. As part of this configuration, competence is often said to be comprised of three main attributes. First, competence embodies tacit knowledge defined as ‘the non-codifiable, person-to-person and context-specific dimension of knowledge’ (Adaman and Devine 2002: 10). Second, competence embraces socially produced knowledge of an organisation based on interactions between its management and employees as well as interactions between itself and other organisations. Such knowledge is said to progressively accumulate and exist beyond that of any single employee. Third, competence is path-dependent to the extent that each organisation has an individual duty to generate, mobilise and articulate knowledge in response to its own unique capabilities (Adaman and Devine 2002: 10). An integral element of competence is the importance it places on establishing dialogic communities (or public spheres) within an organisation 1

2 The Competent Public Sphere

through which employees draw on their tacit knowledge and skills, work in flexible teams, and respond innovatively to a changing competitive business environment. Harnessing intangible and tangible knowledge in organisations is therefore believed to be advantageous because such attributes promote amongst other things the sharing of knowledge between ‘teams’ of workers which encourages those very same workers to flexibly and semi-autonomously acquire, pre-empt, and develop new modes of knowledge as the need arises. Operating in this way allows workers to obtain a space through which to draw on their intangible skills so as to creatively adapt these in a competent manner to the changing organisational competencies of knowledge resources in the respective organisation in which they work; organisations which are seen to be connected to the ever changing global business world. One might therefore say that competence provides a mediating principle and practice that ties together those intangible resources embodied in both individual workers and organisational capabilities. In the rest of this introduction we will expound on this initial meaning of competence and how it relates to the public sphere. But to do this we will first say a little more about conventional meanings of the term ‘public sphere’. This will allow us to gain a sense of how competence can be said to constitute a new public sphere in the contemporary workplace. From here we will briefly outline a Marxist-inspired approach to the public sphere. While this approach will be developed throughout subsequent chapters, it will nevertheless be useful to flag up some of its themes at this stage. Following this discussion the rest of the book’s chapters are set out.

Definitions of the ‘public’ and ‘public sphere’ Warner (2002) suggests that the word ‘public’ is often thought of as a noun. There is either the public, a meaning which tends to make generalisations and is associated with social entities like the state, nation, region, etc., to which all relevant people are said to belong to, or there is a public, which would seem to indicate a particular group of people watching an event of some nature such as a concert. In the latter instance the public denotes a more spatial association between different elements, forces and identities because it is primarily interested in the constitution of specific event and the boundaries and relationships that make up the event in question during a moment in time (Warner 2002: 65–66). Along with these two definitions there is at least one

Introducing Competence and the Public Sphere 3

other definition that is commonly used. This is a public comprised of texts circulating through society and which link together diverse individuals and strangers into some kind of relatively stable audience. A public in this sense can exist across the public and a public (Warner 2002: 66). Think for example of the works of Karl Marx. His texts have stretched beyond any territorial boundaries and have connected various readers through a common public of ‘Marxism’ in both the past and present. And as a result a reading public emerges that expresses itself in particular spaces and events (e.g. meetings of Marxist groups) but which is also expressed privately when people individually read the works of Marx. But the ‘public’ can also refer to a type of accountability between public officials and the electorate. This usage is frequently related to the idea that the government and the electorate share a ‘public interest’ in communicating particular types of information with one another. For example, it might be in the ‘public interest’ to share knowledge about why government ministers took their country to war with another country. A public official might privately believe that on moral grounds the general public has a right to gain access to more knowledge than a government allows about the reasons for going to war. Through his or her moral beliefs, therefore, the official leaks information to the public domain so that the general public are better informed about the reasons for going to war. In this instance, how the government defines ‘public interest’ comes into conflict with a perceived ‘common’ or ‘public good’ such as the common good that, morally speaking, freedom of information and expression should be enjoyed by all and that all should enjoy free access to the relevant knowledge about how important political decisions are made and justified. Here the ‘public’ is believed to relate to ‘everyone’, and policies produced through the ‘public good’ are also those associated with ideas about what constitutes a ‘good’ and ‘just’ society. The ‘public’ in modern times is additionally defined along more abstract lines as referring to the state acting as a public organisation of legitimacy and authority whose aim is to regulate the action and behaviour of individuals in civil society. Frequently this meaning of the term ‘public’ is counter posed to ideas of what constitutes the ‘private’ sphere; for example whether the ‘private’ sphere relates to family or domestic life or whether it relates to the private sphere of economic transactions (Fraser 1992). Others suggest that civil society is intrinsically bound up with the public. Think of the multitude of voluntary associations in existence. Bringing together a whole range of


social interests, many of which are campaigning social interests, voluntary associations enable voices to reach the public and directly or indirectly engage in debate and discussion from a local to a global level (Keane 2003). But another definition is also evident here. The term ‘public life’ has been used in both the past and in present as a means to highlight levels of ‘public sociability’ in communities and neighbourhoods in civil society whereby normally private contacts (e.g. within the family) are stretched outwards to other domestic contexts. This is the idea of groups of people who trust one another, who help one another out at an everyday level when the need arises, whose family members know each another at both a personal and emotional level (Weintraub 1997: 16–25). It is the idea made prominent in the present era through Robert Putnam’s arguments in favour of promoting ‘social capital’ in civil society whereby ‘bonding’ networks of trust and reciprocity within a defined group should ideally be complimented by ‘bridging’ networks of trust and reciprocity between different groups within and between communities (Putnam 2000). Obviously, implicit in these definitions lurks another meaning of the word ‘public’. Matters of, say, public interest often suggest there will be a ‘public debate’ about what exactly constitutes the ‘public interest’ of a subject in the first place. Therefore ‘public’ can also denote that an array of ‘public spheres’ will be readily available for people to take part in such discussions and thus contribute towards the democratic good of society. In the eighteenth century, for example, members of the bourgeoisie would discuss matters of public importance with one another in public spaces like coffee houses and salons (Habermas 1989), while members of the ‘lower orders’ would discuss matters in public spaces like ale houses or at public events like hangings (Roberts 2004). Public spheres can also take the form of the media such as television, newspapers or the internet (see Feintuck and Varney 2006 and Livingstone and Lunt 2007 for a discussion of the relationship between the public sphere of the media and public interest). Public spheres, in this respect, are based, amongst other things, on strangers coming together and exchanging their opinions through what they consider to be ‘reasoned’ and ‘reasonable’ types of argument. If this is indeed the case then the concept of the public sphere consolidates many of the other meanings of the term ‘public’. As Eley (2002) observes: The ‘public sphere’…is a space between state and society in which political action occurs with real effectivities, whether in terms of the local effects, in building a sense of political agency, or in behaving ethically in one’s social relations and allowing some notion of col-


lective goods to be posed, and thereby contributing to the wider process of political mobilization (Eley 2002: 231; see also Roberts and Crossley 2004). As this quote also indicates, the public sphere appears through spatial relations. Indeed, everyday objects and social relations in public space – buildings, parks, laws, computers, and so on – might sometimes enrol people into a ‘public gathering’ through which the ‘truth’ and ‘matters of fact’ about a ‘matter of concern’ are then discussed (Latour 2005). In this sense public spheres are emergent from the processes of enrolment (see Asen and Brouwer 2001). The difference between both – the public sphere and public space – can also be conceptualised through Warner’s initial distinction between ‘the’ and ‘a’ public. On one level at least ‘the’ public sphere functions as an abstract normative guarantee for inclusive debate for everyone while public space acts as ‘a’ particular embodiment of the public sphere in a spatial context. Thus it is the latter – public space – which often questions and interprets the normative potential of the public sphere as when people occupy public spaces during a public demonstration (Howell 1993; Roberts 2008a). In summary there are different meanings of the word ‘public’ in modern times. • The public is often thought about as referring to the whole of society or it is thought about as referring to a specific gathering at an event. • The public is also mobile and emergent to the extent that it crosses different social contexts through objects like books in order to connect people together and to the extent that it manages to enrol people and objects in networks of ‘matters of concern’. • Conflicts can arise over what is thought to constitute the ‘public interest’ and many of these conflicts are formed through wider issues about moral and ethical questions. • The state is a public body that can ‘legitimately’ govern other publics. • But publics should not only be thought as inhering within civil society. For example, publics are also present with the economy. • Debate and discussion about issues of importance occur in ‘public spheres’. And public spheres emerge in a plethora of public spaces. • Publics often promote sociability amongst strangers and can elicit helping out one another in everyday life. While this list is not exhaustive it does nevertheless sketch out some of the main characteristics of the modern public sphere. In the next


section we look more closely at how the public sphere has assumed a specific ideological form in the contemporary workplace through the notion of ‘competence’.

The competent public sphere In recent years new managerial theories have arisen in order to understand global capitalist configurations. Knowledge management (KM) is one such theory and highlights the value of establishing intangible workplace communities to achieve success for an organisation in the global marketplace. One perspective in particular argues that ‘mundane’, or ‘tacit’, knowledge is an important attribute to these workplace communities because such knowledge is embedded in background assumptions and taken-for-granted beliefs and practices through which individuals negotiate, learn, share and build generic workplace relations. Such intangible capital can be defined as ‘all outlays by firms made in the expectation of future profit other than those for plant, equipment and infrastructure. Ideas, skills and creative potential are the essence of intangible capital’ (Webster and Jensen 2006: 83; emphasis added). These potentials are believed by some to be particularly useful resources of an organisation in the contemporary age of unpredictable, rapidly-changing global knowledge-based markets. If transformed into dynamic capabilities, intangible traits enable organisations to learn quickly and react to these changing circumstances through a constant process of learning and experimentation in new markets. This generates feedback loops on existing codified knowledge, and new knowledge can itself become codified and scripted (Eisenhardt and Martin 2000). These everyday working habits also assume a physical form through genres of documentation like ‘process manuals, articles of association, contracts, the inventory, records of property transfers, daybooks’ (Davenport 2002: 1041), all of which help to articulate and coordinate taken-for-granted beliefs and practices and put these to good productive use. This point highlights another characteristic insofar that central to KM is the conviction that affectual, cultural and linguistic practices of a workforce are crucial devices that need to be harnessed more effectively by management. This is especially the case in ‘new economy’ organisations such as telecommunications, the service sector, and occupations utilising intellectual capacities (Day 2001: 733). Key to understanding KM is the competence exhibited by a firm. Historically, the noun ‘competence’ comes from the Latin word ‘competentia’ and denotes ‘being legally competent or qualified to do some-


thing’ (Lemaitre et al. 2006: 48). As an adjective the word ‘competent’ is known to have been used as far back as 1240 and today is commonly taken to mean the possession of enough skills to be capable of carrying out a specific task of some sort or another. To carry out a task successfully also implies that one has the necessary knowledge, capability, capacity and ability to do so. A competent skill thus combines both physical (tangible) and non-physical (intangible) powers (Lemaitre et al. 2006: 49). Competence can therefore be defined in the workplace as acquiring the necessary skills, qualifications, capabilities and knowledge to undertake a specific task efficiently within an organisation as is required by the task in question. In this respect competency is similar to human capital theory, although competency highlights in a more concrete manner how a firm can gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace (Barton and Delbridge 2004: 335). Moreover, when used in managerial theory and practice ‘competence’ is often taken to denote a quality of becoming competent. What we can therefore add here is that this sense of becoming can be summarised by the utterance: ‘to be competence’. ‘To be competence’ (rather than ‘to be competent’) is the ever strived for actualisation of the ‘power to’, or potential of, the word ‘competence’ within a particular state of affairs and signifies a state of continual being and becoming competent at one and the same time. What is important in this regard is not the end result of finally achieving a competent state of being (‘to be competent’) but rather the ability to exist in a repetitive state of ‘becoming competence’, of a willingness to learn more competence skills so that one’s competence levels always exceed previous levels (‘to be competence’). ‘Competence’ also elicits other meanings when used in ‘economic’ terms. For example, Hong and Ståhle (2005) identify a number of competent management types. Individual competence refers to personal and cognitive skills of managers or employees in regard to their job performances. These range from setting up meetings between managers and other employees and building up competence profiles through intranet or data systems associated with the firm in question. Corporatewide strategic competence refers to collective learning within a firm and the bringing together of diverse skills through integrated flows of technology. Competence-based strategic management is based on a holistic process of continuous learning; so much so that a firm can act as a selfmanaging system that moves from competence building to competence leveraging. Dynamic capabilities are built up when a company arranges internal and external competencies to respond quickly to a changing environment. Here, intangible assets can be adopted in the guise of


responsive capabilities to the marketplace. Absorptive capacity is the aptitude to know and distinguish the worth and value of new knowledge outside of the firm and then to productively apply it to the benefit of the firm. Network competence refers to the establishment of interorganisational relations between (e.g.) customers and/or ‘alliances’ with other firms (Hong and Ståhle 2005: 135–137). Competence is thus associated with facilitating the dynamic knowledge-based capabilities of a firm. There are many knowledge-types in this respect, ranging from knowledge sharing (assimilating, adapting and internationalising knowledge), knowledge application and exploitation (the aptitude of a firm to exploit integrated knowledge resources), knowledge leverage (investigating innovative resources for integrated knowledge), knowledge sharing (the capability to transfer knowledge within a firm to its different units), and so on (Nielsen 2006: 63–65). By fixing one’s gaze on various competencies one is able to gain an overview of the qualities an organisation or business has as a whole. In other words, the aim is to put into effect ‘total quality management’ (TQM). It is essentially a way of organizing and involving the whole organization; every department, every activity, every single person at every level. For an organization to be truly effective, each part of it must work properly together, recognizing that every person and every activity affects, and in turn is affected by, others (Oakland 1989: 14–15). Competence has thus helped to create an original and innovative notion of the public sphere in the workplace. Competence can be conceptualised as establishing both ‘the’ public sphere in the workplace in relation to global production and consumption networks that often go under the name of the ‘new’ economy, and competence can be conceptualised as establishing ‘a’ public sphere to the extent that the potential to be competent is thought to be available to every employee in their respective place of work. In this respect competence is often believed to open the way for employees to develop competent skills during particular workplace events such as trying to solve an organisational dilemma in a knowledge-sharing dialogic community of fellow employees. In addition, the fact that competence is said to be enmeshed in a variety of dialogic workplace communities implies that it encourages a number of heterogeneous employee voices to be heard by management on ‘public interest’ issues such as that of a particular organisation’s public profile or public policy mission, and so on. And


through the coming together of such heterogeneous voices between and amongst employees and employers, competence ideally draws people together through a sense of public sociability in an organisation and makes management accountable to its employees. In this book we will critically explore the competent public sphere from a broadly based Marxist perspective. The purpose of this chapter is merely to present an initial sketch for now of what a Marxist approach to the public sphere might entail. One prerequisite of a Marxist theory in this respect is its need to comprehend how social forms of life, including that of the public sphere, are derived from the commodityform of capitalist social relation. Why the commodity-form? Why not start with, say, labour? While labour is indeed the most important category for Marx in his critique of capitalism, labour itself is a commodity in capitalism which is expressed as labour power. First therefore we require an understanding of a more basic, abstract and simple category of capitalism, namely the commodity. By starting with the commodity, then, it is possible to ascertain not only the reasons why capitalism can be classified as a system based on an ‘immense collection of commodities’ (Marx 1988: 125) but also why capitalism engenders systematic breakdowns, crises, and alienated desires. The commodity for Marx thus represents the starting point for a critique of capitalist society because it allows one to work through its contradictory properties to that of other more concrete and complex forms of commodification such as consumption, education, the state, law, religion, or the public sphere. Indeed, as Tinker (2005) observes, ‘(t)he importance of specifying an initial object of inquiry (the commodity) that is sufficiently broad to encompass questions of cultural reproduction and change…is repleat in Marx’s writings. The analysis applies to all areas of life experience that is susceptible to commodification’ (Tinker 2005: 113–114; see also Clarke 1991; Kicillof and Starosta 2007; Postone 1996). The next section therefore sketches out in a little more detail some of the themes encapsulated in a Marxist theory of the public sphere.

Towards a Marxist theory of the public sphere When we come to study capitalism at an abstract and simple level we need to first dissect the main determinants of the commodity. Similarly, when studying the capitalist public sphere we need also to dissect the main determinants of the public sphere and its relationship to the commodity-form. Bringing both the commodity-form and the public sphere together necessitates that we start our analysis by theoretically


unpacking events of commodity exchange as collective activities. There are two reasons for this. First, the most simple and abstract appearance of the public sphere in capitalism is when a buyer and a seller of a commodity confront one another during an event of exchange. Second, if one individual act of exchange does not occur then this will not necessarily affect the general exchange of commodities. Yet if the collective activity of commodity exchange does not occur then capitalism will eventually grind to a halt. ‘Thus the collective actualization of purchasing power, i.e. the widespread exchange of commodities across the system as a whole, is strictly a regular occurrence for the duration of the existence of capitalism’ (Brown 2007: 509). Actual events of exchange in capitalism are at the same time internally related to social relations of collective commodity exchange (see also Heydebrand 2003; Wilson 1999). As a collective and universal activity, simple commodity production thus engenders ceaseless acts of exchange between at least two individuals: the buyer and the seller. Embodied in this relationship is therefore also a dialogic relationship between two individuals: a speaker and a hearer. Correspondingly, simple commodity production is based on two individual owners of private property who must recognise one another as possessing the right to exchange goods (see Marx 1988: 178). After all, universal exchange relations imply that any person from any social background has the capacity to take part in exchange. Moreover, these two individuals must engage in dialogue between one another about this exchange. It subsequently appears to be the case that for the first time in history individuals exchange goods with one another as equals without being coerced to do so by a direct external force such as the state. Yet a more subtle mode of coercion is in fact evident because everyone must exchange commodities if they are to survive in the marketplace. The coercion which is apparent in commodity relationships also brings into being a fetishistic social context. This fetish is part of what Marx describes as being the alienating processes integral to how capitalism as a system operates. The reason for this is because capital establishes indirect social relations which are expressed through alienated forms of life (Postone 1996). In the words of Marx: Objects of utility become commodities only because they are the products of the labour of private individuals who work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the


producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour, the specific social characteristics of their private labours appear only within this exchange…(T)herefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material (dinglich) relations between persons and social relations between things (Marx 1988: 165–166; see also Marx and Engels 1994: 92). What this also tells us is that even the most abstract and simple properties of labour within capitalism contain a tangible measurable quality – direct relations based on ‘the labour of private individuals who work independently of each other’ – along with an intangible and immeasurable quality – indirect relations based on ‘material (dinglich) relations between persons and social relations between things’. This subtle mode of coercion also mediates dialogue between a speaker and hearer during the exchange of commodities. Indeed, dialogue between a speaker and hearer is ‘alien’ to both because it is abstracted away from the concrete and multitude of ‘accents’ which comprise everyday dialogue. Instead, dialogue is objectified in the ‘right’ to exchange goods with one another. As a result, dialogue is constrained and objectified by commodity relationships to the extent that words and utterances become ‘a ready-made and handed-down body of authoritative thought’ through alienated social relations (Voloshinov 1973: 78; see also Collins 1999: 38; McNally 2001: 111–112). Alien words are thereby simultaneously ‘monologic’ words because they encourage a passive understanding of language and engender a loss of control over dialogue in the public sphere. Yet, beneath the form of the commodity public sphere is a more developed division between intellectual and manual labour whereby ‘thinking’ is transformed into a separate cultivated realm of rationality that stands in opposition to that of the labouring body (see also Bourdieu 1986; Hall 2005; Sayer 2005). Underlying this particular division, as well as presupposing the generalisation of private property, is of course a capitalist society in which labour has been separated from the means of production. Commodities seen thus are undoubtedly ‘the products of the labour of private individuals who work independently of each other’ (Marx 1988: 165). But as Marx also observes, the generalisation of commodity exchange across society as a whole, and by default the generalisation of private property across society as a whole, also presupposes ‘that the labourer himself comes forward merely as a


seller of commodities, and thus as a free wage-labourer, so that labour appears in general as wage-labour’ (Marx 1977: 879). The production and circulation of commodities in order to produce and circulate more commodities requires that ‘the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker available, on the market, as the seller of his own labour-power’ (Marx 1988: 274; see also below). Free wage labour is thereby constituted through its separation from the means of production, and such separation is the precondition and continuous result of generalised commodity production (Marx 1988: 1017). It is for this reason that individual commodity owners who privately own objects to exchange with others represent the appearance of the separation of labour from the means of production (see Bonefeld 2004). When we therefore shift our attention to advanced capitalism we can note that the relationship between speaker and hearer during an event of commodity exchange changes in both form and content. First, at a high level of abstraction, advanced capitalism carries with it the emergence of the proletarian public sphere. This public sphere is mediated through the class relationship between capital and (wage) labour and the imperative for wage labour to valorise capital (i.e. reproduce surplus value). This further implies that at a high level of abstraction the proletarian public sphere is based on antagonistic relations between capital and labour. ‘The worker knows the capitalist as his own non-existence, and vice versa: each tries to rob the other of his existence’ (Marx 1981: 82). Second, through a contract the worker seemingly freely sells his or her labour power and thereby personality to the capitalist. Labour as a subject therefore becomes its own object (Kay and Mott 1984: 268; see also Hegel 2000: §71R). The contract also implies that it is at the point of production that the dialogic power of capital and the bourgeois public sphere lies. This power is based on three further fundamental elements of the contract: (i) capital must own the means of production in order to allocate these for its given ends and to produce surplus value; (ii) capital must control the ownership of the means of production and the allocation of surplus value produced; (iii) capital can only ensure both ownership and control to the extent to which it maintains a legal title embodied in contract to do so (Jones 1982; Woodiwiss 1998). Contractual relations thus create a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ in a workplace, the aim of which is to communicate to workers whatever necessary information is required to ensure that a certain level of productive effort is institutionalised at the workplace in question. The


bourgeois public sphere is therefore an integral workplace technique by which management attempts to obtain surplus value from workers. Third, a contract implies that labour is freely mobile. If this was not the case then there would be no need for a contract to fix labour in a particular place for a certain amount of time. By establishing contractual relationships in this way capitalism paves the way for endless dialogue to ensue between the proletariat and capitalists. Dialogue between both transpires through themes such as the nature of specific working contracts, how much freedom will be allowed for each contracting party, and what types of power relations will be established in the workplace in question. Fourth, wage relations appear to suggest that the proletariat has a right to work, yet in reality no such right exists in capitalism. The only absolute right is the right of property. Indeed, the right to work is opposed to the interests of capital because such a right would breach the domination that capital has over workers in the form of the risk of unemployment (de Brunhoff 1978: 24). In addition, a wage must maintain the daily maintenance of labour power but no more than this. Capital, at an abstract level, is not concerned with the welfare of workers who suffer illness or who fall into poverty and hardship, and there is no necessity that capital will intervene to ensure these workers are cared for. As a result workers face the constant feeling of insecurity and of ensuring they can reproduce their daily existence and not fall into poverty and unemployment (de Brunhoff 1978: 11–15). Hence at this level of abstraction contractual relationships invert subjective dialogic relationships, it objectifies them in a contractual relationship, and the appearance of ‘right’ as creating equality between participants actually reveals inequality between both (Tinker 2005: 105). These circumstances, however, create the dialogic potential for the proletariat to discuss the right to work and to relate this to dialogue concerning the right to social welfare. Fifth, the main dialogic device through which labour and capital confront one another is that of ‘freedom’; an utterance which even at a high level of abstraction is a ‘multiaccentual’ word (i.e. freedom of workers to sell their labour to whoever they wish but also their freedom from ownership and control of the means of production). Dialogue in this sense is created through the alienated context of defined personality zones: that of labour and capital. In advanced capitalism, then, dialogue is formed through distinct, different and recognisable meanings of freedom (cf. Bakhtin 1981: 282). At the same time, however, the recognisable personalities and their associated distinct interests imply


that dialogue now becomes a truly internal relationship. This is because a proletarian utterance exists at this stage ‘on the boundary between its own context and another, alien, context’ (Bakhtin 1981: 284); the alien context in this case being that of capital. Proletarian dialogue thus gains the potential to ‘penetrate the deep strata of discourse’ (Bakhtin 1981: 284) between itself and bourgeois dialogue. It can do so because workers have the potential to create a holistic world-view of alienation under capitalism. That is to say, alienation is no longer only viewed as constituted through alien utterances situated at distinct events of commodity exchange, but, more precisely, alienation is potentially now viewed as being constituted through socially alien language, i.e., as being constituted through the mediations of a whole system of capitalist alienation (cf. Bakhtin 1981: 285). This type of ‘holistic dialogue’ helps to initiate a new cooperative desire amongst different workers to transcend the machinery of capital and their exploitation by these machines. Thus the proletarian public sphere is a public sphere that engages in what Bakhtin terms as ‘heteroglossic’ dialogue about the class-related contradictions inherent in the bourgeois public sphere and within society as a whole. Throughout the chapters which follow these initial observations on the capitalist public sphere will be built upon to make sense of the competent public sphere. This will involve drawing on and developing a number of other concepts from several theorists in order to understand the concrete practices of competence in everyday workplace public spheres.

Conclusion: Towards a critical account of the competent public sphere Like many ‘new wave’ management ideas, creating competent public spheres in an organisation looks good in theory but is decidedly problematic in practice. In the first instance, most accounts of competence are based on a wider assumption that major economies in the world have now advanced towards a technologically sophisticated ‘knowledge’, ‘information’, or ‘communication’ economy. In other words, such accounts generally accept that we are in the midst of a ‘new’ economy that is markedly different to the ‘old’ industrial and manufacturing economies of days gone past. By drawing on Marxism this book similarly argues that the ‘new’ economy has made a substantial impact on the global economy but not in a way as suggested by competence or new wave management theorists. Rather, the book argues


that the new economy has acted as a novel alienated fetish which has distorted and inverted the way in which we understand the contradictions and problems of the global economy. For beneath the spectre of the new economy lies the preponderance of financialisation and it is this financial economic formation, not the new economy, which has a more profound impact on the global economy. The book further suggests that the new economy fetish has served to establish more intense working practices in the workplace and that competence has been used to communicate these intense pressures to workers. Once this is accepted then it becomes possible to associate ‘competence’ with the fetish of the new economy and relate both competence and the new economy to the underlying contradictions of financial capital. The next chapter therefore begins the process of outlining this alternative view by firstly looking at some of the arguments and claims of those who say that we now live in a new economy based on the likes of information communication technologies (ICTs) and an expanding service sector. What is interesting about these accounts is that they incorporate both mainstream managerial perspectives and leftist critical perspectives. Yet both share the belief that we have witnessed a wholesale transformation of the way in which we work. In the chapter which follows, Chapter 3, these claims are subject to critical scrutiny. It will be argued that the global economy has indeed changed since the late 1970s but not in the direction new economy gurus and theorists suggest it has. What we will see instead is that the rapidly altering form of economic transactions has been determined by the increasing dominance of the financialisation of the global economy, which has led to the increasing dominance of financial capital in everyday economic life. More specifically, financialisation has led to the creation of innovative bourgeois public spheres in the workplace and in society more generally. Through these public spheres management has communicated information to workers that has intensified their labour effort. For example, in recent years management has communicated to workers the idea that we live in a globally competitive world and that we therefore all need to increase our work effort to remain in an advantageous competitive position in the global marketplace. As a result, these (‘financial’) public spheres have helped to increase labour output and thereby profits for capitalism as a whole. The chapter goes on to argue that many of those theorists and practitioners who insist that it is instead the new economy which is now dominant have helped in their own ways to construct a wider a fetishistic fantasy about participating in the workplace through the notion


of being a ‘competent’ worker; a fantasy that embeds the new economy fetish more firmly within everyday workplace public spheres. It is in this respect that ‘competence’ has become a dialogic device which serves the interests of the bourgeois workplace public sphere. These points are extended in Chapter 4. Here we examine competence and its relationship to the workplace public sphere in more detail. We will see that that dialogue around ‘competence’ has become a key utterance in establishing a public sphere in the contemporary workplace and subsequently in establishing fantasies of the new economy in daily working lives. These fantasies endeavour to reorder the desires of labour insofar that they seek to merge competence within the very personality traits of labour so that workers identify their everyday desires with the need to be competent. More positively, the chapter also begins to highlight some of the dilemmas and contradictions of the competent public sphere. This latter point is taken up in greater depth in Chapter 5 where the focus shifts to questioning the relationship between the competent public sphere and democracy and participation in the workplace. In particular the chapter looks at new utterances used by management around ‘empowerment’ and ‘participation’ and how the meaning of these utterances becomes embedded in workplace thematic events. One aim of this chapter will therefore be to examine management techniques and strategies for constructing public spheres in the workplace through which the dialogic desires of workers are channelled. At the same time we will see how these managerial utterances are challenged by employees at these very same workplace events. Chapter 6 extends this critical discussion by focusing on how thematic utterances around competence often silence the participatory voices of workers, and how technology is an integral part of all of this. Moreover, the chapter demonstrates how competence can act ‘indirectly’ in a workplace and thus conceal the fetish of competence to a greater extent. Again, however, the chapter highlights how tensions in indirect dialogue on competence manifest themselves. Chapter 7 turns its attention to the formation of proletarian public spheres. Of special interest here are the tactics employed by management to anticipate and pre-empt the formation of proletarian public spheres in the workplace by regulating trade union activism. But the chapter also highlights how militant union activism arises in ‘minor’ workplace spaces during specific dialogic events that then spread outwards throughout a workplace. Militant union activism subsequently enables us to understand how ‘heteroglossic’ public spheres can be


established in a workplace for workers to resist managerial fantasies of competence. This approach is somewhat different to many other approaches to the public sphere. In other approaches the focus of attention concerning resistance is often related to public spheres within civil society such as the anti-globalisation movement. This book by way of contrast examines resistance in workplace public spheres and explores the function that trade unions have in mediating such resistance. Consequently, the book deliberately overlooks the role of political and social groups in civil society in favour of concentrating solely on the global economy and contemporary workplace. This also means that the book will rarely explore the role of the state in regulating workplace public spheres, apart from a few exceptions. In the final chapter, Chapter 8, some observations are presented on what a post-capitalist, or socialist, public sphere might look like.

2 The New Economy

Introduction During the 1970s a number of ‘futurist’ writers began to expound on the virtues of the coming of a ‘post-industrial’ society. One notable futurist writer was Daniel Bell. In his highly influential The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society Bell (1976) argued that a service economy would overtake manufacturing in importance. By the latter half of the 1990s social theorists, economists, media pundits, managerial theorists, and politicians suggested in a manner similar to Bell that we were entering a ‘new economy’ based on technological advancements such as information communication technologies (ICTs) and an expanding service sector (Mosco 2004). Many at the time welcomed these developments and even today some argue that the new economy has breathed life into the global economy (for example see Temple 2002), ensuring that age-old problems of capitalism can at last be satisfactorily addressed. To begin to gain a critical take on this debate this chapter looks in more detail at theories of the new economy. First, different thinking on the new economy is presented. Following this, we examine how some have argued that the new economy has changed the way in which we work. Next, we explore how the new economy is said by some to be integrally linked to the branding of consumer products. Indeed, many have used the importance that branding represents in the global economy as evidence that the economy has morphed into something akin to a new knowledge economy. Branding is thus useful to explore because it highlights important links between the contemporary global economy, knowledge, and the public sphere. In the conclusion to this chapter we begin to look critically at the new economy. In particular we will discern 18

The New Economy 19

another underlying set of social relations at work in society based on the valorisation of financial capital and its fetishised form. This will pave the way for a more critical investigation of the new economy in Chapter 3.

Defining the new economy There is some ambiguity about what exactly constitutes the ‘new economy’ and different authors have different takes on this. Obviously knowledge is a key input and therefore unsurprisingly the new economy is often equated with what is also called the ‘knowledge economy’, ‘postindustrialisation’, ‘Risk Society’, or the ‘digital economy’. Moreover, various new economy theorists highlight the enormous progress made in designing more sophisticated computer software, communication networks, and the convergence of communication networks through mediums like the internet (Turban et al. 2004: 4–5). In this respect Powell and Snellman provide a useful starting point of defining the new economy when they say: We define the knowledge economy as production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technological and scientific advance as well as equally rapid obsolescence. The key components of a knowledge economy include a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources, combined with efforts to integrate improvements in every stage of the production process, from the R&D to the factory floor to the interface with customers. These changes are reflected in the increasing relative share of the gross domestic product that is attributable to “intangible” capital (Powell and Snellman 2004: 201). Undoubtedly intangible capital like knowledge is a more prominent moment in the way in which economic transactions operate in the world today. Not only do there exist, for example, a number of firms investing in R&D, training and skills, but these are complemented by: institutions such as universities investing in innovation, science and research management; public research organisations contributing to social and scientific research; private research organisations aiming to invest in industrial research activities; consultation firms which mediate information about management, organisational issues, and technology to other public and private bodies; collaborative organisations constructing


multilateral and bilateral agreements between various associates within and between other organisations (Hamdouch and Moulaert 2006: 27–34). And obviously intellectual rights have also grown in importance (May 2006). But while Powell and Snellman’s definition is useful there is still a sense in which it captures only part of the story. In spite of everything, several attributes included in their definition always have been essential to the competitive nature of capitalism (Carlaw et al. 2006). As Benkler (2003) observes, industrial societies have constantly utilised information technology such as the telegraph in the nineteenth century and brand advertising, cinema and other broadcast systems in the twentieth century. It is in this respect that Castells (2000) offers a more rounded and nuanced definition of the new economy that at the same time places recent economic trends in a wider sociological context. Castells claims that the new economy is comprised of a number of interlinked characteristics. First, the new economy is powered through informational techniques in which a company can ‘generate, process, and apply efficiently knowledge-based information’ (Castells 2000: 77). Second, the new economy is a global economy because production, consumption and circulation are organised globally. Finally, the new economy is a networked economy because production is generated and circulated through global business networks. While Castells admits these three attributes have indeed been a stable diet for the development of capitalism he nevertheless claims that the difference today is that they signal a qualitative transformation of capitalism. ‘The emergence of a new technological paradigm organised around new, more powerful, and more flexible information technologies makes it possible for information itself to become the product of the production process’ (Castells 2000: 78). As a result, ‘(a) networked, deeply interdependent economy emerges that becomes increasingly able to apply its progress in technology, knowledge, and management to technology, knowledge, and management themselves’ (Castells 2000: 78). Knowledge itself is transformed into virtuous global circle in which knowledge is the main resource for the beginning and end of productivity and technology. Significantly, the new economy is said to be reproduced and maintained through networks based on what might be considered conventional information techniques (brands, films, music, service sector, and so on) and on more recent information techniques such as relatively inexpensive but extremely powerful interconnected computer technology (Benkler 2003: 1248). A networked new economy thus

The New Economy 21

destroys space and time between countries allowing the virtuous circle of productivity to recreate itself at a quicker rate than in any previous era. While networks require an element of coordination and centralisation they also act in non-market and decentralised ways, as when non-profit organisations use the internet to connect up with other social groups and organisations (Benkler 2003: 1254). Hardt and Negri similarly argue that no one central power like the USA completely determines global economic and technological achievements. Instead global economic power is decentred because it flows through an array of interlocking ICT networks.1 In this sense the new economy helps to facilitate three attributes of an emerging digital culture in the economy and civil society based on the increasing interaction between humans and technology. First, individuals can themselves produce and participate in the meaning of knowledge both within the market economy and outside of it. Second, individuals can engage in a process of ‘remediation’ whereby ‘consensual ways of understanding reality’ can be directly influenced by them (think, for example, of social movements who use ICTs for political campaigns). Third, individuals can consciously and knowingly assemble their own types of reality through (e.g.) information technology (think, for example, of internet chat forums) (Deuze 2006: 66). But to flesh out in more detail how this expansion in ICTs and the like has affected everyday working lives we now turn to how some argue that the new economy is embedded in the workplace.

The new economy and the workplace Many social theorists argue that the new economy has brought about fundamental changes in the contemporary workplace of advanced capitalist economies. In the words of one such theorist: Today the capitalist organization of work aims to overcome this separation (between work and worker), to fuse work and worker, to put to work the entire lives of workers. Skills, rather than professional qualifications, are put to work and with them workers’ emotions, feelings, their after-work lives, we might say the whole life of the linguistic community. Thanks to new technologies and to the reticular

1 See also Arrighi (2005a; 2005b) for a slightly different take on the decline of US economic hegemony.


organization of productive/distributive processes, knowledge is no longer embodied in ‘some other thing’, in machines or materials or finished products, but in knowledge work itself. Communication support systems – codes, languages, shared meanings – allow knowledge to circulate on its own, independently of fixed capital and legal ownership (Marazzi 2008: 50; emphasis in the original). For Hardt and Negri, this qualitative shift from the ‘mass worker’ associated with Fordist semi-skilled assembly-line factories towards ‘workerless factories’ is constituted by the likes of more intangible production methods such as new information flows, high-technology, computerisation, tertiary occupations, and flexible (often cheap) labour. To this extent Hardt and Negri identify three principle forms of intangible immaterial labour in global capitalism. First, there is immaterial labour associated with industrial production powered by information technology. Firms, in a post-Fordist world, increasingly have to respond quickly to changing consumer tastes. Second, there is immaterial labour that produces analytical and symbolic goods. Dean (2004: 268) characterises such goods as ‘low level’ tasks like data entry, word processing and telemarketing to more high level occupations like research and design, programming and being a broker on financial markets. Finally, there is immaterial labour involved in ‘the production and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human contact, labour in the bodily mode’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 293). This relates to the way in which employees are increasingly forced to utilise and draw on their intangible personal traits (e.g. everyday feelings) in their workplace (see also below on the section dealing with branding). Needless to say, those who suggest that we are at the dawn of a new economy are equally attuned to some of the negative effects of changes in the economy. Beck (2000) reproduces a typical although influential argument in this respect. According to Beck, the most prominent feature of recent changes is of course that related to risk, and it is this category that sets him apart from other new economy theorists. Risks, for Beck, are incalculable dangers because they are global, often invisible, can lay dormant for many years before their effects are felt, and nation states find it increasingly unable to manage them (think for example of environmental or food risks). This leads to the growing propensity for people to adopt more individualised lifestyles and responses to risks in preference to collective solutions mediated by the state. In parallel, contemporary working conditions have seen a qualitative transformation in which traditional lifestyles, social classes and

The New Economy 23

ways of working have been transgressed by global risks that incorporate factors such as individualisation (e.g. identities constituted around individual performance in competitive labour markets), employment insecurity, and a potential that poverty will infect individual lives irrespective of one’s social class (e.g. if a person loses their job in a competitive labour market) (Beck 2000). Even so, Beck still nevertheless suggests that ICTs and knowledge play a pivotal role in mediating our response to tackling risk (Beck 1999). Beck does not therefore deny that a qualitative shift has taken place in the economy similar to that put forward by other new economy theorists, but he is highly disparaging of some of the harmful consequences of this shift. It is for this reason that Beck like other noteworthy social theorists such as Bauman (2000), Castells (2000) and Sennett (2006), can be said to represent a more critical take on the new economy debate. For their part, managerial theorists tend to present more positive analyses of the economic opportunities presented by the new economy. These accounts argue that through technological advances companies increasingly ‘brand’ themselves in the marketplace as being able to satisfy specific consumer wants while at the same time forging partnerships with other companies who concentrate their energies on major aspects of the supply and demand chains. In this way deeper levels of customer satisfaction are met as companies are forced to engage in constant innovative practices to maintain levels of customer satisfaction. These ‘business to business’ practices can be seen most readily with those major internet companies who are linking up with large industrial and service providers to develop specific ventures. Under this new economic regime companies can target ‘MetaMarkets’, defined as ‘outsourced, managed networks that continuously replace elements of the supply chain with more efficient players’ (Means and Schneider 2000: xix). This ‘new economy’ therefore sets its sights on creating ‘value added communities’ between brand-owning companies and external networks of outsourcing with other companies. Companies that situate themselves within the new economy are subsequently no longer only reliant on a stable business environment to make profits but instead seek to take advantage of unpredictable and dynamic future investments (Means and Schneider 2000: 151; see also Chapter 4). According to Thrift (2001), and Hardt and Negri for that matter, such managerial ideas are part of a wider discursive formation of the new economy. Thrift suggests that during the 1990s in the US and in other advanced economies a new rhetoric arose in management, media, policy, and business circles about the revolutionary nature of the new economy.


This rhetoric also came to be embodied in different practices and technologies, especially in team work in organisations which brought together groups of people to work creatively and imaginatively for an allotted time period on specific projects. According to a collaborator of Thrift’s, Ash Amin (2004), globalisation more widely is now best theorised as ‘a new spatial ontology that thoroughly disrupts the dominant spatial ontology of territorial units of organisation and scalar regulation that we have become used to’ (Amin 2004: 224). What Amin wants to draw attention to here is the way in which globalisation alters, indeed obliterates, taken-for-granted spatial boundaries. Cyberspace, for example, brings into being ‘new communities of belonging…across vast physical distances…’ (Amin 2004: 225), so that previous understandings of space/place and home/world become somewhat redundant. Cyberspace, like other aspects of the global economy, is also said to be constituted through different network relations made up of human and non-human actors (examples of the latter being computers and cybernetic systems); networks that are seen to be ‘performative’ to the extent that they are realised through narratives, concepts, names, icons, and so on (see also Jones III et al. 2007; Urry 2003, 2004, 2005). These performative attributes are particularly noticeable in relation to workers and the public sphere. Hardt and Negri argue that in the twenty-first century identities of the multitude fold into, and are constituent of, flows of social networks that cut across the globe. Today’s capitalism is thus responsive to the demands and struggles of a whole array of identities (e.g. gender, ethnicity, sexuality) which have fought for social recognition in the workplace (Hardt and Negri 2000: 153; see also Thrift 2006: 281). Indeed, the proclivity for establishing communication networks between ‘immaterial’ workers unintentionally creates global networks of resistance in and against the new economy. At the forefront of this struggle is what Hardt and Negri term as the ‘multitude’. Distinguished from other terms like ‘the people’, ‘classes’ and ‘population’, terms that tend to reduce multiple social identities to one identity, ‘multitude’ draws our attention to ‘singular’ plural social identities living in the global world today (Hardt and Negri 2004: 99). On this understanding the multitude is a hybrid formation in the sense that it is comprised of different subjectivities living immaterial and plural lives. In the eyes of another theorist writing in the same tradition, Paolo Virno, the multitude exists ‘in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of motion’ (Virno 2004: 21; see also Hardt and Negri 2000: 319). Living through

The New Economy 25

public spaces, and oscillating between different identities, the multitude is connected up through intertwining networks of global communication. As such, while the various individuals and groups who comprise the multitude interact with one another through these communication networks, their actual identities often remain anonymous to one another. In other words, cooperation remains deterritorialised and thus tends ‘towards a virtual existence’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 296) ensuring that ‘collective action’ never converges into the ‘One’. In the next section we examine some other performative attributes of the new economy in the public sphere.

Branding the new economy in the public sphere Hardt and Negri recognise the prominence of (media) spectacles in communicating new intangible economic ideas to the public sphere (see Hardt and Negri 2004: 260–261). One clear illustration of this trend lies ‘in the realm of media-driven electoral politics, an art of manipulation perhaps developed first in the United States but now spread throughout the world’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 322). Indeed, there has been a crossover of late between celebrity culture and that of formal politics (think of politicians on chat and game shows or Bob Geldof and Live8) and it is commonplace for political parties to employ consultancy and advertising companies to get their message across to the public (Scammell 2007; Street 2005). In parallel there has been a proliferation of management experts and gurus who advise firms how to capitalise on their in/tangible goods to consumers. In 2006 for example the worldwide market for management consultancy was worth $100 billion, an increase from $10 billion a decade earlier. The total UK consultancy market was worth around £10 billion (Management Consultancy Association 2006). Consultants clearly express the role that knowledge intermediaries play in deciphering how consumers will understand the ‘tacit knowledge’ (everyday beliefs, experiences, values, routines and organisation) embodied in information about a commodity or a company (Millar and Choi 2003; see also Leitch and Richardson 2003 on branding between companies). With the growth of the new economy, brands, consultancy and the emergence of new media, there has also been a steady increase in the number of financial media publications that draw upon intangibles to sell financial business practices to the wider public. Thrift and his colleagues (Clark et al. 2005) highlight some of the different varieties of financial media in this respect. An upsurge in popular, serious and


specialist financial publications in the last decade or so has been complemented by newspapers increasing their coverage of financial matters. Television, especially of the Reality TV genre, gives more time and space to producing programmes about financial issues, with The Apprentice arguably being the most well known of these, while news and informationgathering corporations like Reuters and Bloomberg have managed to concentrate much of the information we receive about financial movements. The internet has also provided people with knowledge about financial matters, and advertisements frequently promote financial products. Clark et al. argue that all of these factors feed into money and finance possessing a ‘performative’ and ‘theatrical’ element that is acted out through the media and through the everyday emotions of heterogeneous audiences (Clark et al. 2005: 165–172). Hancock and Tyler (2004) also find that much popular management literature is informed by a ‘soft’ and performative rhetoric centred around words like ‘commitment’, ‘communication’, ‘control’, coordination’, ‘efficient’, ‘empowerment’, ‘evaluation’, ‘flexibility’, ‘learning’, ‘principles’, ‘strategies’, and so on, and through ‘soft’ phrases such as creating ‘organisations as communities’, ‘proactive management’, ‘personal action plan’ and a ‘journey of self-discovery’. Hancock and Tyler further suggest that these managerial words and phrases have penetrated popular male and female lifestyle magazines, many of which now champion ‘lifestyle projects’ for their readers by reflecting ‘in equally soundbite fashion, the need to embrace the brand called “you” as a managerial project to be subject to constant performance appraisal…’ (Hancock and Tyler 2004: 633; see also Löfgren 2003: 244–245). Hardt and Negri, along with many other theorists, are all too aware that spectacles of the new knowledge-based economy do not simply represent a homogenous mass of information which is then simply repackaged as ‘public opinion’ and imposed on to an unthinking population. Instead they appreciate that such spectacles contain different and often conflicting meanings which can be read in numerous ways by different groups in civil society, with many of these alternative readings actively resisting dominant codes and narratives (see for example Hardt and Negri 2004: 263).2 Nonetheless, even while such theorists exhibit a degree of critical distance towards the likes of corporate brands and media spectacles they still nevertheless accept the main premise that we are in the midst of a truly revolutionary transformation of economic relations 2 The same is true of financial journalists. They are all also aware of the bias contained in corporate brands and often cautiously approach their subjects in these areas with a degree of cynicism (Doyle 2006; see also Collins 2006).

The New Economy 27

which, as we have just seen, has profound implications for the ‘economic’ public sphere. There is the belief for instance that new ways of branding corporations are representative indicators of the claim that a new knowledge economy is now dominant.

Conclusion This relatively short chapter has been concerned to illustrate some of the characteristics of what many believe is a fundamental shift towards what we have termed for the sake of simplicity as the new economy. Critics believe however that theorists such as Hardt and Negri have been too willing to be seduced by the appearance of brands, managerial discourse, and so forth, in their respective analyses of contemporary capitalism. These critical sentiments can be summed up by Boron’s ferocious, but nevertheless sobering, Marxist critique of Hardt and Negri. It seems unnecessary to insist, before these two authors who identify themselves as communists and scholars of Marx, on the fact that the logic of capital, be it global or national, has little to do with the image projected by business school theoreticians or eclectic postmodern philosophers (Boron 2005: 49). What is this ‘inexorable logic’ in the world today that Boron claims is missed by Hardt and Negri and, for that matter, other like-minded theorists? According to Boron ‘capital moves through an inexorable logic of profit-generation, whatever the social or environmental costs may be’ (Boron 2005: 49). If we look to Marx we see that this ‘logic of profit-generation’ is formed by the ability of capital to ‘dissolve’ contradictions of industrial capital by opening up new profitable opportunities through financial capital. Marx also clearly demonstrates that financial capital develops its own contradictions as it extends its reach across the globe and assumes different appearances. The following quote from Marx, which concerns the ‘new form of production’ associated with financial capital, is worth quoting at length as it is a particularly apt description of some of these processes. This (i.e. the dominance of financial capital – JMR) is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-dissolving contradiction, which prima facie represents a mere phase of transition to a new form of


production. It manifests itself as such a contradiction in its effects. It establishes a monopoly in certain spheres and thereby requires state interference. It reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property…(C)redit offers to the individual capitalist, or to one who is regarded as a capitalist, absolute control within certain limits over the capital and property of others, and thereby control over the labour of others…Success and failure here both lead to a centralisation of capital, and thus to expropriation on the most enormous scale. Expropriation extends here from direct producers to the smaller and medium-sized capitalists themselves. In the last instance it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals… The credit system appears as the main lever of overproduction and over-speculation in commerce solely because the reproduction process, which is elastic by nature, is here forced to its extreme limits… This simply demonstrates the fact that the self-expansion of capital based on the contradictory nature of capitalist production permits an actual free development only up to a certain point, so that in fact it constitutes an immanent fetter and barrier to production, which are continually broken through by the credit system. Hence, the credit system accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the establishment of a world-market (Marx 1977: 438–441). What Marx describes in this passage are some of the characteristics of what has come to be known as financialisation. The next chapter will use these insights and other work on financial capital in order to map out: (i) the form of financialisation; (ii) the relationship of financialisation to neoliberalism; (iii) the global roots of financialisation; (iv) the fetish of financialisation; (v) how this fetish is reproduced by the new economy; and finally (vi) some of the contradictions and desires of financialisation.

3 The New Economy as the Fetish of Financialisation

Introduction This chapter argues that the global economy has indeed changed since the late 1970s but not in the direction new economy gurus suggest it has. What we will see is that the rapidly altering form of economic transactions has been determined by the increasing dominance of the financialisation of the global economy. That is to say, financialisation, not the new economy, has quickened up the speed at which economic transactions operate and it is financialisation that mediate ideas about being innovative, adaptive, entrepreneurial and flexible in the workplace. More to the point, public dialogue concerning the new economy has acted as an ideological fetish, as an inverted set of ideas, which has led to a limited practice about how to tackle the contradictions entailed by financial events and has, in turn, generated its own contradictory effects (see also Harms and Knapp 2003). Such is the force of this fetish that many who are critical of the damaging effects of recent economic developments nevertheless accept the argument that the global economy is now dominated by what might be termed as the new economy. Moreover, while these critics acknowledge that the new economy is beset with certain inequalities they still nevertheless believe that elements of the new economy can be used for positive social outcomes. However, if it is questionable that the new economy exists in such a robust form then it is equally questionable to say that emancipation from the worst vestiges of (neoliberal) capitalism can be achieved by drawing upon selective attributes of the new economy. This is a particularly important point because the (critical) acceptance that we live under a new economy can lead to wider a fantasy concerning ways of participating in the workplace through the notion of being a ‘competent’ 29


worker; a fantasy that embeds the new economy fetish more firmly within everyday public spheres in which ordinary debates about the global economy are conducted. By rejecting the very ideological fetish contained in assumptions about the new economy we will instead have a basis to understand: (i) some of the consequences of the financial form of the global economy; (ii) how and why the new economy has not made the impact on society as some suggest; (iii) how ideas around the new economy are ideological because they serve to invert our understanding of the contradictory and antagonistic reality of global finance; and (iv) how the new economy has played a fetishistic role in establishing the competent public sphere – a role beset with its own contradictions. To begin, we first look at the relationship between financialisation and neoliberalism.

Financialisation and neoliberalism The financialisation of capitalism has grown in dominance in recent years, pointing to ‘the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies’ (Epstein 2006: 3; see also Erturk et al. 2007: 556). Financialisation originally grew apace in the nineteenth century as corporations became bigger economic entities. Through the expansion of corporations and their activities across the economy a market in corporate securities through (e.g.) stocks, bonds and new types of banking established itself. This lay the foundation for the growth of a separate financial sector to flourish. Various states recognised as much and eventually passed legislation allowing liquidity to become ever more entrenched in corporate identity by permitting corporations to issue securities and to own the securities of other corporations. Lo and behold, the holding company was born (Magdoff and Sweezy 1987: 94–102). The holding company was just one example of the increasing hegemony of finance over the economy. This hegemony continued until the Great Depression beginning in 1929 following the US stock market crash. It was not until the Second World War that the state sought to take an active stance in regulating the economy at a macro-level. One notable example was the implementation of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. To maintain some stability in global currencies at the end of the Second World War it was agreed at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, that the US dollar would take on the role of being the main global currency, thus establishing a fixed exchange rate system.

The New Economy as the Fetish of Financialisation 31

Bretton Woods pledged that the dollar was worth a fixed price of $35 per ounce of gold. As a result the hegemony of the dollar was maintained in global trading for over two and a half decades. Confidence subsequently came to be established in global trade, and this was assisted by the formation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, both of which aided the reconstruction of advanced post-War economies. The management of the macroeconomy became widely known as Keynesianism, following the work of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes rejected the idea that the state should regulate managers and finance. Instead Keynes insisted the state’s remit was best served by ensuring employment remained at optimal levels and that oscillations in the business-cycle be limited. Clearly Keynes saw the need for the state to steer consumption patterns through the governance of credit (Duménil and Lévy 2006: 24; see also Jessop 2002a and Nadesan 2001 for useful summaries). But this was not to last. Increasing globalisation of trade and competition, especially cheaper imports from newly industrialised countries, placed a downward pressure on Keynesian demand management strategies and led to the fragmentation of national methods of production. By the 1970s governments were claiming they could no longer sustain social policies like national wage bargaining. On top of this, the Bretton Woods system had encouraged overseas investors to hoard Eurodollars for future speculative gains while new multinational firms saw the rise of this unofficial international finance as beneficial because it offered them a means to circulate their funds. With vast amounts of money being taken out of the global economy through Eurodollars confidence in stable exchange rates began to decline and overseas investors started to claim back gold for their dollars. In 1971 President Nixon cut the dollar from its convertibility into gold and effectively established floating exchange rates whereby the dollar’s value would vary depending on the supply and demand for other currencies (Duménil and Lévy 2006: 24–25; Rupert and Solomon 2006: 45; Soederberg 2006: 6–13). Confidence in the government’s handling of the economy also slipped away within the labour movement. From 1968 to 1979 labour unrest erupted across Europe accompanied by social conflict emanating from other quarters of society such as that from organised student movements. By the beginning of the 1980s leading governments switched their allegiances to new methods of production, especially to the freeing up once again of financialisation. In particular, dollar reserves grew in stature because the US


Treasury encouraged those in other countries holding dollar reserves in America to invest them in US government securities. By 2003 dollar reserves totalled 73 percent of total international reserves (D’Arista 2006: 222). Coupled with this has been a remarkable expansion of a new social group of financial capitalists, or a new global rentier class. Amongst this group are private bankers, currency speculators and portfolio investors (Argitis and Pitelis 2006: 65; see also Folkman et al. 2007). Financialisation has also prospered since the late 1970s onwards by the emergence of a neoliberal workfare state regime. Since the collapse of Keynesianism neoliberalism has provided a protective shell of sorts for financialisation to steadily grow in importance. Broadly-speaking, neoliberalism is the belief that states should not intervene in market transactions but should instead let goods find their own rational level of supply and demand. Gough (2002) suggests that the policies that flow from within a neoliberal environment are based on at least two interrelated processes. First, neoliberal policies devalorise state regulated capital through strategies such as privatisation so that surplus value can be increased. This allows capital to embed itself more freely within new sectors and within specific communities. Second, in order to prepare the way for and to nurture devalorisation the state must depoliticise social relations by removing forms of socialisation favourable to labour that had built up under the auspices of Keynesian corporatist management centred around a welfare state (Gough 2002: 410). Implementation of neoliberalism has thus been sought through the likes of welfare privatisation, tax cuts, and the deregulation of business and industry. These policies have been promoted by a recomposition of the postwar welfare state by the likes of strong law and order programmes, workfare social policy, the articulation of an ‘entrepreneurial’ dialogue through utterances such as ‘energy’, ‘independence’, ‘risk taker’, ‘enterprise’, ‘selfreliance’, and responsibility’, and by restricting trade union power (see Gamble 1988; Gough 2000; Keat 1991). Of course, neoliberalism has not remained an unchanging and static phenomenon but has morphed into several contradictory forms from the 1970s up until today (Kiely 2005a, 2005b; Mittelman 2004). Nevertheless, neoliberalism remains in ascendancy and can be said to bolster the fortunes of financialisation because the loosening up of global trade restrictions in some sectors, technological advancements, and the refusal of governments to commit to managed high growth rates, have encouraged global competition, investment in the service sector and high-tech industries, and more generally has increased the capacity of financial institutions and organisations to pursue their own market-


based profit activities (Kotz 2008a). Moreover, many of the factors that feed into the rapid expansion brought about by neoliberalism require finance and debt (Crotty 2000: 364). In saying all of this, we need to understand that financialisation has also been encouraged to develop globally through the assistance of nation states. In the next section we look at this point in more detail by briefly discussing how the American state remains the ultimate government institution for mediating global financial flows.

The American roots of global finance With the demise of Keynesian demand management a new way of thinking about and working within the economy emerged. This was based on two main changes in the economy: (i) the combined internationalisation of trade, finance and production across the globe increased; and (ii) the growing concentration and centralisation of capital became more prominent (Went 2005: 376). Underlying this was and is both the ‘deepening’ of commodification (more areas of individual societies were and are coming into the remit of the valorisation of capital) and the ‘stretching’ of commodification (more places in the world were and are being subject to the control of capital) (Lysandrou 2005). Capital has therefore become both ‘global’ and ‘complex’ in a very basic sense to the extent that trade, finance and production, through concentration and centralisation, has transformed more people around the globe into labour power and thereby increased and diversified the range of people separated from the means of production. On the other hand globalisation has enabled capital to flow from different branches of production in order to obtain the highest profits. Interlaced with this has been a whole gamut of financial practices. ICTs for example take regional financial trading up to a global level, while financial deregulation forces governments and industry to measure their economic performance in relation to financial markets. Global corporations assert their dominance by, amongst other things, investing in R&D and by promoting acquisitions, mergers and vertical integration (bringing together raw materials, production and marketing of the final product) (Palan and Abbott 1996: 22–25). Ditching many of the regulations of capital flows has meant that world foreign-exchange trading attained nearly $1,900 billion per day in 2004, up three times the level in 1989 (Glyn 2005: 24). A central force at the heart of these global economic ambitions is the spectre of the United States. Nixon’s suspension of Bretton Woods


accelerated the formation of a new global financial regime based on American dollars that had already been forming for some years previously (Konings 2008). Following this suspension, the so-called ‘Volcker shock’ in 1979, whereby the Federal Reserve encouraged interest rates to rise, stimulated global US capital. During this period labour rights also came under attack from an American administration bent on bringing about labour market flexibility and gaining a competitive advantage against Europe. Greater flexibility facilitated a restructuring of industry and enabled US companies to outsource aspects of their production to cheaper and smaller firms, thereby assisting the move towards mergers. In addition, venture capital ushered in new management techniques and new forms of technology. The result was to bring major advantages to American industry. ‘The US proportion of world production did not further decline but continued to account for around one-fourth of the total right into the twenty-first century’ (Panitch and Gindin 2003: 22). It was also after the early-1970s global economic crisis that more corporations in America were willing to engage economically in Europe and Japan; the so-called ‘Triad’. The readiness of US capitalists to move beyond providing loans to foreign governments materialised in the guise of foreign direct investment (FDI) in fixed overseas ventures such as the expansion and rebuilding of factories in other countries. By 2000 outward FDI stood at US$1 trillion (McNally 2006: 39–40; see also Harvey 2003a: 123 and Harvey 2003b). But these investments were often selectively targeted. In 1994 flows of capital to the developing world was estimated at $227.4 billion, a rise of 6.7 percent from 1993, yet much of this investment only made its way to a few developing countries (primarily Asian and Latin American countries) while 90 percent of multinational headquarters were based in the developed world (Went 2000: 44; see also Henwood 2005: 222–223; Koechlin 2006: 375). Cross-border mergers and acquisitions increased from $400 billion in 1992 to $1.5 trillion in 2000, but of all international mergers and acquisitions about 60 percent benefited US corporations (Gélinas 2003: 39) and this allowed the US economy (GDP) to grow at a higher rate from 1984 to 2004 than other G7 countries (Panitch and Gindin 2005: 114). Considering these figures it is perhaps little wonder that advocates of neoliberalism champion not the freeing up of trade but the liberalisation of capital (McNally 2006), especially the liberalisation of financial capital, which has been assisted by the policies of various global governance institutions such as NAFTA, International Monetary Fund (IMF),


European and Economic Monetary Union and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) (for specific examples see Fine 2001; Soederberg 2006; Wade 2007). All of these policies have helped to develop US economic interests across the world by pushing global financial development along an AngloAmerican neoliberal model. And it is financialisation that provides a clue as to how the US ensures that it stays on top of the global economic game and how the dollar remains the main currency in the world.1 Simply stated, the Federal Reserve has managed to pump in liquidity whenever an impeding economic upset has been on the horizon. In addition, US multinationals employ about ten million workers across the world and this, in turn, has encouraged short-term loans to flow into the US economy. Asian labour has moved to America for work and this has opened the way for central banks, particularly Japanese banks, to see the US economy as an attractive investment opportunity. Between 2003 to 2004 ‘35 trillion yen’s of liquidity’ was pushed by the Japanese on to the global market to purchase treasury bonds of the US (Panitch and Gindin 2005: 120; see also Murphy 2006: 48–49). High-priced US stocks have likewise been snapped up by foreign speculators – $84 billion of corporate equities in the fourth quarter of 2003 to be precise – that then went on to help finance the American account deficit during that period (Bello 2005: 103; see also Bello and Malig 2004: 91; Bromley 2003: 65). It is not inevitable however that the dollar will always play a regulating role for global financialisation. The East Asian crisis of 1997–1998 shows us for example that asset price bubbles and too much speculative investment in economies with high levels of dollar reserves can engender over-accumulation (see Nordhaug 2005). This provides an indication of how financialisation is a highly risky strategy to take to garner profits. But to begin to understand precisely why financialisation is a risky strategy we first look next at how financialisation conceals in more complex ways how labour is in fact the source of profits through its exploitation by capital. In other words, we firstly investigate how fetishism operates in capitalism.

1

The idea that new centres of accumulation are beginning to rival the US, such as China, must therefore be treated with caution. While it is true to say that China’s share of imports to Europe and America now outstrips that of Japan, and that in 2003 they enjoyed a trade surplus with the US of nearly $100 billion, it is equally true to say that Chinese exports have not yet reached the level made by Japan in the 1980s and 1990s (Glyn 2005: 18–20; see also Green 2002: 61).


The fetish of financial capital Fetishism is, of course, introduced by Marx in vol. 1 of Capital in order to describe the mystifying power of the commodity. The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers (Marx 1988: 164–165). The fetishism of commodities lies precisely in their inverted form. First, a commodity owner suffers alienation when their concrete labour which is used in making a commodity is subordinated to the ‘dead labour’ of the abstract socially necessary labour time of all concrete labour used in making the commodity. Second, this ‘objectification’ is presented as natural when the labourer exchanges their commodity for another (e.g. all commodity owners are seen as ‘equal’ in the marketplace). Finally, this inverted reality is distorted further in consciousness when ideas arise that suggest such alienated and inverted social relationships are indeed the correct structure of the world (Larrain 1983: 127). Zˇizˇek (1997) usefully develops these insights. For Zˇizˇek, in commodity fetishism it is fetishism itself that is displaced. Fetishised direct interpersonal relations between individuals based on the exchange of commodities, in which people only come into contact with one another for the necessity to exchange ‘things’ (i.e. commodities), are displaced onto the commodity itself. It is the commodity which is believed to naturally possess a power of exchange. Therefore, according to Zˇizˇek, we ‘misrecognise’ the underlying regulatory power of the commodity at work in capitalism. Let us look at money as an illustration. Money is a commodity in capitalism that acts as a universal mediator for the exchange of all other commodities. A person in their everyday life and how they interact with others knows that money is merely a sign that allows them a claim of what is socially produced. However, if a person does indeed make the assumption that money as a commodity is merely a transparent sign for everyday economic transactions, they will simultaneously misrecognise the important point that money cannot in fact merely be


reduced to that of being a transparent sign of interpersonal interaction. That is to say, money cannot be reduced to interpersonal interactions because money under capitalism in fact reproduces a more insidious underlying reality in an inverted form. This underlying reality is based on the abstract compulsion of the socially necessary labour time (SNLT) and the contradictions that accompany this (Zˇizˇek 1997: 100–101). And yet in their everyday actions and practices people do in fact act as if the commodity of money does indeed enable ceaseless events of commodity exchange to simply appear and transpire. In other words, people in their very actions seem to forget that money is not a transparent sign for exchange exactly because in their everyday life they use money and act as if money is a harmless and simple medium to exchange goods. By acting as if, we subsequently suspend our critical stance towards money and let money believe for us insofar that money through everyday exchanges takes the belief in these very acts of exchange out of our hands. This is why fetishism is displaced onto the commodity of money itself, thus ensuring that the commodity, in this case money, believes for us (Zˇizˇek 1997: 105; see also Zˇizˇek 2001). But the fetish alters its form when the commodity is transformed into capital, which is particularly noticeable in the case of financial capital. In its financial form capital appears to magically produce profits beyond that of labour and industrial capital. Think of interest on credit, for example, which is frequently theorised as one important aspect of financial capital. The presupposition of credit and interest is M-M1, namely money generating more money, or the simple circulation of capital. That is to say, credit refracts in its own way the abstract power of money within capitalism. Banks provide the most obvious illustration of this process at work. Bank capital is ‘interest-bearing capital…responsible for the fact that every definite and regular money revenue appears as interest on some capital, whether it arises from some capital or not’ (Marx 1977: 464). Banks are thus willing to give credit to other capitals by issuing value through a promise to pay plus interest (Lapavitsas and Dos Santos 2008: 26). By issuing credit, bank capital functions as both a means of payment and a means of financing capitalist accumulation, and functions as both a means of consumption and as a means of redirecting the flows of production to recalibrate profits, and functions as both a means of fixed rate repayments and finite debt and as a means of dematerialised extended paper credit and infinite debt (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 249). As interest-bearing capital, bank credit therefore appears to unify both the production and circulation of capital in one move by itself


without the need to accumulate surplus value through the exploitation of labour. In these circumstances: Capital appears as a mysterious and self-creating source of interest – the source of its own increase. The thing (money, commodity, value) is now capital even as a mere thing, and capital appears as a mere thing. The result of the entire process of reproduction appears as a property inherent in the thing itself…In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish, self-expanding value, money generating money, are brought out in their pure state and in this form it no longer bears the birth-marks of its origin. The social relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, money, to itself (Marx 1977: 392; emphasis in the original). Interest here appears as capital itself rather than as a function of capital. In reality interest is a portion of profit, and profit is itself a form of surplus value, while surplus value is of course pumped out from exploited labour. And yet by appearing as capital itself, interest essentially distorts the contradiction between capital and labour because interest appears as though it is ‘the typical product of capital’ (Marx 1977: 392). But interest is just one form of fetishism because, as Dimoulis and Milios (2004: 28–32) suggest, capitalism is a system in which capital splits and divides into various forms (e.g. interest, profit, and incomes). This further implies that the actual social determinates of capitalism (e.g. wage labour and surplus value) are displaced onto both the material determinants of ‘things’ (e.g. interest, profit, and incomes) and to the spectral effects of these ‘things’ (e.g. the dematarialised and demonetarised nature of credit as found in, say, the derivatives market or in the mortgage market). That is to say, social relations are transformed into an array of natural and spectral ‘things’. Seen in this way, it is possible to say that capital fetishism (as opposed to commodity fetishism) is associated with two types of ‘lack’. First, an individual suffers from limited social practice in the economy. This limited practice is internally related to: (i) the localised nature of finance as a means of payment that a person enjoys as opposed to the more powerful global nature of financial investment that capital enjoys; and (ii) the complex development of capitalism and the splits and divisions within various forms of capital that displace the social determinants of capital onto material (natural) ‘thingly’ spectral effects. Second, there is also a lack embedded within the Other of


capital, namely in its loss of materiality as global finance becomes increasingly detached from industrial production (see Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 249). Two types of lack are therefore present: one for the subject and one for the Other of capital. Capital fetishism, according to Zˇizˇek, subsequently occurs as both types of lack overlap with one another. ‘The fetish functions simultaneously as the representative of the Other’s inaccessible depth and as its exact opposite, as the stand-in for that which the Other itself lacks…’ (Zˇizˇek 1997: 103). The fetish, as a stand in for both types of lacks, effectively conceals a person’s experience of financial capital’s ineffectiveness to overcome its contradictory exploitative core. The double lack encompassed by capital fetishism orders desire but does so by creating what Deleuze and Guattari (1984) argue is a new ‘body without organs’ (BwO). To gain a sense as to what Deleuze and Guattari mean by the BwO it is worth, first, returning to Marx.

The Body without Organs According to Marx, capitalism expands across society through the separation of intellectual labour from manual labour. In turn, this separation is predicated on labour itself becoming a commodity and so presupposes that each worker can sell his or her labour power to whoever s/he wishes as well as being free from the ownership and control of capitalist mode of production. The fundamental social relation in capitalism is subsequently that which exists between capital and (wage) labour based on the accumulation of surplus value – the greater sum of value produced by labour than is paid out by capitalists in the form of wages and the purchase of new means of production (cf. Resnick and Wolff 1987). To constitute a capitalist social formation this class relationship must be in place. If only wage-labour is evident without the drive to procure surplus value then it cannot be said for certain that capitalist social relations are also present. Feudal social relations, for instance, have been known to harbour wage-labour without the drive or need to procure surplus value (Banaji 1977: 7–8). For a capitalist society to exist, then, there is an imperative for (wage) labour to create, produce and valorise capital, i.e. reproduce surplus value. The reproduction of surplus value is based on new ways of accumulating value through technological innovations. Competitive pressure forces capital to devote part of its profitable energies to enlarging the means of production, to invest in technological developments and improvements, so as to increase surplus value. Value is thereby split


into constant capital (technological improvements and denoted as c) and variable capital (investment in labour and denoted as v). By making these investments in what Marx terms as the ‘organic composition of capital’ (represented as c:v) capitalists hope to increase, or valorise, surplus value. As a result the ‘valorisation process rather than the technical process of production is the characteristic driving force of capitalism’ (Grossmann 1992: 80). Valorisation generates a dizzying array of production methods that produce huge swathes of products. Because of this it seems to be the case that capital, not labour, is the main productive force under capitalism. The basis for a fantasy is thus constructed in which capital rather than labour acts as if it implements its own self-movement (Smith 2006: 183). Valorisation of capital is thus the epitome of alienation in society. This much can be gleaned if we compare labour under capitalism with non-class forms of labour. In Capital, vol. 1, Marx characterises real labour, as opposed to class-based forms of labour, as a way of finding satisfaction in one’s desires by making connections with how others enjoy satisfying labour and desires. But this is part of Marx’s more broadly held belief that through labour one develops different changing desires through connections created between the natural and social worlds. Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature (Marx 1988: 283). Moreover, and as Marx notes elsewhere, only through non-alienated cooperation between all will a situation arise in which ‘the senses and enjoyment of other (people)…become my own appropriation’ (Marx 1981: 95; emphasis in the original). What Marx is alluding to in these and many other observations is a form of labour based on producing goods for their practical usefulness, for their use-values, through cooperative relationships with others and by working in tandem with the natural world. This is a form of labour that presupposes mutual interests, respect, recognition, friendship, and


so on, amongst workers (Sawchuk 2006: 604). In such a situation the skills required for labour are developed creativity by working with others and by enjoying enough space to meet work objectives by expressing one’s meaningful engagement with the world. Skills required for specific tasks have yet to become ‘saturated’ by becoming predictable in both procedure and outcome through highly defined and designed rules and tasks (Aneesh 2001: 372). ‘Unsaturated’ skills are, hence, those skills that permit creative play, freedom and discovery as unintended problems present themselves during work that require the evolvement of new tasks and skills to solve the problems at hand. Unsaturated skills also require a certain amount of intuitive and tacit behaviour to solve problems, to improvise solutions, to trust one’s senses in developing solutions. Senses, in this respect, work in parallel with the task at hand and tap into the potentialities of creative labour (Aneesh 2001: 374–375). What these observations imply is that unsaturated labour is based on a desire to understand how one is connected with both other selves and with the natural world and that this is a desire to understand connections as they appear to us and how connections are part of a nonobservable determinate substance, or essence, of potential to act in different ways. Hegel believes it is through labouring activity that desires arise because labour connects the natural and social worlds (Fraser 1998). But labour achieves connections in this manner through the ‘machines’ it creates for itself. Desire and machine thus represent a single entity: a ‘desiring-machine’. According to Deleuze and Guattari, desiring-machines refer not merely to technological devices but to any ‘organ’ which exhibits a desire to make connections with other objects. So, for example, a baby’s mouth has a desire to make a connection with his/her mother’s breast (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 5–6). Desiring-machines therefore maintain flows of connections between objects and as a result produce new connections and establish new machinic relationships. Production, as a constant evolving process, is as a result a product itself because it creates machinic states of being and becoming. Under capitalist social relations, however, desiring-production assumes an alienated form. After all, from the perspective of capital labour appears to have no ‘organs’ of its own and certainly has no desiring-production to speak of. Capital is only interested in quantitative calculations of surplus value irrespective of the qualitatively different forms of labour that produces surplus value. Furthermore, capital appropriates desiring-machines for its own needs and ensures that other machinic connections associated with labour along with their ‘organs’ are ‘attracted’ by and to capital. At


this point capital no longer merely produces connections between partial machines. Capital instead records and monitors these connections through money and ensures these connections remain in a creative synthetic flow with one another to such an extent that new releases of energy repeat the dominance of capital but in different innovative ways (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 12). Capital, because it operates in this manner, has a virtual potential unimaginable in previous social systems and gains this potential because it extinguishes connections outside of its own body. All social life is now appropriated by the ceaseless energy of the need to accumulate surplus value through the measurement of money. ‘Accumulate, accumulate! That is the Moses and the prophets!…Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production’ (Marx 1988: 742). Deleuze and Guattari term this form of production as a variant of the ‘body without organs’ (BwO) and it is a form of production integrally related to what we might term as the bourgeois public sphere in the workplace.

The Body without Organs and the bourgeois workplace public sphere The capitalist form of the BwO is noticeable in the capitalist labour process itself and therefore it is noticeable in each individual workplace. Within every capitalist workplace labour creates a use-value to be sold. But the use-value must also embody value, the SNLT taken to produce the use-value. ‘Here it is a question merely of the time needed to do the work, of the period, that is, during which the labour-power is usefully expended’ (Marx 1988: 302). Importantly, it is the very nature of the SNLT embedded in the capitalist labour process that sets in motion a number of recording mechanisms in a workplace in order to enhance the productive power of labour for capital. This is because SNLT places an external constraint on each workplace to ensure that labour expends the ‘average amount of exertion and the usual degree of intensity…’ (Marx 1988: 303) as required to produce a particular commodity. This being the case, value confronts a worker as an alien and autonomous power (Marx 1988: 1006) and compels the worker to adapt their own desires to the constraints and need to produce value. The qualitative distinct ‘organs’ of labour are thus the private property of a capitalist and confront the worker in this objectified and external manner. (T)he social configuration in which workers exist, and within which they function only as the particular organs of the total labour-power


that makes up the workshop as a whole, does not belong to them…On the contrary, it confronts them as a capitalist arrangement that is imposed on them (Marx 1988: 1052; emphasis in the original). There is a necessity to compel labour to work in this way because each individual worker is formally free under capitalism and thus retains the potential to organise against the interests of capital in proletarian public spheres. Workers have the potential to organise proletarian public spheres because they are brought together in a workplace and must establish cooperative working relationships with one another. Through cooperation, however, workers recognise that their cooperative activity confronts them externally ‘as a plan drawn up by the capitalist’ to extract surplus value (Marx 1988: 450). This is made all the more obvious by the number supervisors a capitalist employs to oversee and command the cooperative nature of workers in a particular workplace. Subsequently: As the number of the cooperating workers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and, necessarily, the pressure put on by capital to overcome this resistance (Marx 1988: 449). To alter proletarian desires in a direction favourable towards capitalist accumulation, capital is thus compelled to establish bourgeois public spheres in workplaces in which workers learn to internalise the constraints of valorisation through their ‘free’ individual labour input (Marx 1988: 1033). This learning process is conducted in the workplace bourgeois public sphere through such mechanisms such as bookkeeping which calculate commodity prices and determine the movement of capital in production. Indeed, the science of bookkeeping grew with the advancement of capitalism as a global system. By the sixteenth century labour in Europe was increasingly being calculated in terms of units of time (Hadden 1994: 61). It is therefore no coincidence, suggests Hadden, that modern science as a quantifiable method for exploring the natural world was also developing apace during this period in modern Europe and was itself entwined in: (i) the reduction of concrete labour to abstract measurements and the exchange of what appeared to be equivalents of units of labour; (ii) the calculation and record-keeping practices such the rise of accountancy associated with these early capitalist practices. Modern economic transactions signalled in other words the arrival of a new scientific and mathematical outlook that also changed the manner in which theoretical problems were posed and solved and vice versa.


Subsequently, as Bryer (2006: 564) observes, bookkeeping provides the means for individual capitalists to hold their workers to account to the circuits of capital. Accounting is concerned, first, with the assets of a workplace in the form of money that will be transformed into commodities, costs of use-values in production such as machinery, and commodities waiting to be sold (Bryer 2006: 565). Accounting therefore offers up the opportunity for a bourgeois public sphere to preserve the constraint of SNLT within a workplace in such a way that individual workers internalise this constraint within their own personality in the workplace in question. Accountants for example set budgets for management who then convey this information to workers. The bourgeois workplace public sphere gains its identity in the first instance by its ability to communicate accounting information to workers to ensure workers take responsibility for their part of the budgetary standards invoked by accounting and, ultimately, reproduce surplus value by doing so (Bryer 2006: 576; see also Marx 1988: 449). Integrated in accounting are other workplace rules and regulations that stipulate the ‘correct’ type of working behaviour and practice (Marx 1988: 549–550). In addition, the bourgeois public sphere repeats to workers that machines remain the superior moment in the production process so that workers internalise a sense that they are always on the point of being made ‘superfluous’ by machines unless they adapt themselves to the constraints of valorisation. ‘(C)apital proclaims this fact loudly and deliberately, as well as making use of it. It is the most powerful weapon in suppressing strikes, those periodic revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital’ (Marx 1988: 562). Indeed, it seems to be the case under this bourgeois regime that salvation for labour lies in devoting their lives to saving and to hard work. Intimately related to the accounting mechanisms of the bourgeois public sphere are thus a set of ‘bourgeois-personality’ traits: ‘saving’ and ‘hard work’. The proletariat are expected to internalise these personality traits and embark on a path of ‘self-renunciation’. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. (Marx 1981: 104; emphasis in the original) Utterances of self-renunciation help to establish an expressive image of the worker who saved, of the worker who worked damned hard to get


where they are, of the worker ‘who did not immediately consume his surplus but wisely invested it in production and thus gradually became a capitalist, owner of the means of production, able to give employment to other workers possessing nothing but their ability to work’ (Zˇizˇek 2002: 211). This expression is also embodied in the dualism that those who do not prosper under capitalism are feckless, irresponsible and lazy workers; workers who are happy to live in filth rather than be industrious. Through mechanisms such as accountancy, then, the workplace bourgeois public sphere acts as a way of regimenting the internal desires of workers to that of the need to produce value through the machines each worker operates. This desiring-production occurs through different forms of social production such as that related to financial capital (see Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 35). Indeed, it is the ability of social production to capture the flows associated with the BwO and make its own that, then, enables the non-productive moment, namely capital, to turn back on to desiring-production and inscribe and record itself therein rather than freeing up desiring-production to produce its own machinic connections. This is why the BwO can be said to stand between desiring-production and social production and, at the same time, reorganise the desires of labouring production. The role of social production is subsequently to initiate a ‘synthesis of disjunction’ in which capital fixes the desire for surplus value into the desire of productive labour itself so that the accumulation of surplus value appears to be the self-evident and correct path to follow. By fixing itself into desiring-production, and by circulating throughout the BwO, states of intensity are produced which are consummated further under the machinic social production of capital. Consummation operates by the attraction and repulsion brought into being by the disjunctive synthesis. Through this procedure one is both attracted and repulsed by machinic desire embodied in capital – by the potential of capital and the array of connections it makes globally and by the fixed nature of capital as it becomes attached to specific desiring-machines. This ‘self-obvious truth’ of the righteousness of capital manifests itself in a delirious ‘residual energy’ that emanates from attraction-repulsion and which assumes a type of enjoyment in recognising one’s desires as being inescapably tied to the generation of surplus value. This is a subject ‘born of the states it consumes and being reborn with each new state. “It’s me, so it’s mine…”’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 17). To this extent capitalist production thus invests in embodied (financial) desires and will try to ensure that even the desire of ‘the most disadvantaged creature’ is caught up in this investment (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 229).


The desiring fetish of financialisation In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari suggest that ‘(i)n a sense, it is the bank that controls the whole system and the investment of desire’ in capitalism (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 250). What Deleuze and Guattari have in mind here is the ability of banks to represent at one and the same time both the centralisation of lenders and the centralisation of borrowers (see de Brunhoff 1973: 87). Banks thus personify for Deleuze and Guattari the interior limit for the expansion of capital which is capital itself. Capital reproduces this limit by effectively displacing it through finance. Banks provide this finance (pointing towards its role as the centralisation of lenders) to investors (pointing towards its role as the centralisation of borrowers) and as a result discover new global outlets for profit (personification of the interior limit of capital). Financial capital, in other words, has the power to move across the globe and affect the lives of millions (Buchanan 2008: 109). This is in contrast to individuals who only have the power to use money as a localised means of payment (see also Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 249). Financial capital is thus capitalism at its most stupidly cynical because the reasons and justifications for the benefits of financial capitalism boils down to the belief that nobody is ‘robbed’ and that everybody profits from the opportunities envisaged by privatised wealth creation and by the belief that financial capital can displace the limits of capital. This BwO, this desire, is encapsulated by financial stupidity and cynicism. The wage earner’s desire, the capitalist’s desire, everything moves to the rhythm of one and the same desire, founded on the differential relation of flows having no assignable exterior limit, and where capitalism reproduces its immanent limits on an ever widening and more comprehensive scale (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 260; emphasis in the original). To overcome the double lack of capital fetish we allow the spectral effects and objects of finance to believe for us. After all, money denotes a social power of universal equivalents between supposedly free and equal ‘citizens’ (Marx 1988: 280). At the same time financial capital becomes ‘the excess of invisible spectrality (social relations dominated by the invisible spectre of Capital)’ (Zˇizˇek 1997: 103). We still use money, but money itself becomes less ‘knowable’, less visible, as it assumes diverse complex forms. Credit, for example, is a less visible form of money than everyday paper money used in a simple economic transaction, and credit itself divides into a number of increasingly


‘invisible’ forms that we come to understand through their effects (e.g. we come to know financial capital through its effects of the material object of a credit card). Financial capital, in turn, appears to be a more ‘decentred’, liquid and fragmented form of this fetishism. Global finance creates new spaces of commodification in civil society that, in turn, generate a sense of living in diverse realms of difference. Through money and credit we can satisfy, practice and freely create lifestyle consumption ‘project identities’ on an equal basis. Elements of the new economy assist this appearance because the likes of ICTs speed up consumption patterns and lend credence to the idea that we exist in a hyperreal postmodern world of contingency, chaos, and difference (Mooers 2001). In other words, financial capital taps into our desires of identity construction and helps us to invest our desires into these very same forms of identity construction even though these desires are realised through the body of finance. In other words, it is finance which covers over our lack and makes us feel active.2 Far from instigating a process of coding social relations, however, financial capital, like capitalism more generally, decodes life because not only does it measure everything by the same social substance – socially necessary labour time – it also mystifies its contradictory limits and its inability to meet social needs. Rather, what financial

2 The form of this fetish can become refracted to other public spheres operating in civil society. For example, the idea that capitalism is now constituted through a public sphere of knowledge networks brought together by new media encourages the belief that people can actively engage in public debate across time and space through the likes of internet chat forums. Through this type of debate we believe we are being active in society by contributing to social and political discussion whereas in reality the content of our contribution becomes one of many other contents swirling around in cyberspace; contents that never really make active connection with other contents nor address the underlying reality of financial capital. For this reason Dean (2005) argues we live in an age where messages have been disarticulated from their real context (the real context of financial global capitalism) so that they become instead part of a never ending circulating stream of information through new media outlets. The labour of producing messages is thus lost to its circulation. In other words, new media technology does the political work for us and relieves us of our obligation to be active in real contexts. Through new technology such as the internet we feel politically competent by our ability to contribute to internet forums and the like whereas on another level new media ‘functions as a fetish covering over our impotence and helping us understand ourselves as active’ (Dean 2005: 62). It is in this respect that this ‘interpassivity’ can be said to articulate fetishism to a more everyday level of social life (see also Zˇizˇek 1997: 111–113).


capital in its neoliberal phase unleashes to a greater extent than other forms of capital is an ‘axiomatic’ conviction that capitalism is selfevidently true. This is particularly the case when we think about how financial capital can travel the globe and become immanent to a wide variety of social domains and social relations. Capital, that is to say, operates by not specifying the exact nature of the social relations required in a domain for surplus value to transpire. Think, for example, of the different domains and social relations in which capital operates in the world today from the US, to Latin America, to Europe, through Africa, the Middle East and to Australia. It is this flexibility, namely the ability of capital to simultaneously adapt to the ‘functional’ requirements of a diverse range of social relations and domains, which explains the reason why capitalism does not require codes. After all, codes are relative and limited to particular domains and help to express and establish specific ways of doing things within those domains, while the capitalist axiomatic is not limited to any domain but can instead pass through different ‘models of realisation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 501–502). As such there is no need to code the axiomatic of capitalist desire because through finance it is self-evidently the case that all can creatively use finance to fashion their different desires. ‘The strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous one’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 271). The ‘economic’ public sphere has in recent years been reconstituted through the concretization of the financial capitalist axiomatic. By using the debt bequeathed by credit (see below) we can amass concrete ‘things’ along with the spectral images attached to ‘things’ and subsequently allow these ‘things’ to stand-in for that which the Other of finance and the new economy actually lacks, i.e. their inability to overcome the contradictions of capital and their failure to satisfy our real needs and desires. The public sphere thus becomes marked not by people but by the accumulation of ‘things’ and their images. Such is the nature of this fetish that the very inaccessibility of finance has led not to diminishing networks of knowledge but on the contrary to their escalation. Knowledge acts as if we can be compensated for the very loss that financialisation engenders: the more we know, the more we can overcome the inaccessibility of finance. The arguments for the new knowledge economy suggest as much. Think once again about brands and the new economy. Keller and Richey (2006) argue that companies in the knowledge economy need to brand themselves as a ‘personality’ and build on ‘personality traits’


to develop their respective corporate brand. Three personality traits are highlighted. First, the ‘heart’ of a company flags up the passionate and compassionate aspects employees show towards their customers and those aspects a company shows towards its employees. Second, the ‘mind’ of a company refers to the creative way in which the company serves its customers, along with the discipline followed in ensuring appropriate and consistent practices are adhered to. Finally, the ‘body’ of a company highlights the ability of a company to react promptly to market changes as well as acting in a collaborative manner both internally and externally (Keller and Richey 2006: 76). Yet, by invoking the metaphor of a ‘body’ for the brand of a company we also begin to comprehend how far the new economy has gone in furthering the fetish of capital. The brand as body is a stand-in, or the thingly substance, for what one lacks through finance and what finance itself lacks. The brand is seen to embody a creative and passionate personality, just as people do, and through their ‘personality brand’ a corporation can pretend to address ‘real people and their worries’ rather than engage in debates about the Real basis of the fetish of capital (Zˇizˇek 2008: 11–12; see also Chapter 6). The fetish reaches its pinnacle when some new economy theorists argue that business organisations can only be truly innovative if they adapt to more open, participative and motivational processes of work and working. Leadbeater cites the example of Google as a company whose positive identity is related to its open and collaborative work culture and thereby to its positive brand image (Leadbeater 2008: 109–114). Google, so Leadbeater argues, demonstrates how a successful company can at the same time give more control to their workers and thus bring into being an egalitarian workplace. We should also add that it is wrong to assume that financialisation and the images, etc., it produces are autonomous of the productive industrial basis of capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari are correct in this respect to say that the principle mechanism by which ‘capital becomes the full body’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 247), or when capital directly appropriates production and engages in self-valorisation, is the point at which industrial capital comes into being. For Deleuze and Guattari, therefore, financial capital and merchant capital can certainly form alliances with one another in order to retain a competitive advantage against other non-capitalist types of commodity trading, but it is only with industrial capital and the rise of capitalist machines that we note the arrival of ‘filiative’ capital: value in motion and the pumping out of surplus value ensuring that financial and merchant capital


become moments of capital. Financial capital in other words is dependent on the productive, industrial sector of capital (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 247). So, while it is true that financial capital has created investment opportunities across the globe it is nevertheless true to say that excessive speculative de-linking on its part from the industrial sector leads to financial bubbles that eventually burst. The most obvious and devastating example of this development in the last few years has been the subprime housing market crash in the US and its effects elsewhere in the world (on which see Beitel 2008; Blackburn 2008; Jobst 2007; Kregel 2008; Orlowski 2008; Turner 2008). More importantly, this also demonstrates that beneath the speculative mania of recent financial capital lies the stagnation of productive capital. Unable to find demand in the ‘normal’ net investments in the productive economy, explains Foster (2008), money has instead found its way into the financial sector. As a result the financial sector has massively expanded so that ‘capitalism in its monopoly-finance capital phase has become increasingly reliant on the ballooning of the creditdebt system in order to escape the worst aspects of stagnation’ (Foster 2008: 12). The conclusion is clear: stagnation in the productive basis of capitalism generates the irrational dominance of financialisation, an irrationality that many of the largest banks in the world have encouraged of late when the going was good. No wonder, then, that Deleuze and Guattari are clear that financial capitalism requires regulation by the state, or ‘anti-production’, for these very reasons (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 256). The next section expands on these arguments by looking more closely and critically at the empirical evidence that we are in the midst of a new economy.

The refracted fetish of the new economy Deleuze and Guattari argue that capital invests in machines only to the extent that those very same machines lead to a lowering of production costs. What determines the lowering of costs and the elevation of the rate of profit through machinic surplus value is not innovation itself, whose value is no more measurable than that of human surplus value. It is not even the profitability of the new technique considered in isolation, but its effect on the overall profitability of the firm in its relationships with the market and with commercial and financial capital (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 254).


Many who write about the ‘new economy’ tend to forget this important point and instead elevate the new economy to the point of determining all economic relations irrespective of whether new technology provides profitable outcomes for capital. This leads to some truly absurd statements, such as the following from two new economy management gurus. In our times, organisational innovation means creating conditions that enable the constant flow of creativity, not the churning out of yet another standardised product or service…We are either fast or forgotten. In the new economy, there are no speed limits. Agility rules. Speed is all. The need for renewal is something that applies to everyone; goes on everywhere; and is non-stop (Ridderstråle and Nordström 2008: 23). Recognising the absurdity of such claims, which we will do shortly, is not to deny the impact which the new economy has made. Elements of the new economy have indeed become widespread in everyday workplaces. The manufacturing base of major capitalist countries such as the US and the UK has declined as the service sector has increased and the use of IT has witnessed a parallel increase in a variety of sectors in the economy (Sweet and Meiksins 2008). However, it is to say that those theorists who claim there has been a qualitative transition towards a new economy contribute towards the fetishisation of financial capital because they fail to understand, as Deleuze and Guattari point out in the quote above, the wider system of how and where profits are generated. This much can be understood once we acknowledge that although the US is undoubtedly still strong in relation to other economies this been achieved by transferring income to financial institutions and rich households. The industrial sector of the US economy has subsequently lost out and relies ever more on the stock market to fund the market price of corporations (Duménil and Lévy 2002: 62). The ‘new economy’ is related to this development. In the 1980s venture capitalists attached themselves to the stock market, especially to the growing market in initial public offerings (IPO). This particular market helped to pump in capital to new, high technology industries, but also allowed venture capitalists an exit strategy should they require it. In the 1990s the Clinton administration encouraged the growing significance of financial capital by refusing to imposing margin requirements on stock market speculation. This in turn encouraged a debt-financed boom because many rich households were willing to spend more in the belief that the


value of stocks and shares had risen (Pollin 2003). Crucially, as Brenner (2002: 224) notes, venture capital and financial speculation facilitated the expansion of intangible assets such as R&D and reputation in the drive for competitive success as well as opening up irresponsible investment opportunities in the IT sector. Despite the flaws of such investments stocks in the new economy were nevertheless snapped up even though many of these companies had high equity prices. Individuals mistakenly believed high profits and dividends in these companies were there for the taking (Glyn 2006: 56). All of this activity created a fetish based on the idea that a ‘new’ economy was coming into being and formed through positive intangible attributes like knowledge, trust and partnerships between different individuals, groups and organisations (cf. Thrift 2000). One of the problems with the new economy fetish, then, is that it presents only a partial and one-sided analysis of underlying contradictory processes of contemporary global capitalism. In this respect it is useful to distinguish, as Krippner (2005: 175–176) does, between ‘activity-centred’ and ‘accumulation-centred’ approaches to exploring recent economic changes. Activity-centred approaches are those similar to that of Castells and other new economy theorists who examine recent economic changes in relation to tasks performed, employment levels, or goods and services produced (see Chapter 2). Accumulationcentred approaches on the other hand investigate the points where profits are generated in the economy. This is an important distinction to make because when the focus shifts to profit data of the dominant economy in the world, namely the US economy, then the impact of various aspects of the new economy on profits such as the service sector considerably diminishes while the impact of the financial sector considerably increases. Accumulation-centred approaches subsequently indicate that it is the financialisation of the US economy which is now of foremost importance. Indeed, as Krippner suggests through reviewing the relevant data, evidence for the increasing dominance of financialisation of the US economy is strong. Between 1950 and 2001, for instance, nonfinancial firms received a higher share of revenue from financial sources such as interest and dividends. As a result, ‘(n)on-financial corporations are beginning to resemble financial corporations…’ (Krippner 2005: 202) because many of these corporations off-load, or offshore, their internal investment risks to other sources so that they can concentrate on their ‘core competences’ such as financial mergers and acquisitions (which are deemed the most profitable) in order to raise


shareholder value. In the long-run this can lead to diminished funds for real investments and reduce the amount of time available for managers to plan for organisational changes (Milberg 2008; Orhangazi 2008). Other studies similarly report on the relatively low economic gains made from the new economy. For example, the GDP growth rate of the new economy in the US was 3.01 percent in the 1990s and this was below the more than 4 percent growth rates of the 1950s and 1960s and the 3.26 percent in the 1970s. By 2001 the growth rate of the new economy stalled at merely 1.2 percent. Productivity growth – the average value of goods and services produced per hour of labour – showed similar results in the US. During the 1990s productivity growth was at 1.81 percent, but fell behind productivity growth of 2.84 percent of the 1960s and 2.8 percent of the 1950s (Harms and Knapp 2003: 416). Even the new economy’s robust growth rate of 3.9 percent during 1995–2000, while stronger than the 1970s and 1980s, was still lower than the 1950s (4.15 percent) and 1960s (4.42 percent). And the increase in productivity after 2000 can be accounted for in one important respect by the willingness and ability of companies to cut costs, particularly costs in employment. Between 2000 and 2003 for instance three million jobs were lost in manufacturing (Glyn 2006: 135). In the UK the service sector has failed to keep pace with the decline in those export earnings associated with manufacturers being forced to shut up shop. UK financial institutions generated a healthy increase in net income (£27.5 billion in the third quarter of 2007) but this hardly touched the UK’s total deficit in goods (Turner 2008: 71). The fetishisation of the new economy, however, not only transforms us into cogs of the technologies and services engendered by the new economy (‘machinic enslavement’ as Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 506 term it) it also mystifies how the new economy is itself contradictory. For instance, more positive adherents to the new economy thesis argue that technological advances promote greater opportunities than previous methods of production (for an extreme version of this argument see Leadbeater 2008). Internet shopping is a clear and well-known illustration in this respect. Nonetheless, and this is a point missed in many accounts of the new economy, it is equally true to say that much e-commerce facilitated by the internet contributes towards pre-existing business knowledge rather than towards the creation of new business opportunities because selling products on the internet often merely extends mail-order catalogue shopping. Anyhow, the internet has not had the impact on productivity as is the case with older and earlier


technological developments in their time such as the combustion engine. And computer technology from the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. mainframes) are increasingly delivering diminishing returns (O’Hara 2003: 28). Technological innovation also requires added expenses like training and resources but these added costs can at least initially slow down productivity (Daniels 2004: 120–121; see also Dunn 2009: 233–241). Rapid investment opportunities in new economy initiatives can of course be made and it is certainly true to say that in the 1990s such investments cheapened the costs of IT goods, thus ensuring their widespread adoption in other sectors of the US economy. Employment soared in the IT sector as a result, particularly in the computer and data processing industries. Unfortunately a large number of these investments were made without taking account of how they would impact on real productive sector of the economy. The US telecommunications industry is a noteworthy illustration. ‘Techno-entrepreneurs’ were brought together with ‘capital-flush investors’ by financial intermediaries in Wall Street in the late 1990s (Bello 2006: 1355). Through new channels of money rather than by actual demand for the product millions of fibre-optic cables were laid throughout the US. In fact so many cables were laid that in 2000 the telecom industry’s market capitalisation (i.e. its share price multiplied by the number of shares in issue that overall represent the total value for their shares) had reached $2.7 trillion. Such an over-inflated figure led to a downturn and eventual loss in profits for many telecom firms like Global Crossing, Qwest and Worldcom (Bello 2006: 1355; see also Yates 2003: 14–22). More broadly, the flimsy nature of many new economy investments during the 1990s meant that as a consequence of the US recession (March 2001 to November 2001) employment in the American IT industry subsequently fell. This resulted in a total loss of 402,800 jobs between March 2001 and March 2004 (Srivastava and Theodore 2005: 317), with many companies compensating for declining profits by outsourcing parts of their services to low waged countries. To place these critical insights in more Marxist terms we can say that far from providing stability the new economy can in fact help to intensify the contradictions of capitalism. Technological innovation quickens the turnover of production cycles leading to a devaluation of previous investments before gains can be made on current investments. In these circumstances socially necessary labour time is lowered to generate more surplus profits. But this merely intensifies competition between firms as each tries to pass the burden of devaluation onto their competitors. At the same time the shifting of burden in this manner gener-


ates an overproduction of goods as competitive pressure builds (Smith 2000: 111–112). We should also keep in mind that technological progress does not necessarily imply that a qualitative shift to what is known as a new economy, knowledge economy, post-industrialism, and the like, has in fact taken place. While manufacturing has declined it is less clear that mass production has likewise disappeared. Even today, factories still maintain mass production techniques. United Parcel Service and Wal-Mart, both huge employers in the US and elsewhere, rely on semiskilled, unskilled and routine labour processes founded on conveyor belt systems similar in principle to Fordist assembly line factories. According to Sweet and Meiksins, ‘their successes are not built on unique products or customised services; rather they are based on the application of mass production techniques built with high technology and advanced accounting systems’ (Sweet and Meiksins 2008: 29; see also Daniels 2004: 120). In the case of specialist knowledge associated with high-tech industries, Huws (2003) argues that this is part of a wider division of labour in which the physical production of goods is progressively ciphered off to intensive, automated and semi-skilled manual labour while a smaller set of ‘knowledge workers’ design and create the technology for the goods produced. Even in the category of ‘knowledge workers’ there are many caught up in occupations like telesales, occupations which are often low paid, subject to surveillance, and highly managed (Huws 2003: 138–139). Conventional categories of social explanation such as that of exploitation, social class, and surplus value social categories that many new economy theorists believe offer increasingly diminishing returns in understanding global capitalism, still therefore retain powerful explanatory potential in examining trends in the global economy (see Chiang 2007; Fine, B. 2005; Kirsch and Mitchell 2004; Mythen 2005; Thompson 2003).

Intensified working practices and the bourgeois public sphere As we have seen, Deleuze and Guattari argue that desires have often been embedded in a process by which some technical machine is misleadingly posited as a cause of social production rather than the other way round. For example, nineteenth-century capitalism created industrial (technical) machines. However, these industrial machines were not the cause of capitalism anymore than they were the cause of Soviet communism in which they also existed. Instead, it was the


social production of capitalism (the valorisation of capital) that transformed industrial machines into forms of capital, and so it was social production that transformed industrial machines into desiring-machines of capital (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 34–35). Some new economy theorists often misinterpret cause and effect in this manner. Take the example of job insecurity – a theme prevalent in the work of critical new economy theorists such as Bauman, Beck, Castells and Sennett. There is a commonly held belief that the new economy has increased (caused) job insecurity. Doogan (2001) shows that declining trends in long-term UK employment in the 1990s (with long-term employment defined as workers who have been in current employment for ten years or more) was evident in the institutional restructuring of state industries such as mining. In various production, financial and public service industries, however, long-term employment actually increased, i.e. there was a decrease in job insecurity. Overall, the number of people in long-term employment in the UK rose from 7.4 million to 9.0 million between 1992 and 1999 (Doogan 2001: 424). Fevre (2007: 523) provides more recent evidence to make a similar case. He presents data for September 2006 that shows the number of non-permanent employees in the UK was 1,440,000 or 5.8 percent of total UK employment. This represents a decline from the high point of 1,787,000 non-permanent employees in 1997. If work insecurity does exist in the OECD countries then evidence points towards countries like Spain, Portugal and Poland, all of which have seen a rise in temporary work (Fevre 2007: 524). Doogan argues that those, albeit critical, new economy theorists who suggest job insecurity is now a permanent feature of society tend to work with sweeping generalisations about the changes in employment that have occurred (Doogan cites Castells as one such social theorist in this respect). Doogan concludes, as does Fevre, that such sweeping generalisations made by these very same social theorists, generalisations at variance with the evidence, inadvertently contribute in their own way to legitimising current government and business interests. They do so by helping to instil a sense of fear into people; a fear that unemployment looms for those not willing to be more ‘competitive’ in labour markets and not willing to take ‘responsibility’ by becoming ‘employable’ through (e.g.) learning new training skills. This fear is part of the fetish of the new economy and it is a fear underpinned by neoliberal orthodoxy that suggests competitive markets are an economic and social good in which we should participate to satisfy our desires.


The misrecognition of cause for effect and the fear it instils creates the basis for a bourgeois workplace public sphere which is intimately related to the fetish financial capital. In recent times external financial constraints have been brought to bear on the contemporary workplace and to the conveyance of (accounting) information to workers about work rate times, and so on. Derivatives are a case in point. Simply stated, derivatives are based on one trader selling ‘future’ contracts on goods to another trader, ensuring that the second trader has to buy the good in question at an agreed future date for a specified price. Nowadays derivatives have expanded massively and are built on shifting risk between seller to buyer (and back again) on the value of an underlying asset of a good. The underlying value of an asset ranges from a physical good to bonds, currency, and so on. While derivatives can be very risky investments they can also secure high financial rewards. For example, if a buyer agrees to purchase a good for a set price at a set time, the good in question might be worth more by the time the buyer actually pays for the good. Immediately, therefore, the buyer has made a profit. Naturally, the good might also decrease in value at the date when the buyer has to purchase the good leading to a loss. Derivatives are attractive for investors because investors do not have to actually purchase a physical good, such as acres of land, in order to make money on a physical good, say, wheat. Rather, they gamble their investment on the value of the underlying asset of the good (e.g. price fluctuations on the value of the underlying asset). In other words, ‘(y)ou can buy (or sell) exposure to movements in the value of wheat without having to buy (or sell) any wheat, movements in the value of the dollar without trading dollars themselves’ (Bryan and Rafferty 2007a: 136). Derivatives place an external financial constraint on those managing assets to ensure their assets make money for the market. Managers of assets such as goods and services are therefore conscious of the fact they need to try to shape the capacity of profit generation of their respective assets. In this respect managers have the power to restructure the relationship between labour productivity and wages through the intensification of working practices. In particular, some firms are willing to forego national wage bargaining so that they can draw up labour contracts in relation to profitability of assets both locally and globally (Bryan and Rafferty 2006: 277). Interestingly, Doogan claims that the often reported feelings of job insecurity by workers can in fact be explained at a more concrete level by the restructuring of work brought about by (neoliberal) market rationalisation, work intensification, mergers and acquisitions and the loss of certain workplace


benefits like employment-based health insurance coverage as corporations pursue shareholder value (see also Cutler and Waine 2001). This has been accompanied by other external neoliberal constraints such as a diminishing welfare state system, less trade union bargaining power, and the costs involved in losing one’s job. Doogan claims that it is factors such as these which help to explain feelings of employment insecurity more thoroughly than ‘the impact of technological change or the knowledge economy’ (Doogan 2001: 436). To explain these observations in more detail let us begin by looking at the issue of work intensification. Subjective measures in the UK report that during the period 1998–2004 there was an increase amongst the British workforce across a number of job quality indicators such as perception of job security and sense of achievement with work. Through a detailed analysis of these surveys Brown et al. (2007) discovered a link between the British workforce reporting high levels of job quality during this period with low levels of unemployment in the UK. In this respect one might argue that lower unemployment has placed a pressure on employers to ensure higher levels of job quality remain in place. At the same time Brown et al. note that two indicators of job satisfaction – ‘satisfaction with a sense of achievement’ and ‘good employment relations’ – are reported positively by many in low quality and low wage jobs. Brown et al. conclude that these workers ‘are not irrationally expressing satisfaction, but rather are making the most of a disadvantaged socioeconomic position, where the extrinsic and intrinsic rewards from available work are low’ (Brown et al. 2007: 966). Desires encapsulated in norms and expectations of these workers towards various indicators of job quality are thereby low compared to workers who receive high wages and who also reported comparable job satisfaction. In fact, low norms and expectations can be taken as an indication of dissatisfaction with jobs by those in low income occupations. Vidal (2007) discovered similar results from his qualitative study of nine firms said to be engaged in aspects of lean production in Wisconsin, USA. In the more positive accounts, lean production firms are often associated with the knowledge economy and with empowerment programmes seeking to enhance the decision-making capabilities of workers with management. However, Vidal found that the workers he interviewed in these employment sectors highlighted a variety of reasons why they gained job satisfaction. But Vidal also discovered that while most workers conveyed a sense of satisfaction in their jobs, further questioning by him revealed levels of dissatisfaction amongst these very same workers. Vidal concludes that in these cases workers adapt to their given job contexts


‘creating situations in which they are relatively comfortable and satisfied’ (Vidal 2007: 275; emphasis in the original), thus generating consent for workplace relations with management. In his detailed examination of job quality, Green (2006: 69–77) notes that intensification also has a strong relationship to new technologies introduced into workplaces. For example, new technologies enhance the measurement of the individual outputs of workers, ensuring that employers can draw up contracts informed by those outputs. Moreover, new technologies often contribute towards the establishment of flexible work practices in the workplace – such as the ability of a workplace to alter production lines to cater for changing demand – as well as ensuring the multiskilling of a workforce so that workers can carry out a number of tasks. Both practices cut down on idle time at work and increase the amount of time an employee works per minute of the working day (see also Basso 2003; Webb 2004). These studies suggest that contemporary work practices have managed to communicate to workers in the workplace public sphere the message that increased intensification is positive and/or a fact of life in a competitive global economy. They also indicate that intensification has re-orientated workplace desires in a manner favourable to neoliberal capitalism. To explore this point let us momentarily consider mediated work practices. This is justified because intensification is related to mediated work practices although not in a way that simply increases temporary work or insecure jobs. A notable class of mediated work practices is the temporary staffing industry (TSI) which operates in the contingent economy. Once used by employers as a ‘stopgap-staffing provider’ to cover short-term absences of employees, the TSI has morphed into a more ‘systematic and continuous function’ in the US economy of late, ‘mediating between companies’ personnel offices and their preferred labour supplies across an increasingly broad array of industries and occupations’ (Peck and Theodore 2007: 171). In some sectors the TSI has helped to diminish the conditions of temporary work in the US in respect to employment benefits, career advancements, union protection, and protection from workplace discipline. In the UK the TSI has also diversified its operations by entering into new labour markets such as nursing, education and professional occupations. In addition, the TSI is increasingly entering into ‘partnerships’ with public and private bodies in the UK to deliver the government’s New Deal programmes in order to position workers in particular industries and contribute to the ‘employability’ of labour (Ward 2005: 226). Yet, Doogan (2009: 153) claims that the evidence of loss of benefits for workers in the US contingent economy is ambiguous. Some contingent


occupations like agency staff and direct hire temporaries receive lower hourly earnings than permanent staff, while self-employed and independent contractors receive higher hourly earnings than noncontingent workers. In respect to the UK, the picture is equally as ambiguous. While temporary work declined from 1997 onwards, and while the relative pay of fixed-term employees has improved, it is still the case that the employment conditions of agency workers fall outside of government legislation designed to improve the working conditions of temporary employment (Green 2008). However, another way of looking at the growing predominance of the TSI into some US and UK labour markets is to say that it represents an indicator of the intensification of work by communicating and thereby normalising a certain loss of control and benefits in some realms of the contemporary workplace in both countries. In other words, the rise and influence of the TSI signifies that the increasing power of mediated employment go beyond ‘simple headcounts of temporaries’ (Peck and Theodore 2007: 173). In other words, the significance of the TSI is not that it simply contributes towards (e.g.) long-term unemployment or insecure jobs. Rather, the importance of the TSI lies in helping to foster a neoliberal culture in the job market by making organisations think in more market-orientated ways when it comes to employment relations. In the UK, for example, some evidence suggests that far from workers in new economy sectors being subject to agency labour, some of the most enduring use of agency labour have occurred in the public sector. That is to say, it is professions such as those found in the National Health Service, teaching, or local authorities that still experience the use of relatively high levels of agency work (Forde and Slater 2005). What this suggests is that agency work contributes in its own way towards the establishment of a neoliberal culture in the public sector by (e.g.) encouraging employers in that sector to think of agency workers as simply being commodities who can be ordered to suit employer requirements, much like any other commodity in the marketplace (Hoque et al. 2008). The TSI can also be conceived as one practice amongst many others that assists in re-focusing the employment desires of workers by persuading them to think of their own individual employment benefits and welfare needs along neoliberal lines. This is encouraged by publicly communicating to workers that they need to cater for their own welfare needs by (e.g.) providing their own pension plans, child-benefit arrangements, human capital investment, work-life balance, and so on (see Fleetwood 2007; McGrath and Keister 2008). As a result, employees must ideally increasingly gain confidence in their individual skills at


anticipating market fluctuations as well of course relying to an ever greater degree on the luck and timing of market movements on such welfare investments (Langley 2007: 80–81). This represents a move to generate workers who see knowledge as an asset to invest in so that they make themselves employable in the marketplace (Moore 2006: 456). Contributing in their own way towards the normalisation of a ‘coupon pool capitalism’, the TSI is thus a gauge on a wider move in the US and UK to bring substantial pressure to bear on households to invest in their own future through securities managed by (e.g.) pension funds or insurance companies or by households themselves (Froud et al. 2002: 127). In the next chapter we will see how this neoliberal financial culture is communicated to workers in the workplace public sphere through an ideal-typical fetish of competence. For now, however, it is important to note that new economy theorists also recognise some of the negative effects of contemporary work practices, but they frequently do so by abstracting away from the social production of desiring-machines and instead develop ideas congruent with the fetish of the new economy. Leadbeater (2008), one of the more positive cheerleaders for the new economy, acknowledges that the likes of ICTs might reinforce different sorts of inequalities within and between societies (Leadbeater 2008: 193). Nevertheless his optimistic solution to combat these inequalities is to argue that societies require more of the new economy, not less, because it encourages the disadvantaged to collaborate in self-help programmes. For example, the web and internet apparently lowers the cost of research and innovation for developing countries and allows people to participate in adapting ideas and develop their own skills in doing so (Leadbeater 2008: 2000). But Leadbeater’s arguments fly in the face of evidence and again confuse cause with effect. For instance, intensification of work has been complemented by an unremarkable change in wage levels under the period of the supposed rise and dominance of the new economy. While hourly wages grew by 0.5 percent from 1992–2000 in the US, which is more than either the 1970s or 1980s, they still did not exceed wage growth rates of 2.1 percent (1950–1953), 1.8 percent (1955–1957) and 1.9 percent (1959–1973) (Harms and Knapp 2003: 420 and 421; see also Kettell 2006: 42). Moreover, the greatest increase in real wages came about in 1997–1999, but this rise was tied in with the growth of the US stock market bubble and so was itself highly unstable (Pollin 2003: 44). In the case of the UK, London has large income differentials in relation to people working within the knowledge economy; so much


so that it is now more polarised than the US while the knowledge economy in the UK has fuelled greater income inequality than the manufacturing economy (see Hudson 2006). Furthermore, knowledge industries are complex and multifaceted businesses. In the case of the UK, for example, it is certainly true that cities might benefit from an increase in ‘routine…outsourced financial, administrative, or consumer-directed functions’ (Wood 2006: 356). But it is equally true to say that in the UK only a few dominant cities enjoy net interregional trade through knowledge industries, and even then just one city, namely London, dominates international knowledge business exchange (Wood 2006: 356). In other words, knowledge industries often simply reinforce uneven development between cities. Overall, the general impression from the evidence presented so far would seem to point towards a greater allocation of national income being eaten away by profits and a lower allocation being enjoyed by labour. The claim that the new economy has helped to bring about a higher level of labour exploitation in a conventional Marxist sense than at other times since 1945 is thus a plausible one (Smith 2000: 61). Give this, it is little wonder that the new economy has failed to make the same sort of impact in developing countries as it has in the more dominant ones. One must therefore remain cautious as to the impact of intangible software and smart machines in stimulating global communication between users in these geographical locations. Internet use, for example, is structured through global inequalities associated with uneven capitalist development. In 2001 only 6 percent of the world’s population resided in the US and yet it had nearly 41 percent of its population online. Africa on the other hand had about 10 percent of the world’s population but only 1 percent was online (Murdock and Golding 2001: 123). Cost of internet use also differs according to the density of an internet population. Many developing countries have a reduced telecommunications infrastructure compared to the developed world. And less internet access substantially pushes up the cost of gaining online access (see Khiabany 2003 for further discussion of this and other internet inequalities). For these reasons old style methods of exploitation of drawing on sweatshop labour and mass production still dominate many developing countries rather than anything resembling a new economy (Cloud 2001). Indeed, there is more truth to Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that financial capital off-loads (or ‘deterritorialises’) the negative consequences of accumulation to the developing world than the claim that the new economy can overcome inequalities if only it could unburden itself from some poor economic and political decision-making.


More critical new economy theorists are also attuned to the inequalities brought about by high-tech industry. Castells (2000) notably describes the plight of those left out of the knowledge economy and who are forced instead to eke out a living in low paid and insecure occupations such as cleaning, catering, and servicing the informational rich. In turn, Castells argues that a new elite of managerial professionals has arisen based primarily in bureaucratically flattened out organisations and whose prospects are geared towards being risk takers in a knowledge economy. Above all else, observes Castells, the old class system has been eclipsed by a new economy dominated by no overall capitalist class but, rather, by networks of elite professionals and supported by the informational labour of those working in knowledge-based industries (Castells 2000: Chapter 4). Halcli and Webster (2000) point out, however, that Castells forces complex social class categories into rather simplistic homogenous social categories like informational labour. Moreover, Halcli and Webster correctly argue that far from the capitalist class being displaced into ‘faceless’ networks of a managerial professional elite as Castells insists, it is truer to say that the capitalist class is still highly visible but has developed into new forms associated with (e.g.) ‘intertwined shareholdings’ (Halcli and Webster 2000: 75). But if the evidence as to economic dominance of the new economy is questionable, the fetish of the new economy is not in doubt. In the Conclusion we look in more detail at the regulation of financialisation and then move on to consider the underlying contradictions of financialisation and how these very same contradictions produce problems and dilemmas for the new economy.

Conclusion: Debt and financial desires This chapter has shown how financialisation has impressed itself into the very desires of labour through the workplace bourgeois public sphere. We have also noted how neoliberal financial capital operates by intensifying labour and by diminishing the rights of workers to procure a higher average output per worker whilst at the same time keeping wages stagnant. It is important to remember, therefore, that the rise of financialisation and the new economy has been initiated through an attack on labour rights. Evidence suggests that since 1979 some of the industrial labour force slipped into low waged service work while governments have reduced and restricted the bargaining power of trade unions, albeit more so in the UK and US than in other western European countries (Glyn 2006: 126–127). High levels of profit are


thereby made at the expense of relatively low wage levels for many workers. Yet, during 2004 to 2005 consumer spending in the US increased even though there was repressed wage growth. In 2005 for example consumer spending improved by 3.5 percent while disposable personal income rose by only 1.4 percent (Kotz 2008b: 183). One explanation for this figure – higher levels of consumer spending compared to lower levels of disposable income – lies with a rise in household debt. Patterns of consumption are a case in point. Over the last 30 years or so banks have refocused their energies towards tapping into the retail market and the household consumption of consumer goods and more recently getting involved in proprietary trading, i.e., trading with its own money in the likes stocks, bonds, options to generate profits (Erturk and Solari 2007: 383). These practices have facilitated easy money entering the consumer market and have led to increasing purchase assets like mortgages. These financial measures have also meant individuals are saving less and more of their disposable income is being spent on credit or mortgage repayments. In the US for example savings grew to 10.5 percent of disposable income from 1930 to 1975, but by 2001 they had decreased to 1.4 percent (Migone 2007: 191). In the UK figures for household debt are equally startling. First-time buyers in the housing market can expect initial mortgage repayments to be at their highest relative to wages since 1991 (Elliott and Atkinson 2007: 66). House price inflation has encouraged people to take on more debt in other related ways. When home owners feel confident with rising equity they are more prepared to engage in mortgage equity withdrawal such as remortgaging their homes to gain an expendable quick lump sum. Evidence suggests that this has occurred in the UK housing market whereby an expanding amount of fixed assets contained in housing have leaked out, or ‘dematerialised’, through mortgage equity withdrawal (Smith and Searle 2008). The willingness take on debt in this manner can become a problem if the housing market starts to buckle under the pressure of financialisation – as is now the case. But the housing boom and rise of the subprime market is just one of a number of debt-ridden marketplaces initiated by financialisation, another notable case being the explosion of the credit card industry (see Montgomerie 2006: 313). The ruthless competition associated with the credit card industry, competition that operates along similar lines to the subprime market, seeps into civil society where individuals are offered lucrative deals to get into debt. It is now apparent with the problems in the global economy, debt and speculation via fiancialisation has become a real concern for the


US. Standing at almost three and a half times the nation’s GDP in 2005, US debt was almost $44 trillion GDP for the whole world in the same year (Magdoff 2006: 8). Taken as a whole, debt in the US is comprised of that money owed by households, government, non-financial businesses and financial institutions. During the period 1997 to 2005: …financial business debt grew even more as a percentage of the GDP, exploding from 66 percent to over 100 percent of the GDP… Household debt also shot up, from 67 to 92 percent of the GDP (Magdoff 2006: 8). Magdoff goes on to cite a report from the Wall Street Journal which suggests that debt accrued by non-financial businesses rose to $5.5 trillion in the first quarter of 2006 (see also Crotty 2003: 275). As for financial institutions their debt now accounts for almost one third of the total of US debt, up from 10 percent in the early 1970s (Magdoff 2006). But the debt explosion has a negative impact on the economy more generally. When money is directly converted into more money through financial debt in order to engage in speculative activity then investment is taken away from production and from the point where people can be employed. Instead money is channelled into more speculation to make quick profits. This encourages a government to borrow even more money to try and maintain by itself the productive sector, which in turn leads to more debt. As Bello notes of the US: ‘By 2003, there was a current account deficit of about $500 billion that needed to be financed by foreign capital inflows and an escalating foreign debt totalling some $7.1 trillion’ (Bello 2005: 81). But the debt accrued by private households is part of a wider system of debt embedded within the processes of financialisation itself. The freeing up of credit in the 1980s furthered the cause of a series of hostile corporate takeovers and led to an increase in borrowing and debt by the companies purchased in order to finance restructuring of their key assets. Debt was thought of as good business by financial markets because in principle it would act as a pressure on managers to engage in a number of cost-cutting exercises within the takeover company and thereby raise profits. To achieve this it was also thought to be good business if management was given ‘incentives’ in the guise of stock options to ensure high performance. Management shareholder value – managers who would share in the value of a company after it had been subject to restructuring – subsequently grew in importance (Glyn 2006: 58; see also Palley 2007). But one contradictory effect of this has been the


establishment of overpaid and powerful directors and CEOs who gain at the expense of ordinary shareholders. Indeed, directors and CEOs have been known to manipulate shareholder value and retain their power to distribute corporate profits (Brennan 2008). And somewhat ironically, many companies are worse off after the intervention of, say, a private equity fund, because debt has been accrued and the company eventually stripped of its assets (Froud and Williams 2007). Debt has thus driven forward accumulation but has also exacerbated financial problems (Nesvetailova 2005: 405–406). Unfortunately the desire of debt demonstrates the extent to which financialisation has become firmly entrenched in the global economy. As Gowan (2009: 7–8) indicates, since the 1980s Wall Street has operated through a new financial system based on economic practices such as credit derivatives, money markets that trade in asset bubbles, and the shadow banking system. Such has been the institutionalisation of these sort of financial practices, and such has been the internalisation of these financial practices into our everyday desires, that solutions to the malaise in financial capital has been sought in the very forms of financialisation themselves. To give one illustration, on 23 September 2008 the then US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asked Congress for a staggering $700 billion to avert what he suggested was the potential breakdown of the US economy due to bad debts. If granted Paulson planned to use this money to buy back the ‘toxic’ loans which banks had given to ‘bad’ debtors. It was envisaged that this would then transform illiquid assets into liquid assets and free up once again the flow of global credit. The problem with this scenario, however, is that it conceived the financial crisis in terms of illiquidity rather than insolvency. What the US government should have been seeking at a minimum was a strategy that forced creditors to take responsibility and losses on bad debt (Wolf 2008). Yet the Paulson plan effectively sought to rescue the short-term and bad decision-making practices of creditors such as banks. By buying up toxic assets above what they are worth, the Paulson plan aimed to get the American taxpayer to finance an open ended bailout process for reckless investors. Indeed, as Hudson (2008) observes, the Paulson plan could very well have ended up reproducing the worst vestiges of financialisation. After all, Paulson ordered the newly nationalised Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac banks to inflate real estate prices in the hope that new buyers will be attracted once more to this market. But this is in contradiction with surveys which suggested that the US real estate market is forecast to drop another 20 to 30 percent. On 29 September 2008 Congress turned down Paulson’s request.


At the time of writing it is too early to see what impact Barack Obama’s new government will make to the global economy. But the current problems of financial capital do not necessarily represent an absolute crisis for these financial networks. Indeed, as the thinking that went into the Paulson Plan indicates it could very well signal the empowerment of financial intermediaries through government bailouts (Konings and Panitch 2008: 24–25). In the next chapter we therefore extend our critical discussion of financialisation and the new economy. We will see that the fetish of the new economy has also been responsible for creating a bourgeois public sphere around the idea of ‘competence’. More specifically, we will examine how the competent public sphere has constructed a number of expressive ‘fantasies’ associated with what it means to be an ‘incompetent’ economic agent. Such fantasies have thus taken shape in order to explain in advance why one lacks ‘competent’ character traits. In effect, these fantasies mediate dialogue in the ‘economic public sphere’, conceal to an even greater degree the underlying contradictory reality of financialisation, and create workplace ‘personality zones’ congruent with maintaining the dialogic power of ‘competence’ to help regulate and steer neoliberal capitalism. However, later chapters will also show that what we will term as the ‘multiaccentual’ nature of ‘competence’ opens up a space for the proletarian public sphere to challenge the bourgeois form of the competent public sphere. That is to say, the struggle over the public sphere in neoliberal capitalism is at the same time the struggle over ‘competence’.

4 The Competent Public Sphere of the New Economy

Introduction: Knowledge management and competence One dominant fantasy of the new economy suggests that all can enjoy the benefits of capitalism only if workers and management are prepared to work in ‘teams’ pooling their knowledge together. Knowledge management (KM) is representative of this new managerial thinking which aims to directly address real workers and their worries. KM is based on the belief that in a competitive global market in which different firms contend with one another for various stores of knowledge then the management of a firm’s own knowledge and IT base becomes a key component in maintaining competitive advantage. Knowledge within a firm exists at an individual or collective level and can be articulated explicitly between key players or tacitly embraced. ‘Competence’ is part of this agenda because, as we saw in Chapter 1, it defines those necessary skills, qualifications, capabilities and knowledge which are required to undertake a specific task efficiently within an organisation as is required by the task in question. Competence therefore encourages employees and management to work together in a harmonious unity. Indeed, advocates argue that KM works best when entrenched in a number of social relationships and evolving public spheres, or what are also sometimes known as ‘communities of practice’, within firms. The idea is to create ‘practice- and person-based networks’ within a firm that cut across normal workplace boundaries to allow different individuals, groups and practices with various ‘competencies’ to come together to solve problems as they arise. This is said to be a flexible approach to work insofar that it relies not only on formal functional structures of a firm but also on informal contacts mediated by the knowledge that individuals and groups bring to solving a problem. In many situations these 68

The Competent Public Sphere of the New Economy 69

‘communities of practice’ are based on intangible resources such as the ‘shared passion’ for solving a problem and the willingness to share experiences and knowledge (Pan and Leidner 2003: 72–73). Problems are therefore solved in a firm through differential learning experiences (see Williamson 1999). More recently, some have argued that KM strategies need to focus on generating new knowledge as well as on sharing knowledge. This perspective looks to creating, overseeing and managing knowledge as a complex and chaotic flow within and between firms. It is as much about narratives surrounding knowledge, and understanding the uncertainties and risks pertaining to knowledge, as it is about sharing and transferring knowledge within communities in a firm (Hong and Ståhle 2005). In all of these instances KM aims to draw out the adequate ‘competences’ of internal and external social relationships in the everyday routines of a firm through its public spheres. The fantasy which is subsequently attached to the fetish of KM is thus one which suggests that an enjoyable working life is achievable through the public projection of one’s unique intangible and tangible character traits in team work. This is why the Other of our fantasy in this respect is that of ‘competence’. KM conjoins us to become ‘competent’ because by being measured as being ‘competent’ we gain a certain relief to discover that we are now engaged in enjoyable and fulfilling work. Of course, in our daily working lives in which we directly experience (e.g.) the stress and strain of longer working hours associated with financialisation (see Chapter 3), we know that this is not ‘how things really seem’ (Zˇizˇek 2004: 94); we know in other words that we are not in fact bathing in the utopia of enjoyable work. Nevertheless, by allowing ‘competence’ to believe for us that we are indeed engaged in enjoyable work we act as though we do not know ‘how things really seem’. In reality however we can never be competent enough, and the desire to be fully competent escapes us. After all, and as we will see in this chapter, for all of the rhetoric which stipulates that competence is only realisable in public spheres, or communities of practice, competence is in actual fact an inherently individualistic and competitive endeavour for people to pursue under financialisation. Subsequently, a person has to manage and rationalise their ‘lack’ of being fully competent. Rationalisation begins when the fantasy of competence itself produces for example a sense of other workers being too competent, and thereby being selfish and greedy because they do not share competence, or when competence produces a sense of workers as being too lazy, i.e. incompetent, and thereby holding back oneself from realising competence. At the end of the day, if one was to become fully competent, that is if one realised


their fantasy of competence, the result would be traumatic because one could no longer adequately compete in communities of practice in order to ‘become competence’ (cf. Zˇizˇek 2004: 95). Trauma is however kept in check whenever a person thinks that by striving for competence they are enjoying their work even if they are aware that this is not really the case. In this chapter we examine in depth the form and content of the competent workplace public spheres. This will be achieved by concentrating mainly on how competence is presented in an ideal-typical formation through managerial ideas and thinking. We will see that dialogue around ‘competence’ has become a key utterance in establishing a public sphere in the contemporary workplace and subsequently in establishing fantasies of the new economy in daily working lives. More critically, we will also note that this ideal-typical formation articulates a set of fantasies which attempt to reorder the desires of labour. These fantasies seek to merge competence within the very personality traits of labour so that workers identify their embodied desires with the need to be competent. However, just as the new economy is internally mediated through the contradictory limits of financialisation so is it the case that the ‘competent personality’ is internally mediated by these very same financial contradictions, albeit in its own unique manner. This being the case, the utopian idea that labour and capital might work harmoniously together in workplace public spheres is a myth. To see why this is the case the next section begins to analyse competence in more detail.

Contingency and the competent personality While competence defines in advance the ideal personality traits of motivated employees, it also grants workers some autonomy about how exactly they should internalise traits of competence. Vital to creating competent personalities in the workplace is the subsequent harnessing of individual (intangible) emotional traits in dealing with everyday organisational functions and pressures. Over the years many employers have sought to encourage their employees to competently express their emotions in the workplace to produce positive synergies between the organisation in question and its workforce. One term that management gurus and theorists use to describe this affectual type of labour is ‘emotional intelligence’ (EI). At its simplest EI focuses on the ‘character’ of individual workers by encouraging employees to channel their emotional potentials in order to harness their productive potential


in the workplace. Five elements are particularly important in this respect: self-awareness, motivation, self-regulation, empathy, and adeptness in relationships (Goleman 1998: 24). A ‘competent’ worker is thus one who can translate these various potentials into on-the-job capabilities. For instance, being good at serving customers is an emotional competence based on empathy. Likewise, trustworthiness is a competence based on self-regulation, or handling impulses and emotions well. Both customer service and trustworthiness are competencies that can make people outstanding in their work (Goleman 1998: 25). In this ideal state the main responsibility in creating and maintaining emotional competence lies in the lap of individual workers. This is not to say that management has no role to play here in mobilising various types of competences. But, in respect to EI, managers ideally seek to channel individual emotional traits of their employees by working through conflicts between an individual’s emotional world, including their private lives, and their place of work (Hughes 2005). This is also noticeable in respect to contractual relationships between employers and employees. Over time it has been recognised by many human resource theorists and practitioners that a ‘psychological contract’ exists in the workplace based on the mutual obligation that employees believe exists between themselves and their employee. Such obligations might include the expectation that employers will not violate factors like job security and career development, a violation that would lead to a sense of injustice on the part of employees (Cullinane and Dundon 2006). To channel these emotional and intangible personality traits in the direction of competence, various managerial initiatives have been launched. ‘Project management’ is one such initiative and relates to setting out guidelines on how to plan, execute, monitor and close projects. Knowledge is a key component of project management and it encompasses quality management, time management, human resource management, risk management, and integration management. In these different types of management, knowledge is an essential requirement because to successfully undertake projects managers need to engage in (e.g.) creative thinking, effective management, conflict management, leadership, and demonstrating enthusiasm to the rest of the project team. According to those who favour project management, its advantages lie in its ability to use publicly-tested knowledge that has been proven to work. This is a ‘professional’ type of knowledge that seeks to establish a


‘community’ between different ‘stakeholders’ around a project both inside and outside of a company (on ‘stakeholders’ see Chapter 5). Incompetent knowledge is rejected in preference of a common language of what project management entails. In saying this, it is also acknowledged that there is no universal language of project management that encapsulates the contingency of each and every concrete project (Hodgson and Cicmil 2007). Acting as an in-built flexibility embedded in the lexicon of project management, contingency leaves gaps in the language of an ideal project so as to allow practitioners to adapt the main principles of project management to meet the demands of a concrete project. The need to galvanise intangible traits like EI and to channel these into definable concrete management projects often results in management blurring the distinction between home and work lives. One example will suffice to illustrate this point. Some employers blur the work/ life boundary by organising regular ‘fun’ days out for employees or by transforming the workplace into a ‘fun’ environment. Fleming (2005) found this was the case in his study of a call centre in Australia. The company’s motivation drive for its employees was summarised in an employment slogan adopted, namely the 3Fs: Focus, Fun and Fulfilment. To embody the 3Fs the company transformed, amongst other things, the workplace environment into a school-like domain. Walls were painted yellow and red, pillars painted purple, and carpets were a vibrant blue. These symbols of ‘fun’ and ‘enjoyment’ were embodied in one space by some building blocks that spelt the name of a mobile phone company. Near these building blocks were figures from the children’s television programme Sesame Street. The company also invoked dialogue around the family (e.g. working for the company was like being part of a family) and management would at times try to imbue the working environment with a ‘party’ atmosphere during particular events. One motivation session took the form of a relay race in a park, which included drinking beer at the end of the race (Fleming 2005: 294). Management team leaders are an integral element in facilitating competence through a ‘fun’ environment. They have the potential to create a ‘family’ environment in the workplace through which competencies can flourish through an agreed upon consensus with all team members. Again, as the EI guru Goleman suggests: The designated leader is something like a parent in a family. Like a parent, leaders have to be sure that their actions are perceived by everyone on the team as fair, and, like a parent, a good team leader will look out for the team members, defending them – for example,


when their reputation comes under attack – in the organization at large and providing for them by getting the practical support they need, in budgets, personnel, or time (Goleman 1998: 223). This is similar to a total ‘quality management approach’ (TQM), especially since the latter similarly champions teamwork operating throughout an organisation. By sharing knowledge throughout an organisation, teamwork ‘builds up trust, improves communications and develops interdependence’ (Oakland 1989: 236; on teamwork see also Chapter 6). The competent personality is also one who ideally not only thinks carefully about investment decisions, and sees investment as a longterm gain rather than as a short-term profit-making exercise, but who also pools together information and demonstrates an enthusiasm to assist and aid others. Almost mystical in its outlook, competence thus signals a willingness to work as a ‘collective’, a willingness to be part of a ‘team’, a willingness to enjoy work and life through the enjoyment of helping others. My problem can be shared with others, and others can share their problems with me. Together, we can solve problems. This is a new work ethic in which one denies they are ‘in it just for the money’. Instead of the Protestant Work Ethic we have a Caring Work Ethic; a Caring Ethic, moreover, that makes it possible for us to ‘drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of this accelerated process’ of technological change (Zˇizˇek 2001: 13). As long as we are caring and work in teams then we can still retain a ‘genuine’ sense of authentic being. Competence thus claims to speak on behalf of ‘genuine’ workplace concerns and worries and as a result pretends to address ‘real people and their worries’ (Zˇizˇek 2008: 11–12).

Competent personality zones and the new economy fetish Competence is noticeable in constructing personality zones amenable to the new economy fetish. Having ‘fun’ at work or working from home might sound like a great idea but as other critical social scientists argue workplace themes like EI imply that workers and employers are no longer merely concerned with attributes like embodied skills accumulated through workplace experiences. Instead, according to Adkins (2005), it is the cultural affects of labour that become a selling point both internally within an organisation and externally to other clients and customers. As we have seen, this is a capitalism that expects individuals to take inventive risks with where and how they work by creating life projects with


their working experience through informally controlled and less bureaucratic learning curve within a globally competitive environment (Thrift 2000: 86–87; see also Savage 2000). Through management discretion employees are encouraged to invest their emotional energies in cocreating the workplace experience and the goods that result. Terranova labels this way of working as ‘free labour’, which refers to the seemingly voluntary channelling of one’s desires, aspirations, wishes, and narratives directly into the production, and it should be said, consumption, of goods. Commodities, then, turn out to be ‘transparent’ since they display the signs of the labour that nourishes them (Terranova 2000, 2004; see also Hardt and Negri 2000: 293). Lazzarato argues from a similar position that capitalism is no longer only founded on the exploitation of industrial labour. Instead, capital must now invest in ‘knowledge, life, health, leisure, culture, etc. What organisations produce and sell not only includes material or immaterial goods, but also forms of communication, standards of socialisation, perception, education, housing, transportation, etc.’ (Lazzarato 2004: 205). These personality zones are constituted publicly because labouring bodies, including the psychological dispositions of bodies, have to be continually invented and paraded in the workplace in response to continually changing workplace events. However, it is of equal importance to place these personality zones within the overall fetish of the new economy in order to understand in more depth how financialisation is intimately tied to the new economy and to the demarcation of competent personalities in the contemporary workplace. To do so, however, requires us to take a critical standpoint towards the views of some new economy theorists. For example, Lazzarato associates innovative forms of capitalist accumulation with the ‘explosion of services’, and it is here that we can note an important difference between what Lazzarato identifies and what we have discerned concerning the new economy and financialisation. For Lazzarato, the service sector has helped to bring about a situation in which production is constituted through a multiplicity of subjects engaged in multiple tasks ‘both inside and outside the firm…’ (Lazzarato 2004: 201). Through such multiplicities new inventions and modes of knowledge are generated that are in turn grounded in differential activity and repetitive activity. But is what Lazzarato describes not the very essence of the new economy fetish? Is it not the case that Lazzarato accepts the ideological belief that the service sector along with new high-tech industries has utterly transformed society? With doubt, there exists a close relationship between financialisation and ICTs. However, this is part of the development of capital in its


financial forms (see also Chapter 3). Finance after all draws its energy from ICTs in a way that ‘fuses money with information’ (Hope 2006: 297). Internet connections speed up the temporal transfer of information between those involved in global financial transactions while news media can ever more quickly relay information about financial markets. In turn, new spatial and temporal contradictions are released on to the global world. For instance, more speed associated with financialisation induces short-term speculation and this contradicts the emphasis that many companies place on developing long-term resources of trust, skills, collective assimilation of new techniques, and so on (Jessop 2002b: 106). No where is this clearer than with the banking system. Recent years have seen the widespread use of ICTs to conduct banking transactions across a range of services. To take just one commonplace illustration, internet purchases help to cut banking costs to such an extent that in 2001 it was estimated that average variable cost per transaction on the internet was $0.01 compared to $1 or more for transactions with tellers (Lapavitsas and Dos Santos 2008: 9). But, as Lapavitsas and Dos Santos go on to say, the profits made by banks in this way are primarily accrued by exploiting new assets and services instead of enhancing cost efficiency. ‘There is reason to believe, therefore, that inefficient banks have been simply exploiting private incomes’ (Lapavitsas and Dos Santos 2008: 10) rather than subjecting themselves to the external constraints of an equalisation of profit and cost discipline. While it is therefore true to say that these personality traits are related to the fetish of the new economy, it is equally true to say that this is itself a refraction of the fetish of financialisation. Indeed, a worker who embodies competence is one who is seen as individually calculating how they will adjust to changing circumstances and how they will subsequently factor this contingency into their working lives. It is in this way that individual workers can respond quickly to changing circumstances of their place of work and to the surrounding working environment. These personality traits are related to the fetish of financialisation because this fetish suggests that knowledge in various guises is the key component in the production and sale of goods. Therefore knowledge acquisition and pre-empting changing market circumstances through such acquisition are key prerequisites in the underlying fetish of financialisation. This is a move towards a new ‘ethical self’ in which ‘the wise investor separates good information from bad and is in an informational environment, a model of human conduct’ (Martin 2002: 78). Knowing this, it should come as little surprise that the competence agenda has drifted into the ICT realm of work. Some research for


instance indicates that in ICT workplaces, where intangible skills are of utmost importance, there is a growing pressure on ICT employees to acquire business competence along with those normal technological competences expected in such an occupation. Included in business competence is the ability to gain a holistic grasp of the organisation one works within alongside gaining management skills such as team player expertise, project management and leadership skills (Marks and Scholarios 2008). The fetish of financialisation is also present in the biological and physicist metaphors that many new economy and competence theorists use. Economic transactions are seen by them as promoting ‘nonlinear’ formations of ‘unpredictability’, ‘incalculability’, and ‘chaos’. Just as nature is founded on these imbalances so is it the case that the technologically-driven global economy is likewise founded on similar imbalances. Complex global networks constantly provide new economic innovations and through such unstable innovations progress is created. Economic progress is thus generated by random encounters, although through random encounters economic strategies are built up when exit routes for profitable outcomes coalesce (see Ball, P. 2004 for a populist explanation of these ideas). But the new economy ‘spontaneous order’ invoked by these metaphors refracts neoliberal financial ideology in a number of ways. For example, the leading ideologue of neoliberalism, Friedrich Hayek, similarly envisioned the capitalist market as being driven by spontaneous evolutionary processes beyond the scope of human comprehension. And like neoliberalism’s insistence that individual economic actors provide the locus of economic transactions when combined with other individual actors, so is it the case that the new economy fetish presupposes that an individual network node can only adapt itself to complex global networks when it combines with other network nodes. Flattened out organisational bureaucracies also operate through technological networks of knowledge and one’s position within it is determined by individual engagement with technology rather than one’s economic class location (Fisher, E. 2007, 2008). And just as is it the case that the competent personality ideally frames its knowledge acquisition through the prism of risk so is it the case that financial forms such as derivatives are measured through risk. Future prices of assets, for example, or the unpredictable nature of currency rates, consumer tastes, and so on, must all be calculated for when buying and selling derivatives, and these can be broken down into further risk components (Bryan and Rafferty 2007b: 669).


Intangible skills so beloved of competence theorists therefore have a social class bias inscribed within them. For example, financialisation has meant organisational loyalties have become more fractured as businesses are flattened out and restructured. Under these circumstances many managers no longer rely on their organisational assets – those decisionmaking abilities acquired as managers – but instead increasingly utilise in/tangible ties of trust, friendship and respect with other managers in order to land new managerial positions in an unstable organisational environment. These social ties coalesce around the socially constructed and intangible ‘reputation’ of the manager in question based on the estimation by others of his/her abilities. If successful in landing a job, ‘reputation’ can be further converted into more tangible resources such as wealth accumulation in the form of (e.g.) pension plan investments. Intangibility, in other words, is converted into tangible class rewards (Martin 2005). Lazzarato tends to downplay the class bias inscribed in intangible competence skills and on many occasions misconstrues cause for effect when discussing the new economy.

Desiring-production, competence and communities of practice Competence creates new desiring-production between employees and their place of work. For instance, competence is frequently related to the ability of a firm to create ‘interorganizational relationships to link the company’s (technological) competencies with those of its partners in the innovation network’ (Ritter and Gemünden 2004: 549). A business can be said to display signs of competence if it builds on and develops a range of skills and resources specific to its own interests and goals through internal and external networks which help to increase the business organisation’s market value. On this understanding what might be considered competence for one firm could be considered irrelevant for another. Similarly, what might have once been thought to be competent knowledge for a firm in the past might not be considered competent knowledge for the firm in the present or in the future. A successful business, in theory at least, would thus have identified those activities of competence that defuse perceived hazards in the market environment or contribute towards changing customerperceived value in a moment in time (Harmsen and Jensen 2004). Crucially, companies must develop both tangible (physical assets) and intangible resources (e.g. knowledge, reputation, trust, experience, and intellectual property) that reside within the company in question or


within other companies. To do so, a firm can follow a path of competence leveraging through which coordinated deployments of resources are set up without a qualitative change in the firm’s resources or a firm can follow a path of competence building whereby the firm acquires qualitatively different resources and modes of coordination (Sanchez and Heene 1997: 306). For example, if a customer enquires about a product from a firm, but the firm does not possess the product, then it is incumbent on the firm to establish horizontal and vertical relationships with other firms in order to develop the necessary competencies to satisfy the wants of the customer (Kandampully 2002: 22). To capitalise on resources of knowledge networks others have argued that competence works best when situated within team-based ‘communities of practice’ (CoP). Drawing attention to some of the intangible and tangible relationships within a workplace that can go on to develop competent public spheres in an organisation, CoPs are brought together by shared interests between members of a group particularly around motivations and values. In the words of one leading practitioner, ‘(c)ommunities of practice are the basic building blocks of a social learning system because they are the social “containers” of the competences that make up such a system’ (Wenger 2000: 229). Three key points illustrate this statement in more depth. First, CoPs are bound together by a collective understanding of the nature of their community and by what constitutes it. Each member can thereby hold other members accountable to the ‘joint enterprise’ of the community. ‘To be competent is to understand the enterprise well enough to be able to contribute to it’ (Wenger 2000: 229). Second, members of a community engage with one another through mutual engagement and as a result establish norms between members. ‘To be competent is to be able to engage with the community and be trusted as a partner in these interactions’ (Wenger 2000: 229). Third, by engaging with others CoPs draw on a ‘shared repertoire’ of shared resources such as language, tools, stories, narratives, feelings, objects, and so on. ‘To be competent is to have access to this repertoire and be able to use it appropriately’ (Wenger 2000: 229). CoPs subsequently establish how competence can be enrolled in workplace public spheres because CoPs are defined primarily through loose membership groups who come together through a genuine interest in a subject-matter or problem. As such, members share similar values and are willing to learn from one another and critically appraise the job at hand and one another’s contribution to it. Values are not set in stone but are instead discovered through daily interactions between


members and the sharing of new information, know-how and data as it arises. CoPs thus operate through a ‘fellowship’ and through ongoing reflexive dialogue about experience and knowledge as it emerges. Through reflexive dialogue contradictions, problems and dilemmas are openly discussed and this in turn complexifies the experience of tackling these contradictions, etc. (O’Donnell et al. 2003: 81–82). Organisations and firms, in order to harness these connections, should therefore ideally no longer rely only on relatively closed internal and external boundaries. After all, according to one management guru: The greatest danger of boundaries in organisations is the opportunities they provide for the development of us and them cultures – the creation of separation based on culturally reinforced identities. The idea of an elite group that basks in status and privilege is an anathema to creating a true community. Companies are overcoming this issue by referring to everyone as an associate, flattening hierarchical structures and doing away with status symbols (Barrett 1998: 152; emphasis in the original). The management guru, Barrett, goes on to discuss how a company aiming for success must not only do away with boundaries in their organisational structure but must also establish participatory communities at every level of business practice. To be sure, participatory governance involving employees, customers and suppliers is a ‘moral’ good for a business exactly because it furthers the cause of breaking down the barriers between ‘us’ and ‘them’. As Barrett says: Employees develop psychological ownership when they are invited to participate in decision-making. Participation opens up avenues for employees to address their mental need to grow and develop their spiritual need to find meaning, make a difference, and be of service. The sense of ownership is heightened when employees are also given a financial stake in the organisation that satisfies their need for long-term physical security (Barrett 1998: 154; emphasis in the original). By recourse to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the body without organs (BwO) we see from these quotes how desiring-production is reduced to a state of full consummation. What is being expressed is not the direct power of capital over labour but rather the recording and monitoring of physical and psychological movements of employees through the


mantra of participation, namely through the new public sphere of competence that is today being championed by some. In the ideal world of Barrett and competence theorists no one ‘owner’ of a company exists as such because all within a company are made to feel they are ‘owners’. All should be ‘attracted’ to the fortunes of the company through public spheres like CoPs and thus all should be made to sense they are responsible for the life of the company. Desire is only gained through the virtual potential of the company and employees, and one only gains a ‘personality’, or becomes implanted into machinic public connections, through the company. The reason why this is transferred to a state of full consummation is that employees are made to enjoy both the repulsion of innovation that the company engages in (e.g. its unbearable quickness in producing new competitive ideas and the stress of the responsibility of sharing ‘ownership’) and to enjoy the attraction of innovation (e.g. the liberation from organisational boundaries and the empowerment that ‘ownership’ can bring). More disconcertingly, this also implies that psychological and physical insights of individual workers are objectified in the workplace through the competent public sphere and subsequently appropriated by capital. For example, ideas expressed by workers in the public sphere ‘can then be used against the interests of labour, as they are when workers’ suggestions lead to speed-ups and higher stress levels’ (Smith 2000: 86; see also Chapters 5 and 6). New workplace identities are thus effects of these connections and effects of the new intensities associated with competence. The competent personality in this respect expresses a heightened sense of delirious association with the company and becomes embodied in an employee-subject who identifies pleasure with working for a ‘new economy’ company. To enjoy is to enjoy a holistic state of ‘wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 17). At the same time, a person identifies and is defined by their ability to persistently consume changing connections and by the belief that one’s personality is both owned by the company and that one’s personality partowns the company. ‘My’ personality is inextricably bound up with the company – ‘“It’s me, and so it’s mine…”’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 17). Through the connections this introduces, zones of intensities associated with a speculative unpredictable future (the financial basis, remember, of the new economy) become embodied in our very selves. Narratives of time are an integral marker of the BwO under these circumstances. Interruptions in time are flattened out as new technologies


speed up time so that time becomes instantaneous. Communication systems are integrated between public and private spaces and the procession of data is quickened as soon as it enters these systems (Hope 2006). The blurring of boundaries between work and home life is often part of this temporal relationship. Many workplaces encourage employees to work for some days at home during a working week. Evidence from the UK suggests that some employees who work at home for some of the working week nevertheless realise that the home is visualised as a ‘private’ space by management. These employees thus feel a sense of pressure to ensure they are not perceived as being idle and slack. They will therefore react more promptly and efficiently to a perceived need of the company they work for in order to prove their worth and potential. At the same time, the virtual experience of communicating to colleagues through networks like email frequently strengthen personal workplace ties, especially if more time is spent communicating about issues across different spaces (the office and the home) through these technologies (Halford 2005). In this way knowledge communities in the workplace blur private and public space and act as competent public spheres in the economy. The idea that the modern workplace should be a ‘fun’ environment in which to work complements this blurring effect, as Grugulis et al. (2000) indicate. The sense of ‘play’ and ‘fun’ at these workplaces fosters a culture of ‘belonging’ to a firm in which social events outside of normal working hours, coupled with the cultivation of a ‘fun’ environment within working hours, inspires employees to act as if they possess competent personality traits. Employees who actively take part in ‘fun’ sociable events are those employees trusted by management as being good ‘team players’. Moreover, ‘play’ and ‘fun’ appear to extinguish hierarchical structures of a firm because such activities produce connections between tangible and intangible personality traits of individual employees and between individual employees and management. The ‘family’ environment that ‘fun’ and ‘play’ creates in a workplace helps to publicly expose an individual’s affable, cordial and lively skills of interaction with others in a workplace as well as their own individual physical performance in carrying out tasks. This familiarity ideally expresses a sense of commitment on the part of employees to other workers and to the company in question. This manifests itself in observable modes of behaviour such as employees willing to work over and above their contracted hours (Grugulis et al. 2000). ‘Fun’ and ‘play’ is therefore believed to be good for management because it releases human potential and contributes towards well-being and happiness in the workplace (Costea et al. 2005).


Accounting and recording competence The foregoing discussion has also been concerned with how the contribution and output of employees are made accountable to an organisation, and how this accountability is thus implicitly related to accounting mechanisms. But machinic connections, competence, and the BwO are also all palpable in relation to visible types of accounting mechanisms in the workplace. And it is here that we can see more explicitly how the competence agenda is associated with the imposition of a novel bourgeois workplace public sphere. Technology in the workplace is a case in point. If we remember, competence acts as a recording device because it internalises both actual and potential (virtual) forms of working life within its own organisational boundaries or organisational ‘community’. Thus identities are flattened out and distinctive personalities consummated within recording mechanisms. One contemporary technological device to illustrate the recording potential of capital in today’s workplace is that of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Introduced into many corporations, ERP systems consist of software packages that have ‘information blueprints’ built into them which enable a corporation to manage and merge its operations with specific business tasks like human resource management, customer relationships, and supply chain management. As Knox et al. (2007) observe, the power of ERP systems is that they represent the workplace as a measurable category and thereby help to provide ‘solutions’ for real workplace events by ‘“strategic” decision makers whose job is to generate “value” through the use of data that is generated as an output of these systems…’ (Knox et al. 2007: 26). In other words, technology puts in place a multiple set of recording mechanisms that are then used to communicate accounting information to employees. First, data is encoded within ERP systems and this data is based on variables abstracted from real workplace events. Data is then transformed into information which in turn is transformed into knowledge. Knowledge is then used and applied to a real workplace to transform reality so as to gain ‘value’. Knox et al. suggest that each stage in this link has no direct referent, although each stage embodies different ‘abstract and referential indexes’ of ideals and practice (Knox et al. 2007: 27). ERP systems subsequently present us with an illustration of a recording mechanism that monitors representations, or virtual potentials, of workplace practice at various stages, which are then used to order real events. In this sense technologies can make us competent, and also be competent on our behalf, while we assimilate our virtual potential from the


technology. It is therefore not actual employees who create their virtual potentials as such but rather technologies are simulating virtual competent potentials to which employees must then try to match. All along this chain it is the virtual that is undergoing constant change to which the actual must catch up (for related and interesting theoretical discussion see Zˇizˇek 2004: 12–15). By constructing virtual potentials, ERP systems suggest that some workplaces are utilising new technological capabilities to enhance their power to cater for contingency and unpredictability in the working environment. Moreover, ERP systems represent a novel form for calculating workplace effort of employees, parcelling this up into accounting information concerning virtual potentials, and then transmitting this information to employees. But ERP systems represent one development within a wider movement to subject organisational intangibles to accounting procedures. One of the most well known movements in this respect has been ‘intellectual capital accounting’ (ICA), first pioneered by the Swedish insurance company Skandia in the 1990s (Fincham and Roslender 2003) and widely seen as a practice emergent from the new economy. It is generally accepted that intellectual capital comprises ‘human capital’ and ‘structural capital’. The former refers competences, individual skills, customers, suppliers, etc., while the latter refers to internal and external attributes such as distribution networks, brands, organisational culture, supply chains, and so on. One aim of ICA is thus to synthesise ‘the financial and non-financial value-generating aspects of the company into one external report’ (Petty and Guthrie 2000: 159). Many ICAs however concentrate mainly on intellectual capital and intangible asset valuations, while others examine a company’s intellectual capital statements such as the knowledge narrative of the company, its management challenges, and its reports (e.g. setting out how a company has performed in relation to the two other statements) (Fincham and Roslender 2003: 785). Whatever method is chosen ICA presents another calculative regime in a dominant audit culture of forcing employees to take note of accounting (intangible) information in the competent public sphere. More generally, the practice of transforming intangibles into measurable tangibles effectively makes the incommensurable commensurable and stimulates a managerial desire to bring about behavioural change in their employees through new narratives and visibilities concerning organisational change (Power 2004: 776). Such accounting mechanisms seek to put in place wider procedural mechanisms that feed off those everyday lived traits of employees insofar that these everyday traits are


bundled up into idealised and graded standardised procedures and rules of working which are then used as a moral framework for discussion about these very same working practices in a workplace (Lehman 2006). What of course is missing from the idealised procedures and rules is any notion that language does not operate along procedural lines but is, in fact, dialogic and ‘multi-voiced’ in its very form because it refracts the contradictory world of which it is a part at different levels of abstraction. By ignoring this, accounting mechanisms close off areas for public discussion amongst employees (see Chapters 5 and 6). But what this also implies is that accounting mechanisms are themselves refractions of wider contradictory relations which they internalise in their own way. This is one reason why many organisations employ the services of consultancies to assist them in implementing the ‘correct’ accounting mechanisms and ethos to maintain and enhance their competitive (financial) position. In their study of the privatisation of a UK regional electricity company, 1990 to 1995, Carter and Mueller (2006) found that consultancy ideas and theories prompted management to rethink its strategies and rationale. Sure enough, management had initially applied new accounting mechanisms themselves to undertake this task embodied in the likes of SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats), mission statements, and ‘visions’. But this was simply ‘ceremonial activity’ through which management distanced themselves from their previous incarnation as an electrical state monopoly. After time, this changed into a strategy to diversify the company’s business concerns. From here management at the electricity company moved into a more financial mode of thinking, prompted largely by the external regulator and expectations of the City, the financial hub of the UK. The main stimulus was now to focus on core competencies and capabilities of the company including asset stripping the business to off-set any takeover attempts, in order to ensure performance measures looked and remained healthy. These actions were overseen by the ideas and practices of consultancy organisations. In other words, the company responded to the financial expectations of external and internal stakeholders and in turn embedded financialisation within its organisational structures (Carter and Mueller 2006: 981–982). Yet while the electricity company in question was beholden to a central organising point in the guise of accounting mechanisms and stakeholders, it is also true to say that more broadly a ‘common accounting language’ is often missing in an organisation when the organisation in question has experienced (fundamental) change through the likes of


mergers and acquisitions. In this case, the implementation and institutionalisation of new managerial accounting mechanisms can be a protracted process and is reliant on tacit and local knowledge, power relations between different strata of management and between management and workers, horizontal and vertical networks of knowledge, relationships between a parent and subsidiary company (if these are relevant), and key personnel who communicate and negotiate accounting between others in an organisation (Granlund 2003; McKinlay 2002; Yazdifar et al. 2008); points that will be explored in more detail in the next two chapters.

Conclusion: The sense of competence What this chapter has suggested is that competence is an important dialogic device that mediates the material of workplace utterances about ideal employees in the new economy (on ‘device’ and ‘material’ see Bakhtin and Medvedev 1978). By acting as a dialogic device competence helps to define, even if only sometimes implicitly, what constitutes an incompetent personality in the workplace. Competence achieves this through various concrete workplace events wherein the sense of competence is actualised through potentials offered up in a workplace to ‘become competence’, with EI and ‘fun at work’ being two illustrations of such potential. That is to say, competence is a ‘sense-event’ to the extent that it establishes a number material relations and meanings within a workplace that formulate potentials for workers to take the opportunity to ‘become competence’. The ‘sense’ of competence is accordingly present in the utterance – ‘competence’ – itself. Competence, as an utterance, identifies itself through a hazy although intense image, i.e. ‘competence’ is not defined merely by the structure of language but is also defined through ‘disruption’ and ‘suspense’ of the ‘intensity’ that is inherent within the utterance ‘competence’. For, at this level, one discovers potentials associated with competence – potentials comprised of opposites that fold into one another (cf. Massumi 2002: 26–27). After all, a defining characteristic of ‘competence’ is that it prepares one for those unexpected and contingent moments that the business environment inevitably throws up. To ‘become competence’ is exactly to be prepared for contingency and to be prepared for the clash of opposites. This is why ‘become competence’ needs to be contrasted to ‘becoming competent’. The former refers to the never-ending potential to achieve competence at events, while the latter refers to a linear progression of actually achieving the status of being competent at a definable


moment in time. ‘Become competence’ therefore never enjoys a preconceived definable outcome unlike that of ‘becoming competent’. In this respect competence alerts one to the ‘lived paradox’ (cf. Massumi 2002: 30) of the global business environment; to the ‘intensely’ unstable and messy nature of the business environment, for example, and the ability to respond, adapt, and take advantage of this instability without any guarantees that one will achieve a defined end result. The sense of competence is thus itself a paradox. Competence tells us something about the intense nature of business and even to some degree champions this intensity (e.g. that the business environment is inherently unpredictable and chaotic but full of potential). At the same time, however, competence wants to channel these intensities into expressible emotional affects such as emotional intelligence. If Massumi (2002: 28) is correct to observe that intensities are neither ‘ownable’ nor ‘recognisable’, the intensities associated with competence are nevertheless said to be ideally actualised by some in (e.g.) demarcated emotional states, intangible resources, or project management. All of these actualisations of competence are related in various ways to KM and TQM. Competence is subsequently an illustration of what Massumi terms as a ‘qualified intensity’ because it is inserted ‘into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable actionreaction circuits, into function and meaning’ (Massumi 2002: 28). ‘Competence’, as an utterance, is used and applied in a specific state of affairs, such as that which is considered as being actually competent in a particular workplace, along with the opportunities to be competent within the workplace in question. The ‘sense’ of competence thus comprises two moments: it is expressed through the utterance of ‘competence’ itself and it is an attribute of a particular state of affairs. At the same time, however, competence obtains a degree of autonomy from both the moment of its utterance and its state of affairs because the sense of competence exists on the boundary between both (cf. Deleuze 2001: 24–25). One cannot wholly or fully describe the sense of competence because to do so would circumscribe the level of contingency required to be adaptive to the rapidly changing business and organisational environment. Of course one may try to delineate and quantify competence in forms such as EI within a particular state of affairs, but even here there must be an unwritten rule that one cannot in fact obtain full competence by channelling one’s emotions in this way. The very contingency embodied in competence implies that the potential to gain competence might be interrupted by an unpredictable event. In other words, competence entails a fantasy of free choice about how to react


to risky, uncertain global markets in order to obtain one’s potential. If one rejects this choice, if one perhaps criticises the neoliberal parameters in which this choice is placed, then one risks being labelled as incompetent. It is this ‘unwritten framework’ within which the fantasy of competence operates (cf. Zˇizˇek 1997: 29). And it is an unwritten framework based on the enjoyable moment of contingency itself because if one fails to reach their potentials of competence through calculated risks then this can be explained simply as being the fault of a series of unfortunate, contingent circumstances within a particular state of affairs. The fantasy therefore suggests that competence can always be strived for again at another time because each state of affairs will offer up new contingent opportunities to actualise another set of competent potentials. The competent personality is subsequently one who embraces risk in its various unpredictable forms and enjoys the challenges that the very inaccessibility of competence brings (e.g. that one might fail to embody competence during a particular event). Indeed, one is deemed as expressing competence to the extent that through the pooling and sharing of knowledge one can calculate unpredictability as this relates to the contingent events of the external world and to one’s own individual life. Risk thus becomes routine and normative; risk is an every day facet of life. Not to adjust to risk is to allow others to run your life for you. Risk thereby represents one part of a wider fantasmic formation in which those ‘incompetent’ personalities who do not engage in risk are those content to have their lives governed for them by others. ‘Incompetent’ personalities are simultaneously transformed into the fantasy Other who has the potential to stop us from being ‘competent’. Competence thus constructs ‘molar formations’ in workplaces that divide dialogic workplace events into binary oppositions such as ‘lazy’ incompetent workers vs. ‘industrious’ competent workers. By dividing workplace dialogic events into binary oppositions, molar formations make it possible for a central point to control and manipulate the movement of these oppositions at concrete workplace events (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 322–323). Accordingly, the sense of competence is the event of competence itself. And it is this sense, or number of potentials, that emerges from the fetish of the new economy. This is because the new economy fetish establishes ‘potentials’ (or ‘sense’) for workers to become ‘freely’ competent. This is a freedom that liberates workers from the command dictates of conventional bureaucratic organisational structures. Being set free from conventional bureaucratic structures through competence


implies: (i) opening oneself up to external and contingent conditions that exist outside of the organisation in which one works; (ii) taking advantage of the opportunities that this brings; (iii) having the freedom to distance oneself from the official rules of an organisation in which a one works, for example by being cynical of those rules because they hinder risk taking and entrepreneurialism, whilst at the same time striving to become competence; and (iv) being prepared to be judged on the merits of one’s individual decisions made in galvanising opportunities presented As Maravelias (2007) says of these conditions: ‘(F)reedom is transformed from a derivative of individual rights and regulated demands and duties, to a derivative of individuals’ potential’ (Maravelias 2007: 568). Those unfortunate workers who do not manage to convey the ‘sense’ of becoming competence are actualised (i.e. empirically defined) as ‘incompetent’ in concrete states of affairs and therefore deprived of the opportunities of becoming competence. Subsequently the contradiction between competence and incompetence is mystified and transformed instead into a molar formation: ‘becoming competence’ and ‘actual being-incompetent’. The competent public sphere thus establishes the conditions of what is considered to be reputable dialogue and discussion about working conditions. If one does not buy into the expression and desire of competence then they are ridiculed as being naïve and (even if only implicitly) seen as being ‘incompetent’.

5 Democracy and Participation in the Competent Public Sphere

Introduction In this chapter we will examine in more depth how the competence agenda not only infiltrates different workplaces but also how it experiences a number of problems in relation to a workforce. Therefore we will move on to look at how some of the characteristics already identified with the new economy and competence agenda come to be refracted in employee-employer relations. This is a particularly important avenue to explore because participatory programmes in which employees are encouraged at least in theory to express themselves in the workplace have grown in importance over the years. And yet, as others have noted, there is evidence to suggest that many employees in fact feel disempowered in the contemporary workplace despite proclamations by management that participatory programmes of knowledge sharing, etc., are now the norm. For these employees, their workplace can from one vantage point become ‘a voiceless condition of intimidated or discouraged people who operate in organisational contexts where a climate of public interest vocality is not present’ (De Maria 2006: 223). In addition, while practices like information sharing within an organisation might be positively received by employees other practices like team autonomy or team responsibility, practices strongly associated with ideal participatory regimes, can increase levels of stress and engender negatively related factors like work overload (Godard 2004: 358). Evidence as to the benefits of participatory programmes in the workplace therefore remains inconclusive at best. This chapter will thus explore some of the various ways in which a managerial competence agenda has established a bourgeois public sphere in the workplace. It looks at new utterances used by management around 89


‘empowerment’ and ‘participation’ and how the meaning of these utterances has become embedded in workplace thematic events.

On management strategies and techniques in capitalism Marx suggests in Capital vol. 3 that: the specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers to ruled, as it grows out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form (Marx 1977: 791). Resnick and Wolff (1987) similarly suggest that a mode of production is an overdetermined totality (i.e. it involves not just ‘economic’ relations but also cultural, political and social relations) in which a fundamental class relationship at the point of production between performers and extractors of surplus value is influenced by, and in turn influences, other class and non-class relationships (Resnick and Wolff 1987: 117). Resnick and Wolff go on to argue that there are also a number of subsumed social classes evident in this relationship. While subsumed class processes are a constituent part of the fundamental class relationship they are not fundamental for the production and appropriation of surplus labour at the point of production. Instead, subsumed class processes distribute and receive already produced surplus value (Resnick and Wolff 1987: 118). Resnick and Wolff’s observations are helpful because they draw attention to the complex manifestations of class relations inside and outside of a workplace. For this reason we will outline their observations on these class relations in more depth. Workers can be productive within a workplace, i.e. they occupy fundamental class processes by producing surplus value. ‘Only labour which produces capital is productive labour’ (Marx 1978: 156; see also Marx 1988: 1043). Workers can also be unproductive, i.e. they occupy subsumed class processes when they do not directly produce surplus value such as when they assist in distributing surplus value. Workers can of course occupy both positions. In addition, workers frequently take up a ‘non-class’ type of work such as working for a neighbour outside of the confines of a workplace which involves no production of surplus value (Resnick and Wolff 1987: 132–135). The actual relation-

Democracy and Participation in the Competent Public Sphere 91

ship between both productive and unproductive labour is an ever changing one and impacts on an individual worker in complex ways within distinct phases of capitalism, in the changing characteristics of a workplace, and within the life history of a worker. And in all instances workers are overdetermined by categories of race, religion, skill, age, and so on. Advanced capitalism divides surplus value into various ‘fragments’ (e.g. profit, interest, and rent) which are then distributed and received by different subsumed class positions (see also Chapter 3). Ground rent, for example, is a distribution of surplus value from industrial production to a landowner. In this instance, the landowner occupies a subsumed class position because he or she receives a distribution of surplus value from a member of the fundamental class relationship, namely an industrial capitalist, in the form of ground rent. The industrial capitalist must pay the landowner ground rent if he or she wishes to build and maintain their industrial factory on a piece of land (Resnick and Wolff 1987: 120). The capitalist class is thus comprised not only of ‘fundamental’ capitalists, i.e. those industrial capitalists who directly produce surplus value, but is also comprised of merchants and moneylenders, i.e. those subsumed and ‘unproductive’ capitalists who distribute and receive surplus value. These are also ‘capitalists’ to the extent that they personify capital in motion, i.e. the valorisation of capital (Resnick and Wolff 1987: 142). Of course, and again as Resnick and Wolff observe, within one workplace a single capitalist might occupy both productive and unproductive class positions (see also Marx 1977: 375). Overall, therefore, as a receiver and distributor of surplus value a capitalist is thus implicated in both the fundamental and subsumed class processes within a single enterprise. Taking the foregoing observations on board we should expect management in capitalism to constitute a contradictory and fluid form. This is noticeable even at a relatively high level of abstraction. Resnick and Wolff note for example that management of an industrial enterprise can assume a number of distinct forms that often overlap. In the first instance management is represented in its board of directors of those who distribute a share of surplus value to other subsumed managers within an enterprise. Subsumed managers thus require a share of surplus value to ensure that productive workers are adequately supervised. Obviously, some capitalists in smaller industrial enterprises might also take up managerial class positions. But, more broadly, managers represent subsumed class positions whose task is to ensure that productive labourers apply a certain amount of required effort in the labour process so that surplus value is produced. In other words,


managers essentially manage the appropriation of surplus value within an industrial enterprise (Resnick and Wolff 1987: 175). Of course, many enterprises are comprised of a number of departments and therefore a number of managerial positions. Typically, therefore, higher-level managers will manage lower-level managers, while all of these subsumed class managers might give orders to other employees and workers. Outside of these subsumed class processes are other relationships that might not be related to the appropriation and distribution of surplus value (e.g. if a manager gives orders to another manager this might not necessitate the appropriation or distribution of surplus value). Culturally, commodities produced must be marketed and so another portion of surplus value is used in (e.g.) advertisements of its products by an industrial enterprise. And lest we forget, an enterprise can be owned by a subsumed class of owners in the form of (e.g.) stockholders, while financers such as banks claim a share of distributed surplus value from an industrial enterprise in the form of (e.g.) interest repayments (Resnick and Wolff 1987: 176–177). At a more concrete level management must, of necessity, gain some form of cooperation from a workforce. This can be achieved through direct control techniques or by more autonomous control techniques (where labour has a decision-making capacity in the workplace), or it can be won through a combination of both. External competitive pressure faced by a workplace can additionally instil a cooperative ethos within a workforce and with management if employees feel they are in competition with rival workplaces, while internal competition can create divisions within a singular workforce, which again could work in favour of management strategies (Gough 2003: 61–63). Competitive pressure to appropriate surplus value might also emerge through the intensification of labour in a workplace and by other mechanisms such as cost-cutting, deskilling, and more explicit managerial control techniques. In this instance surplus value is raised through the absolute exploitation of labour. Where surplus value is appropriated through technological and task changes then a workplace is subject to the appropriation of relative surplus value. In reality, many workplaces operate by combining both absolute and relative appropriation of surplus value (Gough 2003: 50–51). Significantly, these observations suggest that the formation of different strategies and techniques with which to gain consent from a workforce is of utmost importance for management. Strategy is the ability of management to implement programmes of coordinated activity for workers and is associated with the likes of task organisation and labour


market relations in order to maintain the productivity of workers (Friedman 1986: 105). Techniques refer to the ways in which management implement such strategies. Participatory schemes in workplaces represent such a technique designed to implement managerial strategies. The division between strategy and technique is therefore a useful one because it suggests that (e.g.) a management technique of the ‘empowerment’ of employees in the workplace can in fact result in strategies that foster a retreat from ‘responsible autonomy’ of workers and subsequently a retreat from real democratic empowerment of workers. ‘Empowerment’ management techniques could for example institute strategies which reorganise a labour process in a way that takes power away from elected union officials and thereby circumvent real industrial democracy (Friedman 1986: 113–114; see also below and Chapters 6 and 7). The task of the bourgeois public sphere is to maintain and stabilise various managerial strategies by re-inscribing fetishism through particular techniques within the specific form of a particular concrete workplace in order to reproduce molar dialogue on competence and about workplace relations. We will now explore some empirical examples to illustrate these more theoretical points.

Knowledge management as a participatory workplace technique Knowledge Management (KM) represents a workplace managerial technique because it attempts to order and maintain particular managerial strategies. At the same time as we have seen in previous chapters KM is concomitant with maintaining the fetishism of competence in a workplace. For instance, KM is related to new managerial theories associated with increasing democratic participation of the workforce in a ‘postbureaucratic’ organisation. ‘New wave’ management ideas stress that in our chaotic and complex global world old workplace certainties have splintered and in some respects dissolved. Here, knowledge is no longer conveyed hierarchically through bureaucratic structures but instead flows through numerous and often unpredictable routes across the world. In order to adapt positively to these changing circumstances some argue that business and firms need to create post-bureaucratic workplaces that complement the new economy whereby important decision-making commands are ideally decentred, flattened and spread out across the workforce (Johnson 2006: 248). Post-bureaucratic strategies of working are said to be suited to new participatory practices because post-bureaucratic organisations open up opportunities for


individual workers to channel their emotional experience into a coherent, comprehensible and meaningful whole in order to manage and maintain factors like the underload-overload balance in work (Kira and Forslin 2008). Indeed, there is an expressed desire by some employers and management theorists to implement another technique of ‘highperformance paradigm’ (HPP) in organisations to achieve this sort of participatory holistic balance. Broadly-speaking HPPs consist of two techniques. First, work strategies are designed to encourage autonomous and non-autonomous work practices with different varieties of job reward and enrichment. Second, participatory techniques are put into place to institute ‘quality circles or problem-solving groups’ based on a rotation of meetings and briefings within and between work teams (Godard 2004: 351). These two characteristics are believed to allow employees gain genuine input into collaborative decision-making of tangible (e.g. labour costs) and intangible (e.g. emotion) working practices as conventional managerial prerogatives are swept away. HPP is similar in tone and substance to the ideals expressed in Total Quality Management (TQM). Again, in recognition of the supposed changes that workplaces have undergone in relation to the new economy, TQM as a technique focuses on the implementation of devolved responsibility to employees so that everyone working for a firm or business is committed to continuous improvements (see Hill and Huq 2004 for a fuller discussion). Through these forms of participation, workplace public spheres are designed so that a workforce becomes empowered by gaining a degree of autonomy, confidence and independence to react and adapt to rapidly changing forms of (global) knowledge. Empowerment has subsequently become somewhat of a buzzword in new management literature. At its most basic level of understanding empowerment refers to the capacity of employees to take decisions (see Hales 2000). And for employees to gain this sense of empowerment they need to be able to participate in decision-making. Ideally, for example, employees need to receive consistent and regular information on a company’s performance through consultative forums such as team briefings. If the occasion demands it, employees should also find their employers willing to act on input from all members at regular team briefings (Cox et al. 2006). Participation in the workplace has subsequently gained many advocates in the business management literature. We need to be clear what is meant by ‘participation’ in this context. One strategy looks at the amount of decision-making capability a


workforce enjoys in controlling and replacing the executive of an organisation. Obviously this strategy of participation is restricted to the level of organisational production only. A more radical strategy of participation, and one akin to that advocated by new wave management and champions of the communities of practice (CoP) technique, is to stress that employees require access to a range of democratic rights stretching throughout the whole body of an organisation (Johnson 2006: 254–255). In many respects the differences between the two can be looked at as differences between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ democratic participation in the workplace. The former focuses on issues of employee input and participation into matters relating to production but without additional supporting mechanisms like accurate information from other parts of an organisation. The latter refers to the ability of employees to gain access to a number of reinforcing and interlinked resources across an organisation that can then be used to accumulate sufficient knowledge so as to make democratic decisions. This latter procedure can be said to be superior to the former insofar it includes employees across an organisation and not just at the point of production (Rousseau and Rivero 2003: 125). It is also worth noting that some management theorists insist that high levels of organisational participation is related to some degree with both the branding of an organisation and the emotions of the workforce. A strong organisational brand attracts and retains employees within an organisation, particularly if the brand is embedded within a number of positive and emotional attributes that employees can attach themselves to such as an organisation’s innovative culture. Important here is the organisation’s propensity to promote achievement and self-esteem, its willingness to formalise group identification within an organisation, and its openness to assist employees in their careers through (e.g.) mentoring schemes (Wheeler et al. 2006). Employees, so the theory goes, are more willing to stay loyal to an organisation if these attributes are in place. And greater participation within an organisation helps to form positive links with these brand attributes and with a firm’s core competencies.

Dialogic events In his review of the relevant literature Hughes (2008) notes that research on HPPs reveals no absolute consensus on what actually constitutes high-performance working. This leads Hughes to observe: ‘The broad referential array of high-performance lexicon in itself can be understood to constitute a weakness to the paradigm’ (Hughes


2008: 10). Another way of thinking about the technique of HPPs is to suggest that its very weakness constitutes its strength. Just as the vague sense of competence gives competence its power, so too is it the case that the vagueness surrounding HPPs ultimately highlights the power of this relatively new managerial technique. For it is the very vagueness of techniques and utterances like ‘empowerment’ that leave open a space for management to alter the parameters of strategic decisionmaking in the workplace during specific events. Simultaneously, this very same vagueness entails the potential for workers to ‘traverse the fantasy’ (cf. Zˇizˇek 1997: 48) of HPPs whilst, at the same time, keeping in place the very same fantasy that suggests HPPs do in fact lead to a real sense of workplace democratic decision-making. Suffice to say, the fantasy of workplace participation is not an all-encompassing illusion but must remain inconsistent in its fantasy. The reason why HPPs remain inconsistent relates to the contingency upon which concrete dialogue operates in capitalist societies. At a high level of abstraction, capital is not dependent on extra-economic coercion such as the state to ensure its reproduction. Instead, the reproduction of capital is based on the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’ (Marx 1988: 899) of ceaseless acts of commodity exchange between individuals. This being the case, dialogue under capitalism is mediated between at least two formally ‘equal’ participants who exchange commodities through words that obtain ‘entire fullness’. That is to say, seemingly noncoercive dialogue between both participants during events of commodity exchange opens up the possibility for words to be liberated from explicitly coercive state and government mechanisms as found in societies based on (e.g.) slavery or feudalism. The now boundless manner in which dialogue can be communicated under events of universal commodity exchange frees up a single word to convey ‘its content/sense aspect (the word as concept) as well as its palpable-expressive aspect (the word as image) and its emotional-volitional aspect (the intonation of the word) in their unity’ (Bakhtin 1993: 31) between both a buyer and seller of a commodity. Therefore, the word-as-event, or ‘utterance’, is premised on words being equally and non-coercively answerable to other words during distinctive events of commodity exchange. As such words are also performances at these events because they are ‘answerably aware’ of their relationship to other words during moments of exchange; words are full participants at the event of exchange in which they are uttered (see Bakhtin 1993: 31). Within capitalism, then, one can fully identify with an event at which goods are exchanged without being coerced to do so by an external body like the state.


Needless to say, exchange events are played out through the constraints of ‘a certain typical kind of expression’ (Bakhtin 1986: 87) along with the social conventions and genres accompanying the speech performance one is involved with (see Bakhtin 1981: 312; Voloshinov 1973: 20). Simply stated, commodity exchange will obviously proscribe behaviour in particular ways (e.g. one participant must be a seller, the other a buyer). At the same time however those social relations ‘typical’ to the context and to commodity exchange more broadly gain new expressive meanings as they are being performed during the actual event itself. After all, the ceaseless nature of commodity exchange implies that no act of exchange is exactly the same as another. There is no necessity, for example, that the exchange of goods will be successful at a particular event and so a degree of contingency and the potential for a crisis of exchange surrounds every act of commodity exchange. Such contingency presents new potentialities for dialogue to arise between a speaker and a hearer during concrete encounters. One way of thinking about this is to employ Bakhtin’s explanation of dialogic events. He says: The very moment of transition, of movement from the past and the present into the future, constitutes a moment in me that has the character purely of an event, where I, from within myself, participate in the unitary and unique event of being. It is in this moment that the issue of the event, the ‘either/or’ of the event, is perilously and absolutely unpredetermined…(Bakhtin 1990: 118). For Bakhtin, an event is a moment of indecisiveness, a moment in which new potentialities present themselves, and a moment where such potentialities can invoke a crisis of sorts about how an event is spoken about. In the case of HPPs, decision-making workplace participation can reveal, even if only partially, some intractable issues associated with competence at workplace events. Indeed, it is the very inconsistency of techniques such as HPPs which gives them the potential to create a dialogic crisis between the utterance of, say, ‘empowerment’ and the deed of ‘empowerment’ at workplace events. If this dialogic crisis does indeed transpire then a possibility arises for a void to open up in fetishistic dialogue of participatory competence. This void, this more substantial crisis because it is a crisis in the fetish of competence itself, provides an expressive potential for those deemed ‘incompetent’ to in fact make ‘competence’ answerable to their, i.e. the incompetent-worker’s, passivity


within the workplace public sphere. To paraphrase Zˇizˇek (1999: 164), the incompetent-personality asks: ‘why is competence the route to participation and empowerment?’ We now explore some case studies to flesh these more abstract observations.

Dialogic events of empowerment and participation In his study of what we might refer to as the ‘subsumed’ workplaces of hotel companies, a theme park, and chemical and telecommunications manufacturing plants, Hales (2000) discovered that notions of ‘empowerment’ differed amongst distinct managerial layers. Many of the seniormanagers interviewed and observed expressed a positive attitude towards empowerment. They saw empowerment as transferring decision-making to a variety of ‘front-line’ workers. For example, senior managers at the hotel companies espoused empowerment dialogue through utterances such as ‘competitive advantage’ and ‘quality service’. These utterances could only be performed by gaining ‘trust’ and ‘support’ from junior managers and other related staff by management allowing them to make decisions themselves. At actual workplace events, however, Hales found that the rhetoric of empowerment was seldom practised in the hotels. (E)mployee ‘voice’ meant no more than involvement in quality improvement consultation, whilst increased ‘choice’ meant a generalised invocation to do ‘whatever it takes’ to ‘satisfy the guest’ coupled with expectations that this would be based on ‘common sense’ and subject to ‘guidance’ from managers after the event (Hales 2000: 506). Hales also discovered that some junior managers in the various case studies would likewise adopt the rhetoric of empowerment. Indeed, this was the case even though ‘empowerment’ was often used by senior managers to reorganise lower managerial tasks so that junior managers effectively took on more tasks and responsibilities. According to Hales, the junior managers adopted the rhetoric of empowerment in order to safeguard their own jobs from threats of redundancy and reorganisation. They did this, first, by embracing a more restrictive interpretation of empowerment than senior managers. This reinterpretation by junior managers stated that ‘empowerment’ actually referred to the implementation of highly circumscribed technical decisions. Second, junior managers argued that their technical decision-making capability was necessary for their company to function effectively because such deci-


sion-making took on the responsibility for the day-to-day operations of a specific bounded labour process. Junior managers therefore felt they had to shoulder whatever blame or praise was directed towards the particular work unit in question. Overall, Hales found that empowerment was a contested (multiaccentual) concept within the different layers (or ‘subsumed’ roles) of management, particularly over control at work during actual workplace events. The distinction between rhetoric and reality as regards participation, empowerment and management is one noted by a number of other researchers. In their own case studies of six organisational workplaces in the UK Edwards and Collinson (2002) found that the meaning of empowerment differed depending on the workplace in question. All of the organisations, ranging from a building society to Lewisham London Council, had implemented specific quality improvement programmes for their staff. However, management often found it difficult to define exactly what constituted ‘empowerment’. Some were unhappy with the term itself, seeing it as being ill-defined and thought out. While Edwards and Collinson do not mention it explicitly, it is clear from their investigation that ‘empowerment’ of employees at the respective organisations was itself restricted through everyday workplace events. At Lewisham Council, for example, a scheme responsible for refuse collection, street cleaning, highways, vehicle maintenance, and building and grounds maintenance was to be executed through a new body called DIRECTeam. This body was set up in response to the putting out to tender of some local authority public services. Lewisham Council managed to keep in-house some of those services originally put out in the first round of competitive compulsory tendering, but the Council had also reorganised levels of management hierarchy at the same time. Notably, managers now had to be available to their staff as problems arose while operational staff was granted more decision-making powers and responsibility. Interestingly, a participatory crisis soon opened up between dialogue of increased decision-making powers and the actual deeds of decision-making responsibility. The crisis opened up because resources for the scheme started to shrink and during the second round of tendering, management implemented cuts in the pay and conditions of workers employed on the scheme. Within this particular crisis event, therefore, workers not only felt disempowered they also felt that participation on the terms set out by management led to a ‘sense of powerlessness’ (Edwards and Collinson 2002: 292). What we can note in this example is a hint of how one technique of participation – what might be called ‘managerial participation’ – is


joined up with another form of participation – what might be termed following Bakhtin as ‘participatory thinking’. This is noticeable in one comment by staff member working for DIRECTeam after the cuts in pay and conditions came into effect. ‘There is a management-worker divide now; workers will do what they have and no more’ (cited in Edwards and Collinson 2002: 292). In this utterance we gain a small though significant insight into the transition that has occurred through these particular events in this competent public sphere. Theoretically and broadly-speaking we see that what is spoken about amongst a workforce during a moment of unrest in a workplace, i.e. the dialogic content of this particular public sphere in the workplace of this particular moment of unrest and discontent, is at the same time an emotional-volitional event. It is the very event-ness of a moment of discontent that assumes the status of answerability in this instance. Capitalism in general does not immediately exist for workers but can only be publicly discussed first from within mediated workplace participatory public spheres. Workers gain real empowerment from within a plethora of such minor spaces of work. And it is these concrete workplace spaces that bring into being an array of participatory public spheres along with a sense, a feeling, of a becoming-other-than-management. Workers can only experience true empowerment if they recognise their obligative uniqueness of their personality, or, in other words, if they recognise their uniqueness of what they ought-to-be, i.e. free from being disempowered within a particular workplace. Empowerment must be answerable to them in the event-ness of (e.g.) their particular workplace public sphere, but empowerment can only be answerable if it is connected to the whole system of managerial ideas; a system that prevents these particular workers from experiencing empowerment (cf. Bakhtin 1993: 42). Empirically speaking we see how the actual event of participation under a competence regime at Lewisham Council (e.g. the competitive neoliberal environment in which the staff worked via compulsory competitive tendering) created a crisis. Such was the nature of the crisis that the staff could no longer be consummated by both the technique of participation and by the fantasy of becoming an empowered personality. Instead, staff began to recognise the real and absurd nature of dialogue around participation; that is, the staff no longer had an alibi to construct fantasies of being an empowered personality by participating in the competent public sphere. The reality of empowerment presented itself in its starkest form: management was using the technique of participation to execute the strategies of cuts in pay and conditions. It is at this point that a more proletarian public sphere asserted


itself against the implementation of what amounted to new strategic accounting mechanisms. Hence the albeit minor emotional-volitional utterance: ‘There is a management-worker divide now; workers will do what they have and no more’. This workplace event therefore also represents an insight into the ‘contradictory location’ (cf. Wright 1985) of middle class occupations. While middle class working conditions include professional, supervisory, managerial occupations along with small businesses, the middle class also stand in-between the working class and the capitalist class. They thus share certain characteristics with these two latter classes depending on the middle class occupation in question and on changes experienced in the middle class occupation (see Zweig 2007). In the case of the employees at Lewisham Council, it is possible to say that the changes they encountered to their working conditions brought to light their own contradictory class location. After all, they experienced the degradation and intensification of their employment conditions through neoliberalism in a similar way to which working class employment conditions have been degraded and intensified through neoliberalism. The emotional-volitional utterance signifies the momentary unity of this event of powerlessness with a contradictory whole that competence (through ‘empowerment’) at this workplace represents. The utterance is a traumatic insight into the underlying reality of the neoliberal competence agenda within this particular workplace and to the contradictory class location that these employees exist within. The utterance therefore expresses what Bakhtin terms as ‘the whole truth (pravda) of the entire situation as a unique moment in what constitutes an ongoing event’ (Bakhtin 1993: 36). The sense of what competence epitomised in this particular workplace – the unique shape that competence assumed at this workplace – was fused into the way in which competence was performed by the ‘deeds’ that workers carried out. Through this fusion workers demonstrated that competence injures their own identities as workers. As a result, these workers no longer pretended to be something they were not (i.e. ‘competent’ workers); they no longer accepted their passive status by providing alibis as to why they remained incompetent. Rather, they accepted their ‘obligative (ought-to-be) uniqueness’ (Bakhtin 1993: 42) by challenging the sense of competence in concrete workplace events; events in which they, the workers, were supposed to be ‘empowered’ within. By so doing, empowerment and competence are transformed by them into an actual answerable act through emotional-volitional utterances such as the one made about the ‘management-worker divide’.


Participatory workplace personalities What was further required for a critical practice to emerge at this workplace was an act which established a proletarian public sphere that would in turn permanently puncture a void in this particular competent public sphere. This is an issue we will return to in Chapter 7. For now, let us momentarily consider three further moments of many management-led workplace participatory schemes. First, the external pressures of neoliberalism and financialisation create in its wake downward intensified competitive pressure on a workforce to perform to new accounting standards. Intensification can manifest itself in various ways under these circumstances. The competent public sphere demands that organisations delayer and flatten out their bureaucratic structures, transform themselves into ‘post-bureaucracies’, in order to ensure that knowledge flows more freely around an organisation and that hierarchies are reduced. However, this often generates greater intensive pressures on those employees wishing to gain promotion within an organisation. Occupational grades might be ‘flattened out’ for example so that there are fewer grades to move up for promotion but at the same time the distance between grades might become more pronounced. This, then, will prolong the time it takes to move up a grade because the expectations and job requirements are increased between each grade (McCann et al. 2008: 361). Flattening out bureaucratic structures also implies that, at least at different levels of management, employees can feel added pressures to obtain a broad knowledge of how an organisation operates as a whole, as well as pressures to put in more effort in the face of external competitive pressures (see Chapter 3). These pressures of financialisation are linked with techniques such as ‘empowerment’ because competence demands that employees demonstrate a sense of autonomy in their work duties and a sense of entrepreneurial spirit in how they meet customer tastes and demands. Employees in this way are empowered by an organisation to gain autonomy and to therefore empower their own empowerment. But autonomy and empowerment can lead to conflicts and tensions about how exactly an employee should manage themselves in an organisation as regards meeting targets. Should they forgo training initiatives and opportunities in order to ensure targets are met? How do they negotiate management priorities whilst meeting customer needs and customer quality? (D’Annunzio-Green and Francis 2005). Consider for example those who work at home for a substantial period of time during the working week. Such working patterns potentially


cause anxiety for management because home-based workers are no longer within the terrain of immediate management visibility. In these circumstances management must relinquish close-knit types of office surveillance based on ‘seeing’ these employees working at their desks. Moreover, some evidence suggests that home-based workers eschew teamwork in favour of individualised working patterns such as completing individual projects at work. These workers thus implicitly reject fundamental tenets of competence-based workplace teamwork learning (on ‘teamwork’ see below). This in turn can breed resentment towards home-based workers from office-based workers within the same firm, particularly if home-based workers generate a higher level of autonomy, self-management and confidence than their office-based colleagues (Felstead et al. 2003). These potential dilemmas for generating a competent public sphere within a company can of course be addressed by management through the introduction of smarter workplace surveillance devices (see Chapter 6) to monitor home-based workers. But these devices may prove unnecessary if home-based workers internalise a competent work ethic themselves. Second, where employee autonomy in the workplace is catered for through the competent public sphere (e.g. through HPPs) then collective solidarity amongst workers might be translated into a more close-knit type of managerial peer supervision. Under many types of intermediate teamwork, workers in their daily organisational practices not only have to consider the supervisory capacity of the principle manager but must also consider the supervisory capacity of the whole team to which they belong (Hodson 2002: 515). This is part of a wider molar formation of allocating and shifting responsibility from top-level management to those local supervisors working in key strategic sites of an organisation so that an even tighter control of the workforce can be maintained than in more traditional workplace settings (Hodson 2002: 515; see also below). These added pressures also point towards the fact that some companies and organisations are structured along dualistic lines of a centre governed by higher-level ‘expert management knowledge’ and a periphery occupied by lower-level employees (some of whom might be low-level management) possessing ‘local knowledge’. The centre manages the organisation in question and places importance on the likes of formal qualifications and expertise while the periphery operates at lower levels, has little say over decision-making, and often interacts with organisations and individuals such as clients, residents, and shop-owners who remain outside of their immediate organisational hierarchy. This dualism is itself


based on the more abstract molar division of the separation between mental and manual labour. The current proclivity by some to implement CoPs and participatory regimes therefore fail to fully appreciate how the competence agenda often reinforces the division between mental and manual labour even in the service sector; a structural division that prevents and marginalises the very category of peripheral, ‘lower-level’ knowledge from being heard in the workplace (Yanow 2004: 522). Third, the participatory event at DIRECTeam is illustrative of the complex mediation of resistance in the workplace. On the one hand, this particular participatory technique had the unintended consequence of opening up a space for resistance. Indeed, other researchers have similarly discovered that workers will sometimes utilise intangible attributes and formalise these into more tangible demands (e.g. higher wages, less hours, and so on). For instance, in a comparative analysis of management consultancy teams Meriläinen et al. (2004) found that dialogue around ‘work-life balance’ was applied by some consultants in the UK as a type of ‘resistance’ to the image of an ideal consultant who worked long hours and sacrificed certain aspects of their private life for the good of work. Fleming similarly discovered in his analysis of the call centre in Australia (see Chapter 4) that many of the employees interviewed displayed a cynical attitude towards the managerial idea that the intangible quality of ‘fun’ could be implemented in the call centre. For these employees the imposition of ‘fun’ by management was both condescending and inauthentic. They were well aware of the calculated strategies by management to blur the boundaries of work and leisure by organising ‘fun’ at work (Fleming 2005: 295–297); a blurring that is also apparent in some traditional manual occupations such as car manufacturing plants (see Cheney and Cloud 2006: 521–522; Commisso 2006: 183–185). On the other hand, it is also important to note that the space opened up by intangible traits for what appear to be acts of defiance in the workplace can in fact reinforce the fantasy of resistance. Hodgson (2005) discerned that even amongst project managers of a UK financial service sector there was an air of parody directed towards an imposed managerial ‘professionalisation’ agenda. Humour for example was evident amongst project managers concerning ‘best practice’ methods of professionalisation. Through exaggerated performances and utterances many ridiculed the terms they had learnt about best practice. But this distancing was in practice conducted through the monologic utterance of ‘professionalisation’ itself. Some project managers believed they could break best practice standards because they had already learned and internalised these


professional standards themselves (Hodgson 2005: 63). Unlike trade unions, the project managers were not defined at least in the first instance through an organised and structured relationship of negotiation and antagonism with their employers. This makes it easier to understand why their subjection and resistance to professionalisation was in fact repeated and performed through the very self-same utterances associated with professionalisation. After all, professional occupations are more likely to be defined by ‘non-antagonistic’ forms of working practices where the pursuit of individual and collective routines in the workplace is articulated through individual professional identities. The ambiguous position exhibited by project managers thus facilitates a space of fantasy to emerge for them to be knowingly cynical about certain aspects of managerial rhetoric and thereby derive elements of fun through (e.g.) parody. It is the freedom to distance themselves from the rules of professionalisation that reinforces the unwritten rules of the fantasy of competence for these project managers. That is to say, the appearance of cynicism actually sustains the underlying support of competence by reinforcing the idea that a competent worker is one who is prepared to ‘buck the trend’, ‘take calculated risks’, ‘bend the rules’, and so on, to such an extent that they are willing to parody the very sense of their own ‘profession’ work identity. However, their displeasure of some managerial utterances and the pleasure they gain by being cynical of it through parody permits these employees to simultaneously identify with a wider project of professionalisation (e.g. they can parody professionalisation because they are after all professionals themselves), thus ensuring the fetish of competence remains in place (see also Carlone and Larson 2006: 273; Kosmala and Herrbach 2006: 1418–1421; Poutler and Land 2008: 73–75). More broadly, far from igniting a critical public sphere cynicism can in fact lead to higher work output on the part of employees. This can especially be the case where employees feel a sense of job insecurity at their workplace. Cynicism towards working practices can in this instance actually motivate cynical employees to increase their output because cynics might internalise (e.g.) the threat of job layoffs to a greater extent than non-cynics and thereby raise their work effort accordingly (Brandes et al. 2008).

Conclusion This chapter has sought to outline some of the tensions, dilemmas and contradictions of the current drive to construct competent public spheres in the workplace by management theorists and practitioners. Far from


building a form of democracy in the workplace that overcomes the fetish of capital accumulation, this drive is mediated by the need to extend the productive and financial aptitude of capital across society through the competent public sphere (cf. Cheney and Cloud 2006: 514). This fetish is perhaps exposed in its starkest form in the United States in respect to corporations. The dominant metaphor used in the US when assessing the claims of a corporation is still to treat the corporation as a ‘person’ who works in the best interests of its workforce and other stakeholders. Attached to this metaphor is a set of associated meanings that seek to placate and encourage workers by stressing that everyone works as part of a team, as part of the same community, for the good of a corporation as a whole. And as we have seen these participatory metaphors and themes have come of age under the new economy. But as Fisk (2005) argues the reality is quite different. In 1979 the US Supreme Court passed a judgement that effectively maintained the power of shareholders over employees when the Court decreed that employee pensions are not securities. This means that employees are virtually powerless to sue a corporation for fraud if the value of their pensions has been distorted (Fisk 2005: 843–844). Without real democratic measures in place for workers to critically and publicly question management actions this type of fraud will never be democratically addressed. There is however another hindrance to establishing real democratic participation in corporations. Viewing the corporation as a person also reinforces workplace divisions because only immediate and permanent employees are legitimately recognised as being part of the corporation. No obligation therefore exists for the corporation to recognise temporary workers as employees. In this instance the contract serves as a mediating force between those who are deemed as competent workers and part of the corporate ‘family’ and those who are deemed as incompetent workers and as outsiders to the corporate ‘family’. For if it is the case that the contract implies a sense of freedom on the part of the workforce (i.e. the freedom to choose to work for and thereby freely enter into a contract with whoever one wishes), then the contract also highlights most graphically a worker’s ‘non-existence’ in the workplace (cf. Marx 1981: 82) especially if one is the recipient of a temporary contract. To deny the same status and benefits for temporary workers as might be enjoyed by permanent workers is therefore to pit different desires against one another: the desire to gain a permanent contract and the desire to retain a permanent contract. If this is the case then the idea that a workforce in a corporation can operate in a harmonious unity through participatory regimes and public spheres is once again


highly problematic, especially when a workforce senses deep divisions within its own ranks (Rodino-Colocino 2006). Yet in the world of competence and the new economy we would surely expect to see the sharing of knowledge amongst ‘stakeholders’, not its corporate enclosure. After all, positive adherents of the new economy thesis stress the necessity to share knowledge amongst various partners in the public sphere in order to benefit specific projects and promote the social good. Indeed, for organisations and firms to be deemed ‘competent’ there is one line of thinking which suggests that each has a responsibility to establish networks of knowledge between themselves and other ‘stakeholders’. According to Boatright (2006) there are two principle types of stakeholder management. First, there are those stakeholders who affect and are affected by what a firm does. Stakeholder groups include customers, shareholders, employees, and suppliers and it is the responsibility of management to factor in these stakeholders into their plans of action. Second, there is another type of management that seeks to treat stakeholders according to accepted ethical guidelines. Ethical guidelines in this respect are based on contractual agreements with employees or customers and more broadlybased legal obligations that a business must adhere to (Boatright 2006: 108). Those who believe that stakeholder management can be productively applied argue that its usefulness lies in prompting management to establish a moral and public dialogue with a range of stakeholders and, in the process, persuade management of a firm to be socially responsible towards its stakeholders. In this way management can contribute positively to enhancing their ‘brand’ in the eyes of relevant stakeholders (Simmons 2004: 603). Stakeholder management, some argue, thus widens the basis of knowledge networks and intellectual property rights in the public sphere. As legal entities, for instance, firms have rights and responsibility towards the communities in which they work and therefore have citizenship obligations towards those communities. This is all the more urgent because firms and businesses are being encouraged by government to enter into public-private partnerships with local authorities, voluntary agencies, other businesses and an array of civil society groups (Crane et al. 2004: 109). A modern property rights perspective that recognises the implicit contracts that firms often make with an array of stakeholders beyond that of shareholders will begin to address this issue (Asher et al. 2005). However, the idea that firms should ideally widen their stakeholder remit is a problematical one and this is noticeable in relation to a


workforce. There has been much interest in recent years concerning management giving their employees share options in their respective company. Appearances would lead one to believe that this act is part of a stakeholder capitalism in which management looks after its workers by letting them enjoy the fruits of company profits. However, evidence is mixed as to whether employee share options do engender greater trust and a willingness to work on the part of employees towards management. While the number of companies in some western countries engaging in employee share options has increased it is also true to say that some data does not suggest much improvement on labour’s ownership rights of companies (O’Donnell et al. 2006: 116). Indeed, a recent ruling by the International Accounting Standards Board in 2004 which stated that companies had to include share-based payments in their accounting books implies that businesses will probably increasingly use stock options to mainly attract top level managers and some highly skilled and experienced technical employees rather than ‘ordinary workers’ because these highly skilled individuals are believed to directly influence share prices (O’Donnell et al. 2006: 120; see also Brennan 2008). But the selective rewarding of distinct groups of stakeholders is one strategy amongst other strategies and techniques that management can use. To understand more precisely, then, how competence reorganises the workplace public sphere we now turn to issues concerned with the way in which the voices of workers are silenced.

6 Silencing the Thematic Utterances of Workers

Introduction: On dialogue and utterances In the previous chapter we established how utterances can be used by employees to create a public sphere through distinct events that presents a challenge of sorts to the competent public sphere. This chapter will look more closely at dialogic struggles in the workplace around competence. In particular the chapter will show in more precise detail how management seeks to predefine specific workplace events in advance by predefining specific meanings of competence so that such meanings are no longer open to thematic dialogic challenge by employees and workers at various workplace events. Management can do this in a variety of different ways, from more explicit modes of workplace surveillance through the likes of ICTs to more subtle modes such as rearticulating the desires of workers towards competence. Theoretically speaking, management must aim to define specific meanings of competence with a single ‘accent’, vision, tone and ‘monologue’ favourable to managerial prerogatives. Subsequently the ‘heteroglossic’ utterances of employees – those utterances that represent ‘the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present’ (Bakhtin 1981: 291) – are unable to question the monologic ‘accenting’ of specific meanings of competence by management. The heteroglossic potential of competence, such as that discovered at Lewisham Council, is thus accented in the abstract by management. The separation of meaning from theme is particularly important for management in this respect. Language is obviously an inherently evaluative mechanism that carries different meanings. Those meanings of 109


various linguistic elements are embodied in an utterance and also carry different themes when used at actual events of dialogue. Themes are the non-reproducible meanings of an utterance and these appear in a concrete event during the actual moment of dialogue and which are determined by both verbal and non-verbal factors (Voloshinov 1973: 99–100). Evaluation is the sense and sensation that meaning and theme impart to an utterance at an event. The sense of an utterance is at first ‘haphazard and ephemeral’ and ‘lacks a socially grounded and stable audience’ because it consists of ‘all those vague and underdeveloped experiences, thoughts, and idle and accidental words that flash across our minds…They lack any sort of logic or unity’ (Voloshinov 1973: 92). These relate to the ‘potentialities of our expression’, to the ‘atmosphere of unsystematised and unfixed inner and outer speech which endows our every instance of behaviour and action and our every “conscious” state with meaning’ (Voloshinov 1973: 91; see also Bakhtin 1984: 176). Dialogic potentialities however obtain a form during specific dialogic events in which meanings of words become fused with specific concrete themes. Monologic dialogue must endeavour to regulate this evaluative potentiality of utterances by separating various ideas and worldviews from one another during events so that particular heteroglossic ideas cannot engage in full dialogic encounters and express their thematic potentials. The importance of monologic dialogue, then, is that it suppresses the potentialities of employee utterances to talk about those ideas existing ‘on the borderline of dialogically intersecting consciousness’ (Bakhtin 1984: 91). Monologic utterances therefore suppress the heteroglossic potential of workers to engage in dialogue about themes of (e.g.) unfair and exploitative working conditions amongst one another, i.e. amongst ‘dialogically intersecting consciousness’. It is in this sense that competence is a dialogic device which orders the desires embodied in employee utterances at workplace events. As the potential ‘hero’ of dialogue at workplace events, competence is an example of what Bakhtin terms as ‘the carrier of an independently valid idea’ (Bakhtin 1984: 79) that favours the desires and utterances of management. Management thus becomes the ‘author’ of competence in this respect. To use Bakhtin once again, competence, in this instance, is translated as ‘a true signifying idea’ because ‘it gravitates toward some impersonal, systematically monologic context; in other words, it gravitates toward the systematically monologic worldview of the author himself’ (Bakhtin 1984: 79). Competence ‘binds us, quite

Silencing the Thematic Utterances of Workers 111

independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it’ (Bakhtin 1981: 342). Through competence, management will endeavour to accent heteroglossic themes into monologic themes congruent with the various meanings of competence. In this chapter we begin to demonstrate how this dialogic process works by first exploring how monologic dialogue transforms heteroglossic themes of workers into what Voloshinov terms as ‘indirect speech’ in order to ensure that the fantasy of competence remains consistent. From here we will investigate a number of other monologic workplace themes and relate these to various points explored in previous chapters. In particular we will explore how these themes can also create points of tension in the competent public sphere.

Monologic indirect speech In an ideal competent world, empowerment, freedom of speech, and organisational culture operate in a harmonious unity. Freedom of speech, preferably, convinces people that it is worthwhile to exchange ideas, positively encourages them to either accept or reject those very same ideas, promotes the flow of information so that people can be informed about issues they discuss amongst one another, and by facilitating the critical exchange of ideas freedom of speech engenders autonomous rationally reflexive individuals (Haskins 1996: 88). A competent public sphere in a bureaucratically flattened out organisation is therefore one that should ideally encourage freedom of speech at all levels in an organisation so that employees feel empowered. Management, for example, should clearly state that ‘responsible freedom of speech’ is a guiding principle of the organisation in question. An organisation can also foster a climate of interpersonal dialogue between members based on the free exchange of ideas. Again, managers can lead the way here by addressing their employees through honest and positive communication. If employees work in units of teams then channels of communication within and between teams can be positively created by championing ‘responsible’ freedom of speech. As part of this agenda, teams need to be encouraged to establish their own norms that empower their members and promote freedom of speech. For example, when ‘brainstorming’ a set of ideas there should be no element of censoring in place that silences the voice of any single employee (Haskins 1996: 89–94). At some distance from the ideal conditions of workplace free speech depicted above, however, competence in fact erects barriers against


employees gaining an expressive voice in a workplace public sphere. New economy fetishism invokes individualistic rather than genuine collective responses to limit the damaging consequences of financialisation (see Yamada 1998). For example, in their qualitative study of 40 full-time employees working in a number of new economy industries such as financial services, new media, pharmaceuticals, and advertising, Milliken et al. (2003) discovered that employees expressed various emotional traits of ‘fear’ that encouraged them not to voice their concerns about various workplace issues. A sizeable number of respondents (30 percent) feared that if they did voice concerns they might be labelled as a ‘troublemaker’ and ‘complainer’ in contrast to a ‘team player’. One female respondent working in an investment banking firm voiced her fear in the following way: Because it is a consensus-oriented environment, your power comes from whether people see you as agreeable and easy to work with. Being a rebel is not embraced (cited in Milliken et al. 2003: 1463). Even though Milliken et al. do not analyse the above quote in the following way, it is possible nevertheless to observe that this particular respondent voices a sense of the fear of being perceived as incompetent. The sense of incompetence lurks beneath her utterances to the extent she recognises that her potential resides in the positive intangible attributes she can embody (‘agreeable and easy to work with’). Being incompetent would be to forsake these positive potentials and instead embrace and actualise the potential of incompetence; in this case actualising incompetence in the vaguely defined utterance of being ‘a rebel’. Rather than making her particular workplace answerable to her specific concerns, the respondent shuts down a dialogic crisis in advance through this sense of fear. But fear also manifested itself in other intangible incompetent potentials. Another female employee at a consulting firm invoked the fear of being transformed into an ‘outcast’ if she spoke about problems in her firm. As far as negative consequences, it is not about whether I’m going to get promoted but more like – will I become an outcast in the family (cited in Milliken et al. 2003: 1463). Here we can begin to understand how one’s competent personality is expressed outwardly in specific ideological workplace utterances. In


this case the respondent views the material conditions of the firm at which she works as a ‘family’, as a set of personal social relationships. ‘Family’ thus acts as a theme of dialogue that mediates the personality of this employee in the social context at hand (see Voloshinov 1973: 153). To reiterate what has been said in previous chapters, ‘family’ is a common intangible trait associated with competence that often manifests itself within in/tangible situations such as having ‘fun’ work events. These events help to promote the supportive family metaphor in the workplace (see also Miller et al. 2007). The ability of a firm or organisation to impart this sense of ‘family’ within a workplace and thereby blur the boundaries between private and working lives instils a reticence on the part of employees to freely and expressively engage in the workplace public sphere. As with the case the female employee above, workers do not want to be perceived as being cut adrift from relationships at work, to be cut off from their workplace team or ‘family’, to be seen as being an incompetent team or ‘family’ member. A good competent team member is one who can work autonomously and take advantage of contingent opportunities when they arise. A bad incompetent team member is one who betrays their ‘family’ by complaining and by not taking responsibility for their actions. As the previous chapter indicated, working as part of a team represents at the same time more subtle modes of peer supervision. ‘Family’ thus represents an ‘official’ bourgeois workplace utterance to the extent that it no longer conveys the real tensions evident in the relationship between management and workers at a workplace. Rather, as an official utterance ‘family’ acts as an external and objectified (molar) utterance whose effects (becoming outcast) speaks for the employee. ‘Family’ therefore externalises actual utterances of individual employees within a bourgeois workplace public sphere (cf. Voloshinov 1976: 88). Visualised thus, ‘family’ represents a type of ‘indirect dialogue’. At a basic level indirect dialogue does not operate through the simple reproduction of an author’s utterances – in this case the utterances of management – into another’s speech – in this case the speech of a worker. Rather, indirect dialogue reveals a different emotional-volitional content to that which is manifest in the form of management dialogue. There are after all many ways in which a worker might interpret ‘family’ in their own lived world. And yet it is still the case that the management’s monologic utterances about ‘family’ nevertheless become embedded in a worker’s dialogue. One special characteristic of indirect dialogue, then, is that it enables a worker to reflect on their social situation and therefore allows the worker to seemingly engage in dialogue


with management through their own emotional-evaluative accent (cf. Voloshinov 1973: 144). Unfortunately, the sense of individuality and personality of the worker is misguided because indirect dialogue favours dialogue established by management. In the example presented above for example we saw how the utterance of ‘family’ becomes the ‘Other’ of dialogue and mediates the utterances of the worker. While the worker in question subsequently seems to be freely and reflexively engaged in dialogue about her working conditions, she does in fact speak within the monologic themes defined by management. In effect, the worker asks: ‘what does this object want of me?’ Or, ‘what does my workplace “family” want of me?’ And she answers: ‘not to become an outcast’. The Other in this respect is not the worker but the utterance of ‘family’ itself; an utterance overdetermined by the workplace bourgeois public sphere. The worker thereby offers itself ‘to the Other as the object of its desire’ (Zˇizˇek 1989: 116). ‘Family’ has subsequently become the Other of dialogue through which the worker invests (at least a substantial part of) her workplace desire. Moreover, it is an Other that manifests itself through indirect dialogue. For example, in the quote above we never see the ‘author’ of the employee’s words – for example she never mentions a manager by name – and yet an expressive image is nonetheless created of that which one must not become, namely ‘becoming-outcast’. Employees patently modify managerial dialogue within their own lived context. At the same time, however, employees freely express their own workplace personality through the ideational position of competence. Through a familial sense for instance a space opens up for individual workers to gain an impression of those intangible traits that an incompetent employee might internalise and which therefore need to be avoided at all costs (see also Musson and Duberley 2007: 157). By gaining this sense of incompetence individual workers can avoid being perceived as incompetent by other immediate employee (family) team members. In addition, this sense helps to consolidate the fantasy of an incompetent Other, of an Other that fails to be part of the workplace ‘family’. Broadly speaking, fantasy allows a person to create a ‘chain of speech communication’ of relatively stable speech genres (Bakhtin 1986: 78 and 93) that coalesce around ‘opinions’. Such ‘opinions’ provide explanatory consistency to the dialogue of a person in the face of both a loss of their own desire to that of the Other and the potential loss of their own practice – in the case above the potential loss of practice in ‘becoming outcast’. For instance, in the examples above a worker


might create a fantasy of fellow workers being ‘rebels’ thus stopping the worker in question from gaining enjoyment from being ‘agreeable to work with’. Therefore, ‘the stake of…fantasy is to construct a vision of society which does exist, a society which is not split by an antagonistic division, a society in which the relation between its parts is organic, complementary’ (Zˇizˇek 1989: 126). Fantasy acts as a way in which the worker understands in advance why and how s/he lacks ‘something’, in this case how and why s/he lacks ‘empowerment’. Both quotes from the employees in Milliken et al.’s study also reveal the movement and connection between the sense of in/competence and how individual employees assemble their own potentials to negotiate the fuzziness of in/competence in their respective organisations. These connections are not therefore direct expressions of emotional states of individual employees as such, but rather the movement of affective states, or the movement of potential states of being (e.g. ‘becoming-outcast’). Such is the power of these fantasies that employees can learn to enjoy being subject to workplace surveillance by their own organisational management. In their in-depth interview study of 154 respondents who worked in a variety of organisations in the San Francisco Bay area, Allen et al. (2007) found that many employees had internalised organisational justifications for workplace surveillance. These justifications coalesced into two broad categories: coercive and caring. In the coercive category surveillance was said to be justified if it ensured and reinforced (e.g.) honesty amongst a particular workforce. In the caring category surveillance was justified if it ensured (e.g.) that employees were not overworking. Allen et al. (2007) note that many employees displayed both coercive and caring attitudes, which goes some way to explaining why respondents demonstrated little resistance to workplace monitoring. This example highlights how surveillance is applied by employees to maintain fantasies for ‘becoming competence’ by encouraging employees to construct images of dishonest workers and caring management. In the next section we extend the discussion by situating some of the observations made so far within the wider remit of new economy fetish. We will see how indirect dialogue often evolve into other associated themes, but also how these themes can sometimes give rise to heteroglossic voices in the workplace.

Workplace partnerships and the new economy Certainly it is true to say that the utopia constructed by new wave management theorists and gurus gives the impression that something


along the lines of an inclusive and democratic public sphere is now being championed by those once thought to be diametrically opposed to the interests of workers. In this sense one might optimistically believe that the technique of producing a ‘participatory public sphere’ is now seen as a viable option by some management strategists. But are things really as optimistic as this scenario suggests? Well, not exactly would be the answer. The public sphere championed by new wave management theorists has emerged from the new economy fetish and as such displays some considerable old economy traits. We have already seen in previous chapters how under financialisation levels of exploitation have in some respects increased. Indeed, the fetish of the new economy has heralded capital’s offensive against Fordist trade unions and the restructuring of exploitation by implementing different types of workplace discipline such as increasing the tasks that labour has to perform (see Munck 2002: 78). Even the so-called ‘immaterial’ aspect of labour in the knowledge-intensive new economy is now subject to the normal requirements of rationalisation, calculation, commodification and quantification. High-skilled scientific work, to give just one illustration, is increasingly exposed to rigorous ‘performance metrics, project monitoring procedures, packaged software products and automation’ (Thompson 2005: 84; see also below). In fact, higher levels of exploitation have been justified by merging the new economy fetish with participatory practices. Intangible expressions like ‘trust’ and ‘partnership’ between employers and employees are important mediating utterances in this respect. If we look briefly at the UK we can begin to grasp how this is the case. A key guiding policy of New Labour since it came to power in 1997 has been its emphasis on a new skills strategy. Based primarily around a neoliberal supply-side policy, the need for skills development of Britain’s workforce was seen by the Labour government as key to economic and competitive success in an informational global knowledge economy. As well as this, New Labour believed that increasing the skills base of the workforce would not only get people into the labour market but would empower them once there (McIlroy 2008: 285–286). Amongst other things, this policy was implemented through a number of institutional mechanisms. The Learning Skills Council in 1999 is one such notable mechanism which took charge of post-16 requirements outside of higher education, employer-funding training, and a voluntary system of National Learning Targets (McIlroy 2008: 287). Importantly, the intangible utterance ‘partnership’ was used and applied by the Labour government to bring on board the Trade Union Congress


(TUC) to its skills agenda. One policy development in this respect was the statutory recognition of union learning representatives (ULRs) under the Employment Act 2002. ULRs are union reps who promote learning in their workplace by (e.g.) raising the profile of learning in a workplace, giving advice and working with local union committees on learning issues and raising these with management. But, as McIlroy observes, ULRs, who numbered about 18,000 in 2007, do not create workplace public spheres based around collective bargaining. ULRs are not ‘partners’ in the workplace in this sense but are rather agents who provide a service to employees and employers around training needs. And ultimately it is the state which defines the projects that ULRs must make bids for (McIlroy 2008: 296–297). Naturally, this has led many to be highly critical of terms like ‘partnership’ and ‘trust’ when used in UK industrial relations. For while the intangible attributes associated with ‘trust’ and ‘partnership’ between employers and employees are becoming commonplace in UK industrial relations, indeed more so than in many other countries, much of this dialogue revolves around individual benefits accruing to workers in partnership with their employer instead of collective benefits and rights for the workforce as a whole. This considerably weakens the hand of labour, not least because national bargaining diminishes along with the state’s willingness to take on its share of the risks involved in such partnerships. What we are left with are more intangible industrial relations in the workplace associated with voluntary compromises between employers and workers. ‘Stakeholders’ begin to replace the categories of social class in the workplace and trade unions lean more towards ‘consultancy’ roles in facilitating new industrial relations (Martínez Lucio and Stuart 2005). In this instance ‘partnership’ can be thought of as helping to depoliticise labour representatives by treating trade unions ‘as a special interest group, representing a section of the community’ rather than as representing the workforce as a whole (Fairbrother 2000: 53). ‘Partnership’, as an utterance, enjoys this depoliticised potential in part exactly because of its intangible nature, and it is this which constructs a number of workplace themes compatible with the new economy fetish. Jenkins (2007) notes for example that the utterance ‘partnership’ is frequently used by employers to secure not mutual beneficial outcomes for all but rather to secure a division amongst workers that effectively impedes them from collectively organising with one another in a workplace. Of course, this monologic meaning of ‘partnership’ is not conveyed to workers in such an explicit manner. Instead, ‘partnership’ conveys a neoliberal sense of risk to workers at


particular workplaces and a sense that without partnerships with management in an organisation then workers are more at risk from an externally competitive environment. Workers in one organisation are thereby pitted against workers in other organisations, and this competitive meaning embodied in ‘partnership’ can be transferred to changing working themes that suit a more managerial line of thinking on those factors like ‘cost-efficiency, quality and speed of response to consumer demand’ (Jenkins 2007: 638). These themes are thus similar to those articulated by new wave management and by new economy gurus. In other words, ‘partnership’ is a monologic utterance that has slowly become embedded in the workplace and which acts in a number of instances as indirect dialogue for the new economy fetish. ‘Partnership’ can also be applied internally by employers through intangible dialogic theme of trust. In an ideal world a fundamental requirement for successful partnerships in the workplace is the establishment of consistent and typical modes of trust between employers and employees and the recurrent transfer of mutual benefits between both (Dietz 2004: 19). For this to occur some suggest that the formal control employers have over employees should eventually cede to relationships of trust, with the latter ideally based around shared mutual goals, delegation and control between ‘partners’ as well as to intangible characteristics such as personal qualities and motives of the participants involved (Dietz 2004: 7–8). However, without the intermediary body of strong trades unions the relationship between employers and employees can end up being based on socially negotiated elements of partnership and trust between individuals within a company rather than through a structured formal agreement. In such a situation trust can soon turn into a means for employers to cajole employees to increase their work effort or work beyond their normal working hours when the occasion arises. In this way trust between different ‘partners’ is transformed into a sense of pressurised job commitments (Dean and Shah 2002: 68). Subsequently, the idea that dialogic communities in the form of (e.g.) CoPs will result in a harmonious working environment considerably declines (Roberts 2006: 629). Competence, partnerships and the public sphere can therefore all work together and in the process produce a molar formation in a workplace. The ideal neoliberal picture of partnerships is thus compatible with a competence agenda in another sense because like competence ‘partnership’ can be used to split employees into knowledge-sharing teamwork units. Teamwork is related to the creation of semi-autonomous and semi-directed work teams who accept responsibility for a number of


tasks and whose members within the team monitor one another’s performance of these tasks (Francis 2003: 72). Teamwork exists in ‘partnership’ with management because, again ideally, teamwork units are granted more involvement in tasks by management in return for reorganised work practices. As a result teamwork is associated with competence because teams are expected not only to be competent in carrying out a number of tasks, but also to be competent ‘in various management and leadership functions’ (Francis 2003: 76). A workplace public sphere, in turn, provides an important enabling mechanism for competence and teamwork because the public sphere under these circumstances conveys a dialogic sense that (i) management takes seriously the concerns of its workforce in the move towards a competence agenda; and (ii) management is seen as devolving democratic leadership to specific teams. A more critical approach, however, might be to suggest that teamwork in the workplace remains an important moment in conveying the ‘sense’ of competency to workers because they restrain minor utterances of resistance in a workplace public sphere. Management can implement teamwork in various ways, and some types of teamwork are more flexible and porous than other types. Nonetheless, by generating teams in workplaces management simultaneously establishes the power or potential to divide workers into a visible cellular formation within a single organisational workplace and subject each cell to the pressures of accounting. This enables management to install multilayered supervision within a single cell (e.g. a team leader of a single cell, cell manager responsible for a number of cells, departmental manager, and so on) and ensure that the competence of workers is channelled into one or several functional tasks of a single cell (Danford et al. 2002: 317). Teamwork does not of course insinuate that management simply imposes rather explicit modes of workplace surveillance (Geary and Dobbins 2001). Any change to work practices in an organisation has to gain some amount of consent from at least some sections of the workforce to meet with any kind of success. Indeed, teamwork formations, as elements of workplace accounting mechanisms, can never be simply imposed on a workforce but must always respond to specific assemblage of a workforce in the guise of (e.g.) the collective solidarity of a workforce, its technical skills, and willingness to resist the imposition of budgetary constraints (Saravanamuthu and Tinker 2003). Even so, one of the main potentials of teamwork is that it formalises what are often informal cooperative relationships between workers (Geary and Dobbins 2001). As such expressive modes of resistance come to be


controlled through the molar formation of teamwork because formalised teamwork facilitates more subtle ways of enabling management to ‘see’ and ‘talk about’ both actual and potential heteroglossic issues in a workplace. Again, the observations above should not be used to obscure different types of partnership deals between employers and employees, some of which are more favourable towards the interests of employees than others (see Mellahi and Wood 2004). But past evidence does nevertheless suggests that unions have often been no more successful in gaining positive outcomes on jobs and wages through partnerships with employees than through more conventional non-partnership arrangements (Kelly 2004: 288). In fact, the short-sightedness associated with the pressures of financialisation compels many business organisations to think about ‘short-term cost minimization and profit maximization, attributes that appear inconsistent with long-term commitments entailed by meaningful partnerships’ (Kelly 2004: 288). The same can be said of teamwork. While management might express a ‘consensual’ moment in teamwork that emphasises the need to influence and respond to the cultural beliefs and values of a workforce, the more ‘controlling’ moment of teamwork emphasises the need of a workforce to adapt quickly to changing competitive environments and to have quicker turnarounds in output in a shorter term (Francis 2003: 84). In saying this, ‘partnership’ is a ‘multiaccentual’ utterance in the workplace public sphere and therefore can, like that at DIRECTeam explored in the previous chapter, instigate a void in the public sphere in which workers manage to gain a critical distance to monologic meanings of partnership. In their study of a UK demutualised non-union building society, given the pseudonym ‘FinanceCo’, Tailby et al. (2007) found that management at FinanceCo had implemented a ‘partners council’ (PC) for employee representation. Each PC event operated through automatic employee membership whereby workplace constituencies of 30–35 employees would elect a representative to a PC. The PC would then meet each month. While some employees reported that they were broadly satisfied with team meetings, others were less so. These employees effectively refused to construct ‘alibis’ (cf. Bakhtin 1993: 42) for what they perceived to be the failure of PC meetings to combine its actions (or ‘deeds’) with what the employees in question believed the overall remit, or meaning, of PCs should entail. Some employees thus broke down the meaning of PC meetings into specific critical dialogic themes. For example, some of the more critical employees believed that actual PC events restricted dialogue to the narrow area of


operational issues. Others were sceptical as to whether their individual concerns expressed at PC meetings did actually filter up the management hierarchy. Others disliked the fact that specific issues such as pay or performance targets were deemed out of bounds at PC meetings. PC representatives in turn complained that employees were rather apathetic in their attitude towards the PC system; a trait that perhaps can be explained by the perceived limited powers that the PC system held in the eyes of many employees. Interestingly, Tailby et al. also studied a UK unionised insurance firm, given the pseudonym ‘InsuranceCo’. While some employees had been critical of the union’s cooperative stance towards management at InsuranceCO on various issues, they nevertheless believed that their collective representation was earnestly listened to by management through the union (Tailby et al. 2007: 226). While we shall shortly look at the relationship between trade unions and the public sphere in greater depth in the next chapter, we first turn our attention to another related area. It was argued in Chapter 4 that the competent public sphere facilitates the adoption of new accounting mechanisms in workplaces that in turn communicate intensified working practices to employees. In the next section we look more concretely at some of the themes concerning some of these accounting mechanisms in relation to ICTs in order to understand more precisely how they too give rise to specific tensions.

Technology, accounting and competence in the workplace The introduction of innovative forms of technology has brought about what Laguerre (2004) calls a working ‘cyberweek’ which operates alongside but also at some distance from the normal working week. The cyberweek is virtual life acting quasi-autonomously of clock-time. Virtual life for example splinters and fragments normal working life and clock-time by a variety of measures, not least by creating new events into the way we work. A cyberweek is not defined by fixed measures of time as is the case of the normal nine to five of a working day. Rather, it adds virtual events to normal ‘civil time’. One can switch their computer on during their leisure time to read work emails, or one can work at home and compress their working hours into a shorter number of days (Laguerre 2004). The cyberweek can obviously bring many advantages for workers, not least the ability of workers to adopt innovative strategies for multi-tasking. Think of wireless communication such as mobile phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). Mobile technologies such as these encourage people to increase their


capacity to communicate with one another and present them with a ‘potential to increase control over timing’ (Wajcman 2008: 71). Through mobile technologies individuals shift time (e.g. by consolidation, delay, spatial transference) and multitask by deepening time (e.g. by finishing one background task whilst simultaneously giving direct attention to another task) (Wajcman 2008: 71). Nonetheless, the benefits that new technology brings to working practices should not blind us to the crucial point that these very same technologies are also internally related to more abstractly pronounced capitalist notions of space and time. A capitalist system in which the spatial production of use-value gives way to the temporal exchange-value of commodities is bewitched even today by the mantra ‘time is money’ each and every time somebody sells their labour power. Mobile technologies are therefore often used by employers as ‘work extenders’ by increasing the quantity of locations where work can be carried out (e.g. within cafés) and by encroaching on to other temporal patterns (e.g. coffee time) (Towers et al. 2006: 597). As Hassan (2003) notes, ‘old-fashioned’ clocktime is an enormously resilient mechanism for regulating everyday life and it is fanciful to believe as some new economy theorists like Castells in fact do (see Castells 2000) that clock-time has been surpassed by ‘realtime’, by time that occurs simultaneously as one registers an event represented to us through ICTs (Hassan 2003: 231). These new temporal patterns are still related to that of socially necessary labour time and are thus part of the dominance of contradictory capitalist social relations, albeit exhibiting new concrete spatial and temporal qualities. If anything, ICTs have managed to ‘compress the meter of the clock and to accelerate the time standard of modernity’ (Hassan 2003: 234). Indeed, competence molar formations, like bourgeois molar formations more broadly, view a workforce as being constituted through a time-sequence of individual and personal lives rather than through the temporal formation of the collective organisation of social life as a whole (cf. Bakhtin 1981: 215). The blurring of the boundaries between work life and family life (the ‘work-life balance’) is a modern-day illustration whereby management increasingly emphasise the need for individual employees to create work patterns through ICTs amenable to their own personal working lives. As we have also seen these personal life-sequences are in turn mediated through the time-sequence of new accounting mechanisms, some of which have been brought about by technological developments. To maintain the various meanings of a competence agenda, then, employers have been increasingly willing to utilise technology in order


to subject workers to technological accounting surveillance mechanisms so that temporal work patterns can be monitored. This takes a variety of forms. At a more ‘mundane’ level technology can be introduced into a workplace to fragment and ‘saturate’ the aptitude of employees by making skills predictable in both procedure and outcome through a number of highly defined rules and tasks (cf. Aneesh 2001: 372). Taylorist principles of scientific management are the outcome here, with the upshot being that employee working patterns are monitored more intensely (Fisher, M. 2007). At the more ‘spectacular’ end of the surveillance spectrum lie location-based service (LBS) applications. Becoming more widely used in the workplace, LBS track and monitor the movement of individuals within and between spaces and do so through devices such as wearable active smart charge badges. LBS represent, according to Michael et al. (2008), a new form of überveillance. If dataveillance is based on the employment of personal data systems to monitor people then überveillance is a type of surveillance ‘above and beyond, an exaggerated, an omnipresent 24/7 electronic surveillance’ (Michael et al. 2008: 1198; italics in the original). Überveillance is constant monitoring that not only identifies individuals but also tracks their locations. Moreover, LBS systems can engage in predictive behaviour and adapt themselves to the specific expected temporal movements of an individual. While überveillance is still at a relatively early stage of development there have nevertheless been some cases in the US where employees have been dismissed on the evidence of LBS systems (Michael et al. 2008: 1195). However, recording mechanisms facilitated by new technologies to monitor employee performance create their own tensions that once again negate both the intangible and tangible effects of competence. Based on research conducted with a large telecommunications firm in the UK, British Telecom (BT), Miozzo and Ramirez (2003) explored the instalment of ICT monitoring systems at BT call centres by management to assess the work practices and competence of operators. One consequence of this was to increase resentment and tension between call centre workers and management that then had negative effects as regards the intangibility of trust between both. But this was part of a whole raft of changes in the workforce at BT. ‘In some cases, this has led to the standardisation of certain operations and a narrowing of skills, in others, to demanding a change in attitude from employees, and yet in others, to the need to tap into broader knowledge through the hiring of outside contractors’ (Miozzo and Ramirez 2003: 78).


One reason why ICT industries often employ contract workers is because these organisations are conscious of the fact that investment in company specific skills can produce a loss, especially if these skills quickly become obsolete. To make adjustments easier when responding to market changes companies progressively favour investing in more general industry-related public knowledge (Szabó and Négyesi 2005). To do this, knowledge-based companies will often hire contingent and contract staff because these workers have accumulated and acquired such public knowledge by working for a number of companies for short periods. As a consequence, however, higher levels of anxiety amongst knowledge-based workers can often be reported because they are apprehensive as regards their levels of non-specific skills which they can transfer to other companies. To obtain these non-specific skills, and aware that companies will not wish to invest their own resources in nonspecific public skills, some knowledge-based workers feel the need to invest their own time and money in acquiring these ‘marketable and versatile’ skills and knowledge (Szabó and Négyesi 2005: 80). In knowledgebased industries there is thus an incentive for some workers to train themselves to become competent, to listen to and respond to the market, and to invest in a constant process of gaining more saturated skills. But this is achieved through a sense of anxiety. But we need to also demonstrate a degree of caution when assessing the control that ICTs increasingly have on the workplace. Various pieces of evidence indicate for instance that in both the UK and the US some of the fastest growing occupational sectors lie in low skilled, low wage, and routine service work like cleaning, waiting, shop assistance, fast food, retail, guarding, and so on (Thompson et al. 2001). As a result the sort of high-tech knowledge work so beloved of new economy theorists must therefore be placed in a context of increased interactive service work where the display of personal tacit knowledge is often seen as a premium over, say, one’s software skills. The use of ICTs should not therefore be taken to imply that workers no longer value tangible work practices such as face-to-face meetings and reading printed paper copy. Indeed, workers might value these more (Walker 2006: 34–35). But this in turn creates other points of tension between management and workers during events about exactly how new technology will change organisational decision-making structures. As a result, new tensions in maintaining competence sometimes emerge. These tensions have ramifications about how a competent public sphere will be adopted in a workplace. For example, Wiredu and Sørensen (2006) investigated a pilot project which saw the establishment of Perioperative


Specialist Practitioners (PSPs) comprising nurses and operating room technicians who combined their skills to launch a new medical profession in the National Health Service in the UK. The primary objective of the pilot project was to overcome negative effects of working practices in hospitals such as excessive working hours of doctors. Through new technological devices like PDAs it was thought that PSPs could take over some of the roles undertaken by junior doctors as regards pre- and post-surgical patient care. As a handheld system for collecting data, PDAs allowed PSPs to log information about patients there and then, access past information, record clinical activity, share information, and record and reflect upon everyday experiences. One major problem in making the project a resounding success, however, was the level of control wielded by those who managed the project. From a management perspective certain defined goals had to be achieved. But this meant that at different events PSPs frequently came into conflict with other types of knowledge communities. Primarily this was because PSPs also came under the control and supervision of a local surgical consultant. Often surgical consultants had their own goals of what they wanted to achieve from the project which conflicted with the overall goals of the project itself. Because PSPs were physically located at some distance from managers of the project and were only connected through virtual networks of the technology being applied PSPs felt they were being forced to negotiate two separate managerial directives that frequently exhibited lines of tension with one another (Wiredu and Sørensen 2006). Under these types of conditions, wherein new media time of working causes friction with other modes of working, the propensity for communities of practice (CoP) to operate as competent public spheres in the workplace is made increasingly difficult (see also Chapter 4). For in these pressurised circumstances emotional intelligence becomes embroiled once again with feelings of anxiety as members get caught up in the political culture of an organisation ensuring in turn that the CoP in question is transformed into a ‘dysfunctional’ space (see Pemberton et al. 2006: 69). Socially constructed competence is thus exposed for what it is and yet this has the potential to bring to the fore other political questions of how an organisation is managed (cf. Finch-Lees et al. 2005: 1206).

Conclusion Empowerment and participation paints a somewhat confusing picture in respect to the right to free expression in an organisation. On the one


hand, the competent public sphere would seem to advocate an element of expressive participation by employees. On the other hand, the competent public sphere defines free expression in a highly restrictive manner. Of course one reason for this ambiguity lie in the different types of participatory techniques that management implements across different organisations within and between countries. Germany, for instance, has a stronger trade union and work council movement than the United States and as a result the German labour force has greater scope for genuine negotiation with employees in workplace public spheres. Indeed, differences such as these point towards an interesting ambiguity in new workplace participatory techniques. Many workplaces in the United States have adopted more participatory practices since the 1990s and these have resulted in higher levels of labour productivity. Participatory techniques aim to give workers a ‘voice’ where they work through strategies such as decentralised hierarchical structures at work, encouraging employees to make use of their cognitive skills and generally enjoy more autonomy and freedom over their work. Yet, according to Kwon (2007), these practices are mediated through a culture of managerial dominance in which the voices of employees are largely subordinate to that of an employer rather than, as is more the case in Germany, allowing workers a larger and more genuinely independent voice through their representatives. And because workers in the US are mainly encouraged to put forward ideas as individuals through human resource management procedures rather than as workers tied to trade unions ‘the American version of employee-involvement practices is characterised by relatively low levels of empowerment’ (Kwon 2007: 190). What this highlights, therefore, is a qualitative dimension to participatory techniques in organisations. On the one hand, employers in the US have become more attuned to granting their employees a ‘voice’. Indeed, the US system of workplace participation depends on relatively high levels of training along with the employment of training associations to carry this out. On the other hand, worker compliance in the US has been largely won by a workfare neoliberal restructuring of the labour force during the 1990s. American workers have internalised this new workplace reality and have subsequently adopted a more individualist, accommodating and obedient set of beliefs at work. In saying this, new managerialism has also penetrated what are often perceived to be more progressive countries for trade unions to operate within. The German trade union and worker councils movement has been weakened in recent years through declining membership brought about by structural and occupational changes (see Addison et al. 2007).


And the epitome of welfarism, namely Sweden, has seen public spheres emerge in the workplace through the practices of business leaders, financial magazines, politicians and journalists that champion new managerial theories and practices (see Holmberg and Strannegård 2005). Understanding the of role labour and trade unions in the competent workplace public sphere is thus the task of the next chapter.

7 Trade Unions, Participation, and the Proletarian Public Sphere

Introduction We need to recognise qualitative differences between the ways in which employees and workers set about establishing their workplace public spheres. As we saw in Chapter 5 in the case of DIRECTeam at Lewisham Council, participatory thinking can be evident in a workplace without leading to the opening up of a permanent void and the establishment of a proletarian public sphere. This current chapter therefore attempts to explore a specific form of the workplace public sphere in more detail, which we will call following the discussion in Chapter 1 the proletarian public sphere. One does not obviously have to be a member of the working class to engage in proletarian heteroglossic dialogue, nor be a member of a trade union. Nonetheless, we will see that the collective and organised heteroglossic utterances of labour within a workplace represent a more precise manifestation of a proletarian public sphere because they come closest to directly confronting the most abstract authority of the bourgeois public sphere and of capital. As such, trade unions signify a notable potential for a proletarian public sphere to materialize in a workplace for the simple reason that a trade union at an abstract level represents the collective bargaining interests of organised labour in and against the autonomy of capitalists to own, control and retain a legal title over capital (see also Hyman 2001: 3–4). Not only will we see how ICTs have been used by some trade unions and workers movements to further the cause of the proletarian public sphere, but we will also explore more widely how competence can be challenged by the formation of interconnected minor proletarian public spheres. By examining some of these issues it is hoped that we can move away from the picture often painted 128

Trade Unions, Participation, and the Proletarian Public Sphere 129

by new economy theorists which depicts workers as being passive in the face of global economic changes (see also Strangleman 2007). It should be noted, however, that while we can isolate some of the key moments of the proletarian public sphere at a relatively high level of abstraction, an actual concrete proletarian public sphere is rarely found in its pure abstract form. The next section begins the discussion by looking at how employers attempt to anticipate and consummate proletarian public spheres. From here the discussion moves on to some initial observations on how trade union activism can lead to a more genuine sense of empowerment for workers. Following this the chapter examines in more detail how militant union activism often emerges from specific workplace events and goes on to form assertive proletarian public spheres. In addition, militancy has the potential to make use of minor workplace spaces that also channel the militant desires of workers into new affectual and expressive states of being in and against the fantasies of the bourgeois public sphere. Finally, some initial observations on the socialist public sphere are presented.

Anticipating trade union public spheres Capital will mobilise its own resources where possible to anticipate the formation of a proletarian public sphere in a workplace in order to retain a functioning bourgeois public sphere. One way that this occurs at a concrete level is when management challenges the establishment of a union within its own organisation by creating alternative employerled non-union public spheres. Indeed, by the end of the 1990s in the UK there had been a rise from 16 percent to 40 percent of the number of employers willing to create their own non-union ‘voice arrangements’ for their workers (Dundon and Gollan 2007: 1187). But employers will often go to greater lengths to ensure that union power is kept in check. In the US, for example, it is now common practice for many organisations to employ the services of management consultants, law firms, personal psychologists, and strike management firms to organise union avoidance campaigns in their respective workplaces (Logan 2006). Some firms in the union avoidance industry have diversified their activities in line with the onset of different labour markets by amongst other things employing ‘consultants fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Filipino, Creole and several dialects of Chinese’ (Logan 2004: 78). The union avoidance industry, a multi-million dollar industry in the United States, has also reached out towards, and been embraced within, other countries such as Canada and the UK. Anti-union


tactics also sometimes penetrate those minor everyday spaces for union activism in order to anticipate events of proletarian dialogue emerging at a particular workplace. One employer in the UK, for example, denied access to its car park for activists. There are of course numerous other examples of anti-union tactics by employers (Gall 2004). These very tangible methods of anticipating the formation of a proletarian public sphere are entwined with at least four other processes: (i) affectual states of being; (ii) divisions amongst union officials; (iii) state legislation on union recognition; and (iv) the selective use of accounting information. We will explore these points in turn. First, one of the more obvious affectual states is to instil fear into employees of being involved in union activism. Some companies are willing to victimise, persecute and even sack workers involved in union activity, thereby infusing in workers the belief that unionism is off-limits within the company (see Gall 2004: 40–42 for examples). Workers can also internalise a fatalistic attitude as when employers instigate actions to undermine decisions to recognise a union. Of course, a sense of fear and fatalism can be combined with other affectual states. As we have seen, employers frequently ‘sweeten’ up employees by allowing non-union public spheres to operate in a workplace. In these cases affects act as anticipatory devices for employers against the formation of strong concrete proletarian public spheres both before union activism has started within a workplace and during union activism. ‘Consequently, employer opposition is viewed as important in creating the perception of union illegitimacy among union and non-union workers alike, and suggesting that costs are to be incurred from union involvement (membership activity)’ (Gall 2005: 219). This is an important point in respect to the success of the organising and recruitment potential of a union. White collar unions might be more susceptible to management involvement in these potentials of a union. For example, Charlwood discovered that singleunion white collar workplaces in the UK have high levels of organising and recruitment only when management selects a senior union rep. In this situation the white collar union in question must rely on management’s readiness to engage with the union in ‘good faith’ (Charlwood 2004: 89). Intangible employer-union relationships such as these, that is, relationships mediated through ‘good faith’, considerably weakens the union’s organising potential and provides employers with a disincentive to work with unions through genuine ‘partnerships’ (Charlwood 2004: 89). Second, union organisers who enter a UK workplace through the mechanisms of a national union will sometimes report that opposition


to their presence in the workplace at hand (apart from that of employers) emanates from lay union officers within the workplace for a variety of reasons. Lay officials might resent an external organiser being imposed on them from head office, or they might disagree with the tactics of the organiser in question (Heery and Simms 2008: 32). Furthermore, it is known that unions will compete with one another for recognition within a single workplace and that some unions are more concerned with ‘rapid recruitment of members’ rather than with organising actual and potential members along lines of activism (Heery and Simms 2008: 32). Third, anti-unionism gains legitimacy through the wider coercive body of the state. Recent legislation passed by New Labour in the UK is witness to this. On one level New Labour has been doggedly following neoliberal principles as to how it views the employment relation. The partnership metaphor is a key dialogic device here because it has been used by successive Labour governments since 1997 to reorganise the employer-employee relationship from one that stresses the unequal resources within this relationship to one that highlights the cooperative framework inherent within this relationship to the mutual benefits of all (Smith and Morton 2006). With this principle New Labour has largely accepted previous the Conservative government’s anti-union legislation. What is different however is that New Labour has presented the neoliberal assault on trade unions within a softer and more socialised dialogue. For example, the Employment Relations Act 1999 was instigated by the Labour government as a way to strengthen union recognition in workplaces. However, the Act encapsulates a number of stringent tests that unions must undergo to ensure recognition and employers soon learnt how to oppose the partial powers of the Act. The Employment Relations Act 2004, while improving access for unions to the workforce, still ostensibly serves the interests of employers because it fails overall to recognise the inequality at the heart of the employment contract. In fact many of the 2004 Act’s stipulations treat employers and unions as possessing equal power. When making a decision on an application for union recognition, for example, the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) must take into consideration how an employer will view ‘the compatibility of bargaining units with effective management’ (Smith and Morton 2006: 407) and this significantly effects the ability of unions to maintain wide bargaining units within a workplace. Taken as a whole the effects of these stringent rules for unions are clear. To update some figures from Smith and Morton (2006), by March 2007 the CAC had received 566 applications for union recognition since it was formed in 2000. Of these only 74 unions had


been recognised without a ballot of workers. Where a ballot was held in 143 cases, only 88 were granted recognition by the CAC (CAC 2007: 15). The situation in the US is markedly worse. Not only are there divisions in national unions in America, as personified by the split over union strategy in 2005 between the American Federation of LaborCongress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO) and Change to Win, but large sections of the American working population, primarily managers and supervisors, do not even enjoy the legal right to bargain collectively (Givan 2007). In addition, the employment-at-will doctrine still holds sway in the US. In a court decision in 1884 employmentat-will was defined as the employers right to ‘dismiss their employees at will…for good cause, for no cause, or even for cause morally wrong, without being thereby guilty of legal wrong’ (cited in Barry 2007: 269). While there are protections for employees against employment-at-will (for example an employee cannot be dismissed if their termination jeopardises a public policy and all employees are protected if their contract specifies specific terms and conditions against employmentat-will) it is still the case that two million non-probationary, nonunion and non-civil service workers are dismissed on an annual basis in the US (Barry 2007: 270). Fourth, another technique is for management to selectively disclose accounting information to the public, shareholders, stakeholders, and bargaining parties such as trade unions for their own strategic purposes. According to Amernic and Craig (2005), employers are willing to undertake this action because they believe it grants them a tactical advantage during collective bargaining with unions and in industrial relations more generally. Case studies show the lengths some companies are willing to go to implement such techniques. Some have been known to change their accounting methods so as to reduce their profit margins before commencing bargaining, while others have been known to report losses even though other institutions have reported increased profits for the same company. Importantly as Amernic and Craig (2005: 82) suggest, these strategies help to create images and narratives on accounting and costs in the public sphere that favour a business agenda to the detriment of the ‘stakeholder’ interests of labour. Not only does this mean that theories of stakeholder management are questionable (see also Chapter 5), it also highlights an antagonistic moment in stakeholder relationships. Trade unions are often treated as embedded stakeholders within an organisation and yet trade unions represent the contractual interests of their membership to, and frequently against, the rationale of management within a firm. In this


case trade unions have a relationship with management based on a contract that also entails a relationship of conflict over terms and conditions within a contract (Friedman and Miles 2002). Overall, what these four points suggest is that by engaging in antiunion activity employers can lay the foundations for their own form of participatory (bourgeois) public spheres. The advantages of doing so should be clear. By setting in place the mechanisms for non-union participatory public spheres management can make certain that workers engage in a process of dialogue based around ‘information provision’ between employers and employees. Under such a technique workers are not involved in actual acts of decision-making but are rather informed about decisions taken during formally convened management public meetings with worker representatives. Here, worker representatives often passively convey information about managerial decisions to the other workers. What is not encouraged is an expression of (trained) collective activism amongst representatives and in the organisational workforce as a whole. Without independent union organising capacity management are also better equipped to employ subtle tactics of coercion in making workers accept conditions that are more advantageous to management. In any case, management has greater scope to alter the themes of dialogue that favour its own monologic competence agenda at participatory events in the workplace once unionism has been successfully regulated. Through the selective use of accounting information concerning the competitive environment in which the respective organisation has to operate, management can establish a type of monologic dialogue in the non-union public sphere that helps to reinforce the intense affect of uncertainty amongst employees. It can do so for example by explaining to employees how external competitive pressures impact the organisation in which they all work. Such dialogue can create feelings of anxiety amongst the workforce and lead them to internalise more intensified working practices and to accept moderate wage demands (Butler 2005: 280–281). These critical observations also suggest that the sort of participatory democracy advocated by new wave management literature might very well exist in various degrees within a workplace but still lead to low levels of democratic input from workers. In reality of course competence demands nothing less: monologic participatory regimes and a sense of democracy are mediated through intensified work patterns. New wave management theorists would no doubt argue that if workplaces implement the necessary changes across their organisational structures then any problems evident would be overcome. But such a


view borders on idealism because it abstracts away from those underlying reasons why particular workplaces cannot in fact fully adopt new managerial ideas on participatory practices in the first place. These problems and contradictions greatly affect how management conceives of participatory programmes with its employees. In a comparative analysis of 18 automotive component plants in the US and UK, for example, Barton and Delbridge (2004) discovered that various types of participatory input from workers to management was evident. However, they also found that full participatory practices were not being implemented. They conclude that one reason for this discrepancy was the failure of human resource management (HRM) to execute many of the changes necessary for participatory programmes to be realised. While HRM at a corporate level recognised the need to make changes in the move towards a participatory model, at a plant level these changes did not occur because of contingencies associated with local labour markets. Many plants for instance had a high labour turnover. Accounting mechanisms such as quantitative targets ‘that lacked the detail or depth necessary to meet the expectations’ of the participatory model only served to exacerbate problems (Barton and Delbridge 2004: 343). Such were the problems in some plants that management relied on a minority of ‘willing participants’ in the workforce to become involved in participatory schemes. Interestingly therefore what this example shows us is that it is the very themes embedded in the assemblage of actualised competence – contingency, accounting, and so on – which interrupt and problematise becoming competence. Trade unions are thus paramount in ensuring that real participatory democracy and effective public spheres exist in a workplace. The value of having unionised workplaces also extends to those organisations who have adopted high-performance paradigms (HPPs). In their detailed survey of HPPs, unions and workplace performance in Britain, Bryson et al. (2005) argue that while HPPs can increase labour productivity in organisations, the greatest increases actually emerged when HPP workplaces were unionised. Bryson et al. conclude that far from increased labour productivity being the result of ‘mutual gains’ between employers and employees (e.g. the mutual gains generated from higher financial rewards), a more plausible explanation lies with ‘concessionary wage bargaining than “mutual gains”, given the absence of any association with financial performance’ (Bryson et al. 2005: 485) of those companies who had instituted HPPs. We now turn to consider in greater detail the role of trade unions in facilitating and furthering empowerment.


Empowerment through union participation Labour and union activists are discovering innovative ways of organising in new sectors. Many new economy and service sectors draw in pools of low wage and contractual workers to carry out menial jobs. Silicon Valley, located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California and the spiritual home of the new economy, is perhaps the standard illustration of a place dependent on both high-tech production and a professional class along with casual, temporary, low paid and often immigrant labour. The latter labour workforce works typically in assembly plants, canteens, cleaning jobs, and so on (Dyer-Witheford 1999). In the US these low paid occupations, while crucial to ensure the smooth operation of the service industry and the new economy, were poorly represented by unions during the 1980s, which was compounded by the anti-union action of the Reagan and Bush Sr. governments. By the 1990s, however, the Service Employers International Union (SEIU) embarked on a campaign to mobilise low paid workers in the service sector. In 1999 for example 74,000 home-care workers in Los Angeles County joined the SEIU. But this new brand of radicalism did not initially emerge from the SEIU itself. Rather, an independent movement, Justice for Janitors (JfJ), was established in southern California in 1988. After some strike action in 1990 the JfJ mounted a peaceful demonstration the same year. At this event the police attacked the demonstration and the ensuing publicity surrounding the attack enabled the JfJ to build its organisational strength. A militant threeweek strike by 8,500 office janitors in April 2000 went on to win them a 25 percent pay increase over three years (McNally 2006: 318–319). Labour activists around the world thus recognise that the public sphere and public relations are both essential mediums for conveying everyday work-related events related to shoddy work practices. The National Labor Committee (NLC), founded in 1981 to campaign on human and worker rights, is one such illustration of this practice and has engaged in many successful public relation campaigns against US multinational corporations involved in sweatshop labour (see Ross 2004: 34–38). What these and examples in other countries suggest is that labour still retains the capacity to resist the neoliberal agenda within workplaces and beyond by mobilising radical networks in different community forums and by bringing together different social spheres of labour ranging from domestic workers, service sector workers and manual workers (Davies 2005; Helms and Cumbers 2006). Indeed, a number of


community union organisations have increasingly started to campaign on workers’ interests. In the US for example such organisations include women’s organisations, civil rights groups, gay rights groups, human rights groups, worker centres, immigrant groups, churches, and a range of other community-based groups all campaigning on various employmentbased issues (see Fine, J. 2005). In some instances and on some campaigns American trade unions have forged alliances with these groups and organisations. The SEIU and JfJ discussed above is just one illustration from the US, but other national unions such as the AFL-CIO consciously seek to engage political action in the community and to build alliances between unions and communities. In Britain there are examples of similar union initiatives. The Battersea and Wandsworth Trade Union Council (BWTUC) in London is one notable case which since the end of the 1990s has built links with community groups such as after school clubs, Citizen’s Advice Bureau, resident’s groups, the local Business Link on common campaigning issues (Wills and Simms 2003). By forging these types of connections unions can embed a politics of redistribution with a politics of recognition (Wills 2001) because unions will broaden out their more ‘economic’ struggles to struggles associated with everyday life and with different social identities evident in civil society. However, while community union organisations represent crucial sites of struggle for workers in extending the proletarian public sphere beyond the confines of an immediate workplace, they are often less successful in representing workers’ interests at the point of production through collective bargaining. This is an important point because, as Givan (2007: 850) observes, while community union organisations have the power to represent the legal and political interests of workers these very same organisations are relatively weak when it comes to collective bargaining and placing pressure on the state to respect and advance workers’ interests. In other words, community union organisations can be good at representing the interests of particular groups of workers, but due to their fragmented nature they are not so good at maintaining collective solidarity across sectors. Trade union councils in contrast ‘link trade unionists across a range of sectors and industries thereby connecting workers and unions across a diverse range of problems and issues’ (Taylor and Mathers 2008: 29). This is not to deny of course that trade unions cannot learn important organising strategies from community union organisations. In fact if we turn our attention once again to the UK, studies suggest that some trade unions are utilising minor spaces in communities to create concrete proletarian public spheres. There have been cases of unions making use of


street theatre to enrol support, and of trade unions anticipating anti-union action through leafleting, petitions and by gaining the support of union sympathisers such as local politicians. Issue-based activism on themes such as race and gender is also increasingly used by UK unions at workplaces in order to mobilise union and non-union workers around a sense of ‘collective self-support’ (Gall 2005: 222). Such strategies are important because they prompt trade unions to look beyond seeing employees as being ‘just workers’ and instead forces trade unions to take note of what Panitch discerns is the ‘full-life experiences’ of workers (Panitch 2001: 184). Again, however, it is important to emphasise that trade unions, unlike community union organisations, enjoy the potential to forge a coherent labour strategy (Taylor and Mathers 2008: 29). Issues surrounding the application of ICT in union activism are equally as complex. Some evidence in the UK suggests that unions have made poor use of ICTs to enhance their services in respect to job and union training and support for members. In addition, unions have made little headway in using ICTs for participatory or campaigning objectives (Ward and Lusoli 2003). However, the use of ICTs by unions is dependent on a whole range of factors including the uneven distribution and use of technologies like the internet amongst a workforce, the resources within a union to establish ICT networks and to consistently update and process them, the history and traditions of different unions, and the extent to which unions believe that ICT networks can relay information in parallel with ‘normal’ forms of activism or the extent to which unions believe that ICT networks serve merely to reproduce a somewhat depoliticised ‘spectacle and hyperrealism’ that lacks a grounding in ‘real’ activism (Martínez Lucio 2003: 344). But even where unions fail to take full advantage of ICTs to promote activism, there are nevertheless examples where organised workers outside of a trade union council have done so as part of organised campaigns for workers’ rights. Indeed, the example of the Liverpool Dockers dispute of 1995 to 1998 shows how workers in one locality can use ICTs to distribute information about their particular campaign around the world, thereby transforming a local campaign into a global campaign by connecting up with other worker organisations and non-union political organisations elsewhere in the world (see Carter et al. 2003).

Events of minor proletarian public spheres Perhaps a more positive observation that also emerges from the discussion so far is this: the more assertive the trade union during bargaining


procedures then the more that the workforce gains a sense of satisfaction with negotiations with management over working conditions. Some studies for example suggest that trade union representatives who refuse to reveal all of their bargaining tactics with employers at the start of negotiations over the restructuring of working practices, i.e. trade unions who refuse to enter into a full cooperative relationship with employers over negotiations, possess greater leverage to push forward specific union demands. The simple reason for this is that employers find it difficult to pre-empt union strategies within this context because they do not enjoy full access to information about union strategies to begin with. Unions applying these strategies can sometimes create a space to gain more concessions from employers on factors like wages and working hours. The assertiveness and militancy of the union in this regard is greatly strengthened if these strategies are acted in accordance with the wishes of its membership so that members can see that gains made are in the overall interests of the workforce (Bacon and Blyton 2006). Assertive and organised trade union involvement within a workplace is therefore essential to challenge the competent public sphere as represented in such forms as communities of practice (CoP). For as we have seen in previous chapters, CoPs frequently conceal ‘a fractured, dynamic process of formation and reproduction in which there are often schisms and precarious alignments that are held together and papered over by unreflexive invocations of hegemonic notions including “community”, “family”, “teams” and “partnership”’ (Contu and Willmott 2003: 287). Assertive and organised unions can create expressive proletarian public spheres at workplace events that circumvent fantasies of competence associated with monologic public spheres like CoPs. In other words, assertive and militant unions can reveal the ‘fractured and dynamic’ processes that competent public spheres seek to repress. The study of union activism amongst workers in London’s Underground train system by Darlington (2001) is instructive in this respect. In 1992 London Underground Limited (LUL) (a subsidiary of London Transport) introduced a plan to reorganise working conditions amongst London Underground staff. The changes included new contracts of employment, shorter holidays, reduction of the workforce by one quarter, and plans to restructure the basis of collective bargaining for Underground staff (Darlington 2001: 10). This management plan can be placed within wider neoliberal changes that occurred in Britain under the Thatcher government in which the rights of workers had been sacrificed in favour of the rights of business. In addition, the public sector and nationalised industries came under increasing attack from the Conservatives.


Two main trade unions represent workers on the London Underground. The Association of Locomotive Engineers and Fireman (ASLEF) is an occupational union with about 2,000 members consisting mainly of drivers and guards. The National Union of Rail Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) consist of station engineering and maintenance staff, but also a number of drivers and guards. ASLEF took a more moderate approach towards LUL’s 1992 package, especially since management made more generous concessions to drivers. However, the RMT leadership took a decidedly left-wing turn which was precipitated in some measure by the event of the sacking of a Trotskyist RMT driver activist in the summer of 1993. While a one-day strike by drivers and guards on one section of the Underground against the dismissal eventually pushed management to reinstate the sacked driver, this single event galvanised RMT membership in the Underground as well as galvanising a more assertive breed of left-wing activists. In fact the Trotskyist driver in question was elected on to the RMT national union executive. Importantly, the event-ness of the sacking mobilised the ‘oughtto-be’ freedom of RMT workers; a freedom not to be simply incorporated into the neoliberal agenda of LUL. The sacking radiated an eventness because it publicly asserted the effects of neoliberalism to the RMT membership as a whole, as a definable group of workers who were prepared to challenge the Thatcherite agenda (cf. Commisso 2006: 181). A left-wing leadership layer soon emerged and these leaders maintained a high public profile with workers on the shopfloor through local left-wing reps. Creating an assertive and more militant proletarian public sphere meant that the RMT was more adept at campaigning against the partial privatisation of London Underground in 1998–1999 by engaging in a number of unpredictable acts. For example, the RMT worked against partial privatisation and tied this to a campaign for a 35-hour week for all staff. These campaigns created publicity for the RMT and pulled in a wider layer of members into ‘leafleting and agitational activity’ (Darlington 2001: 14). This was an unpredictable act in the sense that its outcomes were uncertain for the RMT; and yet it was act that the RMT was prepared to undertake despite this level of uncertainty. Militant events are thus capable of posing a challenge of sorts to the competent public sphere. Moreover, militant acts by unions often express the potential of labour to-be-other than capital. As a result ‘minor’ proletarian public spheres can be created. ‘Minor’ public spheres are those whose aim is to challenge the binary formation instigated in molar workplace formations. Molar formations are those ways in which management endeavour to anticipate proletarian utterances. To order the desires


expressive qualities embodied in these utterances does not simply mean to represent them but, rather, ‘to anticipate them or move them back, slow them down or speed them up, separate or combine them, delimit them in a different way’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 96). The workplace bourgeois public sphere therefore orders and regulates proletarian desires and expressions by altering the speed and movement of workplace utterances at different spatial events – as previous chapters have shown (e.g. regulating time and space through the work-life balance). By dividing workplace dialogic events into binary oppositions, molar formations make it possible for a central point such as management to control and manipulate the speed and movement of these oppositions (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 322–323). A molar formation subsequently aims to ‘see’ more of the actual and virtual nature of events in a workplace than the ‘minor’ heteroglossic utterances in a concrete proletarian public sphere (cf. Bakhtin 1990: 6–7). It does so by elevating one side of an expressive binary opposition (e.g. ‘empowerment’) as being superior through the reputation of management to speak about the dualism in question. In this respect the creation of a molar formation enables management to consummate proletarian utterances at specific workplace events (cf. Bakhtin 1981: 312; see also Chapter 4). According to Deleuze, however, minor relations are also evident within a molar formation and these refer to an expressive sense and struggle of belonging within organised ‘molar’ formations (see Patton 2000: 43). Minor relations are molecular and affectual formations that represent another quite different variant of the body without organs (BwO) than that discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. In other words, the BwO is not merely representative of a bourgeois molar formation. Rather, the BwO also refers to the ways in which bourgeois molar formations can be resisted. Specifically, Deleuze argues that it is through the schizoid BwO that molecular relations reveal themselves. Desiring-production is, as Deleuze and Guattari (1984: 2–9) announce, the primal mode of our investments of desire in social activity. Another way of saying this is that desiring-production designates different zones of intensity which connect one’s life up with other ‘machines’ (the sky, flowers, colours, words) to create different states of being. This is a schizoid state of being and becoming because new connections are constantly being gathered together to create different ‘assemblages’. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze similarly describes the BwO as potential states of being and becoming and he relates this to the schizoid position. Accordingly, the schizoid BwO attempts to break apart, liquefy, melt and weld together different objects in order to produce new con-


nections and new relationships in space and time (Deleuze 2001: 216; see also Deleuze 1989). However, social production such as financial capital aims to order and regulate desiring-production and arrest this schizoid development of the BwO (see also Buchanan 2008: 42). That is to say, the repression of desiring-production takes place through social production, in our contemporary times through the social production of financial capital (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 35). One illustration of molecular activity can be found in the identity of labour itself. After all, labour is ‘the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time’ (Marx 1973: 361). What this suggests is that labour occupies different states of becoming within a workplace. The molecular potentiality of labour changes in its qualitative form as it is transferred from one object of production into a higher and more specific form of another object. The use-value of, say, cotton, is transformed into the more developed use-value of fabric, and is then again transformed into a more developed and specific use-value in the form of, say, a dress. Each object here represents the becoming of material for new labour to develop its creative potential by working on the object at hand and transforming that object into more complex forms. Each ordinary object therefore creates new connections with labour and through these connections new states of being are constructed for labour and vice versa (Marx 1973: 362). Even though these objects confront the worker as moments of valorisation, they also nevertheless denote the becoming of labour’s own potential under capitalism, of the ability of labour to use its qualitative potential to both add its own labour to already objectified labour within a product and to alter the form of the product in question. The notion of ‘molecular’ labour therefore usefully draws attention to the potential states of being that cooperative labour assumes within a single workplace. In this ‘minor’ schizoid BwO, then, labour enjoys the potential to resist capitalist organisation exactly because it can creatively assume different cooperative shapes that move in, out, and sometimes beyond the accounting mechanisms of a workplace (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 34). Molecular BwO often therefore represents a feeling of becoming other than the valorisation of capital within a workplace. Similar to heteroglossic utterances, ‘minor’ utterances are ones that become within the formation of bourgeois ‘molar’ workplace utterances by learning the molar language (‘order-words’) embodied in a workplace to create new expressive variations of it (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 117–118; see also Deleuze 1994: 46; Deleuze and Guattari 1994). As a


result molecular entities also convey in an expressive manner aspects of bourgeois binary workplace relations struggling with its own identity, struggling to retain a normative monologic consistency (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 300). The study of the aerospace industry in the UK provided by Danford et al. (2002) can be used to provide an illustration of these processes, particularly through the ways in which organised union members resist the managerial molar formation of operating in discrete worker cells. The Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU) in the aerospace plants investigated by Danford et al. refused to adopt a cellular formation in line with the business ‘unitization’ of the plant (i.e. the breaking up of the plant into 12 separate business units). Instead the AEEU kept in place site-wide bargaining arrangements that spread across the respective plants. Amongst other things, this was achieved by limiting the freedom of movement of local shop stewards and line managers by reassembling the connections of accountability between local shop stewards and the central site executive. One senior shop steward put it like this: We insist that the manager consults with the shop steward first and then the steward comes to see us to see if it’s okay…So we’ve maintained accountability between the manager, the shop steward and the site executive of the union. We still control it 100 per cent. Management can’t do anything, they can’t move labour without our permission, they can’t work extra overtime without our permission. We’re in charge. It’s a good job here (cited in Danford et al. 2002: 313). Clearly, the AEEU are resisting the fragmentation of their workplaces into discrete units by establishing a degree of autonomous control about how decisions are being made. In effect, the AEEU are combating effects of ‘de-collectivization’ of their workforce brought about by neoliberalism and competence (cf. Charlwood 2004: 88). They view the factory as an interconnected whole in which managerial prerogatives emanating from one locale of the factory are believed to have ramifications for workers in other locales of the factory. Visualising the factory as whole, however, is achieved by having some degree of control over contingent decision-making events, slowing these events down, and subjecting each decision-making event to a plant-wide union public sphere. Contingency is therefore confronted through various connections of collective representative action, and time is


given over to discuss the event-ness of the situation/problem/issue at hand. In this way contingency is transformed into open dialogue amongst workers and between workers and management so that practical remedies and solutions are found that retain the organised wholeness of the workforce. In this proletarian public sphere workers unite intellectual and manual labour and transcend any residing image of them that they exist merely as appendages of machines. The union reinstates some characteristics of the desiring-machine of workers, of their need for non-alienated, satisfying labour, but does so by resisting competence embodied in ‘teamwork’. To be incompetent is not therefore visualised as a negative personality trait by the AEEU. Indeed, it is a theme of competence – ‘teamwork’ – which is implicitly visualised as highly damaging and as being somewhat absurd by this proletarian public sphere. For example, an attempt by management in 1997 to install new supervisory arrangements at a particular plant by professionalising cell leaders and recruiting young graduates from outside the factory was perceived by the AEEU as an attack on the intellectual labour of workers. To combat this move by management, AEEU stewards mobilised unofficial action through such tactics as a ban on overtime, refusing to attend team briefings, and refusing to comply with new working practices (Danford et al. 2002: 318). At this event workers expressed their potentials to resist competence by making visible their force as labour against capital. Momentarily this minor proletarian public sphere transformed the workers into another sense of becoming other than ‘becoming competence’. During the resistance against new supervisory practices, stewards would initiate different expressive assemblages and connections to ensure the overtime ban was maintained. One such assemblage was to refer to the overtime ban as ‘going fishing’, and the practice of the AEEU convenor bringing a fishing rod to mass meetings was a common sight. He explained his reasons for doing so along the following lines. Some years ago, I came in Friday morning and inside my union office, someone has bought me a fishing rod. I couldn’t go fishing if I tried! Whenever we have a factory meeting now, I take my fishing rod and I don’t have to say anything to them all. Someone says, ‘are we going fishing then?’ I say, ‘that’s up to you brother!’…We did so recently, the company was trying to implement practices without discussing them with us. We would just have a factory meeting and say we’re sorry, we’re just not going anywhere with this and somebody said, ‘well, we’ll just have to go fishing then’…But as soon as


you go fishing, oh boy oh boy, they (management) are knocking on your door and saying how much they want to talk to you. It’s the only time they listen (cited in Danford et al. 2002: 319). The AEEU use the expressive sense of a different life – a life of freedom from alienated (necessary) work – to reveal the potential and force of the power of labour. The fishing-rod, a normally innocuous object, helps to transform the relationship between workers and management at the plant by visualising, by making clearer, the antagonistic relationship within this relationship and by opening up new possibilities for workers. Set within this proletarian public sphere, the fishing rod is part of an affectual state of being, of a molecular assemblage of becoming other than alienated labour, of actualising the potential of a world of leisure beyond alienation. It is in this sense that the utterance – ‘we’ll just have to go fishing then’ – can be conceived as ‘minor’ words that express new connections beyond the managerial molar formation. Indeed, it is these very words that then compel management to engage in dialogue with the workers. A new gap or void thus opens up in this bourgeois public sphere. Workers came together in this minor workplace public sphere to reject alibis for their passivity and to make the capitalist employer answerable to the utterances of workers. In effect, the workers opened up an expressive void for lines of flight away from the monologic dialogue of management. It is in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari’s characterisation of minor space makes sense. According to them, minor spaces need to be created to encourage individuals to: experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out new continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 178; see also Bakhtin 1984: 128; Harvey 1999: 34). This sort of minor activism often prepares the way for workers to extend their cooperative public spheres to form a strike within a workplace; an issue we turn to in the next section.

Real militant acts of proletarian dialogue If we agree with Zˇizˇek that without fantasy one descends into the unknown and, therefore, descends into the ‘reality’ that underlines


fantasy (Zˇizˇek 1997: 66), then a real ethical act is that which is prepared to take a chance by acting within this underlying reality by asking for our fantasies to be actualised. A militant ethical act works along similar principles. For example, if one fantasy of competence is that a CoP along with ‘empowerment’ and ‘teamwork’ should always be established in a workplace, then a real militant act is one in which a CoP along with ‘empowerment’ and ‘teamwork’ is actually asked for by workers of management. This is not to ask to be ‘empowered’ or to be part of ‘teamwork’ along the lines visualised by management. Rather, it is to campaign for ‘empowerment’ through the collective ‘teamwork’ of organised labour in and against contractual relations of capital. Of course, such militant acts are rare in workplaces and one will always find it difficult to consciously consume one’s own fantasy. Indeed, fantasy is rarely actualised or traversed by a subject because to do so would imply that the underlying reality must likewise be subjectively dealt with (Zˇizˇek 2006: 171; see also Zˇizˇek 2004: 96). What Zˇizˇek terms as a real ethical act is therefore an act which engenders ‘symbolic death’ because one jumps into the underlying reality (Zˇizˇek 1999: 262). This is an ethical act because we act in the unknown reality. We thus face up to our responsibility of asking for our fantasies to become actualised because only by doing so can we breach fetishism and thereby move towards understanding the trauma beneath it, namely the trauma of reality (in our time, the trauma of the reality of financial capitalism). But such a leap of faith requires us to bracket the monologic authoring of our desires at non-repeatable events so that the utterances of our own unique whole personality are heard. This is to assume the status of an emotional-volitional individual, an individual who is in the process of becoming, of an ought-to-be, in the very moment that one ‘is’ in a concrete event. This is to make one answerable to another from within one’s unique developing personality at events, whilst, at the same, making the other answerable to one’s ought-to-be personality. ‘Ought’ is in the very order of ‘Being’ (Zˇizˇek 2006: 49) under these circumstances because ‘ought’ becomes concretized through participation in the event of ‘Being’. This is ‘the ought to realise the whole uniqueness, as the utterly irreplaceable uniqueness of being, in relation to every constituent moment of this being; and that means that my participation transforms every manifestation of myself (feeling, desire, mood, thought) into my own actively answerable deed’ (Bakhtin 1993: 57; emphasis in the original). It is the capacity to dialogically and freely reveal one’s


personality, to freely resist finalisation of one’s personality by an authoring-personality, to gain a sense of the equally valid and openended utterances of other personalities (Bakhtin 1984: 68), and to be prepared to welcome a crisis in one’s authored personality in order to enter the underlying reality. But how do we commit such an ethical militant act in the workplace? The answer lies through organised labour and the establishment of proletarian public spheres. For, as this chapter has tried to show, organised workers and trade unions have the potential to commit such ethical acts through the proletarian public sphere. Far from being utopian, numerous examples show us this to be the case. McCall’s analysis of a strike at Caterpillar Inc., based in Peoria, Illinois, and the world’s largest producer of heavy construction equipment, will serve as an illustration. In July 1991 Caterpillar handed to the United Auto Workers (UAW), the union representing Caterpillar’s workers, an initial contract that attacked the rights of workers at the Peoria plant. The terms of the contract included an end to patterned bargaining on wages, the end to a guaranteed number of jobs for unionised workers, two-tier wage system so that newly employed workers would receive 70 percent less than current workers, and flexible work patterns in which employees could be expected to work split shifts (i.e. work two shifts in the same day) (McCall 2008: 161–162). UAW called a strike when negotiations ended at the beginning of November and 2,400 workers in two plants at Decatur and East Peoria walked off from their jobs. Over the next few years, up until 1998, the union and workers were involved in various types of industrial activism at Caterpillar. On some occasions workers engaged in trench warfare, working only their set hours and thereby slowing down production. Workers also wore badges and other expressive symbols to signal their protest, and on many occasions went on wildcat strikes and temporary walkouts. There was good reason for these actions. Caterpillar’s management instigated many coercive measures to break the activism, including the sacking of workers, the harassment of workers, formulating deals which did not include the hiring of sacked workers, and the banning of symbolic modes of protest. The dispute was only eventually settled in March 1998 when an accord, including wage increases, was supplemented with an agreement to guarantee 50 workers the right to return to work. What is particularly interesting about McCall’s analysis is that he brings to the fore a series of Real ethical acts committed by the workers at Caterpillar (although McCall does not label these acts as such). As


McCall observes: ‘The workers, throughout the conflict, asserted the importance of dignity independent of what material gains it may yield’ (McCall 2008: 172). Clearly, the striking workers lost much in taking industrial action and even when strike activity was eventually called off it was estimated that each striking worker lost on average about $80,000 in wages in the years of the dispute. Even so, striking workers only relented once fellow workers were reinstated at the plant. Within the events of the strike, therefore, striking workers saw themselves as a collective whole in which individual material gains (e.g. higher wages) remained secondary to their collective interests as Labour. Indeed, their personalities as workers rested in some respect on being recognised by management as a collective social body of workers who were in a process of becoming-dignity. This was a process insofar that striking workers never coalesced into a definable aesthetic state, ‘dignified’, but rather were always in a movement to redefine their collective sense of ‘dignity’ in response to moves by management not to recognise the collective interests of workers. By becoming-dignity workers expressed an emotional-volitional sense of collective Being against that which was notdignity, namely the acts committed by the management of Caterpillar to break the strike and to extend the exploitation of workers. It was only by forcing management to recognise their ought-to-be collective identity of continuous becoming-dignity that the striking workers could make management answerable to the interests of workers to not be exploited. These interests encapsulated the temporal orders of past, present and future. For one worker looking back on the strike activity, this temporality was summed up by observing that industrial action was required at the time: …to try to ensure that our future generations has a good-paying union job. Because if we, like our forefathers, don’t fight, the future generation is going to have nothin’…You know, if there was never any unions in this country, if there never was a union, there would never be a minimum wage. We might all be working for four dollars now. Or less…We have to have unions whether every place is union or not. We have to have unions in this country (cite in McCall 2008: 177). The strike was thus seen as a whole event by this worker, as a series of deeds linking together generation of workers, as an obligation on their part to continually realise their interests as workers (becoming-dignity)


so that future generations might also realise their continuous interests as non-exploited workers. Industrial action thus constituted a series of Real acts because workers constructed a proletarian public sphere and as such refused to be drawn into the monologic finalisation of their utterances. Fantasy of managerial participation gave way to its underlying Real. This was obviously traumatic because the workers involved in industrial action at Caterpillar were faced with an extreme form of contingency. In taking responsibility for their heteroglossic utterances and for their acts, in fusing the two together and by no longer sustaining the belief in their actual practice that their words and deeds could be authored by the bourgeois public sphere, the workers placed their identity as workers at risk because they faced the terrible ordeal of losing their livelihoods. It is in this sense that workers during a moment of discontent recognise their true uniqueness only to the extent that they simultaneously recognise and make connections with their ought-to-be relationship to the world of freedom from exploitation, i.e. socialism. And it is the capacity of workers to reject the fantasy of self-renunciation that opens up the possibility for them to overcome the authoring of their utterances by the bourgeois public sphere. Through this rejection the proletarian public sphere recognises alienation as the reification of proletarian utterances within the authorial utterances of bourgeois dialogue. As such, proletarian-personalities seek to extinguish those utterances that might ‘finalize and deaden’ their own utterances (cf. Bakhtin 1984: 59). Freedom becomes an answerable device to illuminate the social conditions of alienation, to illuminate the concrete spaces of alienation, and to illuminate the equal rights of all concrete proletarian public spheres to engage in dialogue about freedom from capitalism. However, what is also evident from the chapter is that there is no one established way in which unions have responded to recent constraints on organising and recruiting members. Indeed unions have reacted in different ways depending on the specificity of the local event in question, on a leadership prepared to challenge competence, on the consistency and mechanisms of a trade union and on a membership prepared to engage in dissent against management (cf. Fairbrother et al. 2007: 47–50).

Conclusion The fragmented nature of trade union response to the practices of neoliberalism, financialisation, and new wave management, along with


the rise of global social movements, have prompted some theorists on the Left to look elsewhere to that of union activism for a new public sphere of resistance to neoliberal capitalism. Some have called for greater justice and fairness in how goods are distributed across global capitalism and how governments respond to the different identities of people. For example, Fraser argues that ‘all potentially affected by political decisions…in opinion formation’ should ideally participate through parity of participation based on socio-economic redistribution and legal and cultural recognition of ones identity. If this was achieved then the ‘misframing’ of issues for public discussion could be tackled. For, according to Fraser, global injustice occurs when issues for public discussion are subject to a process of ‘misframing’. Misframing draws our attention to the act of setting the boundaries of a community in such a way as to ‘wrongly exclude some people from the chance to participate at all in its authorised contests over justice’ (Fraser 2005: 76; emphasis in the original). Fraser thus argues that a remedy to current ills in global democratic participation lies, at least partially, in creating new global political mechanisms to represent different economic interests and cultural identities. Representation here refers to the political dimension of the parity of participation. Its importance lies in establishing ‘the procedures for staging and resolving contests in both the economic and cultural dimensions’ as well as setting out decision rules. In other words, representation not only maps out ‘who’ can make redistribution or recognition claims but also ‘how’ these claims will be arbitrated (Fraser 2005: 75; see also Fraser 2007). These are laudable proposals, backed up as they are by Fraser with a recognition of the need for full employment, universal welfare programmes, democratic decision-making over economic priorities, collective ownership, and so on (Fraser 1995: 85). However, it also needs to be remembered that capitalism is not based primarily on ideas of redistributive justice. Rather, capitalism is defined through the commodification of the whole of social life ensuring that society is reproduced as self-expanding value, namely as M (money) – C (commodities) – M1 (an increase in money). There is a tendency in theories of redistributive justice not to adequately address the objective processes through which capital passes. At an abstract level capitalists are only interested in quantitative calculations formed by price signals. They are not concerned with ‘externalities’ such as the pollution of the environment or the health of workers or whether workers receive just resources. The objective pressure to accumulate profit will take priority over social justice in


capitalist societies (Albritton 2007: 166–168) ensuring that capitalism will always to some degree negatively affect a parity of participation. Therefore we require a vision of the post-capitalist public sphere that recognises this and one attuned with the times in which we live. The concluding chapter provides some brief observations of what this alternative socialist public sphere might look like.

8 Conclusion: Towards a Socialist Public Sphere

Introduction Debates around the meaning of globalisation are not just a to-and-fro tussle between academics in their ivory towers. How globalisation is theorised and looked at also has practical implications. Nowhere is this clearer than in respect to the relationship between poverty, inequality and globalisation. As Sutcliffe (2004: 35) observes, ‘inequality has as many meanings as globalisation’. The way in which world governing institutions conceptualise globalisation will obviously influence how they perceive the causes and effects of globalisation. For example, as Kiely (2005a) argues, one of the main ways of assessing global poverty by the World Bank is to measure the amount of people living on an income of $1 a day. While in theory this might sound reasonable, in practice it is highly problematic. To see why we must remember that the ‘dollar’ used by the World Bank to measure poverty is not the normal US dollar but is rather a dollar based on the purchasing power parity of exchange rates. Effectively, this method compares the purchasing power of commodities consumed across social classes and across countries. By making these assumptions, however, this method abstracts away from complex social issues such as the fact that those from poorer backgrounds do not consume many of the commodities included by the World Bank in their estimations. Yet, by using this method of measuring poverty the World Bank claims that globalisation acts as a positive remedy for combating this world poverty. Accordingly, the World Bank argues that poverty has decreased across the world when developing nations open up their economies and public services to (neoliberal) global market forces. Other policy makers and academics similarly use non-historical theoretical frameworks when talking about the causes of global poverty. In 151


many cases this is accomplished through rational choice methods congruent with a neoliberal standpoint. Rational choice approaches commonly view the world as being based on a rivalry between two or more calculating individuals who engage in a ‘game’ with one another in order to maximise advantages and material rewards. As regards the reason for why people go to war with others, for example, rational choice approaches argue that when one calculates that the payoff of conflict is more beneficial than the calculated risks involved then war becomes an attractive option. Poverty is brought into this equation because some rational choice theorists suggest the poor have a ‘comparative advantage’ in waging war if the payoff in terms of access to employment is sufficiently high. While rational choice models obviously apply other variables in their respective analyses they nonetheless bracket crucial social and historical mechanisms. State mechanisms, for instance, are usually left unaccounted for in rational choice approaches when discussing war and poverty, and individuals are given no historical context from which they make, calculate and judge their ‘rational’ decisions (Cramer 2002: 1847). Problematically, rational choice approaches infer their hypotheses from statistical regularities when exploring (e.g.) causal links between war and poverty (cf. Korf 2006). Qualitative features of poverty are thereby subsumed under empiricist models and the opportunity to look at underlying causal and historical mechanisms is lost. Appearances stand in for reality. The stakes should therefore be clear. How one thinks about globalisation is of practical significance. Of course those who believe that globalisation carries positive consequences are usually those who also believe that only capitalism provides the world’s population with the best chances to alleviate social ills. But to what extent are these claims justified? Inequality is an immensely complex phenomenon and it therefore comes as some relief that Therborn (2006) usefully outlines three basic forms of global inequality. ‘Vitalist’ inequality refers to differential exposure to fatal risk. This is an inequality related to life expectancy, mortality and/or morbidity and to rates of malnutrition. ‘Existential’ inequality refers to life chances surrounding freedom and unfreedom as regards ‘personal life projects, rights, prohibitions to act’ and distributions of ‘affirmations and denials of recognition and respect’ (Therborn 2006: 7). ‘Resource’ inequality refers to factors like income, education, social security and admission to social networks. From various data Therborn estimates the following. As regards vitalist inequality Therborn estimates that South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have the lowest income in the world and this in

Conclusion: Towards a Socialist Public Sphere 153

turn affects birth rates. In Africa for example the average life expectancy at birth is 46 years. In the richest countries people can expect to live 11 years longer than the global average even though they only constitute 15 percent of the world’s population. Under-nourished people across the world have increased to 18 million since 1995. And while vitalist inequality has decreased in different ways in the second half of the twentieth century, emergent forms have nevertheless begun to steadily grow in new places such as Russia. As regards existential inequality, patriarchy (the domination by husbands or fathers) is still an institutionalised practice in parts of South Asia, Central Asia, West Asia, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. It also exists in parts of East Europe, and some sections of US society (e.g. Mormons) practise it. Sure enough, patriarchy exists in less visible forms in other, usually deemed more ‘progressive’, countries like the UK in respect to (e.g.) employment. As regards resource inequality, those who live in the rich countries enjoy an income three times the world average income. Absolute poverty has increased in three areas of the world over the last few decades. Africa saw an increase of 150 million people living on less than US $1 per day from 1981 to 2001. In Latin America the number of poor increased by 14 million over the same period by World Bank standards, while other standards put the figure at 85 million. In the old Soviet countries and Central Asia poverty increased from 1 million to 18 million by World Bank standards (Therborn 2006: 20–26). Certainly these figures give only a snapshot of the state of inequality across the world, but what they do suggest is that after over three decades of neoliberalism world inequality has grown markedly worse in some social areas. And yet leading economic and political institutions across the world still suggest that only by liberalising economies to ever greater extent will these types of inequalities be defeated. Similarly, many of whom are critical of neoliberal ideas and practices nevertheless still believe that a more managed style of capitalism can overcome the most perverse inequalities wrought by globalisation. For its own part, this book has taken a different perspective. Clearly, the book has argued against the neoliberal financial capital from a broadly based Marxist perspective. As such the book has taken for granted that inequality is a necessary and structural characteristic of capitalism and is derived from the very alienated conditions in which goods are produced. Capitalism thus represents a never-ending cycle of inequality. Moreover, inequalities under capitalism necessarily assume a ‘barbaric’ guise because human beings are treated like commodities,


like ‘things’, ensuring that inequalities remain perverse exactly because people cannot control the form they take. Clearly some types of inequalities will always remain, even in a post-capitalist, or socialist, society. But there is a huge different between inequalities existing within a consciously controlled and planned society where human needs are rationally organised and met, and those residing within an anarchic and unplanned society where the needs of capital triumph. The critique of the competent public sphere has therefore been made from within a socialist theory of the public sphere. In this final chapter we will outline in more detail what this socialist theory entails. In saying this, the aim is not to enter into a comprehensive analysis of what socialism more generally entails. Given that there are so many different variants of socialism, this would be impossible (although for a good brief discussion on ‘economic’ variants see Lo and Smyth 2004). Rather, what the chapter will simply try to do is to briefly map out some of the characteristics that would constitute a socialist public sphere. We will see that such a public sphere would be integrally related to other spheres of society such as the economy, politics and culture. This is because socialism recognises that society is an interconnected totality in which workers require real democratic decision-making powers over the economy. Under a socialist society the public sphere would become civil society in the sense that socialism envisages a society in which the state’s concentrated coercive powers have been dissolved into civil society so that people can publicly and democratically discuss the most advantageous way of producing and distributing goods in a manner that does not exploit their labour. We begin this discussion by first critically exploring the merits of an alternative view of the public sphere which has become known as deliberative democracy. This will then prepare the way for thinking through an alternative socialist theory of the public sphere.

Deliberative democracy? The public sphere concept has gradually become more popular in the social sciences and humanities as a means of understanding the democratic potential of civil society. While the public sphere concept has assumed many guises through the years, what underlines many approaches is the idea that the public sphere stands or falls to the extent that it maintains accountability for the democratic procedures of government. Obviously there are many theories of democratic accountability in civil society but an increasingly attractive option for


many has been that of ‘deliberative democracy’. To this extent Chambers (2003) provides a nice summary why deliberative democracy has indeed proved attractive. Deliberative democratic theory is a normative theory that suggests ways in which we can enhance democracy and criticize institutions that do not live up to the normative standard. In particular it claims to be a more just and indeed democratic way of dealing with pluralism than aggregative or realist models of democracy (Chambers 2003: 308). In view of this Chambers argues that deliberative approaches go beyond accounts that stay at the level of individual decision-making which explore how fixed interests and preferences vie with one another in the democratic arena. Electoral systems are an illustration of individual decision-making in this respect. Deliberative democrats highlight instead how mechanisms of communication, debate and discussion might enhance the democratic process before voting takes place. Important are the devices in place that enable and encourage people to argue through their reasons why a particular policy should be adopted and, at the same time, justify their reasons to range of individuals and groups. Accountability is thus more important than consent in deliberative democracy because ‘accountability is primarily understood in terms in terms of “giving an account” of something, that is, publicly articulating, explaining, and most importantly justifying public policy’ (Chambers 2003: 308). Dryzek (2006a) further argues that in a post-9/11 world deliberative democracy stands as the best opportunity through which to enrich the prospect of transnational democracy. This is the belief that deliberative and discursive interactions have far-reaching outcomes for international relations by influencing different individuals. Significantly, transnational discursive democracy seeks to establish a decentralised system of control ‘over the content and relative weight of globally consequential discourses’ that stresses the power of communicative action in discussing issues in the public sphere (Dryzek 2006a: 102–103). According to Dryzek, discursive democracy is subsequently more suited to our current age of interlinked transnational politics because it takes account of the reality of serious democratic engagement at different social and spatial levels, especially the way in which ordinary people reflexively engage in debate and discussion through global communication networks (see Dryzek 2001: 664).


It is in this respect, according to Goodin and Dryzek (2006), that ‘mini-publics’ prove to be a particularly valuable addition to the processes and practices of deliberative democracy. According to Goodin and Dryzek mini-publics ‘are designed to be small groups small enough to be genuinely deliberative, and representative enough to be genuinely democratic (though rarely will they meet the standards of statistical representativeness, and they are never representative in the electoral sense’ (Goodin and Dryzek 2006: 220). In this sense minipublics are comprised of ‘lay-citizens’ and ‘non-partisans’ who share a variety of viewpoints that reflect those viewpoints of wider society. As a result mini-publics do not rely exclusively upon formal procedures of selection that are often associated with (e.g.) different consultative forums say over a housing development. Rather, what mini-publics point towards is the inclusion of ‘ordinary’ people in deliberative decision-making on various matters. To their credit, deliberative democrats likewise recognise problems which constrain deliberative procedures from functioning properly. Dryzek (2006b: 66–68) for instance argues that potential obstacles stand in the way of a functioning public and he outlines three in particular. First, a public sphere might suffer from being too tightly interwoven with the state and this increases the likelihood of disputes and challenges over the question of sovereignty between both. Second, a public sphere might find its ability to function adequately difficult if the state remains unresponsive to the processes and results of deliberation from a public sphere in question. Third, and perhaps most obviously, deliberation will suffer if no autonomous public sphere exists. Be this as it may, for all of their emphasis on bringing people together to engage in deliberative encounters deliberative democrats rarely challenge the power which capital has over the public sphere. For example, we have seen in previous chapters how in the current neoliberal era of financial capital public spheres do in fact function at some distance from the state and yet produce some very undemocratic practices. More specifically, we have discussed how workplace public spheres have actively encouraged employees and workers to deliberate about organisational matters. The question therefore is not so much about whether the public sphere is too integrated with the state as it is to the degree to which whether the autonomy accorded to the public sphere is mediated through capitalist projects such as neoliberalism and competence. This is an important point to the extent that just as knowledge management has acted as the form for the content of competence so New


Public Management (NPM) today acts as the organisational form for the content of competence in how the nation state administers civil society. Unlike Keynesian forms of state management, NPM collapses the distinction between business and government. As Box et al. (2001) suggest, NPM argues that governments should take on a more businessled role while business should take on a more government-led role in providing and developing social policies. The justification for blurring this distinction is that power will be decentralised from the nation state to where it is needed most in regenerating communities. The current penchant for forging public-private partnerships (PPPs) in communities between local authorities, voluntary organisations, business, community forums, quangos, etc., is an indication of how NPM has instigated a deliberative set of mechanisms in civil society (see below for specific illustrations). Of course, entailed in this form of decentralisation are neoliberal factors such as the privatisation of public services, cost-cutting, and the creation of new quasi-public bodies to foster an ‘enterprise culture’ in society (Box et al. 2001: 612). Unsurprisingly, then, dialogue around ‘competence’ has also seeped into the soft virtues now associated with the nation state. Virtanen (2000), for example, distinguishes five competence areas for public sector management. Task competence refers to the performance of goals and the means to achieve these. The value of performance is ‘motivation’ and is closely aligned with instrumental abilities (e.g. ‘how’ will goals be achieved). Professional competence refers to being competent in a specific policy area and also relates to the successful execution of a policy as set out by politicians. Administrative professional competence is based upon valuing the ability to control a policy agenda, while its instrumental mode is built upon the know-how of cooperation. Political competence refers to the values, power and interests of a public manager. This relates to the ideological beliefs of the manager in question, as well as the creation and authorisation of the goals and means of public policy. Finally, ethical competence and commitment refers to the ability to correspond with prevailing moral values and norms prevalent in society. Administratively speaking, this is the capability of public sector managers to take for granted existing laws and to project an image of what is ‘right’ for society as regards which policies are projected. Instrumentally, ethical competence is generated by the capability of public managers to engage in debate and discussion through reason based on an ethical perspective (Virtanen 2000: 334–336). The race to create and promote (e.g.) PPPs in communities through competence has led many local authorities, along with the nation


state, to stress the positive intangible assets which the public sector can draw upon in order to provide intangible quality services. If we think about policy objectives, for example, intangible assets are currently seen as key inputs for the successful running of the public sector. Such intangible objectives include passing laws to create a secure environment for residents to live in and by promoting cultural initiatives for towns and cities. Many services are also of an intangible nature and include values such as ‘customer satisfaction’, ‘image’, ‘care’, ‘effectiveness’ and ‘efficiency’. Public sector managers and employees similarly utilise knowledge and human resources, which are again intangible assets. Management in the public sector is thus increasingly aware of the need to measure the usefulness of different intangible resources (Cina et al. 2003). As part of this rhetoric the public sector has sought to bring ‘partners’ together in community initiatives through deliberative mechanisms. Competence in this respect acts as a regulatory device to govern the moral behaviour of ‘incompetence’ in civil society. Overriding this practice is the aspiration to ensure that the autonomy granted to the public sphere is quite compatible with a new capitalist regime aiming to extend the commodification of civil society. This democratic deficit must make us cautious as to the practical merits of implementing deliberative democracy in communities. In the UK for example Thatcherism had some success in convincing enough people that the postwar welfare state had become too bureaucratic, inefficient, and expensive. What was required, so the New Right argued, was a new welfare agenda based around competition, value-for-money and efficiency. But whereas the old welfare state at least attempted for good or bad to demonstrate a modicum of interest in implementing the virtues of equality, economic prosperity for all, citizenship, educational opportunities, and the like, the new competence agenda shuns these ideals in favour of formal economic measures through the privatisation of public services. But this leads to a somewhat impassive and sterile type of accountability on behalf of the nation state towards recipients of welfare and public services. And by taking a more passive role in service delivery, the nation state promotes indirect service delivery through intangible factors such as ‘divesting resources, making business deals, and monitoring service contracts’ (Haque 2000: 603) and these cloud over the crucial issue of who exactly is directly accountable and responsible for any failures that occur in the delivery of services. At the same time the neoliberal agenda divides the ‘customers’ of the nation state into different groups of ‘democratic competence’. Those who are regarded as ‘big’ customers such as large firms or local political elites enjoy more resources to get their voices heard in the ‘marketplace’ of


policy provision than is the case with average ‘common’ users (Haque 2000: 604). In the UK the move to promote business leaders as competent experts to design and implement local social polices began in the 1980s through ‘quango’ schemes. But business specialists who steered quangos in the 1990s began to have a more ‘inclusive’ remit in the public sector than the mere promotion of business and property interests (Lavin and Whysall 2004). Indeed, by the 1990s business specialists were also being invited to sit on local government committees associated with areas like housing, education, health, and policing. Thus the emerging competence-led agenda in the UK witnessed the promotion of non-elected business individuals making significant policy decisions and focusing their energies upon wealth creation rather than the distribution of wealth. A by-product of the ‘professional competence’ of non-elected officials was thus its contribution to the decline of democratic accountability in the public sector (Peck 1995). In the US we find a similar story. Increasingly, the civil service in America is driven at least in part by a competency agenda that endorses leadership skills and behaviours expected of top individual public servants in promoting market responses to social problems. Five in particular stand out: to lead transformations; to lead people; to ensure that policies are based upon results; to acquire business expertise; and to develop the ability to foster alliances and communication networks (Ingraham and Getha-Taylor 2005: 795). These ideals have brought about a marketisation and depoliticisation of sorts to solving social problems in the US. Examples, as Brown suggests, are legion. (B)ottled water as a response to contamination of the water table; private schools, charter schools, and voucher systems as a response to the collapse of quality public education; anti-theft devices, private security guards, and gated communities (and nations) as a response to the production of a throwaway class and intensifying inequality; boutique medicine as a response to crumbling health care provision; ‘V-chips’ as a response to the explosion of violent and pornographic material on every type of household screen; ergonomic tools and technologies as a response to the work conditions of information capitalism; and, of course, finely differentiated and titrated pharmaceutical antidepressants as a response to the lives of meaninglessness or despair amidst wealth and freedom (Brown 2006: 704). These types of policies depoliticise democratic input into solving problems because solutions to issues like poverty are weighed heavily in favour of the private sector and elite institutions.


The Empowerment Zone (EZ) and Enterprise Community (EC) Initiative passed by US Congress in 1993 is a case in point. The Initiative seeks to regenerate troubled localities by establishing PPPs therein and provide an infrastructure for community groups to help confront problems around employment and poverty in an area. The idea behind the Initiative is to implement a holistic approach to finding workable solutions to these difficulties by mobilising different resources and by including ‘community capacity-building strategies’ (Oakley and Tsao 2007: 819). In some EZs, such as that of Chicago, it has been estimated that the Initiative has made some progress in alleviating factors like poverty (Oakley and Tsao: 2007: 835). But it is equally true to say that much of this progress is slow and unevenly spread within and across US cities. Even if it is the case that some forms of poverty have declined in the US it is still the case that the income gap has been strengthened between the lowest and highest incomes, ensuring that more people live just above the poverty line. Poverty wages in many sectors have likewise increased (Modarres 2002; see also Modarres and Andranovich 2005). And lest we forget, 34.6 million people were classified as living in poverty in the US while at least 5.5 million Americans are homeless at any one point (Shaft 2005: 153 and 157). Unfortunately, then, the Initiative fails to fully consider the underlying structural mechanisms that cause high persistent levels of poverty in the first place and prefers instead to focus on small-scale community developments under the rubric of intangibles such as ‘empowerment’. Needless to say, deliberative democrats are not oblivious to factors such as social inequality. Indeed, they argue that deliberative procedures can only successfully work if social ills such as material deprivation have been abolished. In addition, it is argued that deliberative procedures should ideally open up possibilities for individuals to challenge social inequalities during the moment of deliberation itself (see Cunningham 2002: 163 ff. for a succinct discussion of these points). Yet there is also a sense in which social ills are not comprehensively tackled by deliberative democrats. As Sanders (1997) observes, deliberative democrats tend to concentrate their theoretical energy on outlining what constitutes the force of a better argument in deliberative encounters rather than focus on specified interests based around class, race or gender. As such, ‘democratic citizens described in (deliberative) theories seem to live on another planet…(T)hey are devoid of race, class and, gender and all the benefits and liabilities associated…with these features’ (Sanders 1997: 355). As the EZ and EC Initiative suggests, the neoliberal competence agenda has established exactly those


deliberative forums noted by Sanders where ‘partners’ discuss local issues but do so by abstracting away from the underlying causes of social ills like poverty. These social factors also indicate how power often manifests itself in subtle and invisible ways which are not amenable to challenge in ways suggested by deliberative theorists (Sanders 1997). To give one illustration, some individuals from particular social or cultural backgrounds might not raise certain questions during a deliberative encounter for a number of reasons. For instance, a person might believe that certain questions can be tackled on a more personal level and believe that there is no need to raise such questions at a deliberative forum (e.g. a woman who does not raise questions about sexual harassment because she believes she can tackle this within the confines of her personal life). Or a person might not raise a question because they do not perceive it to be a problem in the first place (e.g. a black person who does not consider racist language to be a social problem unless such language turns to violence). Or a person might not raise a question because they believe it to be of a ‘minor inconvenience’ (e.g. a woman who has suffered sexual harassment but brushes it off with this claim) (Nielsen 2004). This point is connected to another further critical observation. Deliberative theorists are prone to emphasise the power of rhetoric to change hearts and minds during discursive encounters rather than that of coercion. Medearis (2004) illustrates this point through the black civil rights movement in 1960s America. From a deliberative standpoint the leader of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, achieved success because he managed to define the issues and problems around black civil rights through the discursive frames he constructed. In addition, King was renowned for demonstrating astute rhetorical skills when he spoke at meetings and rallies. Medearis argues however that the civil rights movement also achieved success not only through non-coercive communicative acts but also by engaging in coercive and strategic acts of resistance and demonstration such as marches, direct action, boycotts, disobedience, sit-ins, picketing, leafleting, and so on (Medearis 2004: 65). Deliberative democrats tend to downplay this latter element because they advocate a restriction on coercion to a minimum as is possible during the actual moment of deliberation. This is justified by deliberative democrats in order to promote equality and mutual respect in the discursive democratic encounter between individuals so that the better argument prevails. Yet, if it is true to say that capitalist social relations will be evident in a


deliberative democracy then we should again expect structural inequalities also to prevail. If this is the case, however, there is a necessity for those who suffer structural inequality to engage in coercive acts of resistance against such inequality. Of course, none of this is to deny that the new competence agenda has not succeeded in establishing some real empowerment initiatives in communities. Evidence suggests that community-based planning can create opportunities for residents in neighbourhoods to actively participate in deliberation about local policy provision. The hollowing out of some of the powers of the welfare state to a variety of PPPs has meant that residents and community organisations no longer have to campaign at a national and state level to get their specific needs met by accessing particular resources (Pierre and Stoker 2002). In this respect, campaigners and activists can engage in what Lepofsky and Fraser (2003) call ‘flexible citizenship’. This is a type of citizenship that works at many spatial scales to the extent that PPPs around certain policy initiatives can emerge at a local, regional, pan-regional, national and global level. As a result one’s rights no longer merely converge around a ‘natural birth right’ based on social class but rather individuals are conjoined to ‘perform’ their rights as citizens through a number of policy issues (see also Ghose 2005). Through a study of the Neighbourhood Revitalization Program (NRP) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Elwood (2002) found this to be the case. The NRP began in 1990, involved 81 neighbourhoods, and had as its remit the completion of two cycles of neighbourhood planning and revitalization with a projected $400 million in its budget. While Elwood concedes that the NRP broadly sought to apply neoliberal principles in its development agenda, she nevertheless notes how residents and grassroots organisation often used new governance mechanisms to subvert neoliberalism. One illustration noted by Elwood was the ability of some neighbourhoods to change the School Board and Park Board desegregation policy of taking children from racially diverse communities to schools in predominantly white communities. These neighbourhoods instead managed to devise a community schools initiative and get City Officials to build stronger ties between schools and residents. As a result, and against the neoliberal principles of NRP, residents actively (i.e. they employed performative acts) used the deliberative opportunities that had opened up through the revitalization program and successfully campaigned for greater local state involvement with issues surrounding schools (Elwood 2002: 127). Yet the ability of citizens in communities to mobilise in this manner is frequently an indirect effect of service provision as well as being depen-


dent on contingencies of locality, levels of resources available, the impact of various existing state mechanisms, conflicts over user needs and provider needs, and the type of networks which connect residents (see Rummery 2006). Moreover, local participants are often brought into a deliberative framework by planners of a community development scheme through pre-formed markers of identity thought to be wide enough to include as many community members as possible who are affected by the development scheme in question. This satisfies a core commitment of deliberative democrats to the extent that they stress deliberation should aim to generate a common consensus amongst the relevant participants (Sanders 1997: 9). But this approach to public consultation once again neglects the more complex ways that identities are constructed through difference within and between social networks. Local participants have their own tacit beliefs of what issues they wish to discuss and how they wish to discuss them. In one important sense, therefore, local participants also have their own ideas about the rules, expectations and governance of deliberation that may conflict with those of other ‘partners’ (e.g. local governance organisations or business organisations) within the remit of development schemes (Barnes et al. 2004: 2006). In a property-led development in London, for instance, Ball, M. (2004) reports that tensions around the issues of representation, trust, and efficiency were evident between various partners. Community leaders were not thought of by some other partners in the scheme to offer any productive input to the multifaceted issues involved. One property developer complained that ‘there is too much power devolved out to the communities’, while a registered social landlord observed: ‘Those (local) residents…should not be making judgements on how to house everybody that needs to be housed in London. At the moment, nobody is prepared to challenge that, either at the local or central government levels. It has been absolute torture for the local authority, central government, the private sector and the housing association’ (Ball, M. 2004: 135–136). While democratic input from residents and their representatives over ownership of the project was thought to be positive by the developers, Ball states that this did not necessarily imply the input of residents was regarded as important. Rather, there was a consensus amongst the developers that ‘the views for the existing community should be ascendant’ (Ball, M. 2004: 134; see also Beebeejaun 2006). Participation in this respect can be thought of as primarily being public deliberation based ‘in’ communities instead of participation being ‘community based’ (Eisenschitz 1997; Shirlow and Murtagh 2004).


Indeed, tensions between ‘partners’ can lead to elite institutions making decisions which by-pass deliberative channels. This, in turn, can be related to preconceived agendas concerning the role, image and power that an elite institution feels it brings to a local development scheme. Community Development Corporations (CDCs) are a case in point. Based in every major US city, CDCs are part of the ‘empowerment’ agenda and thus aspire to foster partnerships with the private sector, municipal governments, churches and voluntary bodies. Comprehensive Community Initiatives (CCIs) are types of CDCs. Targeting deprived neighbourhoods CCIs start from the premise that poverty is the result of a lack of opportunities due to various social factors (e.g. crime, low income and poor education). CCIs therefore try to link up poor neighbourhoods with leading institutions and private foundations (e.g. the Ford Foundation) so that residents might gain admission to the resources they require. However, as Boyle and Silver (2005) observe, many elite institutions and foundations involved in CCI projects get involved to further their own legitimacy and thereby reproduce their elite status in deprived areas. Such elite institutions also have a big say in how deprivation is tackled and what type of deprivation is targeted. This is not to deny some of the positive effects that CCIs bring to tackling deprivation, but it is to suggest that the more important decisions they make in this area are often carried out behind closed doors with minimum community input. The use of intangible words like ‘empowerment’ does not necessarily mean that democratic apparatuses will be greatly expanded and enhanced for all. Various community regeneration schemes likewise gain legitimacy through a type of political competence because they are said to deliver ‘choices’ to citizens by making public services more responsive to diverse user needs and by instigating a flexible approach to service delivery. As Clarke et al. (2006) claim, ‘choice’ is in this respect a powerful discursive device because it draws upon certain (intangible) desires in society: ‘a desire for greater control, an aspiration to define one’s own needs and a wish to shape outcomes, processes, relationships and patterns of interaction’ (Clarke et al. 2006: 333). In this way ‘choice’ becomes a brand that is bound up with consumerist longings and yearnings. Behind choice as a brand, however, are real social changes associated with neoliberal strategies and all this entails. In fact, for all of its expressed aspirations of responding to local needs much that goes under the umbrella of ‘community development’ is surprisingly homogeneous in scope and leaves little room for ‘choice’. Indeed, words such as ‘choice’ appear to be motivated more by what might be termed as ‘task com-


petence’ because the main aim is to ensure that performance goals are met. This being the case, generic policy prescriptions are often reproduced in different regions. So, a community development project will be seen as being part of a regional economic ‘cluster’ made up of different governance networks; the so-called ‘joined-up’ approach to policy provision. But as already has been indicated, each region and locality contains unique social relations. A policy agenda that subsequently emphasises uniform remedies across regions and localities contradicts the idea of tackling specific problems, issues and relationships of the region in question (Bristow 2005; Hadjimichalis and Hudson 2006). When a policy suffers setbacks because of this the response by the state is not necessarily to deepen democracy but rather to pass more legislation and create more homogenous moral discourses in an attempt to curb the perceived ‘malaise’ in communities and local behaviour. While governments might pass such legislation in order to regain political and professional competence, in reality politicians are aware they must be seen to be ‘doing something’ to overcome the ‘malaise’ in health, education, housing, and so on, in communities. But this ‘something’ can sometimes be accompanied by various criminalising discourses in which those community members who are perceived to be outside the boundaries of ‘respectable’ networks of governance (e.g. ‘problem families’) are treated as being incompetent deviants. From 1997 to 2005 for instance New Labour created over 1,000 new criminal offences, and over 40 crime-related pieces of legislation have been introduced (Crawford 2006: 457). While much of this criminal legislation is justified some such as the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 arguably contribute towards morally criminalising those in deprived communities. Here, ethical competence is artificially constructed by the national and local state through simplistic criminalising dialogue. And while such moral dialogue is constructed in theory to strengthen community ties and to tackle social exclusion, in practice it often serves to create simple binary dualisms in deprived communities based on the ‘responsible’ majority of residents and the ‘irresponsible’ minority who are portrayed as reproducing ‘indecent’, ‘immoral’, ‘asocial’ and ‘workshy’ behavioural traits (Wallace 2007). Again, deliberation amongst various ‘partners’ can be present in this situation while simultaneously excluding others through subtle modes of discursive power. The foregoing discussion would seem to support a comparison Stoecker makes between ‘community development’ and ‘community organising’. Community development is usually managed through a development corporation operating primarily in privatised market places whose aim


is to create jobs, educational opportunities, and so on, in deprived areas. Unlike community organising, however, community development works within and accepts existing (capitalistic) strategic and structural constraints and in most cases seeks to create a deliberative consensus between relevant parties through social networks embodied in the likes of PPPs (Stoecker 2003: 494–495). Often, mini-publics are part of this agenda because they are a way in which different ‘partners’ in the development scheme can come together to discuss issues at hand. In contrast, community organising seeks to build ‘organisations controlled by people normally shut out from decision-making power, who then go on to fight for changes in the distribution of power’ (Stoecker 2003: 493–494). Community organising thus attempts to enlist people to an organisation so that they then select the issues they want to be discussed and campaigned on. Moreover, community organising is predicated on the idea that society is built on conflicts around social inequality. As we have seen, however, community organising is frequently cast aside in community development because it proves too antagonistic to partnership networks. While some types of inequalities are therefore discussed in community development, the underlying social basis of inequality is rarely addressed. For Hirsch, this constitutes a fundamental weakness of the deliberative model. The current ‘realistic’ change to ‘competitive state’ or ‘deliberative’ concepts of democracy is…to be seen against this background. These concepts reduce democracy to processes of negotiation within civil society between extremely unequal actors or simply to participatory mobilization for the international competition of localities (Hirsch 2003: 244). But it is exactly the underlying social form of inequality that socialism wishes to eliminate so that a more inclusive public sphere can emerge, as we will now see.

Socialist democracy and participation One of the defining characteristics of capitalism is its reliance on alienated market mechanisms that take the form of socially necessary labour time (SNLT). This relatively abstract and simple observation is important for the establishment of a socialist public sphere for two principle reasons. First, SNLT implies that capitalist society is based on a class system. As we have noted throughout the book, this class system is


rooted in the fundamental contradiction between capital and labour. But we have also noted that this basic contradiction assumes a variety of concrete forms in actual workplaces. In respect to the public sphere, therefore, social class is still a hugely important way to understand the mediations of public discussions because social class provides a unifying basis for the voices of different oppressed identities in capitalist societies. Social class in this respect should not be defined through static categories. Rather, social class needs to be defined through the power to own and control where one works because this is directly associated with the fundamental class contradiction of capitalism. If it is true that the working class in the US comprises about 62 percent of the American labour force through this definition (Zweig 2007: 173) then this demonstrates how substantial the working class still is as a force. It also underlines the fact that class divisions cut across other social divisions such as ethnicity, race and gender. An increasing number of black and Hispanic professionals are to be found for instance in America’s professional and managerial class. Here, social class can prove more important in how a person votes than that of ethnicity. In this case ‘identities of difference’ who speak in the public sphere do so not through homogenous and static social categories such ‘race’ or ‘class’ but rather speak through fluid categories of race and class (Zweig 2007: 178–179). This is significant because a socialist strategy must seek to realign a ‘politics of identity’ or a ‘politics of difference’ (e.g. politics around race, gender, and sexuality) towards a politics of class. This is not to extinguish the specific characteristics that make up particular social identities, but it is to argue for the importance of bringing these identities within a politics that can collectively challenge the fundamental class basis of capitalism which excludes social identities from full participation in democratic procedures in specific ways (Gough et al. 2006: 226). A class based politics similarly acknowledges that many middle class occupations have connections and common interests with the working class. In Chapter 5 for example we observed how some middle class occupations have become disempowered in the workplace. Chapter 3 meanwhile suggested that many different occupations have suffered from increased intensification in recent years. Recognising the importance of social class in just these two instances provides one rationale for a need to create common socialist strategies across classes. But a class based politics is also required if we wish to challenge the new economy fetish that grips our daily working lives. As was noted in Chapter 3,


one consequence of this fetish is that it instils a fear associated with insecure working conditions into people’s perceptions of work across social class. However, we also noted that this fetish along with the fantasy of competence mystifies the stagnation of productive capital and the hegemony of financial capital. Combating the new economy fetish and the competence agenda is thus in the interests of all employees across class boundaries (cf. Doogan 2009: 214). Chapter 7 observed that one way in which this fetish has been challenged is through trade union activity. It is integral for socialist strategy to therefore campaign for greater trade union rights across workplace sectors and to link this campaign to the negative consequences of neoliberal financial capital. Second, SNLT implies that when a person produces a use-value they only know if it will simultaneously obtain exchange-value through monetary price mechanisms. Asocial and essentially private acts therefore only become social and public through price mechanisms. According to those who believe in capitalist markets such procedures are the only feasible way of ensuring that goods are exchanged and needs met. Problematically, however, these forms of economic transactions cannot account for social effects of market exchanges. Indeed, the atomistic form of capitalism in which individual decisions are championed will never adequately provide reliable information about the public effects of markets such as environmental damage, poverty and inequality (McNally 1993: 199). Capitalist markets reward atomistic behaviour, not social and public behaviour. Without challenging the root cause of this asocial and private behaviour in SNLT it is difficult to envisage how democracy will not spiral into factional vested interests based on the accumulation of privatised wealth creation. Socialism certainly accepts in principle the capitalist premise that individuals stand in a relationship of equality with one another in the marketplace. But where socialism differs from liberalism on this issue is in the belief that this equality is only formally true under capitalism. As we have noted in previous chapters, the formal equality and freedom declared by capitalism masks a real inequality and non-freedom between individuals. Socialism is thus a system in which the selfvalorisation of capital has been eliminated along with atomistic behaviour in markets, ensuring that the equality and freedom promised by capitalism can at last be realised (cf. Levine 1988: 6–7). This is a necessary requirement if some sort of rational control on how we produce and distribute goods is to be maintained. Therefore a socialist society will have to ensure that labour is joined up in some meaningful way with both ownership and control. Clearly, the only way in which this


is feasible is if the division between the economy and politics is dissolved. In other words, a socialist society is dependent on a robust form of economic democracy so that SNLT is abolished. None of this is to suggest that market relations will be completely swept away. But it is to say that market relations under socialism will no longer be mediated through the separation of labour from ownership and control over the means of production. Only by enacting this key provision will labour begin to have a real and meaningful democratic input into economic decision-making. We have observed that the competent public sphere also has a vision of participation at its core. Often, this vision of participation is grounded in theories of workplace democracy. Unfortunately, however, participation and democracy often get confused with one another in the competent public sphere. Pateman’s early work on democracy and participation is extremely useful here even though her original analysis was first published nearly 40 years ago. Sure enough, argues Pateman, different versions of workplace participation can be discovered in modern management techniques which range from ‘pseudo participation’, in which participation is used as a technique to persuade workers to accept decisions that have already been made, to ‘full participation’, in which groups of workers operate in semi-autonomous and self-regulated units and make their own decisions about various work-related issues (Pateman 1970: 68–71). Both types of participation are still found in workplaces today, but new wave (competent) management tends to support the latter of the two. However, Pateman correctly argues that both types of participation can exist with little or no workplace democracy. Even in the case of full participation, management, unlike a democratic government, is neither elected nor subject to removal by workers. Without real workplace democracy, participation can, as we have already noted through case studies and empirical examples (e.g. DIRECTeam in Chapter 5), lead to a sense of political apathy on the part of employees and workers. Moreover, participation without real workplace democracy can engender fear within a workforce, especially a fear of not being seen as a ‘team player’ in the ‘family’ structure of an organisation. One advantage that socialism has over capitalism in this respect is that it pays greater attention to the different motivations people have for working beyond that of generating a wage. As we have seen in other chapters, management theorists and practitioners are rightly attuned to the different motivations people have in working for a particular organisation. These theorists and practitioners are aware that money is not the only motivation for workers in this respect. But as Baker (1987)


rightly suggests the problem here is that management rarely takes this observation to its natural conclusion. If workers do have a number of motivations for working, whether this is pride and dignity in one’s work or an expression for greater control over how one works, management rarely puts these alternative motivations of work into practice. For example, evidence from cooperative movements show that workers are prepared to forego wage increases for more control over their day-to-day working lives (Baker 1987: 100). Money is not therefore the only driving motivational factor or incentive in making one work. Socialism aims to tap into the wide variety of motivations and incentives to work in order to bring about a more equitable set of social relations based on greater amounts of democratic participation for workers in economic decisionmaking. Bringing together both the economy and politics through workplace democracy is also advantageous because it gives us greater scope for exploring society as an interconnected whole. As a result, we are able to develop a better position to assess how the public sphere can be used to extend democracy across society as a whole. To suggest that society needs to be conceptualised as an interconnected whole is to try to understand how the way in which we produce goods is integrally linked together with a number of sectors. Elson (1999: 71–72) provides a useful starting point in thinking this through when she sets out four interconnected sectors. In the first instance we can identify the private sector where a whole array of commercial practices is conducted. In the second instance there is the state or public sector where certain goods are provided to citizens. In this sector the state provides some goods freely to citizens such as a health service. Other goods have a user charge attached to them. And of course the state also oversees laws and regulations, which implies that it must gain some measure of consent from its citizens. In the third instance we can identify the domestic sector where familial and neighbourly relationships take place and where household members own various assets and incomes and consume different products. Finally we can identify an associative sector where voluntary activity takes place through different institutions, societies, organisations and clubs. All of these sectors share some common characteristics. For example, all sectors share the common feature that a degree of coordination is required amongst participants in order to ensure their smooth functioning (this is true even in the private sector). At the same time, all have distinct roles to play. According to Elson: We might sum this up by saying that the private sector is structured by a dynamic of sales and profits; the public sector by a dynamic of


legitimation; and the domestic sector by a dynamic of provisioning. Associations must sustain their membership…as well as recruit new members…Perhaps this might be described as a dynamic of solidarity (Elson 1999: 73). The task for socialism is to ensure that these four sectors are integrated in a coherent and rational manner so that people’s real needs and wants are adequately met and planned for. One way of ensuring these conditions are fulfilled is to instigate a form of council democracy.

Council democracy According to Schweickart (2002) council democracy can be defined along three main lines. First, the worker-management divide is transcended in favour of worker self-management whereby workers democratically control each productive enterprise. Second, there is a marketplace through which enterprises interact with one another and with consumers. This marketplace operates along the principles of supply and demand. Access to raw materials, instruments of production and consumer goods are regulated through this system. Third, social control of investment is instigated in the form of a flat rate tax on capital assets. A tax on capital assets implies that enterprises will have to pay a leasing fee for factors such as land, buildings and equipment; factors that are common property of a community which is why enterprises lease these. Money accumulated by this tax will be returned to the economy through public investment banks, otherwise known as ‘community banks’ (Schweickart 2002: 47). To expand a little, in worker enterprises workers are not employed as wage labourers by capital but rather join an enterprise as a fellow worker with full democratic rights (Smith 2006: 303). As such each worker is seen as a citizen of the enterprise for which they work. Moreover, workers will not suffer reduced costs per unit of labour through factors such as a rise in the intensity of production, unemployment, or diminishing health and safety regulations. Each worker has a guarantee right to work and receive a basic income set at a reasonable level so that there is no necessity to take low paid work for the sake of it. By receiving a basic income more free time will be available for workers because there would be no pressure placed on them to work long hours for the sake of gaining a means of subsistence (cf. Little 1998: 79). This would be complemented by having access to a range of basic free public services such as health care, sanitation, and education. A basic income allows individuals to purchase other basic


necessities as well (Elson 1988: 28–30). These prerequisites considerably empower labour within enterprises and foreclose a basic requirement for capitalist exploitation to occur. The position of labour is also strengthened through the economic democracy that worker councils insist on. Here, workers directly elect management on a one-to-one vote basis. Management will be allowed some autonomy to make decisions but will also be democratically accountable to their workforce. Subsequently, decisions as to what to produce, what will be charged for products, workplace discipline, and so on, are all democratically discussed. However, the assets of an enterprise (e.g. land, buildings, and machinery) are the common property of a community. An enterprise therefore has an obligation to ensure that these assets are properly looked after and repaired and replaced when necessary. Some money from an enterprise in the form of a depreciation fund can be set aside for this purpose (Schweickart 2002: 47–48). Worker enterprises would also produce a number of goods ranging from ‘public goods, inputs into the production process, or final consumption goods’ (Smith 2006: 303). For public goods, planning agencies establish agreed norms that have been democratically decided upon concerning how public assets will be used. Planning agencies could also for example hold property rights over public enterprises to ensure that the rights of workers in these enterprises are maintained and to ensure they operated in the interests of the community as a whole. In return, public enterprise workers would be guaranteed that some of their wages took the form of fixed wages, while varying productivity bonuses would be linked to individual, team and enterprise performance (Elson 1988: 31). Enterprises offer inputs into the production process while final consumption goods would effectively place these inputs into the marketplace. Far from being based on private capitalist markets for capital and labour, a socialised marketplace makes information on prices and wages publicly available. Indeed, both producer enterprises selling goods to other enterprises and consumer enterprises selling goods to individual consumers will endeavour to make a profit. The difference with this type of profit and those profits made in capitalist markets is that socialised markets operate on the principle that wage labour is not a commodity in the normal sense. Rather, ‘labour is the residual claimant’ in a socialist society (Schweickart 2002: 49) to the extent that labour receives the profits once other factors such as a capital asset tax has been paid. Therefore both types of enterprise (producer and consumer) will respond to price and wage mechanisms and respond to supply and demand.


A socialised marketplace also takes responsibility for setting price norms. Through a price regulator, for example, information will be required from each enterprise about its unit costs and this information will then be publicly available for all enterprises and for all household consumers to allow them to make informed judgements about costs and prices during exchanges. There will also be some degree of freedom to deviate from these norms, but this can then be fed into price mechanisms and adjustments made if need be to relevant norms. Publicly available information on these norms could be interrelated with other public information networks such as those of buyers and sellers of common interests. Although buyers and sellers of different networks will exist, they would also have ‘secretariats’ to correspond with planning agencies in order to set an overall strategy for the national economy (Elson 1988: 33–35). It is in this respect that the relationship between buyers and sellers and secretariats relate primarily to market exchange but not to market forces. Market exchange refers to the transactions between buyers and sellers and market exchange coordinates the use of existing productive capacity. Market exchange typically relies on an element of coordination and cooperation concerning information about goods bought and sold during the exchange process itself. Market forces on the other hand refer to the mechanisms set in place that underline market exchange, and market forces essentially relate to the atomistic decisions by various actors in capitalist societies involved in these transactions. If coordination does occur through market forces it comes about only after these exchanges have taken place (Adaman and Devine 1997: 76–77). A principle aim of socialism is to replace market forces by negotiated coordinated activity between various affected social owners of enterprises at different levels in society. A Wage Commission for example could be established to ensure working standards are adhered to and to set wage norms. This information will be publicly available (Elson 1988). It should also be noted that decisions about social investments will be made at a local, regional and national level. An elected national legislature determines the rate of capital asset tax to be imposed on enterprises and also makes pronouncements on funds for national public goods and those funds allocated to elected regional and local legislative assemblies. The rationale for regional and local legislatures is that they can go on to distribute funds for their own public investments in the localities in which they reside (Smith 2006: 304). While the discussion on council democracy is necessarily limited due to restrictions of space it does nevertheless highlight some solutions to


the issues critically discussed throughout the book. In the first instance, council democracy encourages representatives of all affected interests of an economic decision to be involved in deliberative discussion about the decision in question. As Devine says of this process: It would be a process of direct personal interaction in which people would have to justify the position they adopted in the light of the position adopted by others. As a result, people would be helped to modify their own narrow self-interested consciousness and develop a broader social awareness and sense of social obligation based on an understanding of their mutual interdependence (Devine 1988: 39). Council democracy also recognises the importance of common property. Unlike private property, common property acknowledges the fact that individuals must enjoy access to specific resources. As Elson suggests (1999: 78), guaranteed common property allows households to gain access to vital public services and this is assisted by the right to a basic income. Common property also encourages individuals to devote some of their time to associational activities. After all, socialism visualises less intensive work pressures imposed on individuals and more free time with less stress to take part in associational activities. Some funds might also be put aside for associational activities by community banks. Of course, and again as Elson indicates, the right to essential public services and a basic income might entail the obligation to do some unpaid community work. In addition, common property acts as a check on commercial deals because it points towards the transcendence of corporate property rights by ensuring that market transactions are mediated by socially and democratically accountable standards. The state could also be democratically kept in check by a socialist system through the number of democratically elected councils and bodies, including associations such as trade unions (Elson 1999: 80–81). Council democracy therefore views the four distinct realms of economic transactions as being an interconnected unity. To conclude this section, we might say that council democracy instigates a type of ‘stakeholder socialism’ whereby social owners of an enterprise are identified and the weight of their representational input into the activities of an enterprise is calculated (Adaman and Devine 2002: 14).

Socialised knowledge management and the public sphere The socialist society envisaged also confronts many of the problems associated with knowledge. As we have noted elsewhere in the book,


new wave management emphasises the sharing of knowledge amongst ‘stakeholders’ in an organisation. In reality, neoliberal financial pressures tend to stifle knowledge acquisition for the good of an organisation and for society as whole. Over the last two decades neoliberalism has also led to the reinforcement of the intellectual property rights of major global corporations. One notable illustration in this respect is the implementation of the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) by the World Trade Organisation. The TRIPs agreement has enabled multinational companies to protect their patents, copyrights and other intellectual property across the globe (May 2006: 92). A socialist society will abolish those intellectual property rights that work to the benefit of capital in favour of establishing publicly funded R&D and in providing the conditions for enterprises to invest in technological innovation. In this respect socialism will build on the practices already maintained in capitalist societies wherein academics and scientists participate in R&D for reasons other than the profit motive such as prestige, intellectually rewarding and stimulating working conditions, attracting research funds, and so on (Smith 2006: 320–321). Tacit knowledge, so beloved of new wave management, will thus be transformed in socialised markets. Rather than sustaining capitalist social relations, where knowledge is caught up in fetishised processes and contributes to the valorisation of capital, tacit knowledge of each individual worker in a socialist society is allowed to flourish because the unique individual creative input of each worker within an enterprise will be recognised through real democratic participation. Knowledge management in a socialist society is therefore opposed to the commodification and privatisation of knowledge. Instead, tacit knowledge of each individual worker contributes in its own way to enriching the collective knowledge of society as a whole (Lebowitz 2006: 48). Unlike liberal representative democracies in which individuals register their preferences for particular outcomes, knowledge in a socialist society will be coterminous with individuals being both citizens and experts whose opinions contribute towards establishing a democratically deliberated general will at various levels of society (Levine 1998: 118). Needless to say, for this type of knowledge management to emerge a drastic transformation of the financial system has to be undertaken. We have already touched upon some of these issues. Community banks will be under pressure in a socialist society to ensure that poorly innovative worker enterprises do not receive extra funds. But decisions such as these are made under democratic mechanisms and along more participatory lines. While community banks will have the responsibility to distribute funds to worker enterprises and make decisions about the


continual viability of particular enterprises, it will also be the case that representatives from a variety of groups affected by the judgments of the community bank in question will sit on the boards (Smith 2006: 305; see also Adaman and Devine 1997: 76–77). In a socialist society, where the socialisation of the means of production has been implemented, bank managers will be under greater pressure to take note of underperforming enterprises because banks will be answerable to a locality or region as a whole and not just to its own banking interests. Yet this pressure on bank managers, on financial institutions more widely, and on enterprises encourages all to draw on a broad range of both explicit and tacit knowledge of actors affected by economic decisions. As a result enterprises and other institutions become learning organisations because they utilise ‘a wider set of information inputs when reaching their decisions’ (Adaman and Devine 2002: 17). This is a more efficient way of conducting economic transactions than those which currently exist in capitalist societies because it works along a number of criteria rather than the single profit motive criteria. Many would perceive the situation of having civil society sit on the boards of banks as being somewhat outrageous. Numerous illustrations however throughout the world already exist of civil society organisations participating in debates over various aspects of macroeconomic policy. In the early 1990s for example the Swedish parliament deliberated with civil society organisations on its budgetary process with one effect being a closer scrutiny of how budgetary changes effected vulnerable groups. The South African Women’s Budget Initiative (WBI) is comprised of researchers from NGOs and academic institutions and has strong links with parliamentary members and civil servants. The WBI has similarly established links in civil society through forums and workshops it has set up. Through its efforts the WBI has placed real pressure on parliament to distribute funds to employment and training programmes, labour reforms, pension policy, anti-discrimination policy, and to gender-related health care issues (Brinkerhoff and Goldsmith 2003: 695). Similarly, many governments around the world have consultative forums for their public services where members of the public can feed in their opinions about the service in question. In the US, for instance, every element of their regulatory framework is open to scrutiny by the public and all relevant groups and citizens are invited to take part in deliberations about how a particular service or utility operates. This has led to individuals and groups, including trade unions, challenging the prices set by some services and utilities (Palast et al. 2003; see also the discussion in Gibson-Graham 2006). And as many associa-


tion movements such as Local Exchange and Trading Schemes (LETS) testify, people are willing to work together in their communities to forge alternative but more cooperative units of trade to that of capital. In the case of LETS, people come together to establish a goods and service directory and this provides the means for individuals to exchange goods and services. Each good or service on offer is individually priced through locally established LETS units and goods and services are purchased through a LETS cheque for an agreed amount of LETS units (Williams 2007: 257). The practice of allowing affected parties to sit on the boards of community banks is similar in principle to Fraser’s ‘post-socialist’ notion of a parity of participation (see Chapter 7). However, the position defended here contributes towards the elimination of capitalist social relations and this can be appreciated if we return one last time to global finance. It seems reasonable to assume that a parity of participation principle would provide a rationale for establishing a meta-political institution to regulate global financial transactions. Some type of meta-political institution could in line with democratic discussion with representatives from global civil society choose to impose a tax on financial transactions. The obvious example in this respect would be to implement something akin to a ‘Tobin tax’ on short-term speculative capital inflows to ensure that citizens in different parts of the world are protected from the social ills of financial markets. Without addressing the fundamental capitalist relation however such a tax will fail to effectively tackle short-term speculative capital inflows because wherever capital anticipates a profit it will still engage in financial transactions. Neither, therefore, would such a tax stop speculative bubbles from building up (Smith 2006: 113–114). What are also required therefore are mechanisms in place at a global level that put an end to capital flight outside of a country. Building on post-Keynesian theory, but taking it in a more Marxistsocialist direction, Smith suggests that one mechanism that could be put in place to stop this happening would be to establish an accountable and global socialist planning agency that would: (i) demarcate global public goods; and (ii) ensure regions throughout the world gain admission to investment funds. What this also implies is that more generally we require a completely different monetary system than what we currently have in capitalism. A socialist monetary system rejects money as the abstract measurement of every other commodity and so rejects money as stored up value or money used to exploit labour. In socialism money will certainly be used to purchase goods, but this function is accomplished without exploiting labour because workers


receive fundamental rights (e.g. the right to employment) and have a democratic input into how they work that mitigates against exploitation (Smith 2006: 338–339). Global governance institutions would additionally be instigated to protect citizenship rights, and only one form of global money will exist so that countries can convert their currencies to this global money but not the other way round. In this way, domestic savings and credit money would be prevented from leaving a home country to find profitable revenues in other countries (Smith 2006: 306–307). Again, while these proposals might look fanciful current global governance mechanisms such as the World Bank, World Trade Organisation, European Union and the United Nations already show us that a type of global regulation for economic, political and social issues is in fact perfectly reasonable and feasible. But any discussion of planning agencies must also enquire into what would replace accounting mechanisms in workplaces. The first point to make in this respect is that worker enterprises, based as they are on council democracy, require of necessity a different orientation towards intellectual and manual labour. The usual division that exists in capitalism between ‘experts’ (intellect) and ‘non-experts’ (manual) needs to be dissolved in favour of giving workers time and space within an enterprise to learn some of the rudiments of book-keeping, accounting, marketing, and so on (Lebowitz 2006: 77). Only by learning about these practices will workers be able to make informed democratically based decisions about outputs, etc. of their respective enterprise. This new workplace education would be complemented by the establishment of independent social audits. Whereas social auditing in capitalist markets operates primarily along the lines of capital expenditure, and increasingly does so even in public services (see Broadbent 2002), independent social audits under socialism would ensure that worker enterprises are both transparent and accountable in how they operate. Community banks can then base their investment decisions in part on these auditing procedures (Smith 2006: 305). Common property likewise implies open access to more public spaces than is currently available. Recent years have witnessed the increasing privatisation of public space through the likes of shopping malls and regeneration schemes (Roberts 2008b). A socialist society would end the privatisation of common land and make public space as widely accessible and open to all as is possible. Indeed, even capital assets used by enterprises would be deemed common property of society as a whole. Opening up public space in this manner will it is hoped encourage public spiritedness and feed the public good because more common spaces for social


interaction and associational activities are provided (Gough et al. 2006: 229). This might sound unlikely yet the history of modern public parks, at least in the UK, demonstrate how public spaces have in fact been used exactly for these purposes, even if this has occurred along lines of class (see Roberts 2004). All of these observations made about a socialist society are of course only minimally sketched out here. But what they do suggest is that under a socialist society a different type of public sphere will come into being, and one more attuned to human needs. For if it is the case as Marx repeatedly states that human needs are a historical product, then it follows that human needs are always undergoing constant change between and within distinct historical periods. There are no basic human needs as such that trump all other human needs. Rather, even the most basic human needs such as food and clothing develop historically. In line with this way of looking at needs is the related point that human powers and capabilities are always in a constant evolving process of becoming. We are truly human when we respond to this process of becoming by satisfying specific needs while simultaneously creating new needs (Sayers 1998: 163–164). Socialism opens the way for people to satisfy and generate needs through participatory practices that see society as an integrated whole. Socialism enables people to set out on a voyage of becomings and in the process gain the widest fulfilment of their desires by actualising their virtual powers of potential.

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Index accent, 13, 67, 99, 109, 120 accounting, 43–5, 57, 82–5, 119, 123, 130, 132–4, 178 bookkeeping, 43, 178 intellectual capital accounting (ICA), 83 accumulation, 52–3 Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU), 142–4 American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), 132, 136 answerability, 96, 100, 112, 145 Association of Locomotive Engineers and Fireman (ASLEF), 139

communities of practice (CoP), 68–70, 78–80, 95, 118, 138 community, 158–66 Community Development Corporations (CDCs), 164 community unions, 136–7 competence, 1–2, 6–7, 67–9, 97, 105, 107, 110–11, 114–15, 118, 122–3, 133, 142–3, 156, 157–60, 165, 168 becoming, 7 leveraging, 78 strategic management, 7 competent public sphere, see public sphere consummation, 45, 129 contingency, 86, 97, 134, 142–3 contract, 12–13, 71, 81, 106, 124, 138, 146 cooperation, 14, 40–1, 43, 92, 141, 144 credit, 28, 37, 46–7, 64 cyberweek, 121–2 cynicism, 105

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 85, 96–7, 100–1, 109–11, 114, 120, 122, 144–6, 148 banks, 37, 46, 75 community, 175–6 basic income, 171–2 Body without Organs (BwO), 39–46, 79–81, 82, 140–1 brand, 18, 25–7, 49, 83, 95 Bretton Woods, 31, 33 capital, 12, 32, 33, 38, 44–5, 70, 74–5, 91, 156, 167 financial, 27–8, 46–7, 49–51, 63, 67, 75, 141, 145, 156, 168 filiative, 49–50 industrial, 37, 49 valorisation, 39–40 capitalist, 91–2 Castells, Manuel, 20, 52, 63, 122 Caterpillar Inc., 146–8 cell formation, 119–20, 143 choice, 164 collective bargaining, 128, 136, 138 commodity, 9–10, 36 common property, 171–2, 174, 178

debt, 51–2, 63–7 deliberative democracy, 154–6, 161–3, 166 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, 37, 39, 45–6, 48–50, 53, 55–6, 62, 80, 86–7, 140–2, 144 democracy and participation, 16, 89, 95, 169 council democracy, 171–4 derivatives, 57–8, 66, 76 desire, 40–1, 43, 45–8, 56, 58, 70, 80, 105, 110, 139–40 desiring-production, 41, 77, 140 dialogue, 8, 11, 13–14, 16, 29, 84, 96, 98, 111, 118, 131, 133, 144, 148 indirect, 16, 114–15 meanings, 109–10

201

202 Index dialogue – continued themes, 16, 109–10, 115, 118, 120, 133–4 see also events, dialogic dollar, 31–2, 35, 151

heteroglossia, 16, 109–10, 120, 128, 141 high performance paradigm (HPP), 94, 96–7, 134 housing, 50, 64

emotional intelligence (EI), 70–3, 85–6 employment, 54 Employment Relations Act 1999 and 2004, 131 empowerment, 16, 67, 90, 94, 97, 98, 101–2, 115, 125, 134, 140, 145, 160, 164 Empowerment Zone and Enterprise Community Initiative, 160 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), 82–3 ethical acts, 73, 75, 145–7 events, 10, 14, 16, 81, 82, 85–7, 100, 139, 142, 147 dialogic, 95–102, 110 workplace, 87 exploitation, 62, 92, 116, 148 see also surplus value

inequality, 61–2, 151–4, 160, 162, 166, 168 initial public offerings (IPOs), 51–2 information communication technologies (ICTs), 15, 18, 21, 33, 47, 51, 61, 74–6, 122, 124, 128, 137 in/tangible, 11, 72, 77, 83, 104, 112, 116, 118, 123, 130, 158, 164 intensification at work, 57–9, 101, 118, 133 internet, 53–4, 61–2

family work environment, 72, 81, 106, 113–14, 138, 169 fantasy, 16, 40, 67, 68, 96, 100, 111, 114–15, 138, 145, 148 Federal Reserve, 34–5 fear, 56–7, 112–13, 130, 168 fetish, 10, 29, 36–9, 46–55, 63, 74–5, 93, 97, 105–6, 112, 116, 167–8 financialisation, 15, 28, 30–3, 35, 63–7, 70, 75, 77, 84, 102, 116 Fordism, 55, 116 foreign direct investment (FDI), 34 freedom of speech, 111–12 fun at work, 72, 81, 85, 104, 112 globalisation, 24, 33 economy, 18, 33–5 poverty, 151–3 Hardt, Antonio and Negri, Michael, 21–2, 24

job insecurity, 56–8, 71 Justice for Janitors (JfJ), 135–6 Keynesianism, 31, 33 knowledge, 48, 69, 71–2, 77, 85, 103, 124, 174–5 knowledge management, see management labour, 12, 38, 39, 43, 63, 70, 74, 117, 132, 135–6, 141, 143, 154, 167, 169, 172, 177–8 un/productive, 90–1 lack, 28–9, 48–9, 69 London Underground Limited (LUL), 138–9 management, 16, 83, 92, 98–100, 104, 111–12, 118–20, 130, 139–40, 143, 147, 158, 167, 172 human resource management (HRM), 134 knowledge management, 6, 68–9, 86, 93, 156, 175 literature, 26 new public management (NPM), 156–7 participation, 99–100

Index 203 project, 71, 76, 104–5 total quality management, 8, 73, 86, 94 strategies and techniques, 92–3, 94, 96, 132–3 manufacturing, 53 market exchange and forces, 173 Marx, Karl, 3, 9–12, 27–8, 37–8, 40, 42–4, 46, 141 Marxism, 9 MetaMarkets, 23 minor formations, 119, 128–9, 140, 143 see also public sphere, minor molar formations, 87, 104, 118, 122, 139–40, 144 molar dialogue, 93 money, 36–7, 75, 170, 171, 177–8 molecular, 140–1 monologic, 11, 109–11, 114, 117–18, 120, 133, 145 National Labor Committee (NLC), 135 National Union of Rail Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), 139 neoliberalism, 29, 32–3, 34, 56, 60, 102, 117–18, 131, 139, 142, 151, 156, 158, 160, 162, 175 new economy, 15–16, 18–28, 47, 49, 51–3, 56, 61, 70, 74, 80, 107, 112, 116, 167–8 knowledge economy, 19, 20, 48, 61 networks, 20–1, 76–7 workplace, 21–5 New Labour, 116–17, 131, 165 opinions, 114–15 partnership, 52, 59, 115–18, 130–1, 138 public-private partnerships (PPPs), 157–8, 160, 162–6 personality, 12, 48–9, 81, 100, 113, 145–7 bourgeois, 44 competent, 70–3, 75–6, 80, 87, 112–13 incompetent, 88, 98, 101, 112–14

proletarian, 148 zones, 74 post-bureaucracy, 93, 102 flattened out, 102 potential, 41, 45, 70–1, 81, 82, 85, 87–8, 97, 110, 141, 146, 179 productivity, 53 professionalisation, 104–5 public, 2–6 interest, 4, 89 mini, 156 sociability, 4 space, 5, 81, 178–9 public sector/services, 157–8, 178 public sphere, 4–5, 24, 48, 59, 68, 80, 113, 116, 118–19, 156, 167, 170, 179 bourgeois, 12–13, 15–16, 42–6, 89, 93, 113–14, 129, 133, 148 competent, 6–9, 67, 70, 81, 100, 102, 106, 111, 126, 138, 154, 169 Marxist, 9–14 minor, 139, 143 proletarian, 12, 14, 16, 43, 100–1, 128–9, 136, 138–9, 143–8 socialist, 17, 154, 166–79 rational choice, 152 Resnick, Stephen and Wolff, Richard, 90–2 risk, 19, 22–3, 69, 73, 87, 105, 117–18 self-renunciation, 44–5 Service Employers International Union (SEIU), 135–6 shareholder value, 65–6 skills, 19, 41, 59, 73, 76, 83, 108, 116, 119, 123–4 social class, 55, 77, 90, 101, 167 subsumed, 90 socialism, 148, 154, 166–79 socially necessary labour time (SNLT), 36, 42, 44, 47, 166–9 speculation, 50–2, 64–5 speech genres, 114–15 stakeholders, 72, 84, 107–8, 117, 132–3, 175

204 Index stocks, 35 stock market, 51–2, 61 surplus value, 39–40, 45, 48, 50, 90–2 surveillance, 115, 119, 123 teamwork, 68, 113, 118–21, 143, 145 telecommunications, 54 temporary staffing industry (TSI), 59–61 time, 80–1, 122, 125 total quality management, see management trade unions, 58, 63, 105, 116–18, 120–1, 126–7, 128–50, 168 avoidance, 129–30 militant, 16, 129, 135–6, 138–9, 142–50

Union Learning Representatives (ULRs), 117 training, 102 trust, 118 United Auto Workers (UAW), 146 utterance, 16, 85–6, 96, 98, 100–1, 105, 112–13, 117, 120, 139–41 Voloshinov, Valentin N., 110–11, 113–14 wages, 61–2 work-life balance, 60, 72, 81, 122 ˇizˇek, Slavoj, 36–7, 46, 49, 69–70, Z 83, 87, 96, 98, 114–15, 144–5

The Competent Public Sphere: Global Political Economy, Dialogue and the Contemporary Workplace

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