New philosophies of labour: work and the social bond 9789004209763, 900420976X, 9789004215467, 9004215468

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New Philosophies of Labour

Social and Critical Theory Editorial Board

John Rundell University of Melbourne

Danielle Petherbridge University of Melbourne

Jeremy Smith Ballarat University

Jean-Philippe Deranty Macquarie University

Robert Sinnerbrink Macquarie University International Advisory Board William Connolly – Manfred Frank – Leela Gandhi Agnes Heller – Dick Howard – Martin Jay – Richard Kearney Paul Patton – MICHEL Wieviorka

Volume 13

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/sct

New Philosophies of Labour Work and the Social Bond

Edited by

Nicholas H. Smith Jean-Philippe Deranty

LEIDEN • BOSTON LEIDEN • BOSTON 2012

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data New philosophies of labour : work and the social bond / edited by Nicholas H. Smith, Jean-Philippe Deranty. p. cm. -- (Social and critical theory ; v. 13) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-20976-3 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Labor--Philosophy. 2. Work--Philosophy. 3. Work--Social aspects. I. Smith, Nicholas H. (Nicholas Hugh), 1962- II. Deranty, Jean-Philippe. HD4904.N49 2012 331.01--dc23

2011035782

ISSN 1572-459X ISBN 978-90-04-20976-3 Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

Contents Volume Foreword������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� vii Acknowledgements����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ix 1.  Work, Recognition and the Social Bond: Changing Paradigms������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������1   Nicholas H. Smith and Jean-Philippe Deranty PART ONE

FROM HEGEL TO INSTITUTIONALISM 2.  The Role of Work within the Processes of Recognition in Hegel’s Idealism������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 41   Paul Redding 3.  The Legacy of Hegelian Philosophy and the Future of Critical Theory������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 63   Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch 4.  Recognition Theory and Institutional Labour Economics���������� 101   Craig MacMillan PART TWO

CRITIQUE, NORM AND WORK 5.  The Political Invisibility of Work and its Philosophical Echoes������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 133   Emmanuel Renault 6. Expression and Cooperation as Norms of Contemporary Work��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 151   Jean-Philippe Deranty 7.  Three Normative Models of Work�������������������������������������������������� 181   Nicholas H. Smith

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contents PART THREE

WORK AND SUBJECTIVITY: TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY   8. From the Psychopathology to the Psychodynamics of Work��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 209   Christophe Dejours   9.  Care as Work: Mutual Vulnerabilities and Discrete Knowledge��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 251   Pascale Molinier PART FOUR

WORK, RECOGNITION AND THE CHANGING FACE OF CAPITALISM 10. Admiration without Appreciation? The Paradoxes of Recognition of Doubly Subjectivised Work�������������������������������� 273   Stephan Voswinkel 11.  “Exclusive Focus on Figures. Exclusive Focus on Returns.” Marketisation as a Principle of Organisation and a Problem of Recognition����������������������������������������������������������������� 301   Gabriele Wagner 12. A Critical Assessment of Orthodox Economic Conceptions of Work���������������������������������������������������������������������� 327   Dale Tweedie 13.  Liberalism, Neutrality and Varieties of Capitalism�������������������� 347   Russell Keat Notes on Contributors��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 371 Index�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 375

Volume foreword If work is one of the social bonds through which people’s lives can be made meaningful in the modern world, then the new neo-liberal environment can disrupt, damage, or destroy these bonds and the experiences of personal and collective recognition. New Philosophies of Labour: Work and the Social Bond edited by Nicholas H. Smith and Jean-Philippe Deranty brings together leading philosophers and social scientists around the crucial issues of work and recognition in this new environment of neo-liberalism. One of the areas that The Social and Critical Theory Book Series has developed over several volumes has been ‘recognition theory’. Smith and Deranty’s book broadens and deepens the issue of recognition by opening it up to the experience of work, its sociality and social bonds and explores the ways in which recognition is a central part of this experience. John Rundell, Series Editor The University of Melbourne, Australia

Acknowledgements This volume has the shape it has on account of many conversations between the editors, whose specialization lies within philosophy, and sociologists, psychologists, economists and other philosophers based in Australia, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. In addition to the authors included in the volume, we would particularly like to thank Geoff Boucher, Keith Breen, Wylie Bradford, Norbert Ebert, Lorraine Gibson, Axel Honneth, Hermann Kocyba, Michael Pusey, Beate Roessler, John Rundell, Andrew Sayer, Sean Scalmer, Gillian Vogl and Shaun Wilson for helping us think through the central issues at stake. Several of these conversations took place during a conference on the topic of work and recognition held at Macquarie University in Sydney in October 2007; others in a series of seminars and workshops on recognition and the philosophy of work. We thank everyone who took part so engagingly in these events, particularly the students at Macquarie University and Goethe-Universität Frankfurt whose enthusiasm for the philosophy of labour reassures us of the importance of this barely charted field of inquiry. A book of this kind, encompassing several disciplines and languages, requires more than the usual amount of editorial graft. We thank Susie Turner for her assistance in the first stages of editing and Ruth Cox for all her help in the final stages. Of course, we take sole responsibility for any editorial shortcomings. We also thank Lise Andersen and Wilson Cooper for assistance in preparing the index. The volume is the culmination of a research project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC). The editors, as chief investigators on the project, would like to thank the ARC for its financial support. Nicholas H. Smith and Jean-Philippe Deranty

Chapter one

Work, Recognition and the Social Bond: Changing Paradigms Nicholas H. Smith and Jean-Philippe Deranty Introduction: The Post-Hegelian Agenda One of the chief characteristics of “post-Hegelian” thought is that it strives to conceptualise the fundamental features of human life in a way that connects to the major moral and political challenges of the times. The post-Hegelian philosophical impulse could even be said to originate in an apprehension of these challenges and the need to respond to them by way of critical reflection. In the Hegelian jargon, postHegelian thought aims at the “universal”—or has its eye on “totality”— in seeking to provide a framework for understanding not only those essential features of the human life form in general, but the contemporary condition of this life form in its essential aspects. Without the latter, the philosopher’s concern with universality and totality remains abstract; only with it, does philosophical criticism become concrete. At its best, philosophy on the post-Hegelian view is not just the perspicuous self-expression of thought, but of its time in thought. A crucial implication of the post-Hegelian conception of philosophy is that however we conceive the fundamental features of human life, we must conceive them as socially and historically indexed. Of course, many answers have been given to the question of what distinguishes the human life form from the life form of other animals: consciousness, thought, knowledge, reason, freedom and so forth. “Reason,” or perhaps “freedom,” was Hegel’s master concept in this regard, though there is widespread disagreement amongst post-Hegelians about the precise meaning of these terms. What they do agree on, however, is that human beings are distinctive on account of the kind of relations they have with each other, that is, on account of their social relations, and that these relations provide them with a history that also distinguishes them from other animals. Hegel’s theory of the “sociality” of reason and of reason’s unfolding in history is well-known—and not

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without justification taken as central to his philosophy1—but the broader “post-Hegelian” point is that the human condition is at its core social and historical irrespective of the detailed specification of the concept of rationality. However, for most of the second half of the twentieth century, postHegelian thought in the sense we are introducing it here did favour a particular approach to rationality, one that emphasised the link between rationality and language. To the extent that the human being could properly be characterized as the rational animal, on this view, it was in virtue of its self-constitution and self-expression in language. The classical conception of the human being as the animal “in possession of the logos,” radicalized by Hegel into the idea of self-determining consciousness, mutated into a conception of the human being as essentially the being capable of speech and action.2 Under the influence of the later Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, post-Hegelian thought after the Second World War took an unmistakable linguistic turn (and of course was not alone in this respect).3 From Arendt to Gadamer and Habermas, from Ricoeur to Derrida and Rorty, the key post-Hegelian thinkers from the 1950s to the 1980s took it as axiomatic that philosophical self-understanding was to be obtained first and foremost by reflection on language. Furthermore, some of these thinkers went as far as to suggest that the fundamental danger of modern times arose from a kind of reification of the linguistic realm (Arendt, Habermas), or a “forgetfulness” of the proper human relation to language and consequently an authentic experience of freedom (Heidegger, Derrida, Nancy). To a certain extent, these post-Hegelian trajectories are powered by their opposition to external, non-Hegelian philosophical paradigms.

 See, for example, T. Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. 2  See, in particular, H. Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958. 3  Notable discussions (and instantiations) of this trend include H. -G. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1976; J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978; R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979; C. Taylor, Philosophical Papers 1 Human Agency and Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985; J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1987; P. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, Evanston Illanois, Northwestern University Press, 1991; G. Markus, Language and Production, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1986. 1



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Most notably, they offer alternative ways out of the Platonic and Cartesian paradigms, with their ahistorical, asocial, and disembodied conceptions of the human-making feature (be it mind, reason or freedom). But these trajectories are also shaped by developments within the post-Hegelian tradition. That is to say, the linguistic turn in post-Hegelian thought is a response to another way of carrying out the post-Hegelian agenda. Specifically, it is a response to a conception of the human condition and the main challenges facing it that has labour or productive activity at its core. The linguistic paradigm of post-Hegelian thought has been so pervasive, and the historical and social transformation of the past sixty years so extensive, that it is now hard to connect with its predecessor paradigm at all. However, two developments suggest that it may be a propitious time for forging such a reconnection. First, there is the emergence over the past couple of decades of a new paradigm for post-Hegelian thought organized around the concept of recognition. Owing largely to the work of Axel Honneth, it has become plausible to suppose, on the one hand, that the social relations that mark the human life form are fundamentally relationships between a recognizing being and a recognized one, and on the other, that the historical unfolding of social relations is fundamentally shaped by social struggles for recognition.4 Recognition thereby suggests itself as the key for understanding what it is that makes us human in socially and historically conditioned ways. Once this step is made, work as a locus of recognition, misrecognition, the withdrawal of recognition and struggles for recognition immediately enters the agenda for philosophically informed criticism in the post-Hegelian vein.5 The second development is a heightened awareness of work as a defining moral, political and social challenge of the times. Critical social theorists are becoming increasingly concerned by the ways in which the organization of work, its availability, its distribution and its quality, can damage processes of individual identity-formation and the character of societies as a whole. It is no longer passé, as it was not so 4   See, for example, A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. J. Anderson, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994. 5   See A. Honneth, “Work and Instrumental Action: On the Normative Basis of Critical Theory,” in A. Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social, New York, SUNY Press, 1995; and A. Honneth, “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition,” in H. -C. Schmidt am Busch and C. Zurn eds., The Philosophy of Recognition. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2010, pp. 223–239.

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long ago, to characterize the spirit of the times as a spirit of capitalism.6 It is no longer a source of intellectual embarrassment to speak once again of capitalism as a chief source of psychic and social pathology, and thus a legitimate object of critical philosophical reflection. On the contrary, it is now widely acknowledged that it would be remiss of philosophically informed social criticism not to have something to say about capitalism and the conflicts around labour that define it. This new intellectual and historical context makes it incumbent upon post-Hegelian thought to reconsider the legacy of the production paradigm and to turn once again to philosophies of labour for tackling its fundamental problems. It is precisely with this goal in mind that the collection of essays presented here has been conceived. We will summarize later on in our Introduction how each chapter contributes to this task. But before doing that, we should say a little more about the paradigm shifts that have brought post-Hegelian thought to its current state. As we just indicated, two developments in particular call for brief consideration: first, the transition from a production paradigm to a language paradigm; and second, the shift from the language paradigm to a recognition paradigm. Only once the basic features of the recognition paradigm are in view will we be able to see the opportunity it presents for renewed reflection on the significance of work. At the same time, the recognition paradigm itself may need to be modified in order to make the most of that opportunity. From Production to Language Given the characterization of post-Hegelian thought just laid out, its agenda will be set by mutually reinforcing conceptions of the human-making feature (the universal) and the historically specific needs and challenges of the times (the particular). The question we first want to ask is: how could the post-Hegelian mediation of the universal and the particular, so to speak, come to be dominated by the concept of labour? How did the category of productive activity come to seem suited to this role?7

6   See L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London, Verso, 2005. 7  We cannot hope to give this question the complex answer it deserves here. The best account of the matter remains G. Markus, Language and Production.



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The centrality of labour from an anthropological point of view, that is to say its significance in defining the kind of being humans are, emerged from a confluence of elements in Enlightenment and Romantic thought. Both sets of elements can be understood as a reaction to overly “transcendent” conceptions of the human, in particular those that depicted the distinctively human rational capacities in the image of a divine, immaterial or supernatural power. If human beings were to be distinguished on account of their rationality, it had to be in a form that was recognizable in this world and that proved itself through its intra-mundane effects. Rather than aiming at the eternal and the immutable, and revealing the eternal and immutable  essence of the being in its possession, reason finds its vocation, according to the Enlightenment view, in transformations of the world that make it better accord with human desires and purposes. As the primordial mode of “making” activity, of taking control of its environment and transforming it to meet natural human needs, labour could be seen in its true anthropological, dignity-conferring sense. Modern science and technology were but the most advanced expression of this power of labour, that is to say, of the general capacity to work on and modify nature for humanly determined ends. While of course such an instrumental relation to nature was exactly what the Romantic movement strove to get away from, Romanticism nevertheless embraced the anthropological image of the self-making and materially embodied being, which itself required a retrieval of the signif­i­cance of labour as materially incarnated shaping activity. The work of art, which in the Romantic view counter-poses science and technology as the height of human achievement, and represents the purest form of self-expression of the animal “possessing the logos,” is after all a work: it is through authentic productive activity that the individual human being realizes her or his inner humanity in her or his own unique way.8 The production paradigm thus brought together the Enlightenment image of the human being as the tool-using animal whose practical intelligence is bound up with its immersion in nature and purposive shaping of its environment, and the Romantic image of self-formation through singular acts of creative “making” or production. Both elements feed into the expressivist anthropology of the production   See C. Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975.

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­ aradigm. A third feature of this anthropology is a particular formulap tion of the idea that human beings are social animals. According to it, human sociality is rooted in the relations of material dependence individuals have with each other, both in the sense that they rely on the labour of others for the satisfaction of their material needs, and in the sense that laboring activity itself is a cooperative process, such that individuals must depend on each other to get a job done well. Human sociality could thus seem to find paradigmatic expression in the social provision of labour, or social control over the means of production, on the one hand, and the social organization of labour along cooperative lines on the other. Collective control of the labour supply and cooperative relations between individual working subjects could thus appear as the most basic realization of human sociality. Of course it would take particular historical circumstances to bring this insight fully to view. And this is precisely what the upheavals of industrialization and its aftermath in nineteenth-century Europe seemed to provide. To pioneers of the production paradigm such as Adam Smith, Hegel and Marx, these societies were characterized by enormous increases in the powers of production and of the means for satisfying material needs on the one hand, and on the other by the degraded state of labour, not just on account of its alienating effect on the individual worker, but on account of its corruption as a medium of social cooperation. The seemingly inexorable immiseration of the producing class, in the midst of rapidly expanding productive powers, seemed to distil the social contradictions of the age. But if the agent of production as a whole were to reflect on its powers, and appropriate them in what would be an absolute moment of practical insight, the expressive and cooperative dimensions of labour could be restored, and with them true sociality.9 In this way the idea of praxis as revolutionary activity embedded itself in the production paradigm, alongside a notion of the working class as a “subject writ large.” Both notions were underwritten by a philosophy of history which at once diagnosed the ills of contemporary society in terms of conflict over possession of the power of production, and grounded the hope of recovery in a rational, collective re-appropriation of this power. These notions of a subject writ-large and revolutionary praxis, and the philosophy of history they inform, certainly look like relics of a   See G. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, London, Merlin, 1971.

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bygone age. To many post-Hegelian thinkers in the post-war period, the association between these notions and the paradigm of production was so close that only a clean break with this paradigm and a shift to a completely new one seemed in order. To be sure, these were not the only reasons for rejecting the paradigm: a growing ambivalence towards the value of technology in the context of its damaging environmental impact; worries about the apparent hegemony of instrumental reason and its dehumanizing effects; doubts about the capacity of a highly specialized division of labour to deliver meaningful work (perhaps even any work) on a mass scale; ambivalence towards the value of work more generally in the emerging “consumer society”; the rise of progressive social movements pressing for emancipation independently of their “class position”; and other considerations all played their role. But the change of paradigm was not just about rejecting the old: it was about embracing something new that could better meet the demands of the post-Hegelian agenda. Let us briefly consider how language could serve this purpose. Recall that the post-Hegelian agenda calls for mutually reinforcing conceptions of the human-making feature and the historically specific needs and challenges of the times. It is easy to see how language could meet this demand under its first (anthropological) aspect: the idea that human beings are distinctive on account of their use of language is as prima facie compelling as the idea that they are distinctive on account of their use of tools. But the link between language use and rationality is even stronger. The idea that powers of linguistic expression are at the root of rational powers in a strict sense, and that it is these powers that truly mark off humans from other animals, could also draw on currents of Enlightenment and Romantic thought, and took many different directions—even within the post-Hegelian tradition—depending on which of these currents was predominant. One influential formulation, drawing more on Enlightenment elements, emphasized the rulegoverned character of language use and the link between linguistic competence and the ability to apply rules. Possession of this ability enables us to grasp concepts, to formulate propositions, to get things right or wrong, that is to say, to show the features characteristic of the “animal possessing the logos,” the rational animal. Another formulation, drawing more on Romanticism, emphasizes the “worlddisclosive” function of language, in virtue of which different possibilities of being in the world, with more or less emotional depth or resonance, open up. On this view it is in capacities such as “dwelling,”

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or “thinking” in a manner that does not instrumentalize or objectify its subject matter, that human beings best display their distinctive “possession of the logos.” To mention one other influential formulation, it is conversation or dialogue that marks off the human life form from that of other animals, and it is as participants in conversation—listening to the other, taking the perspective of the other into account and being open to correction—that we put our rational capacities to work in the most basic sense. For all their differences, each of these formulations projects an image of the human as first and foremost the “language being.” Language is the central anthropological idea. If the classical idea that human beings were distinctive on account  of  their rationality could be rehabilitated and modernized by re-interpreting rational capacities as essentially linguistic capacities, something similar could be said of the classical idea that human beings were essentially social animals. That is to say, it was first and foremost in virtue of their linguistic nature that human beings had a social nature. For many post-Hegelians, language seemed the paradigm form of intersubjectivity. In acquiring a language one becomes a subject, but language is always shared, and so subjects are constitutively in relation to other subjects. All language users share a minimal horizon of shared meaning. They are thus dependent on something  outside them, on other members of the linguistic community. Furthermore, the act of uncoerced communication presented itself as a model of the social relation in its pure, undistorted form. In engaging in linguistic interaction, in expressing opinions, exchanging views, in sharing a dialogue, one does something together in a deep and arguably paradigmatic sense. At any rate, just as language seemed to offer a more plausible model than labour for understanding the anthropological basis of human rationality, it also seemed a preferable basis for understanding human sociality. For the post-Hegelians who took the linguistic turn, the social realm properly understood was the realm of public, linguistic expression, a shared space of reason-giving, reason-taking and reason-rejecting in which every human being has a stake. This way of presenting the “universality” of language already points to how it could be mobilized for understanding the “particular” needs and challenges of the times. Time and again, the advanced industrial societies have been characterized by post-Hegelian critics as lacking in “public” spirit, as failing to provide the conditions for genuine participation in a community and the sense of belonging that flows



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from it.10 Instead of citizens discussing and deliberating over the terms of their collective life, they leave it to a class of bureaucratic and technocratic experts, retreating into a narrow and experientially flattened private sphere for personal fulfillment. Cultures and traditions which once lived from open linguistic expression and communication across generations are abandoned to market forces and degenerate accordingly. The ethos of openness to the truth and learning from the other embedded in genuine dialogue is replaced by “knowingness,” closed horizons, and ethnocentric arrogance. As the scope for effective communicative, dialogical interaction shrinks, communities become more fragmented, individuals more isolated and spiritually impoverished. While post-Hegelians of the linguistic turn disagreed over the extent of this malaise, and its true causes, there was rough agreement that the particular, broadly speaking “spiritual” needs of the times were of this order, and that a linguistic paradigm of critique was best suited to address them. From Language to Recognition The linguistic paradigm continues to hold sway in many areas of contemporary philosophy, particularly those areas that have their roots in the post-Hegelian tradition. However, a new paradigm has emerged in this tradition that challenges the primary focus on language and attempts to fulfill the tradition’s program in a different way. The work of Axel Honneth, articulated around the concept of recognition, is at the heart of this new development. To understand the motivation behind Honneth’s dissatisfaction with the linguistic paradigm, we should first recall that a key aim of the post-Hegelian program is to tie a theory of the defining features of the human being, mainly through analyses of human sociality (accounts of the sociality of the human being and of the social bond), to a critical diagnosis of the extant historical conditions. This attempt to establish an internal link between the theory of sociality and the critique of contemporary historical conditions leads to the formulation of a number of other significant methodological principles. 10   See, for example, Arendt, The Human Condition; R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, London, Penguin, 2002; A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, second edition, London, Duckworth, 1984; and of course much communitarian criticism of liberalism.

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The first is a sophisticated, self-reflexive, criterion to ensure methodological consistency. Not only does the “anthropological” moment ground the historical diagnosis, more or less directly, by providing the conceptual and normative resources necessary to characterize and critique “the present.” Turning things around, as it were, philosophical reflection must also account for its own historical determinacy, that is, its place within the historical moment it critically analyses. Philosophy that defines itself as its own time reflected in thought must be able to show how it fits in its own time. This is the basis for one of the most famous post-Hegelian mottoes: the unity of theory and practice. Since the most fundamental norm is freedom, and philosophical reflection is driven by a critical impulse, “practice” denotes the attempt to realize freedom, in concrete terms, or the search for emancipation in particular social contexts, however the obstacles to freedom are conceived. This then translates into another famous principle: since philosophical reflection has to demonstrate a substantive link to the reality that it critically assesses, the task of “critiquing the present” cannot be performed by measuring social reality against norms that would be developed independent of that reality, as the Kantian tradition is routinely accused of doing. Rather, philosophy must be able to show how the norms underpinning critique can already be found within social reality itself: the movement potentially “transcending” extant social reality must be found in the “immanence” of that reality. On that account, the philosophy of emancipation is therefore doubly related to social forces that potentially carry it out: it relies on these social forces to find indications as to the content and historical direction of emancipation; but it also aims to offer conceptual and normative direction to that real movement. It was by judging the linguistic paradigm against this set of principles that Honneth found it wanting. Distortions of communication, a withering away of the disclosive powers of language, might well be real, empirical effects of the pathological developments of modern societies. But to explain social pathologies in terms of distortions of communication is to mobilise a kind of higher-order analysis that is situated at a level external to the one at which these distortions are concretely experienced.11 In other words, the analysis of contemporary   See in particular the following articles by Honneth: “Moral Consciousness and Class Domination,” in Honneth, Disrespect. The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2007, pp. 80–96; “The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: On the Location of Critical Theory Today,” in Disrespect, pp. 63–80. 11



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­ athologies as distortions of communication does not seem to use the p right conceptual and normative “grammar,” as Honneth says, to accurately describe the experiences of individuals and groups who would have an interest in emancipation. Similarly, critical analysis in terms of distortions of communication and the corruption of language cannot easily relate back to existing or gestating social and political movements, and for the same reason. What social movements demand is not prima facie, or at least not principally, the redemption of the powers of language or a reawakening of public spheres. In brief, when it makes the structures of language the key to its critical diagnosis of the times, post-Hegelian thought appears to rupture the unity of theory and practice. The concept of recognition is introduced by Honneth to remedy what he thus perceived as a danger of abstraction, and to articulate anew the theoretical and the experiential. Let us first see how recognition theory reformulates the anthropological and social-theoretical sides of post-Hegelian philosophy, before clarifying the link back to critique and the historical situation. For Honneth, the replacement of social labour by communication as the core concept around which a critical social philosophy (another name for the post-Hegelian project) should be articulated, represented an indisputable theoretical progress. The linguistic paradigm emphasized rightly the dimensions of intersubjective reciprocity and of a shared meaning horizon arising from it, as the fabric that enables the different institutions of society to hold together. But instead of accounting for these dimensions through language, Honneth proposed to interpret them more broadly as developing through a range of practical attitudes taken by social agents toward each other. Recognition is the generic name for these fundamental practical attitudes. Just like, for the thinkers of the linguistic turn, language provides the common element accounting for the way in which individual perspectives are always somehow attuned to each other, similarly for Honneth, the different kinds of recognitive attitudes, each governed by specific norms, constitute a general moral basis upon which social life and its complexity can grow without being torn apart. Underneath this shift to recognition, however, the basic anthropological image has changed markedly. The human being is no longer conceptualized primordially as the rational or the self-interpreting animal on account of its unique possession of logos. What demarcates the human being more primitively is a radical, constitutive ­dependency

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towards its own kind, a dependency whose extent is unknown to the rest of the animal kingdom. Whilst the linguistic paradigm retrieved elements from Enlightenment theories of rationality and the Romantic emphasis on expression, the recognition paradigm self-consciously anchors itself in naturalistic and materialist accounts of the human: on the philosophical side, by recourse to the materialist strands of post-Hegelian philosophy, culminating in twentieth-century philosophical anthropology;12 and on the side of contemporary human sciences, by recourse to developmental and comparative psychology. What unites these diverse approaches is the idea that the symbolic powers of the human being emerge paradoxically out of the latter’s instinctual and organic deficiency. Sociality and culture, including language, can then be understood as serving a compensatory purpose  that allows the weakest of species to define its own mode of survival and, in time, to take control of its environment, through individual and collective action. As can be seen, in that model language, as the medium of symbolic capacity, certainly continues to represent a key anthropological trait, but it is no longer the only or indeed the primordial human-making feature. Instead, radical social dependency, and more broadly, radical organic openness to social and material environments, is the more fundamental anthropological marker, since it is at the root of the human being’s essential reliance on processes of “individualization through socialization.” In Honneth’s recent words: “recognition enjoys both a genetic and a conceptual priority over cognition.”13 The change of social ontology and of its underlying anthropological assumptions cannot fail to affect the critical diagnosis of the times. Instead of an attack on the public sphere, the linguistically constituted lifeworld, or the expressive and disclosive powers of language, pathologies of modern society are now viewed as pathologies of recognition. Concretely, this designates forms of social interaction, usually materialised in the structures and practices of particular institutions, which harm one of the fundamental normative expectations of socialized subjects. These are, for example, denials of full civil responsibility,   Crucial in this respect is Honneth’s first book, written with Hans Joas: Social Action and Human Nature, trans. R. Meyer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988. 13  Honneth, Reification. A New Look at an Old Idea, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 40. 12



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expressed in denials or restrictions of rights, which prevent individuals and groups from considering themselves full-blown members of the community; or negative or indeed invisibilising attitudes towards the specific achievements of a group, which again, prevent the group’s members from enjoying full inclusion in society. Transformations in contemporary capitalism can be critically interpreted from the viewpoint of the false promises of recognition made by new modes of management, or the sheer exclusion from necessary social goods resulting from economic globalization.14 However, since the recognition model argues that the normative basis of social life is also the condition for the full autonomy of individuals, or, as Honneth says, their “self-realisation,” the link between social theory and social experience can be said to be more easily demonstrated than in previous models. Pathologies of recognition can be shown to be both the products of unjust or unhealthy forms of social interaction and their corresponding institutional realities, and to directly affect subjects by obstructing or destroying some of the structural social conditions necessary for the development of their identity. With this twist, Honneth thinks he has made it possible to reestablish  the organic link that is supposed to be maintained within postHegelianism, between theoretical explanation, critique, and social experience. The claims made by social movements, once the normative validity of their claims has been extracted, can become the guidelines of critical philosophy. They indicate what in a given state of society is seen by its members as intrinsically lacking from their own point of view, and help understand what the basic moral expectations of social members are. The decisive role of such expectations, and action shaped by them, has been demonstrated most palpably, in Honneth’s view, by historians of the labour movement such as E.P. Thompson.15 Conversely, philosophical reflection enriched by scholarship gathered from the social sciences can help systematize and clarify the types of norms appealed to by different “struggles for recognition.” In Honneth’s mind, recognition thus helps to reconstruct the circle of theory and practice once devised by the labour paradigm, which, for reasons we have said, had become impractical and antiquated.   See in particular, Honneth, “Recognition as Ideology,” in eds. B. van den Brink and D. Owen, Recognition and Power. Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 323–348. 15   See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London, Gollancz, 1965. 14

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nicholas h. smith and jean-philippe deranty From Hegel to Institutionalism

As we have already suggested, it is above all to Hegel that we owe both the anthropological idea that the human life form as such is marked by relationships of recognition, and the historical idea that the transition to modernity—the present epoch—is marked by a specific differentiation in the relationships of recognition that bind societies together. This differentiation is both the source of the grandeur of modernity— its freedom—and its distinctive forms of misery. There are two places where Hegel makes explicit the link he sees between recognition and work: the so-called “master-slave” dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the discussion of civil society in Philosophy of Right. If any two texts have a claim to canonical status in the emerging recognition paradigm, it is this pair. It is fitting, then, that following this Introduction we move directly onto a detailed consideration of the master/slave dialectic in chapter two (by Paul Redding) and Hegel’s account of civil society in chapter three (by Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch). Both Redding and Schmidt am Busch offer new interpretations of Hegel’s texts and in their different ways they both demonstrate the continuing relevance of Hegel for understanding the modern world of work. In proposing that relationships of recognition are constitutive of the human life form, Hegel took himself to be expressing in a more precise form Aristotle’s idea that human beings are rational animals. A central concern of Paul Redding’s essay is to spell out how Hegel forges this link between rationality and recognition, and to bring into relief the contrast between Hegel’s approach and mainstream naturalistic theories of mind and agency, with their roots in Hobbes and Hume. According to the latter approach, which finds its way into orthodox economic as well as much philosophical thought, rationality is the faculty human beings have for ordering ideas, beliefs, and desires, but it is quite distinct from the faculty of desire itself. On this view, only the faculty of appetite or desire has true motivational, causally effective power, implying that the human will itself, insofar as it has such power, is really of the nature of an appetite. But on the view Hegel develops out of Aristotle and Kant, willing is not a question of causing an effect but of giving form or shape to a certain kind of matter: by first identifying the matter of an appetite as “mine” and as something to be acted upon, the “willing” subject gives it shape and the character of a potentially motivating force. In doing so, the subject finds itself not simply in a causal chain of more or less efficacious appetites and behaviours,



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but in a “space of reasons” or “spirit” in which the question of the rightness or appropriateness of its self-forming activity can always be asked. This is also a social space in which subjects come to be themselves in and through the recognition of others. It is by recognizing each other as rational animals—animals whose cognitive and intentional life is shaped by and answerable to reasons—that human beings become rational animals in the full sense. Redding reminds us that while this philosophical anthropology of Hegel’s can fairly be called idealist, it is by no means immaterialist. Self-defining subjects in Hegel’s sense are incarnated, material beings, and recognize each other as such. But then neither is Hegel’s account reductively materialist, since what we recognize in each other as rational animals is the form of our material embodiment. Redding then considers how Hegel’s recognitive materialism, as we might call it, at the level of philosophical anthropology leads to a different kind of political theory than Hobbesian reductive materialism. Whereas in the Hobbesian account political society emerges from the struggle over “the power to satisfy naturally given appetites,” for Hegel politics has its origins in a struggle over the norms or rules to which acts of will answer. According to Redding’s interpretation, the master/slave dialectic in the Phenom­ enology of Spirit is Hegel’s outline of the first stages of this struggle. The dialectic begins with all authority residing in the master’s will. This authority is embedded in institutions and social prac­tices which allow, for example, the master to give orders to the slave. The slave recognizes the master by acting on these orders, which makes him appear as a mere “will-less” instrument of the master’s will. And yet in taking on this role as instrument, the slave has to engage in rational practical activity. To fulfill the command “cook me a fish,” the slave must first see a particular object—a cookable fish—and transform it from its raw state. Redding points out that this forces the slave to engage in a practice of concept application, and thus a kind of inferential activity, that enables the slave to reach a higher level of self-consciousness than the master, who is stuck at the more primitive level of relating to objects “in terms of the simple sensuous qualities that make them suitable for the satisfaction of simple immediately felt desires.” Thus it is by working, by turning the master’s imperatives into a concrete reality, that the slave starts to get the edge over the master, at least as far as the life of the mind is concerned. To be sure the slave still works for the master, and has to suppress his own desires in the course of it, but this very suppression or postponement of impulse also serves

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to raise the slave further out of his merely natural state. The seeds of self-destruction for the master-slave relation are thus sown. While the slave recognizes himself in the master’s recognition of him as a mere instrument of will, in fulfilling this role through his labour the slave at once negates this self-definition. Under the compulsion of work, the slave learns to see things in conceptually articulated ways, to take distance from immediately given desires, and to recognize his own agency in those material transformations that satisfy the master’s will. Like Gadamer and other illustrious interpreters of the Phenomenology before him, Redding notes the crucial point here that the working activity of the slave is at once a transformation of objects and a transformation of self: “an acquiring of skills and dispositions that become partly definitive of one’s character and identity, and so an objective source of one’s sense of self.” This triangulation of self, object and other is thus both a presupposition of the master-slave relation (it is only through the mediation of objects that the slave serves the master’s purposes) and incompatible with it (because it undermines the will-less status of the slave and the authoritative status of the master). The need to keep this triangulation in view, both for an adequate philosophical anthropology and a proper understanding of work, will be a recurrent theme throughout the chapters of this book. As Redding points out in the concluding section of his chapter, one of the central lessons of the master/slave dialectic is the importance of work in coming to recognize ourselves in something more than objects of gratification or consumption (the unsustainable standpoint of the master). Hegel saw that modern capitalist economies endangered this condition both by removing restrictions on the sphere of consumption and by organizing the sphere of work in a way that could make it impossible for rational agents to recognize themselves there. How­ ever, it was in the Philosophy of Right, not the Phenomenology, that Hegel explicitly addressed these concerns about the potentially selfundermining effects of modern civil society. In chapter three, HansChristoph Schmidt am Busch offers an analysis of Hegel’s approach in Philosophy of Right and puts it forward as a model for how a critical theory of capitalism might proceed today. Schmidt am Busch’s interpretation focuses on the role played by the notions of “bourgeois honour,” “the corporation,” and the “quest for profit” and “luxury” in Hegel’s account of civil society. Bourgeois honour refers to something like the self-respect an individual derives from being able to support himself and his family by participating in the



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social process of production, that is, by contributing to the general wealth. “Bourgeois” is perhaps an unfortunate term for this type of honour, since it is as characteristic of the “working class” as the “middle class” (and of course women as well as men). The central point is that, according to this ethos, an honorable life involves more than just making a living: it means doing so by applying oneself to some socially useful skill. There is dishonor, conversely, in merely providing for oneself without at the same time doing something useful for others. But an honourable life, in this sense, cannot simply be left to individuals in the labour market to secure. Institutions need to be in place that are responsible for training people for socially useful work, for maintaining standards in trades and professions, for insuring workers in the various trades and professions against risks to their livelihood, for protecting their interests relative to other professions, and so forth. Hegel called such institutions “corporations,” though as Schmidt am Busch remarks, this is another unfortunate and potentially misleading term for the meaning Hegel intended to convey. Corporations, in Hegel’s sense, are the socially necessary conditions of individual “bourgeois honour,” since it is through them, as Schmidt am Busch puts it, that individuals “mutually secure their livelihoods through their work and the maintenance of a social insurance system.” And it is in the context of membership of a corporation that not only bourgeois honour must be understood, but also the “quest for profit” and “luxury” that characterizes civil society. On Schmidt am Busch’s interpretation, Hegel considered there to be a limited range of variation in personal income and levels of consumption within a corporate system. But outside it, a “compensatory striving for social recognition”—in Schmidt am Busch’s provocative formulation—could give rise to unlimited personal profitseeking and an unbounded “love of extravagance.” Thus, for Hegel, far from excessive individual wealth and conspicuous consumption being the rightful material consequence of an honourable bourgeois life, they reflect the absence of a material condition of bourgeois honour, namely corporate membership in the sense given above. In Hegel’s account, the opportunity to lead an honourable life according to the principle of bourgeois honour, and to gain social recognition for this achievement through membership of a corporation, are crucial to the ethical basis of civil society, and thus the legitimacy of the modern market economy. Furthermore, the modern market economy will only function properly, Hegel thought, if its “ethical basis,” or condition of legitimacy, is met. Without an ethical basis,

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civil society would fall apart. As Schmidt am Busch remarks, Hegel’s commitment to this view puts him at odds with mainstream (neoclassical) economic thought, but not necessarily to his detriment. Hegel’s conception of bourgeois honour, for example, resonates with the significance many people attach to their working lives, which hardly fits with the orthodox economic conception of work as merely irksome activity that rational actors seek to minimize. Hegel also provides an intuitively plausible alternative to orthodox economic explanations of the pursuit of ever-higher personal incomes and levels of consumption. For Hegel, this is not based on some natural desire for more rather than less money (no matter what one earns), or for higher rather than lower levels of personal consumption, in principle without limit. Rather, as Schmidt am Busch explains, it is based on a historically specific set of social circumstances: social recognition of professional activity based on price against a background ethos of bourgeois honour and only partially effective economic regulation. If, with the support of empirical analysis, it can be shown that a striving for recognition does stand behind these phenomena, then a “recognitiontheoretic” approach in the Hegelian mould would not only pose a significant challenge to orthodox economic explanations: it would also show that the recognition-theoretic turn in critical theory advanced by Honneth has considerably more relevance for understanding capitalism and diagnosing its ills than critical theorists such as Nancy Fraser maintain. Schmidt am Busch notes in passing that whilst Honneth’s Hegelinspired recognition-theoretic approach to contemporary capitalism is fundamentally at odds with neo-classical economic theories, it does have affinities with heterodox, “institutionalist” economics. In chapter four, Craig MacMillan examines the relationship between Honneth’s theory of recognition and institutionalism in more detail. As MacMillan shows, institutionalism (at least as conceived by its founding figure, John R. Commons) and recognition theory (as conceived by Honneth) share basic methodological, epistemic, ontological and normative commitments. At the methodological level, both are committed to “field research” that aims to shed light on the phenomena by way of revealing how they are experienced. This means that, at the epistemic level, phenomenological description plays a crucial knowledge-building role. Both these commitments are opposed to abstract, a priori models of theorizing that predominate in orthodox economics, rational-choice social theory, and to a certain extent,



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liberal (Kant-inspired) models of critical theory. At the ontological level, institutionalism and Honnethian recognition theory are committed to both a certain form of holism (in which institutions and social practices, and not just individual actors, have explanatory purport) and a certain form of normativism (according to which the norms embedded in institutions and practices carry explanatory weight). These commitments are to be contrasted with atomism (according to which individuals are distinct and exclusive loci of agency), on the one hand, and anti-normativism (according to which norms are merely epiphenomenal, without explanatory or motivational purport) on the other. Institutionalism and recognition theory thus seek to replace the image of utility-optimising homo economicus with a conception of the human subject as from the start relational (constituted by relations with others) and concerned by and oriented towards norms. Furthermore, they share a normative commitment to forms of life that have the social conditions in place for individual self-realisation in the widest, most inclusive sense. Having established the common ground between institutionalism and recognition theory, MacMillan goes onto suggest areas in which they might learn more from each other. The institutionalists stand to gain from the more developed interactionist psychology elaborated by Honneth, but perhaps more interestingly for our purposes, there are lessons Honneth is invited to draw from institutionalist solutions to “the labour problem” that Hegel and other recognition theorists (amongst others) have grappled with. As we will consider in a little more detail in a moment, Honneth now endorses the kind of response sketched by Hegel and Durkheim to the persistence of unemployment, poverty amongst workers, massive economic inequality, worker disempowerment, and the lack of availability of meaningful, dignified work. The crux of the response is to avoid positing some post-capitalist labour utopia in which work is a source of both enrichment and fulfillment, and to focus instead on the norms that are already in place in the capitalist system, however inadequately from the point of view of workers. The central norm Honneth picks up on is that of the fair and free exchange: if labour is to be divided and distributed according to market principles, then those engaged in it can legitimately expect to enjoy mutual benefit from the exchange and to be able to determine for themselves the terms of the exchange. Hegel and Durkheim realised that institutions needed to be in place for these conditions to be at least approximately met in the labour market. But Commons went a step

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further by making concrete proposals about what these institutions should look like. In particular, as MacMillan brings out clearly, these institutions had to ensure equality of bargaining power between employers and employees. Strong trade unions were thus required to bargain on the market with big employers, and the act of collective bargaining itself had to be institutionally endorsed in the law. Only in such a way could the norms of fair and free exchange be met in the market for labour. Later institutionalist economists have shown how worker collectives can also help to secure meaningful, socially recognized work for their members, if also, in a market environment, at the expense of the work experience of other groups. Critique, Norm and Work The question of the philosophical standpoint from which to examine what Commons called “the labour problem”—roughly speaking, the limited availability of work and the chronic persistence of underrewarded, insecure, disempowered and spiritually stifling or alienating  labour—is central to Honneth’s essay “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition.”16 As we just mentioned, Honneth rejects the wellintentioned but ultimately futile standpoint of the utopian critic, with its appeals to substantive norms of freely associated, self-expressive, non-alienated labour. Honneth argues that this standpoint has been made obsolete by the actual historical development of the division of labour and the market economy more generally. Within the capitalist organization of labour we currently inhabit, it no longer seems reasonable to expect that work will have the self-directed, expressive, “holistic” character that, say, the pre-capitalist craftsman might once have experienced it as having. For this reason, Honneth argues, social struggles over work no longer appeal to such a normative concept of work; and neither, he suggests, should social critics. Rather than adopting the “external” standpoint of the utopian critic, the philosopher/critic should engage in “immanent critique” that draws on internal moral norms that “already constitute rational claims within the social exchange of services.”17 In putting forward this view, Honneth takes himself to be 16  See Honneth, ‘Work and Recognition: a Redefinition’, in H. -C. Schmidt am Busch and C. Zurn eds., op cit. 17  Ibid., p. 227.



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correcting the overly ambitious (in the sense of “merely utopian”) project of grounding critical theory in a normatively substantive “critical conception of work” that he had himself advanced in his earlier essay “Work and Instrumental Action.” According to Honneth’s new position, it is not the act of working itself, but the exchange of services, that provides the “normative surplus” for historically effective, immanent critique of the capitalist organization of work. Honneth takes the conceptual shape of such criticism to have been laid out by Hegel and Durkheim. Honneth follows them in supposing that the market-mediated system of production and consumption, the exchange of goods and services that makes up a modern economy, must have an ethical basis that gives it legitimacy in the eyes of the participants. As we have already seen, in undertaking an exchange, the participants at least tacitly commit to an act that will be mutually beneficial: if they did not reasonably expect each other to be contributing to each other’s good, there would be no exchange. In other words, actual exchanges are premised on a conception of how they ought to be, even in cases where the norm and the reality come apart. The norm is “counterfactually presupposed,” one might say, in the practice, which itself has a “normative surplus” ready to be drawn on for critique. Since the norm of reciprocal and mutual benefit holds for the exchange of services as much as any other exchange, in exchanging her labour for a wage, the wage labourer is entitled to presume that she will be bringing some benefit to another through the exchange—and so, however directly, helping to satisfy the needs of others—through the activity that also allows her to meet her own needs as an autonomous private citizen. The obligation to meet one’s private needs through the exchange of services comes with a corresponding right to participate in the social system of exchange, that is, to earn a decent living on the basis of socially useful and recognized work performed in the labour market. In this way, criticism of the capitalist organization of labour on the basis of it failing to provide either a minimum wage or the opportunity to contribute in a recognizable way to the common good, counts as genuinely immanent criticism since it draws on the very norms that lend the modern labour market its legitimacy. Honneth’s essay raises a number of fundamental issues: What is the content and the status of the norms that inform the contemporary world of work (if, indeed, work is properly understood as a normshaped sphere at all)? What normative standpoint (or standpoints)

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does well-directed criticism of contemporary work practices presuppose? How should the critique of work be understood as relating to other forms of rationally grounded social criticism? These issues are taken up in the chapters that follow by Emmanuel Renault, JeanPhilippe Deranty and Nicholas Smith. While Renault, Deranty, and Smith are sympathetic to the recognition-theoretic approach to work outlined by Honneth, and see themselves as building on it, they share a concern that Honneth’s redefinition of the relation between work and recognition unduly weakens the resources available for the criticism of the modern organization of work, that it does so by restricting the content and scope of the norms that are applicable to work, and that it does this by passing over the normative purport of working activity. If Renault, Deranty, and Smith are right, Honneth has been too quick to abandon the critical conception of work announced in his early essay “Work and Instrumental Action.” In their different ways, they each argue that a retrieval of that conception will help keep the plurality of norms applicable to work in view, and that it will contribute to the critical task of keeping the morally charged experience of working people themselves in focus. An important first step toward reaching this goal is to appreciate the range of obstacles that lie in the way of it. Renault draws attention to a number of these, arising on the one hand from developments in the lifeworld, and on the other from the prevalence of political theories that are ill-equipped for the task at hand. Regarding the former, Renault notes the decline of the workers’ movement (and the corresponding rise of neo-liberal, anti-regulation ideology) that has tended to mute the public and political expression of concerns over work, and the persistence of long-term unemployment that has tended to choke the social articulation of negative aspects of work (as people feel grateful for having any secure work at all). These, and other factors identified by Renault, contribute to the invisibility of work from the perspective of the lifeworld; but this is matched and compounded by theoretical perspectives that are blind to the political significance of work. Whereas the critique of alienation, and with that the critique of alienating work, was once a primary matter for political theory, nowadays democracy and justice provide its basic, and in many cases exclusive, normative orientation. With just one or two exceptions, theories of democracy ignore problems of the organization of work and theories of justice deal with work merely insofar as it is a matter of individual choice and contractual obligation. Within this constellation, Renault argues,



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the task of making work visible again from a political point of view has become paramount. Renault then spells out an agenda for meeting this challenge. The first thing to be done is to develop a conception of work that is rich enough to encompass all the different kinds of normative considerations that bear on work. The norms of justice and democracy certainly have application here (feelings of injustice obviously arise from working activity and the skills of self-rule needed by citizens of a democracy can hardly be divorced from the work they do), but the norms of autonomy and health, Renault argues, are just as important. That is, the moral and political rights and wrongs of work are partly a matter of the autonomy it allows and its effect on the working person’s health. A critical conception of work, of the kind once proposed by Honneth, must be encompassing and differentiated enough to show how work can fall short in all of its measures. Renault is open to the possibility that these measures could be theoretically unpacked in terms of recognition, at least for work under the aspect of employment, but he warns against the danger of normative reductionism this move threatens. One reason why the focus on recognition as proposed by Honneth might lead to a normatively truncated conception of work, Renault suggests, is that it deflects attention from the act of working and the norms that bear on it. While in Renault’s view there are norms of recognition that apply to working activity, they are distinct from those that feature in Honneth’s account, and they do not exhaust the normative content of the act of working, which also has to do with the “encounter with the real.” And finally, any adequate account of the political significance of work must have something to say about the social relations of domination that permeate working activity. For this purpose, Renault suggests that Christophe Dejours’ psychodynamic approach to work might prove more fruitful than Honneth’s recognition theory. The relative merits of Honneth’s and Dejours’ approaches to work, and the possibility of bringing them together in a unified framework, is explored in more detail in Deranty’s chapter. Like Renault, Deranty wants to rehabilitate Honneth’s early critical conception of work, with its focus on the normative content of working activity, by way of Dejours’ psychodynamics of work. And he does so for the same reason as that indicated by Renault: the normative presuppositions of the labour market, and the recognition of achievement or social contribution, do not provide a substantial enough basis for the kind of thoroughgoing critique of work that is called for today. Deranty questions

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the motivation behind Honneth’s move away from a critical conception of work (a conception that locates the normative content of work in working activity itself rather than contribution to the division of labour or participation in the labour market) on two counts. First, it is based on a faulty assumption that the decline of craftsmanship as a model of work means that the norms of autonomous expression and cooperation no longer have application to modern working activity. The mistake here, Deranty suggests, is to suppose that the norms of expression and cooperation can only be interpreted “maximally,” that is, as an ideal or perfect state of autarchic, communicatively coordinated (rather than market-mediated) production. This maximalist conception ignores the possibility of a “minimalist” account that conceives autonomy and cooperation in work as minimal conditions of healthy psychic functioning. Not only does Dejours provide us with such a minimalist account, Deranty argues, but Honneth himself has developed a general theory of norms as the intersubjective conditions of self-realisation which is minimalist in a similar sense. The second reason Deranty gives for thinking that Honneth’s abandonment of his commitment to a critical conception of work is unwarranted is that it is based on the unnecessary requirement that the normative content of work be universalisable. While it is true that individual workers will want different things from work, will take to some kinds of working activity more than others, and will be able to cope in more or less satisfactory ways with suffering experienced at work, it is nevertheless possible to identify thresholds beyond which restrictions of autonomy and blocks on cooperation just cannot be psychically or physically tolerated. This, at any rate, is what Dejours’ clinical practice and research seems to demonstrate. Smith adds further arguments in his chapter for retaining something like the critical conception of work once advanced by Honneth. He begins by reflecting on the criteria to be satisfied by a normative model of work in a historical context marked by distinctive kinds of social anxiety around work. He then distinguishes three normative models of work on the basis of the core norms they posit as most apposite for normative criticism with practical or emancipatory intent: an instrumental model that takes the core normativity of work to consist in means-ends rationality; an expressive model in which the core norms of work are conceived as expressions of values or meanings that are internal to working practices themselves; and a recognition model for which the norm of mutual recognition is decisive. Each model



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admits of internal variation, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. The expressive model in particular, Smith argues, has a range of conceptual resources available to it which adherents of both the instrumentalist and recognition models have not sufficiently appreciated. Furthermore, it is especially well-equipped to frame normative criticism of work in the context of the contemporary malaise around work, an important element of which is anxiety concerning the quality of work and its effect on the subjectivity of the worker. The Subject at Work In the third and fourth parts of the book, the question of contemporary work is approached from a psychological perspective, through the psychodynamics of work; from a sociological perspective, through the historical and qualitative sociology of work undertaken at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt; and from what might be called a critical economic perspective, targeting some basic assumptions of orthodox economics that also find their way into mainstream liberal political theory. In each case, the disciplinary focus produces results with broad theoretical significance, which a contemporary philosophy of labour must take into consideration and include in its analysis. In “From the Psychopathology to the Psychodynamics Of Work,” Christophe Dejours presents a brief historical reconstruction and synthesis of the main traits characterising the method of clinical intervention in workplaces he has developed over the last thirty years with his collaborators at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris.18 Dejours’ primary interest is practical and clinical, the analysis of individual and organisational issues arising in real workplaces, and the ways to resolve them in consultation with workers and management. One might wonder how to reconcile this practically oriented mode of analysing work with the different modes and aims of philosophy and the theoretical social sciences. In fact, the psychodynamics of work has much to offer for a renewal of philosophical and general social-scientific reflection on issues of work and labour. It is as though

18  Other texts by Dejours that can be found in English are: “Subjectivity, Work, and Action,” in eds. J.-P. Deranty et al. Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory, Leiden, Brill, 2007, pp. 71–87; and “The Centrality of Work,” Critical Horizons, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2010, pp. 167–180.

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the psychodynamics of work, which matured thanks to a many-sided opening of clinical practice onto theoretical disciplines, has developed such a rich and detailed analysis of work that it is now in a position to pay back its theoretical indebtedness, as it presents a number of propositions that significantly renew the general reflection on work, its impact on subjects, its role in modern society and therefore the place it should have in contemporary politics.19 The psychodynamics of work arose out of dissatisfaction with the main premises underpinning the “psychopathology of work” that developed in France in the 1950s in response to pathologies of Fordist work.20 Two key orientations of the emerging psychopathology of work in particular became problematic. Their questioning led to the theoretical reversal out of which grew the new discipline. The first key question arose as a result of a fundamental discovery made by ergonomic research: that there is always a gap between the prescribed aspects of the working activity, the way the engineers and managers define the task (in terms of procedures and outputs), and the reality of the activity. Real work, even the apparently most mechanical or simple kind of work, always involves some creative intervention by the worker, simply because it is impossible for the organisation of work to foresee and pre-empt all the obstacles that get in the way of the realisation of the task. The reality of work, as a result, resides in the bridging of this gap. The irreducible kernel of all work, underneath and indeed before all its other possible dimensions, is working, that is, the bodily and intelligent (problem-solving) engagement by a human subject in the realisation of a productive task. A second key challenge derived directly from this discovery. The insistence on the workers’ subjective engagement in the task, as the fundamental condition of any productive work, entails a rejection of approaches that reduce work to one of its dimensions, notably its objective dimension (the organisation of work) or its systemic dimension (the social division of labour). Historically, this was the main reason for Dejours’ departure from a psychopathological approach which overemphasised the rigidity of Taylorian work and defined its research programme as the search for the symptoms of work-related mental 19   See J. -P. Deranty, “Work and the precarisation of existence,” European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 11, No. 4, 2008, pp. 443–463. 20   The key reference here is Louis Le Guillant, Quelle psychiatrie pour notre temps?, Toulouse, Eres, 1984.



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i­llness. More broadly, the focus on subjective experience and workers’ practical, creative engagement also meant a rejection of ergonomic approaches defining the “human factor” only in negative terms or organisational theories insisting only on power relations. This hermeneutic approach to work clearly echoes other approaches in other areas of the social sciences. As Dejours himself notes, the focus on the subjective moment of work strongly evokes the basic methodological impetus of interpretive sociological theories. In recent years, another theoretical ally was discovered in Honneth’s ethics of recognition, which is also characterised by its commitment to maintaining the importance of the experiential dimension in the analysis of social phenomena. These overlaps show the plausibility of, and indicate productive avenues for, sustained reciprocal dialogue between the psychodynamics of work, whose initial object is at first specific (individual working experience and organisational malfunctions), and other approaches in philosophy and the social sciences whose objects are more broadly defined (theories of action, theories of the social, theories of embodied cognition, and so on). The psychodynamics of work thus developed as an original discipline which aimed to circumvent the abstractions of other social and human sciences in their study of work. A thick model of the subject, constructed notably by borrowing and adapting key insights from Freud’s metapsychology, helps to substantiate and articulate the thesis of an intimate link between subjective identity and working activity. On the other side, the “objective,” technical and pragmatic moments of work are upheld, notably through important borrowings from ergonomics and the history and theory of techniques. The result is a highly original and richly delineated model of work, which establishes, against the general disdain for this object in contemporary research, the central place of work for subjective identity, in the life of contemporary societies, and consequently in politics. Today the psychodynamics of work provides a unique, indispensable reference to renew in a sustained way the study of labour, between philosophy and the social sciences. At a simple level, there is much to be learnt from the key notions and arguments it has elaborated: the deep roots work throws into subjective identity, shaping the individual’s intelligence and relationships to others; the deontic underpinnings of cooperation; the specificity and multidimensionality of recognition in work, and so on. On a different level, though, the question arises whether the conclusions reached in the study of work do not in fact entail more general

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lessons: the methodological primacy of experience; the difficulties in gaining access to the reality of social experience, and the necessity to define the real negatively, as a challenge to constituted knowledge; the complexity of the mediations linking individual to social experience; the affective and bodily roots of rationality; the capacity of well functioning work collectives to present an image of democratic communication and to cultivate democratic capacities; the hidden political centrality of work; and so on. Within this now well established paradigm, Pascale Molinier’s research has thrown open a number of important new directions. She explores the ways in which the psychodynamics of work is to be refined and extended by integrating the key dimensions of gender identity and gender relations.21 In the paper published here, Molinier shows how the conceptualisation of care is transformed once it is approached from a psychodynamic perspective. Her empirical work with nurses and assistant nurses challenges many of the assumptions about care, and makes a number of theoretical propositions with general significance. By taking as a fundamental starting point the subject facing a material task, the psychodynamic approach unpacks three interrelated aspects generally overlooked by other forms of analysis: the way subjectivity is challenged in its very identity; the material ways to resolve the task; and the cooperation with others necessary to do so. All work, the psychodynamics of work argues, involves work upon oneself, in the world, and with others. As soon as these three interrelated dimensions are unveiled in care work, many assumptions about it have to be revised. First, care appears as a form of work in the strict sense of the term. That is, all the technical, skill-based aspects of the activities involved in care suddenly appear as primordial elements. In other words, the person providing care must be assumed to mobilise the same kind of involved intelligence as in other forms of work. As Molinier writes, “care defines jointly certain activities and the intelligence that is mobilised in their accomplishment.” This first point, that care is a form of work, entails, however, significant transformations in the basic understanding of the concept. Most importantly, the redefinition of care as care work immediately dispels naturalizing definitions that anchor it 21   See Molinier, L’ énigme de la femme active. Egoisme, sexe et compassion, Paris, Payot, 2001; Les enjeux psychiques du travail. Introduction à la psychodynamique du travail, Paris, Payot, 2008.



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in affective capacities that would be inherent in one of the two sexes. Observing the work of nurses, one sees all the subjective work, the technical know-how and the effort of cooperation that must be put in for proper care to be provided. Such observation, however, also shows the reasons why care work is mostly invisible, indeed why care is mostly not considered a form of work, for which the providers ought to receive symbolic and material reward. Molinier distinguishes four main reasons inherent in the work of care that explain its invisibility. Given the importance of issues of care in contemporary social and political philosophy, this renewed approach to care is highly significant. Furthermore Molinier’s analysis seems to offer further support for the claim that the psychodynamic analysis in fact uncovers features of subjectivity and social life that have significance well beyond its initial, narrow focus. The first reason for the invisibility of care work, Molinier argues, is that it becomes apparent only when it is not well performed. One could object that this is true of most work. In a famous passage in Being and Time, Heidegger had already drawn attention to the fact that the working tool appears as such only when it no longer functions.22 The same could also be said of the performance of work. What distinguishes care work from other work in this respect becomes apparent once we shift the focus to the engagement of the worker in the work tasks. Care work involves not just the use of the proper technical know-how but also, on top of it, the second-order skills, as we might call them, that make the first-order use of skills “inconspicuous” or “discreet”: to perform a task of care well is not only to perform the task but also to efface the traces of effort and endeavour that led to that performance. Care that is too obviously performed as work fails to be received and count as care. It is in this precise sense that the affective and skill-based dimensions of care are intimately linked. As the “inconspicuousness” of the skills involved in care represent an inherent obstacle to the full recognition of their technical nature and difficulty, it also directly impacts on the recognition of the persons involved in these tasks. The tendency to think of care work in naturalized terms, that is, as professions and tasks reserved for women because of alleged natural feminine abilities, stems not just from general cultural (and ideological) representations, but also from a difficulty   Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1962.

22

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present in the tasks of care themselves. The discreetness demanded by care does care workers a disservice, we might say. Inconspicuous skills are not perceived and represented spontaneously in terms of competence but in terms of female qualities. Another dimension of care work contributing to its invisibility relates to the very object that care work touches, namely the raw, bodily vulnerability of the other. Care work puts the working subject face to face with sexuality, the body in all its manifestations, sickness and death, and this both from an objective perspective (the other’s body, sexuality, sickness and death), and a subjective perspective (one’s own body and sexuality). One must therefore speak here of a taboo in the precise sense of the term, to characterize that aspect of care work that is difficult, if not impossible, to speak of publicly, let alone have socially recognized. Care work is inconspicuous also because it touches too many unsavoury aspects in everyone for it to be fully acknowledged. The ways in which the nurses deal with this specific difficulty of their work teach great lessons about the importance of the working collective both for the well-being of each individual worker and the very effectiveness of work. Through discursive techniques (constant collective narrativisation, humour, self-deprecation, discreet revelation, and so on), the most difficult aspects of the job can be symbolized and brought under some degree of control. By contrast, other defence strategies compound the invisibility of care work. These are defence strategies articulated around “virile” values, which can be defined precisely as the rejection and repression of vulnerability and dependence. Such virile collective defence strategies have been well identified by Dejours in other difficult professions, such as the building and chemical industries.23 The defining importance of vulnerability in these diametrically opposed coping strategies means that care is not just one type of work amongst others. Care workers, by facing directly the challenge of bodily vulnerability and “twisted embodiment” (human sexuality), deal with an aspect of humanity that is constitutive, in the precise sense that it is constitutively difficult to assume. Consequently, the invisibility that their work suffers points to very general features of individual and social life. It is a universally observable feature of human societies that the hierarchy established amongst social functions (from the slaves to the priests and king) 23   See C. Dejours, Travail, usure mentale. Essai de psychopathologie du travail, Paris, Bayard, 2008 (4th edition).



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directly parallels the level of engagement with materiality, where bodily materiality is usually the lowest level. The study of care work reveals aspects of human agency and work that have broad anthropological value. In terms of contemporary politics, this means that debates around hospital reform, the status of nursing professions, the medical world, are not just issues concerning a few sectors amongst others in society, but reveal something very general about society as a whole, namely, as Molinier puts it, about the implicit “civilisational” underpinning of contemporary social orders. We might say that social orders can be characterized in terms of the ways in which they organize and recognize care work, that is, both the necessity of care and the work involved in it. Work and the Changing Face of Capitalism The psychodynamics of work emphasises the importance of the moment where the individual agent faces the difficulty of realising the material task. Recognition takes on a specific meaning when it is attached to the concrete realization of the task, within a culture of work and a work collective. Another strand of contemporary research has drawn attention to another aspect of contemporary work, and the central significance of demands of recognition in relation to it. Combining a historical perspective, qualitative methods of inquiry and a philosophically informed model of socialization, sociologists of work at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research have investigated transformations in the cultural and normative representations surrounding work in the wake of the great shift in economic structures witnessed in the last decades. How have expectations of recognition by workers, and the corresponding demands put on them, evolved with the transformation of capitalist societies in recent decades, and more specifically the rise of “postFordist” and “post-Taylorian” models of economic and work organisation? This is the question they have sought to answer in their recent work, in close connection to Axel Honneth’s own philosophical reflections.24 24  See in particular the essays collected in the volume edited by A. Honneth, Befreiung aus der Mündigkeit, Frankfurt/M., Campus, 2002, which documents the key directions of this research programme, and in which the essay by Voswinkel translated here first appeared in German.

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Part four of the book contains two exemplary cases of this kind of philosophically informed sociological inquiry, from two of the leading sociologists in the Frankfurt School mould: Stephan Voswinkel and Gabriele Wagner.25 In his contribution, Voswinkel brings out the tensions lodged at the heart of the recognition models underpinning the previous (Fordist) and current (post-Fordist) modes of economic organisation. The Fordist model, he argues, continued to rely on values and norms of the old work ethic. Accordingly, one’s social recognition derives from one’s work. If we look at it carefully, however, the link between recognition and work was not as straightforward as it seemed. It was not the work itself which provided recognition, but rather the wealth, power or social position attached to it. As a result, those forms of work that were low on the social scale provided only minimal or no recognition, even though the individuals engaged in it would have been doing a lot of work, notably those engaged in “dirty work.” As a result, as Voswinkel sums up, in this older regime “recognition must be based on work but only some types of work find recognition.” This explains the shape of many struggles for recognition during the Fordist era: many struggles for recognition were triggered by dissensions over the evaluation of particular work activities, to claim higher material and symbolic value for them. One key feature of the social logic underpinning recognition, however, provided a powerful avenue for positive valuation for workers involved in forms of work without prestige, that is, for the majority of them. As Voswinkel shows, in reference to Mead, the concept of recognition itself is ambivalent: on the one hand, recognition, as a condition of subjective identity, provides the basis for individual self-realisation, or what we could call subjective creativity, the possibility to shape one’s own self. On the other hand, this makes subjective identity structurally reliant upon social expectations and norms. By making subjective creativity possible, recognition also imposes boundaries on it. This tension delivers two interrelated yet separate meanings of recognition: inasmuch as it is based on the fulfillment of social expectations by the individual, recognition is in the form of appreciation. Recognition here arises within social exchange and reciprocity: the self is socially recompensed for engaging in an exchange of service and counter-service to 25  Other key contributors to this research program include Kai Dröge, Ursula Holtgrewe, Hermann Kocyba and Sighard Neckel. It is a matter of much regret that we have not been able to include work by these authors in this volume as well.



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others (Leistung/Gegenleistung). But recognition awarded to the creativity of the subject, that is, his or her ability to stand out in his or her singularity, is in the form of admiration, and is no longer tied, by definition, to social reciprocity. The self is recompensed precisely for its ability to stand out, to “win” the social competition, in one way or another. By contrast, for the majority of workers in the old Fordist model, engaged in forms of work that remained Taylorian in their operation, recognition in the shape of appreciation could offer strong rewards for the sacrifices demanded by the work ethic. Indeed, a significant part of the rights and institutions set up during that time, both within firms (different forms of leave and benefits) and in the broader social-political context (the different institutions of welfare), could be interpreted as institutionalisations of appreciation. With the massive upheavals that have shaken the internal organization of firms and the broader social-economic contexts since the crisis of Fordism in the late 1970s, recognition as appreciation and the institutions and rights that entrenched it, have come under increasing pressure. In the German sociology of work, an important article by Baethge in 1991, which outlined the most salient features of the new world of work and labour, offered key indications for much of the subsequent sociological research in this area.26 Like the previous one, the postFordist work ethic contains its own ambivalence, well captured by the central motto of the “subjectivisation of work.” On the one hand, the subjectivisation of work denotes the rejection of Taylorian alienation, the demand by workers to be able to realise themselves in work. On the other hand, though, this normative demand has also become, in new management methods and work organizations, a prescription to which workers have to conform: increasingly, the self of the worker is to identify with the work, the firm, the brand; subjective capacities become the new source of productivity; individuals are to assume increased responsibility for the economic viability and profitability of their activity within the firm; and so on. What happens to recognition in this new context? Because the normative ideal has become that of subjective self-expression and self-realisation, the old ethic of self-sacrifice, of doing one’s job for the others (the company or society) no longer holds much value.

26  M. Baethge, “Arbeit, Vergesellschaftung, Identität - Zur zunehmenden normativen Subjektivierung der Arbeit,” Soziale Welt, Vol. 42, No. 1, 1991, pp. 6–19.

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Recognition as appreciation is significantly undermined. This is reflected in the demise, both material and symbolic, of the institutions of the welfare state, but also, at the subjective level, in the difficulty of getting recognition for the everyday, “normal” jobs one does. Instead of mere appreciation, recognition as admiration becomes the prevalent mode, one that inevitably brings its own tensions. Voswinkel highlights a number of these paradoxical traits of the new mode of recognition through work. In particular, since recognition is now owed not just to service, but outstanding service, success and the measure of success become paramount features of the new model. This leads to a culture of constant evaluation and self-presentation, which can develop obvious pathological traits. The qualitative sociology of work is thus in a position to point to social and psychological effects of recognition that far extend the world of work. It also helps to understand new forms of the “struggle for recognition,” as recognition has changed its meaning. Two particularly significant such forms are those of “exit” and “voice”: the retreat outside of the mainstream economic structure; or the attempt to assert an original interpretation of one’s own activity. Gabriele Wagner’s study develops along the same lines as Voswinkel’s. Her specific focus concerns the subjective impact of new structures of work upon workers and the scope for autonomous interpretations of work norms in the new firm environments. This concern with the subjective dimension within the world of economic organization, however, is maintained for the purpose of sociological inquiry. One of the key aims of Wagner’s essay is to make a substantial point of social theory. She seeks to show, through the qualitative analysis of an empirical case, that it is crucial to include the subjective perspective as one of the important structural factors explaining social change, in this case, organizational change. The point is to show that systemic constraints (notably changes in the structure of markets) do not produce forms of social integration and frames for the formation of subjective identity in any direct and straightforward way. Between system integration and social integration, there comes the whole layer of subjects’ interpretations of, and attempt at negotiation around, the basic norms, values and principles underpinning organizational structures. In particular, reciprocal expectations, their negotiations and interpretations, between employer and employees regulate the world of the firm. These expectations can be described in the form of a specific order of recognition. As Wagner writes, “recognition relationships are an essential



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hinge between system and social integration and are likewise a central component of the company’s social order.” Borrowing from Voswinkel the key distinction between recognition as appreciation and recognition as admiration, Wagner unveils, through the example of two middle-management workers in a chemical company, the pitfalls of recognition demands that result from the demise of the old order and the introduction of new forms of organization. The destabilizing experiences of disqualification and disempowerment made by the two individuals interviewed, both of whom used to be successful researchers and team leaders, reveal salient features of the new world of work. Their company has undergone a typical organizational change: significant staff cuts; devolution of financial responsibility to all units in the firm; competition between units; systematic orientation to financial results as the measure of success; market logic applied to all activities, including scientific research; full submission to the client and the shareholder. In this new set up, recognition only goes to economic performance. This entails that the duties of care and loyalty associated with reciprocal expectations in the old recognitive regime have gone by the way side. For the two employees, this mode of operation creates hitherto unknown difficulties to adapt subjectively to the demands of work. The marketisation process in the firm’s internal functioning and the subjectivisation of work create “traps of recognition.” On the one hand, the strict orientation to market acceptance as the sole criterion for success, the use of outsourced services, and the increased demand put on workers to become responsible for more aspects of the work process, disqualifies an older form of “recognition as admiration,” which was based on expertise. Reputation established over time and underpinned by the acknowledgement of competence becomes meaningless when the only criterion that matters is economic performance. Expertise is diluted and can be outsourced. Indeed, in this particular example, scientific competence gets in the way of recognition as it tends to make the economic logic compete and in some instances give way to other standards. Crucially, the definition of “quality work” differs greatly depending on which perspective is favoured, the economic or the scientific one. One way to deal with the withdrawal of the old style of recognition is for the workers to appeal to the other form of recognition, appreciation. This is an interesting twist of the new recognition regime, that workers who previously would have appealed to their right for admiration suddenly demand to be recognised for their sacrifice

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and loyalty, that is, demand appreciation. The first trap of recognition in the current regime is the difficulty to justify a claim for recognition as admiration, whilst the basis for recognition as appreciation has collapsed. On the other hand, the search for admiration which these two workers cannot abandon contains its own trap. A great imbalance is opened between on the one hand the lack of control of the workers over the conditions ensuring market success, and on the other the total responsibility for success that is put on them. In the previous order, when success was not defined solely in commercial terms, the gap was not so great. Most importantly, expertise could prove itself in quality work and by reference to professional standards defined by a specific work culture. But market success is out of the hands of the competent. According to Wagner, this great gap between control and responsibility largely explains the absence of a struggle for recognition. The workers keen on recognition as admiration cannot run the risk of questioning the rules of the game: this would be direct evidence against their deservedness. A kind of voluntary servitude results in which they adapt themselves to rules and norms that take control and recognition away from them. The chapters by Voswinkel and Wagner provide insight into the ways in which recent mutations of capitalism have altered the experience of work and the social bonds that develop in and through that experience. They concern the world of work as it is, illuminated by contrast to the way it was. They are not, directly at least, concerned with the justification of the transition from one mode of capitalism to another, or with how the changing meaning of work could feature in such justifications. This issue is, however, taken up in the final two chapters of the book, where the ethical significance of work, understood as its role in constituting a good life, is reasserted as an apt object of practical, public reasoning in face of the denials of neo-classical economics and liberal political theory. As Dale Tweedie points out in his chapter, it is hard to make sense of the idea that the act of working may be a constitutive feature of a flourishing life—the kind of life people ought to have a chance to lead—so long as work is conceived as sheer “disutility” or a mere “opportunity cost”: that is, as something to be avoided (all things being equal). Yet this is how work typically is modeled in orthodox economic analysis. Furthermore, the ethically destructive consequences of working— the damage it can do to the life of a worker beyond the brute pain of



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exertion or the cost of missed leisure opportunity—is also hidden from view in mainstream economic modeling. Tweedie draws attention to various motivations behind the thin, ethically neutral conception of work at play in these models, such as their alleged scientific objectivity and their indifference to the unknowable world of inner experience and the value individuals subjectively attach to their work. However, this phenomenologically and ethically pared down conception is obtained at a high price: blindness to the ways in which the quality of work, the satisfactions it brings and the sufferings it causes, feed back into the sphere of economic analysis. We need substantive conceptions of work of the kind developed by Dejours and Richard Sennett, Tweedie argues, to appreciate the economic consequences of the changing nature of working activity and the ethical validity of the economic policies behind those changes. Furthermore, this is an insight not completely lost on the orthodox economic tradition. If contemporary neo-classical economists were to go back to one of the founders of their discipline, Alfred Marshall, they would find the germ of a substantive conception of work which—not unlike the conceptions advanced by Dejours and Sennett—emphasizes the importance of the activity of working in the development of human capacities and the role of such development in a flourishing human life. The thrust of Tweedie’s argument, then, is to save orthodox economic theory from itself by retrieving an ethically substantive notion of work. Russell Keat follows a similar strategy in regard to liberal political theory. Liberalism is rightly committed to the promotion of individual liberty by enforcing basic rights, rejecting paternalism and enabling individuals to pursue their own conception of the good. But in addition to their commitment to these sound political principles, liberals typically endorse a principle of state neutrality, which puts a prohibition on state action guided by any conception of the good. On this influential view, a legitimate liberal state is neutral in relation to conceptions of the good and must exclude them from its practical deliberations. Like many communitarian critics of liberalism, Keat wants to reject this principle of state neutrality without throwing out the liberal commitment to individual liberty. In this way he follows a familiar strategy for saving liberalism from itself. But the reasons he gives for rejecting the principle of state neutrality are new and bear directly on our theme: the inescapably ethical character of the sphere of production and of the nature of the choice between economic policies that favour one mode of production or work organization over another.

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Following Peter Hall and David Soskice, Keat begins by distinguishing two models of capitalism that do in fact represent real alternatives for organizing the world of work and shaping economic policy. These are the “Liberal” market economies, with their “impatient” pattern of share ownership, top-down mode of internal governance, and competitive inter-firm relationships, in contrast to “Coordinated” market economies, with their “patient” capital, more consensual styles of management, and cooperative relationships between firms. Keat then draws attention to the ethical differences between these forms of market economy. That is, they make it possible, or easier, for individuals to realise certain conceptions of the good through their work, and they make it impossible, or more difficult, for individuals to realise other conceptions. As examples, Keat mentions the intrinsic satisfaction that comes from skillful, autonomous working activity. This good, as well as the goods of developing industry specific skills and engaging in collaborative relations with workers in other firms, are easier for individuals to realise in Coordinated market economies than in Liberal ones. The Coordinated economies also make it easier for individuals to realise a conception of the good in which they are able to develop trade- or industry-specific skills and their recognition by one’s peers. The Liberal market economies, by contrast, make it easier for individuals to measure the success of their careers, and the goods they realised through them, in financial terms. Another telling example is relationships of trust: the institutional arrangements of the Liberal market economies make it harder for individuals to realise this good in their work, and for this reason individuals whose conception of the good includes the enjoyment of such relationships are institutionally disadvantaged by them. Such considerations support Keat’s thesis that market economies are by no means neutral with respect to the good: they favour the realisation of some conceptions of the good through working activity and disfavour others. Since the institutional shape of a market economy is in part determined by a state’s laws and policies, the deliberations by which a state arrives at those laws and policies are not neutral with respect to the good either. Of course this conclusion does not tell us which conception of the good a given state should favour. But by dispelling the myth of state neutrality, it invites us to think again about the ethical significance of work and to develop a conception of working activity that is commensurate with this challenge.

PART ONE

FROM HEGEL TO INSTITUTIONALISM

Chapter two

The Role of Work within the Processes of Recognition in Hegel’s Idealism Paul Redding Introduction Prior to Kojève’s well-known account in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel there seems to have been relatively little interest in Hegel’s concept of recognition;1 after Kojève, however, a popular view of Hegel’s philosophy emerged within which the idea of recognition played a central role.2 While Kojève directed attention to the importance of Hegel’s use of the notion of recognition in the famous dialectic of “master and slave” in chapter 4 of the Phenomenology of Spirit,3 his reading, inspired equally by Marx and Heidegger, was nevertheless difficult to reconcile not only with the more systematic features of Hegel’s philosophy, but also with what Hegel had to say on the topic of recognition within chapter 4, but especially, elsewhere in the Phenomenology.4 Since the 1970s, another picture of the way in which the notion of “recognition” plays a role in Hegel’s thought has emerged, emanating 1   A. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols Jr, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1969. Kojève’s account was originally given in his lectures on Hegel in Paris in the 1930s, the subsequent popularity of his account owing much to the transmission of his views by authors such as Sartre and Lacan. 2  What distinguishes us as self-conscious beings from the rest of nature is that we are driven by a peculiar type of desire, the desire for recognition leading to struggles over recognition. 3  G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Werke in zwanzig Bänden), ed. E. Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, vol 3, 1969; English translation by A. V. Miller Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977. 4   For early criticisms see G. A. Kelly, “Notes on Hegel’s ‘Lordship and Bondage’,” Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 19, no. 4, 1966, pp. 189–217; and H.-G. Gadamer, “Hegel’s Dialectic of Self-Consciousness,” in Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutic Studies, trans. by P. Christopher Smith, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1976, p. 62 n7. More recently, Robert R. Williams has pointed to the “distortions of recognition” in the postKojèvean “standard interpretation” in Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, pp. 10–13.

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from the work of Jürgen Habermas, and developed more recently by Axel Honneth.5 Here attention was directed to the earlier Jena manuscripts in which Hegel had reworked the notion of recognition from Fichte’s theory of rights into a complex theory of the intersubjective conditions for the formation of the human subject. But while Hegel’s sketches there had promised a new and genuinely post-metaphysical way of thinking about human existence, this line of thought, it was claimed, had been aborted, or at least compromised, by the time of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In that work, the concept of recognition was reduced to the single function of its role in the constitution of selfknowledge, and this represented a regress in Hegel’s thought, away from a promising intersubjective or dialogical approach to subjectivity to a more “monologic” or consciousness-centred and, ultimately, preKantian “metaphysical” one.6 Finally, since about the late 1980s, yet a third picture of Hegel has emerged in which recognition plays an important role. Interpreters advancing this view commonly reject the traditional “metaphysical” interpretation of the mature Hegel and regard Hegel’s generally “recognitive” approach to “spirit” as being central to his success in avoiding such pre-Kantian metaphysics. They thus tend to see greater continuity  within Hegel’s use of the theme of “recognition” throughout his work than had proponents of the second approach. Different versions of this third view of Hegel can be discerned in the writings of Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, H. S. Harris, and Robert Williams.7 Elsewhere, 5  J. Habermas “Arbeit und Interaktion. Bemerkungen zu Hegels Jenenser Philosophie des Geistes,” first published in eds. H. Braun and M. Riedel, Natur und Geschichte. Karl Löwith zum 70. Geburtstag, Stuttgart, 1967 trans. as “Labor and Interaction: Remarks on Hegel’s Jena Philosophy of Mind,” in Theory and Practice, trans. J. Viertel, Boston, Beacon Press, 1974, pp. 142–169; A. Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung. Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte, Frankfurt/M, Suhrkamp, 1994, trans. by J. Anderson as The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1996. 6   Habermas, “Labor and Interaction,” p. 162. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 62. Honneth’s summation here indicates how much this view incorporates the Kojèvean reading of the Phenomenology (pp. 62–63): “The Phenomenology of Spirit allots to the struggle for recognition—once the moral force that drove the process of Spirit’s socialization through each of its stages—the sole function of the formation of self-consciousness. Thus reduced to the single meaning represented in the dialectic of lordship and bondage, the struggle between subjects fighting for recognition then comes to be linked so closely to the experience of the practical acknowledgement of one’s labour that its own particular logic disappears almost entirely from view.” 7  See R. Pippin’s comprehensive, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of SelfConsciousness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, and, more specifically,



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I too have attempted to sketch a picture of Hegel which has these general features.8 In this chapter I want to revisit some of the classic themes of the master–slave dialectic in order to bring to the fore aspects of Hegel’s recognitive treatment of work that may still be significant for us today. More generally, however, I will also suggest that Hegel’s treatment of work enables us to avoid misunderstandings about the nature of his idealism. From his account of work in the master–slave dialectic we can see that far from being an immaterialist doctrine, Hegel’s idealism is premised on a radically embodied conception of the mind and its capacities. The Struggle for Recognition In Chapter 4 of the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel sketches a scenario in which a simple model of political life between a master and his slave results from a struggle that is in some sense over recognition. The most obvious comparison here is perhaps Hobbes’ equally mythical vision of the establishment of political society from a state of original struggle through the institution of the social contract, and here it might be helpful to view Hegel’s myth as a type of post-Kantian transformation of Hobbes’ one. The Hobbesian side of the story is the move that initiates a central theme of modern political philosophy: it is the claim that the normative basis of human society is to be found not in the will of a on the theme of recognition in Hegel, “What is the Question for which Hegel’s Theory of Recognition is the Answer?” European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 8, no. 2, 2000, pp. 155–72; and T. Pinkard’s Hegel’s Phenomenology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994 and German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. While having many internal differences to the Hegel of Pippin and Pinkard, I would count Henry S. Harris’ account of Hegel as sharing these general features. See his Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770–1801, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972; “The Concept of Recognition in Hegel’s Jena Manuscripts,” Hegel-Studien Vol. 20, 1977, pp. 229–248; Hegel’s Development II: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801–6), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983; and Hegel’s Ladder: The Pilgrimage of Reason, 2 vols, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1997. Robert R. Williams, in Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1992; and Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997 extends the work of L. Siep, Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophie: Untersuchungen zu Hegels Jenaer Philosophie des Geistes, Freiburg, Alber Verlag, 1979 to give a comprehensive ethically focused account linking Hegel’s early work to his mature Philosophy of Right. A. Wood, in Hegel’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, also stresses the role of recognition in Hegel’s ethics, although disassociates it from Hegel’s more systematic thought. 8  In Hegel’s Hermeneutics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996.

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transcendent divine being, but rather in the human will. As Hegel puts it in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hobbes had “sought to derive the bond which holds the state together, that which gives the state its power,” not from holy scripture or positive law, but “from principles which lie within us, which we recognize as our own.”9 The Kantian side of Hegel’s model is that this human will cannot be conceived naturalistically, as it is in Hobbes, who famously characterised the will as the “final appetite” in a process of practical deliberation.10 While this anti-naturalism is one of the basic features of such idealist approaches to human society, Hegel’s refusal to reduce what he calls “spirit” to nature has nothing to do with a commitment to any type of mind–body dualism of the early modern Cartesian approach to the mind, nor with its remnants in Kant’s conception of the noumenal self. Rather than locate Hegel’s starting point in the modern subjectivist approach to the mind, we should understand Hegel, I suggest, in relation to Aristotle’s conception of the human soul as the form of the human body.11 In contrast to Aristotle, however, Hegel sees bodily form not as something given but as formed and, indeed, self-forming, and work is central to the process in which such formation occurs. But again, the idea of the mind as giving form is central to Kantian

9   G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. III, trans. E. S. Haldane, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1995, p. 316. For a view of Hegel’s “politics of recognition” as an alternative to social contract theory see A. Patten, “Social Contract Theory and the Politics of Recognition in Hegel’s Political Philosophy,” in ed. Robert R. Williams, Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism: Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2001. On the relation of Hegel’s early account of the struggle for recognition to Hobbes’ account of the establishment of the political community, see L. Siep, “Der Kampf um Anerkennung. Zu Hegels Auseinandersetzung mit Hobbes in den Jenaer Schriften,” in Hegel Studien Vol. 9, 1974, pp. 155–207. 10   Hobbes effectively identifies the will with an empirical bodily appetite or aversion: “In deliberation, the last appetite, or aversion, immediately adhering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is that we call the WILL; the act, not the faculty, of willing.” T. Hobbes, Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668, ed. E. Curley, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1994, ch. vi, §53. In distancing himself from the faculty of willing, Hobbes was setting himself against the scholastic view going back to Aristotle of the faculty of the will—“voluntas”—as a type of rational power causing the action (ibid., ch. xlvi, §28). Instead, Hobbes introduces appetite and aversion as quasi-mechanically acting on affective states, causally brought about by perceptual interaction with the world and manifesting themselves in particular actions. This means that freedom for Hobbes cannot be identified with any notion of a rationally self-determining will that is presupposed by the Christian Platonist tradition. 11  See, for example, M. Wolff, Das Körper-Seele Problem: Kommentar zu Hegel, Encyclopädie, Frankfurt, Klostermann, 1992.



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idealism, and so Hegel’s Aristotelianism has a distinctively postKantian flavour. Willing 1: From Hobbes to Kant As suggested above, a characteristic feature of the idealist approach has to do with its resistance to the type of philosophical assumptions about the will found in the naturalist and empiricist tradition as exemplified by Hobbes or, somewhat later, Hume. Hobbes thought of the will as having a content—desire—which is given to the reasoning faculty from without. Desire itself is arational, and reason’s task is effectively the instrumental one of working out how to act so as to best satisfy such desire.12 In contrast to this naturalistic account, Hegel follows Kant in as much as for him, the will has to be treated in terms of what Henry Allison has called the “incorporation thesis.”13 For Kant, rather than being conceived as some merely natural phenomenon, the will that is expressed in a voluntary act must be conceived as having been already given some type of conceptual form—the form in which that content could be endorsed by the acting subject as its own. As some contemporary philosophers have suggested, there seems a clear distinction between genuine desires and wants, and mere urges or impulses. Being suddenly struck by the urge, say, to stand naked in downtown Sydney at peak hour and recite the poems of Henry Lawson, may be more likely to lead to my seeking therapy than actually doing it. Such an urge is unlikely to be one that I endorse as mine. However, Hobbes’ raw naturalism about desires seems to construe all desires as alien impulses 12   The givenness of desire is usually taken to be the mark of “instrumentalism.” As Christoph Fehige expresses it, “desires—in the sense explained, in which ‘desire’ captures what it is for something to matter to somebody—have the last word. Every such desire, and nothing but such a desire, counts. These desires are ‘given’, not just in the sense that their existence or non-existence need not always be in our power, but also in the sense that, if such a desire is really there, no rational critique can set its normative force to zero.” C. Fehige, “Instrumentalism,” in ed. Elijah Millgram, Varieties of Practical Reasoning, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2001, p. 66. Millgram makes a similar point: “Instrumentalism is the view that all practical reasoning is means–end reasoning. It says that there are various things you want, and the point of practical reasoning is to figure out how to get them…Instrumentalists think that practical reasoning proceeds from desires that are not themselves revisable by reasoning. These are desires that you just happen to have, and we can say that they are arbitrary.” In Practical Induction, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 2. 13   H. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 40–41.

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or something like this. Moreover, once we raise any urge to the level of an endorseable or dis-endorseable conceptualized content, the resulting desire seems to be the sort of thing for which we can ask for an intelligible reason. Kant had tried to capture that by describing our actions as flowing not from impulses but from rules or maxims that guide our practical lives. If I characteristically do action a in context f, it is because I operate on the basis of the implicit rule “do a-type actions in f-type contexts.” In Kant’s version, then, the will, rather than being an element of raw nature is already conceptualized and rationalized. But from Hegel’s perspective, Kant’s attempt to rationalize the will was incomplete. While he insisted on the conceptual form of the will, Kant nevertheless still conceived this in terms of the endorsement or dis-endorsement of an otherwise naturally given content, or “inclination.” However, Kant had not thought of the type of rationality implicit in instrumental reasoning as the only or even the essential form of the will, and had pointed to another form of practical reasoning—the type of moral reasoning that he treated in terms of the categorical imperative, in which the will is not reliant on any externally given content. Kant thus distinguished between the will as Willkür and as Wille, the latter being the autonomous will able to prescribe to itself its content; the moral law.14 We might think of Hegel as attempting to integrate these two aspects of willing—the object-directed will of rationalized inclination, and the other-directed will of Kantian morality—into a unified picture in as much as our willing relations to worldly things are to be contextualised within conceptually mediated relations to each other. These latter relations Hegel conceived as recognitive relations—relations within which we recognize or acknowledge each other as beings with rational wills. It is an idea similar to Kant’s moral idea of treating others not as means to one’s ends but as “ends” themselves, but freed of the formalism of Kant’s conception of the categorical imperative. Moreover, for Hegel, in contrast to Kant, these relations of recognition were constitutive: not only do they constitute the form of the social life within which we live—that is, constitute what Hegel called “objective spirit”—they also constitute conditions for our capacity to have the type of cognitive or intentional life that allow us to function within objective spirit.

14  I. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. M. Gregor, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 13–14.



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It is only in as much as we participate in such recognitive relations in which we are recognized as intentional agents that we become intentional agents, rather than merely natural beings, and so, for example, become the kinds of agents for whom there can be “reasons” for and not just causes of action. Thus, we can say that our belonging to objective spirit is a prerequisite for our being subjective spirits. Willing 2: From Kant to Aristotle It was this rationalization of the will that allowed Hegel to re-­ appropriate Aristotle’s conception of the soul as the form of the body. Aristotle had endorsed Plato’s idea of the primacy of the forms but had denied that they were separable (chōriston) from the things they were meant to be the forms of.15 Thus the mind, as the form of the body, was, for Aristotle, fundamentally incarnated in the body. But this was not to assign the study of mind simply to the natural scientist, the physikos. A state of mind like that of anger, say, might have its material basis in a state of the body—for Aristotle, a “boiling of the blood,” or a “heat around the heart”—but it also should be understood as having a specifically cognitive content, as when we understand anger, for example, as a “desire for retribution.” But to say that it has a cognitive content is to give it the form of concepts or ideas, and this makes it equally an object of study for the logician, or dialektikos.16 15  For example, in Aristotle, Metaphysics Books I–IX, trans. H. Tredennick, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1996, Bk. 1, ch 9. See, G. Fine, “Separation,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 2, 1984, pp. 31–87, and On Ideas: Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato’s Theory of Forms, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993. 16  A. de Laurentiis, “Hegel’s Interpretation of Aristotle’s ‘psyche’: A Qualified Defence” in K. Deligiorgi, Hegel: New Directions, Chesham, Acumen, 2006. But Aristotle’s essentially embodied account of the finite human soul in De Anima was caught in a long-recognized problem concerning the relation of the individual soul to divine disembodied nous or “intelligence” coursing through the world (Aristotle: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett. Cambridge, Mass., Loeb Classical Library, 2000.) In De Anima (413b24—9), Aristotle seems to introduce a dualism in the mind-body relation with the notion of nous. See, for example, K. V. Wilkes’ “Final embarrassed Postscript” to her resolutely non-dualist reading of Aristotle’s “psuchē” in “Psuchē versus the Mind” in eds. M. C. Nussbaum and A. Oksenberg Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s ‘De Anima’, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992. To the extent that humans were capable of nous, they thus seemed to be capable of a type of disembodied thought that was out of step with the more corporeal approach of De Anima. At its most general level, we might say that Hegel’s proffered solution to this problem was to similarly “embody” the processes of divine nous or spirit in the corporeal world as well, by making its processes immanent, in the first instance,

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As a follower of Plato, Aristotle was a realist about “forms” or “ideas,” including the soul as the form of the body. As a follower of Kant, however, Hegel was an idealist about such logical form. To put this in another way, we should not think of the logically structured ideational contents of the soul as quasi-entities that exist “anyway,” independently of their being ascribed to the soul, both by the being whose soul is in question, and by other beings who relate to that being. The former we have already seen in Kant’s difference between a natural inclination and a recognized and endorsed desire—“content” does not become soul or mind-like until it is recognized by that soul or mind as its own. Hegel, however, now made this condition of recognition more general. For him, with respect to the cognitive states of souls, the question of their being in a certain state cannot be separated from the question of their being recognized by others as being in that state. If we now return to the Hobbesian story of the constitution of political society we can see how it will be transformed in distinct ways within Hegel’s approach, ways that bring to bear both Kantian and Aristotelian considerations. Master and Slave For Hegel, as I have suggested, the will expressed in the primordial struggle from which political society is established has to be conceived in terms other than Hobbes’ naturalistic ones. For Hobbes, the struggles found in the state of nature are essentially struggles over the power to satisfy naturally given appetites. In contrast, conceived in Hegelian terms, the struggle will have to be conceived as over the authoritative maxims, rules or norms to which each particular act of the will answers. It will be seen as a struggle, as it were, over the power of legislating the rules of the interaction or game to be played. This, of course, is all very abstract, and in the following I will try to flesh out some of these ideas in terms of the very simple social arrangement with which Hegel’s

not in individuals but in historically evolving communities of interacting and communicating individuals, that is, individuals linked by relations of recognition. Embodying nous or “spirit” (Geist) in this way can sound utterly mysterious until we remind ourselves that the contents of the divine mind were the platonic ideas which Kant had interpreted as rules rather than transcendent immaterial prototypes—rules to be followed, in the practices of theoretical or practical reason. It was these rules then to which Hegel gave concrete existence by giving them a material basis in the normative processes constituting the life of actual societies.



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story of the struggle for recognition concludes—the simple, dyadic relation between master and slave which provides in Hegel’s account the first shape of mutual recognition.17 The struggle for recognition, for the recognition of having one’s will regarded as authoritative, will have been resolved when one of the antagonists has accepted the role of being an effectively will-less instrument of the other’s will. From Hegel’s perspective, there is already a contradiction at the heart of this arrangement. The slave has accepted the role of will-less instrument of another, but paradoxically, this can only be seen as an act of will, as the slave has made a choice (one might think, an eminently rational one), trading freedom for being absolved from the immediate threat of death. Hence to be a slave is to continually will the state of will-lessness. We will later see something of the mechanisms by which this contradiction is manifested and resolved. With this simple pattern of social life established, we may ask after some of the minimum requirements for the master–slave relation to function. At the very least, it might be said, this institution requires the capacity for the master to convey his will to his slave—this community will have to be a linguistically mediated one. There may be hierarchical patterns of social life in non-language-using animals, but there could not be, we might say, ones with the institution of slavery with its conventionally defined social roles. Looking at the roles from a linguistic point of view, we might think of the respective roles of master and slave here as differentiated by the type of speech act that each can employ. More simply put; only the master can utter imperatives. Only the master can say to the other, something like “Cook me a fish!” Of course this does not mean that only the master can produce that set of sounds or string of words, since anyone who knows the language can string such sentences together. The point is, rather, that only the master can perform the act whose normative consequence is that the one to whom it is directed thereby acts in a certain way, the way specified by the content expressed in the sentence. It is the normativity of the patterns of a life so conceived by Hegel that makes the facts of social life irreducible to those of the natural world, and here Hegel departed from Aristotle. Aristotle had thought 17   Compare H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder, Vol. 1, p. 377 n 25. I will use the terms “master” and “slave” rather than the more general “lord” and “bondsman,” which are more appropriate to the condition of selfdom, in order to retain the more classical connotations.

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of slaves as made slaves by their nature,18 but from an Hegelian perspective the characteristics of master and slave cannot be reduced to natural properties but rather require the existence of something more like normatively defined social statuses—something like differential sets of “rights” and “duties” specified by the rules of the institution. In Anscombe’s terminology, the “facts” making up this form of life will be “institutional” ones—facts that hold only in virtue of their being recognized to hold—not “brute” facts about the natural world, facts that hold “anyway,” independently of their being so recognized.19 Moreover, the concepts that articulate such facts—in our simple model, concepts such as “master” and “slave”—have that peculiar normative “thickness” that Charles Taylor and others have appealed to in the domain of practical reasoning. To recognize another as one’s master is to adopt a certain action-guiding orientation to them, the attitude appropriate to their slave, just as the inverse holds for the case as recognizing another as one’s slave. It is because practical consequences flow from the application of concepts in these interactions that Hegel refers to them as logical patterns of inference—“syllogisms.” But for Hegel important consequences follow from the fact that these forms of institutional life are instantiated in otherwise natural beings about whom there are relevant brute or natural facts. With the basic parts of this simple model in place, let us reflect on some of the minimal non-linguistic capacities that would be needed for a slave to act appropriately within this type of institution—for example, to be able to act on the order “Cook me a fish!” First, as is obvious, the slave would have to have a certain set of capacities or skills, most obviously the one’s making up the technique of cooking, but beyond those, techniques for catching fish, and so on—techniques that are linked instrumentally in terms of the relation “for the sake of.” And it is difficult to see how such skills could be successfully deployed without the capacity to make certain types of perceptual judgements, like the perceptual judgement that some particular fish was, in fact, cooked. Put simply, the slave would have to be able to differentiate cooked from raw, that is cookable fish. What can we now say about the interrelation of these skills? 18  Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham, Cambridge, Mass, Loeb Classical Library, 1998, pp. 1254 b 15–20. 19  G. E. M Anscombe, “On Brute Facts,” Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. III, Oxford, Blackwell, 1981.



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First of all, it is now common for philosophers to think of different types of intentional attitudes, such as theoretical and practical ones, as able to have common cognitive “contents,” contents that can be understood as conceptual. From this point of view, we might say that the order “Cook me a fish!” and the assertion “The fish is cooked” have a common content and that the difference between the two utterances is to be captured in terms of the different attitudes that can be maintained to such a content, the attitudes of willing, on the one hand, and perceiving or knowing, on the other. Thus Elizabeth Anscombe, for example, differentiates the attitudes of “taking true” and “making true,” the attitudes that would be consequent to receiving an assertion or an imperative respectively.20 That is, normally the hearer of the assertion “The fish is cooked” would take a certain content to be true, that is, believe it, while normally the hearer of the command “Cook me a fish!” would bring about the circumstances in which this same content had become true. I think that there is clear evidence in Hegel that he considers the contents of thought as separable from the various intentional attitudes to those contents in this type of way, and this, I believe, is central to his idealism.21 A further consequence of being able to conceive of a separable ideational content in this way is that it allows the representation of those “for the sake of ” instrumental relations between actions alluded to above. Working requires the type of practical reason that can allow me to reason from an end, say that of cooking a fish, to a means, say, 20   Harris uses the same terminology in relation to Hegel. See Hegel’s Ladder, vol 1, p. 366. 21   A comparison to Frege’s treatment of negation is useful here. Frege claimed that negation must be an operation that applies to complete propositions so in order to understand a proposition in non-assertive contexts such as interrogatives and hypotheticals we must understand the content independently of the question of its actual truth or falsity. See G. Frege, “Negation,” in M. Beaney, The Frege Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1997, pp. 347–8. In his comments on the law of the excluded middle, which in Aristotle is expressed as “of one thing we must either assert or deny one thing,” Hegel argues for the existence of a “third” that is “indifferent” to the opposition he describes as A and not A, which we are presumably meant to read as the supposedly exclusive assertion or denial of a predicate of some thing. This third is A itself without the “+” or “–” that, in Hegel’s notation, mark the affirmation or denial of A. (Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 438–439.) Hegel describes this third as “the unity of reflection into which the opposition withdraws as into ground,” a unity which looks analogous to the Fregean idea of a propositional content that must be able to be understood in abstraction from its being judged to be actually true or false. I treat this in more detail in Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, ch. 7.

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catching it. The slave has learnt to hold his behaviour to the content of imperatives, and we might think of reasoning practically as involving a type of inference from one imperative (“Cook me a fish!”) to another (“Catch me a fish!”). Hegel, I believe, had developed a particularly powerful logic for capturing this type of complex reasoning implicit in practical activity, and for it he needed to combine elements of Aristotelian term logic with the quite different patterns of propositional logic.22 The Negating Structures of Perception and Work In line with his appropriation of Aristotelian logic, Hegel adopts an essentially Aristotelian approach to the categorical structure of objects of perception. In perception we grasp an object as an instance of a kind, which in turn is relevant to the sorts of predicates that can be said of it (but not, of course, at the same time).23 Thus, in a judgement such as “This fish is cooked,” the kind of term involved (that it is a fish, and not, say, a rock) is relevant to the fact that the predicate “cooked” and its contrary “raw” can be said of it. Moreover, for Aristotle, the terms that can be predicated of such kinds typically come in groups of contraries—ideally, pairs of contraries. We have of course seen this phenomenon before, in the pair of predicates “master” and “slave” itself. Each term is the “negation” of the other, in the sense that the application of one term excludes its contrary. Moreover, we see this account of the structure of the perceptual object recur in the context of the master–slave dialectic as the structure of the object worked upon. So, just as a perceptual object will have the structure exemplified by say, this fish which I see to be cooked and not raw, the object worked upon will have just the same structure, but here, “raw” and “cooked” are the end points between which the work effects a transition. To put it another way, to   See my Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought.   In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel had developed this account of the perceptual object in the context of Chapter 2, “Perception.” Hegel’s primary task there had not been to give a type of phenomenological account of the nature of perception, but rather to examine a certain conception of the nature of “what is.” What he there calls “Perception” concerns a certain normative standard for what is to count as real, and he shows that this conception is self-undermining, and is in turn replaced by another standard, that he calls “the understanding.” However, it seems legitimate to extract from that chapter a general conception of Hegel’s phenomenology of the perceptual object. 22

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perceive an object as an instance of a kind is to conceive of it as suitable to a certain type of treatment, and to perceive it as instantiating one of an array of contrary properties is to conceive of it in terms of an array of possible states into which it may be transformed. In thinking of these logical issues we might be guided by the first three chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit where Hegel distinguishes what are effectively three different conceptions of objecthood: sense-certainty; perception; and the understanding. In the attitude of “sense-certainty,” the world is conceived as made up of simple givens of sensory experience with no internal complexity. Unlike the objects of perception, they have no internal logical form, and so can only function within reasoning in a very limited way—perhaps as simple candidates for being endorsed or disendorsed. It is clear from the way Hegel later treats the orientation of “desire” or “appetite” (Begierde), that he thinks of the world of the desiring–consuming subject, which in this context is the master, in much the same way. That is, while the slave needs to have a conception of the objects on which he labours as having the internal logical articulation mentioned above, for the master, the world can be considered to be made up of objects defined in terms of the simple sensuous qualities that make them suitable for the satisfaction of simple immediately felt desires.24 This difference will turn out to be crucial for the eventual outcome of this form of life. Again, we might understand these distinctions against the background of Aristotle’s approach. Aristotle distinguished human practices from mere animal movements. The movement of an animal will be explained in terms something like those of Hobbes or contemporary “belief–desire” forms of analysis. As he puts it in On the Movement of Animals: “I want to drink, says appetite; this is drink says sense or imagination or thought: straightaway I drink. In this way living creatures are impelled to move and to act, and desire is the last cause of movement.”25 Humans, of course, share in this animal soul, and hence   Compare Harris, “The self-certainty of simple desire tells us (and the other animals) that consumption and enjoyment is the “truth” of the Sachen of Sense-Certainty,” Hegel’s Ladder, vol 1, p. 366. 25  Aristotle, On the Movement of Animals, trans. A. S. L. Farquharson, The Complete Works of Aristotle, rev. Oxford translation, ed. J. Barnes, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1984, p. 701 a 32–35. See also, De Anima, Book III, chs 9–11. Even here, however, the good that the animal seeks is regarded as objective, and the animal’s action is regarded as expressing an intention or purpose. This is behind Aristotle’s criticism of Democritus’ account of animal movement in De Anima, Book I. 24

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realize these types of movements, but what marks them differently from non-human animals is their possession of the rational soul that allows them to engage in two further types of acting, poiēsis or making—a type of action with an external goal—and praxis, a type of action the intrinsic worth of which makes the doing of the action itself as the goal.26 For Aristotle, there is a clear hierarchy between these two forms of action: human life, he says in Politics, consists in “doing things, not making things,”27 a relative valuation that one might expect in a slave-holding society like that of ancient Athens. As we have noted, Aristotle thinks of slaves as slaves by their nature, and the poietic activity of slaves is likewise thought of as close to the processes of nature. Thus the slave is considered to be motivated by the mechanisms similar to those operative in animals, having his behaviour directed by appetite and perceptual imagery rather than reason.28 Next, the transformative processes of poiēsis are regarded as themselves akin to the teleological processes of nature. Thus, as Geoffrey Lloyd has pointed out in his study of Aristotle’s use of the term “pepsis” or concoction, this is clear in Aristotle’s conception of the activity of cooking, as it is seen as a type of extension of natural “peptic” processes such as chewing and digesting, all of which are directed to bringing the flesh of an animal to its most perfect state, that is, most perfect state vis-á-vis its role in the life of a human being.29 For Aristotle, it is the situation of being freed from the need to undertake this nature-bound type of work which is what allows the flowering of the mind to take place among the free citizens: the masters. In Hegel’s account of the master–slave interaction, the slave’s poietic activity will be afforded a much more significant role. While Aristotle had tended to denigrate the status of productive work and think that it was the liberation from it that allowed the life of the mind, in Hegel’s 26  Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, trans. and intro. C. Rowe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 1140 a 1–23. 27  Aristotle, Politics, p. 1254 a 7–9, to which Aristotle adds, “hence the slave is an assistant in the class of instruments of action.” 28  Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy, New York, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 1095 b 19 ff. The closest one finds to a modern belief–desire account of explanation of action in Aristotle is actually that applied to non-human animals. For a helpful discussion of the relation of human and animal desiring in these chapters see H. S. Richardson, “Desire and the good in ‘De Anima’,” in eds. Nussbaum and Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s ‘De Anima’. 29  G. E. R. Lloyd, “The Master Cook,” in Aristotelian Explorations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.



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story, this will in its essential respects be reversed: it is just the master’s “freedom,” purchased by the un-freedom of others that will subvert any capacity for a free and rational life of the mind. The master is a nonlabouring consumer, whose desire is closer to that of the non-human animal—one immediately expressed in the negation, that is the consumption, of the objects of the world. The slave, of course, cannot act on his impulsive desires, as he has to negate or suppress his own natural desires and replace them with the actions required to serve the master’s conceptually conveyed will.30 This adds a layer of complexity to the forms of recognition and, importantly, self-recognition that can occur in this society. And not only does it reflect systematic differences marking off Hegel’s approach as a distinctly “modern” one, it also points to the degree that Hegel’s idealism accommodates the idea of processes working below the level of the overt conceptualisations articulating the manifest view of the world, and the extent to which Hegel is able to maintain a distinction between the capacities of the bearing of a conceptualized social role and the “rules” constituting that role. As we have seen, the master–slave relation is at its basis an institutionally defined recognitive relation. In behaving towards his master as a master, the slave is continually acknowledging the rightness of the master’s bearing of this status, and the same can be said of the behaviour of the master towards the slave. But each can then recognize himself in the other’s recognition, and thereby achieve a type of selfconsciousness—the master understanding himself as a master, and the slave as a slave. But identity cannot be as simple as the apparently dyadic relation between the concepts “master” and “slave” suggests, since all relations for Hegel are mediated or triangulated. Thus the slave’s relation to the master is mediated by the objects that the slave labours upon, as labouring for the master is just what defines the relationship of master and slave.31 This mediation means that while the slave is addressed by the master as a slave, and so recognizes himself in that address as a slave, there are other relations that can contribute to 30   “Now, by working for another, the Slave too surmounts his instincts, and—by thereby raising himself to thought, to science, to technique, by transforming nature in relation to an idea—he too succeeds in dominating Nature and his ‘Nature’…” Kojève, Introduction, p. 49. 31   Similarly, the relation between the slave and the object worked on is mediated by the slave’s relation to the master, because the slave acts on the expressed will of the master, not on his own desire.

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the form of self-consciousness of which the slave is capable, relations that can allow the slave to recognize himself in ways that come into contradiction with his self-identity as a slave. Importantly, what is available to him is that of being the agent who does the transforming of the object. Thus, in the course of being a slave, and acting like a slave, the slave gains a conception of himself in virtue of the world-transforming work that is carried out, such as when one gets a sense of oneself in the perceivable products of one’s activities, for example, when one grasps oneself as a skilled cook. Here it must be remembered that the “perceived” object has a particular logical structure in which the inhering sensible qualities are regarded as excluding or negating their contraries. Hence there is something concrete within which the slave can recognize the purport of his own agency. Importantly, the self-recognition here is in no sense an empty formality, as work is not merely an activity of the transformation of objects, it is also an activity of self-transformation, an acquiring of skills and dispositions that become partly definitive of one’s character and identity, and so an objective source of one’s sense of self. In transforming objects for the master, the slave transforms himself, and since, from the Aristotelian point of view, the soul is the form of the body, the slave transforms his “spiritual” capacities, his soul. And, of course, the dimension of personhood that is coming into focus here is the converse of that constituted at the institutional level. Rather than what is captured by the concepts of servitude and dependence, it is the dimension of mastery that is central here. And a type of ownership is coming into focus, the inalienable property relationship existing between the slave and his own capacities which will contradict the very idea that one individual can own another. The overtly dyadic form of the master–slave relation, therefore, conceals a deeper and contradictory reality.32 32   Considerations such as these indicate how seriously Hegel takes the idea that “spirit” is ultimately embodied in the flesh and bones of the individuals who make up the social world. (In fact we might conjecture that the Aristotelian unilateral privileging of praxis over poiēsis is connected with the anomaly of his treatment of divine nous in contrast with the more embodied treatment of the human psuchē in De Anima.) It is said that in traditional societies such as those of the ancient Greeks, individuals tend to conceive of themselves entirely in terms of their social roles, and this, in some sense, is even expressed in the formal structure of Aristotle’s logic, as individual things are always reasoned about in terms of their instantiating some kind. But Hegel is aware that there are processes at work that result in individuals being such that they do not



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What I want to point to here is more the underlying dynamics of Hegel’s idealist analysis and how he appeals to the immanent dynamics of the institution itself to find the norms for its critique. It should be clear that Hegel’s criticism of the institution of slavery is in no way a “formal” one that simply condemns it as being incompatible with the “essential” freedom of human beings. Slavery is a self-contradictory state in a more substantial sense, in that it is a necessarily self-­ undermining state. It is a form of interaction which comes with a justification concerning the natural superiority of the master that is in contradiction with the reality that develops within its constraints. That is why the common interpretation of Hegel’s idealist slogan that “the rational is the real and the real is the rational,” the interpretation that equates “real” with the prevailing status quo, is so misleading. The nature of “the real” is not to be found in the superficial representations that social life produces in order to justify itself. Discovering “the real” requires the type of analytic unpacking of the categorical structure of these justifications to discover the pragmatic conditions within which they can have any meaning at all, and typically, as in the case we have seen, this pragmatic ground of the normativity of our claims can be seen to contradict the claims themselves. Kant thought that the contradictions that emerged when reason was pushed beyond an application to empirical reality indicated the limits of the role that reason could play. Hegel thought that the contradictions reflected the contradictory state of that reality itself.

simply instantiate the normatively defined characteristics. If we think of the slave merely as an instantiation of a generic concept we are cognizing the slave within the structures of perception, but if we understand the slave as an element within a dynamic system of interacting elements we will be cognizing him with the resources of “the understanding.” But this is still not to appeal to anything outside the scope of conceptuality in the way that Hobbes so appeals to forces given from the world to instrumental reason. It is not as if there is some determinate but non-conceptualized individual reality to which the concept “slave” fails to correspond. It is rather that a concept like “slave” has to be considered in relation to its various structural determinations, one of which is as designating the slave in its singularity rather than as an instance of a universal. While to some extent the proper expression of what is peculiar to the individual itself needs an appropriately shaped conceptual role, one that, Hegel thinks, is only generated after the collapse of the classical polis—first at an abstract or formal level, with the legal notion of individual rights in Rome and the universal scope of the Christian religion, and next, with the liberation of the labouring process from the fixed social statuses of the ancient institution of slavery.

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paul redding The Relevance of Hegel’s Analysis for Today

Hegel himself said that philosophy was “its own time comprehended in thoughts,”33 and his time was effectively the turn and first decades of the nineteenth century. Much has occurred in the world, and especially the world of work, since then. It would be unrealistic, I think, to assume that we could find applicable solutions in Hegel’s writings to problems that could hardly have even been foreseen two hundred years ago. But conceiving of a problem in the right way is at least the first step on the way to finding a solution, and in Hegel we find many percipient clues for how to conceive of problems that seem endemic to the twentyfirst century. Let’s consider, for example, the problems that are seen as following on from the instrumental relation to nature that seems dominant in modernity. Consider, for example, the criticisms of the scenario of human emancipation through work that are found in Hannah Arendt, a thinker whose neo-Aristotelian proclivities show in her attempt to re-establish the priority of praxis over poiēsis.34 In short, Arendt had made a tripartite distinction between labour, work and praxis that was in some ways akin to Aristotle’s between animal movement, poiēsis and praxis, and in some ways different. Effectively, Aristotelian poiēsis is split between the practices designated as “work” that leave a structure within which public life will be shaped, such as building a city; and those that only leave something for consumption—labour—activities such as cooking a fish for consumption. The Greeks were correct, she thinks, in associating the latter with animal existence, and this is at the heart of a somewhat damning critique of modernity. What the modern capitalist economy has done is to have geared production to generalized human consumption, and so the world of work had been colonized by the world of labour. But even when “work” is distinguished from labour as not reducible to the realm of nature and necessity, it is still to be regarded as subordinate to praxis because of its instrumental nature. As in Aristotle’s analysis, in work the ends are given to an activity from without, while in praxis, the activity is undertaken for its own sake. In work there is a type of universality that goes

33  G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 21. 34   H. Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958.



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along with the externality of the objective that levels the individuality of the worker.35 Arendt’s critique of the project of collective human liberation through work was partly directed against Marx, and we might think that it applies equally to Hegel as well, but this, I think, would be a mistake. Especially following Kojève’s Marx-influenced reading of Hegel, there has been a tendency to over-generalize the lessons of the master–slave section of Chapter 4 in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and to see the human subordination of nature through work as the framing narrative of the development of free and rational spirit. But the categories articulating the world of the master and slave are themselves not adequate to the reality that is developing within its boundaries. Consider Henry Harris’ comments on Kojève’s reading, for example, where he points out that the master–slave dialectic is framed within the limited form of cognition that is the analogue (for self-consciousness) of “perception,” and so this dialectic cannot be generalised to the shape of the movement of the Phenomenology as a whole.36 The very dyadic distinction between independence and dependence or subjectivity and objectivity that is modelled in the master–slave relation will be undermined, as the contradiction at the heart of this relationship becomes manifest. Hence, the master–slave relation should not be seen as a distinction that ends up being reproduced at the level of the relation of human to non-human nature. Kojève’s reading of Hegel essentially belongs to the genre of “anthropological” readings of Hegel which, following the “left-Hegelian” lead of Feuerbach and others, had put the focus on the expression of a human essence predicated on a generalized liberation from nature. However, I suggest, this does not reflect Hegel’s own account.37 And yet this does not imply that the

35  We might think of her implicit approach to Hegel as a manifestation in the realm of the analysis of work of the type of criticism that accuses him of a logocentric “subsumption” of the individual by the universality of the “concept,” a concept conceived along Platonic lines as the prototype of some artefact to be fabricated. 36   H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder, Vol. 1, p. 379 n. 33. 37  We might here consider the comparison between the respective analyses of Hegel and the most famous social theorist to emerge from the left-Hegelian camp, Karl Marx. Marx might be regarded as having attempted to “naturalize” Hegel’s analysis by transforming an explicitly idealist form of philosophy into a somewhat naturalistically conceived scientific theory. Marx correctly perceived that Hegel thought of philosophy as operating at the same level as religion, and extended a type of reductive analysis of religion to that of philosophy as well. In Hegelian terms this is to collapse the type of reasoning that properly belonged to “Reason” or Vernunft, back into the

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opposing “right” theistic reading of Hegel was correct, after all, since the mutually excluding determinations of theism and atheism are yet again instantiations of that same dichotomous structure of which Hegel is attempting to show the limits. There are too many dimensions to this nexus between the more romantically orientated critiques of instrumental reason to which Arendt belongs and Hegel’s already complex views to be expanded upon here, but a few points might be usefully made. Importantly, Hegel was one of the first philosophers to acknowledge the modern emergence of “civil society” as a distinct public realm centred on a type of production that was geared to the satisfaction of basic needs—what he called the system of need. Moreover, it is clear that he grasped the profound changes that this was to have for the nature of work. Given the role of work in the transformation of the body and the conception of the soul as the form of the human body, it is clear that he thought of the changes brought about by the modern economy in the nature of work as having implications for changes in the human soul. Indeed, we might see some of these changes as signalled by Hegel’s understanding of the logic of work and activity more generally that is already implicit in the master–slave dialectic. I earlier alluded to the modern conception of activity as a type of “making true,” and it is this that allows actions to be grasped as chained in relations of ends and means. For example, if the objective is to make it true that r, and if we know that if q then r, and also that if p then q, then we have a prima facie reason to do p. Here we might talk of “execution conditions” for commands that are analogous to assertability conditions for assertions, and think of actions as linked in relations of practical inference analogous to the way we inferentially chain beliefs. framework of “the understanding,” or Verstand and that transformation radically changes the understanding of the historical narrative involved. Marx understood historical materialism as an explanatory theory somewhat akin to Darwinian evolutionary theory, but Hegel’s narrative was not meant to be explanatory in that sense. Rather, it was meant as something more akin to a retrospective genealogy in which the consideration that is to the fore is that of grasping where the norms that we take as authoritative came from and grasping the sorts of transformations they have gone through on the way to being our norms. An explanatory account would explain those norms away because they are not grasped as the norms of the subjects, us, doing the explaining. It is this claim to the irreducibility of the normative structure of spirit to any non-normatively material nature which opposes an idealist like Hegel to materialists like Hobbes or Marx. But, as I have tried to suggest, this does not imply an account of the logos that can be isolated from the material basis of the lives of the individuals in which it is embodied.



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But the possibility for this type of mediation had been implicit in the very relation between master and slave. Once the gap is opened up between impulse and action, which is consequent upon the master’s commanding the slave, this gap can be progressively mediated by intervening steps. It is this ever-widening gap, of course, that is complained of by the more romantic critics of instrumental reason. As the division of labour increases, the output of each person’s work will in general be likely to be directed towards the production of the execution conditions of someone else’s activity. That is, the output of labour is no longer the perceptible object as it is in the type of work we think of as craft—an object that manifests the very transformations involved in its very production. This is the world where the value of work is measured in very abstract ways such as in relation to the satisfaction of “key performance indicators” or in terms of symbolic status conferred by its monetary equivalent. It is not the sort of value that can be simply recognized in the transformations of an object, such as that perceived in the products of craft activity. The modern capitalist economy is in some sense a realm in which everybody is theoretically equally the master and slave to each other, and Hegel is well aware of the contradictions that exist at the heart of it. Thus while acknowledging the modern market’s ability to meet human needs in ways that are historically unprecedented, Hegel also recognized the degrading effects of the modern economy, and the corrosive effects this system has had on the human soul. One source of this comes from the production of extremes of wealth and poverty generated by the form of life itself.38 As with his rejection of Aristotle’s claim that slaves were slaves by nature, Hegel is crystal clear that in modernity, the disparity of wealth and power are not the result of the “natures” of the rich and the poor. However, aside from the question of poverty, Hegel is aware of the malady that is now spoken of as “affluenza.”39 While the type of craft work involved in the production of an object of recognizable value is essential to the workers’ grasp of  Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p. 195 and pp. 244–245.   See, for example, C. Hamilton and R. Denniss, Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough, Crows Nest, NSW, Allen & Unwin, 2005; and O. James, Affluenza: How to be Successful and Stay Sane, London, Vermilion, 2007. We might think of these diagnoses of the problems of the modern psyche as standing in the tradition originating from J.-J. Rousseau’s percipient reflections on the pathologies of the emerging modern subject in works like “A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole, London, Dent, 1973. 38 39

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themselves as individual agents, this is endangered when the worker becomes just a cog in a wheel within a larger complex mechanism. Without meaningful work, we have nothing in which to see ourselves other than the objects of our desire. Affluenza, after all, is just another term for the existential problems besetting the situation of the original master. Hegel had attempted to remedy these problems, by projecting into the infinitely mediated realm of civil society with its needs-based individualising tendencies, the opposed recognitive structures that were to be found in the more “immediate” realm of the modern bourgeois family. These may indeed be thought to be no longer appropriate for the world of work at the start of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that the basic conceptual tools he provided for the diagnosis of the depth structure of modern life and its problems are still as relevant as ever. At least within much contemporary philosophy the conception of practical activity and practical reason, despite the technical sophistication with which it is pursued, is still fundamentally based on a Hobbesian conception of the individual will. Hegel’s counter-conception, and its elaboration in his recognitive approach to human thought and action, still stands as an under-explored and powerful alternative.40

40   I would like to thank Jean-Philippe Deranty, Axel Honneth, Simon Lumsden, Emmanuel Renault and Nicholas H. Smith for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

Chapter three

The Legacy of Hegelian Philosophy and the Future of Critical Theory1 Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch I In the words of Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Critical Theory aims “to develop a critical theory of capitalism that integrates and is based upon research in the fields of moral philosophy, social theory, and political analysis.”2 By defining the aim of their theoretical enterprises in these terms, Fraser and Honneth refer back to the origins of Critical Theory. This school of thought—whose best-known representatives include thinkers like Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas—was established by Max Horkheimer in the early 1930’s at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. What Horkheimer intended to set up was a research program designed to analyze what he believed were pathologies caused by the capitalist economies of his time, and to examine the possibilities of economic and social arrangements that would not have such negative effects.3 Like Fraser and Honneth, 1   I have presented different parts of the material in this chapter at the Departments of Philosophy of the University of North Florida, Queens College, City University of New York, University of Cologne, and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, as well as at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. I have greatly benefited from the discussion of my presentations on each of these occasions and would like to thank the participants for their comments and suggestions. Special thanks are due to Daniel Brudney and Michael Quante, who have made some very helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank Julia Ng for her translation from the German. 2   N. Fraser and A. Honneth, “Introduction: Redistribution or Recognition?,” in N. Fraser and A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christine Wilke, London, New York, Verso, 2003, p.10. 3  Compare M. Horkheimer, “Die gegenwärtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozialforschung,” in M. Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 3, Frankfurt (Main), Fischer, 1931, pp. 20–35 and M. Horkheimer, “Vorwort” (Vol. 2, no. 2, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung), in M. Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 3, Frankfurt (Main), Fischer, 1933, p. 110. On this topic see also

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Horkheimer wished to provide both an analysis and a critique of capitalism that is informed by moral philosophy. Although Horkheimer believed that such an enterprise required empirical studies and could only be carried out on the basis of philosophical, sociological and psychological research,4 his own studies suffered from an unquestioned reliance on Marx’s social theory5 as well as his idea of an unalienated, “rational” society.6 By contrast, some contemporary philosophers try to achieve the aims of Critical Theory with a recognition-theoretical framework inspired by Hegelian thought. Axel Honneth initiated and continues to be the most important representative of the ‘recognition-theoretical turn’ in Critical Theory. In fact, Honneth takes recognition theory to be a particularly well-suited basis for an analysis and a critique of contemporary capitalism that is informed by moral philosophy. He also draws on Hegelian thought in an effort to substantiate this claim.7 What are the main arguments behind the kind of Critical Theory defended by Honneth? Is it successful? In what follows, I shall examine these questions. First, I will lay out the main features of Honneth’s theory (II) and then consider the criticism that both his analysis and critique of capitalism have received (III). With resources provided by a new interpretation of several elements in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, D. C. Hoy and T. McCarthy, Critical Theory, Cambridge (USA), Blackwell, 1994; R. Wiggershaus, Max Horkheimer zur Einführung, Hamburg, Junius, 1998, and R. Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule. Geschichte - Theoretische Entwicklung Politische Bedeutung, Munich, Vienna, Hanser, 2001; and A. Honneth, “Eine soziale Pathologie der Vernunft. Zur intellektuellen Erbschaft der Kritischen Theorie,” in eds. C. Halbig, M. Quante, Axel Honneth: Sozialphilosophie zwischen Kritik und Anerkennung, Münster, Lit, 2004, pp. 9–31. 4  Compare Horkheimer, “Die gegenwärtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozialforschung.” 5   Compare for example M. Horkheimer, “Bemerkungen über Wissenschaft und Krise,” in M. Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 3, Frankfurt (Main), Fischer, 1932, p. 44; M. Horkheimer, “Materialismus und Metaphysik,” in M. Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 3, Frankfurt (Main), Fischer, 1933, p. 81; M. Horkheimer, “Materialismus und Moral,” in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 3, Frankfurt (Main), Fischer, 1933, p. 128; and M. Horkheimer, “Vorbemerkung” [zu Kurt Mandelbaums und Gerhard Meyers Zur Theorie der Planwirtschaft], in M. Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 3, Frankfurt (Main): Fischer, 1934, pp. 221–224. 6  Compare for example Horkheimer, “Materialismus und Metaphysik,” pp.117 and 137. 7  Compare for example A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson, Cambridge, Mass., Polity Press, 1995 and A. Honneth, Suffering from Indeterminacy: An Attempt at a Reactualization of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Assen, Van Gorcum, 2000.

hegelian philosophy and critical theory65 I will then explain why Hegelian thought can help answer such criticisms and achieve the aims of Critical Theory in the domains of social theory and social critique (IV, V, and VI). As I hope to show, Hegel’s social and political philosophy can therefore be a major source of inspiration for contemporary Critical Theory (VII). II The main features of Axel Honneth’s Critical Theory can be described as follows.8 From the perspective of social theory, the fundamental assumption is that human relations that “are anchored in different principles of reciprocal recognition”9 constitute the basis of every society. Honneth believes that such a social reality can only be analyzed with a normative social theory whose basic concepts are tailored to precisely these principles.10 Because of this, the category of recognition functions as a socio-ontological “key concept”11 for Honneth. According to Honneth’s view, three kinds of recognition are constitutive of “bourgeois-capitalist society”:12 love, respect, and social esteem. In very broad strokes, these can be understood in the following terms: individuals in a love relationship affirm one another “as needy beings”;13 individuals who respect one another treat each other as subjects to whom the “same autonomy” as well as “equal rights and duties” are accorded; and individuals who esteem one another take each other to possess “skills and talents […] that are of value for society.”14 If this is to be consistent with Honneth’s socio-ontological position sketched above, one would need to show that the core areas of capitalist societies—which Honneth believes are the private sphere,  Sections II and III incorporate—in a modified form—material taken from H.-C. Schmidt am Busch, “Can the Goals of the Frankfurt School be Achieved by a Theory of Recognition?,” in eds. H.-C. Schmidt am Busch and C. F. Zurn, The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Plymouth, Rowman & Littlefield, 2009, pp. 257–283.  9   A. Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition: A Response to Nancy Fraser,” in N. Fraser and A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, p. 146. 10   Compare ibid. pp.132–133. 11   Fraser and Honneth, “Introduction: Redistribution or Recognition?,” p. 1. 12   Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition: A Response to Nancy Fraser,” p. 138. 13  ibid., p. 139. 14  ibid., p. 142.  8

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the constitutional state, and the world of work—can be understood as institutionalizations of love, respect, and social esteem. And indeed, it is evident that Honneth claims to have proof of this when he explicitly links his social-theoretical analysis to “the core institutions of the capitalist form of society.”15 In his view, modern family relationships are characterized by “loving care for the other’s well-being in light of his or her individual needs.”16 Moreover, both the constitutional and the welfare state are governed by the principle of legal respect. Finally, the idea of “individual achievement,”17 which Honneth believes is the “leading cultural idea”18 in the modern working world, can be explained in terms of social esteem.19 For these reasons, he believes it is possible to “interpret bourgeois-capitalist society as an institutionalized recognition order.”20 From the perspective of moral psychology, Honneth’s fundamental assumption is that people can only form a positive, evaluative self-relation if they participate in “social relations that require an attitude of reciprocal recognition.”21 However, this thesis is formal in the sense that it contains no information relating to the content of such social relations. In fact, while Honneth regards participation in social relations of recognition as a “necessary condition”22 for the formation of the kind of self-relation mentioned above, he considers the content of these relations subject to historical change. Qualitatively different constellations of recognition that have been formed in the course of human history are, in Honneth’s opinion, equally suited to the formation of positive individual self-relations. From the perspective of social critique, the aim of Honneth’s theory lies in developing a critique of contemporary “neoliberalism.”23 In this context, the distinction between two types of capitalism—the “socialdemocratic” and the “neoliberal” types—is important.24 Whereas social-democratic kinds of capitalism are characterized by regulated  ibid., p. 139.  ibid. 17  ibid., p. 140. 18  ibid. 19   Compare ibid., pp. 140–141. 20  ibid., p. 138. 21   ibid., p. 143. 22   ibid., p. 176. 23   M. Hartmann and A. Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism,” Constellations, Vol. 13, no. 1, 2006, p. 44. 24   Compare ibid., pp. 41–46. 15 16

hegelian philosophy and critical theory67 markets, significant levels of state spending, and considerable welfarestate arrangements, neoliberal orders have the following features: largely deregulated markets, rather low levels of state spending, a comparatively low level of welfare-state arrangements, and an entrepreneurial culture favoring owners of capital.25 Honneth believes that, at least in the history of North America and Western Europe, models of social-democratic capitalism were dominant between roughly 1945 and 1980, after which a “neoliberal revolution”26 took place. While he seems to hold that social-democratic capitalism is not problematic from the perspective of recognition theory,27 Honneth clearly believes that the neoliberal revolution has had very negative effects on the recognition orders institutionalized in bourgeois-capitalist societies.28 From the methodological perspective, Honneth claims to present a critique of neoliberalism that is “internal”29 insofar as its standards of evaluation lie in relations of recognition that are constitutive of capitalist societies. Honneth illustrates this model of critique by referring to conflicts over distribution. According to him, such social conflicts are essentially struggles for recognition that are—or may be—carried out by reference to the principles of legal respect and/or of social esteem. In such cases, demands for the redistribution of economic goods may meet with society’s approval if they are based on proof that redistribution will remedy an infringement of claims that is identified as being based on such principles. In this context, the task of the Critical Theorist consists in furnishing this proof and making the connections explicit. By relying on principles that are constitutive of capitalist society, the Critical Theorist can be said to engage in an internal critique in the sense mentioned above.

  Compare ibid.   ibid., p. 44. 27   Compare ibid. On this topic see also E. Renault, “Taking on the Inheritance of Critical Theory: Saving Marx by Recognition?,” in eds. Schmidt am Busch and Zurn, The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 241–256. 28  Compare A. Honneth, “Organisierte Selbstverwirklichung. Paradoxien der Individualisierung,” in ed. A. Honneth, Befreiung aus der Mündigkeit, Frankfurt (Main), Campus, pp. 141–158 and A. Honneth, “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition,” in eds. Schmidt am Busch and Zurn, The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 223–240 as well as Hartmann and Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism.” 29   A. Honneth, “Nachwort: Der Grund der Anerkennung. Eine Erwiderung auf kritische Rückfragen,” in A. Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung, 2nd edition, Frankfurt (Main), Suhrkamp, 2003, pp. 303–341. 25 26

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The attempt to analyze capitalist markets and worlds of work in terms of a theory of recognition has been strongly criticized. A number of Critical Theorists have expressed fears that holding Honneth’s socialontological thesis—the claim that bourgeois-capitalist societies are institutionalized orders of recognition—would make it impossible to explain the behavior of capitalist markets.30 As a consequence, such critics maintain that the goal of an analysis of such societies along the lines of a theory of recognition is doomed to failure. Moreover, if recognition theory fails to provide an adequate analysis of contemporary capitalism, it is also ill-suited to ground a social critique that is ‘internal’ in the sense of the word specified above. Should this be true, recognition theory would fail to achieve the aims of Critical Theory in the domains of social theory and social critique. What are the arguments of the critique in question? Is it justified? Since Nancy Fraser has provided the most detailed—and influential— critique of Honneth’s recognition theory, I will investigate these questions by turning to the exchange between these two authors. In Fraser’s view, Honneth has not provided an adequate answer to “the question of how critical theorists should understand the social structure of present-day capitalism.”31 Fraser characterizes Honneth’s analysis of the modern working world in the following terms: “In the sphere of labor, […] recognition should be regulated by the principle of achievement, which determines the level of one’s wages according to the value of one’s social contribution. From Honneth’s perspective, therefore, struggles over distribution are really struggles over recognition, aimed at changing the cultural interpretation of achievement.”32 If this holds true, however, “it follows that there is nothing distinctive 30   Compare for example N. Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition: A Rejoinder to Axel Honneth,” in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A PoliticalPhilosophical Exchange, pp. 198–236; E. Renault, L’ expérience de l’injustice, Paris, La découverte, 2004; and C. Zurn, “Recognition, Redistribution, and Democracy: Dilemmas of Honneth’s Critical Social Theory,” in European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 13, no. 1, 2005, pp. 89–126. See also the critical discussion of these positions in J.-P. Deranty, “Critique of Political Economy and Contemporary Critical Theory: A Defense of Honneth’s Theory of Recognition,” in eds. Schmidt am Busch and Zurn, The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 285–318. 31  Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition: A Rejoinder to Axel Honneth,” p. 211. 32   ibid., p. 213 (my emphasis).

hegelian philosophy and critical theory69 about market-mediated social interactions, which are regulated, like all interactions, by cultural schemas of evaluation. Thus, there is neither any point in, nor any possibility of, conceptualizing specifically economic mechanisms in capitalist society.”33 Fraser elaborates as follows: These considerations apply in spades to the labor markets of capitalist societies. In those arenas, work compensation is not determined by the principle of achievement. […] Also important are political-economic factors such as the supply of and demand for different types of labor; the balance of power between labor and capital; the stringency of social regulations including the minimum wage; the availability and cost of productivity enhancing technologies; the ease with which firms can shift their operations to locations where wage rates are lower; the cost of credit; the terms of trade; and international currency exchange rates. In the broad mix of relevant considerations, ideologies of achievement are by no means paramount. Rather, their effects are mediated by the operations of impersonal system mechanisms, which prioritize maximization of corporate profits.34

In conclusion, Fraser maintains that Honneth’s theory of recognition is “congenitally blind to such system mechanisms, which cannot be reduced to cultural schemas of evaluation.”35 In her view, Honneth claims that the “behavior [of markets—SaB] is wholly governed by the dynamics of recognition.”36 Therefore, his theory is to be classified as merely “truncated culturalism.”37 Fraser’s argument may be summed up as follows: Honneth claims that capitalist worlds of work are institutionalizations of the principle of recognition as it relates to individual achievements; if this thesis is correct, then the level of earned income is a function of cultural assumptions concerning the value of the remunerated occupations; however, this conclusion is false. In Fraser’s opinion, it is impossible to explain specific levels of earned income by referring only—or mainly38—to “cultural schemas of evaluation” concerning the social   ibid. (my emphasis).   ibid., pp. 214–215 (my emphasis). 35   ibid., p. 215. 36   ibid., p. 216. 37   ibid., p. 217 (my emphasis). 38   Fraser is thus not committed to the view that culture does not matter at all when it comes to economics. Such a position has been taken up by Jürgen Habermas, who takes the modern economy to be a social sphere that is “free from norms” (J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston, Beacon Press, 33 34

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value of different professional activities. What needs to be taken into account here, she believes, are “political-economic factors […] which cannot be reduced to cultural schemas of evaluation.” In considering this, Fraser claims to show why capitalist worlds of work cannot be analyzed in terms of recognition theory. As a result, her critique is directed not only at Honneth’s theory, but also at recognition theory in general. This is evident from her belief that, on the rigorous grounds provided by her argument, capitalist markets can only be analyzed systems-theoretically.39 If this holds true, recognition theory is also an ill-suited candidate for grounding a critique of contemporary capitalism that is consistent with the methodological requirements of Critical Theory. Indeed, should it be the case that the distribution of goods and income depends largely on “political-economic factors” that are themselves independent from patterns of recognition, economic injustices would have to be explained by reference to these factors and remedied by measures affecting them. Criticizing such injustices on the basis of recognition theory would therefore fail to meet the requirements of an “internal”40 critique. For this reason, it would be theoretically misleading and politically counterproductive.41 Is this critique justified? There are two things to consider here. On the one hand, it should be noted that within economics there is a growing consciousness of how norms are relevant for the behavior of economic actors (when these actors are human beings). This is a connection of fundamental importance for advocates of the so-called new institutional economics. In their view, it is necessary to take into account “norms, mores, traditions and customs”42 in order to appropriately describe and reliably predict the behavior of economic actors. Now if, as Honneth believes, norms of recognition are constitutive of bourgeois-capitalist societies, then the theory of recognition would be an indispensable—and central—element for the analysis of economic

1984–1987). By contrast, Fraser believes that markets are culturally embedded (see ibid., p. 212), but that market prices are governed primarily by “political-economic factors” that have to be analyzed systems-theoretically. 39   See ibid., pp. 216–222. 40  Honneth, “Nachwort: Der Grund der Anerkennung. Eine Erwiderung auf kritische Rückfragen,” p. 334. 41  Compare for example Zurn, “Recognition, Redistribution, and Democracy: Dilemmas of Honneth’s Critical Social Theory.” 42   S. Voigt, Institutionenökonomik (Munich, Fink, 2002), p. 19.

hegelian philosophy and critical theory71 behavior from the point of view of institutional economics. Thus, there are considerations within contemporary economics that speak in favor of taking Honneth’s theory seriously with regard to social theory. On the other hand, Honneth fails to sufficiently elucidate the conceptual relations between legal respect, social esteem, individual achievements, and economic processes. To substantiate his socialtheoretical claims, he would have to explain why “the core institutions of capitalist society” can be understood as institutionalizations of specific forms of recognition. In particular he would have to show that neoliberal markets can be understood in terms of recognition theory. Moreover, given the socio-political aims of his theory, Honneth would have to explain how neoliberal capitalism can be criticized on the basis of forms of recognition that belong to the normative fabric of bourgeois-capitalist societies. As I have shown elsewhere, however, Honneth’s understanding of “legal respect” and “social esteem” is too vague to meet these requirements.43 It is therefore unsurprising that his recognition theory has received severe criticism. In my view, Hegel’s social and political philosophy can help clarify  the conceptual relations between patterns of recognition and economic processes, and it can help us understand why recognition theory matters when it comes to analyzing capitalist markets. Moreover, Hegel’s philosophy opens up the possibility of criticizing forms of capitalism that can be qualified as “neoliberal” by referring to patterns of recognition that are part and parcel of the normative fabric of bourgeois-capitalist societies. Hegel’s social and political philosophy can thus significantly contribute to achieving the aims of contemporary Critical Theory in the domains of social theory and social critique. In the Philosophy of Right Hegel sets out to analyze the normative fabric of the modern world. On my reading the conclusion to this analysis is that members of a well-ordered modern society recognize one another in three different respects: as persons, as ‘bourgeois’ citizens, and as members of a political community. From the standpoint of contemporary Critical Theory, Hegel’s notions of recognition as a person and as a bourgeois are of greatest importance. In what follows, I will

43  Compare H.-C. Schmidt am Busch, “Personal Respect, Private Property, and Market Economy: What Critical Theory Can Learn From Hegel,” in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 11, 2008, pp. 573–586 and Schmidt am Busch, “Can the Goals of the Frankfurt School be Achieved by a Theory of Recognition?,” pp. 257–283.

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focus on the latter kind of recognition.44 With resources provided by a new interpretation of what Hegel terms bourgeois “honor”45 (IV), “the corporation”46 (V), and also the “quest for profit [Sucht des Gewinns]”47 and “luxury”48 (VI), I will substantiate my above claim that Hegelian philosophy can help achieve the aims of contemporary Critical Theory in the domains of social theory and social critique. IV In Hegel’s view, participation in the work world is an integral part of an ‘honorable’ life in modern times and grounds a specific form of social esteem. Hegel develops this thought as follows: in a modern “civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft],” “[t]he ethical disposition”49 of the people can be characterized by reference to the notion of bourgeois “honor [Ehre],”50 according to which each individual, by his own determination, makes himself a member of one of the moments of civil society through his activity, diligence, and skill, and supports himself in this capacity; and only through this mediation with the universal does he provide for himself and in this way gain recognition in his own eyes [Vorstellung] and in the eyes of others.51

It should first be noted that Hegel uses the term “honor” in this context to emphasize the importance of what it denotes. Indeed, he regards

44  I have discussed Hegel’s conception of recognition as a person elsewhere. Compare Schmidt am Busch, “Personal Respect, Private Property, and Market Economy: What Critical Theory Can Learn From Hegel.” See also M. Quante, Hegel’s Concept of Action, trans. Dean Moyar, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 13–55. 45  Hegel, G.W.F., Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, §244. I use H. B. Nisbet’s translation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which I have occasionally altered for the sake of clarity and consistency. Changes to Nisbet’s translation are not noted. I quote Hegel’s 1821/22 commentary to the Philosophy of Right with my own translations (see G. W. F. Hegel, Die Philosophie des Rechts. Vorlesung von 1821/22, ed. H. Hoppe, Frankfurt (Main), Suhrkamp, 2005). 46   Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§250–256. 47   ibid., §306. 48   ibid., §253, Remark. 49   ibid., §207. 50   ibid., §244. 51   ibid., §207.

hegelian philosophy and critical theory73 the conception of honor described above as a “principle”52 of modern “civil society.”53 By employing the term “honor,” Hegel gestures towards the fact that this concept is as important for bourgeois society as the conception of knightly honor was for feudal societies. Thus, even if the term “honor” seems to be antiquated, it is possible that what it denotes is relevant for our discussion.54 What exactly does Hegel mean by an honorable bourgeois life? This question may be answered step by step with a closer examination of the quote above. I will examine the quote’s most salient features. (i)  “by his own determination”:55 As people who respect one another as persons, the members of a modern society regard themselves as authorized to decide for themselves which ends they would like to pursue. In Hegel’s view, this claim is related to decisions concerning the social production and distribution of goods.56 Consequently, the members of a modern society regard each other as authorized to take up a career path “by [their] own determination.” Such a determination is one aspect of what is held to be an honorable life. (ii)  “makes himself a member of one of the moments of civil society through his activity, diligence, and skill, and supports himself in this capacity”: With the expression “the moments of civil society,” Hegel is referring to the socio-economic spheres of agriculture and the urban production of goods and public administration.57 Thus, one aspect of   ibid., §245.   ibid., §245. 54   It is interesting that Rawlsian liberalism has been criticized with arguments that are very similar to the ones developed in what follows. Compare G. Doppelt, “Rawls’ System of Justice: A Critique from the Left,” Nous, Vol. 15, no. 3, 1981, pp. 259–309 and G. Doppelt, “The Place of Self-Respect in a Theory of Justice,” Inquiry, Vol. 52, no. 2, 2008, pp. 127–154. 55   In Hegel’s view, the male members of civil society are “primarily responsible for external acquisitions and for caring for the family’s [economic; SaB] needs” (Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §171). Accordingly, Hegel only speaks of these citizens when discussing his notion of bourgeois honor. In order not to further complicate the following presentation, I have decided not to refer explicitly to the female members of civil society when analyzing and discussing Hegel’s conception of bourgeois honor. I should like to note, though, that Hegel does not advance any systematic argument in favor of excluding female citizens from the work world and the realm of bourgeois honor. 56   See on this topic my discussion in Schmidt am Busch, “Personal Respect, Private Property, and Market Economy: What Critical Theory Can Learn From Hegel.” 57   Compare Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§203–205. 52 53

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an honorable bourgeois life is becoming and remaining a member of one of these ‘moments’ of civil society through one’s acquisition and application of skills relevant to one’s career—and not, for instance, on the basis of personal connections or one’s social origins.58 (iii)  “only through this mediation with the universal does he provide for himself ”: Whoever wishes to lead an honorable life must satisfy his own demand for goods through his process of “mediation with the universal.” Such a bourgeois would therefore not “provide for himself ” without making himself a member of one of “the moments of civil society” and contributing in this capacity to the production of goods that are useful for other members of society or the public. According to this requirement, it is not honorable for man to “provide for himself ” merely through means that have not been acquired through his own occupational work, or merely through social aid. Of course, a bourgeois could conceivably earn his living partly through occupational work and partly through social aid. But, would it be possible for this person to lead an honorable life?59 Hegel does not seem to discuss the relation between providing for oneself and the process of “mediation with the universal” from a quantitative point of view. The passage quoted above suggests that there has to be such mediation, but not necessarily mediation to the extent that the value of the goods one produces for others has to be at least as high as the value of the goods 58   It is interesting to consider whether Hegel’s political and social philosophy could ground something like a right to work. According to some commentators of the Philosophy of Right, this question can be answered in the affirmative. M. Hardimon, for instance, claims that Hegel “maintains, more specifically, that individuals, as members of civil society, have a positive right to the basic prerequisites of full social participation: work and livelihood.” (M. O. Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy. The Project of Reconciliation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 197). A similar argument can be found in W. Kersting, “Polizei und Korporation in Hegels Darstellung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft,” in Hegel-Jahrbuch, 1986, p. 376. In light of the factors named in (i) and (ii) above (“by one’s own determination,” “activity, diligence, and skill”), I do not find it possible to ground, on the basis of the Philosophy of Right, such a thing as an unconditional individual right to participate in the social process of production that can be obtained through legal action. Participation in the social process of production that is not mediated by the above factors would not, in Hegel’s view, correspond to what the members of modern societies would regard as an honorable life. On the topic of the right to work, see also my systematic considerations in Schmidt am Busch “Gibt es ein Recht auf Arbeit?,” in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Vol. 51, no. 6, 2003, pp. 949–968. 59   In view of the large number of persons whose earned income in the private sector is supplemented by public funds, the importance of this question extends beyond an interpretation of Hegel.

hegelian philosophy and critical theory75 one receives from them. As a result, it is possible that Hegel would answer our question in the affirmative. I shall return to this point.60 For the present discussion, it should be noted that the time span between the acquisition and the consumption of goods is insignificant. When a bourgeois acquires a certain amount of goods in the process of “mediation with the universal,” he remains at liberty, according to the modern world’s conception of honor, to consume these goods at a later point in time. Consequently, a bourgeois need not remain in continuous employment to be able to lead an honorable life. If at time t1 he is not pursuing any work and earns his living with goods acquired through work at an earlier point in time t0, he still leads an honorable life at t1. Since Hegel holds that the division of labor in a modern society has advanced to the point where a bourgeois cannot earn a living as a self-sufficient person,61 he does not ask whether it is possible for a bourgeois who performs no work (in the social sense of the term) to lead an honorable life if he refrains from the consumption of socially produced goods. We can also disregard this question for the present discussion. (iv)  “and in this way gain recognition in his own eyes and in the eyes of others”: In light of the factors given in (i), (ii) and (iii) (“in this way”), another aspect of an honorable life is to be recognized in one’s own eyes as well as in the eyes of the other bourgeois.62 This should be understood in the following way: As we have seen, for a bourgeois it is important   (i) to decide for himself to which “moment of bourgeois society” he would like to belong;   (ii) to cultivate specific skills whose application in the work world is of use to society; and (iii) to earn his living by applying such skills within the work world. For the bourgeois, these three requirements are aspects of the life he wishes to lead. They thus form integral parts of the expectation that   See section V below.   Compare Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §183. 62  To be precise, Hegel speaks here not of the other bourgeois, but merely of other bourgeois. However, since he thematizes the “process of mediating […] with the universal” here, he clearly means the view of all the bourgeois belonging to the “universal” or society when he writes “the eyes of others.” 60 61

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he has for a good life of his own. Against such a backdrop, he is only “recognized […] in [his] own eyes” if he does indeed lead a life that fulfills these three requirements. In this case, since the conception of honor that the bourgeois holds is shared by the other members of society, he is also recognized in their eyes as someone   (i) who has made himself belong to one of the “moments of bourgeois society” through his own decision;   (ii) who has, by his own effort, earned skills and qualifications whose application in the work world is of use to society; and (iii) who does not receives goods from society without producing goods for society. As an amendment to what Hegel has said, one should point out that it is also important for a bourgeois (iv) to be recognized by the other members of society with regard to the above points (i), (ii) and (iii). Thus, it is not only important for such a person to lead a life that fulfills requirements (i), (ii) and (iii); it is also important for him to be recognized by society on these counts. To take up Hegel’s formulation above, it could be said that regarding oneself as being recognized in the eyes of others is another aspect of an honorable life. According to Hegel’s conception of bourgeois honor, then, it is in the interest of the members of a modern society to earn their living— or satisfy their demand for goods—in a particular way: namely by participating in social processes of production. People who wish to lead honorable lives in this sense wish not merely to fend for themselves, but to do so in a way that also fends for others (their fellow bourgeois and/or the public). Although many economists regard work as merely something arduous and privative that people endeavor to minimize,63 according to Hegel’s conception of bourgeois honor, work (in the social sense of the term) is an integral part of a good life in the modern world. Hegel’s idea that this form of honor is a good of great importance for the members of modern societies develops out of a socialpsychological analysis of the living conditions of the unemployed and   See, for instance, K. Hillebrand, Elementare Makroökonomie, Munich, Vienna, Oldenbourg, 1996. 63

hegelian philosophy and critical theory77 impoverished.64 As he himself remarks, he has studied “these phenomena” primarily in “the example of England.”65 On the basis of such studies, Hegel surmises that what he terms ‘bourgeois honor’ is a “principle of civil society”66 that must be considered in its sociopolitical ramifications: If the direct burden [of support] were to fall on the wealthier class, or if direct means were available in other public institutions (such as wealthy hospitals, foundations, or monasteries) to maintain the increasingly impoverished mass at its normal standard of living, the livelihood of the needy would be ensured without the mediation of work; this would be contrary to the principle of civil society and the feeling of self-sufficiency and honor among its individual members.67

V According to the Philosophy of Right, three types of institutions are decisive for ensuring that the greatest number of bourgeois can lead an honorable life: (1.) “abstract right,”68 (2.) “the police”69 and (3.) “the corporations.”70 Abstract right is correlated to aspect (i) of an honorable life: it protects the private autonomy71 of an individual bourgeois to decide as an “individual”72 which career he would like to take up. As I have shown elsewhere, abstract right may be understood as an institutionalization of the mutual recognition of bourgeois as persons

  It should be noted, though, that this analysis is part of a “speculative” philosophical investigation. What Hegel understands by such an approach is a question I have discussed elsewhere. Compare H.-C. Schmidt am Busch, Religiöse Hingabe oder soziale Freiheit. Die saint-simonistische Theorie und die Hegelsche Sozialphilosophie, Hamburg, Felix Meiner, 2007, pp. 93–102. 65  Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §245, Remark. 66  ibid. 67   ibid. F. Neuhouser is therefore correct in emphasizing “the ‘spiritual’ satisfaction—self-esteem and the recognition of others—that comes from fulfilling one’s material needs through one’s own labor and effort.” In F. Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory. Actualizing Freedom, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 173. 68  Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§34–104. 69   ibid., §§231–249. 70   ibid., §§250–256. 71   I use this phrase in the juridical sense. See, for instance, T. Korenke, Bürgerliches Recht, Munich, Vienna, Oldenbourg Korenke, 2006. 72  Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §46. 64

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(in Hegel’s understanding of the term).73 Abstract right includes, but is not exhausted by, proprietary rights that form the legal framework of markets. In Hegel’s view, however, if as many bourgeois as possible are to realize (and be recognized under) aspects (ii) and (iii) of an honorable life, then it is necessary to both regulate the markets institutionalized with abstract right and also to structure the sphere of production in a specific way. Market regulations belong to the domain of an economic police74 authorized in cases of market failure to, among other things, take measures aimed at stabilizing the economy.75 Corporations, by contrast, are essentially responsible for structuring the sphere of production. Since I have dealt with Hegel’s theory of the police elsewhere,76 I shall focus on his theory of corporations in what follows. In order to avoid misunderstandings, I shall first make some remarks about terminology. When using the expression “corporation,” Hegel does not refer to a particular historical phenomenon. Thus his theory of corporations cannot be read as a plea for the social rehabilitation of corporations that were called into question during the course of the French Revolution and the nascent Industrial Revolution in Europe. Rather, Hegel’s use of the term “corporation” denotes a form of organization that only exhibits unspecific historical traits and contains rather general institutional directives.77 For this reason Hegel employs—seemingly arbitrarily—a multitude of terms to denote the form of organization in question (e.g. “corporation [Korporation],”

73   Compare Schmidt am Busch, “Personal Respect, Private Property, and Market Economy: What Critical Theory Can Learn From Hegel.” 74   It may not be amiss to signal that Hegel’s theory of the police is inspired by cameralistic economics. On the philosophical foundations of this school of thought, see my discussion in Schmidt am Busch, “Cameralism as ‘Political Metaphysics’: Human Nature, the State, and Natural Law in the Thought of Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi,” in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 409–430. 75   Compare Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §236. On Hegel’s theory of the police see, for instance, Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy. The Project of Reconciliation, pp. 195–197, and P. Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, New Haven, London, Yale University Press, 1999, pp. 265–277. 76   Compare Schmidt am Busch, Religiöse Hingabe oder soziale Freiheit. Die saintsimonistische Theorie und die Hegelsche Sozialphilosophie, pp. 156–163. 77   S. Gallagher has emphasized this point. Compare S. Gallagher, “Interdependence and Freedom in Hegel’s Economics,” in ed. W. Maker, Hegel on Economics and Freedom, Macon, Mercer University Press, 1987, p. 174. A. Honneth, by contrast, takes a different view on this point when he accuses Hegel of equating “spheres of recognition” and “institutional complexes.” Compare Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition: A Response to Nancy Fraser,” pp.172–173.

hegelian philosophy and critical theory79 “cooperative [Genossenschaft],” “guild [Zunft],” and “estate [Stand]”78), asserting that “corporations can be guilds, and this can be a municipality [Stadtgemeinde] and a city in itself; the state, however, is the whole, the unity of many such cooperatives [Genossenschaften] and municipalities.”79 Hegel uses the expression “estates [Stände]” on the one hand as an equivalent to “corporations,” and on the other hand as a term for the “particular systems”80 into which he takes modern society to be divided: the agricultural estate, the “business” estate and the estate of civil servants.81 Hegel views each of these estates as a specific social sphere, namely, as a “particular system of needs, with their corresponding means, varieties of work, modes of satisfaction, and theoretical and practical education.”82 Now, the differentiating characteristics Hegel names here—special forms of consumption, work, and education—are also features by way of which different corporations distinguish themselves from one another. (This will be shown in what follows). The common feature of these three estates and of corporations may explain why Hegel occasionally describes both as estates. Corporations are sites of production for the goods required by society. Regarding the legal situation of corporations, Hegel writes: By this definition [Bestimmung], the corporation has the right, under the supervision of the public authority [Macht], to look after its own interests within its enclosed sphere, to admit members in accordance with their objective qualification of skill and rectitude and in numbers determined by the universal context, to protect its members against particular contingencies, and to educate others so as to make them eligible for membership. In short, it has the right to assume the role of a second family for its members, a role which must remain more indeterminate in the case of civil society in general, which is more remote from individuals and their particular requirements.83

Corporations are subject to the legal requirements that are in force, which include the police regulation mentioned above—it is in this

  See, for instance, Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §207 and §253.  Hegel, Die Philosophie des Rechts. Vorlesung von 1821/22, §256. 80  Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §201. 81   ibid., §§203–205. 82   ibid., §201. It should be noted that Hegel does not use the term “system” in a systems-theoretical sense. 83   ibid., §252. 78 79

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sense that they are “under the supervision of the public authority.” As for the rights of corporations, Hegel says the following: 1. Corporations have the right to determine for themselves whom they would like to take on as members. However, corporations may not engage in hiring practices that would be discriminatory by today’s lights. Rather, they are legally bound to ‘recruit’ their members according to the following criteria: (i) the “skill[s]” or qualifications of the candidate; (ii) the “rectitude” or willingness of the candidate to observe the regulations and demands of the law; (iii) society’s “universal context” or the social need of the goods produced by the corporation. For Hegel, candidates’ “skill[s]” and “rectitude” are to be determined objectively. Therefore, in a corporation’s hiring practices, there needs to be a general and transparent way of determining which qualifications are expected as well as what counts as proof thereof. 2. Corporations have the right to establish insurance systems that secure the livelihoods of their members should these members prove unable to work due to illness, accident or old age, and they are authorized to require their members to contribute to the maintenance of these systems.84 In this way, they provide their members with legal claims to financial support in case of an inability to work. Within a corporation, the protection “against particular contingencies” thus takes the form of rights: “Insofar as corporations protect their members, the members have a right to the corporation’s help, and thus it is not alms that they receive, but rather a right.”85 Because this is so, in the corporation “rectitude […] receives the true recognition and honor which are due to it.”86 3. Corporations have the right to introduce measures by which their members may gain skills, qualifications or further training, and they are authorized to require their members to take part in such measures.

84   In this context, Hegel is thinking of contributions that are proportionate to one’s income. Compare ibid., §253, Remark. 85   ibid., §253. 86   ibid., §253, Remark.

hegelian philosophy and critical theory81 According to Hegel, in exercising the rights named under headings 2 and 3 above, the corporation serves as a functional equivalent to the traditional family. For in pre-modern societies, the family is the substantive whole whose task it is to provide for this particular aspect of the individual, both by giving him the means and skills he requires in order to earn his living from the universal resources, and by supplying his livelihood and maintenance in the event of his incapacity to look after himself. But civil society tears the individual [Individuum] away from family ties, alienates the members of the family from one another, and recognizes them as self-subsistent persons. Furthermore, it substitutes its own soil for the external inorganic nature and paternal soil from which the individual [der Einzelne] gained his livelihood, and subjects the existence [Bestehen] of the whole family itself to dependence on civil society and to contingency.87

Because it protects its members against the contingencies of being unable to work due to illness, accident or old age, as well as of the loss of market-related professional qualifications, the corporation “assume[s] the role of a second family.”88 However, it should be noted that this protection takes on a different form than it does in the family. While members of a family protect one another out of love and affection,89 relations between a corporation’s members are regulated by law. (As we have seen, Hegel himself makes this point.) Although the corporation thus fulfills two functions that were allotted to the family in pre-modern society, it does so in a different way. How does the corporation help its members lead an honorable life? This question is taken up in §253 of the Philosophy of Right: In the corporation, the family90 not only has its firm basis in that its livelihood is guaranteed—i.e. it has secure resources—on condition of its [possessing a certain] capability, but the two [i.e. livelihood and capability] are also recognized, so that the member of a corporation has no need to demonstrate his competence and his regular income and means of support—i.e. the fact that he is somebody—by any further external evidence. In this way, it is also recognized that he belongs to a whole which is itself a part of society in general, and that he has an interest in, and

  ibid., §238.  ibid., §252. 89   Compare ibid., §§162–165. See also A. Honneth, Suffering from Indeterminacy. 90   Hegel refers here to his claim that the corporation is like “a second family” (ibid., §252) for its members. See above. We can leave this point aside here. 87 88

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hans-christoph schmidt am busch endeavours to promote, the less selfish end of this whole. Thus, he has his honor in his estate.91

According to this passage, the member of a corporation leads an honorable life—for he has, as Hegel says, “his honor in his estate.” We thus need to address two questions: What does it mean to have one’s honor in one’s estate? And how does the corporation contribute to leading an honorable life? As we have seen, to lead an honorable life one must      (i) decide for oneself which “moment of bourgeois society” one would like to belong to;   (ii) cultivate specific skills and qualifications whose application in the work world is of use to society; (iii) earn one’s living by applying such skills and qualifications within the work world; and (iv) be recognized by society with regard to points (i), (ii) and (iii). If we assume that abstract right provides sufficient protection for aspect (i) of an honorable life, as well as the social recognition of this aspect, then we have to ask: How does the corporation contribute to the fulfillment of the other three aspects laid out above? Regarding point (ii): The members of a (properly functioning) corporation possess qualifications whose application in the work world benefits society. As we have seen, possessing an “objective qualification of skill” is a condition of their membership in the corporation, and by participating in measures for gaining qualifications or further training, they make sure that they remain in possession of capabilities that are relevant for production. As members of corporations, bourgeois can thus earn socially relevant qualifications. Regarding point (iii): The members of a corporation mutually secure their livelihood through work and through the operations of an internal insurance system that protects them financially should they be unable to work due to illness, accident or old age. As a result, the corporate assurance of livelihood is constituted by the mutual work of these bourgeois: by making a part of their income available for the support of those colleagues who are not productive at that time, the working members of the corporation secure not only their own subsistence, but also that of their colleagues.  ibid., §253.

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hegelian philosophy and critical theory83 The structure of this corporate assurance of livelihood has effects on the type of honor that is accorded to the members of such an institution. Since they do not earn their living as individuals, they cannot lead an honorable life as individuals. Rather, they are only honorable as members of a corporation in which they mutually secure their livelihoods through their work and the maintenance of a social insurance system. It is in this sense that the members of a corporation have their honor in the corporation or, as Hegel writes, “in [their] estate.” It is now possible to return to a question that was posed above.92 There we asked: According to Hegel’s notion of bourgeois honor, can a person only lead an honorable life if the value of the goods she produces for others is at least as high as the value of the goods she receives from them. We concluded that Hegel does not explicitly deal with this question. Now, if bourgeois honor takes the form of corporate honor or “honor of one’s estate [Standesehre],”93 then the condition named above does not have to be met. For it is possible to have corporate or estate based honor even if the value of one’s own contributions to an insurance system is less than the value of the insurance benefits one claims. However, in order to attain this sort of honor, one must contribute to the corporate production of goods. Only those who have worked as a member of a corporation can have their honor “in [their] estate.” Regarding point (iv): The members of a corporation are socially recognized with regard to points (ii) and (iii). Hegel states this explicitly in the passage from the Philosophy of Right quoted above (§253). In a commentary on this paragraph he elaborates: Honor is being recognized as what one is, such that one’s subjectivity is regarded as such by the other; the competence etc. of the member of a corporation is recognized by the fact that he is a member, and then this recognition [Anerkanntsein] is also documented in that he is a member, a master, and has this title. His title is the external sign for everyone that he is recognized as such. Thus it [his being recognized; SaB] is also placed externally. This title expresses the publicity of his recognition by his fellow members, who are in the position to judge his competence; with this recognition it is also recognized that his livelihood is secure.94

  See section IV, point (iii) above.  ibid., §207. 94  ibid., §253. 92 93

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The social recognition of the professional “capability” and “competence” of a corporation member can be analyzed as a two-step process. The first step concerns an individual’s recognition by his colleagues (step 1) and then his recognition by society (step 2). Within the corporation, a member’s recognition as a professionally qualified and competent individual is based on the ability of other members of the corporation to judge the relevant qualities of their colleague. Clearly Hegel is of the opinion that the members of a corporation are more capable than most other members of society to make such judgments. This is not implausible if there exists a professionally specialized society based on the division of labor. Colleagues sharing a professional field know which qualifications and efforts are needed in their work sphere, and they have the competence to judge the qualifications and efforts displayed by their colleagues. On the other hand, in a highly specialized work world individuals normally lack the knowledge to judge professional performance in other social sectors appropriately. For these reasons, it is plausible to maintain that in a modern society colleagues are especially qualified to judge their competence. The recognition that the professionally qualified individual experiences within society (step 2) is based on the recognition that his colleagues accord him (step 1). Following Hegel, the former kind of recognition takes place when one’s recognition by one’s colleagues is rendered public in a specific way. “Titles” act as the vehicles of this communication insofar as they distinguish their bearers as members of a corporation. They are “the external sign for everyone that he is recognized as such,” or “the publicity of his recognition by his fellow members, who are in the position to judge his competence.” In regard to the general recognition of the individual as professionally qualified, non-members of a given corporation simply follow the judgment internally carried out within that corporation—judgment that is rendered public in a socially determined manner. While nonmembers normally have neither the opportunity nor the professional competence to judge the capability and competence of a corporation member, they rely on the judgment of those who, as bearers of titles, are publicly recognized as competent judges in a particular section of the work world.95 If such judges esteem someone in the socially 95   On this topic of being recognized as a recognizer see H. Ikäheimo, “On the Genus and Species of Recognition,” Inquiry, Vol. 45, 2002, pp. 447–462, H. Ikäheimo & A. Laitinen, “Analyzing Recognition: Identification, Acknowledgement and Recognitive

hegelian philosophy and critical theory85 required manner for his professional qualifications, skills and efforts, then, following Hegel, the esteemed individual will also be recognized in this regard by the other members of society. If no esteem is accorded to him by his colleagues, he will not count as professionally qualified or competent in the eyes of the others either. Hegel argues in a similar manner when it comes to the social recognition of the corporation member in the manner specified under point (iii): the titles express “the publicity of his recognition by his fellow members, who are in the position to judge his competence; in this recognition it is also recognized that his livelihood is secure.” According to this, persons distinguished as members of a corporation are esteemed by society as bourgeois who secure their livelihood or “regular income and subsistence” through the production of socially needed goods. In view of what has been established under point (iii) above, this kind of esteem cannot be accorded to persons as individuals, but only as members of a corporation. Because of their titles other members of society take them to be persons who mutually secure their own demand for goods by means of a socially useful activity. It is in this sense that they are regarded as having their honor in their corporation or estate.96 For the purposes of this chapter, the following should be emphasized: In the form of recognition described above, professionally relevant competencies can be classified as being of higher or lower value only to a very small degree. It is certainly conceivable that there are different titles within a single profession (or corporation) that distinguish their bearers as being more or less competent; however, many persons who pursue different professions cannot be classified comparatively on the basis of their titles. This can be explained by the content Attitudes towards Persons,” in eds. B. v. d. Brink and D. Owen, Recognition and Power, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 33–56, and A. Laitinen, “On the Scope of ‘Recognition’: The Adequate Regard and Mutuality,” in eds. Schmidt am Busch and Zurn, The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 319–342. 96   As noted above, Hegel believes that any corporation is publicly recognized as an institution that serves to produce socially useful goods. (Compare Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §253 and §253, Remark.) It is possible, however, that some corporations be regarded by some members of society as production sites of (i) socially useless or even (ii) socially harmful goods. Obviously, such circumstances would be relevant from the perspective of recognition theory. While the issues related to the above cases are too complex to receive full treatment here, they have to be taken into account by any effort to make Hegel’s conception of bourgeois honor fruitful for contemporary debates.

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of the professional activities in question. Members of the same profession (or corporation) perform work that is similar enough to be compared on the basis of its content. (For this reason, colleagues are particularly able to judge one another’s professional capability and competence). By contrast, many professional activities in a highly specialized work world cannot be compared by reference to their content. Indeed, what should one select as the measure for a comparison between, say, scientific, pedagogical, craftsman’s and artistic work? To summarize: in Hegel’s view, societies characterized by abstract right, police regulation of markets and sites of corporate production form a set of institutions that enable people to lead an honorable life, that is to say    (i) to decide for themselves which “moment of bourgeois society” they would like to belong to;   (ii) to cultivate specific skills and qualifications whose application in the work world is of use to society; (iii) to earn their living by applying such skills and qualifications within the work world; and (iv) to be recognized by society with regard to points (i), (ii) and (iii). VI In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel implicitly upholds the following two theses: 1. As a member of a functioning corporation a bourgeois is not interested in attaining an ever-increasing level of (personal) consumption. 2. As a member of a functioning corporation a bourgeois is not interested in attaining an ever-increasing level of (personal) income. Within the framework of the present study it is simply not possible to explain why Hegel subscribes to these two theses. However, it is also not necessary. I will thus limit myself to remarking that Hegel believed that members of a well-ordered society can fulfill their need for recognition (as persons, bourgeois and members of a political community) without having either of the interests referenced under headings 1 and 2. Furthermore, such members have no other needs that would

hegelian philosophy and critical theory87 motivate them to constantly pursue a higher level of personal income or consumption. Here one could object that Hegel himself analyzes patterns of behavior—denoted by the phrases “quest for profit [Gewinn]”97 and “love of extravagance” or “luxury”98—that derive from the pursuit of the interests named in theses 1 and 2. Further, Hegel also indicates that these behaviors are specifically modern phenomena that arise in civil societies. And finally, Hegel convincingly argues that a society whose members pursue interests 1 and 2 is in danger of destroying its own order of recognition.99 All of this is certainly true. However, this does not mean that our above observations are incorrect. In order to reconstruct Hegel’s theory of the “quest for profit” and “luxury” (and to establish its implications for current Critical Theory), one must turn to §253 of the Philosophy of Right, where his theory is outlined. As we have already seen, Hegel states in the main text of the paragraph: “In the corporation, the family not only has its firm basis in that its livelihood is guaranteed—i.e. it has secure resources—on condition of its [possessing a certain] capability, but the two [i.e. livelihood and capability] are also recognized, so that the member of a corporation has no need to demonstrate his competence and his regular income and means of support—i.e. the fact that he is somebody—by any further external evidence.” Hegel’s remark to this paragraph reads as follows: When complaints are made about that luxury and love of extravagance of the professional [gewerbetreibenden] classes which is associated with the creation of a rabble, we must not overlook, in addition to the other causes [of this phenomenon] (e.g. the increasingly mechanical nature of work), its ethical basis as implied in what has been said above. If the individual [der Einzelne] is not a member of a legally recognized [berechtigten] corporation (and it is only through legal recognition that a community becomes a corporation), his is without the honor of belonging to an estate, his isolation reduces him to the selfish aspect of his trade, and his livelihood and satisfaction lack stability. He will accordingly try to gain recognition through the external manifestations of success in his trade, and these are without limit [unbegrenzt], because it is impossible

 ibid., §306.  ibid., §253, Remark. 99   See, for instance, G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophie des Geistes (1805/06), in Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 8, ed. R.-P. Horstmann, Hamburg, Meiner, 1976, pp, 242–245. 97 98

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hans-christoph schmidt am busch for him to live in a way appropriate to his estate if his estate does not exist; for a community can exist in civil society only if it is legally constituted and recognized. Hence no way of life of a more general kind appropriate to such an estate can be devised.100

To understand the following reflections it is helpful to consider the thrust of Hegel’s argument. Hegel tries to show that striving for everincreasing levels of income and consumption is a compensatory striving for social recognition that only appears under specific social conditions. In doing so he contests the existence of something like an original need or tendency belonging to human nature to increase one’s own income or level of consumption “without limit.” Hegel tries to substantiate the two theses above by showing that a modern society that includes an economic police and corporations does not fulfill the conditions that, in his view, must obtain before striving for an everincreasing level of income or consumption emerges as a phenomenon at a level relevant for society. In what follows, I will investigate (i) what the abovementioned striving for social recognition consists of; (ii) the conditions under which it emerges, in Hegel’s view; and (iii) the extent to which it can be understood as a compensatory phenomenon. Regarding point (i): The type of striving for social recognition in question consists in “try[ing] to gain recognition through the external manifestations of success in his trade, [which] are without limit.” As Hegel’s reference to “the luxury and love of extravagance of the professional classes” makes clear, the phrase “external manifestations” denotes consumptive expenditures. Persons who strive for recognition in this way therefore try to be recognized by society as professionally successful bourgeois, and they believe that they can attain this goal by documenting their economic success in the form of consumptive expenditures. More precisely, this striving for recognition is based on the assumption that a bourgeois is regarded as all the more professionally successful the greater his economic “success in his trade” in comparison with that of others. So long as he belongs to such a context of recognition, he will thus be motivated to attain an ever-increasing income, and to document his economic success with the highest possible consumptive expenditures. For this reason, persons who wish to be recognized  Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §253, Remark.

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hegelian philosophy and critical theory89 in this manner can be said to have a “quest for profit” as well as a tendency towards “luxury” and “love of extravagance.” These considerations make it clear that bourgeois who strive for the type of recognition described here differ from corporation members in the manners laid out above in theses 1 and 2: they try to attain an everincreasing level of income and consumption for themselves. Regarding points (ii) and (iii): Under what conditions does the phenomenon of striving for recognition analyzed in point (i) emerge? The passages cited above from §253 of the Philosophy of Right as well as Hegel’s Remark to this paragraph give us five factors to consider: (F-1) Persons who strive for the type of recognition analyzed in (i) can only secure their livelihood by means of their own income (and by means of wealth accumulated from it). In contrast to the members of a corporation, they are ‘isolated’ individuals in the sense that they do not belong to any collective social insurance system.101 For this reason, their “livelihood” lacks, as Hegel puts it, “stability.”102 (F-2) Persons who wish to be recognized in the manner laid out in (i) do not participate in any “way of life of a more general kind” that might shape and stabilize their consumptive demands or the manner in which they are satisfied. Due to their “isolation” from any such “way of life,” their consumptive demands and the manner in which they are satisfied “lack stability.”103 (F-3) Persons who strive for recognition of the type analyzed in (i) do not belong to a professional field in which the individual has an interest not only in his own well-being, but also that of his colleagues. They are therefore ‘isolated’ individuals in the sense that they are reduced “to the selfish aspect of [their] trade.” (F-4) Persons who wish to be recognized in the manner laid out in (i) are “without the honor of belonging to an estate.” Therefore they 101   As we have seen, Hegel places social insurance systems on the same level as corporations (and not on the level of the society as a whole). 102  Here I leave aside the possibility of securing one’s livelihood through inheritance. 103   Here one could object that the stabilization in question might also be produced by membership in other social contexts, for instance religious communities. It is therefore problematic to hold that non-membership in a corporation necessarily goes along with unstable consumptive behaviors. Hegel, however, appears to do precisely this, as his Remark to §235 of the Philosophy of Right shows.

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cannot be socially esteemed as bourgeois who secure their livelihood through their work on the basis of their membership in a corporation.104 Instead, they are ‘isolated’ individuals in the sense that they must themselves show to the other members of society that they earn their living with success. (F-5) Persons striving for recognition in the manner analyzed in (i) do not belong to any production site of social goods in which they would experience esteem on the basis of their professional “capability” and “competence.”105 They are ‘isolated’ individuals in the sense that they do not have a professional field in which their accomplishments might be positively evaluated by other competent persons on the basis indicated above. As a result, they cannot receive any social esteem as professionally qualified and competent individuals. To sum up: persons wishing to be recognized in the manner analyzed in section (i) have the following properties: they can only secure their livelihood by means of their own income and by means of wealth accumulated from their own income; they have no stable consumptive preferences; they have no colleagues in whose well-being they might have an interest; they are not socially esteemed on the basis of their membership in a corporation as individuals who earn their own living by means of their work; and they are not esteemed as professionally qualified and competent individuals. Which of these five factors are relevant with respect to the emergence of the type of striving for recognition analyzed in section (i) above? Obviously, this striving satisfies or compensates for some human need. But which one? Since Hegel offers no discussion of this question, it makes sense to distinguish between three possibilities: (a) the need to secure one’s own livelihood (N-1); (b) the need to be esteemed as a bourgeois who secures his own livelihood with success (N-2); and (c) the need to be socially esteemed as a professionally qualified and competent individual (N-3). In investigating these

104   As we have noted, Hegel occasionally employs the expression “estate [Stand]” as a synonym for “corporation.” See section V above. This is also the case here, as indicated by the passage cited above (“If the individual is not a member of a legally recognized corporation (and it is only through legal recognition that a community becomes a corporation), his is without the honor of belonging to an estate […]”). 105  Hegel, Die Philosophie des Rechts. Vorlesung von 1821/22, §253.

hegelian philosophy and critical theory91 possibilities, we will be able to clarify the relevance of the above five factors with respect to the emergence of the type of striving for recognition analyzed in section (i). (a)  Let us assume that the behavior discussed in (i) serves to satisfy the need N-1. Under this interpretation, such behavior is independent from whether the needy individual is socially esteemed as a professionally qualified member of the work world, or as a bourgeois who successfully secures his livelihood. But if needs N-2 and N-3 are irrelevant for the present discussion, so are factors F-4 and F-5. Therefore, if we assume that the behavior analyzed in (i) serves to satisfy the need N-1, we need to investigate whether its emergence can be explained by this need, as well as by factors F-1, F-2 and F-3. Is this possible? According to Hegel’s 1821/22 commentary to the Philosophy of Right, one aspect of the striving for recognition analyzed in (i) can be explained by the need N-1 as well as factors F-1, F-2 and F-3. This can be seen in the following passages: Because man is rational, he must make provisions for the future. I earn my living [Subsistenz], but I want the universality of my subsistence, i.e. for the span of my life and for my family […].106

Let us assume, Hegel continues, that each [member of society; SaB] is only assured that he has the permission to secure his subsistence for himself. Then there is no security of subsistence and no honor. Only the possibility of his subsistence is allowed. The individual who lacks a corporation in this way is dependent upon the earnings of the day, and finds himself in the situation of the gambler. He has to try to win in this instant, and is induced to make demands in the most impudent manner; because he is dependent on chance, he is dependent on all contingencies, and the impudence of making demands belongs to them.107

According to these passages, Hegel’s argument is as follows: humans are beings that provide for the future; they are interested in producing conditions under which their livelihoods (and that of those belonging to them) can normally be secured for the long-term. If the individual depends solely on his work for his livelihood—and does not p ­ articipate in any collective insurance system—it is in his interest to achieve the  ibid., §251.  ibid., §253.

106 107

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highest possible income because of his concern for the future. This is so because he can only protect himself against the “particular contingencies”108 of human existence through savings. This explains why he strives to maximize his income “in his trade” and why in doing so he has no qualms about making demands “in the most impudent manner.” Following Hegel’s line of argumentation here, one could say that our theory (a) is well-suited to account for one aspect of the striving for recognition analyzed in section (i): the interest in always attaining a higher income for oneself. To explain this, it would indeed be sufficient to consider the need to secure one’s own livelihood (N-1), and to assume that human actors are “selfish” and that their “livelihood and satisfaction lack stability” (F-1, F-2 and F-3). By contrast, it would not be necessary to consider the needs to be socially esteemed as a professionally competent individual and as a bourgeois who successfully earns his living (N-2 and N-3), or the question of whether these needs are satisfied or not (F-4 and F-5). With regard to this argument, two critical remarks are in order: 1. In my view, it is questionable whether every effort to increase one’s income can be explained conclusively by the attempt to secure one’s own livelihood for the long-term. The (continuous) effort to make a fortune that is already very large even larger can hardly be traced back to such a motive.109 (This striving could perhaps be understood as a habitualized striving for high income that originally served to secure one’s livelihood for the longterm. However, we can leave this aside due to the following point.) 2. Attempts to attain a high level of consumption cannot be explained by the factors named in (a). If striving for an everincreasing income originates in the motivation to secure one’s livelihood for the long-term, it will be accompanied by the effort to accumulate savings and thus to limit consumptive expenditures. Therefore, costly consumptive “manifestations” of one’s own “success in [one’s] trade” cannot be explained by what is stated in (a). For this reason, we require a different theory.

 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §252.   L. Boltanski and È. Chiapello seem to advance a similar argument. Compare L. Boltanski and È.Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott, London, Verso, 2005. 108 109

hegelian philosophy and critical theory93 (b)  Let us add to the elements laid out in (a) the need to be socially esteemed as a bourgeois who successfully secures his livelihood (N-2), as well as factor F-4. We can now not only explain why at least those people who do not possess very large fortunes attempt to maximize their income, but also why consumptive expenditures are carried out for reasons related to recognition. According to the present explanation (b), the individual must himself show that he earns his living with success—as we have seen, this function is not fulfilled by membership in one of the “moments of civil society.” Furthermore, since he is a selfish actor, consumptive manifestations are an appropriate means with which he can show his fellow bourgeois that he receives an income that is sufficient for his livelihood.110 However, there are two problems with such a reading: 1. The elements belonging to (b) cannot explain why consumptive manifestations take place “without limit.” (As we have seen, this is what Hegel’s claims). In order to document one’s success in earning a living, it can be appropriate to engage in certain consumptive practices; however, it remains unclear why particularly high levels of consumptive expenditures should be required. Even if one supposes that “subsistence level[s]” are cultural phenomena,111 and that among the members of a society there is some uncertainty about which kinds of income should be regarded as necessary for securing one’s livelihood, it is not possible to account for unlimited consumptive manifestations or “luxury and love of extravagance” on the basis of the elements composing (b). For luxury articles include precisely those goods that are regarded as unnecessary or superfluous with regard to earning one’s livelihood.112 2. Like (a) above, approach (b) cannot explain why persons who possess large fortunes strive to make them even larger, and as large as possible. Since ‘limited’ consumptive manifestations are

110   Here I leave aside the possibility that consumptive expenditures may also be financed by inherited wealth. 111   The fact that Hegel shares this assumption is given in §234 and §244 of the Philosophy of Right. 112   See on this topic W. Sombart, Liebe, Luxus und Kapitalismus. Über die Entstehung der modernen Welt aus dem Geist der Verschwendung, Berlin, Wagenbach, 1996, pp. 85–89.

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hans-christoph schmidt am busch sufficient for the documentation of success in earning one’s living, that striving cannot be inferred from the desire to furnish such manifestations without limit. Therefore, the above striving, which is one aspect of the behavior analyzed in (i), cannot be explained on the basis of approach (b).

(c) The situation improves if we add to the elements included in (b) both the need to be esteemed as a professionally qualified and competent individual (N-3) and factor F-5 (according to which the individual lacks esteem in precisely this regard). This statement may be surprising. Given F-5, N-3 cannot be fulfilled. Why, then, are these two elements of interest for the present discussion? In my opinion, the behavior analyzed in (i) can be understood as compensation for the lack of esteem as a professionally qualified and competent individual. Under this reading, one kind of professional esteem would be replaced by another kind of professional esteem. What are the relevant characteristics of these two kinds of esteem? As we have seen, esteem as a professionally qualified and competent individual is based upon a positive evaluation of such features that comes from other competent people (colleagues from the profession or corporation). On the basis of such an evaluation—which is socially expressed by way of titles, according to Hegel—an individual is esteemed as a professional not only by his colleagues, but also by the other members of society. As explained above, this kind of esteem only makes it possible to classify professional performances as more or less valuable to a very limited degree. The kind of esteem that serves to compensate for the lack of recognition as a professionally qualified and competent individual is based on the prices paid for professional activities. Accordingly, someone is regarded as more or less professionally successful the higher or lower his income is in comparison with that of the other members of society. Therefore, his social esteem depends on monetary evaluations of the products (goods or services) that he, and the others, offer. Under market conditions, all members of society—and not just other competent people—are, in principle, in a position to carry out such evaluations. It  should be noted that this kind of social esteem makes it possible to classify any work as more or less useful and thus any working person as more or less successful. This is so because it provides a universal—namely, monetary—standard for the evaluation of these activities and persons.

hegelian philosophy and critical theory95 If people try to be socially esteemed in this manner, they have a reason to always strive for a higher level of income and consumption. This thesis can be substantiated on the basis of our reflections thus far. Under the above assumption, the levels of—and, more precisely, the differences in—income form the basis of people’s comparative social esteem as professionals. Thus, from the perspective of social esteem, a human individual is better positioned when his income rises and/or when the incomes of other people sink. As a result, an individual participating in a social practice of this kind of esteem has an esteembased reason to strive for an improvement of his income and to contribute to the reduction of other persons’ incomes. And since no maximum in the difference in income can be established, such an individual has an esteem-based reason to always strive anew for an improvement in his income and for a reduction in the incomes of other people. If, in addition, we assume that human beings in such circumstances are selfish, lack stable consumptive preferences, and must document their professional success themselves (F-2, F-3 and F-4), it is understandable why they try to attain the highest possible level of consumption. They regard manifestations of this sort as an appropriate means to display the level of their income and the extent of their professional success to other members of society. For these reasons, we are justified in maintaining that the behavior analyzed in (i) can be understood as compensation for the lack of esteem as a professionally qualified and competent individual.113 One might ask whether all five factors have to be given before the striving for recognition analyzed in (i) can emerge. In my view, this is not the case. If striving for recognition compensates for the lack of esteem as a professionally qualified and competent individual, then it serves to satisfy a need that is independent of the need to secure one’s own living (N-1). Accordingly, the type of striving for recognition analyzed in (i) is independent of the presence or absence of factor F-1. Even persons whose livelihoods would be secured through social insurance systems can therefore strive for recognition in this manner.

113   By making this case, I do not say, of course, that the behavior analyzed in section (i) is the only possible way to compensate for the lack of esteem as a professionally  qualified and competent individual. Striving for esteem based on political power may also be understood in this way. This possibility is discussed by M. Weber. Compare M. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, Munich, C. H. Beck, 2006, pp. 68–69.

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If the above compensation thesis is correct, even persons who are esteemed as successfully earning their living can strive for recognition as laid out in (i). The reason is that this striving for recognition serves to satisfy another need as N-2.114 It may therefore occur even when N-2 is fulfilled. To summarize: The emergence of the kind of recognition analyzed in (i) can be adequately explained on the basis of the elements presented in (c) above. These elements help explain why people seek to always attain a higher level of income and consumption. Therefore, when it comes to explaining these phenomena, the theory described in (c) has greater potential than the theories laid out in (a) or (b). These considerations allow us to substantiate two theses Hegel’s theory of the corporation includes. As noted above, these theses read: 1. As a member of a functioning corporation a bourgeois is not interested in attaining an ever-increasing level of (personal) consumption. 2. As a member of a functioning corporation a bourgeois is not interested in attaining an ever-increasing level of (personal) income. In Hegel’s account, the interests described in 1 and 2 only emerge under specific social conditions; they therefore do not constitute components of an unchanging human nature. Furthermore, Hegel believes that production sites of social goods framed by an economic police and by corporations do not fulfill the conditions that he takes to be necessary if people are to develop an interest in attaining an ever-increasing level of income or consumption. For these reasons, he (implicitly) upholds the two theses above. This line of reasoning can be understood as a critique of the unlimited validity of what economists describe as the “non-satiation requirement.” Under this assumption, people are insatiable in the sense that there is no bundle of goods that can completely satisfy their consumptive demands; rather, for every bundle X there is a bundle Y that they would prefer over X.115 If Hegel is correct, then the members of modern societies are “insatiable” not in general, but only under certain (social) circumstances.   See section VI, (b), point 1 above.   Compare W. Reiß, Mikroökonomische Theorie, Munich, Vienna, Oldenbourg, 1998, pp. 224–227. 114 115

hegelian philosophy and critical theory97 Furthermore, the behavior of those who are insatiable is explained differently by Hegel than it is within (the dominant trend of) contemporary economics. The latter operates on the assumption that these people strive for an ever-increasing level of income in order to satisfy as many of their consumptive needs as possible. Hegel, by contrast, sees them as constantly trying to reach a higher level of consumption in order to socially document the level of their income and the extent of their professional success. On this view, their consumption therefore fulfills a representational function that does not come under proper consideration in contemporary economic theory.116 VII As we have seen, the question of “how critical theory should understand the social structure of present-day capitalism”117 is the subject of much controversial debate. In accordance with the socio-ontological premise of his theory, Axel Honneth seeks to “interpret bourgeoiscapitalist society as an institutionalized recognition order.”118 By contrast, Nancy Fraser and others argue that such an interpretation would make it impossible to understand the behavior of capitalist markets— in their eyes, it is theoretically unfounded and politically naïve. Like other Critical Theorists, Fraser is of the opinion that capitalist markets have to be analyzed in terms of systems-theory. Should this be true, recognition theory would also be ill-suited to ground an internal critique of contemporary capitalism that meets the requirements specified in section II above. In this case, it would fail to achieve the aims of Critical Theory in the domains of both social theory and social critique.

116  T. Veblen is also of the opinion that consumptive behavior performs a social representational function. In contrast to Hegel, however, he believes that what is represented in this manner is one’s independence from incomes gained through occupational employment. (Compare T. Veblen, Conspicuous Consumption, New York, Penguin, 2006, p. 21). By way of consumptive expenditures, the members of modern societies thus wish “to show that [their] time had not been spent in industrial employment” (ibid., p. 23). According to Veblen’s theory, then, social esteem does not refer to what Hegel calls “bourgeois honor.” 117  Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition: A Rejoinder to Axel Honneth,” p. 211. 118   Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition: A Response to Nancy Fraser,” p. 138.

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In my view, Hegel’s social and political philosophy can help clarify the conceptual relations between patterns of recognition and economic processes, and it can help us understand why recognition theory matters when it comes to analyzing and criticizing capitalist markets. For these reasons, Hegelian thought can be a major source of inspiration for current Critical Theory in the domains of social theory and social critique. With respect to the social-theoretical goal of Critical Theory, the following should be emphasized: On the reading of the Philosophy of Right offered in the previous sections, Hegel believes that the “quest for profit” and “luxury” are key elements of a specific practice of social esteem, in which people recognize one another as more or less professionally successful citizens. If these considerations are correct, then it is possible to use recognition theory to analyze some of those dispositions and behaviors that many social scientists regard as central to the “new spirit of capitalism”:119 striving for professional success as well as for the personal qualities necessary in this respect; striving for an everincreasing income; and displaying professional success (for example through a specific pattern of consumptive behavior). Obviously, such an analysis would greatly enhance the possibility of “understand[ing] the social structure of present-day capitalism” in terms of recognition theory. This can be shown with respect to the very phenomena Nancy Fraser cites: “prioritiz[ing] maximization of corporate profits” can be understood as a key element of the above practice of social esteem, and such a practice would undoubtedly have considerable influence on “political-economic factors such as the supply of and demand for different types of labor; the balance of power between labor and capital; the stringency of social regulations including the minimum wage; the ease with which firms can shift their operations to locations where wage rates are lower; the cost of credit; [and] the terms of trade.” As a result, it is not appropriate to rule out the possibility of a recognitiontheoretical analysis of capitalist markets from the (obvious) relevance of these factors for contemporary economic processes.120 As my

119   I borrow this phrase from L. Boltanski and È. Chiapello. Compare Boltanski & Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. 120   For this reason, it is inappropriate to maintain that a social theory of recognition is “congenitally blind” to economic processes “which cannot be reduced to cultural schemas of evaluation” (Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition: A Rejoinder to Axel Honneth,” p. 215).

hegelian philosophy and critical theory99 considerations show, the social structure of present-day capitalism need not be the other of recognition.121 In addition, Hegel’s social and political philosophy provides resources that can help achieve the goals of Critical Theory in the domain of social critique. Indeed, his notion of bourgeois honor opens up the possibility of criticizing contemporary capitalism on the basis of patterns of recognition that are part and parcel of the normative fabric of “bourgeois-capitalist” societies. In the remainder of my chapter, I shall briefly outline the thrust of such a critique.122 Sociologists have convincingly shown that participation in the working world is a major source of social esteem and profoundly influences peoples’ sense of their own worth.123 What is more, work seems to be important for most people because—or, insofar as—it allows them (1) to acquire and employ specific skills or qualifications and to be socially recognized as having them, and (2) to make their living by being useful to other members of society and to be socially recognized in this respect.124 If this is true, we are justified in believing that what Hegel termed “bourgeois honor” might actually belong to the normative fabric of modern societies. Now, the notion of bourgeois honor is able to ground a critique of some institutional elements that are central to contemporary capitalism. For example, highly flexible business organizations—a characteristic feature of many enterprises125—can be shown to be problematic because an environment in which teams are rapidly changing and people are easily moved from one task to another makes it difficult for workers to acquire professional skills and be recognized by coworkers as having them. Similarly, deregulated labor markets that promote poorly paid temporary labor, short-term employments, and 121   Whether or not the phenomena mentioned above are actually to be analyzed in terms of social esteem can only be investigated empirically. This question therefore lies outside the scope of the present study. 122   I discuss this issue at greater length in H.-C. Schmidt am Busch, ‘Anerkennung’ als Prinzip der Kritischen Theorie (Berlin, New York, de Gruyter, 2011). 123   Compare for example P, Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Oxford, Polity, 1999; and R. Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Ques­ tion, trans. and ed. Richard Boyd, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers, 2003. 124   Compare R. Sennett, Respect in a World of Inequality, New York, W. W. Norton, 2003, pp. 63–64. 125   Compare R. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, New York, W. W. Norton, 1998; and R. Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006.

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informal service work can be questioned on the grounds that they jeopardize the abilities of workers to consider themselves, and be recognized as, useful members of society. As these examples show, “bourgeois honor” thus makes it possible to criticize institutional arrangements that are central to contemporary capitalism in terms of recognition theory. Moreover, Hegel’s social and political philosophy opens up the possibility of using recognition-theoretical terms to criticize some of the elements of the spirit of contemporary capitalism mentioned above: striving for professional success as well as for the personal qualities necessary for such success; striving for an always higher income; and displaying professional success (for example through a specific pattern of consumptive behavior). As we have seen above, Hegel believes that these elements are components of a compensatory striving for esteem that only emerge under specific social conditions. On his account, these conditions are morally deficient in that they make it impossible for many humans to satisfy some of their basic social needs, which Hegel cashes out in terms of “bourgeois honor.” Obviously, much more conceptual, normative and social-scientific work would have to be done if one wanted to make Hegel’s arguments fruitful for contemporary Critical Theory. As I hope to have shown, however, there is reason to believe that such an effort can yield important results.

Chapter four

Recognition Theory and Institutional Labour Economics Craig MacMillan “It is so with our industrial system. Let men compete in the full assurance of equal opportunity, and their competition will not be directed mainly to crush the weak, but will develop the highest forms of voluntary cooperation. … Voluntary cooperation is the natural outcome of fair and open competition. …Under these progressive conditions competition will continue, but the ‘survival of the fittest’ will not be that of the unscrupulous and the cunning, but of the morally fit.” John R. Commons1

1. Introduction In “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition” Axel Honneth seeks to reorient the critical debate about the organisation of work under capitalism.2 He enjoins us to replace what he calls “external criticism,” which is made from a perspective outside the capitalist system and assumes the availability of forms of work that are unaffected by the modern division of labour and task specialisation, with immanent criticism grounded in the normative conditions of the capitalist labour market. In order to articulate these normative conditions, Honneth draws on the writings of both Hegel and Durkheim.3 He argues that the key to uncovering these normative conditions is to view the primary function of work as fostering social integration rather than economic efficiency. But as both Hegel and Durkheim saw, the reality of the division of labour and task specialisation under capitalism  J. Commons, “Progressive Individualism,” The American Magazine of Civics, Vol. 6, no. 6, 1895, pp. 562–574, pp. 573–4. 2   A. Honneth, “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition,” in eds. H. -C. Schmidt am Busch and C. Zurn, The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2010, pp. 223–240. 3  G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, Newburyport, MA, Focus, 2002 and E. Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, New York, Free Press, 1997. 1

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makes it difficult for work to perform this function. This raises the question: under what conditions is the capitalist organisation of work able to foster solidarity and thereby social integration? For Hegel, Durkheim and Honneth, the answer lies in the socially integrative achievements of institutions that support (but are not identical with) the capitalist labour market. Traditionally, orthodox or neoclassical economics has not assigned a constructive place to institutions beyond those necessary for the maintenance of civil order and the enforcement of contracts. Apart from these core institutions, others, such as professional associations and trade unions, are viewed at best as providing a veil for market forces or at worst as obstacles to the achievement of economic efficiency. By contrast a heterodox school of thought in economics, institutionalism, argues that institutions are crucial to the operation of the economy in general and to the labour market in particular.4 A further point of contrast concerns the proper function ascribed to markets. Orthodox economics proposes that the principal normative goal of the economy is the achievement of economic efficiency, which in turn ensures that firms maximize profits and consumers maximize utility. From this perspective the organisation of work should be structured in such a way that labour is efficiently allocated. The issue of social integration is not explicitly discussed in this framework, but is assumed to more or less spontaneously emerge as a by-product of the efficient functioning of the economy. By contrast, institutional economics “recognizes the worth of human labour and the dignity of the worker” and proposes that the achievement of economic efficiency is not the sole or even primary function of the labour market.5 On the institutionalist view, work should be organised in a way that ensures the workplace is not a source of injustice and offers the possibility of personal development and self-actualisation.6 4   Within Economics there are different traditions in institutionalism. Typically a distinction is made between “old” and “new” institutionalism and this is discussed in a later section. The argument developed in this chapter concerns links between “old” institutionalism and recognition theory. A useful introduction to the “old” institutionalist approach to labour is eds. D. Champlin and J. Knoedler The Institutionalist Tradition in Labor Economics, New York, M. E. Sharpe, 2004. 5   D. Champlin and J. Knoedler, “Prospects for the Future of Institutionalist Labour Economics,” in eds. Champlin and Knoedler, The Institutionalist Tradition in Labor Economics. 6  B. Kaufman, “John R. Commons and the Wisconsin School on Industrial Relations Strategy and Policy,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 57, no. 1, 2003, pp. 3–46.

recognition theory and institutional labour economics103 These opening remarks suggest that Honneth’s proposed “­recognition-theoretic” reframing of the criticism of work under capitalism resonates with the old institutionalist critique of neo-classical economics. In the rest of this chapter I shall explore the relation between Honneth’s theory of recognition and institutionalist economics in more detail. In section two I will examine the arguments made by Honneth regarding the relationship between recognition and the organisation of work under capitalism, paying particular attention to his rejection of external criticism and his counter-model of immanent critique. I will also expand on the institutionalist solutions to the problem of social integration Honneth extracts from Hegel and Durkheim. After briefly examining the relationship between orthodox economics and institutional economics in section three, in section four I move on to the main concern of the chapter: the links between institutionalist labour economics (especially as developed by John Commons) and Honneth’s perspective on the organisation of work under capitalism. Section five summarises the relation between recognition theory and institutionalism as I have presented it in this chapter. 2.  Honneth’s Theory of Recognition and Work under Capitalism Honneth’s redefinition of the relation between recognition and work hinges on the distinction between external and immanent critique of the capitalist organisation of work. External critique focuses on the degradation of work under capitalism compared to an idealised precapitalist model of work that nevertheless was still present in the early phases of capitalist development. This critique could be described as the “craftsman critique” and is based on the early writings of Marx. According to the craftsman model of work, the worker has a high degree of control over the work process and is able to ply his skills in a creatively autonomous fashion such that the final result of his labour, the finished product, is a direct embodiment and representation of his skill. The craftsman model of work had considerable empirical validity under pre-capitalist modes of production. By contrast, the capitalist organisation of work is based on the division of labour and the associated process of task specialisation which splinters the craftsman’s unified and singular act of production into an increasing number of stages, each of which is completed separately. In so doing, the worker is deskilled, and is simply required to perform the same specialised task over and over again, as exemplified in assembly line production.

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Consequently, a worker never produces the finished product, indeed he or she is alienated from the final fruit of his or her labour, and has virtually non-existent control over the pace of work. In other words, the worker is no longer a craftsman. Honneth classifies the craftsman critique as external criticism because under capitalism the driving force behind the organisation of work is the division of labour which is incompatible with craft work. Although craft work continues to exist under capitalism it is not the dominant or defining mode of work. Consequently, it is a criticism from outside the capitalist system, lacking both conceptual relevance and empirical validity. For this reason it cannot form the basis of a forceful critique of work under capitalism. The rejection of external criticism based on the craftsman model marks a significant but not wholly unexpected shift in Honneth’s thinking on work.7 In his initial theorising in “Work and Instrumental Action,” Honneth argued that a critical conception of work, grounded in what is referred to here as the craftsman model, has enduring conceptual value despite not being consistent with the dominant mode of organising work under capitalism.8 Specifically, Honneth cited the work of Bernoux who empirically established that workers in the industrial plant he investigated were constantly developing strategies to appropriate some degree of control over the work process.9 Honneth interpreted this finding as providing empirical validation of the normative value of the craftsman model of work. It is important to note that Honneth made particular mention of the research methods employed by Bernoux that included participant  observation, standardised questionnaires and open interviews. In The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth also argued that the moral order of society could be established using the “tools of anthropo­ logical fieldwork”: participant observation and interviews.10 Finally,  7   The focus in this chapter is on Honneth’s most recent redefinition of the relationship between work and recognition. For an excellent critical assessment of Honneth’s thinking on this topic up until this recent work see N. H. Smith “Work and the Struggle for Recognition,” European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 8, no. 1, 2009, pp. 46–60.  8   A. Honneth, “Work and Instrumental Action: On the Normative Basis of Critical Theory,” in A. Honneth The Fragmented World of the Social, Albany, NY, SUNY, 1995, pp. 15–49. Original German version published in 1980.  9   See ibid., pp. 47–48. 10   A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1995. These techniques are obviously of greatest relevance when the society under investigation is contemporary. In situations where the

recognition theory and institutional labour economics105 in  his debate with Fraser, Honneth has remarked that “in order to estab­lish a conception of the moral order of society, the starting-point tends to be a phenomenological analysis of moral injury.”11 These comments, and many others, reflect Honneth’s fundamental methodological commitment to the investigation of the conscious experiences of injustice and disrespect suffered by people in different social contexts, including the workplace, for the purpose of establishing the normative presuppositions of a society. Yet the approach taken to the organisation of work under capitalism in “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition” seems to break with this basic methodological premise. I will return to this point, and its significance for understanding the relation between recognition theory and institutionalism, a little later. Having cast aside external criticism, Honneth then sets himself the more ambitious but potentially more fruitful task of establishing the basis of an immanent critique of the capitalist organisation of work. He does this by appealing to “moral norms” that “already constitute rational claims within the social exchange of services.”12 In addition, immanent critique must take its departure from work as it is actually practised within the division of labour, which is in turn considered not just from the point of view of its economic efficiency, but in terms of its role in generating social solidarity. It is with a view to showing how the capitalist labour market should function if it is to generate social integration that Honneth next turns to Hegel and then Durkheim. For Hegel, markets can only perform their “primary integrative function” if each person is able to work and develop their skills in a way that contributes to the stock of permanent capital. When the right to work is understood as an obligation to work, there is, furthermore, a reciprocal obligation that requires workers to be paid a minimum wage, one which is adequate to ensure their economic independence. Under these labour market conditions it is possible for “subjects to mutually recognise each other as private autonomous beings” which is the basis of “self-respect.” Honneth points out that for Hegel capitalist development could undermine its own “normative recognitional conditions” because the concentration of profits in too few hands, society being studied existed in the past Honneth advocated the use of historiographical techniques pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Barrington Moore. 11  A. Honneth, “Recognition or Redistribution?: Changing Perspectives on the Moral Order of Society,” Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 18, no. 2–3, 2001, pp. 43–55, p. 48. 12   Honneth, “Work and Recognition,” p. 7.

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the decline in wages and increasing task specialisation, could lead to a lack of satisfaction from work. In order to avoid these developments Hegel argued for what could be called an institutional solution. The operation of the market economy would be supported by two organisations, the “police” and the “corporations” or trade associations. The former would monitor the quality of goods, provide the basic infrastructure necessary for economic activity, and through colonisation find markets in which increasing production can be sold. The latter would ensure that their members maintain their skills and abilities and earn an amount consistent with a decent livelihood. Honneth sums up Hegel’s position in the following way: The structures of the capitalist labour market could only develop under the highly demanding ethical precondition that all classes are able to entertain the expectation both of receiving a wage that secures their livelihood and of having work that is worthy of recognition. Hegel sought to prove that the new market system can only lay claim to normative approval on two conditions: first, it must provide a minimum wage; second, it must give all work activities a shape that reveals them to be a contribution to the common good.13

After considering Hegel, Honneth turns his attention to Durkheim. Durkheim’s core proposal is that the division of labour succeeds in the crucial task of fostering social solidarity because as the tasks of workers become more specialised, the workers themselves become more acutely aware of their dependence on the activities of fellow members of society for the satisfaction of their needs. At the same time, Durkheim acknowledged that this experience of healthy mutual dependency among members of society would only result if certain normative conditions are already met in the economy. From Honneth’s point of view, this meant that Durkheim too was approaching this issue from an immanent rather than an external perspective. As Honneth interprets them, both Durkheim and Hegel argue that the capitalist system requires each person to make a contribution to the common good through work. In this sense people have a right to work, but a simultaneous duty to work also. Moreover, in return for labour they should receive a living wage which is great enough to maintain their skills, or what economists now call their human capital. But whereas for Hegel the receipt of a living wage that was sufficient to   ibid., p. 16.

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recognition theory and institutional labour economics107 ensure economic independence provided the experiential basis of “self-respect,” Durkheim emphasised the importance of the perception that the division of labour is fair and transparent, as a condition for free consent to labour contracts. This would in turn only occur if workers enjoyed equal access to the acquisition of qualifications. It was also crucial for Durkheim that all “social contributions must be remunerated in accordance with their real value for the community.”14 These conditions that Honneth draws from Durkheim can be thought of as ensuring that the terms of the employment contract are reasonable and fair. However, Honneth also points out that Durkheim went beyond this to argue that despite the deleterious effects of the division of labour on the quality of work, the activity of working should itself be meaningful, at least to the extent of being reasonably complex and cooperative. Overall, Honneth distils from Hegel and Durkheim a set of normative conditions that must exist if the division of labour is to generate both social integration and moral legitimacy. If these conditions are met workers will have the experience of contributing to the common good. The normative conditions relate to both the terms and conditions of work and the nature of the work itself. Specifically, the conditions are that: workers should be free to enter into a labour contract; workers should be adequately rewarded for their work, that is, paid a living wage; workers should have equal access to the acquisition of qualifications, and; workers should experience their work as intrinsically meaningful, which requires work to be at least moderately complex and performed in a collective context. Therefore, from the point of view of the theory of recognition, if these normative conditions are met, work will be a source of socially recognised experiences that in turn will generate a sense of self-esteem. It is important to note that both Hegel and Durkheim considered it highly unlikely that these normative conditions would be realized through the unimpeded workings of the capitalist system. Consequently, they both proposed that the capitalist labour market be supported by other institutions that will facilitate the realisation of these conditions. As discussed above, Honneth briefly outlines Hegel’s institutional solution based on two organisations: the “police” and the “corporation.” However, Durkheim also has an institutional remedy that Honneth   ibid., p. 20.

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does not mention. Durkheim believed that because economic life had become and was becoming more specialised, the state on its own was not able to regulate economic activity sufficiently to avoid the abuses of power that undermine the sense of social solidarity that would otherwise spontaneously emanate from the division of labour. According to Durkheim, there needed to be organisations that could operate in the social space between the individual and the state, in specialised spheres of economic activity such as a particular industry. Ideally, “the sole group that meets these conditions is that constituted by all those working in the same industry, assembled together and organised in a single body. This is what is termed a corporation, or professional group.”15 At the time of writing Durkheim reported that unions of either employers or employees were the social groups that most closely resembled what he had in mind. However, he noted that whilst it was “both legitimate and necessary” that these unions be separate organisations there was little regular contact between them. What was required was “a common organisation to draw them together without causing them to lose their individuality, one within which they might work out a common set of rules and which, fixing their relationship to each other, would bear down with equal authority upon both.”16 The absence of such a “common organisation” led otherwise to the group with the most power setting the terms and conditions of work. In other words, the contract that emerged from bargaining between the two groups would be a reflection of the power advantage one group had over another. Such an outcome would more than likely violate a number of the normative conditions outlined by Durkheim. For example, the group with the most power would be able to coerce the weaker group into accepting contractual terms that were inferior to those that would have been negotiated had bargaining resources been equal. It is difficult to know exactly what type of institution Durkheim had in mind when he talked about a “common organisation” appropriate for modern societies. Indeed, Durkheim argued in the Preface to the second edition of the Division of Labour that it is not the sociologist’s job to set out in detail what this “common organisation” should look like. Rather he argues that the sociologist’s task is to identify on the basis of detailed analysis the general principles that should be followed  Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, p. xxxv.  Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, p. xxxvi.

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recognition theory and institutional labour economics109 in designing the organisational framework. One of the principles identified by Durkheim is that the dimensions of the professional group be closely linked to the dimensions of the market. If the market is national then it is necessary for the professional group to be organised along national lines. It is also important that professional groups have an appropriate regulatory relationship to the state, in which the state is not overly controlling, because this had been the cause of the decline of corporations under the Roman Empire. In addition, it is essential that professional groups do not simply promote the economic interests of members but also support members in other ways by providing assistance in difficult times, educational and artistic activities, and the opportunity for political engagement. A final principle articulated by Durkheim is that the form corporations or professional groups take is conditioned by the circumstances in which they emerge and accordingly any particular form is temporary. He demonstrates the temporal aspect of institutions by discussing at length the emergence, function and decline of professional groups under the Roman Empire and during the Middle Ages. 3.  Orthodox Economics and Institutional Economics Orthodox or mainstream economics, more formally known as neoclassical economics, proposes that the goal of economic activity is the efficient use of resources to produce goods and services. The division of labour enables workers to focus on a narrow set of tasks that they learn to perform very well through repetition. Thus the main function of the division of labour from the point of view of mainstream economics is to increase economic efficiency. Social order emerges spontaneously as a by product of this process. Orthodox economics assigns a preeminent position to the market in the functioning of the economy. The market is conceived in “naturalistic” terms—that is, in terms continuous with the natural sciences—and is regarded as analytically prior to other institutions. Beyond the market, orthodox economics sees little role for institutions apart from those that are necessary for the enforcement of contracts and the protection of property rights: the judicial system, the police and the military. Other institutions such as trade unions, professional associations, employer associations and regulatory bodies are regarded at best as ineffective—because they are nothing but a veil through which market forces operate regardless—or

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at worst as a source of inefficiency. Orthodox economics’ conception of the market mechanism as a “natural” one, constituted beyond the socio-cultural realm, typically leads it to construe institutions as causing economic outcomes that diverge from their “natural” values.17 Given this conception, it follows that if the relations between capital and labour are so conflicted that they produce poor economic outcomes and social dysfunction, the source is likely to be the excessive influence of institutions: for example, excessive union power or onerous state regulation of the employment relationship. Consequently, from the point of view of mainstream economics, the solution involves the minimisation of institutional influences. By contrast institutional economics contends that the economy, including the market, is institutionally constituted. Before examining this idea more closely, a few elementary background remarks about institutionalism might be in order. Institutional economics emerged in the United States in the late nineteenth century as a reaction against neoclassical economics and flourished in the early twentieth century. Indeed, institutional labour economics was the dominant approach to the study of labour in the United States until world war two. While it has been rightfully argued that institutionalism was primarily an American phenomenon, there have been many prominent institutional economists on the other side of the Atlantic, including the Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal and K. Wlliam Kapp. Institutionalism has not developed a unified body of theory, and the work of the leading institutional economists does not lend itself to easy synthesising. Nevertheless it is possible to identify some key characteristic elements of the institutional approach. Clarence Ayres, a prominent early institutionalist, argued that the core issue separating institutionalism and orthodox economics was the conception of the market as the guiding mechanism of the economy, or, more broadly, the conception of the economy as organised and guided by the market. It is simply not true that scarce resources are allocated among alternative uses by the market. The real determination of whatever allocation occurs in any society is the organisational structure of that society—in short, its institutions. At most the market only gives effect to prevailing instituting.18 17  Y. Ramstad, “John R. Commons’s Reasonable Value and the Problem of Just Price,” Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. xxxv, no. 2, 2001, pp. 253–277. 18  C. Ayres, “Institutional Economics: Discussion,” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, Vol. 47, 1957, pp. 26–27. Cited in W. Samuels, “The Present

recognition theory and institutional labour economics111 For institutionalism, then, the market was no longer conceived of as a naturally occurring phenomenon, but as another institution functioning according to its own set of “working rules.” Moreover, these working rules are established by the interplay of the market and other institutions such as the state, the courts, employer associations and unions. Another key component of institutionalism is that institutions play a decisive role in structuring and regulating economic activity. While there is controversy within institutionalism concerning the correct definition of an institution, Geoffrey Hodgson, a leading contemporary institutionalist, has developed a useful broad definition of institutions as “systems of established and embedded social rules that structure social interactions.”19 Institutions are generated by the interplay of socio-cultural, legal, political and economic forces and play a fundamental role in forming individuals, particularly their tastes and preferences. From a methodological point of view institutionalism is multidisciplinary, making use of ideas from a range of human sciences, such as psychology and sociology, rather than colonising these other disciplines—which is effectively how orthodox economics has approached them.20 In terms of research methods, institutionalism makes extensive use of both qualitative and quantitative research techniques. The prominent role played by qualitative research techniques, such as fieldwork, participant observation and interviews, is due to the interest institutionalism has in understanding the consciously articulated experience of participants in the economy. In this respect the institutionalist perspective differs strikingly from the orthodox approach, which tends to dismiss as “unscientific” research based on the reported conscious experience of people and qualitative techniques more generally. Finally, there is a strong tendency among institutionalists to construct models that are based on realistic assumptions that are solidly grounded in empirical observation. This is also at odds with orthodox economics which tends to disregard the question of whether a model’s assumptions are realistic or not, on the basis that only the model’s predictive value really counts. State of Institutional Economics,” Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 19, no. 4, 1995, pp. 569–590 (p 571). 19   G. Hodgson, “What are Institutions?,” Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. xl, no. 1, 2006, p. 18. 20   B. Fine, “A Question of Economics: Is it Colonizing the Social Sciences?” Economy and Society, Vol. 28, 1999, pp. 403–425.

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With regard to institutional labour economics in particular, the leading figure during its formative period was John R. Commons and the central organisation advocating an institutionalist approach to the study of the labour was the University of Wisconsin. The intellectual roots of institutionalist labour economics lie in the German historical school, the work of Sydney and Beatrice Webb in Britain, American Pragmatist philosophy and the Social Gospel movement in America.21 Commons argued that core economic processes were not natural phenomena but the product of collective action. Competition, as Commons put it, “is not Nature’s ‘struggle for existence’ but is an artificial arrangement supported by the moral, economic, and physical sanctions of collective action.”22 Indeed, Commons argued that “[T]he subject matter of the institutional economy…is not commodities, nor labor, nor any physical thing—it is collective action which sets the working rules for property rights, duties, liberties and exposures.”23 Commons defined an institution as “collective action in control, liberation and expansion of individual action.”24 He understood an institution to be a system of “working rules” which coordinates and sets limits on individual behaviour. Commons’ concept of collective action covered a vast range of human behaviour, “from unorganised custom to many organised going concerns, such as the family, the corporation, the trade association, the trade union, the reserve system, the state.”25 From a legal perspective, institutions also establish the rights and duties that pertain to individuals when engaged in certain activities: “[I]n the language of ethics and law,” Commons wrote, “all collective acts establish relations of rights, duties, no rights and no duties.”26 The perspective adopted by Commons was that institutions or working rules construct and guide all types of social interaction among 21   See S. Jacoby, “The New Institutionalism: What can it Learn from the Old?” Industrial Relations, Vol. 29, n. 2, 1990, pp. 316–359; B. Kaufman, “The Institutionalist and Neoclassical Schools in Labor Economics,” in Champlin and Knoedler, eds. The Institutionalist Tradition in Labor Economics; D. Spencer, The Political Economy of Work, London, Routlege, 2008. 22  J. Commons, Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political Economy, New Brunswick, Transaction, 1990, 1934, p. 713. 23   J. Commons, Institutional Economics:Its Place in Political Economy, p. 523. 24   J. Commons, “Institutional Economics,” American Economic Review, Vol. 21, no. 4, 1931, p. 649. 25  ibid. 26  ibid.

recognition theory and institutional labour economics113 people.27 Consequently, Commons believed that human beings are institutionally constructed. This view stands in sharp contrast to that of neoclassical economics which assumes the existence of rational selfinterested individuals with a given set of consistent preferences and tastes. In other words, individuals are assumed to come to the economy to participate in market exchange preformed. Commons took the opposite approach, arguing that the institutional structure (including the market) is analytically prior to the individual and that the individual can only be understood in the context of background formative institutions: If it be considered that, after all, it is the individual who is important, then the individual with whom we are dealing is the Institutionalized Mind. Individuals begin as babies. They learn the custom of language, of cooperation with other individuals, of working towards common ends, of negotiations to eliminate conflicts of interest, of subordination to the working rules of the many going concerns of which they are members. They meet each other, not as physiological bodies moved by glands, nor as “globules of desire” moved by pain or pleasure, similar to the forces of physical and animal nature, but as prepared more or less by habit, induced by the pressure of custom, to engage in those highly artificial transactions created by the collective human will… Instead of isolated individuals in a state of nature they are always participants in transactions, members of a concern in which they come and go, citizens of an institution that lived before them and will live after them.28

Commons’ conception of the individual as institutionally formed had implications for the school of psychology he drew upon to explain human behaviour. For Commons: [N]early all historic psychologies are individualistic, since they are concerned with the relation of individuals to nature, or to other individuals, treated however, not as citizens with rights, but as objects of nature without rights or duties. This is true all the way from Locke’s copy psychology, … Bentham’s pleasure-pain psychology, the hedonistic marginal utility psychology, … Watson’s behaviourism, … All are individualistic. Only Dewey’s notion is socialistic.29

27  See Hodgson, “What are Institutions?” and B. Kaufman, “The Institutional Economics of John R. Commons: Complement and Substitute for Neoclassical Economic Theory,” Socio-Economic Review, Vol. 5, no. 1, 2007, pp. 3–45. 28  Commons, Institutional Economics:Its Place in Political Economy, pp. 73–74. 29   Commons, “Institutional Economics,” p. 655.

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Dewey’s notions of custom and habit were particularly important for Commons because they provided explanatory mechanisms which could account for the internalisation of working rules by individuals. For neoclassical economics, in keeping with its individualistic perspective, theorising begins with individual economic agents, such as the representative consumer or the representative firm. By contrast, for Commons, because of the key role institutions play in structuring human interaction, the basic unit of economic activity is the transaction, which is fundamentally interactive or relational. According to Commons, “[T]ransactions are, not the “exchange of commodities,” but the alienation and acquisition of the rights of property and liberty created by a society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labour can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged.”30 The study of transactions required an institutional psychology, which Commons called negotiational psychology. Biddle has suggested that negotiational psychology was Commons’ term for the “mental processes and associated activities of people as they engaged in transactions.”31 A key task of negotiational psychology was to uncover the individual’s “habitual assumptions”: perceptions, expectations and strategies that are formed through social interaction and maintained by social sanction. At the level of the group these cognitive and behavioural regularities are termed “customary assumptions.” In order to tap into the individual’s habitual assumptions, Commons particularly valued first-hand observation and interviews of participants to a transaction.32 When interviewing was not possible Commons advocated the detailed study of historical documents revealing the experiences of people at the time of conflicts; for example, newspaper articles on industrial disputes, union pamphlets, court decisions and collective agreements. In this regard it is important to note that one of Commons’ greatest intellectual achievements was the compilation of the multivolume work The Documentary History of American Industrial Society.33   ibid., p. 652.   See J. Biddle, “The Role of Negotiational Psychology in J. R. Commons’s Proposed Reconstruction of Political Economy,” Review of Political Economy, Vol. 2, no. 1, 1990, pp. 1–25. 32   Biddle even cites Commons as declaring the interview method to be “the prime method of investigation.” Commons, Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political Economy, p. 106; cited in Biddle “The Role of Negotiational Psychology,” p. 16. 33   See J. Commons et al, A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, Volumes 1–10, Cleveland, Arthur H. Clark, 1910–1911. 30 31

recognition theory and institutional labour economics115 4.  Institutional Labour Economics and Honneth’s Immanent Critique Commons’ documentary history illustrates the similarities between institutionalist methodology and the “recognition-theoretic” approach advocated by Honneth. The contrast between both and mainstream economics is just as striking, since as we have noted, the latter sees little point in allowing explanations of socioeconomic phenomena to be informed by the consciously articulated experience of market participants. In this section I will explore the relation between Commons’ institutionalism and Honneth’s recognition paradigm in more detail, with a particular focus on Commons’ institutionalist approach to labour economics and the program of immanent critique laid out by Honneth in “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition.” A central feature of the institutional economics of Commons is that it is a positive form of economic analysis. Commons was committed to providing a detailed and rich description of how the economy, and the labour market in particular, actually operates. In addition, Commons was a social reformer and consequently there was also a strong normative dimension to his institutional economics. In a well known quote concerning the aim of his research Commons made clear this normative orientation stating: “I was trying to save Capitalism by making it good.”34 Ramstad has even claimed that “there can be no doubt that the central purpose to which the entire body of Common’s policy prescriptions gave effect was that class income inequalities should and can be reduced through public policy.”35 However, it would be incorrect to understand Commons’ normative vision as being narrowly focused on redistribution. In terms of the labour market, Commons aimed primarily at equalising opportunities rather than outcomes. Kaufman has identified the broad normative goals held by Commons and his colleagues to be economic efficiency, equity and justice in the workplace, and opportunities for personal growth and self-actualisation.36 And as Ramstad has pointed out, Commons took individual selfrealisation to be based on the satisfaction of what Commons called the “three most fundamental wishes of mankind”: equality, liberty and

  J. Commons, Myself, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1934, p. 143.   Ramstad, “John R. Commons’s Reasonable Value and the Problem of Just Price,” p. 261. 36   Kaufman, “John R. Commons and the Wisconsin School on Industrial Relations Strategy and Policy,” p. 5. 34 35

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security. Equality related to the desire to be treated the same as others, while liberty was the desire to be free from the arbitrary will of those in authority. Finally, security referred to the wish to have relatively stable expectations concerning the future.37 Central to the normative dimension of Commons’ institutional economics was the concept of reasonable value. According to Commons, whether or not a particular outcome, such as a market price, represented a reasonable or fair value was not linked to the intrinsic pro­ perties of a particular commodity but rather was determined by the processes or working rules that generated the market outcome. For Commons, a reasonable or fair value emerges when a transaction is entered into by a “willing buyer and willing seller.”38 Moreover, a buyer or seller can only be regarded as willing if the bargaining process is free of duress or coercion. To explain this more fully it is important to note that Commons identified three forms of power that could be deployed by parties to a transaction in order to secure a desired outcome: duress, coercion and persuasion. Duress refers to physical power and primarily involves the use or threatened use of violence. Coercion refers to economic power and is based on the principle of scarcity. The party to a transaction for whom scarcity is less of a constraint has the capacity to wait longer in a bargaining deadlock and hence press for terms that are more advantageous at the expense of the other party. The grip of scarcity on a party to a transaction is determined by their wants relative to their resources, and on their opportunities to deal with alternative parties. Finally, persuasion refers to what Commons called moral power and involves each party to a transaction pressing their case through argument and inducement. Commons argued that markets generate reasonable values when the parties negotiate a transaction free of duress, with balanced economic power, and rely on persuasive argument. If these conditions are met then free competition is transformed into fair competition and people will “compete in the full assurance of equal opportunity, and their competition will not be directed mainly to crush the weak, but will develop the highest forms of voluntary cooperation.”39

37   See Ramstad, “John R. Commons’s Reasonable Value and the Problem of Just Price.” 38  Commons, Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political Economy, p. 337. 39   Commons, “Progressive Individualism,” p. 573.

recognition theory and institutional labour economics117 Commons regarded scarcity of resources as a universal principle from which emerge two other principles: conflict of interest and a sense of mutual dependence. This in turn gives rise to collective action  which generates a set of working rules to maintain order.40 The study of the conflict of interest between capital and labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was of particular interest  to Commons and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin and led to the development of the concept of the “labor problem.” The “labor problem” was a constellation of poor labour market outcomes including poverty level wages, low work effort, workplace accidents, excessive work hours, strikes, high employee turnover, and child labour.41 Documenting the “labor problem” and formulating strategies to resolve it was a critical focus of Commons’ work. Kaufman noted that Commons regarded the “labor problem” as an extremely serious threat to social cohesion: “If there is one issue that seems likely to overthrow our civilization it is this issue between capital and labor.”42 From Commons’ perspective individual bargaining, between an employer and employee, was unlikely to produce terms of employment  that could be regarded as fair or reasonable. Even if the law proscribed the actual or threatened use of violence between the two parties such that they could be regarded as equal in terms of their capacity to exercise duress, Commons argued that they were unequal in terms of economic power or coercion. The individual worker was at a bargaining disadvantage because not only did he or she have few alternatives due to the problem of persistent and pervasive unemployment, but the worker almost invariably possessed fewer resources than the employer. Both of these factors meant that the power of scarcity had a greater grip on the individual worker than the employer. Consequently, bargaining power and the subsequent terms of employment were tilted in favour of employers. This was empirically demonstrated by the existence of the “labor problem.” In order to solve this problem Commons proposed a number of solutions in the course of

40  See Commons, Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political Economy and Ramstad “John R. Commons’s Reasonable Value and the Problem of Just Price.” 41   Kaufman, “John R. Commons and the Wisconsin School on Industrial Relations Strategy and Policy,” p. 4. 42   J. R. Commons, “Industrial Relations,” Papers Reel, Vol. 17, 1919, p. 1; cited in Kaufman, “John R. Commons and the Wisconsin School on Industrial Relations Strategy and Policy,” p. 4.

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his life that have been carefully documented by Kaufman.43 As with Hegel and Durkheim, all of these solutions required institutional adjustment. Commons argued that it was critical to increase the bargaining power of workers to equality with firms. In other words, Commons aimed at ensuring that the principle of scarcity exercised the same control over both workers and firms and both had as equal as possible powers of coercion. An early solution advocated by Commons involved trade unions bargaining collectively on behalf of workers to secure written collective agreements. Workers bargaining together with an employer clearly had more economic power and were able to lift wages above poverty levels. Commons also argued that collective bargaining should occur on an industry-wide basis because this would remove labour as a dimension along which firms could compete with each other for a competitive advantage. If the terms and conditions of all workers in an industry were set down in a collective agreement binding on all employers in the industry, a competitive advantage could only be derived through improvements in technology or managerial efficiency and not by cutting wages. Finally, Commons advocated that government regulation and the courts should protect the right to collectively organise and should facilitate collective bargaining, but then should allow the two parties to negotiate unencumbered the terms and conditions of the collective agreement.44 In addition to wage levels, other conditions could be written into trade agreements that introduced or increased worker voice and representation in the workplace, such as rules guaranteeing due process in the investigation of employer and employee grievances. These due process provisions meant that workers were recognised as in some sense equal with their employers, and were also an important check on the power wielded by management. This increased sense of equality generated by the right to due process introduced “industrial democracy” into the workplace and allowed people to be recognised as citizens not just in society but in the workplace too. Two quotes of Commons reported by Kaufman bring home these points powerfully. The first is Commons’ description of attending a week-long conference

43   Kaufman, “John R. Commons and the Wisconsin School on Industrial Relations Strategy and Policy.” 44  ibid.

recognition theory and institutional labour economics119 between the mine workers union and the coal operators association in 1900: I was struck by the resemblance to the origins of the British Parliament. On the one side of the great hall were nearly a thousand delegates from the local unions, … on the other side were about seventy employers… It was evidently an industrial House of Commons and House of Lords, but without a King.45

The second quote also concerns industry-wide collective bargaining: Here is an industry (coal) where, for many years, industrial war was chronic, bloodshed frequent, hatred, and poverty universal. Today the leaders of the two sides come together for two weeks parliament, face to face, with plain speaking, without politics, religion, or demagogy … The most important result of these trade agreements is the new feeling of equality and respect which springs up in both employer and employee. After all has been said in press and pulpit about the “dignity of labor,” the only “dignity” that really commands respect is the bald necessity of dealing with labor on equal terms.46

The terms and conditions of employment that emerged from collective bargaining would be regarded as fair and reasonable having been negotiated freely from an equal basis. Moreover, these terms and conditions written down in the collective agreement would give both parties security of expectations for the future, they would ensure that all workers were treated equally, and they would free workers from the capricious rule of the foreman. This strategy thereby allowed Commons’ three fundamental goals of equality, liberty and security to be realised. Notably, Commons’ advocacy of industry-wide collective bargaining is also consistent with Durkheim’s general principle that professional groups should be organised on a basis consistent with the market in which they operate and that this should (at the time of his writing) be a national basis because large-scale industries operate in a national market. Commons was concerned that a strategy built on trade unions, collective bargaining and industry-wide agreements would still not include a large number of workers who either were not members of unions or were members of weak unions. In order to extend many of the improved working conditions written into collective agreements to  Commons, Myself, p 72; cited in ibid., p. 6.   J. R. Commons, Trade Unionism and Labor Problems, 1st edition, New York, Augustus Kelley, 1905 (reprinted 1967), pp. 2 and 12; cited in ibid. 45 46

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vulnerable workers, Commons advocated a combination of protective labour legislation and social insurance schemes overseen by regulatory bodies. Minimum wages, maximum hours of work, health and safety standards, accident insurance and unemployment insurance were some of the aspects of work that Commons sought to address. In order to craft appropriate legislation and to enhance compliance with the labour reforms, Commons proposed the formation of regulatory commissions that would be staffed by experts in the field and commissioners chosen by the key stakeholders—employer groups, unions and consumers or the public. Kaufman reported that Wisconsin was the first state to adopt this strategy when it instituted the Industrial Commission of Wisconsin in 1911 on which Commons served as a commissioner representing the public.47 This tripartite structure was consistent with Commons’ normative vision. Working rules were formulated on the basis of joint consultation between employers, unions and consumers. Each group had equal representation and thus equal bargaining strength. Duress and coercion were neutralised and rules were established on the basis of moral power expressed in persuasive argument. The outcomes of such a process could thus be said to satisfy Commons’ theory of reasonable value. They also meet the normative conditions of work spelled out by Honneth. For these new regulatory bodies were designed to ensure that all working people were paid a living wage through minimum wage laws and more broadly that they could not be coerced into accepting poor terms of employment. It is important to note that during the first forty years of the twentieth century in the United States, when the institutionalist school was the dominant approach to the study of labour, there was very strong support for minimum wage legislation among economists. Support was based on a number of arguments including the substantial bargaining disadvantage suffered by many groups of workers that resulted in levels of remuneration inconsistent with a living wage. Such an outcome was condemned on moral grounds because of the social maladies and general unrest it generated. Interestingly, in more recent times some institutionally oriented labour economists have also provided robust defences of the minimum wage.48 This support for legislated minimum   See ibid.   B. Kaufman, “Promoting Labour market Efficiency and Fairness Through a Legal Minimum Wage: The Webbs and the Social Cost of Labour,” British Journal of Industrial Relations, forthcoming 2009; and R. Prasch, “In Defense of the Minimum Wage,” Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. xxx, no. 2, 1996, pp. 391–397. 47 48

recognition theory and institutional labour economics121 wages among institutionalist economists contrasts sharply with the negative view towards minimum wages of contemporary mainstream economists.49 It is clear from the foregoing discussion that Commons’ institutional economics addresses a number of the normative conditions of work articulated by Honneth. In particular, it was important to Commons that workers be able to freely consent to a labour contract and having done so be paid a living wage. Commons did not have much to say about the other normative conditions concerning the opportunity to acquire qualifications and the opportunity to perform moderately complex work in a collective context. But an argument could be made that Commons’ emphasis on industry-wide collective  bargaining at least indirectly addressed the latter issue because it created an experiential foundation on which workers within an industry could experience a sense of social solidarity. More importantly, however, later institutional labour economists have explicitly attended to these issues. Two post-world war institutional labour economists in the United States, Clark Kerr and John Dunlop, have described the way sociocultural, economic, and political forces interact to create internal labour markets (ILMs). Kerr (1954) identified two different ILM models: the craft or guild model and the industrial or manorial model. The guild or craft internal market was based on the craft union having control over the jobs “falling within a carefully defined occupational and geographical area.”50 If firms required a specified occupational skill in that area they must hire a union member or face industrial action. Once a worker was a union member they could largely move anywhere within the internal market, and movement between employers, and between the plants of a particular employer, was normal, with workers’ careers more associated with horizontal moves between employers than vertical moves with a single employer. Workers could be fired by an individual employer but could not be ejected from the craft ILM 49   R. Prasch, “American Economists and Minimum Wage Legislation During the Progressive Era: 1912–1923,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Vol. 20, no. 2, 1998, pp. 161–175. 50   See C. Kerr, “Labor Markets: Their Character and Consequences,” Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting, Industrial Relations Research Association, 1950. Also see C. Kerr, “The Balkanization of Labor Markets,” in ed. E. Wright Bakke Labor Mobility and Economic Opportunity, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1954. Both reprinted in C. Kerr, Labor Markets and Wage Determination: The Balkanization of Labor Markets and Other Essays, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1977.

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except by the union itself. Employment security was not linked to a worker’s relationship with a particular employer but to his occupation or skill, and therefore to union membership. Social norms relating to fairness often played a role in determining which workers received employment. For example, the daily allocation of work in the market for longshoremen on the West Coast of the U.S. in the 1930s was based on a rotational system, where those that had worked the day before went to the end of the dispatch queue and those that had been waiting longest for work were at the front of the queue.51 The second type of internal market, the manorial market, was based on the industrial enterprise, rather than occupation. Production jobs were structured into job ladders, with jobs rising in importance as workers moved up the ladder. Access to the internal market was restricted to entry-level jobs on ladders. These jobs were known as ports of entry. Job vacancies within the firm were filled internally, with promotion based typically on seniority and ability playing a secondary role. Seniority also played an important role in determining the order of lay-offs when the enterprise had to reduce its workforce. Therefore, social norms relating to equity were important in terms of determining both promotion and lay-off. Power was also important with the threat of industrial action generally preventing the enterprise from filling vacancies on job ladders by external recruitment. In addition, within a particular enterprise, there could be a number of job families— production, maintenance, sales and white-collar—each constituting a separate sub-internal market. Typically, horizontal movement between job families was not possible. Unlike in craft based internal markets, horizontal movement between enterprises was discouraged not simply by seniority-driven promotion systems but also by the non-portability of pension plans, the knowledge that a worker would only be employed at a port of entry in another enterprise, and sometimes by the existence of a “gentleman’s agreement” between employers against pirating labour from each other. Wages were attached to jobs, and therefore primarily determined by the position of one job relative to another within an ILM. The influence of market forces on wages was relatively muted in such ILMs because a change to one wage rate would 51   See L. Kahn, “Internal Labor Markets: San Francisco Longshoremen,” Industrial Relations, Vol. 15, 1976, pp. 333–337. Also see W. Finlay, “One Occupation, Two Labor Markets: The Case of Long-shore Crane Operators,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 48, 1983, pp. 306–315.

recognition theory and institutional labour economics123 necessitate a change to all wages within the ILM, if notions of equity were to be maintained.52 These two markets were seen as separated from the “open” or “unstructured” labour market by institutional rules. Kerr made clear however, that the open market was not free of institutional influences but was rather not as structured as craft or industrial markets. This perspective was implicit in Kerr and Siegel’s argument that the labour market did not exist in isolation from its socio-cultural, political and historical context but was embedded within it and structured by a “web of rule” which emerged from the interplay of worker organisations, employers and the state.53 The “web of rule” related to rules concerning the recruitment and training of the labour force, the level and form of pay received by workers, the pace and quality of work, the movement in and out of work and from one position to another, etc. The work of Kerr and Dunlop was elaborated and refined by Peter Doeringer and Michael Piore in their classic work Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis.54 Specifically, they focused on industrial ILMs which they re-labelled the enterprise model. According to Doeringer and Piore enterprise ILMs emerged because of three factors: asset specificity, on-the-job training and customary law. Drawing on Becker’s distinction between specific and general training, Doeringer and Piore argued that skill specificity related to the idea that many of the skills a worker acquires are specific to the job he or she performs for a specific firm.55 In addition, these skills typically are not acquired through employer-provided formal in-house training, rather they are acquired informally, on-the-job, by asking questions of more experienced workers, by simply observing fellow workers, and by practicing during slower production periods. Consequently, incumbent workers are more valuable to the firm than those outside and if an   Kerr, “The Balkanization of Labor Markets.”   C. Kerr and A. Siegel, “The Structuring of the Labour Force in Industrial Society: New Dimensions and New Questions,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 8, no. 2, 1955, pp. 151–168. 54  P. Doeringer and M. Piore, Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis, Lexington, D. C. Heath, 1971. 55   See G. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1975. Becker describes the general training as training which equips workers with skills that are transferable to workplaces in other firms. By contrast, specific training refers to training in which workers acquire skills that are either not transferable to other firms or if so only imperfectly. 52 53

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incumbent exits, firms are faced with a new round of recruitment, screening and training costs. In order to economise on these costs firms create enterprise ILMs to foster worker attachment to the enterprise. The third factor, customary law, is more elusive. Doeringer and Piore defined custom at the workplace as “an unwritten set of rules based largely upon past practice or precedent…(and) appears to be the outgrowth of employment stability with internal labor markets.”56 Customs are also vehicles through which social norms relating to equity or fairness are expressed and they can either facilitate or diminish economic efficiency. Piore argued that the nature of the training process had been relatively neglected in the economics literature.57 He pointed out that workers, especially in enterprise ILMs, acquire most of their skills through on-the-job training that occurs within informal social groups. Moreover, for this type of training to be successful, new workers are required to understand and abide by the norms of the work group regarding how work should be performed, and how they should relate to each other in their respective roles. Indeed, inextricably woven into the training process is the induction of workers into knowledge of these group norms. Knowing the norms and customs of the work group was therefore just as important to doing a job well as possessing the required technical skills. Piore also noted that when these norms develop in the context of a long-term employment relationship they acquire within the work group “an ethical aura.” Abiding by the group norms is a moral issue. It is through acquiring an understanding of the group norms and the required specific skills that workers come to experience their work as meaningful in the sense suggested by Honneth. More particularly, it can be argued that workers would experience their work as moderately complex, and thus meaningful, as a consequence of having acquired a range of new skills. This experience would be reinforced by the promotion-from-within policy adopted in most enterprise ILMs. Furthermore, by performing their work in accordance with group norms their efforts would be recognised as contributing to the common good by their fellow workers. Doeringer and Piore integrated their account of ILMs with Piore’s dual labour market theory which contends that the aggregate labour   Doeringer and Piore, Internal Labor Markets, p. 23.   M. Piore, “Fragments of a ‘Sociological’ Theory of Wages,” American Economic Review, Vol. 63, no. 2, 1973, pp. 377–384. 56 57

recognition theory and institutional labour economics125 has two segments: a primary market and a secondary market.58 The primary market is made of jobs located in craft and industrial ILMs. These jobs typically have decent wages, good working conditions, employment stability, due process provisions and good career prospects. By contrast jobs in the secondary market are characterised by relatively poor wages and working conditions, little protection from harsh and capricious management, and a highly truncated career trajectory. Consequently, it is only a section of the workforce that can hope to enjoy the sort of training and employment conditions that make work both technically and socially meaningful. While Honneth does refer to recent developments in economic institutionalism and economic sociology in “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition” it is not without misgivings. He correctly notes that the institutional rules or the economic presuppositions of the market identified by these new disciplines are not moral in nature, and so should not be hastily identified with the recognition norms he has in mind. But the developments in institutionalism Honneth describes are in fact characteristic of what economists now call the “new” institutional economics, which should not be conflated with the institutionalist tradition as such.59 The so-called “new” institutionalism aims to provide economic efficiency-oriented explanations of the institutional rules operating in the economy.60 Indeed, the bias towards efficiencyoriented explanations is so strong that at least one prominent e­ conomist has called for the approach to be renamed the “new efficiency oriented institutional labour economics.”61 It is also true that, in most instances, “new” institutional economics is committed to finding explanations of economic phenomena that exclude reference to moral and other noneconomic concerns. There is considerable debate in the economics literature concerning the relationship between the “old” institutionalism associated with Veblen, Mitchell and Commons and the “new” institutionalism. Some scholars, such as Kaufman, have argued for considerable commonality, and therefore continuity, between the old

  Doeringer and Piore, Internal Labor Markets, pp. 164–183.  O. Williamson, “The New Institutional Economics: Taking Stock, Looking Ahead,” Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. xxxviii, 2000, pp. 595–613. 60   G. Dow, “The New Institutional Economics and Employment Regulation” in ed. B. Kaufman Government Regulation of Employment Relationship, Industrial Relations Research Association Series, 1997, pp. 57–90. 61   See Jacoby, “The New Institutionalism: What can it Learn from the Old?.” 58 59

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and new institutionalism.62 By contrast, others, including Ramstad, have rejected any meaningful common ground between the two schools.63 There is not the space here to discuss in adequate detail the complex issues which lie at the heart of this question. However, the present discussion, which has focused on the institutional economics of Commons and more recent institutionalists working in the tradition he founded, has shown that much more than economic efficiency in a narrow sense is at stake in the institutionalist economic approach. 5.  Recognition Theory and Institutionalism Let me now draw together some of the threads of my discussion by way of some suggestions for what institutionalist economics and Honneth’s theory of recognition can learn from each other.64 We have seen that both approaches conceive of the human subject as socially constituted and argue that individual economic action can only be properly understood when the socio-institutional context in which it occurs is given explanatory priority. But the concept of subjectivity, and the relational psychology behind it, remains underdeveloped in Commons’ work. His so-called “negotiational psychology” remained an unfinished project and nowhere did he provide a comprehensive statement of the “psychological framework he associated with his negotiational psychology.”65 As Albert and Ramstad have observed, institutionalism has still not developed an adequate psychology to underpin its account of the economy. Albert and Ramstad have sought to address this theoretical weakness by linking

  See Kaufman, “The Institutionalist and Neoclassical Schools in Labor Economics.”   See Y. Ramstad, “Is a Transaction a Transaction?” Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. xxx, no. 2, 1996, pp. 413–425 and Ramstad “John R. Commons’s Reasonable Value and the Problem of Just Price.” 64   See also J-P. Deranty, “Critique of Political Economy and Contemporary Critical Theory: A Defence of Honneth’s Theory of Recognition,” in eds. H.-C. Schmidt am Busch and C. Zurn The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 2009. While Deranty examines the relationship between institutionalism and recognition theory from the point of view of how institutionalism can enhance recognition theory, the question of how recognition theory can enhance institutionalism also needs to be considered. 65  A. Albert and Y. Ramstad, “The Social Psychological Underpinnings of Commons’s Institutional Economics: The Significance of Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct,” Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. xxxi, no. 4, 1997, pp. 881–916. See also Biddle, “The Role of Negotiational Psychology.” 62 63

recognition theory and institutional labour economics127 Commons’ account of the “will-in-action” to Mead’s concept of the “social self.”66 But they acknowledge the speculative basis of this effort as Commons made no reference himself to Mead’s ideas in his writings. At this point Honneth’s meticulous reconstruction of Mead’s psychological framework can be brought into the picture.67 His Mead-inspired account of the human subject as constituted by intersubjective processes of reciprocal recognition promises to provide just the kind of psychological framework that institutionalism currently lacks. Furthermore, a recognition-theoretic, Meadian psychology might be put to work to address some of the concerete practical problems at the heart of the institutionalist enterprise. As is well known, Honneth posits three practical relations-to-self that are crucial to human flourishing: self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem. Each of these are acquired and sustained through processes of mutual recognition. This normative model of the human subject can be fed into strategies pursued by Commons to deal with the “labor problem” in the following way.68 Commons valued the due process provisions in collective agreements which protected workers against capricious and discriminatory decision making by management.69 By attempting to ensure that all workers were recognised as equals these provisions can be viewed as providing workers with a sense of self-respect. Commons was also concerned that workers received wages that were reasonable and fair, and which in Honneth’s terms, conveyed a sense of selfesteem. Moreover, because in Commons’ preferred model of collective bargaining the state did not arbitrate wage outcomes in a bargaining deadlock, the wages (and conditions) that were finally negotiated would be based on a mutual recognition of workers’ contribution to the production process and the employers’ capacity to pay. I have already commented on the shared methodological approach adopted by Commons and Honneth. Both allow the conscious 66   A. Albert & Y. Ramstad, “The Social Psychological Underpinnings of Commons’s Institutional Economics: The Concordance of George Herbert Mead’s ‘Social Self ’ and John R. Commons’s ‘Will’,” Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. xxxii, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–46. 67   See Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, pp. 71–91. 68   The argument advanced here is that Honneth’s normative account of the human subject could contribute to the psychological underpinnings of institutional economics, however, it is acknowledged that Commons’ notion of negotiational psychology takes in areas not directly addressed by Honneth. 69   Kaufman, “John R. Commons and the Wisconsin School on Industrial Relations Strategy and Policy.”

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e­ xperience of labour market participants to be explored, and indeed prioritise the normative expectations contained in this experience. At the same time, Honneth’s position in “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition,” departs somewhat from his earlier writings, which focus on the normative presuppositions of society as revealed by a “phenomenological analysis of moral injury.”70 The account of the relationship between work and recognition elaborated by Honneth leans less on this idea, indeed it is not clear where it fits in at all. In this respect, Commons seems to suggest a different path, one that might actually lead recognition theory back to a more phenomenologically grounded understanding of the relation between recognition and work. Commons’ research might also serve as a source of potential solutions to the problems identified by Hegel and Durkheim. We have seen how Honneth distils from their writings a set of normative conditions relating to the organisation of work in capitalist society. Both Hegel and Durkheim proposed that these normative conditions could only be reliably sustained if there were institutions supporting the ­operation of the labour market. As has been demonstrated in this chapter, such a position is consistent with the tenets of institutionalism generally and with the institutional economics of Commons in particular. Rather than tackle poor labour market outcomes through redistributive policies, Commons sought to prevent them emerging in the first place by establishing institutional arrangements that put workers on an equal footing with employers when negotiating the terms of employment. In order to equalise bargaining power, workers needed to be organised and such collectives needed to be recognised as legal entities. Further­ more, collective bargaining also needed to be recognised and facilitated by legislation. Thus Commons’ strategy required that new working rules be established that accorded certain groups (unions) and certain activities (collective bargaining) greater social standing. More broadly, Commons’ strategy was based on the understanding that poor labour market outcomes were the product of inappropriate institutional arrangements. Honneth follows a similar conceptual path when he assigns a crucial role to pre-market institutional arrangements in determining economic outcomes:  Honneth, Recognition or Redistribution? p. 48.

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recognition theory and institutional labour economics129 [The] rules organising the distribution of material goods derive from the degree of social esteem enjoyed by various social groups, in accordance with institutionalised hierarchies of value, or a normative order… [They are not] simply derived from the relations of production, but are rather seen as the institutional expression of a sociocultural dispositive that determines in what esteem particular activities are held at a specific point in time.71

With regard to the normative conditions of work that Honneth distils from Hegel and Durkheim, those relating to the ability of workers to freely consent to a labour contract and the payment of a living wage have deep connections with Commons’ normative goals. Commons argued that in order for the terms of employment to be considered fair and reasonable they must have been negotiated in a context of equal bargaining power and free of duress. Furthermore, only when these conditions were satisfied could employees be regarded as having freely or willingly consented to a labour contract. The other normative conditions were not directly discussed by Commons, but later institutionalist economists such as Doeringer and Piore have shed some light on the role of social groups in equipping workers with skills that enable workers to perform increasingly complex and meaningful tasks and also in establishing a sense of social belonging at work. They have also shown that, due to the structure of the labour market, only a segment of the workforce has such experiences. This is an important conclusion for contemporary institutionalism as well as recognition theory to reflect upon. The links between these two research paradigms I have discussed in this chapter suggest they should perform such reflection together.

  ibid., p. 54.

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PART TWO

CRITIQUE, NORM AND WORK

Chapter five

The Political Invisibility of Work and its Philosophical Echoes Emmanuel Renault Although new conditions of work are a major concern for employees and unemployed workers, work as such, in a sense that must be distinguished from employment, is no longer considered as a major issue in the political public sphere. Various processes explain this fact, and it seems that they have produced their effects not only in the political public sphere, but in political philosophy as well. Here, political shortcomings seem to reproduce in philosophical shortcomings, so that, as regard to work, the relation between philosophy and political philosophy could be compared to what Marx had in mind when he explained that a critique of the political justified a critique of political philosophy. One could distinguish three political, social and psychological processes that tend to produce a denial of work itself, or of the problems experienced at work. First, a political denial of work is linked to the victory of neoliberal ideology and the defeat of the workers’ movement and its social democratic off-shoots. The workers’ movement, the social democratic parties and unions have given to workers a means to express their social point of view in the public political sphere, as well as their claims for a collective control of work. The sociologists Beaud and Pialoux have shown how, as soon as they were defeated, the workers tended to be made more and more invisible in the public sphere, as well as work itself.1 The force behind this invisibility has been supported and enhanced by a neoliberal ideology according to which the economy has to be considered as a functional system that no State policy should try to regulate. Second, a social denial of problems at work takes various forms. Hughes has explained that because all professions try to improve their social position, their members tend to dissimulate the bad aspects of their work to others’ eyes as well as to   S. Beaud, M. Pialoux, Retour sur la condition ouvrière, Fayard, Paris, 1999.

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themselves.2 This kind of social denial is restricted to socially esteemed professions, but a comparable denial is socially produced in jobs that enjoy less social status. Another social denial of the problems experienced at work is linked with long term unemployment in Europe and the dismantlement of social protections in other western countries. In this context, people tend to believe that work has become a privilege, or a wrong not so severe as unemployment and marginalisation. Consequently, as Dejours has pointed out, employees tend to feel guilty about facing problems at work.3 Moreover, in today’s finance-ruled economies, trade unions are becoming the managers of the pension funds of their members, and employees are becoming interested in the profit rate of their firms in order to consolidate their pensions, so that the social motivations and institutional settings of the critique of work are undermined. Third, there is also a general psychological factor that tends to deny problems at work. As Bourdieu has stated in his article “The double truth of work,”4 work is a social activity in which individuals can engage only if they ignore the pain they suffer in it and minimize the social and political problems that are intrinsically contained in it. How could political philosophy avoid reproducing these three types of denial in its own discourse? How could it address the invisibility they produce, and how could it develop the social critique of work they impede? In this chapter, I analyse neither the various forms of the denial of work, nor their link with its philosophical denial. I only describe the main ways in which the issue of work gets marginalised in political philosophy and the reason why a theory of recognition could provide means not only for bringing work back to the fore, but also to analyse its normative content and its political significance in order to promote a social critique of work. 1.  The Theoretical Denial of Work In contemporary political philosophy, the exclusion of work is the result of various trends, some of which belong to the normative   E. Hughes, “Work and Self,” in eds. J. H. Roher and M. Sherif Social Psychology at the Crossroads, New-York, Harper & Row, 1951, pp. 313–323; and “Studying the Nurse’s Work,” American Journal of Nursing, Vol. 51, (May) 1951, pp. 294–295. 3   C. Dejours, Souffrance en France. La banalisation de l’injustice sociale, Paris, Seuil, 1998. 4   P. Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes, Paris, Seuil, 1997, pp. 241–244. 2

political invisibility of work and philosophical echoes135 assumptions of political philosophy, others to the social theories presupposed by political philosophy. In the Marxian-Hegelian philosophy that was influential in the post second world war intellectual world, as well as in some existentialist philosophy of that time, the notion of alienation defined a normative point of view for social critique, and one of the targets of such a critique was work. The renewal of normative political philosophy since the beginning of the 70’s has been accompanied both by a disqualification of the issue of alienation and a disappearance of work as a political problem. It is as if the rejection of the theoretical scheme that has been used to analyse and critique work has been accompanied by the rejection of work itself. Two alternative stances have replaced that of alienation, and in both of them work can no longer be a real target of social critique. The first normative stance is that of democracy. According both to republican and proceduralist theories of democracy, political freedom is constituted in a public sphere that is external and independent of the social sphere of work. And in the republicanism of Arendt, as well as in that of Habermas, it is essential to political freedom that it develops itself independently of economic constraints and labour activity. Even if political discussions can take some economic problems into consideration, there is only a loose and secondary link between democracy and work. The liberal conception of democracy can obviously not take work into consideration as a normative issue any more. Interpreting work as an individual freedom, and restricting the right of the State to limit freedom, it can even lead to the exclusion of work as a legitimate object of political democratic discussions. As Honneth has pointed out, in his article “Democracy and Reflexive Cooperation,”5 it is only with the pragmatist conception of democracy as a way of regulating problems arising from social cooperation that contemporary political philosophy offers an alternative view. It is only here that work becomes a normative issue that is essential for the very possibility of democracy. But in current discussions, the reference to Dewey is not so common, and it should be considered as an exception to the exclusion of the relevance of work by normative theories of democracy. Moreover, in the Deweyan model, the link between work and democracy remains external. It is not work itself that can be judge from the point of view of 5   A. Honneth, “Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation: John Dewey and the Theory of Democracy Today,” Political Theory, Vol. 26, No. 6 (Dec. 1998), pp. 763–783.

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democracy, but only the participation in a just division of labour that belongs to the conditions of a democratic public space. But on closer consideration, work has to be considered as an instrumental activity (or technical mastering of instruments of production) and as a communicative activity: it is a cooperative activity where the prescriptions of hierarchy and the rules of interaction between colleagues have to be interpreted and specified in an internal public space.6 The second normative stance is that of justice. There are various reasons why work can be excluded as a significant issue in discussions about justice. According to a liberal definition of justice, the priority of negative freedom over positive freedom and good life implies that the effects of work on the quality of life and the possibility of reaching strong evaluations about work can only be secondary. According to a socialist definition of justice as redistribution, work seems better off: issues of wages and of a repartition of work inside society then appear as plainly relevant. But on closer consideration, it appears that it is more employment as a means of income and social status (having a job and obtaining social recognition from that) than work as particular activity (technical and cooperative activity in a work place) that is introduced in the framework of justice. Just as democracy is at stake in the internal public space of work, so justice is at stake in work as activity. There is substantial sociological evidence that workers complain about the injustice of their work,7 but normative political philosophy usually fails to capture this kind of understanding of injustice in their models.8 What would be required instead would be an enlarged conception of justice taking the standpoint of the normative expectations that are dissatisfied in the various experiences of injustice. Honneth’s theory of recognition provides the best example of such conception of justice.9 The counterpart of this normative narrowness of contemporary political philosophies, their descriptive side, social theory, also plays a role in the exclusion of work. A first social theoretical argument to take into account is that of the economy as a social system that only has functional regulations. The Habermasian distinction between system 6  See C. Dejours, “Subjectivity, Work, Action,” Critical Horizons, Vol. 7, 2006, pp. 45–62. 7   F. Dubet, Injustices. L’expérience des inégalités au travail, Paris, Seuil, 2006. 8  For a critique of theories of justice from this point of view, see E. Renault, L’Expérience de l’injustice, Paris, La Découverte, 2004 and “Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice,” Critical Horizons, Vol. 6, 2005, pp. 137–152. 9   A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995.

political invisibility of work and philosophical echoes137 and lifeworld gives a good illustration of this position and of its consequences. As a result, the economy as such is no longer a normative problem but only its colonising intrusions into the lifeworld. Honneth has plainly shown the dead ends of this position, insofar as it is not able to take into account the distinction between economy as coordinated interaction, and work as individual activity loaded with specific normative expectations. The only normative issue it can associate with work as such is that of the liberation from work, namely, that of the reduction of the limit on working hours. A second social theoretical argument is linked with the description of society as a network of social supports. In this case, work can appear as a normative issue through the critique of casual work. But here again, it is more employment than work as such, that comes to the fore. Castel gives a good illustration of the kind of social critique that results from this: it is focused on the deregulation of the labour market rather than on the organisation of work inside of firms, and the solution it advocates deals with legal protection rather that transformation of working conditions.10 It is interesting to notice that when sociologists want to approach work as a social activity within firms, they tend to focus on the rules of interaction between employees rather than on the technical and cooperative dimensions of work as social and material activity. The approach to work through principles of justification and through the sense of justice in Boltanski and Dubet provide good illustrations of this last trend.11 This focus would be plainly legitimate if work could be defined as a social activity that has been extrinsically defined as work by given social norms, that is, if working activity was nothing more than other social activities and if the rules of the working activity  were nothing more than rules of social interaction. But work­ing activity is not a given social activity among others, is it a productive activity where one has to cope with the real (technical constraints, mistakes and failures…) and with the other (with a hierarchy and with peers) in a very specific way. It is also a social activity overloaded with psychic stakes: work can enlarge and enhance subjectivity or wound self-confidence, self respect and self esteem. And the working activity also has very important stakes as far as it is a powerful place of ongoing 10   R. Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question, trans. and ed. Richard Boyd, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers, 2003 [1995]. 11  L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott, London, Verso, 2005 [1999]; F. Dubet, Injustices. L ’expérience des inégalités au travail.

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education to sociality and democracy, or on the contrary, to adaptation to domination or to unbearable conditions of life.12 In brief, it is because of its normative models as well as because of its descriptive models that political philosophy is able neither to make explicit the importance of the normative expectations that individuals associate with their work, nor to take into account the fact that for many individuals, work remains the main issue of social life. In a way, one might argue that the issue of work reveals the incapacity of political philosophy to deal with what appears to individuals as real normative problems. 2.  Three Challenges If one wants to avoid these shortcomings, one has to address three challenges. The first is that of the normative assumptions of a “critical conception of work.” The second is that of a conception of work which is able to describe work as working activity. The third is that of a conception of the social that is able to make explicit what is experienced in work as a normative problem by individuals. a.  A Critical Conception of Work In his article “Work and Instrumental Action,” Honneth has explained why political philosophy should elaborate a “critical conception of work” in order to fulfil its goals, namely, its claim to grasp all significant social problems within a normative model of the social.13 We have already shown that some conceptions of democracy as social cooperation can be useful since work appears as a condition of a real democratic public space, and a mode of cooperation where communicative action is more or less democratically shaped. We have also seen that various feelings of injustice emerge from the working activity so that a relevant conception of justice could meet the requirements of a critical conception of work. Two other normative points of view could meet these requirements, that of autonomy and that of health. The various normative assumptions of a complete critical conception of work are of   C. Dejours, “Subjectivity, Work, Action.”   A. Honneth, “Work and Instrumental Action : On the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory,” in Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social, Albany NY, SUNY Press, 1995. 12 13

political invisibility of work and philosophical echoes139 different types, and it seems particularly important here to keep in mind the pragmatist warning against the philosophical temptations of reducing the various types of normativity to a unique one.14 If understood as interplay between individual and collective autonomy, the norm of autonomy could sustain a normative conception of work. In his book The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth has shown that the recognitive relations related to work (in the third sphere of recognition) belong to the intersubjective conditions of positive freedom in general.15 And in his article on “Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation,” he has also suggested that what can be conceived of as the highest form of freedom, namely political freedom in its democratic form, is also dependent on a just social division of labour. The interest of such approach is not only that it identifies work as a significant normative problem; it is also that it captures some aspects of the normative problems individuals experience at work. Indeed, individuals complain about injustice at work, but they also complain about domination, a problem that can be described in the framework of a model of communicative freedom or socially decentralised autonomy. But in work as working activity, autonomy is also at stake as the individual ability of expressing ones identity and mastering one’s own activity and interaction with colleagues and clients. As Dejours explains, the norm of autonomy captures an expectation to be able to integrate the various aspects of one’s social experience that interact with the working activity, as well as expectations of being able to find ways of preventing or solving problems and of sustaining interactions with others. But this individual autonomy always relies upon collective discussions with colleagues and passes through recognition as intersubjective confirmation of individual solutions, so that individual and collective autonomy are closely interrelated.16 Another normative standpoint able to ground a critical conception of work is that of health. It surely might sound strange to think of health as a norm as long as one conceives of norms as claims that can be universally accepted and can be used as criteria of distinction

  See J. Dewey, “Three Independent Factors in Morals,” The Later Works, Vol. 5, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 279–288. 15   A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995. 16   On the link between autonomy, expression and cooperation, see J.-P. Deranty, “Expression and Cooperation as Norms of Contemporary Work,” in this volume. 14

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between good and bad human practices. There are indeed very contradictory conceptions of health, they do not usually function as normative criteria, and they have no immediate link with the problem of evaluation of human practices. But if one understands norms as ways of making explicit what is a stake in our social experience, and to monitor our practical endeavors to make it better, there is no reason to reject the ethical and political importance of health17—at least if health is understood and referred to in a negative way, especially with regard to the various social situations where the feeling that something is going wrong in our life is able to contaminate all our existence and to alter our mental health. As Dejours plainly states it in his book Travail usure mentale, work is a condition of mental health, an opportunity for recovery, and a possible cause of extreme psychic suffering.18 If health is understood as a condition of positive freedom, this other norm can be conceived of as closely linked as well as complementary to this former one. It is worth noticing that the psychic investment in one’s body and in one’s creativity within a cooperative community of work belongs to the conditions of individual and collective autonomy. But it is also important to highlight that the norm of health is able to capture other aspects of the normative problems experienced at work. In fact, individuals do not complain only about injustice and domination. They also complain about stress and unbearable conditions of work, about a suffering at work that is able to undermine the meaning of their activity, and efforts to colonize not only their professional life but also their social and private life. It seems to me that a normative conception of work has to refer to the norms of democracy, of justice, of autonomy and health. One interest of a theory of recognition is to offer a model to associate these four norms, but maybe one of its limits is to reduce them to a common term. Understood in the Honnethian framework, positive recognition is a condition of collective and individual autonomy, as well as a condition of justice and good life. Conversely, the denial of recognition can constitute an obstacle to democratic life, as well as lead to a loss of indi­ vidual autonomy and to an alteration of identity (or psychic health). 17  For this pragmatist argument, see for example J. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, Boston, Beacon, 1948, chapter 7; and Experience and Nature, New York, Norton, 1925, chapter 10. 18   C. Dejours, Travail usure mentale, Paris, Bayard, 2000 (third ed.). For a comparison between Honneth’s and Dejours’ account on work and recognition, see E. Renault, “Travail et reconnaissance,” Travailler, No. 18, 2007, pp. 119–135.

political invisibility of work and philosophical echoes141 To check that a recognition theory can really provide a critical conception of work, one has to describe more precisely the relationship between work and recognition. The link between recognition and employment is easy to describe. To have a job is to have a double opportunity to have the social dimension of one’s existence recognised: wages, on the one hand, and social prestige, on the other hand, are social evaluations of one’s social activity. Wages can be experienced as social recognition by individuals, but also as disrespect and injustice when they do not meet the expectation of individuals. The prestige hierarchy of professions also means that individuals do not benefit from the same social recognition, so that it can produce either positive recognition or denial of recognition. As Honneth has explained it, the need for recognition is one of the main incentives of the struggle for redistribution through increased wages. And as Hughes has shown, transformations of professions are not only due to technical innovations, but also to attempts to obtain higher prestige and better social recognition.19 A theory of recognition seems very appropriate to make the normative content of work as employment explicit. But in order to set up a critical conception of work, another step is required. One has also to describe the relationship between recognition and work as working activity. b.  A Definition of Work as Specific Activity And here we are coming to the second challenge: the definition of the specificity of work as activity, and the definition of the role recognition plays in it. One can distinguish three types of definition of work as activity, or three types of activity. Each of them is correlative of a different normative stance and to peculiar modes of recognition. The first definition of work as activity is that of technical activity which involves an implicit reference to norms of efficiency. As an activity of production of goods and services, work presupposes the use of given means of production in a given material environment and is defined by various technical constraints. If work as activity was nothing else than technical activity, then the critical conception of work would only have to take work as employment into consideration, 19   E. Hughes, “Social Role and the Division of Labor,” Midwest Sociologist, Vol. 17, No. 1, 1956, pp. 3–7.

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focusing on the problems of social prestige associated to the various professions and on the social definition of given productive activity as belonging or not to work. But there are other levels of activity in work. The second level of activity is that of coordinated activity. A specific feature of the working activity is that it takes place in a social and technical division of labour, and that it develops under hierarchical constraint (formal or informal in the case of domestic work) in interactions with member of a higher or lower hierarchy, with peers and with customers. As a result, it is defined by specific rules of interaction within work places and by specific expectations toward the other as customers, peers or member of the hierarchy. These rules and expectations are defined by the structure of the division of labour inside the productive activity and in the relations between producers of goods or services and customers. The norms that are involved in this level of activity are not only efficiency, but also utility: utility of the employee’s activity for the firm, or utility of the service for the customer. What is at stake in this level of activity could be compared with what is at stake in work as employment. As well as identification with a profession being part of the socialisation process, the cooperative activity inside the work place is part of the socialisation process. Just as professions give the means to obtain recognition of the social value of one’s activity, the community of work (that of the hierarchy and the peers) and the customers can provide recognition to its members. Nevertheless, these two kinds of socialisation and of valuing must be distinguished. The value at stake here is no more that of prestige linked with a collective identity, but that of the utility of an individual activity. Two distinctions are to be made. The first one relates to the object of the valuing and to the distinction between collective and individual identity: the valuing of the community in which I participate, that of my profession or of my firm (collective aspect of my identity), differs from the valuing of my individual activity (individual aspect of my identity). The second distinction relates to the type of valuing and to the distinction between the social as global society and the social as social situations or as sets of local social relations: conceived of as prestige, the social value of my profession means its value for the whole society and it is internally associated with the goods and services produced; conceived of as utility, the social value means its value in given interactive and hierarchical relations and it relates to the process of my producing activity. One interest of a theory of recognition for a critical conception of work is that it can capture this specific normative content. It is simply

political invisibility of work and philosophical echoes143 a fact that people expect recognition of the value of their activity in work places and that they hope that the hierarchy, colleagues or customers will offer them recognition. It is also a fact that this recognition can transform work into a pleasure and provide incentives for increasing involvement and creativity, whereas lack of recognition can produce feelings of injustice, of suffering and of loss of meaning. In order to capture this normative dimension of work as activity, it is not only important to distinguish these types (prestige, efficiency, utility) and sources (scale of social esteem, individual customers, peers and hierarchy) of recognition. This dimension also relates to the fact that various tensions and conflicts can develop between these types and sources of recognition. Resolving them is also part of the working activity. Dejours for example, but also sociologists like Lallemant, Osty or Eme have given plenty of evidence for these facts.20 Even if the conceptual framework of Honneth’s theory of recognition provides no systematic room for this particular form of “social esteem,” it can easily be introduced into it. And the valuing of the utility of work by the hierarchy, colleagues and customers can be interpreted as one recognitive expectation that defines the specific normative content of work as a specific form of socialisation. In other words, I would say that within the framework of Honneth’s theory of recognition, the general link between socialisation, normative expectations and recognition offers an interesting model to capture the normative content of work as employment and as coordinated activity. Its only limitation is that it seems not very appropriate to take the third level of activity into account. The third level of activity is that of practice as coping with the real. As Hughes has pointed out, work activity is mainly an attempt to deal with errors that arise in technical and cooperative activity, and with errors that could arise. As the French psychoanalyst of social action Mendel explains, work cannot be conceived of as the development of action planning, but instead must be understood as an attempt to practically subjectify the affective and social dynamics that converge in our activity as well as to appropriate subjectively our deeds.21 According to 20  M. Lallemant, “Qualité du travail et critique de la reconnaissance,” in ed. A. Caillé, La quête de reconnaissance, Paris, La découverte, 2007, pp. 71–88; F. Osty, Le désir de métier. Engagement, identité et reconnaissance, Rennes, PUR, 2003; Bernard Eme, “Jeunes salariés en quête de respect,” Sciences humaines, No. 172, Juin 2006. 21   G. Mendel, L’acte est une aventure, du sujet métaphysique au sujet de l’actepouvoir, Paris, La Découverte, 1998.

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these approaches, one specificity of working activity is that it is an encounter with the real, in a Freudian sense in which the real can be distinguished both from conscious expectations and desire. Work is surely not the only encounter with a real that can disturb our technical mastering of our own activity, that can dissatisfy our desires and expectation toward the other. But it is the only activity where one is structurally imprisoned in the necessity of dealing with the fragility of our technical skills and of coping with a social environment saturated with social rules and roles. More than anywhere else, the resistance of the materiality and the constraints of social domination and interaction converge on our body and affect our psychic life. The French psychology of work has developed this analysis of work as encounter with the real showing its importance for psychic life and describing its normative implications. The psychic implications of work have been highlighted by Clot and Dejours. Clot has spoken about a “psychic function of work,” in order to show that the need to deal with the material and social constraints of work implies some kind of subjective decentration that is the condition for an ethical reflexivity and a flexible personal identity.22 Dejours has explained how these psychic, material and social constraints produce a suffering with which individuals have to cope, so that practical activity at work is accompanied by a psychic work on the psychic and social dimensions of our existence that is able to transform deeply our identity.23 Both of them have highlighted the implications of the distinction between the prescribed work (the prescribed coordination of activities) and the real work (the activities of coping with technical and coordination problems). Work activity is always an invention of a particular interpretation of rules, so that the very individuality of the worker is always at stake in its own activity, his or her very identity not only as a psychic body involved in working activity, but also his or her identity as thought and reflection on oneself. It is interesting that in its suffering part as well as in its inventing part, recognition plays a role. Because of the difference between prescribed and real work, the cooperation is always something more than a mere coordination of action in a technical division of labour, and it is something more than simply following the rules of coordination according to shared habits. Therefore, a worker  Y. Clot, La fonction psychologique du travail, Paris, PUF, 1999.   See C. Dejours, “Coopération et construction de l’identité en situation de travail,” http://multitudes.samizdat.net/spip.php?article638. 22 23

political invisibility of work and philosophical echoes145 always has to obtain recognition of the value of his or her idiosyncratic way of following the rules of coordination if cooperation is to be sustained. This particular form of recognition is termed “recognition of the beauty of work” by Dejours, in order to distinguish it from the norms of efficiency as well as from those of utility.24 Recognition of the beauty means that colleagues recognise that the invention is appropriate for making cooperation more satisfying, for saving time, for preventing errors and for ease of repair. To phrase it in Meadian terms, the judgment of beauty is not only raising the issue of the recognition of the worker as “Me” (or conformity with general expectation about efficiency and utility of all working activities inside a firm) but also as “I” (or as non conformity with the rules that are supposed to coordinate the working interaction).25 Important to note is that this new kind of recognition, as well as recognition of utility, plays a decisive role in coping with suffering at work, and in transforming it into pleasure. Here, one can understand why lack of recognition at work can produce not only injustice or deterioration of psychic health, but also a feeling that one’s efforts are made in vain and that one’s whole life is losing its meaning. What seems to me important in this third level of working activity is that it raises new normative problems that a critical model of work has to take into account. First, it raises the problem of possible denial of recognition that can be produced by the practice of work itself, whatever the social valuing of professions, or the recognitive relationships between colleagues, might be. Examples of this problem are provided by extremely degraded working conditions where people can just not identify with their activity. It is the case for example with work assigned to the lowest group of the lowest caste (Dalits) in India, the Dangis, untouchable among untouchables, scavengers that have to cope every day with the piss and shit of other castes. As Rajeev Bhargava has recently shown, the activity as such produces a deep feeling of disrespect, or denial of recognition, that no social recognition can compensate.26 The problem is not primarily that of social evaluation, but that of   See C. Dejours, Le facteur humain, Paris, PUF, 1995, pp. 59–62.   On the problem of the dialectic between “Me” and “I” in the working places, see S. Voswinkel, Anerkennung und Reputation. Die Dramaturgie industrieller Beziehungen, Konstanz, UVK, 2001, p. 69 ff. 26   See R. Bhargava, “Hegel, Taylor and the Phenomenology of Broken Spirits,” in ed. M. Seymour, The Plural States of Recognition, Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan, 2010, pp. 37–60. 24 25

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the real of its work, that of its raw material, that of its infinite distance from all the strong evaluations that are shaping identity and with all recognitive expectations. What is coming to the fore, here, is that recognition is not the only condition that enables one to identify with one’s activity. Other conditions depend on other subjective dynamics of activity.27 A second important normative problem relates to what Dejours has termed “deontic activity.” Because the real work is always different from the prescribed work, working involves normative invention. And the necessity for individuals to cope with their suffering also drives them either to sublimation or to rigidified psychic defences. Mental health depends largely on the possibility of using collective norms to produce sublimation of the suffering. Instead, individuals and communities of workers will resort to psychic or collective psychic defences as modes of denial of the problems and, because of the rigidity of these defences, will lose the normative creativity that is part of mental health. This point is important to note because it plays a great role in the degradation of working conditions, in a context in which, as Dejours has pointed out, the intensification and decreasing protections of work produce more suffering at work, whereas managers are sometimes tempted to manipulate collective defences and denial to increase the productivity of work, increasing again, therefore, the suffering at work. As a conclusion of the discussion of this second challenge, it seems that a theory of recognition can definitely provide the various normative principles that are required by a critical conception of work as employment and as working activity. In this respect, Honneth and Dejours offer complementary insights, and it seems that each of them offers a conceptual framework in which the theoretical proposal of the other could be integrated. c.  A Definition of the Social where Work As Such Exists The third challenge deals with the social theory in which the problems at work would exist. If a conception of work has to contribute to a social critique of work, it must capture the social processes that produce the normative problems of work. What does that mean? Let me address this problem with three brief remarks.

  See Y. Clot, Travail et pouvoir d’agir, PUF, 2008, pp. 249–268.

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political invisibility of work and philosophical echoes147 First, a social critique of work cannot define the social only according to an interactionist paradigm: in general, it might be problematic to reduce the social as a mode of interaction to social rules and roles, but in the analysis of work in particular, the shortcomings of this approach become obvious. As we have seen, work is not only a cooperative action, but also a transaction with the real where materiality, corporeity and social constraints play a role. According to the rule approach, the normative problems at work are only about injustices of treatment. According to the role approach, the normative problems at work are only recognitive expectations included in professions as collective identity. These normative problems are surely important parts of individual experiences of work as an ethical and political problem. But a critical conception of work should also take other problems into consideration. Second, a social critique of work cannot complete this first model solely by a definition of the social as a network of social support. This kind of approach, which is developed in social psychology as well as in the writings of sociologists like Latour28 or Castel, is surely insufficient to ground a general social theory, but its shortcomings become even more obvious in the analysis of work. It is true indeed that a community of workers must be conceived as a network of social support, and the reason why casual work is so much a problem for individuals is partially because it undermines the support one expects from one’s colleagues. But even in the critique of casual work, the approach in terms of social support alone is not sufficient. An obvious fact is that social protections offered by colleagues are also a means of resistance against attempts to make individuals compete against each other in work places in order to intensify work, to increase productivity, and to consolidate the domination of the hierarchy. Then the interactionist and the social support approaches have to be completed by a theory of domination. The idea of domination captures two features that are central to the experience of work as activity: first, this activity develops under a hierarchical constraint; second, because work as employment is a scarce good and the best means to satisfy one’s needs, ways of resisting or escaping the hierarchical constraint are very limited. Domination is always accompanied 28   See B. Latour, “Factures/fractures : de la notion de réseau à celle d’attachement,” in A. Micoud and M. Peroni, Ce qui nous relie, Éditions de l’aube, La Tout d’Aigues, 2000, pp. 189–208.

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by legitimating principles, and because of the suffering we experience under domination, the social dynamics of legitimation can be supported by a psychological dynamic of identification or denial. In this sense, domination is also a way of thinking about and identifying with unequal roles that has strong effects on the ways individuals use the principles of justice. In other words, the analysis of experiences of injustice at work cannot achieve its goals without analysing social relations of domination. Social support approaches also have to take social relations of domination into consideration if they want to distinguish between our identifications with supportive relations of domination (voluntary servitude or alienation) and our identification with what protects us against domination and violence. Social relations of domination are structuring work places and they are part of the real we encounter in work as activity: they are part of the social real we have to cope with. They explain the specific vulnerability we experience at work, a vulnerability that cannot be explained only by the fragility of social support. An analysis of these relations enables us to capture an important feature of what individuals experience as normative problems at work: for example, it enables us to explain what is at stake with the rejection of casual work. And it also offers us an interesting means to make sense of the ambiguity that is often characteristic of the moral experience of work: for example, the paradoxical identifications with firms (identification to a given firm even when it is perceived as a place of domination or injustice), the temporary approval of organisational transformations and support for promises made liberation from constraints (through flexibilisation, through autonomy, or through recognition…). Since the theory of recognition seems to provide the most promising attempt to develop a critical conception of work, the social theoretical challenge could be phrased in the following way: how can a theory of social domination be developed within a theory of recognition? On the one hand, it seems to me that the theory of recognition has been very convincingly developed as a theory of justice and as a theory of social support by Honneth. But even if domination can be conceived of as a kind of symbolic domination, Honneth has not yet tackled systematically the problem of social domination.29 On the 29  For a discussion of model to associate recognition and domination, see E. Renault, “Reconoscimiento, lotta, dominio: il modello hegeliano,” Post Filosofie, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2007, pp. 29–45.

political invisibility of work and philosophical echoes149 other hand, Dejours has placed the social relation of domination at work in the centre of his theory of suffering at work and of the social conditions of health. But it seems that he has made explicit neither the relationship between recognition and domination, nor the general definition of social domination his analysis assumes. In other words, the issue of work not only offers an opportunity for developing the theory of recognition as the critical conception of work that contemporary political philosophy needs, it also offers the opportunity to develop the social theoretical part of the theory of recognition.

Chapter six

Expression and Cooperation as Norms of Contemporary Work Jean-Philippe Deranty Axel Honneth is one of the few contemporary philosophers to have consistently maintained an interest in the problem of work, from his very first writings to his latest publications.1 His best known book, The Struggle for Recognition, deals for a substantial part with issues arising from the meaning of work and employment for modern individuals, notably as they pertain to the recognition of the individual’s contribution to the division of labour.2 With his attempt at a “redefinition of the problem,” presented for the first time at the 2007 “Recognition and Work” conference at Macquarie University,3 Honneth has cast a reflexive glance upon the evolution of his thinking on issues of work, and performed a partial self-correction.

1   A. Honneth, “Work and Instrumental Action: On the Normative Basis of Critical Theory,” (1980), in ed. C.C. Wright, The Fragmented World of the Social. Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, New York, Suny Press, 1995, pp. 15–49; A. Honneth and H. Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, trans. R. Meyer, Cambridge University Press, 1988 (German edition: 1980), pp. 18–25; A. Honneth, “Critical Theory,” (1989), in The Fragmented World of the Social, pp. 61–91; A. Honneth, “The Capitalist Recognition Order and Conflicts over Distribution,” in N. Fraser and A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. J. Golb, J. Ingram and C. Wilke, London, New York, Verso, 2003, pp. 135–159. For a detailed study of the shifts in Honneth’s conceptualisation of work in relationship to struggles for recognition, see Nicholas H. Smith, “Work and the Struggle for Recognition,” European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 46–60. See also the passages in my study of Honneth’s writings, specifically dedicated to work: J. -P. Deranty, Beyond Communication. A Critical Study of Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy, Boston and Leiden, Brill, 2009, notably pp. 43–60, and pp. 410–425. 2   A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. J. Anderson, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994, pp. 121–131. 3   “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition,” in eds. H. -C. Schmidt-am-Busch and C. Zurn, The Philosophy of Recognition. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2010, pp. 223–239. Republished in German in Das Ich im Wir. Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie, Frankfurt/M., Suhrkamp, 2010, pp. 78–102.

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Honneth’s very first article on the topic presented a programme for a “critical conception of work.” Under this term, Honneth envisaged a quasi-anthropological characterisation of work that would allow him to find within the very activity of work the normative resources upon which to ground broader claims of social and political theory. Today, Honneth rejects such an endeavour. He now considers as doomed from the outset any attempt to conduct a critique of work by referring to norms that would be inherent in the activity of work itself. Immanent criticism of work practices and work organisations continue to define Honneth’s interest. But he now locates such immanence at a difference level: namely, no longer in work as an activity, but rather in the social organisation of work. The norms to which he now appeals for his critical diagnoses are the norms implicit in current social-economic organisations, no longer the norms of an autonomous working activity. These latter norms were encapsulated in the ideal figure of craftsmanship. They denoted an autonomously designed and autonomously conducted activity in whose products the working subject could recognise the expression of its skills. Honneth has replaced his initial normative model of work based on the norms of expression and cooperation, with a model based on the norms linked to a fair division of labour in society. We could say that the normative ground for the critique of contemporary economies has shifted, from an anthropology of work, to a social theory of labour. This chapter aims to offer an immanent-critical appraisal of Honneth’s shifts in the critique of contemporary work. I would like to suggest that in order for Honneth to maintain the force of his earlier approach to work, and so, for him to continue to accept the normative and critical force of expression and cooperation, all that would be required would be to understand his initial “critical conception of work” no longer in anthropological, but in psychological, or phenomenological terms. This means simply to approach work not just from the perspective of its inscription in the social division of labour, but also from the subjective perspective of the working agent. The research that Christophe Dejours has devoted to the meaning of work for modern subjects from a “psychodynamic” perspective, that is, from the perspective of subjective economies, is the reference point for this proposal. The chapter will argue in effect that Dejours’ “psychodynamics of work” provides, amongst other things, a striking confirmation of the validity of Honneth’s initial, “critical conception of work.”



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This kind of immanent criticism will appear all the more modest if we consider the fact that Honneth’s “new characterisation” reinstates norms that remain close to the ones used in the initial argument. The main difference rests not so much on the content of the norms but rather on their methodological status. Honneth now argues that these norms are not to be externally applied from some external ontological standpoint. Rather, they should be extracted from the normative presuppositions underpinning contemporary markets. But if it can be shown that the norms used by Honneth remain similar in their content, then my arguing for the usefulness of the initial normative framework might seem of little merit and of little use. The first point in my argument, however, is not so much to defend the normative value of expression and cooperation, but to defend the place in which they were found in the initial proposal, that is, the activity of work itself. This is what a deep-psychological, phenomenological approach like that of Dejours allows us to do. In the end, though, this methodological discussion impacts also on the scope of the norms of expression and cooperation. The basic intuition at the heart of this chapter is that one gives only a truncated  account of the normative significance of work experience for modern subjects if one interprets its ethical weight solely from the perspective of the individual’s inscription in the division of labour. The full ethical weight of the work experience can only be fully measured if work is approached also as subjective activity. It is in that very specific sense that the “craftsman” model will be defended in this chapter. Finally, this difference in methods, which leads to a different description of the ethical weight of work, also has political implications. Honneth now rejects the norms inherent in the subjective activity of work because of the alleged impossibility of articulating such normative dimensions in proper practical discourse. This argument is surprising as it seems to run counter to the gist of Honneth’s earlier objection to Habermas’ approach to normativity. Was not the model of a “struggle for recognition” devised precisely in order to account for the transformation of inchoate experiences of injustice and suffering into valid, practical claims? If that were the case, then the theory of recognition would, despite its author’s reservations, provide the theoretical means to think of the ways in which the myriad of diffuse experiences of ill-being at work can still fuel substantive political contestations.

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jean-philippe deranty 1.  The Norms of Work: Work as Activity

To begin with, let us recapitulate the substance of Honneth’s rejection of the “craftsman” model as a valid normative source for the critique of contemporary work. The basic trait of this model is the autonomy of the worker in the act of working, the capacity for the working individual to retain control over the production process in its entirety. This autonomy itself is articulated along two normative lines, one intersubjective, the other objective. Autonomy means first of all “free and self-determined cooperation.”4 This again can be taken in two senses. The initial image is that of single artisans, or independent workers akin to artisans, related to each other externally through the “general” division of labour.5 In this image, the workers are free in the simplest sense, inasmuch as they alone decide on the different dimensions of their work, that is, how and how much, they work. Cooperation is external, a coming together of free individualities. This is the ideal single worker canvassed by the political economists as they set out to explain the origin, rise and benefit of the division of labour.6 It is also the implicit image of the worker for Hannah Arendt, for whom “isolation from others is the necessary life condition for every mastership.”7 Strictly speaking, this image is extremely unrealistic since even in times well antedating the rise of manufacture, the division of labour “in detail” had already entered the workshops and building sites.8 However, despite the fact that this ideal of autonomy is problematic on a factual level, it can be kept as an ideal image, if only because the small number of workers gathered in workshops, combined with the strong ethical standards shared by all participating in the same trade, meant that, even in the direct dependence on other workers, especially towards the master, each single worker could retain a sense of control over the production process. The authority of the master, for instance, was predicated on the mastery of a skill   Honneth, “Work and Recognition,” p. 225.   Recall that the “division of labour” has three meanings: “general,” between the main sectors of economic activity; “in particular,” between different trades within these broad divisions; and “in detail,” between specific types of activities in the work unit itself, see Marx, Capital I, trans. B. Fowkes, London, Penguin, 1976, p. 471. 6   Paradigmatically, in the first chapter of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 7   Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 161. 8   As Richard Sennett has remarked, the Ford manufacture itself was still made up in the early 20th century of a number of specialised workshops of skilled workers, The Corrosion of Character, New York, Norton and Company, 2000, p. 40. 4 5



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that was potentially shared by all, a mastery which the apprentice could aspire to.9 Autonomy within the production process means secondly that the worker can retain a sense of control in the act of production itself. The act of production could in theory represent a double alienation: first by directing the worker’s forces towards an activity that would be perceived as painful constraint. This is work as toil, as exertion of physical and mental forces, as “travail” and “labour” (labeur). And secondly, the finished product, as a coagulation of the worker’s labour-power, could appear metaphorically as the objective proof of the stealth of the worker’s strength and life powers. The norm of expression, however, inverts this possible reading: activity is nothing if it is not exerted; the act of work itself, working, and the product of work, present to the worker the possibility to develop, apply and demonstrate his or her vital skills. This is the ideal of “an organic process in which the worker’s skills are objectified in a finished product.”10 The process is organic because the working activity remains unified throughout, the aim of the activity is present at every one of the production’s stages, and so the worker retains a sense of purpose even in the most exerting or debilitating moments, and indeed sees a concrete incarnation of his or her ideas and purpose in the finished product. On what grounds does Honneth reject these two norms, cooperation and expression, and the general ideal of an autonomous work activity, as a valid normative framework to critique contemporary work formations? The main ground is the inappropriateness of the craftsman model to account for the reality of “socially organised work.” Most work in contemporary society cannot be appropriately measured to a high standard of holistic autonomy simply because it involves a high degree of interconnection and interdependence amongst all social agents. To uphold the craftsman ideal is therefore to commit a logical mistake, by generalising from a few cases where work indeed continues to be akin to artistic production, to all instances of work.11 The craftsman ideal is too utopian in the face of the “constraints and conditions that prevail” in real work. Drudgery, subordination to superiors, dependence on clients, and so on, make the ideal of work along the model of craft or art   See R. Sennett, The Craftsman, Yale University Press, 2009, p. 54.   Honneth, “Work and Recognition,” p. 226. 11   ibid., pp. 227–228.  9 10

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completely unrealistic. This is all the more true today with the rise of the service sector in contemporary economies, indeed with the shift to a new paradigm of work, from production to service, in which ever greater number of work activities are redescribed and redesigned as services. As Honneth writes, in this sector, no product is constructed in which acquired skills could be mirrored, rather the worker merely reacts with as much initiative as possible to the personal or anonymous demands of those in whose service the respective task is performed.12

As a result of the chasm between the reality of modern work and the excessive ideal of holistic work, the latter in fact only ever remained a dream, notably in the era where work and the organisation of labour were the burning issues in social and political confrontations: as vivid and enthralling as all these ideas about the emancipation of work were, they ultimately failed to have any effect on the history of the organisation of societal labour. Although the romanticised model of the craftsman and the aesthetic ideal of artistic production had sufficient impact to alter permanently our conception of the good and well-lived life, they exerted no real influence on the struggles of workers movements, nor on socialist efforts to improve working conditions and give the producers control over these conditions.13

By contrast, Honneth favours a method of “immanent criticism,” whereby the norms to be used for the critique of economic orders must already be implicitly assumed as valid and as structural preconditions underpinning those very orders. Honneth finds in Hegel’s Philosophy   ibid., p. 228.   ibid., The historical reference is not entirely convincing. In The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson reminded us of how the Luddite rebellion was due in no small part to the deep frustration felt by the English artisans towards the lowering of professional standards, as a result of the introduction of machinery. It was not just the question of the “right price” which decided whether a frame would be broken or not, but also whether the frame was “making full fashioned work” (p. 555). Thompson argues for the “transitional” nature of the Luddite movement, “whose streams run in one direction back to Tudor times, in another forward to the factory legislation of the next hundred years” (p. 552). One can argue that the norms of craft and artisanship have played as much if not an even greater role in the constitution of the French labour movement, see R. Magraw, A History of the French Working Class, Vol. I, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992, notably the conclusion, pp. 281–293. In reference to Thompson, some very convincing pages on the impact of the devaluation of good work in capitalism can be found in an important book by N. Dodier, also positively referenced by Honneth: L’Homme et les Machines, Paris, Métaillié, 1995, pp. 192–197. 12 13



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of Right precisely this type of approach to the fundamental norms underpinning the modern economy, which allows the theorist to turn description into criticism by measuring reality by its own implicit norms. The basic concept of the modern, “capitalistic” economy is that every individual is linked to all the others through the market, in particular through the labour market, which brings about a general interconnection of exchanges between all the individual productive activities. The coordination of all individual productive activities allows the satisfaction of everyone’s need, the material reproduction of society. But this functional capacity rests on fundamental normative premises from the perspective of each working individual. The most fundamental of such norms is that an individual contribution to society must allow the individuals to satisfy their needs. Otherwise there would be neither incentive nor justification for the individual to enter the labour market. This in turn requires that the productive activity receives a minimum of social recognition, so that it can count as productive, that is, as socially useful. For this to occur, the activity must be sufficiently complex and allow for a sufficient “display of skills” to warrant a claim for social recognition. We are thus implicitly retrieving the two ideas of cooperation and expression. But this time, the normative crux lies not in the contemplation by a single subject of his or her own skills in an external object, or in the coming together of independent artisans; rather, the normative crux lies in the reality of modern socialeconomic orders, as complex webs interlocking individual productive activities. With this shift, cooperation now designates the acknowledgement by all economic agents of their radical interdependence towards each other. This general relation of mutual dependence is at first merely functional, yet it also necessarily entails the two mentioned normative components: that one’s satisfaction be ensured through the economic process; and that one’s contribution to the division of labour in society be recognised, and therefore given the opportunities to be recognised. This leads to additional normative elements that refor­mulate, from the new perspective, much of what the norm of expression also entailed: that the task be complex enough to allow one to demonstrate one’s skills; and, negatively, that productive activity not be emptied out of meaningful content through  fragmentation, hyper-specialisation or excessive productive rhythms.

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By turning to Durkheim’s early essay on the Division of Labour in Society, Honneth is able to close the circle and basically retrieve most of the normative substance that was contained in the craftsman’s ideal, but this time from the perspective of the individual’s integration in the division of labour. For instance, the idea of an “organic” form of solidarity as the basis of modern societies means amongst other things that “the cooperative connection between one’s own activity and that of one’s fellow workers must be clearly visible from the perspective of each individual job.”14 With the help of Durkheim and the recognitiontheoretical perspective, Honneth is thus able to re-enter “the hidden abode of production”15 and delineate the normative weight of work as an activity. But from his point of view, this has been made possible by a crucial methodological move: the cooperative and expressive qualities demanded of work are no longer extracted from an essence of work, but rather from the normative assumptions underlying modern societies organised through a complex, infinitely ramified division of labour. 2.  Immanent Criticism of Capitalism or the Market? Before we attempt to evaluate this shift, a note is in order regarding the remarkable absence of a reference to Marx in Honneth’s latest article on work. The method of immanent criticism has always been a hallmark of Honneth’s approach, throughout his writings. He has always been very explicit about his faithfulness to the tradition he calls “Left-Hegelianism,” as he sees in it the most appropriate means of conducting social criticism, both for theoretical and practical reasons.16 The passages where Honneth shows how the new, “recognitiontheoretical” normative approach to work would be applied for concrete social criticism are typical of this position: norms that remain external to the social reality they are meant to critique are toothless, both epistemically (they remain arbitrary) and practically (their application is problematic). By contrast, norms that are already at play 14  E. Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, New York, The Free Press, 1984; Honneth, “Work and Recognition,” p. 235. 15  Marx, Capital I, p. 279. 16   I have traced Honneth’s commitment to the methodological principles he identifies as “left-Hegelian” throughout his oeuvre, in Beyond Communication. A Critical Study of Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy, Leiden, Brill, 2009.



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represent a real critical leverage point. This is so first of all for theoretical reasons, but it can also be demonstrated empirically, via the examples of real social struggles. But then the way in which Honneth pursues the Left-Hegelian tradition in this particular paper might seem paradoxical since Hegel is upheld as a better conceptual solution to his later theoretical offsprings whereas the “Left-Hegelian” tag generally denotes the reverse, namely an approach anchored in later authors for whom Hegel furnishes only a set of basic methodological and conceptual presuppositions. This paradoxical take on “Left-Hegelianism” characterises Honneth’s general approach since The Struggle for Recognition at least, but it is especially striking regarding the work question since Marx, the most significant “Left-Hegelian,” is also the philosopher who in that particular tradition tied the analysis of contemporary social-economic orders substantially to the fate of work, in all of its dimensions. Thus, one cannot help but interpret the absence of any direct reference to Marx as an implicit point made by Honneth. When he writes in rejection of the craftsman model, “particularly amongst the socialist heirs of early German Romanticism, the idea spread that all human labour should possess the self-purposeful creativity exemplified by the production of works of art,” it is difficult not to think first and foremost of Marx’s early writings, or his famous characterisation of work in the Grundrisse.17 Against the background of Honneth’s significant earlier work in critical Marxist exegesis, and given the continued predominance of the Marxian reference for a critique of contemporary work, Honneth seems to imply that it is in Hegel and not in Marx that an appropriate critique of contemporary political economy can be grounded, that is, a proper immanent critique of capitalism. This return to Hegel away from Marx, however, might come at a cost, depending on one’s theoretical options. Honneth’s analysis is premised on the idea that “market-mediated exchange” and more particularly, the “market-mediated exchange of labour,” the “marketmediated division of labour,” are synonymous with capitalism. Given that for him the norms of critique can only be found in the immanence 17  Marx, Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, London, Penguin, 1973, p. 611: “(Adam) Smith has no inkling whatever that this overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity—and that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits—hence as self-realisation, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labour.…”

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of existing social reality, the critique of political economy, before it turns critical, must first posit the existing capitalistic order as an unquestionable premise that is itself out of reach of critique. From the perspective of “immanent critique,” to question capitalism would be to adopt a type of externally based criticism that is inherently mistaken. On the other hand, since the capitalistic economy is organised as a market, the latter, now interpreted as a type of “social order,” also provides the opportunity to find implicit norms upon which existing social-economic conditions can be critiqued. However, since capitalism is posited as an indisputable premise, the reach of critique is limited in its scope from the beginning. Criticism can go far in the critical diagnosis, in pointing out extant pathologies, in denouncing social dominations that entrench those pathologies, but in terms of the directions for political practice, it can only point to reforms of the existing order, in no way to something beyond that order, however pathological and destructive the latter might be. Of course, a Marxist perspective has a very different stance on this. What I would like to point out is that a different take on the pathologies of existing capitalism does not necessarily originate in a conceptual confusion. From the perspective of certain readings of Marx, it is Honneth who overlooks a crucial conceptual distinction, as he equates “market-mediated exchange” with capitalism. The methodological crux of Marx’s Capital is the idea that, although capitalism has been historically the social formation that has generalised and systematised the market-structure of the economy, logically the relation is the reverse: capitalism could only arise because the structural conditions for it were given with the shift to modern society, with its specific mode of economic coordination (the market), essentially related to decisive normative advances (freedom and equality). The logical scheme to think this relation is the Hegelian one of position and presupposition: capitalism has posited in historical society the logical and normative presuppositions that made it possible in the first place. From Marx’s perspective, one should not confuse “the specifically capitalist form of the process of social production” with “the organisation of social labour” in general that arises with modernity.18 In particular, capitalism added a decisive new element to the historical emergence of new modes of social coordination, by confiscating in private hands a wealth   Capital I, p. 486.

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that is essentially social. Even if “on the foundations available to it, it could not develop in any other form than the capitalist one,”19 this historical fact should not be confused with a logical necessity. In other words, the fact that markets have arisen historically with capitalism does not necessarily mean that markets and capitalism are indistinguishable.20 The implications of this other reading of modernity are clear. If the market and capitalism are two separate things, it becomes possible to retrieve the normative resources that Honneth draws from his analysis of modern economies as markets economies without having to conclude that this entails renouncing a move beyond capitalism. From this perspective, Honneth’s construal of immanent critique ends up in a historicist justification of the given similar to what Hegel has been accused of providing. On the other hand, a radical critique of capitalism can still claim to remain immanent if it rests on norms that are not those of capitalism but rather the norms of modernity. Indeed such a critique can diagnose in the logic of capitalism, that is, in the commodification of the entire world (of human labour, psyches, social relations, natural environments, cultural lifeworlds, and so on) for the sole purpose of ever-increasing abstract valorisation, a perversion of the norms of modernity, that led us to the crises we now face. Very concretely, the distinction means that there are other ways to organise the markets, and in particular, to articulate them to other forms of social coordination, than in capitalistic ways. This general remark regarding the reading of modernity and the ways of conducting its critique is in fact not too distant from the analysis of the norms of work. Despite the difficulty of delineating precisely the normative status of work in Marx’s writings, it is certain that his analysis of the injustice implicit in the production of surplus-value has strong moral overtones. Honneth might well be right when he writes that the analysis of social struggle ends up, in the late economic writings, in a utilitarian model, where each class struggles for its own interests.21 At the same time, though, many critical passages in Capital rely  ibid.  J. Bidet, Exploring Marx’s Capital: Philosophical, Economic and Political Dimensions, Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2009. For the concrete political implications of this reading of Marx, see J. Bidet and G. Duménil, Altermarxisme. Un autre marxisme pour un autre monde, Paris, PUF, 2007. 21  A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, trans. J. Anderson, London, Polity Press, 1994, pp. 148–149. 19 20

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on a different normative stance. In these passages, the scandal of exploitation is not just that a false bargain, an arithmetic injustice, is imposed upon the wage worker, but that vital forces are directly attacked and undermined.22 In other words, there is a phenomenological strand running through Capital, which sees Capital as a force that must be resisted also for what it does to life.23 It is a similar strand I would now like to retrieve to discuss the two norms of work, expression and cooperation. If these are taken not as dimensions of instrumental activity, but rather in relation to their constitutive importance to human subjectivity that is, taken in a deep-psychological sense then it might be possible to show that they retain a normative significance despite Honneth’s reframing of work in social-theoretical terms. Indeed if it can be shown that psychic economies rely on processes of expression and structures of cooperation to sustain themselves in work experiences, then the reproach of using external criteria in social criticism no longer holds since nothing is more immanent to socialeconomic life than the subjectivity of the individuals engaged in it. As a matter of fact, one could reasonably argue that subjective vulnerability as a result of social dependency is also the normative bedrock of Honneth’s own ethics of recognition.24 3.  Autonomy in the Working Activity: Expression The key question, then, is the following: Is it true that the demand for autonomy within the production process is an external and unrealistic criterion, which should be rejected for that reason? We can ask that

22  Through the modern division of labour, Marx writes, Capital “seizes labourpower by its roots,” Capital I, p. 481. “Modernity sees the emergence of an “industrial pathology,” p. 484. For a detailed analysis of this naturalist strand in Marx’s critique of capitalism, see Stéphane Haber, Aliénation. Vie sociale et expérience de la dépossession, Paris, PUF, 2007. 23  To human life and to natural life more generally. The famous chapter on “Largescale industry and agriculture” in Capital I links tightly the two forms of life degradation: “Capitalist production only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker,” Capital I, p. 638. 24   See a particularly telling page in The Struggle for Recognition (p. 48), in which Honneth uses the term of “Versehrbarkeit” as he appropriates Hegel’s Iena theory of recognition. His core normative concepts of “integrity,” “successful self-realisation,” “unimpeded realisation of goals” or “positive self-relations” all relate back to this notion of essential vulnerability.



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same question twice, in relation to the two core norms in view, expression and cooperation. A simple argument can be made to rescue the norm of autonomy in the expressivist sense. It is one thing to argue that the subject at work demands a certain level of autonomy in the conduct of the task, and that he or she suffers when that level of autonomy is not present; and it is a different thing to argue that the whole production process must be organised in such a way that every individual worker, whatever their individual task, must remain in full control of her or his task from beginning to end. It seems as though Honneth is arguing against autonomy on the basis of the second maximalist claim. The reason why he does so relates to the problem of the practical legitimacy of normative claims. Against the grain of his earlier work, he now follows Habermas much more closely in arguing that only universalisability makes a normative claim practically receivable. Since it is not possible to universalise a claim to autonomy (because this is unrealistic given the reality of contemporary work), the feelings and sentiments of contemporary workers denied autonomy and who, in one way or another, express this discomfort have no decisive normative value. But one might object the following: just because a claim cannot be maximally universalised does not necessarily make it normatively irrelevant. We consider the political dimension of the problem in the last section. Honneth’s rejection has a lot to do with the capacity of a claim to be politically justified and practically effective. In this and the next section, we remain at the descriptive level and investigate whether there is not a way to reintroduce expression and cooperation as two norms of work, once the burden of their potential universalisability has been bracketed. The question then is not whether it would make any sense politically to criticise modern work on the basis of autonomy, but whether modern work can be described, inasmuch as it has a normative component that is not just instrumental, as entailing a demand for autonomy. In the end we will see that indeed a strong normative core of contemporary work can be described in the language of autonomy, and that it is in fact Honneth’s own approach to politics that allows us to delineate realistic modes of politicisation on this basis. In this chapter, normative therefore designates the dimensions of work when the latter is considered as a practice involving human subjectivity, by contrast with a mere instrumental approach to work interested only in the articulation of means to productive ends. In other words, normative conclusions are drawn from psychological and

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phenomenological considerations. This will strike many as an inherently flawed methodology, given the tendency today to identify normativity with discursive redeemability. However, I believe this approach to the normativity of work can be defended. Normative after all simply denotes at first what differentiates the right from the wrong in given practices. Normative here will mean what is right and wrong for working subjects, insofar as they are human subjects. The basic assumption here is that, whatever their subjective construct, no human subject is left unaffected by the experience of work and some forms of work (work organisations, types of tasks, work relations and so on) affect human beings for the worse. The approach to the normative is thus the following: if some practices of work impact negatively on the agents, they are normatively wrong. This approach is heavily influenced by the way in which Christophe Dejours deals with the question of work. Dejours’ “psychodynamic” analyses of work situations, and the theory of work he has developed as a result of his practice as a clinician, are premised on the idea that one cannot form a proper judgement of what work means to individuals if one does not bring into the analysis a sufficiently rich notion of what a human subject actually is and requires, as a result of this constitution. As soon as one takes a realistic view of the human subject as an individualised, unified, yet fragile, construct binding somatic, psychological and intellectual resources, then work must appear at first as a challenge because of the many constraints that are structurally present in it. Work is necessarily a challenge to body, soul and mind. As a result, all work is potentially pathogenic because all work involves constraints which can impact more or less deeply on an individual’s subjective construct. Suffering is for Dejours an irreducible part of all work.25 The key questions therefore turn on the analysis of the ways in which these pathogenic traits are dealt with by subjects and organisations, in the negative and the positive: for example, under what conditions work ceases to be a destructive experience; what the thresholds are after which the constraints become active factors of subjective  disintegration; what specific individual and collective defence mechanisms are developed to deal with the suffering involved in work, and so on. The earlier chapters of Travail, Usure Mentale focused on the most obvious source of tension between subjectivity and work, namely the   See in particular the text by Dejours published in this volume.

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organisation of work, which defines and implements the constraints under which work is performed: productive cadences; targets; working conditions; hierarchical relations; relations between peers, and so on. Very simply, work organisations force people to do things in circumstances for which their constitutions (physical, emotional, social and intellectual) are not well adapted, sometimes not at all. The later chapters of Travail, Usure Mentale identify a second structural tension within the work process. All work entails the possibility of suffering because all work challenges the need for a sense of minimal mastery that is a structural need of subjective constructs. This challenge, however, is not just the challenge represented by the difficulty (physical exertion, emotional or intellectual affront) inherent in the production process. Even for the most basic or the most thoroughly programmed operations, Dejours argues, following a wealth of research in ergonomics, there is always a gap between the prescriptions and the effective realisation of the task.26 This gap between the prescribed and the effective is a structure of all forms of work, whatever the work organisations. Indeed, this gap is a challenge both for subjects and organisations. No prescriptions, rules or regulations can ever predict, pre-empt and organise in advance all the possible contingencies, vagaries, variations, and hazards involved in productive tasks. An infinite number of factors can obstruct and prevent the production process: human factors (human errors; limitations of all kinds, physical and intellectual); inter-human factors (relations with peers; relations with hierarchy; competing demands from different groups within productive units); institutional factors (an organisational culture that actually makes it more rather than less difficult to circumvent obstacles to productive efficiency); material factors (resistance of materials; negative interactions between machines and/or materials; wearing down of machines); scientific and technological limitations (lapses in knowledge; insufficient account of complex interrelations; short-term thinking); the list is indefinite.27 The focus on the subjective engagement of individuals in their work leads to the following new definition of work: “the activity deployed by men and women in order to overcome what the prescribed

26   For another clear exposition of this essential feature of work, see also Le Facteur Humain, Paris, PUF, pp. 38–46. 27   It is a well established fact that even in fully taylorised work, production can only occur through the initiative and creativity of workers.

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organisation of work did not anticipate,”28 with the added implied element: “in the fulfilment of a productive task.” For Dejours, in order to understand the moral and existential impact of work on human subjects, one must view it as subjective activity, as working. From this point of view, work is the activity that is required of subjects in order to bridge the gap between what is prescribed and what is demanded for the productive end to be met.29 This vision of work leads to a highly specific normative consideration. The gap between the prescriptions and the effective realisation of the task is an irreducible source of suffering because it can be bridged only in conditions that are rarely available in real work organisations. So again, it is the work organisation that is implicated in the emergence of subjective suffering, but this time not directly as an affront to what human subjects are and are capable of, but indirectly, as an obstacle to their inherent desire to fulfil their tasks. In all these cases, however, the normative bedrock is the possibility for the working subjects to make sense of their activity. Sense here is to be taken in the “psychodynamic” acceptation: can the working subject integrate the activity in her or his subjective “economy” or does the activity, in any one of its dimensions, represent too much of an affront to subjective identity? Can the subject symbolise, that is, appropriate into his or her own subjective life, the suffering that work represents for him or her? How do these two structural traits of work, the tension between organisation and subjectivity and the gap between the prescriptions and the realisation of the job, relate to the question of autonomy? In the first instance, that is, the tension between organisation and subjectivity, the link is straightforward: since the difficulties arise for 28   Quoted from the chapter by Dejours in this volume. In Le Facteur Humain, the definition is the following: “The coordinated activity deployed by men and women in order to overcome that which, in a utilitarian task, cannot be obtained through the strict execution of the prescribed organisation,” p. 43. 29   “Productive ends,” “utilitarian tasks” in the note above, should not be taken in a restricted, “productivist” sense, as excluding forms of work activity not directly related to the production of goods. They point to all forms of activity whose primary feature is the realisation of a socially defined good, whether the latter is a commodity, a service or a form of care. Despite the great differences in all these kinds of work, all involve an active engagement on the part of the worker, to circumvent the resistance of the real and realise the task at hand. Using a similar approach as Dejours, Pascale Molinier has shown the irreducible dimensions of skill use and technical know-how involved in care. Indeed, as the chapter in this volume shows, she argues that it is important to define care as care work to do justice to its ethical and political significance.



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the subject as a result of the constraints imposed by the organisation of work, more autonomy, a lessening of constraints is what is called for. Dejours thus sees the world of pre-Taylorian artisans as a world in which the subject was able to adapt the activity, and the ways in which he or she went about it, to his or her own capacities.30 The fundamental norm here is: “the worker is the best placed person to know what is compatible with her or his health.”31 From this perspective, what is inhuman in Taylor’s scientific organisation of work, or in current forms of purely managerial definitions of working tasks, is that they eliminate all the times, spaces and relations through which subjectivities would in fact have been able to “recharge their batteries,” that is, restore the conditions of sufficient well-functioning.32 In the second instance, that is, in terms of the gap between prescription and realisation, autonomy is again at stake but in a more specific sense. Some work organisations recognise the impossibility of adjusting the production process a priori and from above, and leave room for interpretation and innovation on the part of those who directly confront the resistance of the real in the reality of production. But these are exceptions, even in the modern, “post-fordist” workplace. Most contemporary workplaces continue to be highly prescriptive, organising a thorough surveillance of all aspects of activity. In most work organisations today it remains a risk to not follow the prescriptions. The generalisation and refinement of evaluation techniques to measure performance, with all the punitive aspects linked to them, render the necessity to interpret and sometimes overlook the rules and regulations even more risky.33 But if, as Dejours argues, subjects have an inherent interest in performing the productive activity, then all these organisational obstacles to the realisation of the task impact directly on subjective identity and integrity.34 From the “psychodynamic” perspective, autonomy therefore is the normative term naming what makes it possible for subjects to   Le Travail Humain, p.62.   ibid., p.64. 32   See a particularly clear analysis of current management techniques in Dejours’ latest publication with Florence Bègue, Suicide et Travail: Que Faire?, Paris, PUF, 2009, pp. 33–50. We might note that one of the key aspects of exploitation for Marx is the inherent tendency of capitalistic work to “push” workers beyond the boundaries of what they can sustain, “that obstinate yet elastic natural barrier” (Capital I, p. 527). 33   See C. Dejours, L’évaluation du travail à l’épreuve du réel. Critique des fondements de l’évaluation, Paris, INRA, 2003, as well as Suicide et Travail, pp. 42–46. 34   See in this volume, p. xxx. 30 31

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appropriate their suffering through work. The normative onus is the opposite of what it is in the “craftsman” ideal. That ideal is a “maximalist” one, envisaging a state of productive autarchy where every moment is under the command of the worker, from beginning to end. Here, the norm of autonomy is a minimal one; it envisages a minimum of subjective control over the production process, conditions under which work becomes a source of pathology. There are obviously serious objections to this psychologically based definition of autonomy at work. The immediate objection is probably that the concept appears to remain highly formal and indeterminate. This is firstly because each subjective construct is different from every other one. Some individuals can flourish, or at least develop good enough strategies to cope with some forms of work, whilst others wither in the same circumstances. The psychologist might be able to explain an individual case where the work organisation has been a more or less direct cause of pathology, but this is not what is sought here. The problem considered here relates to the norms for the critique of society, and so norms that can be appropriately generalised. Before the issue of their possible politicisation, there is the issue of their generality already at the descriptive level. Indeed, not just individual reactions to given work practices differ greatly, but work situations and tasks are also specific. Secondly, beyond the problem of the individualised meaning of autonomy once it is defined psychologically, there is the issue of the helpfulness of the model for concrete critique and proposals in real work situations.35 If the idea is to retrieve the concept of autonomy in such general terms as: the possibility for the subject to appropriate the task inasmuch as the latter represents a challenge for his or her psychic economy, then we may well ask: how would that be implemented in concrete terms and in real situations? The notion does not seem at first to contain what it takes to answer this question satisfactorily. In response to the first part of the objection, we can probably refer to the type of response Honneth himself has given to criticisms

35   This is one the main criticisms expressed by Alain Ehrenberg in his recent attack on the growing influence of the “suffering” paradigm and Dejours’ influence in the French debate, in La Société du Malaise, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2010. Interestingly, Ehrenberg also takes Honneth to task and, politely but forcefully, contrasts his analysis of the rise of depression in Western societies with Honneth’s interpretation of the latter.



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questioning his grounding of normative social critique in a thick theory of the subject. Honneth’s response is that recognition does not designate the content of subjectivity but the conditions for the development of autonomous subjectivity. The same applies to Dejours’ proposal. However, beyond the idiosyncrasy of individual pathologies, Dejours also identifies collective forms of pathology that are grounded in general traits of work and affect large parts of the population. The definition of work as subjective activity demanded of the subject to bridge the gap between the prescribed and the real is true of all work. The impact of constraining work organisations and in particular the impact that organisations have in making the bridging of the gap more difficult, these are again universal features in the subject-work relationship. Given the essential vulnerability of subjective constructs, it is impossible for work not to represent, at some level, a source of discomfort and a challenge to subjective identity. The variability of individual reactions to specific work situations remains an objection only within certain limits, only in relatively benign cases. There are thresholds, physical, emotional and intellectual, beyond which work becomes more and more constraining and affects more and more people. To give examples of contemporary problems arising in relation to the factors highlighted in Dejours’ approach: when the rationalisation of work processes means that fewer workers are to achieve the same productive targets as previously (physical constraint); when increased surveillance makes the possibility of imaginary evasion more risky or impossible; or when constantly changing or ever increasing demands from the hierarchy give a sense of radical hopelessness. Thresholds can be taken in an extensive or an intensive sense. Extensively, Dejours argues that the pathologies of contemporary society are due to a large extent to the nature of work in neoliberal economies, because of the fear generated by new forms of work and work organisation (fear of unemployment, fear arising from systematic competition, from constant evaluation, and so on).36 In this case, we could say that the thresholds have been crossed for a great number of people, in a simple numerical sense. A rich and growing literature on the magnitude and intensity of suffering caused by post-fordist work organisations seems to lend massive, if indirect, empirical support to

36   In particular in Souffrance en France. La banalisation de l’injustice sociale, Paris, Le Seuil, 1998.

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this side of the argument.37 But the notion of threshold remains valid in smaller work units, this time in an intensive sense: here the analysis can restrict itself to the smallest of units, down to a single individual case, without losing sight of general work conditions, as in the case of suicides at work, which remain exceptional in any given particular workplace, but can be taken as symptoms of a general degradation of working environments. In response to the second part of the objection, regarding the usefulness of the notion of autonomy for concrete work situations, again, it is based on a misunderstanding similar to the ones that have been raised against recognition theory. The notion of autonomy as capacity to appropriate meaningfully one’s own suffering remains unspecified only for as long as it is not applied to a concrete case, a social analysis or the study of a particular work place. Of course, a great many factors can contribute to blocking the subjective symbolisation of suffering: material, institutional, intersubjective, factors arising from the productive demand, and so on. What a “Dejourian” notion of autonomy adds to the analysis of these factors is a unique, and it seems to me indispensable, focus on the very activity of work. But such a focus is not to the detriment of all the other dimensions mentioned. Rather, the subject at work is the point at which all the other dimensions converge. The key point though is that it is not just a social subject, but also a subject engaged, with body, mind and soul, in the activity. This is the point where the difference with Honneth’s approach is most substantial. In attempting to redefine the possibility and the meaning of a critique of modern work,38 Honneth also aims to maintain a strong connection between the conceptual, normative analysis and the reality of pathologies of work as documented by clinical and sociological analysis. His attempt remains squarely a work of “critical 37   Amongst the immense literature on the rise of stress, burnout, muskeletal pathologies, and more generally the psychological and physical cost of work intensification and flexibilisation, let us note simply, for the American context, a classical, particularly clear study, which showed a clear link between individual suffering and the socialeconomic context: C. Maslach and M. Leiter, The Truth about Burnout, Jossey Bass, 1997. In the French context, two recent studies, directly informed by Dejours’ model, give a particularly vivid picture of the situation: M. Pezé, Ils ne mouraient pas tous, mais tous étaient touchés, Paris, Pearson, 2008; P. Coupechoux, La déprime des opprimés, Paris, Seuil, 2009. 38   See Honneth’s “Organised Self-realisation. Paradoxes of Individuation,” European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2004, pp. 463–478, and “Paradoxes of Capitalism,” Constellations, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2006, pp. 42–58 (with Martin Hartmann).



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theory” targeting, and indeed largely taking its conceptual cue from, “social pathologies.” But his interpretation of the ways in which the critique of work needs to be properly conducted makes him view these pathologies as arising solely from the social, intersubjective vulnerability of modern subjects, from the fact that they cannot escape taking part in the contemporary division of labour. Everything comes down to the possibility or not of taking place meaningfully in the division of labour. There is no doubt that this dimension is crucial for subjective well-being. Indeed, Dejours’s own critical interventions on the social impact of changes in the world of work overlap to some extent with Honneth’s on this point.39 But Honneth’s new approach seems to be tailored only to a certain band of pathological phenomena. It must leave out of sight a number of other ways in which work affects modern subjects. By definition, Honneth’s social-psychological approach excludes the possibility for social critique to target pathologies arising from the “ergonomic” side of work: the reality of work cadences, material working conditions, productive pressures, the ever increasing number of prescriptions constraining the productive act (safety, quality, quantity, behavioural constraints, and so on). Secondly, Honneth’s new approach to work can only study subjective impacts of work organisations from a sociological perspective as paradoxes of self-realisation.40 The psychological problem is limited to the relation of subjects to themselves as a result of the social mediations that frame and influence these self-relations. For Honneth, the key affect in neoliberal society is the “suffering from indeterminacy,”

39   I have attempted to relate their two theories of work and recognition in “Work and the Precarisation of Existence,” European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 11, No. 4, 2008, pp. 443–463. 40   Honneth in fact comes close to the impact of work as an activity when he refers to studies conducted at the Institute in Frankfurt, highlighting the rupture between performance (Leistung) as engagement of the worker in the activity and performance as mere success measured by productive and economic targets. Implicit in these studies is the normative significance of the correlation between the worker’s active engagement in the task and the recognition he or she receives. See the two studies by Stephan Voswinkel and Gabriele Wagner in this volume as well as H. Kocyba, “Was leistet das Leistungsprinzip?,” ed. R. Zwengel Gesellschaftliche Perspektiven: Arbeit und Gerechtigkeit, Essen, Klartext Verlag, 2007, pp. 163–177, as well as H. Kocyba and S. Voswinkel, “Die Kritik des Leistungsprinzip im Wandel.” in eds. K. Dröge, K. Marrs and W. Menz Rückkehr der Leistungsfrage, Berlin, Sigma, 2008, pp. 21–37. For a synthesis of the research of the Frankfurt sociologists of work and a comparison with Honneth and Dejours’s own theories of recognition and work, see E. Renault, “Reconnaissance et travail,” Travailler, Vol. 18, 2007, pp. 117–135.

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which arises from the fact that the great push for individualisation which characterises modernity and indeed represented a revolutionary force, has become a productive factor, used by managements and organisations to increase productivity, flexibility, and to dismantle the old, “rigid” structures, which offered some forms of legal and institutional protection for subjects. As a result of the exploitation for economic purposes of this increased individualism, the search for individual self-exploration and self-definition, the pressure to constantly self-present in the best possible light, to ensure one’s “employability,” and the resources of intimate relations, are put under extreme pressure. Such a diagnosis is certainly very convincing, but it deals only with the pathologies that arise from the relation between the individual and the broad social framework. If we follow Dejours, the subjective impacts of the new economic arrangements are not limited to problems of self-definition from a social perspective. In order to be able to look precisely at the way in which new forms of management and organisation of the work processes affect subjects, it is important to put the light precisely on those interactions, which require us to descend from too general a perspective, and enter the hidden abode of production. To mention just one, especially striking, example highlighted by Dejours, the immense spread of fear and anxiety in current workplaces means that the suffering of others is less and less perceptible to the subjects, and that, as a result, there is less and less compunction to do bad things to others. Brutal retrenchment, increased surveillance, destruction of solidarity, blackmail of different forms, form the reality of contemporary work. The psychological impact of this is immense and can be felt in the broad social sphere, well beyond the workplace. Yet it cannot be properly uncovered unless one seriously focuses on the subject in concrete work situations. What is the link between the definition of autonomy proposed here and expression? Since the key idea is the utter dependency (physical, psychological and intellectual) of the subject at work, it is clear that expression here cannot be the unattainable ideal of a worker in full command of the entire mode of production. The psychological detour Dejours suggests leads to a more low-key version of expression. The crucial conceptual link is provided by the category of meaning. The possibility for the subject to integrate meaningfully the working activity in his or her subjective economy, despite the challenges the activity necessarily represents, can be described as the capacity to



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become minimally the subject of one’s own activity. When that is realised, the subject can sense that he or she is the actual subject of work: she or he can see herself in it. The activity is not necessarily a perfectly adequate development of all of the subjects’ skills, and the product (or services rendered) might not be perfect mirrors of those subjective resources. But within the activity, the subject can retain his or her sense of self. As vague as this might sound at first glance, Dejours’ detailed approach to work in fact shows to what extent the conditions for this to happen are in fact varied and precise. 4. Cooperation The same remark that was made about autonomy within the activity can be made at the outset about autonomy in the sense of the free cooperation of independent agents: there might well be a minimalist account of cooperation, one in particular that focuses on its importance for the psychic economies of working subjects, which would be radically different from an unrealistic, maximalist understanding of cooperation, understood as external, pre-capitalist exchange between autarchic producers. Again, Dejours makes substantial propositions in this sense and helps to defend a certain version of cooperation as a norm to critically analyse contemporary work, with a view in particular to its general social and political significance. In order to retrieve the normative importance of cooperation, I must briefly introduce Dejours’ own account of recognition as it relates to the working process. As we have seen, the first decisive element in Dejours’s analysis of work was to take into account the gap between the prescriptive and the effective in the productive process. The second crucial discovery relates to the structural importance of recognition. As the chapter published in this volume shows very well, recognition is one of the key factors to determine the ultimate meaning of suffering  in work. Given that suffering always threatens to sever the link between subjective identity and the subject’s activity, the role of recognition, in allowing for a meaningful articulation between the two, is decisive: The symbolic recompense accorded through recognition comes from the production of the meaning which it confers on the work experience. This is the meaning of suffering in work: as we have seen, it originates in

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Recognition here is first and foremost the recognition of the subject’s productive performance, of his contribution not to the division of labour in general but to the specific division of labour within the production process, the recognition of this concrete “Leistung.” One of the key preconditions for this recognition is the existence of a group, in which the judgement over the actual realisation of the task is effectively produced. This, however, points precisely to the normative importance of cooperation. In Dejours, cooperation is distinguished from coordination as the normative from the instrumental. All work requires a coordination of action, even for the mythical autarchic artisan. Yet technical constraints are not sufficient to bring about on their own the actual coordinating of subjects’ actions. This is because, once again, working subjects are not machines, but human subjects. They confront the resistance of the real, and the affront that this resistance represents to all the prescriptions governing production. Even in the most mechanised and rationalised work processes, the human factor remains indispensable because no machine can demonstrate the same level of inventiveness and creativity, the same range of adaptability, as the human agent. This is true even for the most trivial of tasks and for the most rationalised forms of working processes. However, in order for the coordination of human efforts to be operative, a minimum basis of trust is necessary.42 This stems from the fact that this joining of efforts demands precisely to go beyond the prescribed, since the prescribed demonstrates its limits very quickly. This overlooking of the prescribed, however, is dangerous. By definition, it means breaking the established rules.43 In dysfunctional workplaces, when the hierarchy is too punitive or the working relations are too degraded, workers cannot take the risk of going beyond the prescribed. But then it is the production that suffers. Cooperation designates the normative supplement to the coordination of productive acts, a supplement that is, according to Dejours, indispensable for production to occur. However, cooperation is not   Dejours, “From psychopathology to psychodynamics of work,” in this volume.   See Dejours, in this volume, p.xxx, as well as Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, pp. 64–75 and pp. 140–142. 43  Dejours, Le Facteur Humain, pp. 52–62. 41 42



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just an indispensable aspect of work simply from the point of view of productive efficacy. It is also essential to working agents because only through cooperation can the recognition of the subject’s concrete contribution to the organisation of work be granted. And as was said earlier, this recognition of the subject’s “doing” is essential to the psychological dimension of work. One of the most important ways in which a subject can give meaning to his or her work is by having his or her concrete contribution to the work process recognised, that is, epistemically and normatively acknowledged. And this occurs through cooperation (as opposed to merely technical coordination). Put in the negative: the dismantling of work collectives, via the systematic competition organised between co-workers and productive units, projectbased production and generalised outsourcing, all of this impacts on subjects at work not just because it weakens structures and institutions that once offered material (legal, institutional, financial) protection, but also because all these changes rob the working agents of one of the essential ways through which they could construe the meaning of their activity by having their skill and engagement valued by the only people who could truly understand what those are really about. Once again, we should note that these arguments are in fact quite close to arguments that Honneth himself makes. In particular, his “redefinition” of work adds new dimensions to recognition through work, that is, to the recognition of individual status that he defined in The Struggle for Recognition as the third sphere of recognition. Honneth now finds in Hegel, beyond the demand for fair pay, the demand for the recognition of the subject’s productive contribution: Hegel was convinced that the moral presuppositions of the capitalist organisation of work required that the individual’s work not only be remunerated with an income that secured a livelihood, but also retain a form in which it remained recognisable as a contribution to the common good on the basis of the skills it entails.44

This is very close to the recognition Dejours talks about in “From the Psychopathology to the Psychodynamics of Work.” The key difference, however, is the one already noted. Honneth interprets the phenomenon and the norms it entails in social-theoretical terms, in terms of the relationship between subjectivity and its social environment. The skills of the working subject, the minimal complexity of the productive task,   Honneth, “Recognition and Work,” p. 231.

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are means for an end: ways for the subject to make a valid contribution to the general division of labour. From this perspective, cooperation has no inherent normative role to play. In Dejours’ model on the other hand, the recognition of the activity is in and of itself a source of subjective validation (or suffering when it is lacking): the subject demands to be recognised for his or her activity, for the precise contribution to a productive task, and this is structurally dependent on extant cooperation. Indeed, we could also point out that this Dejourian take on cooperation is quite close to what Hegel and Durkheim had in view in their respective references to the division of labour in society. When Hegel writes that the working subject takes place in the division of labour “durch Bildung und Geschicklichkeit,” “through education and talent,”45 the second term refers unmistakably to the concrete exercise of skills that demand recognition qua skills. We can see in this term an anticipation of Dejours’ insistence on “practical intelligence” as subjective skill that is both instrumentally demanded for the success of production and normatively in need of recognition. Later on, in the section on the corporation, Hegel states explicitly that the subject “gives himself or herself reality,” qua subject, by particularising his or her activity in embracing a particular profession, in joining a specific productive area of society. Once again, it is through the exercise of concrete skills, through the development of a specific type of “practical intelligence,” through “Tätigkeit, Fleiß und Geschicklichkeit,” through his “activity, diligence and skill,”46 that a subject becomes a full subject. The corporation, then, is defined not just through the general division of labour, in mere functional terms, but also through concrete types of activities. To say it differently, the normative significance of the division of labour is not just social but also technical. But the technical division of labour is premised on cooperation. This concrete, practical, sense of recognition one achieves through one’s activity in a professional collective is even more explicitly expressed in Durkheim. Indeed, it appears most expressly in the very quote Honneth uses in his article. According to Durkheim,  G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, #199, trans, H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 233. The reference to a professional culture, in the technical sense of the term (a culture arising from shared skills and techniques), as the ground of the corporation, is more explicitly developed in Hegel’s Iena writings. 46  Hegel, Philosophy of Right, #207, p. 238. 45



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the “meaning” of work that the worker is able to formulate, depends on him or her “not losing sight of those co-operating with him,” of him “acting upon them and being acted upon by them.” In this case, “he knows that his movements are tending in a certain direction, towards a goal that he can conceive of more or less distinctly. He feels that he is of use… Thenceforth, however specialized, however uniform this activity may be, it is that of an intelligent being, for he knows that his activity has a meaning.”47 The meaning of work stems from the opportunity for the worker to see his or her function within the social whole, but this in turn occurs through immediate cooperation, through reciprocal interaction (acting upon/being acted upon) with those closest to him or her. This relates to a fundamental dimension of Durkheim’s social ontology. Durkheim always speaks of the social bond in a concrete, physical sense. It is the contact, in the literal, physical sense of the term, between social agents, that secures their interdependence and binds together individual actions that otherwise risk undermining themselves and each other. In his book on the division of labour in society, it is clear that the predominant form of contact Durkheim entrusts with creating social bonds and thus with repelling the deleterious effects of anomie, is the contact through cooperation in the technical division of labour. The very quote that Honneth refers to insists on the concreteness of the social task that ensures social integration. The proximity in question is the proximity of people who work together, who are brought together by technique and production.48 In other words, it is possible to argue that for both Hegel and Durkheim, the sense of general social usefulness is in fact already grounded in a more specific sense, something we could call, professional usefulness. Or in terms of recognition: social esteem is anchored in professional esteem. The third sphere of recognition is indeed the recognition of Leistung, but with of Leistung taken in its concrete, productive, sense. And that specific sense of social service, which provides

 Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, p. 308.   We might add that although Marx discusses cooperation in the sense of Dejours’ “coordination,” that is in a mere functional sense, some normative elements also appear, as when he writes that “apart from the power that arises from the fusion of many forces into a single force, mere social contact begets in most industries a rivalry and a stimulation of ‘animal spirits’, which heightens the efficiency of each individual worker,” Capital I, p. 443. 47 48

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meaning to the activity, can be realized only in the professional community, via the judgement of the peers, that is, through cooperation. 5.  Work and Politics The problem of politicisation is the final great objection to the norms of expression and cooperation. Even if it were true that those norms are, as Dejours argues, essential psychological dimensions for working subjects, this does not automatically make them norms that would be appropriate for a more general social criticism and for concrete political demands. Indeed, how could one base a concrete political discourse on the heterogeneity of individual pathologies and the highly specific problems arising in particular work places and industries? On this point, however, we must note that Honneth’s rejection of the “norms of the craftsman” for their impossible universalisation is surprising, given the thrust of The Struggle for Recognition. In that book, Honneth had argued precisely that the true leverage for social critique and for positive political claims was in fact to be sought in the structural conditions that are necessary to enable subjects to develop positive forms of self-relation. Indeed, the argument then was decidedly anti-Habermassian: the fact that normative demands cannot be directly universalised does not speak against their normative value. It is precisely the work of social movements, under conditions described precisely in chapter seven of the book, to develop the practical and normative arguments that transform the normative claims arising from the experiences of injustice and disrespect, often known only implicitly in the sense of violated expectations, into explicit, normatively valid practical claims.49 We might ask why the same process of universalisation through the specific cultural and political work of social movements could not also apply to the norms of work. The fact that such social movements might be weak or, in some cases, barely survive is no argument against their possibility or indeed their desirability.50 Indeed, Dejours has shown in 49  For a substantial development of this argument, see Emmanuel Renault, L’ expérience de l’injustice, Paris, La Découverte, 2004. 50   In fact, in some North-European countries, norms of autonomy at work, in a sense close to what we have described here with the help of Dejours’s psychodynamics, are very much part and parcel of the compromise between employers and employee organizations, see D. Coats, “Quality of Work and a New Politics of the Quality of Life. A Progressive Agenda for the Workplace,” Per Capita Research Paper, 2008.



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the case of the French public sphere how the inability of the organised labour movement post-1968 to look beyond the sole questions of employment and to insist on the importance of working conditions and autonomy at work, had been a historical failure for which today’s workers were paying the price.51 The pessimism with which we must view any practical proposal to radically alter the organisation of workplaces and working conditions today is not an argument against the denunciation of their deleterious effects. In any case, it is only if one keeps in view all that work can do to subjects inasmuch as they are engaged in working activities, that one can do justice to the suffering these inflict on them.

  Souffrance en France, pp. 41–45.

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Chapter seven

Three Normative Models of Work Nicholas H. Smith One of the distinctive features of the post-Hegelian tradition of social philosophy is the connection it forges between normative criticism and historical understanding. For some philosophers who place themselves in this tradition, the main consequence of making this connection is to alert us to the historical contingency of the norms on which normative criticism is based: historical understanding brings to light the plurality of values and the possibility that the norms we now adhere to could have been otherwise.1 But historicism, in the sense of moral relativism, is not the only lesson that can be learnt from taking the link between normative criticism and historical understanding seriously— indeed, it is not the lesson that most philosophers in the post-Hegelian tradition want to teach. For in addition to showing that norms are subject to change, historical understanding reveals that norms have historical power. That is to say, norms are historically effective, they have social reality, and the social philosopher should be aware of this when targeting her normative criticism. Philosophically well-targeted normative criticism will be rationally grounded criticism that draws on norms that are historically effective, that have a hold on people in the here and now, and that can therefore motivate or drive social change. In addition to being effective, well-targeted normative criticism will be necessary, in the ordinary sense of being directed where it is most needed. It will be directed not just at any normative deficit, as measured against historically effective norms, but at deficits that really matter to people, that impact on them negatively in serious ways. Historical understanding can help to diagnose the main social pathologies from which people suffer. Normative criticism mediated by historical understanding both looks backward at the emergence of historically effective norms, and forwards towards emancipation from the 1   See for example Richard Rorty, Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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defining pathologies of the times. This, at least, is what normative criticism does at its best, on the post-Hegelian view. The normative models of work I shall discuss in this chapter are frameworks for normative criticism in this post-Hegelian sense. They claim to identify certain core norms that have at once helped to shape what work has actually become today, at least in advanced economies, and that have the potential to transform this world in a progressive manner. They are thus normative models in the double sense that they claim to identify the historically effective core norms of work, the norms that have been effective in constituting it historically, in making it what it is; while also claiming to provide orientation for normative criticism of work aimed at genuine emancipation, at making it what it should be. In the latter role, the models claim to be responsive to the distinctive needs of the times and to suggest paths for possible recovery. I will suggest that the post-Hegelian tradition presents us with three contrasting normative models of work, in the sense just introduced. According to the first model I shall identify, which I shall call the instrumental model, the core norms of work are those of means-ends rationality. In this model, the modern world of work is constitutively a matter of deploying the most effective means to bring about given ends. The ends for which working is the means do not themselves come from the working, they are not internal to work activity: they derive first and foremost from the material conditions of human existence and the natural necessity of securing them. The rational kernel of modern work, the core norm that has shaped its development, is on this view instrumental reason, and this very same normative core, in the shape of advanced technology and more efficient, time-saving production, can help to liberate it. The second model, by contrast, takes the core norms of work to be internal to working activity. Rather than work gaining its normativity, so to speak, from something external to it, from ends to which the work is a contingent means, on this second view the core norms of work are expressions of values or meanings that are immanent to working practices themselves. The expressive model of work, as I shall call it, regards the actual world of work to be constituted historically by work-specific norms, norms which working subjects themselves have invoked and mobilised around in the course of their struggles for emancipation. According to the third model, the core norms of work, in the double constitutive-transformative sense we are dealing with here, have to do neither with instrumental



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rationality nor authentic self-expression. Rather they concern norms that relate either to individual achievement or contribution through work (in the form of esteem) or to the conditions that must in place for individuals to participate in the exchange of services by which market societies reproduce themselves (in the form of mutual respect). Following Honneth, I shall call this the recognition model. I want to look at each of these models in a bit more detail, but before doing so, I should say something about the anxieties around work which provide the backdrop to the contemporary philosophical discussion. As we have seen, part of the task of a normative model of work is to provide a framework for understanding the “pathologies” of work and the “malaises” surrounding it. This is because such an understanding is a pre-requisite of well-targeted normative criticism, in the dual sense of effective and necessary criticism distinguished above. Put otherwise, the appropriateness of a normative model of work will depend in part on its responsiveness to the dominant social pathologies and malaises of work. Let me offer a few observations, then, about where contemporary anxieties around work seem primarily to lie. The Malaise over Work The widely used expression “work-life balance”—or rather “imbalance”—nicely captures one field of anxiety that characterises the Zeitgeist around work. There would seem to be little doubt that many people are troubled by the amount of time they spend at work, or that others spend at it, compared to the “non-work” aspects of their lives. And this is often associated with a perception that the value of work is exaggerated, either by the individuals who allow their lives to be swallowed up by work, or by the society at large which encourages, and perhaps even forces, people to lead such work-obsessed lives. This socio-cultural exaggeration of the value of work might fit an ideology of economic growth and continuously improving performance within companies and institutions, but only at the cost of those values that can only be found in life outside work, and the overall balance between the values of work and non-work. We can make the nature of this anxiety a little more precise if we distinguish two ways in which the value of work might be conceived. On the one hand, if the value of work is conceived purely along instrumental lines, that is, in terms of the income it generates, then the

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excessive value attached to work really amounts to an over-estimation of something that work is just the means for: namely, the power to purchase goods and ultimately the pleasure of consuming them. The work-life imbalance then appears as the mark of a society bent on excessive accumulation, consumption and hedonistic enjoyment—a symptom of “affluenza,” as one social commentator has put it.2 But the malaise over the work-life imbalance appears in a different light if we conceive of work not just as an instrumental good whose meaning and fulfilment lies in some future enjoyment, but as an intrinsic good whose satisfactions derive from the activity itself. For what is then in the balance is not the sheer pain of work and the pleasure of life, nor an amoral thirst for consumption and the wholesome goods of family life, community engagement, self-cultivation, and so forth, which are sacrificed in the frenzy to get on with work; but rather two competing sets of broadly speaking “moral” demands: the “life-good” of work and other “life” goods.3 If our interpretation is based on the latter conception, then the malaise over the work-life imbalance can be seen to arise from a kind of normative conflict within the sphere of recognisable life goods, above all those of working life and family life. That is a quite different interpretation to one which construes the work-life imbalance as an irrational prioritisation of means over ends, or as a victory for hedonism in its battle with morality.4 If popular consciousness of the first malaise (about the work-life imbalance) focuses on the quantity of time spent at work (and the ever-diminishing amount of time spent outside work), the second malaise has to do with the quality of time spent working. The worry here is that the quality of working experience has generally deteriorated.5 To the extent that work has become experientially

2  See Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss, Affluenza, Crows Nest, Allen and Unwin, 2005. 3  On the notion of life-goods I am deploying here, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989. 4  Influential statements of the view that the motivation for overwork has mutated from a work-ethic of diligence and sacrifice to an amoral desire for consumption include Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, New York, Norton, 1978, and Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, London, Heinemann, 1979. For an interesting discussion of these views see Russell Muirhead, Just Work, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2004. 5  On the long-term decline of the quality of work under capitalism, see Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York, The Monthly Review Press, 1974.



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impoverished, so that it no longer provides the kind of satisfaction it once provided and is capable of providing, the designers of jobs, and the broader culture from which job-design draws its norms, can be said to diminish the value of work.6 The malaise around the degradation of work has several facets. A common view is that the potentially rich and challenging experience of work has been flattened out by mind-numbing new technologies.7 Certain jobs that previously involved the subtle exercise of arduously obtained skills have been reduced to a few routine, child-proof operations of a computer. The so-called “dumbing-down” of work features prominently in public perceptions of the deterioration of work experience. At the same time, and in apparent contradiction to this, an even more prominent feature concerns the rise in stress suffered at work.8 Work certainly seems to be more stressful than it used to be, and both the stress suffered directly at work, and its social consequences for life outside work, contributes in great measure to the malaise around work. Another contributing factor is the perceived decline in levels of sociability, cooperativeness, trust and loyalty at work: what Richard Sennett calls the ‘social deficits’ of the new workplace.9 When combined with anxieties about the worklife imbalance—that is, the amount of time given over to work—we arrive at a widespread image of work as “nasty, brutish and long.”10 The third malaise can hardly be separated from the work-life balance or the qualitative deterioration of work experience, but it deserves a special heading. It relates to changes in the balance of power at work. There is no doubt that the so-called “liberalization” or deregulation of work, the decline of trade union power, together with changes in the     6   See John B. Murphy and David Pyke, “Humane Work and the Challenges of Job Design,” in eds. S. A. Cortright and M. J. Naughton, Rethinking the Purpose of Business, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.     7   See, for example, Barbara Garson, The Electronic Sweatshop, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1989, and Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, New York, Norton, 1998.     8   This seems to be especially true of the French debate, which has a sharper focus on suffering at work (especially in the wake of the shocking spate of work-related suicides in that country in recent years). See Christophe Dejours, Souffrance en France, Paris, Seuil, 1998; and Christophe Dejours et Florence Bègue, Suicide et travail, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2009.     9  See Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006. 10   The Observer, 1998, as cited by Frances Green, Demanding Work: The Paradox of Job Quality in the Affluent Economy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. xvi.

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decision-making structures of employing institutions, has wrenched power from the grips of workers.11 Workers are now more likely to be (and to feel) subjects of the decisions that fundamentally affect them than to be authors of those decisions. Rather than being confident participants in the processes of institutional will-formation, so to speak, they are more likely to be anxious observers. The fundamental worry is not just that the pendulum of power at work has swung decisively away from workers, but also—and perhaps more significantly—that accountability for that power has diminished. A particularly important and egregious consequence of this is to heighten the sense of insecurity amongst workers. This insecurity is compounded by a perception that the transfer of power away from them is inevitable, that there is nothing (short of economic suicide) that can be done about it. Retention of a decent job, or access to better quality work, appears in the lap of the gods. The work-life imbalance, deterioration in the quality of work, and a shift in the balance of power which reduces autonomy and accountability, are three malaises around work that trouble advanced industrial societies. These are not the only anxieties about work that we encounter—for example, there is consternation about the fate of the “work ethic” which I mentioned only in passing when discussing the worklife balance. But more significantly, it is of course an empirically contestable (and contested) matter whether the anxieties I have been describing are accurate representations of social and economic reality. After all, commonly voiced worries about the work-life imbalance, backed up by countless attitude surveys, sit alongside statistics indicating the persistence of large-scale under-employment (that is, of people having too little rather than too much work-time), even before the recession precipitated by the financial crisis of 2008 set in.12 Concerns about the degradation of work in advanced economies, backed up by formidable research in historical sociology and by recent psychological studies, have to be read alongside the results of surveys that document enduringly high levels of satisfaction with the quality of work in those very societies.13 Anxieties about the ubiquity of precarious work, 11  For an overview of these developments, see Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London, Verso, 2005; and Serge Paugam, Le salarié de la précarité, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2000. 12  See David Dooley and Joann Prause, The Social Costs of Underemployment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004 13  A sophisticated example of the more “optimistic” outlook on work satisfaction is Green, Demanding Work.



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now taken for granted by many sociologists, sit alongside surveys reporting low levels of fear of job loss and statistics indicating no substantial shortening of job tenures.14 And while the sense of powerlessness in face of the liberalisation of work surely is real, it is not as if it is going unchallenged. To take just two examples, think of the hundreds of thousands of French citizens who rallied against the first-employment contract bill in spring 2006, or the tens of thousands who protested against the Australian government’s neo-liberal industrial relations laws prior to the election of 2007 (resulting in the defeat of the government and the overturning of the hated IR laws). The social sciences thus send mixed messages about the nature and extent of the malaise around work. But assuming, not without some evidence, that the three malaises just sketched do have some basis in reality, even if only as widely held anxieties, we can ask how the normative models of work that have been developed in post-Hegelian thought relate to them. We can consider the hermeneutic “validity” of these models—their validity as frameworks for self-interpretation and social diagnosis—in a context shaped partly by such general anxieties around work. For as we have seen, hermeneutic validity in this sense is an important aspect of the kind of validity to which these normative models of work aspire. The Instrumental Model Let us turn now to the first of our models, the instrumental model. Recall that a normative model of work is instrumental if it takes the core norms of work to be those of instrumental reason. This means, on the one hand, that the historical development of the world of work is to be understood in terms of its increasing accordance with those norms. The norm of efficient production has guided the development of work, according to this model, to the extent that it is now constitutive, as a core norm, of contemporary working practices. To say that ­means-ends efficiency or instrumental reason provides the core norm of work is also to say that other norms, especially moral and ethical ones, do not  On the one side (emphasising the prevalence of job insecurity or “precariousness”) see for example Arne L. Kalleberg, “Precarious Work, Insecure Workers: Employment Relations in Transition”, American Sociological Review, Vol 74, No. 1, February 2009, 1–22. On the other side, drawing attention to steady levels of job duration, see Kevin Doogan, New Capitalism? The Transformation of Work, Cambridge, Polity, 2009. 14

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have this guiding, regulating feature. On the other hand, the instrumental character of the core norms of work means that instrumental reason can be called upon for purposes of critique, since more efficient production can better meet those non-moral, non-ethical needs that human beings have on account of their physical existence. Furthermore, more efficient technology may also relieve people of the burdens of participating in the system of production, understood as the means by which the material, pre-ethical needs of a population are satisfied. The instrumental model thus combines the following ideas that define its normative character. First, it construes work as the kind of activity humans must undertake merely to survive as natural beings. The ultimate end at stake here, the reproduction of “mere life” or continuation of natural organic being, is not itself taken to be a moral or ethical purpose, though of course it provides the material condition for the realisation of such purposes. Second, the worth or good of work lies primarily in its role in producing and allowing for the consumption of goods and services that raise the quality of this natural life. Work is thus conceived as an instrumental rather than an intrinsic good. And third, work-activity that has production as its end and is guided by the norm of instrumental reason must be distinguished from the kind of activity in which distinctively human moral and ethical capacities are exercised, in which intrinsically valuable goods are enjoyed, and—in the truly moral cases—unconditional, categorical worth experienced. This set of ideas about the normativity of work, which goes back to Aristotle’s distinction between poieisis and praxis, is widely subscribed to in the post-Hegelian tradition, but Arendt’s and Habermas’s formulations of it in the mid-twentieth century are perhaps the most familiar and consequential.15 Arendt distinguished “action” from both “work”   The instrumental model of work in post-Hegelian thought is developed by way of various interpretations of Aristotle’s distinction between poieisis and praxis. As a reminder, poiesis, or production, is the making or bringing about of something useful, and is governed by the norm of technical or instrumental reason (techne). For Aristotle, the value of poieisis lies solely in the thing made or brought about, the end for which work-activity is the means. The work-activity itself, abstracted from the product, has no value. This contrasts with praxis, which is action guided by the norms of moral reason (phronesis). Good praxis, as opposed to good poiesis, is its own end, worthwhile for its own sake, and so an intrinsic good. Praxis, but not poiesis, is an excellence of the agent; it perfects the agent in the sense of contributing to the agent’s full self-realisation as a moral being. For extended discussion of Aristotle’s distinction and its influence, see James B. Murphy, “A Natural Law of Human Labor,” American Journal of Jurisprudence, 71, 1994, 71–95, and by the same author, The Moral Economy of Labour, New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1993. 15



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and “labour” precisely to bring out the moral and ethical normative specificity of action in contrast to the utilitarian world of work and the brute organic sphere of labour.16 Both working and labouring, in Arendt’s sense, have only instrumental value, the difference being that the value created by labour is used up “almost immediately” (in order to keep the labourer alive) whereas work is done for the sake of useful things that endure.17 It is only with action, or rather speech and action, that “we insert ourselves into the human world.”18 As is well-known, Habermas articulates a similar thought when he distinguishes labour, again understood as instrumental action, or action properly guided by the norms of instrumental reason, from “interaction” or communicative action, which is properly guided by the norms of reaching an understanding.19 Arendt’s distinction between action, work and labour, and Habermas’s distinction between labour and interaction, provide a conceptual framework for a normative model of work of the instrumental type. But they also have the effect of radicalising the instrumental model in a problematic way. For up to now, I have presented the instrumental model as a thesis about the core norms of work. The core norms of work, according to this model, are instrumental. But the Arendt/ Habermas thesis we are looking at now suggests that the norms of work are solely instrumental. Work and labour are subject to the norms of instrumental reason, and only those norms, by definition. This is problematic because it invites the question: granted that work is of instrumental value, why does that exclude the possibility that it is of intrinsic value? What compels us to conceive of work as only instrumentally valuable, as subject exclusively to the norms of instrumental reason? James B. Murphy has pointed out that Aristotle could not countenance a conception of work as both intrinsically and instrumentally valuable because of his commitment to a metaphysical distinction between immanent and transitive activities.20 Transitive activities, 16   “Action alone is the exclusive prerogative of man,” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 22. 17   ibid., p. 99. 18   ibid., p. 176. Arendt continues: ‘This insertion [into the human world] is not forced upon us by necessity, like labour, and it is not prompted by utility, like work” (ibid., p. 177). 19  See Jürgen Habermas, “Labour and Interaction: Remarks on Hegel’s Jena Philosophy of Mind,” in Habermas, Theory and Practice, London, Heinemann, 1974. 20   John B. Murphy, “A Natural Law of Human Labor,” 73.

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such as making things, are only completed upon the completion of the object external to them. In and of themselves they are incomplete. It is the nature of immanent activities, such as contemplation or experiencing joy, on the other hand, to be complete in themselves. As these kinds of activity were mutually exclusive, Aristotle concluded that work, as a transitive activity, could at best only have instrumental value. While this metaphysical style of thinking is alien to Arendt and Habermas, nonetheless a similar type of consideration leads them artificially to exclude the possibility of non-instrumental norms applying to work. If we just consider Habermas’s position, we can see that it rests on premises that make the idea of work as both an instrumental and an intrinsic good, or as subject to both non-moral and moral norms, seem spooky. For this idea suggests an intrinsic normative content to a kind of activity that can be specified independently of our intersubjective, and more precisely linguistic, constitution. Work as instrumental action may enable us to cope with the contingencies of nature better, but it does not transcend the contingency of the natural world. Only the norms embedded in linguistic interaction manage that.21 From this perspective, a more than instrumental conception of the value and normativity of work can seem to represent an inadmissible regression to an enchanted world. But a more formidable obstacle to a conception of work as possessing both instrumental and intrinsic value arises from the central role attributed to instrumental reason in the diagnoses of the times of the first generation Frankfurt School, which Habermas sought to refine. The central thought here is that the pathologies of the modern world arise from the domination of instrumental reason, a thought which is by no means unique to the Frankfurt School but which is most explicitly and systematically taken up there. On this conception, instrumental reason is the essence of the scientific-technological-industrial complex that reifies and imprisons us.22 Accordingly, critical theory is by definition the critique of instrumental reason. While Habermas was able to extricate himself from the idea that instrumental reason as such was intrinsically bad, it is not surprising that he found it difficult 21   “What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we know: language,”  Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro, London, Heinemann, 1972, p. 314 (Postscript). 22   See T. W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. J. Cumming, New York, Herder and Herder, 1972 [1947].



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to see anything intrinsically good about it, or about the main kind of social activity governed by it—namely, work.23 This consideration is just as telling in Arendt’s case, for whom labour  and work are not just distinct from action, but threats to it. This at any rate is the diagnostic position taken up in The Human Condition. Arendt’s position is well-known—and widely embraced— for its affirmation of plurality and its critique of the modern tendency toward homogeneity. But what is the archetype of the “sameness” that threatens to engulf us? The “labour gang.”24 For Arendt, the labour gang exemplifies the qualitatively undifferentiated, nature-like (indeed “herd-like”—only more menacing) unity of collective labour. This unity extinguishes “all awareness of individuality and identity,” such that “all those ‘values’ which derive from labouring, beyond its obvious  function in the life process, are entirely ‘social’ and essentially not different from the additional pleasure derived from eating and drinking in company,” or in other words, no different from the mere organic satisfactions of non-human animals.25 There is no “true plurality” in labouring, merely “the multiplication of specimens which are fundamentally all alike because they are what they are as mere living organisms.”26 Admittedly, labouring is not “working,” in Arendt’s technical sense, but even the activity of work as distinct from labour cannot set up a true realm of plurality in which “men qua men” can appear.27 In a revealing footnote, Arendt cuts through what she rather aloofly calls “theories and academic discussions” of work that attribute a more than instrumental value to it by invoking a survey, conducted in 1955, showing that “a large majority of workers, if asked ‘why does man work?’ answer simply ‘in order to be able to live’ or ‘to make money.’ ”28 This is presented as rough empirical confirmation of the instrumental model of work Arendt advocates, according to which the normative content of work lies solely and simply in its instrumental value. But the surveys available to us today suggest the matter is much more

23   See Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. T. McCarthy, Boston, Beacon Press, 1984. 24  Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 213–214. 25  Ibid., p. 213. 26   ibid., p. 212. 27  ibid. 28   ibid., pp. 127–128, note 75.

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complex.29 These show that work matters to people for a wide range of reasons, and not just reasons of an instrumental type, according to which the good of work lies in the means it provides to satisfy ends independent of it. There are goods that are specific to work activity, and which can only be enjoyed by taking part in that activity, which also go some way to explaining why people work.30 Instrumental reason alone does not provide an adequate answer. This also holds if we raise that question not just at the micro level, at the level of individual motivation, but at the macro level of socio-economic forces. To consider the world of work as a labour market determined solely by norms of efficiency and instrumental rationality, or indeed as a “norm-free” zone of optimally coordinated action-consequences, is to ignore the ethical decisions, and so the ethical reasons counting for and against them, that shape economic policies and institutions.31 Decisions of a more than purely instrumental kind are also at play when the social division of labour is modelled practically on the technical division of labour.32 Moral and ethical norms, not just norms of instrumental reason, are operative here too, and contribute to the melange of social forces that any adequate explanation of “why people work” would have to take into account. If the instrumental model radicalised in the manner of Arendt and Habermas gives a simplified account of why people work, it also seems limited as a framework for understanding the contemporary malaise around work. It is confined to an interpretation of the work-life imbalance as a conflict between intrinsic life-goods and merely instrumental values, and cannot make sense of the possibility that a conflict between intrinsically valuable life-goods is involved. It also makes it difficult to see how the quality of work can become a serious source of disappointed normative expectations. And although it places great weight on the values of autonomy and responsibility, it does not anticipate that work would become a key site of anxiety around them. 29  See for example, Shaun Wilson, The Struggle over Work, London, Routledge, 2004. 30   See Robert E. Lane, The Market Experience, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991. 31   This point is convincingly argued by Russell Keat in his contribution to this volume. 32  See John B. Murphy, The Moral Economy of Labour, and William J. Booth, Households: on the Moral Architecture of the Economy, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993.



three normative models of work193 The Expressive Model

Whereas the instrumental model takes the core normativity of work to lie in its effectiveness as a means to bring about ends whose value is independent of the work (and thus contingent to it), the expressive model takes the core norms of work to be internal to working activity, to be expressions of values or meanings that are immanent to working activities themselves. The term “expression” serves to highlight this internal relation between working activity and the norms that apply to it, between the being of the good and the doing of it.33 There are, however, various forms of expressivism, and various levels at which the expressive relation can hold, which should be distinguished, even if expressive theories of work typically bring them together. First, there is what we might call existential expressivism, which focuses on the ontological significance of work. The fundamental normativity of work, on this view, arises from the special position work holds in the self-expression of being, or as is more common in expressive theories, the self-expression of life. Marcuse’s early existential analysis of work, which claims to lay out an ontological concept of work that is prior to and presupposed by ontic conceptions (especially as deployed in economics) illustrates the former approach,34 whereas the notion of work as the self-expression of life is perhaps most vividly present in Marx’s famous analysis of alienation.35 The thought that work carries ontological significance, and that “life” is the fundamental norm that work (at its best) gives expression to, can also be found today in Dejours’ psychodynamic approach to work.36

33  For an attempt at spelling out in more detail this meaning of expression, see Nicholas H. Smith, “Expressivism in Brandom and Taylor,” in eds. James Chase, Edwin Mares, Jack Reynolds and James Williams, Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, London, Continuum, pp. 145–156. 34  See Herbert Marcuse, “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics,” Telos, 16, Summer 1973 [1933], 9–37. 35   See Karl Marx, “Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy” [1844] and Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx, Early Writings, London, Penguin, 1974. 36  In addition to Dejours’ contribution to this volume, see Dejours, “Subjectivity, Work, and Action,” Critical Horizons, 7, pp. 45–62; Christophe Dejours and JeanPhilippe Deranty, “The Centrality of Work,” Critical Horizons, 11, 2, 2010, 167–181; and Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Work as Transcendental Experience: Implications of Dejours’ Psychodynamcs for Contemporary Social Theory and Philosophy,” Critical Horizons, 11, 2, 2010, 183–225.

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Second, and more commonly, expressivism contains an anthropological thesis about the role of work in the development of human capacities. This thesis can be presented transcendentally, as if working (in some suitably abstract sense) were a condition of the possibility of human, rational powers, or teleologically, such that working activity functions as the medium in which human flourishing or self-­realisation at both the individual and species level takes place. The prototype for the former type of argument is the dialectic of self-consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.37 According to this argument, it is through working that slave-consciousness, relative to masterconsciousness, “rises to the universal” through externalisation and objectification of its powers, such that the externalisation and objectification of subjective powers in working is revealed as a structural feature of human subjectivity in general.38 Marx’s manuscripts of 1844 and comments on James Mill are classic sources of the latter type of argument.39 In more recent formulations of the anthropological dimension of work, the emphasis may lie in the role of work in maintaining psychic integrity,40 in securing the positive self-relations (such as selfrespect and self-esteem) needed for a good life,41 or in the basic human goods that work provides.42 But whether the argument is presented transcendentally (work as a condition of human subjectivity) or teleologically (work as a vehicle of human self-realisation), the crucial point for our purposes is that the normativity of work has to do with the role of work in giving expression to, and facilitating the development of, distinctively human capacities. The norms at issue at the first two levels—namely the self-­expression of life or being, and the formation and development of distinctive human capacities—are supposed to apply to human beings generally. But the norms that working brings to expression may have a more local character. That is to say, there may be goods that are specific to particular working practices in the sense that they can only be enjoyed 37   See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977 [1807]. 38   See especially ibid., paragraphs 195 and 196. 39  See especially Marx’s account of alienation from the ‘species being’ in the Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844. 40  As in Dejours’ psychodynamic model (see note 36 above) 41  As in Axel Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, tr. Joel Anderson, Cambridge, Polity, 1995. 42  As in John B. Murphy’s neo-Aristotelian account in The Moral Economy of Labor and in Robert E. Lane’s account of work in The Market Experience.



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by those participating in those practices. Such goods are internal to the practice. Thus at this level we are not concerned with universal norms, or norms that have a claim to unrestricted validity. But the normativity at issue here is no less real or objective for that, and the goods at stake no less genuine. The fact that working practices “create”—or more precisely, “give expression to”—specific goods by no means compromises their validity. It is just that enjoyment of the good is restricted to those who participate in the working practice, precisely because participation (of the right kind) is the expression of the good. For example, agricultural practice gives expression to goods that are specific and internal to it, as does handicraft, engineering, nursing, teaching and so on. The realisation and promotion of these goods is guided by practice-specific norms which are internal but of course by no means arbitrary. Expressivism at this level, which for want of a better term we might call practice-internal, goes back to Aristotle, and neo-Aristotelians like MacIntyre have given it renewed currency.43 The expressive model of work, whether taken at the ontological, anthropological or practice-internal level, regards the actual world of work to be constituted historically by work-specific norms, norms which working subjects themselves have invoked and mobilised around in the course of their struggles for emancipation. The key difference between it and the instrumental model can be put as follows. If work is an indispensible vehicle for the development of human capacities, and development of those capacities is either a condition of human flourishing or a constitutive feature of it, then work itself must be conceived as integral to a flourishing human life, or a “good life.” The expressivist, therefore, is committed to a normative conception of work according to which work has intrinsic and not just instrumental value. Furthermore, if particular working activities may be regarded as 43   See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, second edition, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, from which these examples are also taken. MacIntyre himself though is not an expressivist about modern work, since (following Polanyi) he takes the core norms of modern work, mediated as it is by the labour market, to be instrumental (and so not concerned with internal goods). For attempts at expanding MacIntyre’s account of practices to cover the contemporary world of work and labour markets (and thus extracting what I am calling an expressivist model of work from his writings), see Keith Breen, “Work and Emancipatory Practice: Towards a Recovery of Human Beings’ Productive Capacities,” Res Publica, 14,1, 2007, 381–414; and Russell Keat, “Ethics, Market and MacIntyre,” in eds. K Knight and P. Blackledge, Revolutionary Aristotlelianism: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia, Stuttgart, Lucius and Lucius, 2008, pp. 243–257.

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expressive of goods that can only be realised and enjoyed internal to those particular practices, then a more than instrumental significance needs to be attached to them. Although those practices may also be a source of instrumental value, or goods that can also be enjoyed and realised externally to those practices, nonetheless the core norms which make up those activities are considered, on the expressive model, to be those internally generated, practice-specific norms. Now the main point of a normative model of work, in the sense we are discussing here, is to provide a framework for understanding the most salient normative deficits of actual work and a well-grounded sense of how those deficits can be corrected. So subscribers to the expressivist model do not claim that all actual work is conducive to flourishing or self-realisation, or for that matter expressive and constitutive of internal goods. I have already mentioned Marx as a paradigm figure in the expressivist tradition, and clearly the point of his expressivism, at least in his early writings, is to frame fundamental criticism of alienated labour and to ground hope for a more human world in which alienated labour would disappear. Contemporary expressivists also intend their normative model of work to provide a sound foothold for the criticism of actually existing work. Their expressivist models include a “critical conception of work,” to use Honneth’s formulation.44 Yet such a critical conception faces formidable challenges. Indeed, Honneth himself has come to see these challenges as insurmountable and he has subsequently abandoned this model in favour of an alternative approach. We will look at this alternative, third model in the next section. But first, let us briefly look at the reasons he has given for rejecting the critical conception of work of his earlier expressivism. According to the critical conception of work originally defended by Honneth, an “undistorted” act of work, one in which its “normative content” is fulfilled, is a “unified activity, autonomously planned and carried out by the working subject.”45 In another formulation, he describes it as “a self-contained, self-directed work procedure which embodied the worker’s knowledge.”46 It is noticeable how thin—modest but non-defeatist, one might say—this normative model of work is,  Axel Honneth, “Work and Instrumental Action: On the Normative Basis of Critical Theory,” in Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social, Albany, SUNY Press, 1995, pp. 15–49, 17 (n. 1). 45   ibid., p. 18. 46   ibid., p. 22. 44



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in the context of the history of expressivism. There are no references to the self-expression of “life,” for instance, or the realisation of a “speciesbeing,” or self-formation through the externalisation of subjective powers at the individual or collective level. Nevertheless, this deserves to be called an expressivist model because it posits that working activity that accords with its norm gives proper expression to the worker’s singular practical intelligence and her underlying autonomy. It provides a norm, over and above efficiency and instrumental rationality, which fits the exercise of productive capacities by indicating, at a very general level, the proper shape of the expression of those powers. Furthermore, this is not an abstract norm that has no historical force and so no place in a normative model of work in the sense that concerns us, since it can plausibly be argued that workers actually anticipate its fulfilment and are liable to resist working practices that break with the norm. At the time of formulating this critical conception of work, at least, Honneth could draw on recent industrial sociology for evidence to suggest that workers actually do resist practices that deprive them of this basic autonomy and capacity for expression. But no matter how modest the normative content of this critical conception of work might seem from an expressivist perspective, Honneth himself came to see it as an “extravagant” conception and an over-reaction to the limits of the instrumental model.47 He gives two basic reasons for rejecting his earlier approach, objections which can be seen to apply not just to his own version of expressivism, but to the expressive model generally. The first is that the implicit moral claims underlying resistance to working practices that fall short of the expressive norm are not fully rational, in the sense that they lack universal validity. As Honneth puts it: “The silent protests of employees who oppose the determination of their work activity by others lack that element of demonstrable universalisation required to make them into justified standards of immanent criticism.”48 More generally, Honneth suggests that norms of expression or self-realisation through work can at best possess only local, relative validity, the kind of validity that conceptions of the good can have, as distinct from moral norms which are universally valid. The second reason Honneth gives for abandoning his 47  Axel Honneth, “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition,” in eds., H.-C. Schmidt am Busch and C. Zurn, The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 223–239, p. 226. 48   ibid, p. 229.

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earlier expressivist conception is that it is no longer plausible to suppose that working activity has a proper “shape” for which the selfdirected exercise of productive powers is exemplary. Put bluntly, this is because most work today is concerned not so much with the production of objects but with the delivery of services. As soon as one has to deliver a service, all sorts of considerations come into play, such as responding to variations in customer demand and adapting to fluid technological and social environments, which the model of autonomous self-expression, or the “craftsman” ideal, is hardly well suited for. There is also just too much variation in the kind of work that has to be done to make one model of working activity normatively appropriate. As Honneth puts it, “given the multiplicity of socially necessary work activities, it seems impossible and absurd to claim that their autochthonic, internal structures demand that they be organized in one specific way.”49 In lacking both a rational grounding and a firm foothold in the actual world of societal labour, the critical conception of work, and by implication expressivism more generally, is shown to be inadequate as a normative model of work, Honneth now argues. Honneth is surely write to note that aspirations for meaningful work fit into conceptions of the good that are not shared by everyone, and that craft-like production of objects forms only a small part of the contemporary world of work. Still, it may be that these points call only for an amendment of the expressive model, including Honneth’s own early version of it, rather than wholesale rejection. For in response to the first point, one could argue that conceptions of the good are unavoidable when it comes to the organisation of work, and that the unavoidable choice between one form of work organization (say, one that generates and equitably distributes meaningful work) and another (say, one that sacrifices the quality of work to other considerations) is one that can be made with more or less justification, depending on the strength of the ethical reasons behind it.50 The mere fact that the aspiration for meaningful work finds expression in non-universalisable conceptions of the good does not deprive that aspiration of rational status. This is all the more evident in Honneth’s own version of expressivism, with its “critical conception of work,” since the basic norm it draws  ibid.  See Russell Keat’s contribution to this volume, and his “Choosing between Capitalisms: Habermas, Ethics and Politics” (available on-line at http://www .russellkeat.net). 49 50



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upon is autonomy. Assuming that the capacity to express one’s autonomy in the work one does is a good (rather than a right), clearly it is not one which is just a matter of esoteric wishes or caprice, on a rational par with any other conception. It has a good claim to be part of a good life. It is even arguable that the demand for autonomy is the rational claim par excellence, the claim that rational agents ought to make for their work, the claim that should trump all others as far as practical reason is concerned. We would not consider autonomy to be such a contingent, dispensable good in other life-contexts. But even if we grant that heteronomy is more acceptable for the worker than, say, the citizen, we are still left with good reasons for favouring work with certain qualities (such as some degree of autonomy) rather than others (such as the near absence of self-directed activity).51 The expressivist model may also be able to answer Honneth’s second criticism, though it may have to modify itself accordingly. Honneth’s main point is that the provision of services that makes up the bulk of working activity today does not have the structure of the externalisation of subjective powers in an object we take to be characteristic of craft activity. The counterfactually presupposed norms of craft work should therefore not feature in a normative model of work, in our practically demanding sense, since they are not in fact the “core norms” of contemporary work, and lack an “effective history.” Such a normative model would only be able to furnish “external” criticism, as Honneth puts it. But what if the norms of craftsmanship were not to be understood in such a restricted way; restricted, that is to say, to the external expression of a subject’s knowledge in an object? What if the meaning of craftsmanship were to opened up to include “work done well for its own sake” in the provision of services as well, indeed in a potentially unlimited field of activities?52 The expressivist could then appeal to standards or norms that are internal to working practices of all kinds, but which are compromised, or undermined, or corrupted by contemporary regimes of work. The expectation that one should be able to do a “good day’s work,” or a “job well done,” is after all common to very many trades and professions, if not all of them, and certainly is  For a more detailed account of the importance of autonomy in this context, and of the difficulties approaches such as Honneth’s have in dealing with it, see Beate Roessler, “Meaningful Work: Arguments from Autonomy,” unpublished ms. 52  As suggested in Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008. 51

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not limited to traditional craft work. Furthermore, it is an expectation whose disappointment features centrally in the malaise around work sketched above— especially, it could be argued, for those who work in service industries such a care-provision, health and education. For it is a common complaint of such workers that their ability to do the job well, as defined by criteria of excellence internal to the trade or profession, has suffered due to the imposition by management of alien standards and norms.53 The Recognition Model So it is by no means settled that an expressive normative model of work is necessarily overburdened by an obsolescent ideal of craftsmanship. There may well be room to accommodate the ideal of craftsmanship, re-interpreted as excellence by way of situation-specific exercises of practical intelligence, within an expressivist normative model of work suited to contemporary conditions. Honneth need not foreclose that possibility. But he could still reasonably argue that there might be a third normative model of work available to us, which is better equipped  than instrumentalism to locate the normative deficits of work while at the same time more securely anchored in the normative  basis of the actual organisation of work. Let me call this third normative model, the one that Honneth now advocates, the “recognition” model of work.54 The key idea of the recognition model is that the core norms of work are norms of recognition. But just as the expressivist idea that the core norms of work are norms of expression admits of variation, so the recognition model can take various forms depending on which norm of recognition is emphasised and the level at which the salient recognition relations are postulated. Such variation is evident in Honneth’s own proposals for a “recognition-theoretic” approach to the

53   See for example the contributions by Pascale Molinier and Gabriele Wagner to this volume. 54  I have discussed Honneth’s approach to work prior to the publication of “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition” in Nicholas H. Smith, “Work and the Struggle for Recognition,” European Journal of Political Theory, 8, 1, January 2009, 46–60. In that piece I emphasized the link between the recognition model and expressivism, whereas here (partly in response to Honneth’s proposed “redefinition”) I am more concerned with their differences.



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normativity of work and in the space remaining I will briefly consider the two main ones.55 First, there is the approach framed by the distinction between “respect” and “esteem” which plays such an important part in the social theory presented in Struggle for Recognition and Honneth’s contribution to Redistribution or Recognition?.56 According to Honneth’s general theory of recognition, effective human agency requires a minimal set of “practical self-relations” to be in place, relations that are established in the course of an agent’s successful socialization. The socialization of the highly individuated members of modern societies, however, depends on a differentiation of the sources of these practical selfrelations and in particular the separation of recognition in the form of respect (on which the practical self-relation of self-respect depends) from recognition in the form of esteem (on which the practical selfrelation of self-esteem depends).57 Respect, on this account, is the recognition any person is due simply on account of being a person. As such, it provides the core norm of modern legal systems: all persons are to be equal under the law and to enjoy the same basic legal entitlements. Esteem, on the other hand, is recognition that follows from achievement or social contribution. It is not allocated equally and in advance to everyone, as basic legal rights are, but distributed post hoc in proportion to individual accomplishments and abilities. The primary social sphere in which these accomplishments and abilities are made manifest is the production and exchange of goods and services. 55  Of course Honneth is not the only contemporary theorist of recognition, but he is the most prominent one to have proposed a specific “recognition-theoretic” approach to work. There are some theorists, most notably Nancy Fraser, who embrace a “restricted” recognition paradigm, for the sake of analysing identity politics, while rejecting a “comprehensive” recognition model as unsuited to the analysis of class politics, and so work. Such theorists do not have a recognition model of work in the sense that concerns me here, so there is no need to discuss them. Elsewhere I have argued that Fraser has a crypto-instrumentalist model of work which is indebted to Habermas (a position which Honneth himself now seems to flirt with, as I shall suggest below). See Nicholas H. Smith, “Recognition, Culture and Economy: Honneth’s Debate with Fraser,” in ed., D. Petherbridge, Axel Honneth: Critical Essays with a Reply by Axel Honneth, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2011, pp. 324–344. 56   See Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, and Faser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. J. Golb, J. Ingram and C. Wilke, London, Verso, 2003. The approach is also exemplified in Honneth, “The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: Situating Critical Theory Today,” in ed., P. Dews, Habermas: A Critical Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1999. 57  A third crucial source of practical self-relation (the relation of self-trust) is love, but that is not so relevant for the normative model of work that concerns us here.

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So while respect, in the narrow sense that contrasts with esteem, is an important norm of work insofar as work is subject to the law, esteem (in the specific sense of recognition for achievement) provides the core norm of recognition in this sphere. This makes it possible for a distinctive kind of “struggle for recognition” to emerge here, namely one based around the interpretation of the principle of achievement. After all, the criteria of what counts as achievement, the means by which different achievements and contributions are measured and weighed relative to each other, and so on, are never purely impartial: they are laden with cultural values and typically reflect the interests of socially dominant groups. Members of socially stigmatised and subordinated groups can contest prevailing interpretations of the principle of achievement that make the kind of work they do, or the kind of work associated with the group, appear unworthy of esteem or perhaps even socially invisible. Without due recognition of their achievements, the members of such groups are liable to suffer from a debilitating lack of self-esteem, even if their equal legal status as persons is secured. The approach to the normativity of work that focuses on “esteem”recognition (or the principle of achievement) and the effect it has on subjectivity opens up fields for further research that can consolidate its claim to provide an adequate normative model of work in our postHegelian sense. Particularly worthy of note is the role the model can play in guiding empirical investigation into the changing modalities of esteem in actual work organizations. For this purpose, we require not just a distinction between respect and esteem, but distinctions within the concept of esteem that can map recent historical changes in the dominant modes of recognition (and misrecognition) at work. The distinction between recognition as “appreciation” and recognition as “admiration” as elaborated by Stephan Voswinkel and others serves this function well, since it is effectively a distinction between two modalities of esteem-recognition whose tense co-existence is at least partly responsible for changing patterns of experience of work.58 Another interesting feature of this research is the experience of moral ambiguity around recognition it reveals: esteem-recognition at work is not always welcome, especially when it is mobilised for the sake of the

58  See the contributions of Stephan Voswinkel and Gabriele Wagner to this volume.



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profit-maximization of the provider of work.59 This raises the question of the ideological role of esteem-recognition, or the role that recognition of achievement plays in the reproduction of relations of domination, including the relation between employer and employee. These issues have been explored at a conceptual level by Honneth and are central to the empirical sociology being undertaken by Voswinkel and his co-researchers.60 Such considerations count in favour of a normative model of work that takes the core norms of work to be those of esteem-recognition as encoded in the principle of achievement. But a weakness in the recognition model developed in this way appears when one considers the basis of the normative criticism of work the model is supposed to frame. All it seems to have to go on is challenges to the socially dominant interpretation of the achievement principle that emerge from marginalised or subordinate groups. We have already seen that Honneth came to reject the expressivist model of work on account of it failing to establish a rational basis to its normative criticism of prevailing conditions of work. Mere feelings of alienation or dissatisfaction with work did not of themselves provide a rational basis for the critique of work. And a similar problem could be seen to affect the recognition model in this esteem-based version. For merely to have the experience of not being properly esteemed does not entitle one to the claim that the principle of achievement should be interpreted otherwise, that is, in a way that would affirm one’s subjectively apprehended achievement. Some reason would need to be given to justify one interpretation over another. And if the interpretation of the principle of achievement is inherently contestable, if there is no shared background understanding of what achievement consists in, then normative criticism of work would seem to amount to a taking of sides. If normative criticism of work is to be more than that, if it is to have rational force, 59  See Herman Kocyba, “Der Preis der Anerkennung. Von der tayloristischen Mißachtung zur strategischen Instrumentalisierung der Subjektivität der Arbeitenden,” in eds. U. Holtgrewe et al, Anerkennung und Arbeit, Konstanz, Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2000, pp. 127–140. See also Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class, New York, Knopf, 1972, for an account of the moral ambiguities of esteem-recognition from an earlier period. 60  For the conceptual analysis, see especially Honneth, “Recognition as Ideology,” in eds. B. van den Brink and D. Owen, Recognition and Power. Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 323–348; and Honneth, “Organised Self-realisation. Paradoxes of Individuation,” European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2004, pp. 463–478.

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then some shared norms, norms that are more or less explicitly accepted by everyone despite them having different understandings of the principle of achievement, would need to be identified. We can read Honneth’s proposed “redefinition” of the relation between work and recognition as an attempt at overcoming this weakness in both the expressivist model of work and the first, esteem-based formulation of the recognition model. According to this second version of the recognition model, the normativity of work arises from the “conditions of recognition prevailing in the modern exchange of services.”61 Drawing on Hegel and Durkheim, Honneth argues that modern market economies gain their legitimacy from a norm of mutual recognition according to which “subjects mutually recognize each other as private autonomous beings that act for each other and thereby sustain their livelihood through the contribution of their labour to society.”62 The moral basis of the modern labour market resides in the reciprocity of the obligation to work for one’s living by satisfying others’ needs, on the one hand, and the opportunity to do reasonably paid work which involves a minimal level of self-directed skilful activity on the other. The availability of paid work which can support a decent standard of living is thus a rational claim for subjects who are ready to deliver a socially useful service through their labour. Likewise, the availability of meaningful work, of work that requires the kind of skills that an autonomous person can be expected to possess and which other autonomous persons can recognise as such, amounts to a rational claim under modern market-mediated conditions of social reproduction. Put negatively, a market economy that deprives subjects of the opportunity to do work complex enough to be commensurate with the status of autonomous agency at a minimum wage is inconsistent with its own normative conditions. It prevents individuals from securing “self-respect”—as Honneth puts it following Hegel—for themselves as autonomous agents, even though the legitimacy of modern societies depends crucially on its capacity to make the bases of self-respect available to everyone. Clearly the normative presuppositions of exchange, if they are valid at all, hold for all acts of work insofar as they are mediated by the labour market. The reach of their validity is not restricted, so to speak, by particular cultural horizons of interpretation of the principle of  Honneth, “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition,” p. 225.  Ibid, p. 230.

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achievement. In this respect it does seem to represent an advance on the esteem-based recognition model, as well as the expressive model. But as we saw when considering Honneth’s reasons for rejecting the expressive model, his favoured recognition model must also provide a framework for the internal or immanent criticism of the organisation of work, not just rational criticism of it. While, in Honneth’s view, the craftsman ideal that formed the normative core of the expressive model had validity as a conception of the good, it was a “merely utopian” conception of work which was “too weakly linked to the demands of economically organized labour.”63 For this reason, it could only serve the purposes of external criticism and so was inadequate as a normative model in the post-Hegelian sense. The new recognition model avoids this problem, Honneth argues, because it draws on the very norms that the capitalist organization of work uses to legitimate itself. But in order for this feature to represent a decisive advantage over the expressive model, it would also need to be shown that the norms of mutual recognition are an historically effective force in this context, and more effective than the norms of expression. This latter claim, however, seems to be undermined by the counterfactual status Honneth attributes to these norms. As Honneth writes, the norms of mutual recognition that provide the conditions for market-mediated exchange “exist in the peculiar form of counterfactual presuppositions and ideals.”64 But if that is the case, they would seem to be as “weakly” connected to the demands of economically organised labour as the norms of expression are. There must be some “factual” (and not just counterfactual) status to these norms if they are to count as core norms of work in the demanding sense required of a post-Hegelian normative model of work. Indeed, if the norms of mutual recognition really do only have a counterfactual existence in the social exchange of services, it would suggest that the core norms of work are of a different kind. Given that Honneth rejects the claim that norms of expression can have that role, we would seem to be left with the instrumentalist view that the core norms of actual work, the historically effective norms that have shaped it, are those of means-ends rationality. And Honneth comes close to endorsing the instrumentalist model both when he discounts the viability of expressivist aspirations about work in the face of economic  Ibid, p. 226.  Ibid, p. 234.

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reality and when he suggests that it would only take a flip of perspectives (from that of “social integration” to “system integration”) to bring out the economic naivety even of his preferred recognition model.65 Still, the recognition model, in both its “esteem”-based formulation focusing on the principle of achievement and its “respect”-based variation focusing on the normative presuppositions of exchange, presents an alternative to both the instrumental and the expressive normative models of work. The advantage it shares with the expressive model over the instrumental model is that it can address concerns about the degradation of work, or the lack of availability of meaningful work, which is an important element in the current malaise around work. It can do this by appeal to the norm of mutual respect that forms the moral basis of the market-mediated exchange of services. But because it takes the normative content of work to reside in the normative conditions of the exchange of labour, rather than the activity of working itself, it does not have the resources that are available to the expressivist model for supporting normative criticism of the quality of work. This kind of criticism can hardly be divorced from expressivist insights about the intrinsic value of working activity that allows for the expression of a subject’s practical intelligence in a context of cooperation. These insights are quite compatible with the idea that work is also an instrumental good, and that it is instrumental in bringing about intrinsic goods that have little to do with work. Indeed, I have suggested that this is just the conceptual framework we need for making sense of worries about the “work-life imbalance.” The reminder that work is not the only good, and that it actually needs to be brought in balance with other goods, serves as a warning against a hyper-expressivism that would reduce the “good human life” to working life. This is the nightmare that propels radical instrumentalism about work, but we can reject it without embracing the idea that the normative content of work is exhausted by mean-ends rationality.66

  ibid, pp. 236–237.  Earlier drafts of this chapter were presented at the Recognition and Work con­ ference at Macquarie University in 2007, the Philosophy and the Social Sciences conference in Prague, and seminars at University College Dublin, the University of Wales in Newport, and the University of Exeter. My thanks go to everyone who gave me valuable feedback on these occasions. 65 66

PART THREE

WORK AND SUBJECTIVITY: TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Chapter eight

From the Psychopathology to the Psychodynamics of Work Christophe Dejours Introduction This essay was originally published to explain the theoretical bases of the psychodynamic analysis of work. The use of this specific designation aimed at obtaining the scientific community’s recognition of the legitimacy and originality of a new discipline within the work sciences. Stemming from research on the mental pathologies related to work, the “psychodynamics of work” constitutes a wider field of investigation and research than the “psychopathology of work” which emerged in France in the 1950s. The broadening of the question has undoubtedly resulted from interdisciplinary comparisons within clinical approaches to suffering, as well as in the social sciences. This comparative effort, organised with support from the French CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), took the form of a seminar entitled “Plaisir et souffrance dans le travail” (Seminaire interdisciplinaire de pathologie de travail) (Pleasure and suffering in work [Interdisciplinary seminar on the pathology of work]), which took place in Paris between 1986 and 1988. The papers from this seminar have had a lasting impact, as demonstrated by the number of times they have been reprinted over the past twenty years. The text which follows was published for the first time in 1993 as an addendum to the second edition of an essay on the psychopathology of work (Travail: usure mentale [Work: Mental wear and tear], first edition 1980). As such, it explains the reasons behind the change in designation proposed for this theoretical school and sketches out a new conceptualisation of the work collective and cooperation around the central idea of “activité déontologique” (deontic activity). But it also suggests that there is no possibility of cooperation without the mobilisation of the workers’ desire and determination, both of which are closely linked with a psychodynamics of recognition. It should be

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noted, however, that the problematic of recognition as addressed here was developed without reference to Axel Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition,1 which was not yet known in France, and it is distinguished from Honneth’s approach in that it deals with the worker’s contribution to the organisation of work. The recognition in question bears exclusively on the quality of the work and its usefulness: in other words, not on who the worker is but on what he or she does. The effects of such recognition on identity and mental health can be quite strong. But they are indirect. Conversely, the lack of recognition can have extremely deleterious effects on mental health; in the text which follows, these are analysed under the heading of alienation. This essay has provided a programmatic basis for many subsequent studies which increasingly demonstrate the importance of the role work plays in the individual’s mental health but also in the reproduction and evolution of the social relations of gender and the evolution of society as a whole. These studies have led to the thesis of the “centrality of work,” a subject which cannot be addressed here but which was already implicit in the text which follows. The Psychopathology of Work in Retrospect The psychopathology of work is the name given to a discipline inaugurated in the 1950s and 1960s by authors including (to cite the most prominent) Louis Le Guillant, Claude Veil, Paul Sivadon, Adolfo Fernandez-Zoïla and Jean Begoin. In spite of certain theoretical hesitations, quite understandable in such a formative period, the clinical monographs published at that time referred, either implicitly or explicitly, to a causal model (which they criticised, moreover, but without managing to escape it completely): the constraints of work could, it was postulated, provoke psychopathological ailments. Aetiological research on the causes and mechanisms saw work, notably industrial work, above all as a socially generated hardship, which was harmful to the workers’ mental health. Clinical research was divided between identifying syndromes or clear cases of mental illnesses. The model provided by occupational pathology (studied by occupational medicine and industrial toxicology) exerted a powerful influence. 1   See A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, trans. J. Anderson, Cambridge, Polity, 1995.



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Our own research in the 1970s, which led to the publication of Travail: usure mentale, belonged to that tradition and benefited from its legacy. In our understanding of the psychic relationship to work, the organisation of work, a key concept, was conceived of as a fact, an element existing prior to the encounter between the individual and work, a group of massive, monolithic constraints, unwavering if not inevitable and endowed with the heaviness and rigidity of mineral matter. It is true that we were faced with the tremendous power of Fordism and did not dare to imagine that alternatives to Taylorism could be less rigid (in spite of early warning signs in the analysis of the process industries). This vision of the organisation of work, as frozen as the industrial technology plants of the time, was later to be considerably modified, as we shall see below. In opposition to this model of work organisation, presented as a physical fact, we proposed one incorporating human attitudes and behaviours, an analysis which diverged greatly from the causal psychopathological model: the workers were not passive in the face of organisational constraints; they were capable of protecting themselves from the harmful effects on mental health and warding off the “natural” outcome represented by the spectre of mental illness. They suffered, but their freedom could be exercised in the construction of individual defence strategies (for example, repression of instincts in repetitive tasks under time constraints) or collective defence strategies (for example, the collective defences of construction workers).2 This clinical investigation of defensive strategies drew on the psychoanalytical model of psychic functioning, whose economy we had managed to interpolate between the organisation of work (as cause) and mental illness (as effect). This was not without theoretical obstacles, moreover, and if these have not been completely eliminated since then, they have been largely overcome. While workers’ freedom found a place opposite the weighty technical-organisational constraints, in the conception of

2   The major part of the initial 1980 essay was devoted to the description of the defence strategies which workers develop to contain suffering and its effects on health, on the one hand, and the decline in production quality on the other. Following the publication of this work, the focus of clinical investigation shifted from mental illnesses to research on the defence strategies. These strategies are much more specific to the work situation and its particular constraints than mental illnesses in the strict sense, given that the symptomatic form of the latter depends more on each worker’s individual psychic structure than on the characteristics of the concrete situation involved in psychopathological decompensation.

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that time, it was l­ imited to inventing the means of adapting to concrete situations. As subtle and intelligent as that freedom was, it could not eliminate the enormous risk of alienation which was looming over a non-too-distant horizon (in spite of yet another case of contradictory but consistent signs, such as the production of “tricks of the trade” as defensive—or offensive?—strategies against fear observed in the process industries). In any case, from the time of that first phase in the development of the psychopathology of work, we had abandoned the idea of focusing our research on mental illnesses and turned instead to suffering and defences against suffering, which is to say, looking at what underlies decompensated mental illness. In this way, without completely measuring its importance, we had accomplished a theoretical reversal which now appears to be the very foundation of the nascent discipline. We admitted the impasses and failures of research on the mental pathology of work. We recognised that most workers succeeded in warding off madness, in spite of the pernicious constraints of work organisation. We thus turned to the defensive strategies. And at the same time, what emerged as the central enigma of the investigation and analysis was “normality”3: the normality which appeared from the outset as an unstable, inherently precarious balance between suffering and defences against suffering; but which also appeared to be resulting from strategies which were both complex and rigorous, and thus not as a mechanical consequence of an accumulation of actions and reactions, stimuli or responses, but as fundamentally intentional. Making the field of normality into an enigma open to the freedom of the agent’s will4 meant simultaneously breaking with the models stemming from Behaviourism, Pavlovian psychology and theories of stress. It also, and above all, meant conceiving normality as the product of a human dynamics where intersubjective relationships (for constructing defensive, if not offensive strategies against suffering) are central. And it meant asserting, tacitly at first and then explicitly, the principle of a “subjective rationality” of workers’ behaviours and actions.

3   See C. Dejours, Chapter 1, in ed. C. Dejours, Plaisir et souffrance dans le travail, Editions de l’AOCIP, 1988, Vol. I. 4   See H. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the will and the concept of a person,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 68, 1971, pp. 5–20.



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By taking normality as its subject, the psychodynamic analysis of work opens wider perspectives which, as we shall see, no longer concern only suffering in work but also pleasure, no longer only the person but work as well, no longer only the organisation of work but the work situations in the detail of their internal dynamics. The psychodynamics of work can no longer be considered one area of specialisation among others. Does it attain an anthropological dimension capable of reorganising the field of knowledge? Does it deploy methods of action capable of shaking up the conventional practices of intervention in the world of work? As long as work organisation was seen as a fixed block, the analyses produced by the psychopathology of work were condemned to remain useless in terms of practical intervention to promote mental health at work. Worse, they might sometimes be seen as harmful insofar as they brought to light a tragic situation which might better have been kept hidden. Disclosing it might have distressing, discouraging or demobilising effects which would only aggravate the suffering and ultimately amount to twisting the knife in the wound. The replies we could make to these objections were the following: – The truth is what counts: refusing access to the truth of the tragedy experienced also means precluding any possibility of subsequent action and contributing to the reinforcement of the suffering by imprisoning it behind a veil of ignorance. – The psychopathology of work is above all an analytical (and not only speculative) discipline, which is to say, one which produces intelligibility about human behaviours in work situations and is thus capable of demonstrating the rationality of such behaviours, even when they seem to be the most absurd, illogical or paradoxical. – This intelligibility is brought out not only for scholars or managers; it is also useful, potentially at least, for the workers, whose behaviours have a legitimacy which often escapes them because their intelligence and the rationality of their actions may be in advance of their consciousness of them, because of the very effectiveness of their defensive strategies. Indeed, the practical aim of these strategies is to minimise suffering, but not to heal it. As a result, they often act as a brake on reappropriation, emancipation and change. – The psychopathology of work also intends to explain the meaning of human behaviours. But its mission is not to propose actions. It  limits itself to performing the analytical work and refers the

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question of action back to the workers themselves, who have sole authority over deliberations, choices and decisions. The psychopathology of work adopts a position which is analogous to that of psychoanalysis. The psychoanalyst’s work consists of drawing out the meaning of subjective situations, but acting on reality depends on the patient’s will, and the psychoanalyst should abstain from giving any advice about that reality. This psychoanalytic position is problematic, however. Abstention can sometimes also be an admission of powerlessness and thus goes beyond the saying that “the cure is something extra.” Making change depend on the patient’s will means neglecting the fact that many patients see an analyst precisely because their will is in a sorry state. Even though they understand the logic of their subjective situation, they are incapable of acting or putting an end to the repetition. Whether we invoke resistance, negative therapeutic reaction or failure syndrome, there remains a trace of dissatisfaction. And as we know, the psychoanalytical drift towards a purely speculative analysis, devoid of any “impure” therapeutic intent, has spread widely, notably in France. For our part, we refused to accept that conception of psychoanalysis and recognised the psychopathology of work’s powerlessness with regard to action as a grave limitation, or even an aporia, with the additional fear that the lack of power over reality would inevitably lead to the discipline’s practical and therefore theoretical failure. Since then, however, the advances made with the psychodynamic analysis of work have provided a way out of the impasse. – The psychopathology of work thus leads to the idea that the organisation of work raises a series of human problems which cannot be reduced to questions of power. Changing the power structure in the company would not resolve the issue of suffering and would only lead to shifting responsibilities from one hand to another. The complexity and rationality of defensive strategies against suffering in work cannot, in our view, be reduced to participants’ strategies as these are conceptualised by organisation theory. – A minimum objective relative to the preceding objections (but one which is maximum relative to the research effort) would consist of obtaining recognition of the psychopathology of work as a fundamental science producing knowledge and theories in the same way as anthropology, sociology, ethnology or even history. And it was on this basis that the investigations and debates continued for several years.



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Twelve years later, the situation has considerably evolved. The psychopathology of work has become an original practice, in the full sense of the word, namely as a means of intervention in work organisation which is subject to strict methodological and ethical rules and based on practical reasoning. The psychodynamics of work is first of all a praxis.5 But it is not only a mode of intervention in the field; it has continued to be a knowledge-producing discipline. The 1980 essay on the psychopathology of work was primarily centred on clinical investigation and deliberately left aside the enormous theoretical problems which the latter raised. Giving form to this clinical experience first implied significant theoretical breaks: with medicine, with psychiatry, with psychoanalysis, ergonomics and the traditional psychology of work (essentially tied to experimental psychology). But the shape of the theoretical reconstruction was not yet fully conceivable. What has remained from these breaks is the originality of an approach situated outside the paradigm of the applied sciences and this originality has consistently been confirmed ever since. The psychopathology of work was no longer an applied psychology, nor was it a psychiatry applied to the world of work like that of Sivadon and Amiel,6 much less a psychoanalysis applied to work situations like certain movements in psycho-sociology. Does this mean that the investigation was totally naïve and untouched by any intellectual heritage? This was certainly not the case. We definitely drew on the other theoretical corpuses but used them in an essentially critical way, namely by seeking to give form to the empirical matter which, precisely, resisted interpretation by means of existing knowledge. In other words, we were trying to capture part of reality, of what resists the heuristic power of available scientific corpuses. And this was no longer with the intention of resolving reality in algorithms, which would be a vain effort, but in hope of bringing out an intelligibility of work situations which would take into account the irreductibility of that reality. Probably because it has survived that tumultuous phase, the psychopathology of work, in the new form of the psychodynamics of work, can now assert the primacy of research   For our use of the terms practice, praxis, practical reason, and practical wisdom, see P. Ladriere, “La sagesse pratique,” Raisons Pratiques, Vol. 1, Paris, Editions de l’E.H.E.S.S., 1990, pp. 15–38. 6   See P. Sivadon and R. Amiel, Psychopathologie du travail, Paris, Editions Sociales Françaises, 1969. 5

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in the field. Conceptualisation begins in the field, with the tragedy, the life experience; it originates in praxis and, for its very development, strives to respect the basic lesson it draws from the clinical experience: intelligence and ingenuity in action are ahead of the agents’ consciousness of them. Similarly, in the psychodynamic analysis of work, we insist on trusting the intelligence of practice and subordinate conceptual elaboration to the primacy of praxis.7 This approach places the psychodynamics of work within the tradition of the “interpretative sociology” initiated by the Dilthey-Durkheim debate, with specific methodological modifications and a relationship between the empirical and the theoretical which we group together under the term “epistemology of the field” to designate an upwards intellectual dynamics which opposes the downwards dynamics of the applied sciences in every respect. The evolution of the psychopathology of work towards the psychodynamics of work is based on an essential “discovery” which, once again, is nothing other than a recognition of the reality of concrete situations, namely that the relationship between the organisation of work and the human being is not static, but rather, perpetually changing. Otherwise stated, the apparent stability of this relationship depends on an equilibrium open to evolution and transformations—a “dynamic” equilibrium, one which constantly evolves. When this dynamics is impeded or blocked, as sometimes happens, the situation may, contrary to what we initially believed, be considered extra-ordinary. Experience also shows that such a blockage may be lasting. It then leads to inefficiency in terms of production, and sooner or later results in a crisis (that is, a break in stability).8 It is especially in such situations that researchers in the psychodynamics of work are asked to intervene in the field. The organisation of work thus reveals itself to be less monolithic than we thought. Its development can in part be freed from the systemic logic in which the “apocalyptic analyses of technology”9 have 7   C. Dejours, “Intelligence ouvrière et organisation du travail,” in ed. H. Hirata Autour du ‘modèle’ Japonais production. Automatisation, nouvelles formes d’organisation et de relations de travail, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1993. 8  See C. Dejours, “Contributions of the psychodynamic analysis of work situations  to the study of organizational crises,” Industrial and Environmental Crisis Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1993, pp. 77–89. 9  See D. Bourg, “L’approche philosophique de la technique et les discours apocalyptiques modernes,” Cahiers du MIRS-CNRS, Editions du CNAM, Vol. 1, 1990, pp. 83–109.



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seemingly imprisoned it. It cannot escape completely from systemic constraints, yet its development may also be subject to principles that rely on practical wisdom and rational action. In order for this ideal to be formulated, it is still necessary to have access to a rigorous analysis of the processes underlying the dynamics of the work situations. How did such a modification of the viewpoint on action in the psychodynamic analysis of work come about? This is what we are going to examine. Before reviewing the stages of the debate, as seen from the “inside” (that is, from the standpoint of the researchers involved), a few reservations should probably be expressed. The very evolution of scientific debate depends on dynamics whose mechanisms partly escape the researchers themselves. As with other workers, researchers can also manifest intelligence (in the sense of the ability to understand) before they are actually conscious of it. But the discussion also shifted its focus because of “outside forces.” These would include the emergence of new production techniques as well as major social and political changes which in turn promoted the recognition of certain schools of thought until then seen as obscure and cut off from reality, such as the sociology of ethics.10 These factors also presided over the choice of new fields of empirical investigation, new areas of research which became the prerequisites for comparative analyses. In other words, the various stages of the scientific discussion were not just the result of greater perceptiveness or wisdom on the part of the researchers but also an “imposed” displacement of the centre of gravity of their debates. A Fresh Look at the Organisation of Work From the outset, the psychopathology of work of the 1970s developed within a double dialogue: with the health sciences (through psychoanalysis), on the one hand, and with the work sciences (through ergonomics) on the other. The research which led to the 1980 essay got underway around 1976 in the ergonomics laboratory at the National Conservatory of Arts and Engineering (CNAM) under the direction of Alain Wisner. Among those participating in the discussions were

10   See F.-A. Isambert, “Le ‘désenchentement’ du monde. Non-sens ou renouveau du sens,” Archives des Sciences sociales de religions, Vol. 61, 1986, pp. 83–103.

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Wisner and Dominique Dessors for ergonomics, Alexandre Dornot, who defended the behaviourist approach, John Kalsbeek, who drew on experimental psychology and his experiments with the single channel, and Bernard Doray, who had already produced major studies in the area of the psychology of work.11 The debate with ergonomics has continued without interruption ever since.12 At the time, the ergonomists had come out with a fundamental discovery: the existence of an unbridgeable gap between the prescriptive “task” and the actual work “activity.”13 This gap, apparent in even the most fragmented tasks, those considered tasks of strict execution, must be distinguished from the more familiar one, advanced by the sociologists, between formal and informal organisation. The latter, in fact, emphasises the constraint-independence dichotomy, in the context of the social agents’ strategies within organisations and institutions. The analysis is essentially focused on power relationships. Work as such does not appear as anything other than a pretext (or lever) for the agents’ strategies. In the distinction made by the ergonomists, however, the contradiction no longer lies solely in the power relationships; it appears at the very level of technique. Whether in the operating procedures, the order of the gestures, the involvement of the bodies or the processes of exploration and information-gathering, technique is full of contradictions. 11   See J. Kalsbeek, “Etude de la surcharge informatique sur le comportement et l’état émotionnel,” in C. Dejours, C. Veil and A. Wisner, Psychopathologie du travail, Paris, Entreprise moderne d’édition, 1985, pp. 167–173; P. Doray, Quelques aspects historiques, sociaux et scientifiques du mouvement dit de l’organisation scientifique du travail, considéré en particulier dans ses rapports avec la physiologie du travail, Thèse Faculté de Médecine, Paris, 1975. 12   See A. Wisner, “Ergonomie et psychopathologie du travail,” Prévenir, Vol. 20, 1990, pp. 65–73; D. Dessors and A. Laville, “La signification du discours ouvrier. Ergonomie et psychopathologie du travail : incompatibilité ou complémentarité?,” in C. Dejours, C. Veil and A. Wisner, Psychopathologie du travail, Paris, Entreprise moderne d’édition, 1985, pp. 58–63; F. Daniellou, “Le statut de la pratique et des connaissances dans l’intervention ergonomique de conception,” Texte d’habilitation à diriger des recherches, Université Toulouse/Le Mirail, 1992; Y. Clot, Le travail entre activité et subjectivité, Thèse de philosophie Université de Provence, 2 volumes, 1992. 13   See A. Laville and J. Duraffourg, Conséquences du travail répétitif sous cadence sur la santé des travailleurs et les accidents, Rapport N° 29 du Laboratoire de Physiologie du travail et ergonomie, CNAM, Paris, 1973. The interdisciplinary work which had as its offshoot the psychodynamics of work in fact stemmed from the confrontation between, on the one hand, the “clinical” experience of this gap and what its management implied in terms of intelligence in work as seen by the ergonomists, and, on the other, the clinical experience of the subjective relationship to work as seen by the psychoanalysts and psychiatrists.



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With ergonomics, the perfect organisation of technique and the harmony between science and technique are over and done with. Down to the last detail of its concrete practice, technique is the arena of a struggle between order and disorder. And the possibility of catching this contradiction even in the secret hideout of real work activity (which presumes a complex, sophisticated methodology)14 had considerable consequences for the subsequent practice of the ergonomic intervention. The psychodynamic analysis of work situations would, in turn, identify a specific dimension of the gap between prescription and reality, namely that: Work organisation is not strictly endured by the workers … all instructions are reinterpreted and reconstructed: the real work organisation is not the one which is dictated. This is never the case: it is impossible to foresee everything and master everything (in advance where work is concerned). But the distance between prescription and reality does not always lead to the same outcome: either it is tolerated and provides creative margins of freedom or it is hunted down and the workers are afraid of being caught red-handed. Most often, it is both at the same time: tolerated where the gain is visible, hunted down where it is interpreted as a sign of disobedience and fraud.15

In the investigations carried out since 1980, the organisation of work often turns out to be highly problematic. In the initial essay, we insisted on the ignorance weighing on techno-scientific mastery in relation to procedures in the chemical industry. In spite of considerable personal reservations, we were forced to admit that this situation is in fact not exceptional. It can also be found, for example, in the case of maintenance in the nuclear industry16 or in hospital work or among railway conductors and thus in high-tech industries as well as in industries involving serious potential risks for personal safety and security. But unlike what we had learned in the chemical industry, where management tacitly recognised the contradictions and flaws in tech­ nical mastery, we had to admit that at present, in a large number of  Compare F. Daniellou, D. Dessors and C. Teiger, “Formation à l’analyse de l’activité et rapport au travail,” in ed. C. Dejours, Plaisir et souffrance dans le travail, Editions de l’AOCIP, Vol.1, 1988, pp. 77–94. 15  Cited from D. Dessors and J. Schram, “Le travail social. La peur au cœur,” Informations Sociales, Vol. 24, 1992, pp. 80–90. 16   See C. Dejours and C. Jayet, “Psychopathologie du travail et organisation réelle du travail dans une industrie de process,” Rapport Ministère de la Recherche et de la Technologie, Vol. 1, Ronéo, 1991. 14

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situations, the flaws in technique and knowledge are obstinately denied by many company heads.17 This denial considerably adds to the workers’ difficulties in their everyday activity but it also serves to legitimise innovations in the area of “structural changes” in management and administration, with serious consequences not only for production quality and security but also for the agents’ mental health.18 After many investigations in the field, it turns out that beyond the contradiction between prescriptive and real work organisation, the former is itself full of contradictions. Indeed, each incident or accident leads to the drafting of new instructions or regulations, which are added to the sum of the preceding ones. With the result that over time, the laws, regulations, rules and instructions become more and more complicated and inevitably more and more contradictory. For anyone who intends to respect all the instructions, it becomes impossible to work. The very orders which are supposed to organise work sometimes wind up disorganising it! This is something many line managers recognise (often in off-the-record conversations but rarely in public ones). Developing real work organisation thus implies departing from the letter of the orders and opting for “interpretations.” Indeed, the bulk of the problems subject to the psychodynamic analysis of the work situations arise precisely from the ignorance and sometimes the denial of the concrete difficulties which the workers face because of the insurmountable imperfection of the work organisation. How then can the adaptation between prescriptive and real work organisation be made? And at what cost? The real organisation of work is ultimately a compromise. But this compromise cannot be worked out solely on the basis of technical arguments (which would be quite simple to establish). To the extent that interpretation is called for as well, there are inevitably many possible interpretations and thus a conflict of interpretations among the agents. Building a compromise entails an interplay between labour and management. Real work organisation is a product of social relations. But—and this point is crucial—the stakes of the discussion cannot be reduced to power relations. What is at issue in the social relations 17   See C. Dejours, “Pathologie de la communication, situations de travail et espace public: le cas du nucléaire,” Raisons Pratiques, Vol. 3, Paris, Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1992, pp.177–201. 18   See Dejours and Jayet, “Psychopathologie du travail et organisation réelle du travail dans une industrie de process.”



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of work is the elaboration of the activity (real procedures). Although they are essential, the social dynamics, as we shall see, do not exhaust the local dynamics of the work situation. We are far from the initial vision of work organisation as a monolithic, static block. Should we make a distinction between the ergonomist’s analysis of “activity” and that of “work organisation” proper to the psychodynamics of work? The answer is yes, especially in relation to “human factors” and cognitive ergonomics (notably the ergonomics of computer programmes and interfaces), which remain strictly at the level of activity in order to rationalise tasks or retrieve and automate knowhow in the context of a single type of rationality: the teleological one. The psychodynamic analysis of work, meanwhile, is interested in the intersubjective processes which enable the subjects’ social management of the interpretations of the work (thus generating new know-how, procedures and activities) and bring out the conflicts between teleological and subjective rationality. A New Definition of Work This considerably modified approach to the organisation of work led the psychodynamics of work to identify dimensions of work which had generally been underestimated and to propose a new definition of work itself: “Work is the activity men and women carry out in order to confront what is not already provided for by the prescriptive work organisation.”19 The Mechanical and the Human in Work This definition brings out the fact that work cannot be reduced to its social dimensions: the social relations surrounding it, relations between the workers, or power relations. The prescriptive is never sufficient. When it is made so today, it becomes dehumanised, automated, and mechanical, as was the case in the first phase of industrial development when machines replaced a number of handling activities. Robots may displace human beings within the field of work. But each new 19  See P. Davezies, “Eléments pour une clarification des fondements épistémologiques d’une science du travail,” Communication at the French Society of Psychology National Colloquium, 6 December 1991.

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automation brings out unpredictable, non-standardised new problems, requiring the development of new know-how, as Boehle and Milkau have clearly demonstrated in the case of the new technologies.20 Automation inevitably generates new challenges to the activity. In other words, a fresh look at work organisation leads to refuting the traditional division between conception and execution. All work involves conception. The resulting definition of work therefore stresses its human dimension. Work is human by definition because it is called upon precisely where the mechanical-technological order is insufficient. Creativity and Work From this same point of view, work is the creation of what is new, unprecedented. Adapting prescriptive work organisation requires bringing into play initiative, inventiveness, creativity and specific forms of intelligence close to what common sense would call ingenuity. Boehle and Milhau speak of “subjectivising activity” (subjektivierendes Handeln) to characterise this intelligence which is deployed specifically in the field of practice.21 We would speak of “worker intelligence” or “practical intelligence,” not to say that it is proper to workers and would only be exercised in manual tasks, but to indicate that it appears in its purest, most typical form among workers and in practice. Our analyses show that worker intelligence is also indispensable in socalled intellectual or scientific tasks and even in theoretical work in the strict sense. The analysis of the specific form of intelligence required by problems stemming from activity is closely tied to the metis (“cunning intelligence”) of the Greeks described by Détienne and Vernant,22 as distinguished from the application (“execution”) of instructions, which has more to do with themis (or what Boehle and Milkau call “objectifying activities”). That said, the exercise of practical intelligence raises problems concerning the way the social, psychic and cognitive requisites of its functioning come together, an issue which has only been sketched out so far and largely remains to be explained. 20   See F. Böhle and B. Milkau, Vom Handrad zum Bildschirm. Munich, Campus, 1991. 21  ibid. 22   See M. Detienne and J. -P. Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, Chicago University Press, 1991.



psychopathology to the psychodynamics of work223 Coordination and Work

Above all, the discoveries, clever interpretations, innovations stemming from interpretations of the prescribed organisation, and the experimentations and singular experiences of work, all have to be coordinated. Otherwise, there is a major risk of disorder and misunderstanding among agents, which ruin the potential advantages of worker intelligence in terms of production quality or plant safety. But beyond coordination, there remains perhaps the most important problem of all: cooperation. Cooperation and Work Cooperation represents an additional level in the complexity and integration of work organisation. Unlike coordination, it entails not simply the logical and cognitive conditions for a successful linking up of individual activities but the will of the persons involved to work together and to collectively overcome the contradictions arising from the organisation of work. As a consequence of the primordial gap between prescription and reality, cooperation is inherently impossible to define beforehand. The form cooperation should take cannot be determined in advance. And because the content of cooperation escapes any a priori definition, it cannot be ordered either. Cooperation depends, moreover, on the subjects’ freedom and the forging of a common will. For this reason, any attempt to dictate it results in a paradoxical command. In the absence of cooperation, the situation is equivalent to what we observe in work-to-rule, in other words, bringing production to a halt. Research in the psychodynamics of work has specifically dedicated itself to the analysis of this difficult question, which is decisive for both the efficiency of work and the economy of suffering and pleasure in work. Trust and Work Above all, cooperation requires relationships of trust between subjects—trust in colleagues, subordinates, as well as company heads and managers. But this is not self-evident. Trust is often lacking, and even when it exists, it remains fragile. In a world of work where the

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very idea of trust generates bemused, if not ironic reactions, asserting that it is an essential dimension of work, quality, safety and security may seem like a utopian dream. Our investigations demonstrate, however, that the need for trust is not a fantasy. Without trust, we are faced with distrust and suspicion. Bluntly stated, trust is a battle. Real work organisation cannot be neutral where trust is concerned: trust or distrust, cooperation or disorder—these are the alternatives. The mechanisms of trust have thus gradually become a major issue, both empirically and theoretically. Analysing these mechanisms has caused us great difficulties. It now seems possible to conclude that trust is not a feeling and that it is not of a psycho-affective nature. It stems mainly from deontic activity, which is to say, the elaboration of agreements, standards and rules framing the way work is performed. Explaining the mechanisms of trust in work relationships helps us to understand what the “rules of work” or the “rules of the trade” consist of and how they are constructed and stabilised.23 Thus, the adaptation of work organisation entails the creation of ethical conditions. This essential dimension introduces into the ordinary management of work organisation a part which goes beyond technique. Work depends not just on techne, or even poiesis. It also depends on praxis.24 Subjective Mobilisation and Work Beyond the coordination of each subject’s individual contributions to the building of work organisation and beyond the ethical or even political conditions underlying the construction of relationships of trust between workers, cooperation only becomes real if the latter have the desire to cooperate (orexis). What are the conditions which bring people into the dynamics of the construction and development of work organisation? The psychodynamic analysis of work has made progress on this last point in recent years. The findings may be briefly summed up as follows.

23   See D. Cru, “Les règles de métier,” in ed. C. Dejours, Plaisir et souffrance dans le travail, Editions de l’AOCIP, Vol. I, 1988, pp. 29–50. 24   See Dejours, “Pathologie de la communication, situations de travail et espace public: le cas du nucléaire.”



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Subjective mobilisation in face of the challenge of work organisation presumes: – Efforts of intelligence. – Efforts of elaboration in order to develop opinions concerning the best way of arbitrating contradictions and settling problems of work organisation (which are based on personal experiences of work, interpretations of the prescriptive work organisation, each person’s individual values, moral obligations with regard to the others and to preferences and tastes depending on personality). – Efforts to get involved in the exchange of opinions in the discussion which should precede or accompany choices or decisions about the organisation of work. This activity of discussion is sometimes institutionalised in the form of staff meetings, for example, in hospital or social work or among executive management, and so on. Noninstitutionalised forms often occur in spaces supposedly reserved for socialising and considered to be outside of work: meals, ­cafeteria, breaks, changing rooms, etc.25 In other cases, there has been an attempt to give this activity a standardised form inspired by the Japanese model of the quality-control circle. The involvement in and commitment to such a space of discussion constitute specific forms of work and thus entail risks and efforts. Otherwise stated, cooperation entails a mobilisation which should be considered as the workers’ specific, irreplaceable contribution to the conception, adaptation and management of work organisation. And this contribution depends on each subject’s own desire. We have already indicated that such a mobilisation cannot be dictated. It is possible, as today’s company management models show, to formulate calls for mobilisation or generate individual commitments with the help of company cultures or exotic training courses (e.g., bungee jumping or walking on burning coals). All the experiments in ‘Human Resources Management’ are specifically aimed at getting around the impossibility of dictating cooperation. Our investigations lead us to conclude, however, not only that it is impossible to order the psychic mobilisation required for cooperation

25   See Dejours and Jayet, “Psychopathologie du travail et organisation réelle du travail dans une industrie de process.”

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but that this is largely a useless consideration. The problem is exactly the opposite: knowing how to proceed so as not to destroy the mobilisation of intelligence and personalities. In most cases where the subjects are in good health, subjective mobilisation in fact turns out to be quite powerful. It is as if such subjects, faced with the organisation of work, could not help putting the resources of their intelligence and personality into action. And the reasons behind this can easily be explained by clinical investigation and theoretical analysis. But however “spontaneous” this subjective mobilisation might be, it is extremely fragile. It depends on the dynamics between contribution and recompense: in return for their contribution to work organisation, the subjects expect recompense. And even before any recompense in the strict sense, sometimes they just expect that their initiatives and their desire to make a contribution are not systematically blocked—in other words, that they are not merely seen as “underlings” condemned to obedience and passivity. If they receive no recompense for their efforts, they wind up being apathetic, for the most part reluctantly, because of the grave consequences on their mental health (as we shall see below). Recognition and Work What does this recompense consist of? The psychodynamic analysis suggests that the recompense expected by the subject is essentially symbolic in nature. Its specific form, which can easily be identified through empirical studies, is recognition. This recognition has two dimensions: – Acknowledgement, in the sense of the recognition of the reality constituted by the subject’s contribution to the organisation of work. This first aspect of recognition comes up against considerable resistance from superiors because it also implies the recognition of the imperfection of science and technique, the flaws in the prescriptive work organisation and the indispensable recourse to the workers’ contributions in order to make the work process function. But it faces another source of resistance as well: the imperfections inherent in work organisation sometimes generate fear among managers and company heads, notably when the process implies major risks, as in the nuclear industry. In such cases, the denial of workers’ contributions becomes part of a collective defence strategy aimed at



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combating the suffering proper to managers in dangerous industries.26 The psychodynamic analysis of work has not only permitted clinical investigation to bring out the specific forms of collective defence strategies used by managers to fight their own suffering on the job; it also permits the analysis of the dynamics of group-togroup relationships (managers and workers) when communication is hindered or distorted by the intervention of defensive strategies against the suffering of one group or another.27 – Gratitude for the workers’ contribution to the organisation of work. This second aspect of recognition is only granted sparingly in most of the situations we have studied but it exists nonetheless. The lack of recognition is one of the recurring themes in the world of work. It is not a marginal demand but a key issue in the psychodynamics of cooperation. It is possible to analyse the intermediate links in the dynamics of recognition but we cannot go into all the details here. What follows are some of the main points. Recognition entails the rigorous construction of judgements bearing on the work carried out. These are made by specific agents who are directly involved in the collective management of work organisation. (As we shall see, such judgements presume the efficient functioning of the work collectives, notably where peer judgements are concerned). It is possible to distinguish between the different types of judgements constituting recognition: the judgement of usefulness, made by someone else along a vertical line, namely superiors and subordinates, but possibly by clients, and the judgement of beauty, made on a horizontal level, by peers, colleagues, members of the team or the larger professional group. These judgements all have one particular feature in common: the fact that they bear on the work accomplished, in other words, on the doing rather than the person. But recognition of the quality of the work carried out can also concern personality in terms of a gain in identity. To put it differently, the symbolic recompense conferred by recognition may become meaningful in relation to subjective expectations of self-fulfilment. But the ontological sequence is capital here:

26  See C. Dejours, “Travail et santé mentale : de l’enquête à l’action,” Prévenir, Vol. 19, 1989, pp. 3–19. 27   See Dejours, “Contributions of the psychodynamic analysis of work situations to the study of organizational crises.”

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recognition of doing first, gratification in terms of identity subsequently. Several remarks are called for here: – The relationships between subjective mobilisation of personality and intelligence on the one hand and self-fulfilment on the other necessarily entail mediation, namely the relationship to the reality constituted by work. – The relationship between identity and work is mediated as well: by the others, in their judgement of recognition. – In this way, a basic triangle emerges, that of the dynamics of identity formulated by François Sigaut.28 REALITY

EGO

OTHERS

In the psychodynamics of work, this triangle takes a specific form: WORK

SUFFERING

RECOGNITION

– The symbolic recompense afforded by recognition results from the production of meaning conferred on the work experience. This grants meaning to the suffering in work: as we have seen, the latter originates in and is consubstantial with every work situation, insofar as it is above all a confrontation with systemic and technical constraints.

  See F. Sigaut, “Folie, réel et technologie,” Techniques et culture, Vol. 15, 1990, pp. 167–179. Republished in Travailler, Vol. 12, 2004, pp. 117–130. 28



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– The construction of the meaning of work through recognition which gratifies the subject relative to his or her expectations of selffulfilment (construction of identity in the social sphere) can transform suffering into pleasure. This transformation through the mediation of work is the exact opposite of the dynamics of masochism (direct eroticisation of suffering). – The problematic of identity simultaneously acquires a basic role in the psychodynamics of work, where it replaces the reference to personality which still dominated the psychopathology of work in the 1980 essay. – Referring to identity means touching the core, the very infrastructure of mental health. Every psychological decompensation presumes a vacillation in identity or an outright identity crisis. The dynamics of the recognition of contributions to work organisation thus automatically engages the problematics of mental health. – Regaining identity in the intersubjective dynamics of recognition in work essentially involves self-fulfilment in the area of social relations. The psychodynamic analysis of work leads to the conclusion that there is no direct link between the subject of the unconscious and the social arena. Such a relationship is always mediated by the reference to an action on reality which the work activity mobilises. In this respect, the psychodynamics of work confirms its distinctiveness relative to social psychology, which usually seeks out a direct relationship between subject and society by focusing on the analysis of small groups. – Self-fulfilment in the social domain through the psychodynamics of recognition constitutes one of the two aspects of identity-building, along with that occurring in the erotic economy. This dynamics of recognition may be related to that of sublimation in psycho­ analysis.29 – The regaining of identity in the social arena, mediated by the work activity, entails the dynamics of recognition. Such recognition implies peer judgement, however, and this is only possible if there is a collective or community of peers. Ultimately, the collective emerges as both the key link and the trouble spot in the intersubjective dynamics of identity in work (in the identity triangle, the others are

29   See C. Dejours, “Note sur la notion de souffrance,” in ed. C. Dejours, Plaisir et souffrance dans le travail, Editions de l’AOCIP, Vol. 2,1988, pp. 115–125.

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a collective structure). In the 1980 essay, there was no explicit reference to the concept of the collective. It was only accessible to us by virtue of “collective” defence strategies. In fact, the contribution of such defensive strategies to the construction of collectives still seems quite important. But does that allow us to assume that the collective is essentially the outcome of a defensive dynamic? This question was raised by Nicolas Dodier in particular.30 Since then, and notably on the basis of Damien Cru’s studies,31 we have been able to identify other specific contributions to the constitution of the collectives which, on the contrary, stem from processes oriented towards the search for quality and pleasure in work. The crucial role of work rules (along with defensive strategies, which can also be analysed as defensive “rules”) subsequently led to assigning a key role to professional ethics in the building of the collectives. Lastly, the function of language (along with language practices) has emerged as increasingly significant; it now figures among the main research paths to be explored. Asserting the central role of the collective and making it a forceful concept in the psychodynamic analysis of selffulfilment, however, also means taking into account its unstable, perpetually incomplete nature as an inherent difficulty in the regaining of identity in work. This summary of the dynamics of recognition in work situations suggests that cooperation is inseparable from the economics of identity and mental health in work. As already stated, the subjective mobilisation necessary for the ordinary management of work organisation cannot be dictated. And it is useless to dictate it because it is generated spontaneously by expectations of self-fulfilment. The practical problem confronting us is just the opposite. Most subjects in good health hope to have the opportunity to build their identities in the social sphere through work. This hope is so great that it gives rise, in ethical terms, to the demand for a right to contribute—to contribute to responsibilities for civic life,32 or in this case, responsibilities for the organisation of work. The practical problem, then, consists in not interrupting

  See N. Dodier, “La construction sociale des souffrances dans les activités quotidiennes de travail,” in ed. C. Dejours, Plaisir et souffrance dans le travail, Paris, Editions de l’AOCIP Vol. 2, 1988, pp. 95–114. 31   See Cru, “Les règles de métier.” 32   See P. Pharo, Politique et savoir vivre, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1991. 30



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the generic mobilisation of subjectivities, whether by attacking the right to contribute or by inhibiting the dynamics of recognition. If the dynamics of recognition is paralysed, suffering can no longer be transformed into pleasure; it can no longer find meaning. In this case, it can only build up and engage the subject in pathogenic dynamics ultimately leading to psychiatric or somatic decompensation. It is possible, however, for defensive strategies (singled out from the very beginnings of the psychopathology of work described in the 1980 essay) to intervene between suffering and illness. Thus the psychodynamic analysis of work complements the dynamic analysis of suffering and defensive strategies with that of suffering and its transformation into pleasure through recognition. Work goes hand in glove with suffering and recognition. In the absence of recognition, the subjects embark on defensive strategies in order to avoid mental illness, and this has serious consequences for work organisation, which, as several studies have shown, then runs the risk of paralysis.33 Between recognition dynamics and defensive strategies against suffering, work as a whole is sustained by the intersubjective relationships among the persons involved. Human behaviours of mobilisation, demobilisation or defence are in no way the product of chance but are organised under the primacy of what we came to characterise as subjective rationality. Work takes place first of all in the objective world, where it is subject to the validating criteria of instrumental cognitive rationality: the area of activity as such constitutes the most precise analytical level for addressing the efficiency of the work in terms of production, productivity and quality objectives. We have seen that the contradictions inherent in the organisation of work presuppose a space for discussion structured like a public space and that the handling of the disparity between prescription and reality is subject to agreements between agents in the social sphere, namely axiological rationality. We can now add that work not only takes place in the objective world and the social sphere, but also in the subjective world (that of recognition). These considerations and their subsequent development provide the basis for the following hypothesis: in the management of any work situation,

33   See Dejours, “Travail et santé mentale : de l’enquête à l’action,” and D. Dessors and C. Jayet, “Méthodologie et action en psychopathologie du travail (A propos de la souffrance des groupes de réinsertion médico-sociale),” Prévenir, Vol. 20, 1990, pp. 31–43.

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it is more rational to take into account the subjective rationality of behaviours than to dismiss it in the name of teleological and axiological rationalities. Methodology and Action Researchers and clinicians ask those specialising in the psychodynamics of work to explain the methodology of their investigations, whether this involves the handling of proofs concerning the clinical data invoked or the epistemological status of validation criteria. And it is true that at the time the 1980 essay appeared, that methodology was still vague. But it was elaborated in the years that followed, mainly in response to pressure from the scientific community. In fact, it took seven years to arrive at the first acceptable formulation, which was presented in the 1988 publication Plaisir et souffrance dans le travail (Pleasure and suffering in work), bringing together material from the interdisciplinary seminar on the psychodynamics of work mentioned above. This methodology has since proven itself and for the most part, does not seem to require major modifications. However, we shall highlight certain points which, after the fact, have turned out to be particularly difficult to handle and we shall also add several observations of a more epistemological nature. In our view, the methodology of the psychodynamics of work is totally original. But instead of being a virtue, this has turned out to be a problem, for theoretical and epistemological discussion on the one hand, and its transmission to clinicians and researchers on the other. 1. The first distinctive feature of this methodology is the absence of questionnaires or interviews. The investigation depends above all on the involvement of workers brought together in an ad hoc collective. There is no individual interview. Nor are the researchers alone in facing the workers. They too always intervene as a collective, the “investigation collective”—a small group—which also maintains functional ties with the larger collective now composed of our laboratory’s research team. This larger collective is constituted both as a resource and as a “control collective,” so named in order to indicate that the confrontation between the “investigation collective” intervening in the field and the whole of the research team aims at a broader analysis of the whole of the intervention underway. Indeed, we shall see that the investigation is also an



psychopathology to the psychodynamics of work233 action and that, as a result, it requires a specific space for collective debate during the entire time it is being performed. This analytical process operates within the debate, moreover, by bringing psychodynamic theory into play as a whole, even if this means calling it into question.   Each investigation also changes all the researchers, those of the investigation collective and of the control collective alike. The methodology thus mobilises a collective of workers and a collective of researchers. We are not yet able to explain why this setup—for all of its unwieldiness, it must be recognised—is necessary. For the time being, only two possibilities can be suggested: – For one thing, the investigation methodology is not a banal means of observation or data collection. It is rather a specific kind of work, in the sense we have already given to the concept of work, based on open discussion between workers. Facts do not exist in themselves; this is why they cannot be collected. They have to be extracted from the discussion, to be constructed, and this construction process must then be validated.34 But open discussion leads, here as in any work situation, to conflicting interpretations. And in order to be able to transfer the discussion initiated in the field to the analytical work, the involvement of several researchers proves indispensable. – For another, insofar as the “reality” of the clinical facts is not given beforehand but proceeds from an intersubjective dynamics mediated by language, it may be possible for the researchers’ collective intervention to replicate the structure of any ordinary space for discussion in a real work situation (where “space for discussion” is taken in the narrow sense of the concept, subject to communicative rationality, as Habermas defines it).35 To the extent that the investigation is also an action, it too requires specific ethical conditions, as with any action, namely the confrontation of the researchers’ opinions within a space open to debate. The reason for this weighty methodological constraint, which was imposed from the outset although we could not provide

  See Dodier, “La construction sociale des souffrances dans les activités quotidiennes de travail.” 35  See J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. T. McCarthy, Beacon Press, 1985, German Edition 1981. See also P. Ladriere and C. Gruson, Ethique et gouvernabilité, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1992. 34

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arguments justifying it, has been suggested to us by Gérard Mendel, who also called for work between collectives in the methodology he developed for socio-psychoanalysis.36 There, he stressed the importance of introducing a rigorous economy of group-togroup relations into the socio-psychoanalytical intervention. 2. The second particularity of the investigation’s methodology results from the originality of the facts to be constructed scientifically. We already indicated that suffering, along with the principles controlling defensive strategies and the cooperation of individual contributions to work organisation, to some extent escaped both outsiders and the subjects themselves. To put it more concisely, we can go back to the idea that the agents’ intelligence is often ahead of their consciousness of it. Intelligence has two meanings here: it designates a specific mode of exploring the work situation based on the subjectivising experience of the work on the one hand, and the understanding of that experience on the other, namely the elaboration of its intelligibility. The originality of the facts to be constructed stems from the advance which the intelligence of the experience enjoys over its intelligibility for the subject.37 The defensive strategies, which we have described elsewhere at great length, are another source of difficulties with regard to the facts to be constructed insofar as they contribute to hiding the reality of the suffering and its dynamic relationship with work. Here—and this second point is capital in the methodology—the psychodynamic analysis of work does not undertake scholarly interpretations based on the paradigm of applied sciences, even less that of expertise. Such an approach, to borrow Alain Cottereau’s excellent turn of phrase, would have less to do with diagnosis in the strict sense than with “dia-gnosis.”38 The meaning of the subjective experience of work and suffering cannot be produced from the outside. The analysis of the subjective dimension of work, or the “objectification of subjectivity” necessarily entails access to the meaning which the situation   See G. Mendel, La société n’est pas une famille, Paris, La Découverte, 1992.   On the concept of “experience” here, see the notion of “subjectivising activity” in Y. Schwartz, Expérience et connaissance du travail, Paris, Editions Messidor, 1988; and F. Böhle, and B. Milkau, Vom Handrad zum Bildschirm. Eine Untersuchung zur sinnlichen Erfahrung im Arbeitsprozeß, Frankfort am Main, Campus, 1988. 38   See A. Cottereau, “Plaisir et souffrance, justice et injustice sur les lieux de travail, dans une perspective socio- historique,” in ed. C. Dejours, Plaisir et souffrance dans le travail, Editions de l’AOCIP, Vol. 2, 1988, pp. 37–82. 36 37



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has for the subjects themselves. The objectification of experience thus requires an introspective effort of collective working-through spurred by the workers’ desire for re-appropriation and emancipation. Just as in the tradition of interpretive understanding the actors are not seen as “social imbeciles,” in the psychodynamics of work, the subjects are not held to be psychic imbeciles.39 Taking these two problems into consideration (the advance of intelligence over intelligibility and defensive strategies) leads us to define an unusual objective: collecting data which the researcher cannot observe directly, of which subjects are not always conscious. 3. Recourse to speech. In order to overcome this difficulty, there is no choice but to turn to the workers’ own words: this is the only means to access a reality which has not yet come into being. Provided, however, that we recognise that in this situation words cannot simply function as a simple means of translating the subjective reality. This could only be the case if all the facts to be collected were conscious, whereas speech functions as a means of bringing out the intelligibility which is not yet conscious. This property of language is related to the fact that speaking with someone is a very powerful means of thinking, namely thinking through an experience which is lived subjectively. Speech is the means of working-through, as psychoanalysts have long demonstrated on the basis of Freud’s work. But this power of language is not automatic. It is possible to speak without saying anything. Language acquires its power when speech is addressed to others. There are thus specific intersubjective conditions for making the power of language real. This is what linguists study under the name of pragmatics.40 But the pragmatic dimension of language is not our only methodological problem. It remains to clarify two key points: the question of the authenticity of speech and the explanation of the intersubjective conditions that enable the construction of clinical facts and the elaboration of the subjective experience.

  See A. Coulon. Ethnométhodologie, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1987.   See J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words, Oxford University Press, 1962. On the status and function of language in work see J. Boutet, “La question de l’interprétation en linguistique,” in ed. C. Dejours, Plaisir et souffrance dans le travail, Editions de l’AOCIP, Vol. I, 1988. 39 40

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Suffering, as we have seen, is not directly accessible and its expression through language comes up against the protective shield of defensive strategies. But a second obstacle must also be taken into account: the expression of the truth of real-life experience may compete with the subjects’ strategic interests. Independent of defensive strategies, the subjects may well have good reasons not to tell the truth, to hide it, minimise it or, on the contrary, dramatise or even distort it in order to serve interests of an instrumental or strategic nature. And this raises the question of the truthfulness or authenticity of the speech addressed to researchers. This problem is of considerable importance with regard to the validity criteria applied to the findings of the clinical investigation. In an attempt to get around it, the methodological principle used here is to privilege the analysis of the request in the preliminary phase of the investigation. In addition to the methodological reasons, there are ethical ones making the principle of what we have termed “working on the request” a central, if not decisive time of any psychodynamics of work study. Indeed, as we shall see further on, the objectification of the experience may well have major consequences on the relationship to work and the collective management of work organisation, which is to say, in terms of both the subject’s future and the development of social relations. These consequences will be assumed above all by the subjects participating in the investigation. Thus, the researchers’ collective  alone cannot assume the responsibility of taking such a risk involving someone else’s future. The risks and responsibilities must first be known and willingly assumed by the subjects. This is what the analysis of the request ensures, and once it is completed, what it guarantees. Conversely, experience shows that in the absence of a request, we have access to neither the defensive strategies nor the suffering. The main reason that some scientists contest the existence of the defensive strategies we have identified—and which they have not found themselves—stems precisely from the fact that their entry into the field is not backed up by the subjects’ own request. In this respect, the psychodynamics of work approach might be compared to that of ethnography and sociology.41 41  Compare commentaries on S. Bouchard, “Du plaisir et de la souffrance d’être truckeur,” in ed. C. Dejours, Plaisir et souffrance dans le travail, Vol. 2, 1988,



psychopathology to the psychodynamics of work237 The Request

But the request itself is not self-evident. Under what conditions can it be considered sufficiently explicit to permit the beginning of the investigation? Does the request result from a spontaneous process or does it have to be sought out or even provoked? This is a difficult question and a constant subject of debate. In any case, the request requires a rigorous effort of elaboration, or “working on the request.” One case has been specifically studied in terms of its different stages, and notably the one called the “socialisation of the request,” which involves its construction as a request which is socially validated by the different company players.42 If rigorous work on the request and the ethical principles framing it are determinant with regard to the validity criterion of authenticity, the overall validation of the data and their interpretation does not rely on it alone. There are other modes of verification, notably at the time of the two oral and written reconstitutions which conclude the investigation phase proper. Before going any further, however, it must be stressed that this specific requirement of the psychodynamic approach with regard to the request, undoubtedly constitutes the greatest problem for the handling of this instrument, not only from a technical standpoint (working on the request is tricky) but above all due to the fact that the set-up thus constituted, with its many participants, is unwieldy and time-consuming. The Ability to Listen The second question we have to address here concerns the intersubjective conditions for the elaboration of the subjective experience of work. In order for the subjects’ “speech acts” to allow the working-through of real-life experience, it is not enough to have a mechanism of dialogue alone, namely someone who speaks and someone who listens. Even if there were no ambiguity about the workers’ request, listening would not be enough to bring about a miraculous emergence of meaning. This depends also on the nature of the listening. Very briefly stated, pp. 115–131 and P. Bourdieu, “Introduction à la socio-analyse,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Vol. 90, 1991, pp. 3–19. 42   See Dejours and Jayet, “Psychopathologie du travail et organisation réelle du travail dans une industrie de process.”

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listening only produces an effect when it takes risks, in the same way that speaking out takes risks. Listening and hearing, which means understanding something new in what is spoken, leads to a first risk. Above all because hearing the suffering of someone else, penetrating the tragedy in Politzer’s sense of the word, is upsetting and destabilising for the researchers’ psychic functioning. From the very beginning of the work on the request, the psychodynamics of work investigations turn out to be extremely painful for the researchers. Others have had the same experience, notably psychoanalysts and ethnologists.43 The second risk for the researchers involves their relationship with established scientific knowledge. As we have already indicated, an investigation only works if the entire theory of the psychodynamics of work is constantly put to the test of reality, even if this means that it loses its legitimacy or interest for the researchers because the real-life situations are incompatible with its theoretical corpus. Indeed, this is why the “control collective” mentioned earlier was set up. The third risk taken by the researchers is more decisive. Willingly or not, they commit themselves to the workers participating in the investigation. The fact that the investigation must arise from a request, as a methodological principle, inevitably implies taking a stand in relation to that request. Here, it is worth recalling that the request is only acceptable when it is explicitly formulated in terms of a request for understanding and analysing the work situation, not as a therapeutic one. But this should not be misunderstood: while the investigation collective does not commit itself to resolving the problems raised by the relationship to work organisation, it does, on the other hand, commit itself to doing everything in its power to arrive at the intelligibility of the situation. This is a weighty commitment and one which implies significant risks, because we cannot be certain in advance of reaching conclusions which satisfy all the validation criteria. Thus, the researchers are prey to the same anxiety they face with any scientific problem, except that here, by contrast with other research approaches, they are in a real situation and in real time. And the researchers’ success or failure is also responsible, in part, for the subjective future of the workers who, from their own end, have taken the risk of getting involved in the investigation. These conditions as a whole characterise what we would call “risky listening.” 43   See G. Devereux, De l’angoisse à la méthode dans les sciences du comportement, Paris, Flammarion, 1980.



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When the three risks identified here actually come into play, they inevitably confront the research collective with an additional one which, in our opinion, is even more imposing: in some field research, the action engaged by the investigation often goes far beyond it, leading to circumstances in which the individual researchers are sought out, and it is impossible for them to avoid the moral or even legal obligation to testify publicly about their scientific work. This situation occurs when the problems the investigation raises about the contradictions inherent in the organisation of work set off debates extending into the public sphere. The obligation to testify arises from a double constraint. For one thing, the refusal to testify is not neutral and can act to the advantage of certain participants and the disadvantage of others, thus implying a lack of fairness. And for another, the debates sometimes become polemical and certain participants resort to manoeuvres attempting to disqualify the research group or even the entire laboratory, or indeed, the scientific community at large. In this case, abstention becomes untenable. The three (and possibly four) dimensions of “risky listening” are thus inseparable from the methodology of the psychodynamics of work. This is why we have come to define the psychodynamic analysis of work situations, above all, as we stated at the beginning of this chapter, as a practice of intervention and not simply as a classical analytical science which produces knowledge. This is also why the investigation methodology in the psychodynamics of work follows the “action research” model. Many other forms of investigations in the human and social sciences claim to go back to action research. But in most cases, this means that the investigation, through its own dynamics, provokes changes in the situation studied. In the case of the psychodynamics of work, however, the changes in question are not simply side effects of the scientific research, to be recorded for purposes of evaluation and validation. In the psychodynamic analysis of work, the changes which the investigation may generate engage the responsibility of the researchers’ collective, even within the action itself, because what is involved is suffering. However, the forms of this responsibility and commitment, which are strictly governed by respect for the “ethics of evidence,” make the content and nature of the researchers’ intervention radically different from those of the other participants in the action underway. In any event, “risky listening” ultimately appears to be the counterpart, for the researchers, of what the request represents for the workers.

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In our view, this methodological setup provides the basis for what might be considered an equitable relationship between the speech motivated by a request and “risky listening.” This economy of intersubjective relations in the investigation methodology of the psychodynamics of work is critical for the efficiency of the pragmatic dimension of language relative to its capacity for working-through or bringing out the meaning of the real-life experience. Thought and Action A final remark to bring this section to a close: we have seen how access to the intelligibility of the workers’ experience projects the researchers, whether they like it or not, into action itself. And the same is true for the workers. The collective working-through of the work experience, through the investigation, transforms the workers’ subjective relationship to their work situation. After the investigation, whether they like it or not, their interventions in the “discussion space” devoted to the organisation of work cannot be the same as before because they do not perceive it and think about it in the same way. Action is thus inseparable from the work of elaboration, even if the latter has only involved thought and speech. The practice of the psychodynamics of work investigations suggests that the theoretical locus of the action is in the very work of thinking and there is no reason to maintain the traditional philosophical distinction between thought and action. From Intersubjectivity to the Test of Objectification This long digression on methodology should now enable us to address several epistemological questions more succinctly. These issues, raised by the shift from the psychopathology of work to the psychodynamics of work, must be examined if we want to determine the possible role of the new discipline within the scientific domain. Even if some authors consider this a futile task,44 we feel it is unavoidable. However incomplete and awkward it might be, the debate is introduced here to indicate the main lines of research which exchanges with researchers in

44   See J. -C. Passeron, Le raisonnement sociologique. L’espace non poppérien du raisonnement naturel, Paris, Nathan, 1991.



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theoretical sociology have suggested to us over the past few years. The psychodynamic analysis, as we have already indicated, cannot lead to the observation or revelation of pre-existing occurrences. The investigation brings out a reality by the very process of interpreting speech. Researchers and philosophers have constructed an entire tradition around the questions raised by the recourse to interpretation and the role of interpretation in scientific work. The psychodynamics of work is a discipline which makes use of the technique of interpretation with the methods described above. As such, it comes under the epistemology of the historico-hermeneutic sciences, which Habermas distinguishes from the empirico-analytical (ie. experimental) sciences.45 The fact of referring to the Habermassian conception, however, requires us to raise another question, even if we cannot discuss it here, namely whether the psychodynamics of work does not also belong to the critical sciences, to the extent that, like psychoanalysis, it is basically aimed at an effort of reappropriation and emancipation based on the critique of the distortions of communicative action.46 Notwithstanding Gadamer’s warnings about the opposition between truth and method and his intention to create a philosophical hermeneutics rather than constituting the bases of a methodology for the social sciences,47 we would be tempted to think that the work carried out in recent years on methodology in the psychodynamics of work helps to demonstrate the possibility of building a “hermeneutical method” in the narrow sense of the term.48 The methodology of the psychodynamics of work gives a possible form to the application criteria which Gadamer considers capital for establishing the hermeneutical stance and approach. A systematic epistemological discussion concerning the relations between the psychodynamics of work and the hermeneutic approach would lead us to consider a dimension which is generally excluded from our subject: in contrast to poiesis, which finds a concrete form of expression in the object produced, praxis requires

45   See J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro, Beacon Press, 1972 [1968]. 46   See B. Flynn, “Reading Habermas Reading Freud,” Human Studies, Vol. 8, 1985, pp. 57–76. 47   See H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall, London, Continuum, 2004 [1960]. 48   See J. Ladriere, “Herméneutique et épistémologie,” in J. Gteisch and R Kearney, Paul Ricoeur: les métamorphoses de la raison herméneutique, Paris, Cerf, 1991, pp. 107–126.

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an additional mediation in order to be attested and discussed, namely, a narrative or commentary. Where a craftsperson can remain silent and let the object produced speak for itself, the agent must speak, because poiesis has a concrete dimension, while praxis is abstract. Action thus requires a narrative in order to occur, as Ricoeur explains.49 Indeed, the narrative can even take shape in a text. But the text in turn is endowed with a life of its own which transcends its author and produces effects which partly escape the initial intent.50 The psychodynamics of work investigation ends with the drafting of a written text, namely a report collectively developed through the interaction between workers and researchers. This report gives concrete form to interpretations of the subjective relationship to the organisation of work. Some of our subsequent research bears more specifically on this aspect of the investigation, namely the status of spoken and written language in the work of analysis itself. It seems to me (although this remains to be developed in greater detail) that language functions at three levels: – It is a mediator between the workers and researchers whose intersubjective requisites we have already considered (authenticity of speech versus risk of listening). – But it also functions as a mediator or medium between the workers themselves, one which is both powerful and necessary to the extent that it permits the sharing of real-life work experience among the members of the work collective involved in the investigation. For them, language is not only the medium of the collective elaboration of the experiences but is also operative in the construction of the collective itself. At least this is what the investigations suggest. And this means that the practice of the investigation amounts quite simply to the more systematic handling, under the impetus of the researchers, of a dynamics which emerges “spontaneously” in ordinary work situations between the agents in the “discussion space” devoted to the organisation of work (when this space actually exists). From a theoretical standpoint, then, the methodological setup of the psychodynamic analysis of work functions as a magnifying glass which allows us to see the dynamics involved in the ordinary 49   See P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans. K. McLaughlin and J. Pellauer, University of Chicago Press, 1990 [1983–1985]. 50   See P. Ricoeur, Du texte à l’action, Paris, Seuil, 1986.



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management of the organisation of work, and possibly stimulates it as well. – Language, and notably written language (investigation report, minutes of the Committees on Health, Safety and Working Conditions [CHSCT], activity report of the occupational medicine department, articles in the press, etc.) echoing the terms used in the work sessions and discussions of the investigation, can be used as a tracer of the action, as Teiger and Laville say.51 Language can then serve as a means of objectifying the subjective experience of the work situation studied. The Concept of Psychodynamics The term “psychodynamic analysis” belongs to psychoanalytical theory, where it designates the study of psycho-affective movements generated by the development of inter- and intrasubjective conflicts. Psychodynamic analysis takes place at a concrete level and bears specifically on the tragedy experienced, its content and its meaning for the person living it. In this respect, it is the opposite of metapsychology, which studies processes, structures and balances of forces at the abstract level of mechanisms, topical instances of the psychic apparatus and the economy of drives. When we speak of the psychodynamic analysis of work situations, the concept of “psychodynamics” is thus distorted, to the extent that, strictly speaking, it is only applied in the context of the psychoanalysis  of the cure process and the conflicts brought out through transference. Two initial objections raised by this situation can quickly be refuted: – The first consists in confusing the use of the term in the clinical approach to work with that of North American psychiatry, where “psychodynamic conceptions” lump together all the clinical and theoretical approaches which are not experimentalist, behaviourist or biological theories of mental disorders. We reject the descriptive, nosographic use of the term “psychodynamics” and, on the contrary, lay claim to the rigorous application of the concept in the sense of concrete psychology. 51   See C. Teiger and A. Laville, Expression des travailleurs sur leurs conditions de travail, Rapport N° 100 du Laboratoire d’Ergonomie du CNAM, 1989.

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– The second consists in considering the clinical approach to work as a form of applied psychoanalysis to be placed alongside the psychoanalytical interpretation of art and literature, psycho-sociology, the analysis of myths and so on. From the very outset, we rejected the applied science model for the psychodynamics of work and sought to place it within the epistemological model of the field sciences. This statement of principle does not exhaust the differences between psychodynamics of work and psychoanalysis, however. Taking the theses of the psychodynamics of work to their logical conclusion has meant that after considerable borrowing from psychoanalysis, we reversed the process, by questioning psychoanalysis about itself on the basis of the questions raised by the clinical approach to work. But if there were in fact a distortion of the term “psychodynamics,” what would it be? For one thing, what might be considered an excessive extension of the term to a clinical approach excessively anchored in reality. It is true that the clinical approach to work is entirely situated in a clinical social space surrounding the reality of the work situation; the organisation of work constitutes, as it were, the geometric centre of all interpretations, and these cannot in any way be freed from the constraints of instrumental rationality. Conversely, however, the stratagems of the intelligence and the will open up a psychic and social space such that the entire clinical experience of work also appears as the locus of movements of subversion, encirclement and circumventing of the centripetal constraints imposed by the reality of work. Encirclement and release vie with one other but reality remains the universal centre of gravity of the clinical approach to work. By contrast, psychoanalysis is founded on a sovereign act of expelling reality to the periphery, while the psyche and the imagination are called upon to occupy the central position. There is thus an inherent movement opposing psychoanalytic psychodynamics and the psychodynamics of work. And yet, the clinical experience brought out by the psychodynamic analysis of work situations persists. Is reality truly excluded from the psychoanalytic mechanism? This question might provide the basis for a re-examination of psychoanalysis. Indeed, the psychoanalytic cure is impossible without the establishment of what, in technical terms, is called the “framework”, namely the regularity of the sessions, fee-for-service payment, working rules (no touching),



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the psychoanalytic community (school or institution). In other words, the psychoanalytic cure is also, and fundamentally, a form of work, which, like any other work, implies a formalised, regulated relationship to reality as concretised in the therapeutic goal. The systematic analysis of psychoanalytical practice in the light of the psychodynamics of work is possible and it could lead to revising the approach to reality (the framework) both in theory and in the way the cure is handled. We would thus stand by the legitimacy of a strict use of the concept of psychodynamics in the clinical approach to work and would go so far as to deduce a problematic of identity which would be valid in the domains of normality and pathology alike. Indeed, the clinical approach to work suggests the outlines of a subjective rationality of action, the analysis of which presumes that the links between the three terms are rigorously and simultaneously maintained: suffering— work—recognition (the triangle of the psychodynamics of work). This configuration is the counterpart of the triangle of identity and alienation proposed by Sigaut: ego—reality—others. Clinical work teaches us that it is impossible to understand questions about the emergence of mental pathology in work if the aetiological investigation is limited to the subject’s individual history and his or her private inner life (intrasubjectivity). Nor are the psychopathological phenomena intelligible if we refer only to relations between subjects (intersubjectivity), whether these are hierarchical or between co-workers, as the psychology of organisations and the psycho-sociological analysis of groups suggest. The conflicts, suffering and pleasure emerging in the work situation also owe their dynamics to the organisation of work and the difficulties, or even conflicts, which it occasions between subjects, within teams and within individual subjects through the tensions it brings out between the constraint of the work situation and that of relations in the private sphere. As a result, the psychodynamics of work leads to reexamining the status of reality within the general economy of pleasure and suffering, the defensive strategies and psychopathological decompensations. The struggle against madness, which is mainly of interest to the psychodynamics of work but also to psychoanalysis, entails both the subject’s confrontation with reality and the recognition of his or her action by others. This argument is central. Madness does not depend on the intensity of the constraints imposed on the subject by the work reality. Reason (or normality) does not depend on the happy medium of these same constraints. Rather, it is when one of the three

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terms is isolated from the other two that the risk of alienation and madness emerges. Let us go back to Sigaut’s analysis: REALITY

OTHERS

EGO Mental alienation

When the subject is cut off from reality and recognition by others, he or she is abandoned to the solitude of the classic madness known as “mental alienation.” WORK

SUFFERING

RECOGNITION Social alienation

When the subject maintains a relationship with reality through his or her work but this work is not recognised by others, even if it is a true relationship, here too, the subject is condemned to alienating solitude. Sigaut designates this situation as “social alienation.” This is the case of the unrecognised scholar or genius, but also the most frequent case of the subject whose work and contributions go unrecognised. These circumstances too may provoke an identity crisis and plunge the subject into the madness which is often confused with mental alienation if he or she protests and attempts to claim what is due (paranoia), or winds up losing all self-confidence and doubting the reality he or she faces because no one else recognises it (depression). Most of the



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psychopathology of work in the narrow sense operates in the realm of social alienation.52 REALITY

EGO

OTHERS Cultural alienation

Last of all, when the subject’s acts are recognised by others but this recognition takes place, on both sides, in a psychic world which has lost its ties with reality, we are, according to Sigaut, dealing with “cultural alienation.” This is the case of sects. But it can also be the case of certain communities of researchers, practitioners or even political leaders cut off from their base, or administrations “cut off from reality.” Nor does cultural alienation only concern exceptional situations; it also takes more ordinary forms which can nonetheless be extremely serious in certain work situations. In one of our investigations, workers or supervisors were aware of anomalies in assembly, of tasks carried out in a slapdash way, of defective drills or measuring devices, of serious breaches of specifications or even blatant frauds in the accomplishment of certain stages of the work, which in their view called quality or plant safety into question. The chain of authority lent a deaf ear to these repeated warnings coming from the base. Many incidents, notably the most serious ones, are not reported back to management. What gets excluded is reality, while company heads and executives debating questions of management, administration and doctrine are cut off from the reality of the work, in other

52   See A. Bensaid, “Apport de la psychopathologie du travail à l’étude d’une bouffée délirante aïgue,” Archives des Maladies Professionnelles, 52, Paris, Masson, 1990, pp. 307–310; C. Dejours, “Introduction clinique à la psychopathologie du travail,” Archives des Maladies Professionnelles, Vol. 52, Paris, Masson, 1990, pp. 273–278; C. Dejours, T. Collot, P. Godard and P. Logeay, “Syndromes psychopathologiques consécutifs aux accidents du travail (incidences sur la reprise du travail), ” Le travail humain, Vol. 49, 1986, pp. 103–106.

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words, in a situation of cultural alienation. (At the same time, workers and supervisors, whose relationship to that reality is not recognised, are exposed to the risk of social alienation). From this standpoint, identity is always the result of a struggle against the three possible risks of alienation, albeit one which is never definitively won, even in the best of cases. The psychodynamic analysis of work situations suggests that the relationship to reality is never directly determined. It is not natural. It always involves the mediation of an action on that reality leading to the simultaneous discovery of: – The experience of that part of reality which, as always, resists the control of technique and knowledge. – The possibilities, nonetheless, of action upon that reality which, by the fact of partially conquering, harnessing or circumventing it, attest to the creative power of the subject’s imaginative thinking. Conclusion: Work and Love This problematic of identity and alienation is interesting above all, relative to the question of designation raised by the evolution of our discipline, because it shows how recognition by others can pose a mental risk to the subject when this recognition does not entail a judgement on what is actually done and on the relation to the real of work, in other words, a judgement on the reality of his or her work. This risk is not confined to the clinical field specifically investigated by the psychodynamics of work, however; it also hangs over the clinical experience explored by general psychopathology. The recognition conferred by love and the interaction of feelings alone is not enough for the child to construct his or her identity. There are many clinical examples of fusion or excessive eroticisation of the mother-child relationship where, through a familiar process of reciprocal idealisation, reality is excluded in favour of imagination. The subject is granted the recognition of love but at the same time, these excesses destroy his or her identity and generate the most serious mental illnesses (in particular, psychoses, which are the principal form of madness or alienation). Similarly, some psychoanalytical cures can lead to mutual recognition between patient and analyst within a shared psychic world which has lost its ties with reality. In the absence of a confrontation with the test of reality and validation by its liberating effects, the double



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delirium of an interminable process of interpretation and total intelligibility leads to alienation within the analysis itself (cultural alienation). The psychodynamics of work enlarges the initial field of the psychopathology of work. The investigation of the pathology remains within its scope but it is now situated within a broader problematic offering concepts which may be used to describe both suffering and pleasure, madness (and alienation) and normality. Common sense tells us that work occupies a large share of life in quantitative terms—eight hours a day, which amounts to a third of daily existence. This rough figure underestimates the reality, however. The subjective relationship to work spreads its tentacles well beyond the space of the shop floor, the office or the company and sinks them deep into the non-work space. Analyses of the psychodynamics of work are instructive on this issue.53 But even more instructive are the analyses proposed by the sociology of gender relations when these are based on the problematics of the sexual division of labour.54 The classical separation between work and non-work has no meaning in industrial sociology and the same is true for the psychodynamics of work. This strictly spatial separation, notwithstanding its adoption by classical sociology and psychology, is radically contradicted as soon as the dynamics of the psychic and social processes are taken into account. The working of the psyche cannot be divided up. Persons involved in defensive strategies to combat suffering in work do not leave their psychic behaviour in the changing room. On the contrary, they take their mental constraints with them and need the cooperation of family and friends to keep their defences ready for when they return to work. It can also be shown that the entire family economy is called upon to help its members face the constraints of the work situation. Nor are children spared by the dynamics of their parents’ relationship to work, to the point that their own development is deeply marked by it, even in the construction of their sexual identity.

53   See Bensaid, “Apport de la psychopathologie du travail à l’étude d’une bouffée délirante aïgue,” Dejours, “Introduction clinique à la psychopathologie du travail,” and C. Dejours, “La charge psychique de Travail,” in Équilibre ou Fatigue par le travail?, Intervention aux Journées nationales de psychologie du travail, Paris, Éditions ESF/ Enterprise moderne d’Édition, Vol. 1, 1980. 54   See H. Hirata and D. Kergoat, “Rapports sociaux de sexe et psychopathologie du travail,” in ed. Dejours, Plaisir et souffrance dans le travail, Vol. 2, 1988, pp. 131–176.

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By attempting to extend its field of investigation to normality, the psychodynamics of work has discovered that work is not limited to a marginal role in the construction of identity. On the contrary, the clinical experience of work leads to recognising the need for a more demanding, systematic development of the problematics of the work situation in general psychology. Not only is the clinical approach to sublimation considerably enriched but it emerges as an element at least as important as the clinical approach to erotic life for identifying the driving forces of mental health. It may be that sublimation is not just an optional process reserved for talented artists, creators and scientific researchers but an essential process for constructing and sustaining each individual’s psychic economy. And this means in turn that there is no avoiding an examination of the consequences of lasting deprivation of the right to sublimation. After the fact, it seems to us that social inequality with regard to the symbolic benefits of sublimation for mental health is more determinant than psychic inequality with regard to individual resources for sublimation. To cite only one example here: the profound inequality between men and women in access to the dynamics of recognition in work. Thus, a socially and historically constructed reality makes a brutal intrusion into the clinical approach to sublimation, which is in fact becoming one of the most urgent questions for the psychodynamic analysis of work situations. Taking into consideration the weight of the reality exposed by the clinical approach to work situations does not call into question the legitimacy of the concept of psychodynamics in the analysis of work situations. In our view, the question arising today is just the opposite: can general psychopathology, which, since the nineteenth century, has been constructed at the patient’s bedside, in the space of the asylum or in the private space of the face-to-face relationship, continue to do without the clinical approach to work? Translated from French by Miriam Rosen

Chapter nine

Care as Work: Mutual Vulnerabilities and Discrete Knowledge Pascale Molinier Care is not just a disposition or an ethical attitude. First and foremost care is a form of work, work that can be done or not, chosen to be done or not, indeed something that a society as a whole can choose to do or not. To provide a formal description and a theory of this work seems to me an indispensable condition of an “ethic of care” that would fulfil its goal. Such an ethic would contribute towards the recognition of the people who perform care work in Western societies; people who in the main are females, poor and immigrant, and often the three at once,1 without harming those who benefit from their work; that is, all of us. This chapter will not be able to fulfil all the criteria that would enable such a formalisation. Its ambition is restricted to the concerns of the psychodynamics of work whose object of inquiry is not work taken in an objective, sociological or ergonomic sense, but the processes underpinning the three powers of “working,” namely transforming the world, applying intelligence objectively, and enabling the subject to form itself. By producing goods and services the subject does not merely transform the world but also transforms itself by working. (“Working” therefore designates a major process of subjectivation, that is, creation of subjectivity).2 The relationship to the world that develops through care work entails specific dimensions that can be highlighted. Only a few of these dimensions, amongst the most hidden, can be unveiled here. It is obvious that the psychological stakes of work cannot be severed from the latter’s material conditions. From this point of view, this chapter restricts itself to my research with nurses and auxiliary nurses. 1  See E. N. Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historial Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1992, pp. 1–43; R. A. Hochschild, “Le nouvel or du monde,” Nouvelles Questions Féministes, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2004, pp. 59–74; E. Dorlin, “Corps contre nature. Stratégies actuelles de la critique féministe,” L’Homme et la société, Vol. 150/151, No. 1, 2004, pp. 47–68. 2   See C. Dejours, “Travailler n’est pas déroger,” Travailler, Vol. 1, 1998, pp. 5–12.

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These two highly feminised professions stand in hierarchical relation to each other so they cannot be identified with each other. Their antagonisms but also their modes of cooperation would have warranted a broader effort of contextualisation.3 For the purposes of this particular chapter, it will be sufficient to note that in terms of the division of labour, the main aspect of the nurses’ delegation of work in relation to assistant nurses has consisted in their offloading the most ungratifying aspects of care work, that is, the bodily care (soins) of personal hygiene and personal comfort. This part of care work belongs to the category of dirty work as it has been conceptualised in the 1950s by the American sociologist Everett Hughes.4 Dirty work designates those tasks that are seen as physically disgusting, which symbolise something degrading or humiliating, and/or confront some of the taboo dimensions of human existence, like the impure, the vile, the deviant,5 and to which I would add sexuality. The professions concerned are those that collect or deal with waste and refuse, like the cleaning work; those that entail a relationship to the body, notably bodily detritus, and cadavers; as well as those that involve a certain degree of instituted abuse and violence. In the social imaginary, proximity with what is normally held at a distance is perceived as threatening to “contaminate” those that fulfil those tasks—however necessary they are. The individuals fulfilling those tasks are seen as soiled, impure, transgressive or even evil. As Dominique Lhuillier emphasises, the notion of dirty work is heuristically useful “to address the question of the division of labour inasmuch as the latter is not just technical and social, but also moral and psychological.”6 The meaning that can be attributed to this type of work is often precarious. Narcissistic wounds resulting from these activities are undeniable. The auxiliary nurses I organised interviews with defined themselves in bitter terms such as “shit cleaner” (“torche-pots”/ torcher = clean someone’s bottom; pot = piss pot.) It is significant that

3  In France the nursing profession is predominantly female. In 2004, 87% of nurses were female. However, this varies across different sectors: 47% of males in psychiatry; 27% in anaesthetic services; and only 1% in pediatric services. There were 740,000 assistant nurses and hospital assistants (91% and 81% female respectively). See Sabine Bessière, “La feminisation des professions de santé en France: données de cadrage”, Revue française des affaires sociales, La Documentation française, 2005, 1, pp.19–33. 4   See E. C. Hughes, Men and Their Work, Glencoe, IL., Free Press, 1958; “Good People and Dirty Work,” Social Problems, Vol. 10, 1962, pp. 3–11. 5   See D. Lhuillier, “Le sale boulot,” Travailler, Vol. 14, 2005, pp. 73–98. 6   ibid. p. 73.



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care work is also stigmatised as “dirty work” by others as well as by those who undertake it. Conceptual Tensions By care work (travail de care) I understand, following Patricia Paperman’s definition, all the activities that fulfil “demands characteristic of relations of dependence.”7 To “take care of (the other)” (prendre soin) is not to think of the other, nor to care for the other (se soucier) either in an intellectual or even in an affective sense, it is not even necessarily to love the other: it is first and foremost to do something, to produce a certain type of work which directly contributes to the maintenance or the preservation of the other’s life. It is to help or assist the other in his or her basic needs: like eating, being clean, resting, sleeping, feeling safe, and being able to devote oneself to one’s own interests. With the latter, I understand in particular all the activities that help to create meaning, those that relate to sublimation, in the Freudian sense of the term, and which are therefore not directly related to basic physical needs but rather to psychological needs linked to self-fulfilment. To be able to devote oneself to one’s own interests requires a certain form of psychological availability, a form of detachment from the time constraints arising from bodily needs, like having to think about preparing a meal. Indeed the production of the other’s autonomy and identity is at the heart of contemporary theories of domestic work (travail domestique), which emphasise its dimensions of psychological and emotional work.8 This is the noble part of care work. In English there are two terms to designate care (le soin): cure and care, with the first referring to the curative aspect of care. Whereas the cure concerns only those who are sick, care concerns every one of us, from the beginning to the end of life. No life is possible without care. In the perspective of the ethics of care, vulnerability and dependence are at the core of what it is to be a human being. This means that one and the same model of the human being can be used to designate the person who gives care (the care giver) and the person who benefits 7   P. Paperman, “Les gens vulnérables n’ont rien d’exceptionnel,” Raisons pratiques, Vol. 16, 2005, p. 321. 8   See L. Adkins and C. Lury, “Making Bodies, Making People, Making Work,” in eds. L. McKie and N. Watson, Organizing Bodies: Policy, Institutions and Work, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, pp. 151–165.

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from this work—whether or not that person is a “competent adult.”9 In this sense, “competence” designates a certain degree of autonomy, always provisional and partial, and therefore does not imply that the competent adult would be invulnerable—this would be an absurd idea—or that he or she would have exited the state of dependence that characterises him or her just as much as that of autonomy. Some authors insist on maintaining the distinction between care work with people who are unavoidably dependent, for example, the sick or those who are invalids, as well as people who are very young (dependency care), and care work with people in good health who would be able to direct their “self-maintenance” on their own.10 Even if it is relevant under certain aspects (in economic terms in particular, or in terms of moral obligation), with the dualism “autonomy/dependence,” this distinction nonetheless risks perpetuating the fiction of a self-constitution of personal identity, whereas in fact the successful achievement of the latter is dependent on the work of a “spouse/mother whose self is oriented towards the others and demonstrates affection”, as Adkins and Lury put it.11 Conversely, as the English psychoanalyst Margaret Cohen notes, respect of the most dependent of dependent people—in her case, “giving a voice to the experience” of young infants in the “neonatal intensive care” section where she works—implies recognising them as independent human beings.12 By independent, she means comparable or similar to oneself, that is to say, from her perspective as a psychoanalyst; and recognised as a subject with his or her own subjectivity, a psychological life and his or her own story. The default position, given the difficulty of providing technical care (cure) without causing suffering, is to concentrate solely on the technical difficulty while refusing to see that the infant child is writhing with pain, without imagining his or her distress. In the perspective of care, the categories of dependence/autonomy as well as the relationships between these categories must therefore be conceptualised anew. Is it the content of tasks which defines care  9   See P. Paperman, “Perspectives féministes sur la justice,” L’année sociologique, Vol. 54, No. 2, 2004, pp. 413–433. 10   See E. Feder Kittay, “Dependency, Difference and Global Ethics of Longterm Care,” www.carework-network.org/ 11   See Adkins and Lury, “Making Bodies, Making People, Making Work.” 12   See M. Cohen, “Histoires de naissances et de mort,” Autrement, Vol. 10, 1993, pp. 67–87.



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work? Or is it the way they are accomplished? In French there is no appropriate term to translate the concept of care. The French word “soin” is too reductive by comparison. Care is not “sollicitude” (“solicitude”) or “dévouement” either. The concept of care comprises a constellation of physical or mental states, as well as activities of work relating to pregnancy, the raising and education of children, the care/ soins of people: bodily care/hygiene, and domestic work. The most important point is that in the concept of care the material tasks are not dissociated from the psychological work they entail. Furthermore, care denotes the properly affective dimension that is mobilised in a type of activity which has to be accomplished with “tenderness” or “sympathy.” We shall come back to that. The sociologist Geneviève Cresson has suggested translating the term as “health domestic work” (travail domestique de santé), which partly overcomes the difficulties of translation.13 This translation however is only partly successful. On the one hand, it manages to rehabilitate the essential part of care and concern for the other in domestic work, as well as the psychological load (“charge”) associated with it. However, it is problematic on two fronts. First, the concept of “health domestic work” tends to artificially dissociate domestic work from health domestic work whereas from the perspective of care, all domestic work is health work, beginning with “sleeping in a clean bed.” Second, it also tends to dissociate domestic care work that is accomplished for free in a private space from waged care work, whereas the concept of care overcomes this dichotomy and allows us to analyse the similarities between such  disparate activities as those that concern house work, the care for the sick, education, secretarial work as well as assisting work in all its shapes and forms (for example the case of legal assistants studied by Pierce).14 If we recall that housework has for a long time been considered as a mindless type of work demanding no particular skills, the change in perspective is radical: care defines both activities and the intelligence that is mobilised in their accomplishment. The reason why this form of intelligence and its realisations have attracted so little interest, both on a scientific and philosophical level, mainly has to do with the fact that 13   See G. Cresson, Les parents d’enfants hospitalisés à domicile. Leur participation aux soins, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2000. 14  See J. Pierce, “Les émotions dans le travail: le cas des assistants juridiques,” Travailler, Vol. 9, 2004, pp. 51–72.

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it is difficult to establish a relationship with the concrete experience of care. This is because of: (1) The invisibility of the conditions of successful care; (2) the naturalisation of care as belonging to womanhood; (3) the emotional aspects of its discursive expression; (4) the virile defences of decision-makers. This is what I would like to show on the basis of several studies in the psychodynamics of work15 I have undertaken in several hospitals with auxiliary nurses, nurses and head nurses.16 The Invisibility of Care Work and Inconspicuous Skills What do we learn from the psychodynamic analysis of work situations in the health sector? In order to be efficacious, care work must not appear as work (literally, it must efface itself as work). Its success depends on its invisibility. Every time one has to attempt to relieve the suffering of another person (or attempt to not add to it), the only way to avoid that person getting tired or embarrassed, and also of sparing oneself useless gestures and journeys, is to know how to anticipate the request and to hide the efforts and the work that has been accomplished to reach the desired goal. This can take very banal forms, for example putting a glass of water or a bell within the person’s reach, avoiding saying “you are looking tired” and instead offering a chair. The concern for the psychological comfort of the other is always at play in this type of skill. One attempts to avoid embarrassing the other, shaming him or her, to respect his or her “modesty”, his or her desire to be autonomous, to spare them the humiliation of dependence, and so on. But such inconspicuous skills (savoir-faire) can also mobilise technical knowledge, like when a (good) nurse hands the surgeon the right instrument at the right time, before he had to ask for it, or like the good secretary who prepares the right files (without 15   The psychodynamics of work studies the centrality of work in psychic functioning, in other words, the fact that work is never neutral in relation to the cons­truction of identity and mental health. We intervene when people request it, when they seek to elucidate the reasons explaining why their work has become so difficult to bear they have become ill as a result, and others fear the same fate. See C. Dejours and P. Molinier, “De la peine au travail”, Autrement, No. 142, 1994, pp. 138–151. 16  See P. Molinier, “Prévenir la violence: l’invisibilité du travail des femmes,” Travailler, Vol. 3, 1999, pp. 73–86; P. Molinier, “Travail et compassion dans le monde hospitalier,” Les cahiers du genre, Vol. 28, 2000, pp. 49–70; and P. Molinier, “Souffrance et théorie de l’action,” Travailler, Vol. 7, 2001, pp. 131–146.



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being asked) for the boss to use in the next meeting. Another type of inconspicuous skill (savoir-faire discrets) is that of the cleaner who manages to clean a table without upsetting the researcher’s desk. Another example still is that of being able to avoid saying to parents that an important event in their child’s development, for example her first steps, happened in the childcare during their absence. These skills are inconspicuous or discreet in the sense that in order to achieve their goals, the means used to do so must not draw the attention of those who benefit from them and must be mobilised without expecting gratitude for it. As a result, care work becomes visible mainly when it fails, when a smile becomes too “forced” or disappears from the nurse’s face, when a gesture is too mechanical, when the response to a request takes too long, when the child comes back from childcare bitten or scratched by another or when the housewife makes the home’s cleanliness a form of domestic tyranny. The invisibility of care work, which is intrinsic to it, and belongs to its very essence, results in a chronic deficit of recognition. As a general rule recognition is difficult to obtain because it has to be granted to work that is actually accomplished (and not to its theoretical presentation in charts, protocols, job descriptions, and so on) and it relies on two separate types of judgement: 1. First the “judgement of beauty” evaluates work by assessing its conformity to the rules of the trade but also its originality, that is, its capacity to find new solutions to the problems encountered. This judgement is delivered by peers, mostly through the symbolic forms of integration within the collective, and through admiration. 2. The “judgement of utility” relates to the social, economic or tech­ nical usefulness of work. It does not evaluate the means used but verifies that the goals have been achieved. It is delivered by those further up the hierarchy, and is materialised in the form of the wage, qualification, promotion and the attribution of more resources. The dynamics of recognition rests upon the collective capacity to make judgements of beauty and utility, with as little contradiction and as much congruence, as possible. This implies that it is possible to regularly discuss the difficulties encountered by the team, in the internal public space of the company or the institution, so that the prescription can be changed in a more realistic way and made more compatible with the demands of the task and more respectful of the meaning that

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the workers attribute to their work.17 As a result, to be recognised for what one does is not an everyday experience. It is the hope to be recognised that plays a fundamental role in the possibility of continuing to work by being involved in what one does and not falling ill. As care work is forced to efface itself as work and cannot be visible, it tends to be undervalued as a way of doing and overvalued as a way of being. Care work is generally identified with womanhood (woman-asgifted-for-the-relational), or with the feminine side in a man. It is perceived as a capacity for self-sacrifice that would be an emanation of the feminine soul and not as a skill acquired through experience. Care work is thus referred to in terms of “moral qualities” that are also “gender qualities” and which can therefore not be codified or rewarded. As Danièle Kergoat has shown, the social definition of a professional competence cannot rest on a list of “individual qualities.”18 We cannot develop this point at length within the scope of this chapter, but the psychodynamics of work can show that for nurses and auxiliary nurses, their inconspicuous, discreet skills are not perceived and represented spontaneously in the terms of competence. For example, the nurses in the operating theatre who are able to present the required instrument before the surgeon even asks for it, thus sparing him the effort of having to think about it himself, first talked about their work as “mindless work, just passing the instruments.” Twisted Vulnerabilities Let us now change perspective and focus on the person benefiting from care. This is not hard for us since we are all in that position at one point or another, whereas we are not necessarily providers of care. Here, there appears a strange and tenacious tendency to want to be “loved” by those who serve us. We would like this part of work to be “given” to us. Even the Papin sisters who killed their employers were in this situation.19 The judge asked them: “Did you like your masters?” 17   See C. Dejours, “Pathologies de la communication,” Raisons Pratiques, Vol. 3, Pouvoir et légitimité, 1992, pp. 177–201. 18   See D. Kergoat, F. Imbert, H. Le Doaré, and D. Sénotier, Les infirmières et leur coordination 1988–1989, Paris, Éditions Lamarre, 1992. 19   The Papin sisters were two maids who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in 1933, in one of France’s most famous criminal cases. A number of artists and intellectuals (Lacan, Sartre, Genet, De Beauvoir) discussed the case in their



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No, they responded, they were serving them, “that’s all.”20 In the article he wrote about them, Jacques Lacan thought he had discovered an anticipation of the tragedy that was to unfold in the coldness that characterised the relationship between the masters who “seem to have strangely lacked human sympathy” and the “haughty indifference of the servants.”21 It was as though the presence of love would make it fine to be served and thus to subordinate; and as though love by itself erased the chore aspects inherent in care work. What one forces the other to endure as a result of one’s own dependence is therefore veiled by the combined effects of inconspicuous skills and the justification of service work by the “love” of the provider towards the beneficiary. The relationships between love and care work are complex. To love can be a way to survive for the care giver. It is often believed that love comes first, and “causes” the involvement in care work, whereas many situations show that the attachment to the persons cared for is only secondary, or even that this attachment creates a psychological situation which makes the constraints even more difficult to endure. An example of this is the immigrant nurses from Southern countries who leave their own children to come and look after children from the North: “in the absence of my own children, the best I could do was to give all my love to this child,” one of them said. Or said another: “I work ten hours a day, I do not know anyone in this area, this child gives me what I need.” All this illustrates how love is naturalised by their female employers in the terms of “the loving and warm temperament of the women from the South.”22 How can we separate care work from the “love” which tends to mask it, to justify it or make it unbearable? The pragmatic knowledge of the nurses and auxiliary nurses, their inconspicuous, discreet skills and their naturalisation under the category of womanhood are not the only causes of the invisibility of their work. The ambiguous status of the writings. In 1963, Louis Le Guillant published an article in Les Temps Modernes (Sartre’s journal), entitled “L’affaire des soeurs Papin” (Nov. 1963, p. 868–913) [Added by the editors]. 20   See L. Le Guillant, “L’affaire des sœurs Papin,” Les Temps Modernes, Vol. 216, 1963, pp. 869–913, p. 894. 21   J. Lacan, “Motives of Paranoid Crime: The Crime of the Papin Sisters,” Critical Texts, No. 3, 1988, pp. 7–11, p. 7. 22   Hochschild, “Le nouvel or du monde.” On the ambiguity of the feelings mobilised by waged domestic work, see also S. Esman, “Faire le travail domestique chez les autres. Transcription de l’instruction au sosie suivi du commentaire,” Travailler, Vol. 8, 2002, pp. 45–72.

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mobilised affectivity on the one hand, and the care relation on the other, constitute another motive of the invisibility of care, or more precisely of the difficulty to account for it publicly. In my fieldwork research, the material is gathered in small groups of a few people who have agreed to talk about the difficulties of their work. A beautiful woman recounts with uneasiness that she has agreed to the request of a sick patient in intensive care who was confined to his bed through tubes and pipes. He had asked her if she could arrange her hair in a way he found suited her more. Is this still care or is it already a transgression, a kind of erotic play? How far can self-sacrifice (don de soi or literally, to give oneself) go before losing oneself? How do the nurses manage not to confuse everything? The erotic dimension of their relationship is not lost on the nurse. This gesture of arranging her hair made her uneasy. If however she did agree to fulfil the patient’s desire, it is not out of love for him, but out of compassion. The nurses often say that the main reason they can sometimes transgress the rules is their conviction that the patients have no one else to look after them. In this particular group of nurses, this story elicits others which once again poses the question of the boundaries that cannot be crossed, even out of compassion. For instance, they tell of an old man who asked to be slipped into a short nightgown of pink lace. The nurses agreed to put it on him, but refused to wash him in it when he also requested this. The knowledge of the nurses can hardly be formulated in the public  sphere because this knowledge about our intimacy reveals not only that vulnerability is the norm, but also that as vulnerable beings we are also twisted beings: the twisted beings that have to be cared for, and those who care for them who are no less twisted themselves. Indeed the title of this chapter could just as well be “twisted vulnerabilities” as “mutual vulnerabilities.” “Mutual vulnerabilities” is only an approximation, partly inaccurate, to indicate that it is more apt to think of the asymmetry characteristic of the care relation as a form of work, “one for the other,” rather than as “one is vulnerable, the other not.” This is because, as the psychodynamic of health work suggests, it is not possible to take into consideration the vulnerability of the other without mobilising one’s own sensitivity, that is, without taking the risk of being destabilised by the twisted expressions of one’s own subjectivity. To relegate intimate bodily care into the category of “dirty work,” tasks performed by the least qualified women, is therefore an easy way



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out for everyone’s peace of mind. Indeed, we can add that the cultural taboo relating to the activities of touching human waste and dead bodies, as well as the discourse of those who accomplish these tasks, tends to opportunely mask the taboo that goes even deeper relating to sexuality and the ambiguities of affectivity. The nurses, and even more so, the auxiliary nurses, cannot describe their work using general representations, even less can they model it through numbers and diagrams. In order to make someone understand what they do, they have to tell a succession of twisted stories where vulnerability is in no way synonymous with “innocence,” “transparency” or “goodness.” This succession of stories which the nurses tirelessly tell each other as soon as the opportunity arises helps them build a common ethic that cannot be separated from a community of sensitivity. What is one to do when one keeps finding two old ladies in the same bed every morning? Can one tolerate that a patient secretly drinks alcohol? A dying patient prefers to smoke rather than eat— should one give him this last pleasure? Or should one give in to his family who refuse to accept the imminence of his death and demand that the auxiliary nurses confiscate his cigarettes and force him to eat? Making oneself pretty, tolerating another’s sexuality (and a twisted one at that), letting someone drink or smoke, authorising illicit pleasures and sometimes authorising them to oneself: what these peers judge collectively is not the transgression itself, according to the norms of (well done) work and the good life, but rather the degree to which the transgression belongs to the sphere of care. What orients public deliberation is not the intimate dimension of pleasure for the person—perhaps the nurse did take some pleasure from the seduction of her raised hair—but rather the highest shared goal of health work, which consists in ensuring that the other suffers the least. Conversely, deliberation is also what enables the nurses and auxiliary nurses to avoid giving in without control to transgression and its ambiguities. Recognition by their peers unfolds in the very exercise of this community of sensitivity, via the mediation of those stories that constitute it and through which the rules of the trade are constantly elaborated. Those rules enable them to adjudicate over what belongs or does not belong to good work. Even though care work at first appears difficult to grasp, it is accessible through narration. Transforming it into a story does not aim for truth or objectivity but it tends to give expression to what cannot be expressed, namely that which resists the dominant symbolic order.

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Can any of this be said publicly? There is a great risk that the attempt to bear witness to the effects of the real upon one’s own subjectivity leads one to become ensnared in the traps of confession, in a situation where the other is judge and censor of a subjectivity that would then be perceived unilaterally as inappropriate or deviant. Most models of care escape this danger because they cheat with reality by not accounting for the sexually incorrect character of the care relation, which is anything but a marginal dimension of it, or by overlooking the disgust and hate that care work sometimes causes towards recipients.23 Politics and Practice, Virility and Femininity The nurses’ movement which emerged in France at the end of the 1980s represented an important shift in the history of this profession. It contributed to legitimacy for the nurses, of the values associated with their work. But their collective power of action did not reach its goal of modifying the perception of the representatives of the state. The encounter between them failed. The representatives of the state, after an initial stage where they were destabilised, eventually managed to reduce this legitimacy and the political scope of the nurses’ movement by reducing it to feminine pathos. A member of the health minister’s department summed up the misunderstanding in the following terms: “It was incredible. These girls from the nurses’ coalition, they would tell you in detail the problems of their everyday life! They were quite moving and touching, but how can you negotiate with a slice of life?” Whilst on the other side: “We realised that the quality of care is not their problem. For them, things have to work without the human side being taken into consideration. They have no clue about what a hospital is really like, our life.”24 It is interesting to note that in the nurses’ discourse, the “quality of care” and the “human” are identified. The definition of care stands at the heart of the misunderstanding. Undoubtedly the nurses’ strategy was not the best one; it is important  to be able to change the mode of enunciation when one shifts from  the practical to the political. However, beyond their failure,   See Cohen, “Histories de naissances et de mort”; P. Molinier, “La haine et l’amour, la boîte noire du féminisme? Une critique de l’éthique du dévouement,” Nouvelles Questions Féministes, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2004. pp. 12–25. 24   The quotes are from Kergoat, Imbert, Le Doaré, and Sénotier, Les infirmières et leur coordination 1988–1989, pp. 107–108. 23



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if we want to find a mode of expression more appropriate to the political expression of care, a necessary condition is to understand the obstacles to the understanding between the politicians and the nurses (and more broadly the care providers). Amongst these obstacles, some are defensive. Indeed what the two quotes above demonstrate is that the nurses and the state (through its representatives) not only expressed themselves on different levels, but also in different registers, the virile and the feminine respectively, which made them unable to hear each other. By feminine and virile, I mean defensive positions that have nothing to do with the “essence” of men or women, but have everything to do with the arbitrariness of the social and sexual division of labour.25 This arbitrariness creates different experiences leading to forms of subjectivation that are not only very distinct, but also antagonistic. There is a conflict of interest between collective defence strategies that are elaborated to support the suffering caused by care work, on the one hand, and the collective defence strategies of politicians, managers and doctors who are mainly male. What does this refer to? Research in the psychodynamics of work has shown that the involvement of workers is mostly dependent on the symbolic resonance that can exist between work and the inner space inherited from childhood, that is, on the possibility of using what they do to develop a sense of self and overcome the suffering inherent in their psychological development. Suffering therefore predates entrance into the world of work. Suffering is an experience that cannot be separated from embodiment—no suffering without body—and that can never be fully represented. As a result, subjective suffering is always awaiting its meaning, both to allow the subject to perform a reflexive return to its being in the world, and to 25   The thesis of a simultaneous construction of gender identities and the sexual division of labour can be found in a number of authors. Lisa Adkins, “Mobile Desire: Aesthetics, Sexuality and the ‘Lesbian’ at Work,” Sexualities, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2000, pp. 201–218 in particular, following Judith Butler, insists on the mobile, or even “flexible” (in the neo-liberal sense) characteristics of gender identities produced by service activities, especially in commercial activities. In contrast, my own research leads me to emphasise rather the contribution of work to the parts of gender identities and the sexual division of labour that are the most fixed and the least susceptible to change, inasmuch as these parts resist change because of their defensive function. Although I cannot develop this point further here, men (who are in the minority in a female collective) can take on “feminine” defence strategies, and women virile defence strategies. For example, women doing male work (in the social sense) are not necessarily different from men. They can well be, however, when expectations and injunctions addressed to them are different.

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direct the latter towards action on the world. This is the point where the subject encounters work: for better, when work is such that it creates something; but also for worse, when work is an obstacle to selffulfilment, when it borders on the absurd or confronts the subject with major psychological threats like fear. People do not all fall ill in such deleterious but very ordinary circumstances, because they are able to develop defence mechanisms between health and sickness. Our research has shown that certain ways of talking, certain behaviours and attitudes than can seem aberrant or irrational in the face of “classical” forms of rationality, become highly intelligible from the point of view of the function they fulfil in allowing self-preservation—what could be called their pathic rationality. In contrast to what psychoanalysis teaches about individual defence mechanisms, it appears that these odd forms of behaviour belong in fact to systems that are constructed collectively. In other words, there exist ordinary forms of cooperation whose main purpose is a defensive one, namely to prevent subjects from thinking about what makes them suffer at work.26 Precisely speaking, in work situations that are dangerous for physical integrity (the building industry for example) or for psychic integrity (in particular when one has to assume responsibility for the lives of others, or accomplish a task that conflicts with one’s moral sense), work collectives mostly composed of men defend themselves against fear and/or moral suffering by constructing collective defence strategies centred on: The denial of men’s vulnerability—a real man has no fear/has no feelings. The disregard for the vulnerability of others.27 In other words, all those who demonstrate vulnerability, whatever their biological sex, are excluded from the category of real men. Whereas from the perspective of care there can only be one model of the human being—homo vulnerabilis—the virile defence ideology constantly reiterates a bipartite division of human beings which opposes them and hierarchically ranks them: man/woman, strong/ weak, autonomous/dependent, reason/unreason. Such an ideological construct creates a dominant system of thought we can only escape with great difficulty.   See Dejours, “Pathologies de la communication.”   See C. Dejours, Souffrance en France. La banalisation de l’injustice sociale, Paris, Seuil, 1998. 26 27



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If the nurses and auxiliary nurses (female or male), as in the virile model, denied their own vulnerability and devalued that of the patients, they would not be able to accomplish the work of care. Instead, care providers attempt to work through the suffering caused by care work amongst them. This suffering therefore cannot be reduced to a mechanism such as “patient suffering = carer’s compassion.” The angst generated by the other’s suffering, or, under a more elaborate form, the compassionate identification, fail in a number of ways. The experience of such failures of compassion—to realise that one can no longer stand the patient, that one hates his/her dependence, that one in fact wishes him or her to disappear, to discover one’s own indifference or cruelty— all of this is just as painful and disturbing as the experience of compassion. The most painful situations are sometimes those where the psyche of the care worker becomes like an internal threat to her and undermines the meaning of work and its established identity features; work is “Nothing to brag about.” We will come back to that point. If nurses and auxiliary nurses simply complained or described their “naked” reality, as for instance in an objective witness account, the expression of their lived experiences would be unbearable for their interlocutors and for themselves. In that case, there would be no transmission, no deliberation, no construction of a common ethic and a common sensibility. This shows the added dimension of the pathetic narratives quoted above: namely, their defensive function. In order to make the evocation of this experience bearable, one has to distance oneself from it, to alleviate its ability to create angst. This unburdening  and detachment is made possible through the use of humour. The pathetic narratives of nurses are in fact tragi-comic narratives. The defensive dimension of this collective story-telling lies precisely in the fact that nothing can be said that, in the end, one would not be able to laugh about, even if one cries at the same time. But there is more. Humour in this situation must serve the capacity to support one’s own vulnerability, which is in itself indispensable for care work. Against that, it would be much more economical from the psychological point of view to harden oneself, to cut oneself off, affectively, from the other’s distress. Indeed such a hardening is highly encouraged by the concentration that is required of technical work (pricking, probing, cutting flesh, and so on).28 28   There is a conflict between the types of subjectivity that are mobilised in the cure and in care. The learning of a technical skill implies that one goes through phases

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pascale molinier Self-mockery as a Way of Dealing with Defeat

Since what is targeted is truly the maintenance of personal ­vulnerability—with its corollary, unavoidable failures of subjective constructs, which cannot be boasted about—one understands why the nurses’ collective defence strategies mobilise a particular form of humour, namely self-deprecating mockery. They mock themselves,  “poor women,” as others are being mocked for their own weaknesses. Through this medium of mockery combined with selfmockery, an entire suffering humanity is incarnated: the humanity of sweating, snoring, limping, fearfully teeth-chattering, individuals. Eventually, this constitutes a whole universe of common references where vulnerability and its diverse expressions are, if not necessarily always pleasant, at least sayable, as the very basis of any ethical demand. The stories told by nurses and auxiliary nurses could scare anyone. For instance, one nurse recounts the day when she cleaned a dead body for the first time. As she started to panic, she unwittingly locked the door through which she had attempted to flee, thereby locking herself in with the dead body. Another nurse recounts the day when she was looking for her broom and discovered a patient hanging in an old attic full of aged equipment; she ran through the mess, knocking over old drip-stands and urinals in a hellish racket. A further nurse recounted herself walking backwards towards an open window as a huge man came near her screaming insults and death threats. The man had been rung earlier that day to collect his wife, a temporary contract worker in charge of the cleaning, who had suffered a nervous breakdown upon arriving at work that morning. In telling these stories the nurses stage themselves in episodes where they were facing an event that temporarily terrified and paralysed them, to the extent that they lost their “selfcontrol” and made themselves utterly ridiculous. By contrast with the typical stories told by interns, the stories of the nurses do not give centre stage to obscenity or sexual references. Fear and vulnerability are of trial and error where, as in the case of the interns described by Margaret Cohen, it is difficult not to feel persecuted by the patients or not to instrumentalise them by “forgetting” that one is making them suffer. In order to fully unfold, sensibility to the suffering of the other requires that the individual has undergone a number of phases of learning and has become sufficiently expert to be able to distance himself/herself from the technical act. Only in that case can care complement the cure. Moreover, a patient who is confident and as relaxed as is possible in the circumstances is much easier to handle.



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not denied. On the contrary they are relived and domesticated through well-crafted stories, many times recounted and embellished throughout a career. These stories attempt to circumscribe the irruption of the real—defined as what resists mastery through conventional means— not in order to push it outside of shared representations, but rather to control its effects on the psyche. These stories help transmit and reiterate a culture of the craft/trade (métier) which is nothing but a way of living (art de vivre) with defeat. This specific ethos of the nurses’ craft is all about acknowledging the limits of all things, starting with one’s own limits, in the face of death, madness, the waste produced by human bodies, sexuality, and so on. It is also about accepting the failures of embodiment, first and foremost of one’s own, notably in the failures of one’s body, for example when the nurse feels her blood curdling, her legs become weaker, disgust, uncontrollable giggles, excitement, and so on. All of this shows that even though self-mockery coupled with mockery enables the nurses to take a certain measure of distance and detachment, the latter is anything but indifference. Rather, such detachment enables the acceptance and elaboration of vulnerability. However, the self-mockery that makes the experiences of care sayable within the collective of peers also makes it unacceptable outside this narrow circle (outside recognition by the peers). The experiences of nurses and auxiliary nurses in its authentic expression cannot be accepted from the vantage point of the dominant (virile) position—a subjective position which prohibits individuals from laughing at their own weakness or from expressing any tenderness towards the twisted individuals that we all are. These stories which constitute in fact a narrative of the experience of care are perceived as “slices of life,” as anecdotal and not quite “serious,” and paradoxically can even be taken to represent a lack of respect towards the patients. The very health of the staff providing care appears improper. How can you laugh about it? The Contingency of Care “Nursing is by essence the work of women,” wrote Désirée Magloire Bourneville, who as leader of the reformist doctors at the end of the nineteenth century was the main proponent of the introduction of nurses into the public hospitals of Paris.29 The nurse was considered  In Le Progrès médical, Vol.7, 1878, p. 388.

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at the time the main vector for the humanisation of care. The candidate was to be young because that would ensure she would be “docile” and “malleable” so she could be “educated according to her own nature” (as a woman), and become an assistant that was “tender and dedicated” towards the patients. However, the rationalisation of “scientific charity” through the division of labour constantly increased during the first half of the twentieth century. Services are organised according to pathologies, the organs to be cured, the different ages of life. Health work becomes more and more fragmented: the distribution of “basins” (urinals) and thermometers is assembly-line like, and so on. What is asked of the nurses is only their obedience (they are considered solely as operational staff with no power of decision) and their composure in the face of suffering and death—not their capacities for compassion. In the 1970s, a new wave of the “humanisation of the hospital” emerges, denouncing this organisation of work and the reification of patients designated by their room number, the name of their pathology, or even their sick organ.30 Common rooms are abolished, psychiatric hospitals and nursing homes are reformed, and new types of organisation are invented, like the sectors, day hospitals, long stay, palliative care, child-mother hospitalisation, and so on. New nursing schools teach a new conception of the nurse, inspired by the AngloSaxon tradition of clinician nurses, which rests on a more holistic conception of the person. New tools and practices are introduced.31 A new profession is invented: the auxiliary nurse. Their presence, especially for the patients in long stay, brings an undeniable improvement of living conditions. On all these levels, progress is undeniable, but it is fragile. Today, political choices concerning the restructuring of hospitals are made according to management and accounting principles. In particular, the main exercise consists of counting what treatments of pathologies are cost-effective, or not based on a conception of the treatment that is entirely aligned with productivist models. The main proponent of this kind of hospital management in France writes: It is wrong to oppose quality and quantitative evaluation. Agreed, not everything can be measured easily, but companies in the industrial sector have established quantitative measurements for the satisfaction of their clients, rates of faults in the manufacture of electronic components,   See M. Abiven, Humaniser l’hospital, Paris, Fayard, 1976.   See B. Walter, Le savoir infirmier. Construction, évolution, révolution de la pensée infirmière, Lamarre-Poinat, 1988. 30 31



care as work269 rates of error in payroll or invoicing systems. Quality can also be measured. This is exactly what the “zero default” in quality circles aims for…32

In the hospital’s case, quality indicators are rates of falls, number of iatrogenic infections, and so on—care is never mentioned. Quality means something different from the perspective of management principles than it does for nurses and auxiliary nurses. In the perspective of management, care is reduced to the mention of “basic human gestures,” to quote an expression from the press during the 2003 heatwave. The term “basic” signifies not only that the complexity of care is trivialised, but also that care and the “human” could be handed over to volunteers. Care is not rooted in human nature. It is not triggered automatically by contact with the helplessness and dependence of others. Care is produced by a collective effort, a culture of caring for others, which is contingent and can disappear. As the organisation of work no longer makes satisfactory solutions possible, new collective defence strategies have been identified in a number of auxiliary nurse collectives. These new strategies make the nurses sort out the patients between those who are deemed to “deserve” to be treated as full persons (mainly those who cooperate and show gratitude) and those who are to be treated as sub-members of the human species, or even as things, because they slow down work and make it harder without showing any gratitude: typically, senile patients who have “lost their heads,” drug addicts, alcoholics who “only get what they deserve,” or women the day after a suicide attempt who “are just acting.” There is only a small step from care to instituted maltreatment. Tomorrow, a hospital without care is possible. Contemporary reflection on care is rich and full of promises. However, it will only fulfil this promise if it takes into consideration the material and psychological dimensions of care work. This requires interdisciplinary work between philosophers, sociologists and psychologists. Otherwise there is a danger that an abstract, top-down perspective will be taken which will pass moral judgement on practices and the individuals who perform them and deem them deviant. These individuals will find it all the more difficult to make themselves heard as they are at the bottom of the social ladder. In that case, care would

  J. Kervasdoué, L’hôpital, Paris, PUF, 2004, p. 109.

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become the good conscience of the elites. The main tasks for this interdisciplinary reflection would therefore be the following: to account for the tensions, twists and contradictions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity; to acknowledge the impact of the organisation of work on the capacity to provide respectful handling of patients; to analyse the “cursed share” of dirty work in care work—and most importantly, not to dissociate the two; to account for the complexity of care work on a psychological level; to uncover the forms of virility in expert discourses; and to identify the blind spot of work in political analysis, especially of female work.33 Translated from the French by Jean-Philippe Deranty and Nicholas H. Smith.

33  This essay was first published in French as “Le care à l’épreuve du travail. Vulnérabilités croisées et savoir-faire discrets,” in eds. Patricia Paperman and Sandra Laugier, Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care, Paris, Editions de l’EHESS, 2006, pp. 299–316.

PART FOUR

WORK, RECOGNITION AND THE CHANGING FACE OF CAPITALISM

Chapter ten

Admiration without appreciation? The paradoxes of recognition of doubly subjectivised work1 Stephan Voswinkel The self-understanding of bourgeois society is characterised by the fact that it is mainly work which provides the criteria for the social recognition of subjects. This emphasis on work distinguishes bourgeois society from other forms of social life, in which—as Thorstein Veblen had already shown—it was precisely “conspicuous leisure” which grounded social prestige, whilst work was seen as degrading.2 Such an attitude towards work was a feature both of Antiquity, with its belief that work contradicts the freedom of the citizen, and the Catholic Middle-ages, which saw work as a punishment for the fall from grace. As Weber has shown, the work ethic which arose with the developing bourgeois society came to prominence through the cultural impact of Protestantism; more particularly via a secularised version of Luther’s theory of vocation, as well as the teaching of Calvin and Puritanism. Success in professional work was a sign of divine election.3 After the demise of religious worldviews, this work ethic is maintained through the iron cage of the market. However, this notion of recognition through work is very general and undetermined from two points of view. First, it must be specified which work and what in work is the object of recognition. And secondly, one must specify what type of recognition is provided by work.

1   Special recognition is due to Ursula Holtgrewe for her part in developing many aspects of this concept and the reflections in this essay. The essay was first published in German in Axel Honneth ed., Befreiung aus der Mündigkeit, Frankfurt/M., Campus, 2002, pp. 65–92. 2   See T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York, MacMillan, 1899. 3  See M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York, Scribner, 1958 [1920].

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stephan voswinkel 1.  Recognition through which Type of Work?

If we look more closely, we realise that even in bourgeois society (and this was already the case in Protestantism, as Weber saw) it is not work strictly speaking which provides recognition, but rather success in one’s profession (Beruf), the wealth (Reichtum) secured through work, and one’s position (Position) in the market or the organisation. But in the “achievement society,” (Leistungsgesellschaft) success, wealth and social position must not (just) be obtained through inheritance, luck or theft, but rather through work. At the same time though, recognition does not arise from “hard work,” the type of work that is simple, exerting and dirty. Michael Walzer describes this type of work in the following terms: “This kind of work is a negative good, and it commonly carries other negative goods in its train: poverty, insecurity, illhealth, physical danger, dishonour and degradation.”4 The claim of bourgeois society to confer recognition and prestige in proportion to work has therefore always had a split meaning. Indeed, the question of which type of work is worthy of recognition, and which “performance” or achievement (Leistung) is recognised in what measure, has been and still is a matter of social negotiation and definition. For this reason work and performance separate two values of recognition. This can be defined as a paradox of—or put more carefully a tension within—work-based recognition. And it is this tension which time and again has led to struggles for the recognition of work, in line with changes in working cultures, as well as forms of institutionalisation and normative structuring of work and performance/achievement­, and the legal regulation of work. In these confrontations society also deals with the fundamental problems of legitimation that are linked to this split recognition. The thesis that this chapter defends is that contemporary transformations in the world of work lead to renewed confrontations around the definition of recognition-worthy work and performance. What is at stake here is a new definition of the type of recognition that particular types of work receive. This leads us to the second important qualification that needs to be made if we want to address the recognition of work.

  M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1983, p. 165.

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admiration without appreciation?275 2.  Which Recognition of Work?

At this stage a few reflections on the concept of recognition are needed. Recognition can first be regarded as the medium of social integration, through which social norms and values get transported into the identities of subjects. Following a long social-theoretical and socialpsychological tradition, recognition is the condition of identity formation. Adam Smith first emphasised the link between external evaluation and self-evaluation,5 then George Herbert Mead took the dialectical reciprocal mechanism of “taking the perspective of the other” as fundamental for the social identity of the “me” and the creative response of the ego-identity of the “I.”6 Cognitive and normative evaluative dimensions are here tightly interwoven. Not only do I develop what and who I am in the confrontation with the gaze of the other, but also how I evaluate myself is determined in the confrontation I have with others’ evaluations of me.7 The relationship between social and ego-identity is therefore conceived by Mead as a “dynamic, dialectical one.”8 The “I” can only arise by orienting itself to others, on the basis of the “me,” but it also transforms this orientation by responding to normative expectations in a specific way, by adapting or contravening them.9 The “I” then becomes a moment of social transformation when it demands social recognition of its specificity and thereby attempts to change the expectations which bring recognition when one meets them. However, the idiosyncratic character of the “I” should not be conceived solely as metaphysical creativity, as a sign of the uniqueness of 5   See A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1795]. 6   See G. H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1934. 7  See especially U. Holtgrewe, S. Voswinkel and G. Wagner, “Für eine Anerkennungssoziologie der Arbeit. Einleitende Überlegungen,” in U. Holtgrewe, S. Voswinkel and G. Wagner, Anerkennung und Arbeit, Konstanz, 2000, pp. 9–26; U. Holtgrewe, “Anerkennung und Arbeit in der Dienst-Leisungs-Gesellschaft. Eine identitätstheoretische Perspektive,” in eds. M. Moldaschl and G. G. Voß, Subjektivierung von Arbeit, München/Mering, 2002, pp. 195–218; S. Voswinkel, Anerkennung und Reputation. Die Dramaturgie industrieller Beziehungen, Konstanz, 2001, p. 69; G. Wagner, Anerkennung und Individualisierung, University of Bielefeld Dissertation, 2001, Chapter II. 8   L. Stanko, “Arbeit und Identität,” in eds. D. Kahsnitz, G. Ropohl and A. Schmid, Handbuch zur Arbeitslehre, München/Wien, 1997, p. 71. 9  Wagner, Anerkennung und Individualisierung, p. 76.

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the individual, but also in its turn as being in a sense a functional requirement of social interaction and of the capacity of subjects to be identified and made accountable. If the individual did not take over socially defined behavioural requirements, there could be no convergence of expectations nor a common horizon of understanding. But if the individual did not transform these expectations in a way that allowed for the development of a consistent ego-identity, then there would be no subject to identify and hold responsible, which is a condition of social interactions. This is all the more true for social rela­ tions  in which the subject is exposed to different expectations from different ‘others’ in changing situations and varied social contexts; in other words in situations in which the subject has different “mes.”10 Krappmann has therefore characterised successful identity-formation in modern conditions as “balancing identity,” in the sense that identity involves a balance between the acceptance of expectations from others and the simultaneous rejection of them as a result of the individuality of the subject.11 But the concepts of “balancing identity” and “dialectic of me and I” themselves already involve the idea of a successful unification of the diverging demands that stem from the recognition of others, on the one hand, and self-formation on the other. This process of unification can, however, also fail. Accordingly, one could diagnose pathological cases in which a subject obsessively “striving for recognition” can only conform to the (changing) expectations of others—like the ‘Riesmanian’ character driven from the outside12—or alternatively cases in which the subject only follows its own spontaneous impulses in autistic fashion, or constructs his self-recognition by reference to imaginary relationships, to posterity or higher beings. Consequently it makes sense to emphasise the twofold character of recognition and to distinguish between an aspect of limitation or boundary-drawing on the one hand, and an aspect of “making possible” on the other. Since it is a condition of identity formation, recognition places limits on it, by keeping identity tied to the fulfilment of social expectations. But recognition also makes identity formation 10   See Voswinkel, Anerkennung und Reputation, p. 72; Wagner, Anerkennung und Individualisierung, p. 77. 11   L. Krappmann, Soziologische Dimensionen der Identität, Stuttgart, 1969, p. 79. 12   See D. Riesman, R. Denney and N. Glazer, The Lonely Crowd, Yale University Press, 2001 [1950].



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possible since identity cannot be thought without recognition. “Making possible” then means two separate things: recognition as a condition of identity on the one hand; and even creative identities must constitute themselves in social terms inasmuch as they strive for recognition. The distinctive relationship between these two dimensions of recognition results from the self-formative process of the subject. This relationship is however also a characteristic feature of social relations of recognition, in other words of culturally stabilised and often institutionalised forms of social evaluation, that are to be granted to individuals, collectives, values and ways of life. A culture of individualisation is characterised by the fact that individual particularity is itself a reference point for social recognition and is thus normatively expected.13 Another fundamental twofold aspect of recognition concerns its relational versus competitive dimensions. Recognition relates first of all to shared values. It is granted for the fulfilment of expectations resulting from an “intersubjectively shared horizon of value” and thereby has a social-moral content.14 On the other hand, recognition is also given to the capacity to assert oneself, to make things happen, for the latter is a condition of identity. Recognition therefore refers not just to morality but also to power.15 The link to morality characterises the 13  See A. Honneth, “Organisierte Selbstverwirklichung. Paradoxien der Indi­ vidualisierung,” in ed. A. Honneth, Befreiung aus der Mündigkeit, Frankfurt/MNew York, Campus-Verlag, 2002, pp. 141–158. 14   A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, trans. J. Anderson, Cambridge, Polity, 1995. 15   “Power” is used here in a general sense, for instance in the sense given by Giddens, that is, without a priori negative connotations, as the “transformative capacity of human actions.” A. Giddens, “ ‘Macht’ in den Schriften von Talcott Parsons” in ed. P. Imbusch, Macht und Herrshaft. Sozialwissenschaftliche Konzeptionen und Theorien, Opladen, 1998, pp. 131–147, p.145. The twofold referential link of recognition can first be grounded in a functional way: it is not just that social integration is served by moral, normatively adequate action that makes a social contribution; equally, efficient action must be stimulated so that the capacity for action and the reliability of agents is recognised and with it the success of collective action. But the double character of recognition can also be grounded historically and empirically: recognition linked to status and criteria of social evaluation such as fame and birth in “estate” societies is not at all moral in nature, but relates rather to force and victory. (S. Neckel and J. Wolf, “Die Faszination der Amoralität. Zur Systemtheorie der Moral, mit Seitenblicken auf ihre Resonanzen,” Prokla, Vol. 70, No. 18, 1988, pp. 57–77, p. 63). And finally, from a theoretical perspective we should enlarge the dual relation of recognition with more agents. The way in which Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit outlines the recognitive relation means that the devaluation of the slave by the master leads to the paradoxical result that the recognition of the master by the slave loses its significance for the master himself. In that case, however, the master can receive recognition from a third or fourth party, and precisely for his superiority over the slave. (See T. Todorov, Abenteuer

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relational side of recognition, the link to power the competitive, differenti­ating side. Against the background of this twofold character of recognition, two modalities of recognition can be distinguished: 1) First, a recognition which rests on belonging, to a group or a community of value. This recognition functions as a kind of “payment in return” (Gegenleistung) in relations of social reciprocity and expresses appreciation for the contribution of the subject. This type of recognition has a strong link to the community and confirms the binding elements of the performance (Leistung). It is close to the “gratitude” which Simmel characterised as the “moral memory of humanity,” as emotional reciprocity, the to and fro of service rendered and service in return (Leistung und Gegenleistung). I call this modality of recognition appreciation (Würdigung). A specific nuance in such a model of recognition is when recognition relates to a contribution which is understood as sacrifice (of something or indeed of oneself). 2) A second type of recognition must be distinguished from the first, namely recognition which emphasises difference. This is the recognition granted to singularity, great achievements, impressive success, superiority, originality. This recognition does not presuppose proximity, indeed it often involves distance, or in some cases a proximity of fascination through distance, like the fan may feel towards the star. We can call this modality of recognition admiration. Admiration corresponds to prestige, high rank, or success on the market and is therefore a vertical form of recognition: from bottom to top.16 An important difference between the two modalities of recognition consists in the fact that appreciation is more morally grounded. This makes for both its strength and its weakness compared with admiration. Appreciation can be morally demanded more so than admiration (it is more readily the object of a valid moral claim than is success), but appreciation also relies on corresponding moral worlds of norms des Zusammenlebens. Versuch einer allgemeinen Anthropologie, Berlin, 1996, p. 36). In a similar way, Popitz grounds recognition in the essential reciprocal recognition of the powerful, a mutual recognition which grants them authority even in the eyes of the subordinated. H. Popitz, Phänomene der Macht, Tübingen, 2nd edition, 1992, p. 198). 16   Here we could distinguish further between admiration granted to superiority (vertical) as opposed to recognition granted to singularity (more horizontal).



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(whereas success generates its own charisma, appreciation must be based on a moral duty).17 Since in modern societies one cannot rely on morality on its own, appreciation is often secured through law and is fixed in rituals. Appreciation provides an alternative form of prestige, it grants recognition to agents with little power, success or prestige. As a result, however, it also contains an ambivalence: appreciation can potentially express contempt as well as recognition. When it is enshrined in law and through ritual, it counteracts the weakness arising from a mere moral foundation and it spares subjects of having to ask for it, but it loses its emotional-moral content and can become a mere form without substance. Even if it is morally legitimate, appreciation must still be acquired by way of power, for the very definition of what counts as a contribution or as sacrifice is the result of social struggle.18 Social relations of recognition are also characterised by their given combination of admiration and appreciation. And the thesis to be defended in this chapter is that changes in the social relations of recognition can be understood precisely as a re-combination of the recognition modes of admiration and appreciation. 3.  Recognition Relations in Taylorism We can now return to the question of how bourgeois society deals with the tensions inherent in recognition based on work and the legitimation problems linked to it. Recognition must be based on work but only some types of work find recognition. Work must be the precondition for recognition, but it is precisely work which differentiates the amount of recognition an individual receives. A first step for dealing with this problem consists in linking the life situation (that is, social security and one’s general status as a normal citizen) to normal work relationships. Robert Castel argues that the status of work represents the modern equivalent to forms of social security that were traditionally ensured by property.19 However, given the extent to which wage

 In this case—and in this case only—can sacrifices be a morally grounded resource. 18  For a full delineation of “admiration” versus “appreciation,” see Voswinkel, Anerkennung und Reputation, section B. 19   See R. Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage labourers. Transformation of the Social Question, trans. R. Boyd, New Brunswick NJ, Transaction, 2003 [1995]. 17

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labour is generalised, the status attached to it loses its capacity to ground distinction and prestige. From now on, social status results from the relative position taken in wage labour.20 The ambivalence of recognition based on work is reproduced in this way. Another way of dealing with this ambivalence relates back to the different modalities of recognition and combines admiration and appreciation in a specific way. Admiration then goes to work which brings high prestige, which is valued as a special achievement (Leistung) and is expressed in economic and professional success. This recognition presupposes a common horizon of valuation, but it does not relate to belonging to a community and does not rest in the first instance on moral norms. This form of recognition is not accessible to types of work that are considered simple, laborious, dirty or invisible, especially those that do not count as waged work at all. For these types of work there remains the modality of appreciation, as the recognition of efforts, exertions, perhaps even of sacrifice. In the case of appreciation the normal performance is also recognised, the work of those who “do their duty,” without thereby aiming for success. The failure to have this moral expectation for appreciation met is what employees particularly express—as Hermann Kotthoff21 has shown in particularly striking fashion, after Gouldner22—when the company fails to treat them with consideration in difficult situations or with sufficient patience when mistakes are made; when they are devalued if their performance diminishes as they become older; when their knowledge based on experience is not recognised; or when in difficult economic situations they are treated as mere labour power and are retrenched without regret or securing their future. Appreciation, as a moral form of recognition based on reciprocal interaction, usually presupposes communality and belonging. In German work relations, it was mainly the company which ensured this belonging. This form of appreciation undoubtedly often possessed a vertical aspect in the sense of the “care” (Fürsorge) that was particularly rife in patriarchal social orders. It is precisely the reason why institutionalisations of appreciation through work committees (Betriebsräte)  See ibid., p. 284.   See H. Kotthoff, “Anerkennung und sozialer Austausch. Die soziale Konstruktion von Betriebsbürgerschaft,” in eds. Holtgrewe, Voswinkel and Wagner, Anerkennung und Arbeit, 2000, pp. 27–36. 22   See A. Gouldner, Wildcat Strike, New York, Antioch, 1954. 20 21



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and trade unions were so important as they made it possible to establish forms of appreciation without this sense of assistance. They established true relations of recognition instead of patriarchal company communities (Betriebsgemeinschaft), which Kotthoff named “company citizenship” (Betriebsbürgerschaft).23 And it seems plausible that with such institutions a basis and an arena of recognition were created in which wide-ranging demands of self-realisation and self-­determination could be developed by the employees and their representatives. On the other hand however this form of recognition under Taylorian conditions was also—or even, “just”—the other side of the devaluation of Taylorised work, its depreciation in terms of prestige, and the contempt towards workers in the work processes, their reduction and objectification to the status of operatives in an optimised functional system. We know that subjectivity, in the actual practice of the Taylorian system, was in no way eliminated, indeed was often the condition for the actual functioning of the work systems. But subjectivity played that role only “tacitly,” not really as being recognised, or indeed only as tacitly recognised.24 Subjectivity lived in the “hidden situations” of companies, as Konrad Thomas25 said, or, as Volmerg, Senghaas-Knobloch and Leithäuser put it, in the “lifeworld of the company,”26 that is, in the informal handing out of reciprocal consideration between foreman and worker, but also in the creative and playful attempts at putting the work situation in a new light. On the one hand, such recognition was iron-clad in rituals of appreciation: for instance in twenty-fifth anniversaries of employment and company vacations. On the other hand, it was consolidated by regulations such as work rights, by social policies at the level of the company and the State that transformed the claim to appreciation into a rights claim, a claim that ensured that the dimension of (selective) care was no longer present; a dimension, which even though it might have been a “guarantee” of recognition, would have still entrenched the power and authority of the company. Examples 23   See H. Kotthoff, Betriebsräte und Bürgerstatus, Wandel und Kontinuität betrieblicher Mitbestimmung, München/Mering, 1994. 24   See H. Kocyba, “Der Preis der Anerkennung: Von der tayloristischen Missachtung zur strategischen Instrumentalisierung der Subjektivität der Arbeitenden,” in eds. Holtgrewe, Voswinkel and Wagner, Anerkennung und Arbeit, 2000, pp. 127–140, p. 128. 25   See K. Thomas, Die betriebliche Situation der Arbeiter, Stuttgart, 1964. 26   See B. Volmerg, E. Senghaas-Knobloch and T. Leithäuser, Betriebliche Lebenswelt. Eine Sozialpsychologie industrieller Arbeitsverhältnisse, Opladen, 1986.

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of such regulations are: sick leave provisions and certain rights, insurances and company bonuses linked to seniority. Such rituals and regulations were thus secured collectively, without the deep logic of contempt (Missachtungslogik) of Taylorism being undermined by them. Domestic and family work—if I may be allowed this shift of focus that is unusual in mainstream sociology of work—followed a similar pattern. This type of work does not receive any recognition as admiration either: it is rather appreciated as a form of fulfilment of duty. Gabriele Wagner has emphasised the gender dimension in recognitive relations of work and has characterised it aptly as a form of recognition based on “harmonious inequality.”27 This aspect is well captured in the image of the mother who is excluded from public life and may expect admiration through the career of her husband, but appreciation as a mother “happy to sacrifice herself,” who might claim this appreciation in the rituals of “Mother’s day.” In this particular case, there was, other than industrial work, no possibility to counteract the patriarchal logic of appreciation through institutionalisations and regulations of recognition. Both fields of appreciation—Taylorian work and domestic and family work—corresponded to the duty ethic of work, which manifests precisely the sacrifice aspect of work granting a right to a claim of appreciation. The Taylorian form of recognition can therefore be delineated in three categories: it misrecognised work and workers through the objectification of work processes, the “reduction of working individuals to beings akin to machines,”28 and in such a context the recognition of subjectivity was only possible tacitly. Such non-recognition of work was to some extent compensated by appreciation for contribution to the common creation of value, although this appreciation took patriarchal forms (as in the case of care), or more cooperative or more legalised forms (such as company citizenship). This mode of recognition as appreciation rested on the duty ethic of work, in which work was defined as a burden rather than as self-realisation, and the “honour of work” was linked precisely to supporting this burden.  Wagner, Anerkennung und Individualisierung, p. 185.  E. Senghaas-Knobloch and B. Nagler, “Von der Arbeitskraft zur Berufsrolle? Anerkennung als Herausforderung für die industrielle Arbeitskultur im Rahmen neuer Organisations- und Managementkonzepte,” in eds. Holtgrewe, Voswinkel and Wagner, Anerkennung und Arbeit, 2000, pp. 101–126, p. 110. 27 28



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4.  Transformations of Recognition Relations in Post-Taylorism and the Subjectivisation of Work I would now like to show the extent to which the transformation from Taylorism to post-Taylorism (however one characterises it) represents a crisis of the recognition relations characteristic of the former. The recognition of work becomes socially negotiated in new forms and debated with new terms of reference. This is in no way a linear or predetermined process. The concept of “post-Taylorism” used here is purposely vague. It points to a number of transformations that can only be summarily outlined here: – The transformation of company structures with the aim of a decentralisation and marketisation of decisions changes the constraints and frames of action and modifies simultaneously the action orientations.29 –  This goes together with the increased value put on short-term measures of success, a short-term economy and short-term bonds. This is encapsulated in the concept and the corporate model of “shareholder-value.”30 –  Decentralisation of businesses and short-term economy are accompanied by the erosion of long-term bonds between businesses and employees as well as the diminished opportunity for career paths.31 – The emergence of a new type of manager,32 who “not being bound to the firm and the company and mainly oriented to short-term changes of position, is mainly interested in individual success that

29  See M. Moldasch and D. Sauer, “Internalisierung des Marktes—Zur neuen Dialektik von Kooperation und Herrschaft,” in ed. H. Minssen, Begrenzte Entgrenzungen, Berlin, 2000, pp. 205–224; G. Bender, Lohnarbeit zwischen Autonomie und Zwang, Frankfurt am Main/New York, 1997. 30   See M. Schumann, “Frißt die Shareholder-Value-Ökonomie die Modernisierung der Arbeit?,” in eds. H. Hirsch-Kreinsen and H. Wolf, Arbeit, Gesellschaft, Kritik, Berlin, 1998, pp. 19–30; R. Springer, Rückkehr zum Taylorismus? Arbeitspolitik in der Automobilindustrie am Scheideweg, Frankfurt am Main/New York, 1999. 31   See M. Faust, P. Jauch and P. Notz, Befreit und entwurzelt: Führungskräfte auf dem Weg zum “internen Unternehmer,” München/Mering, 2000; U. Heisig and W. Littek, “Wandel von Vertrauensbeziehungen im Arbeitsprozeß,” Soziale Welt, Vol. 46, No. 3, 1995, pp. 282–304. 32   See K. Inkson, A. Heising and D. M. Rousseau, “The Interim Manager: Prototype of the 21st-Century Worker?,” Human Relations, Vol. 54. No. 3, 2001, pp. 259–284.

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can be quickly demonstrated.”33 This is accompanied by the “demise of the old corporate culture.”34 – The shift away from the model of Taylorism is especially evident in the new valuation of the self-organisation of employees. Processes are replaced by objectives, which means that it is left to the employees—or expected of them—to determine through which form of work and organisation they will reach these targets. Related to this is a reappraisal of “human capital” as a reserve of productivity. Flexibility and creativity are demanded, together with identification with the objectives of the company or the department, which are often defined in narrow market-terms.35 The last point in particular is covered by the term “subjectivisation of work.” This is a multi-dimensional concept which seems especially appropriate to capture the difference with Taylorism, as it emphasises as a new central phenomenon in work the subjective requirements which in Taylorism were factually present but not represented in the model.36 Kleemann, Matuschek and Voß in their review of the ­literature which diagnoses in different ways and through different explanations the phenomenon of the “subjectivisation of work,” distinguish between six different processes and forms of application of the concept: – A subjectivised activity of work, as necessary complement to more technical, mainly computerised work, – subjective work performances as conditions of post-Taylorian work organisations, 33   K. Dörre, “Unternehmerische Globalstrategien, neue Managementkonzepte und die Zukunft der industriellen Beziehungen,” in ed. U. Kadritzke, “Unternehmenskulturen” unter Druck, Berlin, 1997, pp. 15–44, p. 22. 34   H. Kotthoff, “Betriebsräte und betriebliche Reorganisation,” Arbeit, Vol. 4, No. 4. 1995, pp. 425–447, p. 443. 35  See H. -J. Braczyk and G. Schienstock, “Im ‘Lean-Expreß’ zu einem neuen Produktionsmodell? ‘Lean Production’ in Wirtschaftsunternehmen BadenWürttembergs—Konzepte, Wirkungen, Folgen,” in eds. H. -J. Braczyk and G. Schienstock, Kurswechsel in der Industrie: Lean Production in Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart/Berlin/Köln, Kohlhammer, 1996, pp. 269–329; H. Kocyba and U. Vormbusch, Partizipation als Managementstrategie, Frankfurt am Main/New York, 2000; H. Minssen, Von der Hierarchie zum Diskurs? Die Zumutungern der Selbstregulation, München/Mering, 1999; M. Moldaschl, “Ökonomien des Selbst. Subjektivität in der Unternehmergesellschaft,” in eds. J. Klages and S. Timpf, Facetten der Cyberwelt, Hamburg, 2002, pp. 29–62; U. Vormbusch, Diskussion und Disziplin, Frankfurt am Main/New York, 2002. 36   See F. Kleemann, I. Matuschek and G. Voß, “Subjektivierung von Arbeit. Ein Überblick zum Stand der soziologischen Diskussion,” in eds. Moldaschl and Voß, Subjektivierung von Arbeit, pp. 53–100.



admiration without appreciation?285 –  subjective ways of shaping the work-life relationship, – demands on individuals to self-direct their professional biographies, –  specific demands on the shape of work relations for women, –  normative subjectivisation as a result of transformations in values of work.

In relation to the discussion conducted in this chapter, I would like to  reduce this complexity to two main themes: on the one hand, the subjectivisation of work designates the expectations of employees, on the other, the demands of businesses for subjective work performances. These two dimensions might well complement each other, but  it is also highly likely that there are conflicts and dissonances between them. However, the shift from Taylorism to post-Taylorism is not a unified process. Just as it would have been impossible previously to talk about a general implementation of Taylorism, it is not possible today to talk about a general shift away from it. Essential elements of Taylorism remain in essential areas of the world of work and even undergo a renaissance.37 But just as previously non-Taylorian forms of production and working cultures existed in the “shadow of Fordism,”38 these elements find themselves today in the shadow of models in which they appear dated or atypical. Relations of recognition and the legitimacy of expectations of recognition change in similar fashion; in a field of values in which appreciation as a compensation for Taylorian misrecognition loses its legitimacy. Relations of recognition which today dominate in social models and which have become real in not marginal areas of the world of work are distinguished from the recognitive relations characteristic of Taylorism in the following way. First, the duty ethic plays hardly any role anymore. To illustrate this, I would like to evoke an image known to all: the classical image of the unemployed asking for work by having a sign around his neck saying: “I take any work.” With this, he signals a distinctive ethic of duty, a capacity for self-sacrifice, he considers nothing to be beneath himself.

37   See M. Schumann “Frißt die Shareholder-Value-Ökonomie die Modernisierung der Arbeit?”; C. Kurz, Repetitivarbeit—unbewältigt, Berlin, 1998. 38   See S. Voswinkel, S. Lücking and I. Bode, Im Schatten des Fordismus. Industrielle Beziehungen in der Bauwirtschaft und im Gastgewerbe Deutschlands und Frankreichs, München/Mering, 1996.

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In many areas of today’s world of work—not all of them, notably not of low-wages sectors nor the most recent reform ideals governing the administration of (un)employment—such a way of being utterly undemanding would be today the surest way not to get work. Who would want to employ someone for activities requiring self-activity, engagement, business initiative and creativity, who would do everything— and that means perhaps—only what they’re being told to do, because they have no interest in a specific type of work? This shift from an ethic of duty to an ethic of subjectivised professional self-realisation has already been well outlined by Johann Behrens.39 In a publication that did not draw attention at the time, he interpreted the most striking features of the social situation then, in opposition to the thesis of an “end of the work society,” in the following terms: “As the work ethic of the profession (Beruf) expands, the model of a work ethic based solely on the fulfilment of duty cannot (or can no longer?) count on recognition. The social classes supporting the ethic of duty such as unskilled and semi-skilled workers, as well as housewives, are thereby caught up in a dilemma. On the one hand, they are obviously ‘ridiculous’ if they present their work as self-realisation and personal development, whilst such self-presentation in other professions is precisely a condition of employment. On the other hand, they cannot have recourse to the honourable role of the respected victim of duty, as in the old shape of the ‘hard worker.’ ”40 Behrens thereby characterises the heightened recognition problem linked to the subjectivisation of work for simple activities poor in social prestige. When simple, “normal” work and “normal performance” is no longer valued, its chances of recognition are taken away from it.41 If one is no longer able to offer successful performances worthy of admiration, one can no longer count on the compensatory appreciation. Lack of recognition threatens through being overlooked. Secondly, the recognition of simple work and normal performance is

  See J. Behrens, “ ‘Selbstverwirklichung’—Oder: Vom Verblassen aller Alternativen zur Berufsarbeit. Umfragen und Fallstudien zur Krise der Arbeit in Familie und Erwerbstätigkeit,” in eds. H. -J. Hoffmann-Nowotny and F. Gehrmann, Ansprüche an die Arbeit, Frankfurt am Main/New York, 1984, pp. 117–135. 40  Behrens “ ‘Selberstverwirklichung’—Oder: Vom Verblassen aller Alternativen zur Berufsarbeit,” p. 118. 41  See S. Neckel and K. Dröge, “Die Verdienste und ihr Preis: Leistung in der Marktgesellschaft,” in ed. A. Honneth, Befreiung aus der Mündigkeit, pp. 93–116. 39



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also eroded in the mode of appreciation. Thirdly, this shift from a culture of work based on objectified functionalism to one based on the model of the subjectivisation of work also opens up new recognition potentials for employees. As Senghaas-Knobloch and Nagler have argued, employees find in the new culture of work “a professional role which contains more scope for freedom, social and professional competences as well responsibilities.”42 The subjectivisation of work can therefore be experienced by the employees as a new recognition of their capacities and competences. The combination of all these transformations makes it necessary to talk of the ambivalence of the subjectivisation of work, and of the paradox of the recognition of subjectivised work. 5.  The Paradoxes of the Recognition of Doubly Subjectivised Work Subjectivisation, as was shown, has two different meanings. On the one hand, it relates to the dimension of the increased demands placed on subjectivity, self-responsibility and self-management: direct management becomes contextual, control is transformed from a control of procedures to one targeting results and success; concrete work processes are increasingly left to the activity of the individual. On the other hand, subjectivisation relates to the demands placed by workers on their work.43 They also expect to find room for self-responsibility as well as opportunities for self-realisation, and are no longer satisfied with receiving a salary for a docile fulfilment of tasks. One could say in pointed fashion that workers today do not work because they have to but because they want to. There might well be some “elective affinity” between these two dimensions of the subjectivisation of work, as Heidenreich argues.44 If we relate these two dimensions to each other, however, some paradoxical relationships between them come to light. Behrens had also alluded to the latter as early as 1984, when he pointed to the new emerging

  Senghaas-Knobloch and Nagler, “Von der Arbeitskraft zur Berufsrolle?,” p. 120.   See M. Baethge, “Arbeit, Vergesellschaftung, Identität—Zur zunehmenden normativen Subjektivierung der Arbeit,” Soziale Welt, Vol. 42, No. 1, 1991, pp. 6–19; M. Behr, “Regressive Gemeinschaft oder zivile Vergemeinschaftung?,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Vol. 24, No. 5, 1995, pp. 325–344. 44   M. Heidenreich, “Die subjektive Modernisierung fortgeschrittener Arbeitsgesellschaften,” Soziale Welt, Vol. 47, No. 1, 1996, pp. 24–43, p. 40. 42 43

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constraint consisting of opting for a form of self-presentation as virtuoso of self-realisation.45 Hermann Kocyba calls these constraints linked to self-presentation “appellative subjectivisation”: under the conditions of modern management strategies, employees having normative expectations of their work as meaningful, fulfilling activity is itself the object of normative expectations which are activated through a number of social techniques and training methods.46

In the ambivalence of the subjectivisation of work, (genuine) claims of recognition and expectations that people will make such claims are indissolubly intertwined. Self-determination can just as much be demanded in the face of restrictive working conditions as it can lead to a paralysing abandonment of one’s own demands, when subjects attribute responsibility for them to themselves, along the lines of “I’m responsible for this.” What does this double subjectivisation of work—as claim and as expectation, Anspruch and Anforderung—do to the form of recognition? Does it imply the end of the need for recognition in work, because the individual who is striving for self-realisation in work is intrinsically motivated and needs no extrinsic motivation through recognition coming from the outside? This would contradict the Meadian conception of the link between identity and recognition, namely that identities are formed through confronting the recognition of others. Mead’s dialectical concept starts from the assumption that subjects strive for the recognition by others of the particular traits and idiosyncratic sense of self which make for an ego-identity. This explains—as Klaus Dörre has shown—why self-development cannot be realised over a long period of time without the experience of being valued by others. But how can we understand the recognition relations of subjectivised work? When work is no longer perceived as a burden, but rather as self-realisation, then new conditions emerge for its recognition. I assume that there is indeed a shift in the modality of recognition and I argue that the subjectivisation of work brings about an erosion of the

  See Behrens “ ‘Selbstverwirklichung’—Oder: Vom Verblassen aller Alternativen zur Berufsarbeit,” p. 128. 46   Kocyba, “Der Preis der Anerkennung,” p. 131. 45



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moral resources available for appreciation, so that recognition can from now on particularly be expected in the form of admiration. When the subjectivating work activity appears as self-realisation, there is no legitimate room left for recognition in the form of appreciation. Self-organisation entails self-responsibility. Being centred on the subject, work no longer commands thankfulness or appreciation on the part of the company. If one conceives of oneself as (self-)entrepreneur and not as employee or member of staff, then the relationship to the employer must be defined as a business relation. To want to realise oneself through work entails a corresponding giving up of the moral claim to appreciation. By defining one’s relationship to work as a selfrelation, and not as a contribution or even as a sacrifice, one forgoes appreciation for it. The attitude to work discussed here corresponds to the type of orientation to performance which Pongratz and Voß have characterised as “performance optimisation” in a recent study.47 It is well encapsulated in a passage like this one: I’ve had my fun. I must really add, I’ve had a lot of fun in my professional life. For decades now, since I’ve done my second qualification, my attitude has been: I’ll only take jobs that I find fun. I have to say, every time I’ve applied for a new job, that’s the first thing I was interested in, what’s in the job, is there any fun around it, is it interesting.48

When the workers high on performance (Leistungsoptimierer) emphasise the “fun” aspect of work, they—as Pongratz and Voß highlight— do not mean that it is entertaining, in the sense of the “society of fun” (Spaßgesellschaft), but rather, they mean the kick they get out achieving high goals through their total involvement and effort. Central here is the (positive) abnormality of work, as another employee in an IT-business emphasises: When my work is needed, when what I accomplish is in a certain way unique or when I’m the only one who can accomplish that, then I feel I am needed, and that feels great. If on the other hand I’m just another cog

47   See H. Pongratz and G. Voß, ArbeiterInnen und Angestellte als ­rbeitskraf­t A unternehmer? Erwerbsorientierungen in entgrenzten Arbeitsformen, Forschungsbericht an die Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, München/Chemnitz, 2002. 48   Ibid,, p. 56.

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stephan voswinkel in the machine, that can always be replaced, then work is not important. Then it makes no sense.49

Such an orientation to work is clearly not solely self-centred—the worker wants to be needed—but the use-value of work is not formulated in terms of gift or indeed of sacrifice, but rather as “fun.” But the individual who is already satisfied by work can no longer have a moral expectation to be appreciated for it. Another “high performer” thus draws the consequences: “(…) when the job or what I’m actually doing at the time is fun, if I can flourish in it, then it’s fine, but if I decay in it, then I must leave.”50 Exit instead of the demand for consideration is the consequence of not “giving” work and therefore not being able to demand a service in return such as appreciation. Against such a background, the institutionalisations and regulations of appreciation can be eroded in their legitimacy: for example, the continued payment of a salary in the case of sickness, as a mark of acknowledgement of belonging to the company and as counter-service (Gegenleistung) rewarding the sacrifice of one’s health in the service of the business;51 the assurance of long-term activity; but also such rituals as company celebrations or the honouring of workers by celebrating their jubilees. One episode makes particularly visible the meaning of rituals and the demise of their legitimacy as symptoms of the erosion of appreciation. Sylvia Witz has been researching the normative horizons that are at play in decisions regarding promotions in an insurance company.52 In this research, she has compared Herr Goeke, a high flyer to whom admiration is given and who has been earmarked for higher things, with Frau Scholz, who has the same level of expertise but is neither noteworthy nor given particular consideration. Frau Scholz was asked to take over the area of compulsory long term care insurance and had trained herself in that area. This however has not improved her chances of promotion. She is less bitter about that (there is no right to

  Quoted in ibid., p. 57.   Quoted in ibid. 51   See S. Voswinkel, “Anerkennung der Arbeit im Wandel. Zwischen Würdigung und Bewunderung,” in eds. Holtgrewe, Voswinkel and Wagner, Anerkennung und Arbeit, 2000. 52   See S. Wilz, Organisation und Geschlecht. Strukturelle Bindungen und kontingente Kopplungen, Opladen, 2002. 49 50



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advancement) than about the fact that her involvement has not been sufficiently valued. She says: I’ve just experienced it with the business administrator. Because I am, I mean, because I didn’t have the full intent, I knew that I would not go further in this house, but nobody cares about it. I am a bit disappointed about it. There were two of us and normally we get a bunch of flowers from the management, but this time we had the exam in May, the result in July and we received the flowers in October. I nearly didn’t take them. I thought that was too stupid. I was really disappointed about that.53

Now the subject can experience recognition mainly in the mode of admiration—for his/her performance, success, self-realisation. Subjectivisation therefore implies recognitive relations in which the recognition that is central is one that occurs through spaces for autonomy, and as the admiration of competence, performance and success. At the same time, subjectivisation is requested by companies and built into their demands. The paradox of subjectivisation is that the fulfilment of external demands presented as one’s own subjective needs is now normatively expected and possibly also understood in this way by the subjects. Since on the other hand companies no longer provide appreciation, because the social exchange necessary for it no longer exists, as a result the demand for appreciation is also less raised, since it implies the admission that one lacks self-reliance. For—as Sennett says—“economic flexibility is legitimated through an appeal to personal autonomy.”54 To want to work independently or self-reliantly, one cannot want to be a valued servant. Admiration, however, is tied to success, to distinctive performance. Performance without success, in the sense of efforts on the one hand, or in the sense of normal, unexceptional performances, can claim to receive appreciation but not admiration. The excellence of performances and successes must be contended for; it must be presented and staged. The self of the self-entrepreneur55 must put itself on the market and strive for the award of recognition. In labour markets outside the company in particular, as well as in careers that span across organisations, reputation as a “reflexive and externalised form of recognition”56   Quoted in idid., p. 243.   R. Sennett, “Der neue Kapitalismus,” Berliner Journal für Soziologie, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1998, pp. 305–316, p. 309. 55   See G. Voß and H. J. Pongratz, “Der Arbeitskraftunternehmer,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Vol. 50, No. 1, 1998, pp. 131–158, p.142. 56  Voswinkel, Anerkennung und Reputation, chapter B.3. 53 54

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is a central form of capital. In order to secure and increase it, the subject must deal with recognition strategically, precisely it must treat it as a form of capital and strive to secure and increase it. Since, however, the increased fluidity of organisations also makes it increasingly difficult to calculate which forms of subjective investment will be rewarded in what kind of reputation, the strategic attitude towards reputation becomes increasingly difficult. As a result, the increased importance taken by recognition as reputation is paradoxically paralleled by its increased insecurity for the self-entrepreneur. It seems necessary to build multiple reputations and to avoid being trapped by the current form of reputation. This risks making the subject “into an object of ever changing external relations, which form and if need be even transform his/her fluid self.”57 One way of bringing subjects to observe their valuation and reputation through others can be called “desubjectivised evaluation.” This is the organised transformation of external demands into needs of the subject itself. The subjects are surrounded by evaluations and feedbacks, in which the permanent, total 360° observation of performance and behaviour takes over the function of the mirror of others. The performances of co-workers and superiors is continuously submitted to evaluation by the colleagues, superiors and subordinates, and communicated to the people concerned through individual performance profiles.58 With this management through indicators, quantitative data, often directly related to market outcomes, are directly communicated to the workplace as transparent constraints and serve as benchmarks for the evaluation of action. They put a figure on the degree to which the results of individual action correspond to the aims and requirements of the company. What is striking about this form of evaluation is that it is not accompanied by the setting up or the demand for improvement measures.

57   G. Wagner, “Berufsbiographische Aktualisierung von Anerkennungsverhältnissen. Identität zwischen Perspektivität und Patchwork,” in eds. Holtgrewe, Voswinkel and Wagner, Anerkennung und Arbeit, p. 148. 58   See U. Bröckling, “Totale Mobilmachung. Menschenführung im Qualitäts- und Selbstmanagement,” in eds. U. Bröckling, S. Krasmann and T. Lemke, Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart, Frankfurt am Main, 2000, pp. 131–167, p.151; O. Neuberger, Das 360°-Feedback. Alles fragen? Alles sehen? Alles sagen?, München/ Mering, 2000; B. Runde, D. Kirschbaum and K. Wübbelmann, “360°-Feedback— Hinweise für ein best-practise-Modell,” Zeitschrift für Arbeits- und Organisation­ spsychologie, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2001, pp. 146–157.



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It is the subjects’ or teams’ own responsibility to draw the consequences of a negative evaluation of performance, and these consequences are once again evaluated through a new evaluation round and new target levels.59 Insofar as workers and teams are not congratulated or blamed in interpersonal fashion, this is a depersonalised, automatised form of recognition and mis-recognition. Precisely because it is desubjectivised, it demands of the evaluated workers subjective efforts of selfmanagement. But it is clear that it is impossible for the workers concerned to please everyone. If the person tries to do so, he/she will “continuously fail in her missions, will remain criticisable and be prepared to face sanctions, which will be justified even though they are unjust.”60 We can describe these evaluations as the institution of an externally driven social character whose subjectivity consists in feeling expectations on its own and in developing forms of self-management with which to deal best with external expectations. Niklas Luhmann spoke in this context of a “reflexively controlled self-presentation,” by which he meant that an inner perception was necessary to steer the outer perception, which made it possible to decide which impressions in which context were to be achieved or avoided. I would not concur with him however when he claims that this represents the opposite of conformism.61 It is only too obvious that what is taken into account here are not dimensions that are relevant to individual subjects. It would be more accurate to speak of “reflexive conformism.” Subjects are encouraged to conform on their own accord, “subjectively,” to the (anticipated) evaluations and demands of recognition of the others. As they have the experience that they cannot fulfil all the different and changing expectations, they are forced to position themselves in this game, to play off different types of “mirrors” against each other or to reconcile differences. Whether they manage to retain a sense of selfdetermination and are able to bring creativity into the process is an empirical question. For recognition relations are ultimately constituted by the sub­ jects  themselves, in subjective and intersubjective, situated and 59  See Vormbusch, Diskussion und Disziplin, p. 35 ff; Kocyba and Vormbusch Partizipation als Managementstrategie, p. 19 ff. 60  Neuberger Das 360°-Feedback. Alles fragen? Alles sehen? Alles sagen?, p. 73. 61  N. Luhmann, “Reflexive Mechanismen,” Soziologische Aufklärung, Vol. 1, Opladen, 1974, pp. 92–112, p. 100.

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c­ ontextualised fashion. And paradoxical relations of recognition provide no clear indications of processing by the subjects. In summary, relations of recognition of subjectivised work can therefore be understood as paradoxical in two senses: –  When subjectivisation in the sense of self-organisation and selfrealisation in work is normatively expected by companies, it turns into an external demand. However, since this external demand appears as the subject’s own need, no claim of recognition, in the sense of appreciation, can derive from its fulfilment. –  Recognition as admiration for success and self-realisation presupposes that one gives up the claim to appreciation for normal performances and self-sacrifice. With this, however, recognition becomes dependent on the contingency and fluidity of success. It must be striven for strategically, but thereby loses its expressive meaning as positive valuation of identities. The erosion of the moral resources enabling subjects to receive and demand appreciation deepens the competitive meaning of recognition. From now on, workers who only perform normal duties, those who remain unnoticed, those that do not have success only experience non-recognition and lack of regard, without being captured by the recognition through appreciation. As a result, they must take responsibility for their lack of recognition, precisely because they have not been able to present a case for admiration. 6.  Potential Developments for Recognition in the Context of Doubly Subjectivised Work The shifts in the relations of recognition, namely the erosion of appreciation and the increased significance of admiration, in no way represent a process without contradiction and conflict. To begin with, relations of recognition are not simply the result of changed relations of production and economic processes. Rather, they are established, defended, transformed and culturally shaped by the subjects themselves. A change in social-economic relations, which influence the shape of recognition relations, can trigger “crises of recognition.”62 62   See S. Krömmelbein, “Identitätskrisen als Anerkennungskrisen—Umbrüche von Erwerbsarbeit und Sozialstruktur in den neuen Bundesländern,” in eds. Holtgrewe, Voswinkel and Wagner, Anerkennung und Arbeit, 2000, pp. 193–216.



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These crises can have destructive and pathological implications for subjective identities, but can also lead to new recognition demands which can modify, limit or undermine the transformative processes. This is one aspect of the “struggle for recognition.”63 There is therefore no unambiguous developmental logic behind the paradoxical relations of recognition. In conclusion, I would like to point to two contrasting potentials for development, namely: 1. The association or coupling (Verkopplung) of recognition and success, which mainly brings into play the limiting aspect of recognition, and; 2. Self-realisation between exit and voice,64 as self-assertion or as struggle for recognition in which the enabling dimension of recognition is articulated. 6.1  The Coupling of Recognition and Success When subjectivisation goes together with marketisation, recognition is directly associated with success. In this case, performance is increasingly understood as success, and the double character of performance—as expenditure and effort on the one hand, as output and particular economic success on the other—is increasingly pushed to the success side.65 Normal performance then receives hardly any recognition at all. Admiration then means recognition of success and misrecognition pertains to lack of success—and that independently of other aspects of the performance principle, like effort and professionalism. Here it must be emphasised that admiration and appreciation do not necessarily point to different characteristics or types of performance.

  See Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition.   Exit and voice characterise two different reactions to unsatisfactory treatment by the organisation: leaving or opposing (see A. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1970). 65  See S. Voswinkel, “Transformation des Marktes in marktorientierten Organisationen. Erfolgsorientiertes Entgelt in Wirtschaftsorganisationen,” in ed. H. -G. Brose, Die Reorganisation der Arbeitsgesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main/New York, 2000, pp. 239–274; S. Neckel, “ ‘Leistung’ und ‘Erfolg’. Die symbolische Ordnung der Marktgesellschaft,” in eds. E. Barlösius, H. -P. Müller and S. Sigmund, Gesellschaftsbilder im Umbruch, Opladen, 2001, pp. 245–265; Neckel and Dröge, “Die Verdienste und ihr Preis: Leistung in der Marktgesellschaft.” 63 64

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Their distinction designates rather how performances and characteristics are socially defined and valued. It points therefore to the meaning of recognition. To take one example: someone who works endlessly without regard for their own health can well show thereby that they sacrifice themselves for the firm, and the social world values this exactly in this sense. Or they thereby show how resilient they are, since nothing can overwhelm them, and the social world admires the exploits of the Stachanows and Henneckes of capitalism.66 However, the same sense of recognition granted by the social world also withdraws recognition in another sense, since the worker has demonstrated that he/she was in fact overwhelmed. The worker has not applied his/her resources in a way that was sufficiently economical and rational. He/she can therefore not expect to be given favourable consideration, instead, he /she has put in question the foundation of the business. If recognition—as admiration—requires success, employees cannot afford any mistakes; investment that is not justified by immediate success is not worth it. The changed relations of recognition thus support in their turn the short-term economy. “Recognition opportunities become … increasingly more uncertain and take more and more the form of a market-reward which occurs ex post.” For success “can be influenced by the effort of the workers only to a limited extent.”67 Especially when subjectivisation is tied to marketisation, recognition and success are intimately associated. Success on the market then entails a tautological self-recognition. Bröckling has expressed it in the following terms: “If someone has success, they have earned it; if someone does not have success, it’s because they did something wrong. … Empowerment and humiliation go hand in hand.”68 66   In 1935 the miner Alexej Stachanow was said to have exceeded his work targets fourteenfold. He was made into a hero by the Stalinist leadership who founded the “Stachanow-movement” in order to force an increase in production. The miner Adolf Hennecke was made into the Stachanow of the DDR in the 1950s. He managed— apparently after the manipulation and preparation of his working conditions—to exceed his work quota by 387%. It is plausible to view the freelancers and workaholics of the New Economy as the new Stachanowists, whose success can fail to materialise just as much as the fame of one-day stars. 67  U. Holtgrewe, “  ‘Meinen Sie, da sagt jemand danke, wenn man geht?,’ Anerkennungs- und Missachtungsverhältnisse im Prozess organisationeller Transformation,” in eds. Holtgrewe, Voswinkel and Wagner, Anerkennung und Arbeit, 2000, pp. 63–84, p. 64; Voswinkel, ‘Transformation des Marktes in marktorientierten Organisationen.” 68  Bröckling “Totale Mobilmachung. Menschenführung im Qualitäts- und Selbstmanagement,” p. 162.



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But when one cannot make or admit to mistakes, one is forced to build protections and avoid risk. When normal performance no longer receives any appreciation, when recognition is only given to distinctive, successful performances, then loss of motivation can quickly result. An IBM project manager describes this connection in the following way. First, she emphasises the meaning of decent, “reasonable,” qualityconscious work, with which she fulfils her professional demands: What seems important to me, next to the fear (of having mistakes attributed to me), is something like a sense of responsibility. I have a strong sense for reasonable work, what is acceptable and unacceptable, what products should look like. For me these norms have something to do with self-respect and dignity. They are like a need for me. Just like we shower once a day, even if we wouldn’t go bad or fall ill if we didn’t do it.

Then she remembers a previous occasion where she tried to get admiration but her attempt was not met by recognition on the side of management: Beyond this sense of responsibility, I used to have the dream of excellence, to achieve something special, something big, something exceptional. For a while that was a strong motivation for my work. Now I find this absurd, silly, insignificant. This desire for excellence is activated through praise and recognition.

The desire for excellence and admiration appears after a while “absurd,” because this type of work cannot be sustained in the long term: Independent of the question whether 9 hours of work per day is a lot or not, I’ve had to realise that the situation is now almost unbearable. But I can’t see my workload substantially decreasing any time soon.69

What happens after the reckoning and disenchantment has set in? To begin with, how can one ensure that a work performance is acceptable and good enough over time, and what type of recognition can there be when work is subjectivised? For businesses that no longer want to engage in long term engagements, it can become tempting to react to a fall in performance with early exclusion and an increase of control. Subjectivised pressure to succeed for some; re-Taylorisation for the others: that could be the outcome of this scenario. But then this would be a Taylorism without recognition through appreciation.   Quoted in eds. Moldaschl and Voß, Subjektivierung von Arbeit, p. 315.

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Instead of relating to work and performance in the sense of effort and exertion, recognition would then relate to economic success, the utilisation of favourable circumstances, good luck, a good reputation: in other words, more pre-, or post-modern understandings of recognition. This scenario would correspond to the diagnosis of an erosion of the “performance principle” that Sighard Neckel and Neckel and Dröge have proposed.70 If such a shift in the meaning of recognition were confirmed on a broad basis, it would signal a modification in the selfunderstanding of society, and a departure from the “society of performance” (Leistungsgesellschaft) in the classical sense. We might consider this a pathological solution to the paradoxes of recognition of subjectivised work. 6.2  Self-realisation between Exit and Voice The alternative scenario looks approximately like this: when appreciation can no longer be demanded, but admiration cannot be morally requested, one way that suggests itself is for the subject to distance himself/herself from the conflicting claims of recognition and to single-handedly set individual terms of reference. Producer pride, professional standards, and empathy with the clients can be read as claims for the recognition of the use-value and quality of work. However, the manifold and contradictory aspects of recognition relations cannot simply be reduced to the market.71 This way of holding onto claims that are properly one’s own, and of maintaining the value of one’s work and the appreciation-worthiness of one’s individual effort, can end up in a form of retreat, in inner withdrawal, exit. This would be a form of self-assertion without, and giving up on, recognition. Subjects define the forms and contents of evaluation that are appropriate for them, seek niches in the world of the company or flee that world, with the hope of being able to realise their own world of value in independent work. In many sectors, this might be

70  See Neckel “  ‘Leistung’ und ‘Erfolg’. Die symbolische Ordnung der Marktgesellschaft;” Neckel and Dröge, “Die Verdienste und ihr Preis: Leistung in der Marktgesellschaft.” 71   See Holtgrewe “Anerkennung und Arbeit in der Dienst-Leisungs-Gesellschaft;” U. Holtgrewe and S. Voswinkel, “Kundenorientierung zwischen Mythos, Organisationsrationalität und Eigensinn der Beschäftigten,” in ed. D Sauer, Dienst— Leistung(s)—Arbeit. Kundernorientierung und Leistung in tertiären Organisationen. ISF Formschungsberichte, München, 2002, pp. 99–118.



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possible. On the whole, however, such an attitude conflicts with the demands and constraints of cooperation and with the market mechanisms of capitalistic societies. This mode of insisting on one’s own criteria of recognition and one’s own claims for recognition can also lead to voice. Here a significant element—already in Taylorism—is that work requires cooperation that, notwithstanding all the talk of “self-corporation” (Ich-AG),72 still relies on reciprocity of performance and contribution, and therefore relies on a normative culture of reciprocity. In the company as well as in work itself, a professional lifeworld emerges with communitybuilding mechanisms. The relations of recognition and the claims of recognition thereby introduced can hardly be reduced to the mode of admiration. They can constitute an alternative arena of recognition for the employees. This new arena of recognition makes it possible to handle the experiences of non-recognition and the misrecognition of labour, effort and normal performance, as well as articulated professional standards and a professional sense of self against the restric­ tions produced by marketisation. And on the basis of this, commonly recognised standards can be invoked against the fear of being overwhelmed by the continued pressure to conform to expectations of performance. In another grievance of an IBM employee, we can read: It is incredibly easy for management to continue to give me yet another project, until I’m totally overwhelmed—even if I was the best project manager in the world. … When a boss tells his employee: “I think you can’t cope anymore,” the employee should not say, “No, that’s not true at all, I’ll show you!,” but rather, “I am not overwhelmed, but I get ­overwhelmed.” Or even better, he should say: “Yes, that’s right, and so I should be.”73

This is an area for further empirical investigation. Only it can tell us how subjects deal with the shifts and paradoxes of relations of recognition. Translated from the German by Jean-Philippe Deranty and Nicholas H. Smith. 72   Literally: “Me-Stock-Corporation” or “Me-Inc.” A term of the labour-marketreform under the red-green government in Germany in early 2000s. It signified a person in self-employment as part of a scheme to help unemployed people to start-up their own business. It also was a metaphor for self-employment as a mental virtue. 73   Quoted in Moldaschl and Voß, Subjektivierung von Arbeit, p. 321.

Chapter eleven

“Exclusive focus on figures. Exclusive focus on returns.” Marketisation as a principle of organisation and a problem of recognition1 Gabriele Wagner “So, every day you are confronted with what you are actually worth here. And that has gone down a lot in Chemie AG. You are simply personnel number so and so, and personal things come last.” With these harsh words, the laboratory manager Dr. Bleibtreu summed up the consequences of a fundamental reorganisation of the Chemie AG where he has worked for many years. The passage expresses anger at the insult and disrespect afforded to a once proud senior employee who, following the organisational restructuring of Chemie AG, now finds himself in the position of an anonymous number. In the context of the widespread discussion of business change, the case of Herr Bleibtreu and his colleague Frau Schmidtmeier exemplifies how the consequences of the “marketisation” of organisations are reconstructed as a problem of recognition. For this reason the debate on the much discussed consequences of internal marketisation should be expanded by a further perspective, one which makes visible the importance of the pursuit of recognition in the mobilization of members’ greater compliance. The first part of my chapter (1) argues for this conceptual expansion with reference to the discussion as it currently stands and introduces central concepts from the recognition debate into the analysis. The argument is thereby developed that the subjective realization of recognition relationships substantially contributes to the way employees deal with reorganisation. The second part (2) deals with an empirical case that exemplifies the analytical perspective

1   I am thankful to Silviana Galassi, Birgit Geissler, Veronika Tacke and Stephan Voswinkel for clarifying discussions. This essay was first published in German in the Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 33:3, 2008, 20–42. Thanks are due to the anonymous reviewers of the journal for their valuable tips and constructive arguments.

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exemplarily developed here. It reconstructs the massive crisis of recognition which the company’s new orientation evoked for the highly qualified interviewees Dr. Bleibtreu and Dr. Schmidtmeier. The interviewees fail doubly, receiving neither admiration for their professional achievement, nor experiencing recognition in the form of an acknowledgement of their commitment and performance-vouching contributions. In their ambivalent pursuit of recognition they become ensnared in both an admiration and an acknowledgement trap. As a consequence of the failed recognition aspirations, the conceptually empty duty-ethos of the secondary virtues takes the place of the producer’s pride. The text finishes with a concluding summary (3). 1.  Diagnoses of Organisational Change a.  The Discussion to Date The reorganisation process which Chemie AG is undergoing is not an isolated case. Rather, economic and organisational sociology observes a comprehensive transformation of business enterprises. The respective relevant diagnoses, however (thus runs the argument of this section), all contain a gap which can be filled by reference to relations of recognition. In the course of the concentration of companies on their “core business,” previously integrated areas are differentiated out and reconfigured. Management by results, flat hierarchies, personal responsibility, and decentralisation are elevated to central instruments of organisational design.2 Additionally, the comprehensive orientation towards the market increases in significance both in the internal and external relationships of the company. The decentralised units are positioned against one another in a competitive market relationship. Each unit is made to orient itself towards profitability criteria. Target agreement processes and performance-related pay are aligned with

2   See D. Sauer and V. Döhl, “Die Auflösung des Unternehmens. Entwicklungstendenzen der Unternehmensreorganisation in den 90er Jahren,” in Jahrbuch sozialwissenschaftliche Technikberichterstattung, ed. Institut für Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung, München; Internationales Institut für Empirische Sozialökonomie, Stadtbergen; Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt M.; Soziologisches Forschun­ gsinstitut, Göttingen; Berlin,1996, pp. 19–76. See also M. Moldaschl, “Internalisierung des Marktes. Neue Unternehmensstrategie und qualifizierte Angestellte,” in Jahrbuch sozialwissenschaftliche Technikberichterstattung, 1997, pp. 197–250.

exclusive focus on figures. exclusive focus on returns303 benchmarks.3 Thus the concrete everyday work of the (highly) qualified employees also changes: extensive pre-structuring of work gives way to self-regulation and self-organisation; responsibility is delegated or shifted “downwards.” As a consequence of the “subjectivisation of work” and in the name of responsibility for results, the employees of the relevant reorganised units are comprehensively bound to forms of self-control and self-responsibility.4 The sociological analysis of the possible consequences of these reorganisation processes has been so abundant that a few key-points should suffice here. “The flexible market-centred production model”5 leads to “structural egoism”6 within and between the departments. It releases forces of disintegration which for their part end up producing pendulum swings between decentralisation and recentralisation.7 The sharper focus on the market as a coordinating and controlling mechanism burdens the employees with increasing insecurities and ever heavier workloads and demands. The consequences of internal marketisation for processes of identity development and assertion are dealt with under such key phrases as “internal colonisation”8 and “identity as commodity.”9 Most of the current sociological contributions share the same analytical perspective. The focus is upon profound changes which are observed and also analysed at the structural level or the level of system integration. Beginning with structural changes in the market they pass through the new structural alignment of companies and move on to the altered structural conditions that frame membership relationships. 3   See J. Flecker, “Intrapreneure, Arbeitskraftunternehmer und andere Zwitterwesen,” in Kurswechsel, 2000, pp. 28–36. 4  See G. Wagner, “Ein neuer Geist des Kapitalismus? Paradoxien der Selbstverantwortung,” in Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Vol. 32, 2007, pp. 3–24. 5  K. Dörre, “Das flexibel-marktzentrierte Produktionsmodell— Gravitation­szentrum eines neuen Kapitalismus?,” in eds. K. Dörre and B. Röttger, Das neue Marktregime. Konturen eines nachfordistischen Produktionsmodells, Hamburg, VSA, 2003 pp. 35–54. 6   See C. Deutschmann, M. Faust, P. Jauch, and P. Notz ed., “Veränderungen der Rolle des Managements im Prozeß der reflexiver Rationalisierung,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Vol. 24, 1995, 436–450. 7  See H. Hirsch-Kreinsen, “Dezentralisierung: Unternehmen zwischen Stabilität und Desintegration,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Vol. 24, 1995, pp. 422–435. 8   See Moldaschl, “Internalisierung des Marktes. Neue Unternehmensstrategie und qualifizierte Angestellte.” 9  See S. Neckel, “Identität als Ware. Die Marktwirtschaft im Sozialen,” in eds. F. Müller and M. Müller, Markt und Sinn. Dominiert der Markt unsere Werte?, Frankfurt/Main, Campus, 1996. pp. 133–145.

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The associated consequences for the members’ personal identity are discussed under the catchphrase “economisation of subjectivity.” According to Kocyba,10 this diagnosis can easily be seen as a reprise of the well-known colonisation thesis which infers the level of social integration directly from the level of system integration. Even if the differentiation between system and social integration is not unproblematic, Kocyba nevertheless hones in on an important point: if it actually does come to the claimed submission of employees to economic principles, then this is a contingent result of a process which is to be investigated at the level of social integration, and this is all the more valid if it is shown that the submission is self-driven. Otherwise one runs the risk of being taken in by a structural determinism. This argument directs attention to the concept of the “company social order” (“betrieblichen Sozialordnung”)11 which applies to the level of social integration.12 From this perspective companies cannot be described exclusively with concepts such as power, organisation structures, forms of control and interests. With the concept of “social order” Kotthoff and Reindl are rather emphasising that in companies we are always dealing with norms, loyalty, expectations and attachments deriving from one’s lifeworld. From a constructivist perspective, Kieser13 further points out that formal organisation programs only come into empirical effect through the interpretive and thus structuring activities of their members.

10  H. Kocyba, “Der Preis der Anerkennung. Von der tayloristischen Missachtung zur strategischen Instrumentalisierung der Subjektivität der Arbeitenden,” in eds. U. Holtgrewe, S. Voswinkel and G. Wagner, Anerkennung und Arbeit, Konstanz, UVK, 2000, pp. 127–140. 11  See H. Kotthoff, and J. Reindl, “Sozialordnung und Interessenvertretung in Klein- und Mittelbetrieben,” in ed. E. Hildebrand, Betriebliche Sozialverfassung unter Veränderungsdruck, Berlin, Edition Sigma, 1991, pp. 114–129. 12   The management studies by M. Baethge, J. Denkinger and U. Kadritzke, Das Führungskräfte Dilemma. Manager und industrielle Experten zwischen Unternehmen und Lebenswelt, Frankfurt/Main, Campus, 1995, as well as those of M. Faust, P. Jauch, and P. Notz, Befreit und entwurzelt: Führungskräfte auf dem Weg zum “internen Unternehmer,” München, Mering, 2000, are concerned with the dimension of social integration, but not with the recognition perspective which is advocated here. An overview of the themes and findings of management research and the profound changes in the self-interpretations of the highly qualified are to be found in H. Kotthoff and A. Wagner, Die Leistungsträger. Führungskräfte im Wandel der Firmenkultur—eine Follow-up-Studie, Berlin, 2008. 13  A. Kieser, “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Organisation beim Reden. Organisieren als Kommunizieren,” in Industrielle Beziehungen, Vol. 5, 1998, pp. 45–75.

exclusive focus on figures. exclusive focus on returns305 Recognition relationships are an essential hinge between the two levels and are likewise a central component of company social order. They direct the employees’ attention to the change in organisational programs. Moreover the change in organisational structures and the change in recognition relationships mutually condition each other.14 In this sense Voswinkel shows that under the described reorganisation conditions, the “recognition of belonging” in the form of “appreciation” is eroding.15 The recognition mode of “admiration” for (market) success is now taking the place of the old order of recognition. This chapter puts forward the thesis that both forms of recognition are, as ever, effective in providing orientation. The contemporaneity of these non-contemporaneous principles leads to a new risk of selfexploitation on the part of the employee which is expressed in an extraordinary renaissance of the ‘old’ duty ethos—extraordinary because the ‘old’ duty ethos has been culturally devalued and no longer has any structural foundation. b.  From Appreciation to Admiration In the normal work relationship of the Fordist era, recognition for belonging and the corresponding relationship of appreciation were the dominant reference points of the ‘old’ recognition order. Appreciation, according to Voswinkel, rests on social exchange, on norms of reciprocity, as well as on structurally ensured longevity.16 Companies show their appreciation of their members by rewarding their contributions and achievements with moral-economic promises and by taking into consideration moral standards that are valid in the lifeworld. According to Kotthoff,17 the employees expect from “their” firm that they will be granted a second chance in situations where they fail in an assignment,  With this, the mutual relationships between structured practice, interest-­ constellations, and struggle for recognition are also shifted. For detailed treatment of this problem field see A. Boes and K. Trinks, Theoretisch bin ich frei! Interessenhandeln und Mitbestimmung in der IT-Industrie, Berlin, Edition Sigma, 2006. 15   See S. Voswinkel, “Die Anerkennung der Arbeit im Wandel. Zwischen Würdigung und Bewunderung,” in eds. U. Holtgrewe, S. Voswinkel and G. Wagner, Anerkennung und Arbeit, pp. 39–62; S. Voswinkel, Anerkennung und Reputation. Die Dramaturgie industrieller Beziehungen, Konstanz, IVK-Verlag, 2001, especially pp. 55 ff and 301 ff. 16   See S. Voswinkel, “Die Anerkennung der Arbeit im Wandel. Zwischen Würdigung und Bewunderung.” 17  H. Kotthoff, “Anerkennung und sozialer Austausch. Die soziale Konstruktion von Betriebsbürgerschaft,” in eds. Holtgrewe, Voswinkel and Wagner, Anerkennung und Arbeit, pp. 27–38, p. 31. 14

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that older employees are not simply written off, and that in cases of doubt, rules are not just implemented without further consideration. Alongside the more or less extensive fulfilment of such expectations, the “duties of gratitude”18 of the employers towards “their” employees “materialise” in the principle of seniority, in Christmas celebrations, in company jubilees as well as in the union-secured continuation of payment in case of illness. The examples show that relationships of appreciation [Würdigungsbeziehungen] go beyond the logic of a market-centred exchange of equivalences in favour of an asymmetric reciprocal social exchange.19 The employees are precisely not treated as pure commodity labour-power, as “personnel number so and so” (Bleibtreu). Rather they are appreciated [gewürdigt] as “belonging” to a “company community”20 to which they contribute as members. Conversely the recognition mode of appreciation normatively commits the employees to be prepared to adjust themselves to the company and to orient their individual career plans not to short term calculations of opportunity, but rather to the long term of the company’s development. This includes the expectation that individual employees will consider the company’s interests in their “private” lifeplans and, when necessary, adapt their life plans to company requirements. Relationships of appreciation span a reliable horizon of normatively-binding duties of care on the employer side and particular  duties of loyalty on the employee side. The recognition mode of appreciation creates an “ideal figuration of harmonic imbalance”21 in which integration and faithfulness are exchanged for protection and consideration.22 In this asymmetric figuration, it is not autonomy and individualism which are rewarded with recognition, but rather submission and a willingness to contribute. 18  See G. Simmel, “Dankbarkeit. Ein soziologischer Versuch,” in Schriften zur Soziologie, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 1986, pp. 210–220. 19  See S. Voswinkel, “Reziprozität und Anerkennung in Arbeitsbeziehungen,” in eds. Frank Adloff and Steffen Mau, Vom Geben und Nehmen. Zur Soziologie der Reziprozität, Frankfurt/Main, Campus, 2005, pp. 237– 256. 20   See Kotthoff, “Anerkennung und sozialer Austausch. Die soziale Konstruktion von Betriebsbürgerschaft.” 21   See B. van Stolk, “Der Staat als Ernährer,” in ed. C. Eckart, Selbständigkeit von Frauen im Wohlfahrtsstaat, Stiftung Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, Hamburg, 1990, pp. 27–39. 22  See G. Wagner, Anerkennung und Individualisierung, Konstanz, UVK, 2004, p. 255.

exclusive focus on figures. exclusive focus on returns307 The changed organisational structures mentioned at the outset, namely the increasing market-orientation and short-term profit targets along with the associated destabilisation of membership relationships, undermine the bases of recognition for belonging and the corresponding relationships of acknowledgement.23 When departments are constantly restructured, hierarchies flattened, and managers constantly exchanged, the addressee of long-term relationships of social exchange disappears. Finally, after the third or fourth reorganisation round, the recipient of trust no longer finds the bestower of trust to whom he/she can direct claims for the acknowledgement of his/her loyalty and contributions. This of course does not mean that the importance of contribution and performance diminishes. On the contrary: against the background of market-conditioned membership-relations, the importance of a comprehensive commitment to performance increases, whilst its reward becomes uncertain.24 In parallel to the erosion of recognition for belonging, recognition  for success gains in significance. Admiration (Bewunderung) is bestowed on short-term, achievable, visible results, and most importantly on results made visible. This requires skilful action and wellstaged impression-management in order to “sell” oneself and one’s successes on both the company internal job market as well as on the external labour market. In this way the “labour-power entrepreneurs”25 are required to hold up their own “employability” and to convert it into upwardly mobile careers. In the recognition mode of admiration, outstanding performances, special abilities, and above all impressive results are rewarded through  commodities, services, and “attention markets.”26 It is the nature of admiration that it falls upon the single individual. Individual

 See Voswinkel, Anerkennung und Reputation. Die Dramaturgie industrieller Beziehungen, p. 304. 24  See H.-G. Brose, M. Diewald and A. Goedicke, “Arbeiten und Haushalten. Wechselwirkungen zwischen betrieblichen Beschäftigungspolitiken und privater Lebensführung,” in ed. O. Struck and C. Köhler, Beschäftigungsstabilität im Wandel? Empirische Befunde und theoretische Erklärungen für West- und Ostdeutschland, München, Mering, 2004, pp. 287–309, p. 294; Voswinkel, “Reziprozität und Anerkennung in Arbeitsbeziehungen,” p. 251. 25   See G. G. Voß and H. J. Pongratz, “Der Arbeitskraftunternehmer. Eine neue Grundform der Ware Arbeitskraft,” in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Vol. 50, 1998, pp. 131–158. 26  See G. Franck, Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit. Ein Entwurf, München, Carl Hanser, 1998. 23

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autonomy, independence and the ability to direct oneself and take personal responsibility are explicitly recognised. This, however, also applies to the case of the failure. Here the “labour-power entrepreneur” does not have a legitimate claim to the “second chance” which had been morally anchored in the appreciation relationship. Furthermore failure is an expression of the “consequence of ineffective management of the labour-power for which the entrepreneur him/herself is responsible.”27 This transition from appreciation to admiration in the course of the transformation of organisations underlines the reciprocal relationship between (organisational) structures and relationships of recognition. Reciprocal relationship does not however mean that both levels change at the same speed or in the same sense. This is mainly because recognition relationships must first be produced by way of interpretation before they can be effectively used. This is the “filter function” aspect of recognition which now needs to be analysed. The pursuit of both recognition for belonging and recognition for (market) success relies on a horizon of collectively shared representations.28 Only by reference to such a common horizon of interpretation and value can subjectively different performances, abilities, and skills, as well as individual characteristics and particularities, be expressed in a general, intersubjectively understandable way.29 However the aspiration for recognition is not realised in the tickingoff of normatively generalised behavioural expectations and collective interpretations. Subjects cannot simply perform specified tasks in a mechanical action mode, because action is constitutively based on one’s own interpretive performances. This practice of interpretation is not just a “contemplative taking note, but rather the full involvement of an agent, who as a result is also a being involved in changing reality.”30 Subjective interpretations of social recognition relationships thus translate intersubjective ideas about what constitutes good work, recognition-worthy performances, or success worthy of admiration into the corresponding individual practices. The concepts so translated 27   S. Voswinkel, “Die Anerkennung der Arbeit im Wandel. Zwischen Würdigung und Bewunderung,” p. 58. 28   See A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, trans J. Anderson, Cambridge, Polity, 1995. 29  See ibid., p. 121. 30  H. Popitz, Phänomene der Macht, second enlarged edition, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 1992, p. 116.

exclusive focus on figures. exclusive focus on returns309 serve prospectively as orientation points for one’s own future professional action as well as retrospectively as a frame of reference for processes of self-interpretation of one’s current and past professional biography. The subjective actualisation of society’s recognition relations represents an essentially regulative element which substantially shapes the subjective mode of perceiving and dealing with the structural reorganisation measures sketched at the beginning. The ensuing—decidedly ambivalent—consequences of such a process should now be illustrated with an empirical case. 2.  The Case Study: Marketisation and the Reflexive Organisation of “Social Order” a.  The Reorganisation of Chemie AG—or: The Ship on High Seas The empirical material was collated in an internationally active chemical company with its headquarters in Switzerland.31 The case study centres on interviews with the laboratory managers Dr. Schmidtmeier and Dr. Bleibtreu, who are responsible for the official approval of pesticides. Schmidtmeier, a woman in her mid-thirties, has been employed at Chemie AG for eleven years. She has a doctorate in biology and has been in charge of a small laboratory team which researches the behaviour of certain active plant substances. Bleibtreu, a man aged 42, has already been working for 15 years as leader of a laboratory unit which is responsible both for studies and special assignments. At the centre of the interview is the question of how these two highly  qualified employees perceive the radical reorganisation of “their” company. Since 2004 Chemie AG has undergone a comprehensive conversion  of its organisational structures which operates under the name 31   The empirical material was collated by Thomas Wex, Andreas Polster and Norbert Huchler as part of the project “Learner Research Context.” The project was funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research and conducted by Joachim Ludwig (University of Potsdam), K. R. Müller and Margit Weihrich (University of the Bundeswehr, Munich); in collaboration with Gerd G. Voß. My thanks are due to Joachim Ludwig for allowing me to use the collated material for this paper. I am also grateful to colleagues from the interpretation workshop “Chemiewerk” for inspirational discussions on both complementary as well as mutually exclusive perspectives on the material. In the presentation of the reorganisation measures I draw on the documentation of the case material of Norbert Huchler and Thomas Wex. Along with these two, I am also thankful to Claudia Dreke, Andreas Polster and Micheal Weis.

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“Leadership through excellence” (Project LEt’s go). The individual LEt’s go measures aim to deal with the official approval of pesticides in a faster, more cost-effective manner. To achieve this target, the following restructuring measures were adopted: • there was a 20 per cent reduction in staff across all departments and hierarchical levels, • the individual departments were required to keep their cost structures transparent and also to critically examine these in view of a “make or buy decision” and where necessary to contract out studies to a third party (outsourcing), • in the target agreement processes, achieving market indices gained in importance, • operation-related project work, flexitime systems, and strict result orientation intended to increase the ability to react to fluctuation in demand, • two formerly separate departments, which were specialised in studies on animals and plants respectively, were amalgamated, • office premises were reallocated according to businessmanagement efficiency criteria (compaction). Thus the points of departure for the case at hand are the ubiquitous focus on the market, the dramatic redundancies, and the amalgamation of two formerly separate areas. Staff who previously carried out either plant or animal studies are, from now on, to attend to both areas. Thus, in addition to increasing workloads, there is also a rise in qualification requirements. The management anticipates the attendant problems and initially takes care to have the new strategic orientation communicated to the staff by external moderators. A workshop is held in which long term development and qualification projects are conceived in accordance with requirements and then translated into plans—which, however, in the business of daily life quickly fall victim to the “urgency of the temporary (Vordringlichkeit des Befristeten).”32 The outcome of the “first to market” management strategy is “that other important issues, namely, further training, group integration, integration of other study types, get left behind” (Schmidtmeier).

32   See N. Luhmann, “The Future Cannot Begin: Temporal Structures in Modern Society,” Social Research, Vol. 43, No. 1, 1976, pp. 130–152.

exclusive focus on figures. exclusive focus on returns311 On the other hand the external consultants engaged by Chemie AG have the task of “designing” a new self-understanding which henceforth should realign the professional experience and actions of the staff. In order for the meaning of the new scripts to be fixed, the staff— externally moderated—paint the following picture: the company is represented as a ship that is in the possession and control of the ship-owner, namely the “customer.” This is an extraordinary image. It is no longer the management, but rather the customer who determines the course direction and makes difficult decisions, which are (apparently) to be executed without seeking alternatives. The customer, who is introduced as an anonymous construction in the collective singular, is thus granted enormous powers of enforcement. Ultimately it is the ship-owner/customer who decides whether the ship remains in operation, or is soon to be run aground; whether it sets sail with this team, or with another one. And there is additional drama to be found in the situation at sea—certainly meant to symbolize the turbulence on the world market—where one can never know if the winds are favourable, or if the ship will get caught in a dangerous storm which could capsize it. The image thus exhorts the employees to perceive themselves as a community drawn together by fate. Everyone is sitting in the same boat and must obey the allpowerful ship-owner/customer and confront the “forces of nature”— the market. Although it is not up to the captain to determine the route, if the ship encounters turbulence along the way, then the captain must be unconditionally obeyed. In the end it is only the frictionless interlinking of all the individual tasks which can ensure survival. The reward for the unconditional surrender and the intense efforts and commitment of the team lies in having warded off the danger and still being left alive on deck. At the same time the picture conceals the high profits. It remains unsaid that it is a decision of the captain/management to allow external consultants to come in and “rescript” the experiences and actions of the team as a product of “market constraints.” At the same time the image by no means denies hierarchies: there is the captain, the ship’s officers and the team. Obscuring the picture, however, and shirking the conflict-laden discussion, is the question of whether normative expectations and claims can be addressed. The ship metaphor draws together promises of rescue with existential threats: whoever makes an effort claims market “leadership through excellence,” and gets the better of the company’s internal and external rivals, will be able to stand their ground both in the internal organisation as

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well as in the face of world-wide competition. Thus the ship metaphor lays the foundation for a new order of recognition: recognition in the form of admiration is only earned by those who secure markets, conquer new ones, and serve demand both promptly and profitably. Whoever disregards this rule, is unwilling to get “fit” for competition, keep a “lean” profile through personnel cuts, or stay supple via outsourcing, will sink with every man and mouse in tow. All employee expectations of arranging the restructuring processes differently, exploiting any contingent room for manoeuvre, catering for normative aspirations, can be quashed with an allusion to the—dramatically staged—constraints of the market. Thus the ship metaphor also has a micropolitical component which in the case of conflict lays down new contextual conditions. The captain/management demands unconditional compliance and commitment—in the guise of there being no alternative. And with this the case structure is installed: as a consequence of the strict market orientation, the employees are to work more, faster, and autonomously, while the management withdraws from its responsibility for ensuring that the conditions are met which make such challenging and cumbersome work possible. The best-practise directive of getting more products, in a shorter time, at lower prices, to marketripe approval, blanks out path dependencies, structural restrictions, and traditionally rooted claims. On the risky ship journey it is the arrival that really counts; the question of what sacrifices must be made for this is at best secondary. Thus a structural conflict—to be developed in the next section—is pre-programmed. b.  The Subjective Actualisation of Admiration The interpretation of the ship’s metaphor has shown that the top management of Chemie AG are trying to establish a new order of recognition. In the context of the horizon of interpretation created by the new organisation, recognition will henceforth only be granted for those commitments, qualifications, and achievements that can prove themselves on the market. However, this does not mean that the employees adopt the new recognition order intact and immediately implement it as the only valid guideline for their experiences and actions. Rather, the recognition order which has been officially communicated and structurally recommended through the organisation will only be able to effectively orient the actions of the employees once

exclusive focus on figures. exclusive focus on returns313 it has been viewed through the lens of each subjective evaluation and interpretation. For this reason a yawning gap can emerge between the recognition order proposed by the organisation and the recognition order that is actually realised subjectively for each individual, as will be seen in the next sections with senior staff members Bleibtreu and Schmidtmeier. Schmidtmeier and Bleibtreu see themselves as successful leaders and highly qualified specialists who naturally lay claim to recognition in the form of admiration. At the beginning of the interview Bleibtreu thus ranks himself as a top performer who “takes his fate into his own hands” and has a clear vision of his professional targets and ambitions and furthermore has people who support him in this (Bleibtreu). He explains distinctions gained as being due in no small part to his having anticipated during his career the new organisational direction of having everyone equally qualified for everything: “because I was always curious I’ve been partly doing this myself from the start” (Bleibtreu). Showing full self-confidence he refers to his position as “deputy plant manager” (Bleibtreu) and sketches the whole panorama of his duties, assignments, and personnel and facility  responsibilities. Capacity overload is not in his vocabulary: “The only problem which I  never really solved was devolving aspects of my work when I was given new assignments (laughs)” (Bleibtreu). Bleibtreu’s self-projection as a confident top performer is confirmed by the interviewer: “So you are omnipotent.” Bleibtreu confirms this attribution with the lapidary comment: “I try to be” (Bleibtreu). Thus Bleibtreu orients the reconstruction of his current and past career biography towards the recognition mode of admiration. Contrary to the new way of reading, which reserves admiration only for marketable achievements, Bleibtreu, just like his colleague Schmidtmeier, conceives the canon of admiration-worthy goods more extensively. In their view they earn admiration for their specialist qualifications, leadership capacities, and their above average commitment. Within the old order this recognition was also granted to them. Chemie AG rewarded their dedication with promotion and granted them the symbolic apparatus of recognition that was customary for successful senior staff. As the company realigns, their quest for recognition in the form of admiration is increasingly in vain; the foundations which carry their conception of admiration-worthy performance are beginning to totter. Following the amalgamation of two units which housed specialists

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in  animal and plant studies, their expert status is depreciated. If everyone is supposed to be able to do everything, and studies can be commissioned externally depending on opportunity costs, specialist  quali­fications become a standard expectation, which everyone— even the stigmatised “cheap labour” abroad—can fulfil. Thus the prospect of being admired for “limited” specialist qualification is on the wane. In the course of the reorganisation, self-organising capacities and personal responsibility are expected from all staff across all hierarchical strata. As a result, competencies which were previously only attributed to management staff become a standard expectation whose fulfilment, accordingly, is not rewarded with admiration. Admiration is granted not to what is normal, but to what is special. Thus Schmidtmeier’s and Bleibtreu’s pursuit of admiration for specialist qualifications and leadership competency can now hardly find any structural connection points. So it is not surprising that they are henceforth denied further reward in the form of an upwardly mobile career. Bleibtreu’s standing is even down-graded. In the course of the consolidation of offices he loses his private office and must share his workplace with a colleague. On the symbolic scale of prestige he sinks down in full view of all. c.  In the Appreciation Trap Bleibtreu fails in his claim to admiration as a high performer. And at the end of the interview, little remains of his self-presentation as omnipotent executive. The 43 year old now describes himself as “old”; he is disappointed, resigned, and angry in the face of the extensive disrespect he has experienced. In an attempt to avert the problem  of being on the receiving end of such disrespect, Bleibtreu for his part devalues the new recognition order based on market success. He compares the new strategic direction of the company and its strict results orientation to the methodical over-fulfilment of targets in the centralised socialist planned economy: “it reminds me of those times, I used to have relatives over there, of 120 per cent plan fulfilment or 150 per cent. It’s actually just the same here” (Bleibtreu). The barb of his criticism is the observation that with the new direction it is not about an advanced organisation strategy, but rather the return of centralist socialist bureaucratic principles which have historically outlived themselves. He thus devalues the new order which

exclusive focus on figures. exclusive focus on returns315 has downgraded him. As a countermove Bleibtreu invokes the “good” old order. He points out that “before,” a job in the plant was a form of lifeinsurance, which allowed you to plan your whole life. He recounts how pleased his mother-in-law was over his successful interview: “it was clear to her then that her daughter would be provided for (Bleibtreu).” There was no fear of losing one’s post, the company took care of personal matters, for instance by asking after “the wife or the sick child” (Bleibtreu). At the same time the company was a lifeworld establishment: on Fridays the managers cooked schnitzel in the laboratory with their staff, they went bowling together and there were regular springtime hikes. In this context Bleibtreu does not lay claim to admiration for his professional competence and leadership skills. He is rather laying claim to acknowledgement as a co-worker belonging to the company. The mutual social exchange of trust and integration in return for protection and consideration belongs constitutively to the old order to which Bleibtreu and Schmidtmeier appeal in vain. The company’s increased focus on the market and its associated orientation towards a short term economy deprive this exchange of its structural basis. Now the hitherto unquestioned assumptions are prised open and long term biographical projects come under pressure: “But I am confronted on a daily basis with my people’s queries: ‘tell me, how are things looking, I’ve built a house. Will I still be with you next week?’ ” (Bleibtreu). In the place of old securities there is a profound insecurity which can no longer be transformed into clear safeguarding strategies.  When by directive and according to a scattershot procedure, 20 per cent of the personnel across all hierarchical levels are made redundant, the criteria according to which one could perhaps be sorted into the league of the “superfluous” are not easy to recognise: the objective illegibility33 of the practical test leads to widespread insecurity on the part of the employees: “well now, are you not a bit too sure of yourself, should not you start thinking about things too?” (Bleibtreu). As a defence strategy against such insecurity Schmidtmeier and

33   See R. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, New York, Norton, 1998.

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Bleibtreu once more appeal to the old order of recognition. As a sign of recognition of their performance-vouching contributions they expect their boss, Herr Schneidt, to protect the group and thus fulfil his duty of care. For once there would be some communication and he would say: ‘hey, I’m fighting for the group.’ And not, ‘I’ll make another staff cut there, we could contract out more here’ (Bleibtreu).

In diametrical opposition to the comprehensive success and market orientation, Schmidtmeier and Bleibtreu maintain their claim to recognition for belonging and call upon the moral-economic commitments which the company owes its employees. Furthermore, by invoking acknowledgement claims, they manage to express their outrage and anger at the rampant intensification of their workload. Bleibtreu and Schmidtmeier address their expectation to higher management, in person to their direct superior Schneidt, in the following way: the workload must be reduced and daily work must also be recognised. It is not a given that these studies will be finished, they require a lot of time (Bleibtreu).

This claim however breaks up against Schneidt’s leadership style. Disregarding the daily running of the business, ignoring the com­ mitment of his staff, and giving no consideration to their lifeworld expectations and problems, are all part of this style. Due to the high demand on his time and his frequent absence, Schidtmeier gets the feeling “that he really does not know what’s going on anymore” (Schmidtmeier). Everyday business remains invisible to him. The attempt to enlighten him on the everyday details, the toil and the effort, runs aground because he’s “also lacking somewhat the deeper interest” (Schmidtmeier). This becomes clear in the way he does not get involved in details, but brushes aside the problem at hand asking something like “have you got it under control?” Staff requests to show consideration for their workloads often end with the allocation of further tasks. At the same time it would be premature to impute the lack of consideration exclusively to lack of interest, lack of time, or general tactlessness on the part of the superior. The blindness towards excessive workloads has strong structural reasons which are rooted in the new regulation tools of target and result orientation. The concentration on targets and results masks

exclusive focus on figures. exclusive focus on returns317 daily business and makes it impossible to thematise issues of labourpower expenditure, exertion, and effort: “Exclusive focus on figures. Exclusive focus on returns” (Bleibtreu). Behind this exclusivity there lies a new arrangement for the performance policy. In order to develop  this problem I hearken back to a conceptual suggestion of Voswinkel.34 First, in view of performance, a differentiation should be made between the input and output sides. The input side can be further subdivided into: • talent/qualification/aptitude • commitment/exertion/workload/labour expenditure The output side comprises three dimensions, namely • the material dimension (quantity or quality) • the social dimension (problem solving, social benefits) • the economic dimension (business profit, market success)35 A management focusing exclusively on results places the economic dimension in a central position and is indifferent to all other dimensions of performance. Recognition in the mode of admiration is linked to market success: the process of delivering the performance takes a backseat, along with time and effort, duration of the work effort, stress, and commitment.36 Even the quality of a product or its social meaning are only conditionally important, namely when the product has been successfully placed on the market. It is only in retrospect that the decision-makers can ascertain whether or not the product is a market success and thus whether commitment and contribution to performance are worthy of recognition. After all, the market only evaluates performances ex post. Thus the laboratory managers Bleibtreu and Schmidtmeier are left with the problem of having to make decisions on 34   See S. Voswinkel, “Leistung und Anerkennung—Sind Zielvereinbarungen eine Lösung?,” in eds. U.-M. Hagebrauck et al. Handbuch Betriebsklima, München, Mering, 2003, pp. 179–196; S. Voswinkel, “Die Organisation der Vermarktlichung von Organisationen—Das Beispiel erfolgsbezogenen Entgelts,” in eds. W. Jäger and U. Schimank Organisationsgesellschaft. Facetten und Perspektiven. Wiesbaden, Vs, 2004, pp. 287–312. 35  Voswinkel, “Leistung und Anerkennung—Sind Zielvereinbarungen eine Lösung?,” p. 180. 36  See S. Neckel and K. Dröge, “Die Verdienst und ihr Preis. Leistung in der Marktgesellschaft,” in ed. A. Honneth, Befreiung aus der Mündigkeit. Paradoxien des gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus. Frankfurt/Main, Campus, 2002, pp. 93–116, p. 99.

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the investment of time and work today on the basis of what they will only find out tomorrow.37 In this organisationally prescribed anticipation of uncertainties the input and output dimensions of performance diverge. Or put differently: one might well show commitment, put one’s qualifications and working hours at the service of the common cause, but if the result of the work is not rewarded by the market, then all the effort has simply failed, and is therefore not given recognition.38 Thus in the performance based concept of “Management by Results” the whole input side, including expert qualifications and acknowledgement of contributions, is systematically disregarded. Bleibtreu sharply criticises the limitations of this concept: So when I think now what percentage of my working day I use to get the daily business running, in order to ensure that my plants are really growing, it’s a percentage rate that, on some days, lies between 60, 70, 80 per cent. Sometimes it’s almost 100 per cent. But it’s only the strategic aims which are seen. (…) No one sees anymore how much work goes into it. (…) Daily work is no longer acknowledged (Bleibtreu).

The standard of reference for his outrage and disappointment is acknowledgement (for which he now waits in vain) of contributions and sacrifices made in the name of performance. These passages show that in the face of imminent experiences of disqualification and excessive demands, at least the remains and residue of the old moral economic order are called to attention. The recourse to acknowledgement claims lends the employees’ protest a voice and protects them from experiences of disqualification—this, at least, is how it appears at first sight. With this appeal, Schmidtmeier and Bleibtreu bring the problem on themselves of appealing to a recognition order which in the course of the company’s reorientation has lost its structural foundations and has been culturally devalued. But Bleibtreu is also aware of this problem, as he describes himself as an “old romantic” who is hanging on to “sentimentalities.” However, it must remain an open question how humiliating it is for highly qualified personnel no longer to self-confidently 37  See U. Holtgrewe, “Meinen Sie, da sagt jemand danke, wenn man geht?” Anerkennungs- und Mißachtungsverhältnisse im Prozeß organisationeller Trans­ formation,” in eds. Holtgrewe, Voswinkel and Wagner, Anerkennung und Arbeit, pp. 63–84. 38  See Neckel and Dröge, “Die Verdienst und ihr Preis. Leistung in der Marktgesellschaft.”

exclusive focus on figures. exclusive focus on returns319 insist on recognition for success, but rather to call for the acknowledgement of its victims and thus to make a claim which is normally made by less qualified “self-sacrificing housewives” and dutiful “workhorses.”39 Furthermore, according to the new recognition order, insisting on the acknowledgement of one’s commitment to sacrifice and thus presenting oneself as a victim deserving of pity is a sign of a lack of success40: high-potential performers who believe in themselves and their resilience do not in general contravene the rules that allow one to orchestrate the kind of “omnipotence” that attracts esteem. Schmidtmeier and Bleibtreu put themselves in an acknowledgement  trap of their own making: they pay for (fruitless) protest with self-humiliation. To solve this problem they change track again and lay claim to recognition in the form of admiration—without however relinquishing their claim to acknowledgement. d.  In the Admiration Trap But here too they become entangled in the conflict situation between “old” recognition of good scientific work, which they try to rescue in vain, and “new” economically oriented recognition for quickly realised market success. They criticise the new order while at the same time following it. This is due, on the one hand, to their position in the hierarchical structure. As laboratory managers they are responsible for carrying out the studies and, at the same time, according to the stipulations of the LEt’s-go project, they are supposed to reduce costs and vouch for reaching the benchmarks. This interface function drives  them into the structural conflict of having to shoulder the contradictions between sale and science. On the other hand, the contradiction between complaining about the new recognition order and simultaneously complying can also be explained in the recognition perspective. In the course of the company restructuring, the deadlines for laboratory studies and scientific expertise are no longer set according to pure scientific criteria, but rather follow the moving target of getting the product as quickly as possible onto the marketplace. The required  J. Behrens, “Selbstverwichlung,” in eds. H-J. Hoffmann-Nowotny and F. Gehmann, Ansprüche an die Arbeit, Frankfurt/Main, Campus, 1984, 117–135, p. 122. 40   See S. Voswinkel, Anerkennung und Reputation. Die Dramaturgie industrieller Beziehungen, p. 319. 39

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speed gain can only be reached by lowering the standards. Both Schmidtmeier and Bleibtreu report that, previously, quality standards approached those of a dissertation and enough time was allowed for this. From this it can be concluded that for Schmidtmeier and Bleibtreu the central point of reference for the recognition of work is, or rather was, the professional standards of good scientific work. By contrast, the new reference criterion for the recognition of good work is an extra-scientific, business management one which is mainly focused on sales volume. “There are not any more deadlines in that sense. The deadline is really ASAP—as soon as possible” (Bleibtreu). The decisive thing is that this criterion is conceptually underdefined. While the quality criteria of good scientific laboratory work were more or less capable of answering the question, “how good is good enough?,” the mixed criteria—scientifically speaking: as good as is necessary for approval; financially speaking: out on the market as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible—elude a clear-cut definition. With this an element of inner disquiet comes into play which risks developing into a new form of self-exploitation. Whoever receives recognition today for rapid results should be even faster tomorrow, should indeed—as a boss of the company surveyed puts it—“set tougher milestones.” Behind this lies a power phenomenon resting on recognition, which Paris41 referred to as “politics of praise”: the organisation’s official communication on recognition for strong performance entails the duty of continuing to prove oneself worthy of the current praise in the future—principally through further increases in performance. Resting on one’s laurels tends to be replaced by a continual demand to develop. Accordingly, as Paris observes, the implicit, ‘keep it up!’ resonating in all praise fixes at the same time a performance level, which henceforth may not be fallen short of. (…) Praise, in a manner of speaking, obstructs the return to mediocrity and installs the extraordinary effort as the new normality.42

This new risk of self-exploitation and the new ambiguities outlined here help to answer the question of why Bleibtreu and Schmidtmeier, despite their heavy burdens, do not enter into a struggle for the

  See R. Paris, “Die Politik des Lobs,” in Paris, Stachel und Speer. Machtstudien, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp,1998, pp. 152–195. 42   ibid., p.160. 41

exclusive focus on figures. exclusive focus on returns321 r­ ecognition of reasonable workloads, but rather tenaciously attempt to meet all demands, however contradictory and strenuous they may be. Withholding performance reserves and jamming on the brakes could only be achieved by the highly qualified at the price of incurring the disrespect of the new management in their very own field—the field of good specialised work—and thereby adversely deviating from the new recognition order. Even though Bleibtreu and Schmidtmeier criticise the new recognition standard of “good” work, they nonetheless submit to the market-centred aspect of the new recognition order. They do not manage to take an indifferent stance towards the new order. This becomes clear when both—like it or not—realise that it makes sense to stop imposing the traditional standard of exactitude. They are thus obliged as scientists to lower their criteria for good work and with this to throw overboard a central reference—once valid on both the personal and company level—for the recognition of good work. With the retraction of their own professional standards, they decrease their selfrespect. At the same time they must answer for their work to the licensing authorities and endure the rebuke of the authority official: “how on earth could you get like that” (Bleibtreu). Following the market-centred results orientation, the highly qualified specialists Schmidtmeier and Bleibtreu are compelled themselves to disregard relevant dimensions of the recognition of good work: with ever increasing tempo and ever decreasing personnel they barely manage to achieve “still good” work results. A specific tension arises at this point from the fact that management demands personal responsibility for the shaping of the work process and responsibility is increasingly self-ascribed by the employees. Schmidtmeier calls attention to this conflict between the lack of structural support for this attribution and the symbolic representation of the employees as personally responsible agents. She worries that: we’ll drive something into the wall, that perhaps a product won’t be registered because of us. Or that we’ll hand in faulty products, which perhaps sometime later … will come to light. And then of course there is the question what will happen then … will you yourself be the fall guy? (Schmidtmeier)

There are two sides to personal responsibility: on the one hand the autonomy that is materially supported, of being able to take decisions and push them through, and on the other hand the ascription of responsibility onto the decision maker for the consequences of the decision. In the company surveyed, the two sides are out of balance.

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Appointments, deadlines, targets, resources are preset. If, however, the market success fails to materialise, Schmidtmeier and Bleibtreu, by virtue of their positioning as “personally responsible project leaders,” have failed and are to blame for their failure. Failure, however, in the world of highly qualified personnel who are self-reliant and take personal responsibility, is associated with deep contempt and leads to the penetrating shame of the “failure.” The pursuit of recognition therefore traps the laboratory managers Schmidtmeier and Bleibtreu in an endless engagement which is perhaps capable of deflecting failure. Chemie AG’s “flexible market-centred” restructuring43 is not only based on structural constraints, but is grounded also in the damaged self-esteem of its employees. The potentially inferior personnel attempt to evade the threat of humiliation by obeying the corresponding framework of norms and appraisal. This however leads to them becoming entangled in an obligation to prove their “questionable” quality rating and to accept the shame-provoking new order as the guiding principle of their experience and action. With this, Schmidtmeier and Bleibtreu are stuck in an admiration trap of their own making. 3.  Conclusion and Prospects: the Renaissance of the Duty Ethos The reorganisation of Chemie AG operates on two levels. First, the transition is introduced at the level of concrete restructuring measures. The “internal marketisation” described in the scholarly literature does not however imply a levelling of the difference between organisation and market in favour of the latter. Individual restructuring measures are rather more about the “organisation of marketisation,” which follows well-known organisation principles.44 Management defines what market success is: within the scope of agreements about targets, the path to success is staked out and, with the setting of benchmarks, success is even written in advance. Second, on the meta-level of organisational self-description, management also tries to make the employees’ “sense-making” an object of restructuration. To put it bluntly, one could say that the management relies not just on silent coercive 43  See Dörre, “Das flexibel-marktzentrierte Produktionsmodell—Gravitationszentrum eines neuen Kapitalismus?” 44   S. Voswinkel, “Die Organisation der Vermarktlichung von Organisationen—Das Beispiel erfolgsbezogenen Entgelts,” in eds. W. Jäger and U. Schimank, Organisa­ tionsgesellschaft. Facetten und Perspektiven, p. 306.

exclusive focus on figures. exclusive focus on returns323 relations or the power of system integration; it also tries through the ship metaphor to transform the perception and evaluation modes of the employees in line with the company’s new direction.45 The quintessence of the new scripts prescribed by management can be described in Weber’s terms as follows: Weber portrays the pure “consociation (Vergesellschaftung) through exchange in the market” as the “a-ethical” (“anethische”) institution per se, since the “masterless slaves” cannot meaningfully interpret the market order into which they have been thrown. It is truer than ever that these impersonal forms of rule can by no means be ethically regulated.46 The ship metaphor is part of a “concept population” whose centre is occupied by the pervasive semantic figure of “inevitable market constraints.”47 In this semantic field the “market” takes on the role of an “omnipotent subject” which acts “as a compelling, unstoppable external force” to which the only possible response is adjustment.48 In this context Flecker advocates the idea that these semantics target a “dissolution of boundaries between requirements and exploitation.”49 Protest is nipped in the bud because the semantic figure of a constraining force makes market domination anonymous. In the face of severe structural constraints the question of legitimation can hardly be asked meaningfully.50 Contrary to a version of the colonisation thesis which moves too quickly and too directly from the level of system integration to that of social integration, this chapter has shown that Schmidtmeier and Bleibtreu do not seamlessly carry out the process of marketisation on themselves. Nor do they simply accept the interpretation of the management according to which the market is an “a-ethical” (“anethische”) institution per se, against which the top-management themselves are 45   See Kieser, “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Organisation beim Reden. Organisieren als Kommunizieren,” Industrielle Beziehungen, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1998, pp. 45–75. 46   See M. Weber, Economy and Society: an Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1978. 47  R. Stichweh, “Semantik und Sozialstruktur. Zur Logik einersystemtheoretischen Unterscheidung,” Soziale Systeme, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2000, pp. 237–250, p. 247. 48  H. Tyrell, “Singular oder Plural—einleitende Bemerkungen zu Globalisierung und Weltgesellschaft,” in Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Sonderheft, Weltgesellschaft: Theoretische Zugänge und empirische Problemlagen, 2005, pp. 1–50, pp. 21, 30. 49  Flecker, “Intrapreneure, Arbeitskraftunternehmer und andere Zwitterwesen,” p. 32. 50  See Dörre, “Das flexibel-marktzentrierte Produktionsmodell—Gravitationszentrum eines neuen Kapitalismus?,” p. 28.

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equally powerless. They see very well that the new direction of the company is a consequence of management decisions. Furthermore the difference between market and organisation is and remains clear to them. This knowledge leads them to demand that all remaining room for manoeuvre be explored. In the name of the old order they address normative expectations to the management. Its responsibility does not remain invisible. However, in so doing, Schmidtmeier and Bleibtreu become caught up in the muddled conglomerate of old and new claims to recognition and thus paradoxically, on the level of social integration, prepare the way for “colonisation.” The attempt to secure recognition in the mode of admiration leads, under the conditions of the new order, to the risk of a recognition-driven self-exploitation. This is not least because admiration for individually attributable success in the final instance refers the subjects back to themselves, and this also holds in the case of failure. The attribution problem in the recognition mode of appreciation is different. Although from a sociological perspective it can be observed that the new performance policy and its attendant instruments, with their market-centred focus on results, structurally preprograms the failure of the acknowledgement claim, the interviewees Schmidtmeier and Bleibtreu deal with the structural conflict in an intensely personal manner. The normative expectations they address to their superior Schneidt have to do with the appreciation or acknowledgement they are due, which remains a powerful mode of recognition capable of providing personal orientation. This personal attribution of responsibility abstracts from the structural context in which Schneidt is positioned. In their narratives he appears as a cool executive organ of the “new thought.” Whether Schneidt as a person is a driven highachiever without consideration for others, or whether he is himself driven by upper management (or a mixture of both), cannot be determined on the basis of the material. On the other hand the perspective of recognition enables us to systematically reconstruct the expectations and claims which Bleibtreu and Schmidtmeier direct at the “attribution figure” Schneidt. Their conventional way of attributing responsibility, which focuses on persons and not on market structures conceived as anonymous, is grounded in the recognition mode of appreciation, which rewards integration and loyalty with protection and consideration. For highly qualified employees however this is a problematic mode of recognition. After all in this particular mode of recognition it is not

exclusive focus on figures. exclusive focus on returns325 autonomy and independent thinking, but rather submission and faithful fulfilment of duty, which are considered worthy of recognition. Following the normative subjectivisation of work51 and the associated increase in demand for self-reliance and autonomy, we can surmise that highly qualified staff in particular, such as Bleibtreu and Schmidtmeier, will try to balance the asymmetry in the recognition mode of acknowledgement with the recognition mode of admiration. Or put another way: against the background of radical reorganisation  and internal marketisation processes with the accompanying insecurities—including those concerning professional biographies— they claim their rights to the acknowledgement of their performancevouching contributions and to the admiration of their highly qualified work and scientific expertise. Thus instead of the company’s structural demand for comprehensive market and results orientation, Bleibtreu and Schmidtmeier attempt to place the figure of the highly qualified staff member who does want to work independently and contribute their share, but should not be held fully responsible for market risks. But this bricolage of acknowledgement and admiration is itself condemned to failure. Their losing battle for recognition aims at a pluralisation of the content and reference points of recognition. In spite of the increasing pressure towards marketisation, they attempt to assert their professional identity as experts in their field, for within relations of pluralistic recog­ nition one can fail in terms of market targets whilst still being successful as a specialised scientist. The management on the other hand offers admiration for (market) success without acknowledgement or any long term binding commitment linked to affiliation. This is to be read from the implementation of regulation tools such as target and results orientation which are systematically blind to the aspect of appreciation of daily work and the routines that ensure the maintenance of performance. The new recognition order which the company is trying to put into effect leads to a one-sidedness of recognition and a systematic shortage of recognition opportunities. As a consequence of this onesidedness the company casts off its Simmelian duties of gratitude and the normative obligations related to the model of consideration.52 51   See M. Baethge, “Arbeit, Vergesellschaftung, Identität. Zur zunehmenden normativen Subjektivierung der Arbeit,” Soziale Welt, Vol. 42, 1991, pp. 6–19. 52   See A. W. Gouldner, Wildcat Strike. A Study in Worker Management Relationships, New York, Harper & Row, 1965.

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Within the new recognition order the employees are positioned as “labour-power entrepreneurs who sell their labour-power and who, as entrepreneurs of their own labour-power, are the only ones to whom the risks of success and failure are to be assigned.”53 None of this leaves the interviewees untouched. In contrast to the company’s orchestrated culture of strong valuation for topperformance on the world market, there is not a single passage to be found in the two interviews where the highly qualified Bleibtreu or Schmidtmeier report with producer’s pride on the contents, results, or special quality of their work. Consequently, in their own horizon of perception, all possible reference points disappear which could anchor an aspiration for the recognition and admiration of outstanding specialist achievements. The producer’s pride falls behind the empty competence of the rat-race participant who wonders at the fact that somehow one still manages to do everything: “At least the shop’s running. There’s a few rough spots here and there.” What remains is having to deal with one’s disappointment, resignation, and the reversion to the culturally devalued duty ethos of the secondary virtues. The highly qualified “working Spartans”54 grit their teeth and get down to work: “well, we’re working at perhaps 120 per cent capacity, but there’s not a peep out of anyone” (Bleibtreu). The “economisation of subjectivity” is therefore not only an expression of the harsh structural constraints or the consequence of a semantically suggested bedazzlement. It also expresses the paradoxical effect of failing struggles for recognition—this not least because it is in fact not a struggle for recognition, but rather a struggle against the subjective experience of devalorisation, the insecurity of one’s position within the new constellation, and the individual experience of suffering. In this context it is only a question that can be answered empirically whether a new legitimation regime will develop that makes visible the collective reference points of individual suffering and can thereby make it possible to organise struggles for recognition within a contemporary setting. Translated from the German by Jean-Philippe Deranty and Nicholas H. Smith. 53   Voswinkel, “Die Anerkennung der Arbeit im Wandel. Zwischen Würdigung und Bewunderung,” p. 57. 54   See M. Behr, “Ostdeutsche Arbeitsspartaner,” Die politische Meinung, No. 369, 2000, pp. 27–38.

Chapter twelve

A Critical Assessment of Orthodox Economic Conceptions of Work Dale Tweedie When economists argue that the organisation of work must change due to economic constraints or goals, what concepts of work, and of the role of work in people’s lives, are implicit in these arguments? And what effects do these concepts of work have on how we view the desirability or otherwise of contemporary working life? This chapter addresses these questions, in three parts. Part 1 distinguishes two dimensions of work: the resources work provides, either directly or via a wage; and the act of work, or working, which refers to the experience of performing a given task in a particular physical and social environment. This chapter focuses on economic analysis of the act of work: what is work to economists besides that by which people earn an income? Part 2 reconstructs three orthodox (neoclassical) economic responses to this issue. As economists such as David Spencer and Ugo Pagano have shown, there are substantial variations in how the act of work is constructed within the orthodox economic tradition.1 Early orthodox economic models provide more or less substantive analyses of how the act of work directly affects the labour supply and improves or undermines human welfare. By contrast, more contemporary orthodox models either exclude these aspects of work entirely or consider them only indirectly, by presuming that people’s different subjective experiences of work are adequately reflected in observable differences in wages.  1   See U. Pagano, Work and Welfare in Economic Theory, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1985; D. Spencer, “Love’s Labor’s Lost? The Disutility of Work and Work Avoidance in the Economic Analysis of Labor Supply,” Review of Social Economy, Vol. 61, No. 2, 2003; D. Spencer, “Deconstructing the Labour Supply Curve,” Metroeconomica, Vol. 55, No. 4, 2004; D. Spencer, “From Pain to Opportunity Cost: The Eclipse of the Quality of Work as a Factor in Economic Theory,” History of Political Economy, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2004.

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Part 3 evaluates orthodox economic models of work in light of two recent theoretically informed diagnoses of pathologies in contemporary working life: those offered by Christophe Dejours and Richard Sennett. The pathologies Dejours and Sennett diagnose are invisible to, or marginalised by, contemporary economic theories, yet these pathologies are also attributed to the individualistic and competitive forms of work organisation that many economists advocate. Due to their more substantive model of the act of work, earlier orthodox economic theories are in fact better placed to analyse these contemporary trends in work than what is now the economic orthodoxy. Conversely, a reexamination of these earlier models reveals that Dejours’ and Sennett’s diagnoses can develop concerns about work organisation which have been historically—although not currently—part of the economic mainstream. 1.  Work in Two Dimensions Work provides the material conditions of life, yet clearly this is not all that work provides.2 While many types of work provide similar material rewards, not all work is equally fulfilling: some work is more interesting, better respected, or contributes more to society than others, which is in turn reflected in people’s overall job satisfaction. The same point can be made negatively, since empirical research in both economics and psychology indicates that the suffering people often experience during long-term unemployment is not well explained by the loss of income alone.3 This research does not show that work is a necessary component of the good life, but it does show that the contribution 2   Note that “work” and “labour” will be used interchangeably in this chapter, since they do not denote distinct meanings in economics in the way they do for Hannah Arendt, for instance. See H. Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958. 3   For example, Clark and Oswald show substantial differences in reported wellbeing across a range of categories for unemployed as against employed, in A. E. Oswald and A. J. Clark, “Unhappiness and Unemployment,” The Economic Journal, Vol. 108, 1994. Theodossiou notes similar differences, and emphasises the significant differences in subjective well-being between unemployed and low-paid employment, which suggests the significance of work as the key explanatory variable rather than income. See I. Theodossiou, “The Effects of Low-Pay and Unemployment on Psychological Well-Being: A Logistic Regression Approach,” Journal of Health Economics, Vol. 17, 1998. Johada provides a more comprehensive theoretical approach to the numerous ways unemployment undermines welfare beyond income effects, in M. Johada, Employment and Unemployment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982.



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work can make to human life cannot be adequately explained by the resources work provides alone. To better explain economic conceptions of work, it is useful to draw a broad distinction between the resources work provides, typically a wage, and what will be termed the act of work, or working. The act of work designates people’s particular experience of work, which includes their task, their affective response to that task, and the physical and social environment in which they work. While the resource dimension of work foregrounds issues of distributive justice, especially whether people deserve the resources their work provides, the act of work foregrounds the desirability or otherwise of the conditions under which people work. In focusing on the act of work in economic theory then, I leave to one side many significant issues as to the adequacy of economic models of wage determination. Instead, three issues in how the act of work is modeled in orthodox economics are considered below. The first is the extent to which workers are motivated by the experience of work relative to wages, and the possible tension between these two motivations. For instance, if a change in how work is organised increases productivity and wages while undermining working conditions, how do economists model the overall results, and desirability, of such a change? Secondly, to the extent that the act of work is included in economic analysis, how are the strikingly diverse experiences which working entails conceptualised? As John Kenneth Galbraith evocatively observed, the word “work” designates acts that are pleasurable, engaging and well-respected, and acts that are painful, mundane, and humiliating, as well as everything in between.4 Consequently, any generalised concept of working must incorporate experiences that vary not only in degree (for example, more or less pleasurable), but also in kind (for example, pain versus pleasure, well-respected versus humiliating, and so on). Thirdly, to what extent, if at all, do economic models incorporate the capacity of work to shape human capacities and skills over time? That is, if it is granted that people’s talents and personalities develop differently depending on their physical and social environments, then the influence of working conditions on workers is not limited to the

4   See J. K. Galbraith, The Economics of Innocent Fraud, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co, 2004, pp. 17–20.

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pleasure or pain these conditions cause at any given time. Rather, over time, the work people do and the environment in which they work will also influence the capacities and skills they have, and so the kind of life they can live, or indeed the types of people they become. Adam Smith’s well-known critique of the nascent industrial working conditions he observed was based on just this point.5 Smith worried that the mundane and repetitive working conditions brought on by the division of labour in factory production were not just unpleasant, but could also undermine the worker’s mental and social capacities, and so their ability to interact in meaningful and fulfilling ways with others. From this perspective, even work that is well-remunerated and relatively painless may be deleterious to human welfare if it represses—or fails to develop—the capacities that are necessary to live a rich and fulfilling human life. 2.  Economic Analysis of Work: Three Models This section outlines three economic models of work, which are drawn predominately from orthodox (neoclassical) economic explanations of labour supply. A full economic analysis of labour supply must address three issues: the source of available labourers (that is, population size and growth); how people allocate their available time between labour and other activities (that is, work versus leisure); and how labour time is distributed between different possible tasks or industries (for example, mining versus accountancy).6 The latter two issues in particular require at least a minimal response to the questions raised in Part 1, since these issues require a direct account of what motivates people to work, and at least an indirect account of how the choice to work or not work makes a person better or worse off overall. Of course, there are limits to how substantive a model of work it is reasonable to expect economists to provide here, in so far as the aim of their analysis is to explain movements in labour supply rather than to provide a comprehensive account of what work really is. However, drawing on Spencer and Pagano, I argue that there has been a progressive marginalisation of the act of work in orthodox economic theory 5   See A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Vol. 2, London, J. M. Dent and Sons, 1954, pp. 263–264. 6   See G. Becker, Economic Theory, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1971, p. 160.



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over time.7 It is the consequences of this retreat, especially relative to the growing influence of economic ideas on work organisation over recent decades, which will be explored in Part 3. To show changes in economic thinking over time, the following models of work are given in broadly temporal order, with Model A drawn from early orthodox economic theory, and Models B and C characteristic of more contemporary positions. It should be noted though that for reasons of brevity these models are indicative rather than exhaustive.8 Model A—The Pleasure and Pain of Work The defining feature of this model of work is a substantive account of how the act of work influences both labour supply and human welfare. The model is termed substantive in so far as it identifies the circumstances under which the act of work is pleasurable or painful, and then explains how these circumstances affect worker motivation and wellbeing. As David Spencer has shown, this approach is exemplified by William Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall.9 Jevons is one of three economists generally credited with developing the characteristic techniques of neoclassical economic analysis.10 His analysis of labour supply follows an explicitly utilitarian framework, where work is essentially a painful sacrifice endured for the pleasures of consuming the goods that work provides. Yet Jevons also identifies two distinct types of pleasure that work may produce. The first is the generic pleasure of bodily action, which, in small doses, is “almost     7  See Pagano, Work and Welfare in Economic Theory; Spencer, “Love’s Labor’s Lost?”; Spencer, “Deconstructing the Labour Supply Curve”; Spencer, “From Pain to Opportunity Cost.”     8  One especially notable omission is the comparatively recent development of personnel economics. For a discussion of this strand of neo-classical thought, as well as alternative economic approaches to labour theory such as institutionalism, see C. MacMillan, “Internal Labour Markets, Institutionalism and Personnel Economics,” Annual Conference of History of Economic Thought Society of Australia, Victoria, 2006; D. Spencer, The Political Economy of Work, Routledge, 2008.     9  See for instance Spencer, “Love’s Labor’s Lost?”; and Spencer “From Pain to Opportunity Cost.” 10  See M. Blaug, “Economic Theory in Retrospect,” Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 294. What exactly defines neoclassical analysis is a subject of debate not entered into here. For further discussion see: T. Aspromourgos, “On the Origins of the Term ‘Neoclassical’,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 10, 1986; M. Zafirovski, “How ‘Neo-Classical’ Is Neoclassical Economics? With Special Reference to Value Theory,” History of Economics Review, Vol. 29, 1999.

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merged in the pleasures of occupation and exercise.”11 The second is a more intellectual pleasure derived from being engaged in an inherently interesting task. The first type of pleasure is brief and transient, being limited by bodily fatigue, while the second type of pleasure may continue indefinitely, since “success of labour only excites to new exertions, the work itself being of an interesting and stimulating nature.”12 Jevons constructs a three stage model of the common (bodily) work experience. Work is painful to begin with, because there is an inevitable bodily resistance to beginning a difficult or demanding task. Work then becomes briefly pleasurable in the physical sense outlined above, as the worker adjusts to his or her task, and finds pleasure in the movement of limbs and in the release of pent up energy. Yet after just a short time, work becomes painful once more, but this time pain is experienced as fatigue, which becomes progressively more intense the longer work continues. On Jevons’ model, work for most people is pleasurable for a time, but it is painful overall and at the margin, which is to say, in the final period of work. As Spencer notes, a key feature of Jevons’ model is that the hours people work (that is, labour supply) are jointly determined by the pleasures of consuming the products of work and the pleasure or pain experienced by the worker at work.13 In particular, towards the end of the working day, whether or not workers choose to work another hour depends on whether the pleasure from additional consumption will exceed the pain from additional labour. It follows that changes in the pleasure or pain of working can affect the number of hours they work, by changing the point at which the pleasures derived from additional hours are outweighed by the pains. To illustrate this point, consider a change in working conditions which makes all hours of labour more pleasurable or less painful, such as better facilities at work or more collegial working relationships. This change would improve the welfare of workers directly by decreasing the pain they experience at work at any given time. However, although Jevons does not clearly spell this out, it could also increase labour supply by decreasing the pain-cost of additional labour hours, thereby allowing longer working hours to be exchanged for the same amount 11   Jevons is citing Jennings here. See W. S. Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, New York, Augustus M Kelley, 1965, [1871], p. 172. 12  Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, p. 182. 13   See Spencer, “Deconstructing the Labour Supply Curve,” p. 449.



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of consumption. Thus, as Spencer also notes, Jevons’ model of work can provide a case for improving working conditions on two grounds: the direct improvement to worker welfare, and the increase in labour supply that can (possibly) result.14 Alfred Marshall was the leading orthodox economist of his day, with his major works published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.15 His analysis of labour supply adopts the basic template from Jevons: work is painful at first, then pleasurable for a time, and then declines towards pain at the end of the working day.16 Consequently, Marshall also represents both worker welfare and labour supply as jointly determined by wages and the pain or pleasure experienced by the worker at work. Yet Marshall also diverges from Jevons on two significant points, which alters Marshall’s overall conception of the role of work in human life. First, Marshall rejects that work is generally painful overall, especially once it is recognised that what economists term “leisure” can also be a painful experience: the deleterious effects of long-term unemployment on human welfare again illustrate this point. Secondly, while Jevons ignores the potential of the act of work to shape a person’s character,17 Marshall takes this as a fundamental, if not primary, economic feature of work. He spells this point out clearly in his definition of economics—on page one of The Principles of Economics—where he writes that economics …is on the one side a study of wealth; and on the other, and more important side, a part of the study of man. For man’s character has been moulded by his every-day work, and the material resources which he thereby procures, more than by any other influence unless it be that of religious ideals.…For the business by which a person earns his livelihood generally fills his thoughts during by far the greater part of those hours in which his mind is at its best; during them his character is being formed by the way in which he uses his faculties in his work, by the thoughts and feelings which it suggests, and by his relations to his associates in work, his employers or his employees18 [emphasis added].  See ibid., p. 451.   See T. Parsons, “Wants and Activities in Marshall,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 46, 1931, p. 101; S. Pressman, Fifty Major Economists, New York, Routledge, 1999. 16   See A. Marshall, Principles of Economics, eighth edition, London, MacMillan & Co, 1961, p. 118. 17  This follows from Jevons’ definition of economics as satisfying given wants. See the definition of economics in Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, p. 267. 18  Marshall, Principles of Economics, p. 1. 14 15

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Marshall’s definition builds into economic analysis the distinction introduced in Part 1, between work as a means to resources on one hand and the act or task of work on the other. Here the resourcecreating dimension of work is identified with the economic study of wealth creation, while the act of work includes both the experience of work at any time—which includes the task, affective response to task, and the physical and social environment—and the effect of this experience on the worker’s character over time. What gives this dual perspective on work a critical edge is the conception of the good life to which Marshall connects it, where he maintains that a constitutive feature of a fulfilling life is the opportunity to develop one’s skills and capacities. For instance, Marshall writes in The Principles of Economics that “the fullness of life lies in the development and activity of as many and as high faculties as possible,”19 and elsewhere that “there has always been a substratum of agreement that social good lies mainly in that healthful exercise and development of faculties which yields happiness without pall, because it sustains selfrespect and is sustained by hope.”20 This concept of the good life owes more to Aristotle than to an economic utilitarianism, because it depicts the good life as attained via the development of fundamental human faculties, rather than through the satisfaction of existing preferences or desires.21 The critical perspective on work which results from the above ideas can be reconstructed as three linked claims. These are: (1) the development of one’s capacities through action is at least partly constitutive of the full human life; (2) work provides an opportunity for capacity development; and (3) that work occupies “the greater part of those hours in which [the workers] mind is at its best.” Given these three prem­ ises, work has a constitutive role in the full human life because work is demonstrably that domain in which most people have the greatest opportunity to develop human capacities—which is to say, as a matter  of fact rather than by necessity. It is this contingent notion of the centrality of work that Marshall has in mind when he writes in   ibid., p. 112.  In “The Old Generation of Economists and The New,” cited in Robin C. O. Matthews, “Marshall and the Labour Market,” in ed. John K. Whitaker, Centenary Essays on Alfred Marshall, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 27. 21  For further discussion of incorporating this kind of Aristotelian approach to labour into economic theory, see J. Murphy, The Moral Economy of Labour, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993. 19 20



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“On  the Future of the Working Class” that “work in its best sense, the healthy energetic exercise of faculties, is the aim of life, is life itself.”22 Model B—The Opportunity Cost of Work While Jevons and Marshall arrive at very different conceptions of the significance of work overall, both economists adopt substantive models of the act of work by explaining labour supply and worker welfare through the specific pleasures and pains of the work experience. However, according to Lionel Robbins, such substantive models of work were almost universally rejected by 1930, in favour of an “opportunity cost” approach to labour supply. On an opportunity cost model, work always has costs, but these costs are not identified with, or derived from, the (painful) experiences of labouring. Rather, the costs of work “are ultimately to be regarded as being the pull of foregone leisure or foregone present income,”23 which is to say, as the leisure time or alternative income that workers must always sacrifice to devote some of their limited time to work. The main insight behind the opportunity cost approach is that devoting time to work always requires a sacrifice of some other valued activity, provided it is (fairly uncontroversially) assumed that a person has many desired activities and only so much available time. For example, Jevons thought that intellectual work such as engineering was unusual in potentially providing sustained pleasure, due to the inherently interesting nature of the task. Yet the opportunity cost doctrine emphasises that even where his or her work is pleasurable, the engineer must always sacrifice other valuable uses of his or her time to work, for example, time with friends or family. Hence, working has at least some cost to the engineer irrespective of whether the experience is in itself pleasurable or painful. What is controversial is that analysing work as a sacrifice of opportunity costs alone excludes consideration of how different working conditions may affect the welfare of workers at work, and in turn affect

  A. Marshall, “The Future of the Working Classes,” in eds. T. Raffaelli, E. Biagini, and R. McWilliams Tullberg, Alfred Marshall’s Lectures to Women, Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1995, p. 168. 23   L. Robbins, “On a Certain Ambiguity in the Concept of Stationary Equilibrium,” The Economic Journal, Vol. 40, No. 158, 1930, p. 208. 22

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labour supply.24 Pagano demonstrates this point with an example of a worker on an eight-hour day in Smith’s famous pin-factory. From an opportunity cost perspective, it makes no difference whether the worker straightens pins for eight hours, or if the worker has the presumably more interesting option of rotating around several different tasks or responsibilities. In either case the opportunity costs remain the same, because the same amount of leisure time is sacrificed irrespective of the uses towards which work time is put. This conceptual exclusion of the act of work from economic analysis is reflected in Frank Knight’s remark that, from an opportunity cost perspective, “ ‘labour’ is really the sacrifice of some desirable alternative use of one’s time and strength. If there is no alternative there is no sacrifice.”25 What Pagano draws out is in effect a corollary of this position: if there is no change in alternatives, there is no change in sacrifice. It is important to note though that Knight—and other opportunity cost theorists—need not deny that working is in reality a pleasurable or painful experience. Rather, an analysis of work costs as solely opportunity costs denies that the pleasure or pain of working is relevant for economic analysis. Knight makes this point explicit in writing that whether labour is experienced as pleasurable or painful is from a (scientific) economic perspective a “matter of indifference.”26 Elsewhere, he writes in a similar vein that For scientific purposes it simply does not matter what the physical attributes or psychical accompaniments of the labour may be, or whether labourers know or feel at all, so long as they in fact respond to the incentives in a uniform way. All such notions as irksomeness belong in a later stage of the discussion, the whys of the whys.27

Knight’s position here is that the basic patterns of labour supply can be determined without introducing the pleasures or pains of working into the analysis, because people always need incentives to compensate them for the opportunity cost of work. Consequently, people’s choice to work or not work at any time can be modelled as a relationship

24  See Pagano, Work and Welfare in Economic Theory, pp. 113–114. See also I. Steedman, “Welfare Economics and Robinson Crusoe the Producer,” Metroeconomica, Vol. 51, 2000. 25   F. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, New York, Harper Torchbook, 1965, p. 63. 26   ibid., p. 68. 27   F. Knight, “A Suggestion for Simplifying the Statement of the General Theory of Price,” The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 36, No. 3, 1928, p. 357.



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between the incentives work provides and the opportunities that work costs. However, what Pagano’s response reveals is that the incentives and costs in Knight’s analysis can only be of a particular kind: wage and leisure opportunities rather than changes in the conditions under which wages are earned. Model C—Compensation and Commodities The opportunity cost model retains Jevons’ conception of labour as essentially a cost borne for consumption, but it reinterprets that cost as due to lost opportunities rather than the painful experience of the act of work. Yet if what Knight terms the “inner experiences” of labour are indeed a “matter of indifference,” then some important features of labour supply seem inexplicable. For instance, how can the relatively high wages required to induce people to work in especially demanding, dangerous or unpleasant conditions, such as on an offshore oil rig, be adequately explained without some reference to the particular  experience of this kind of work, such as the loneliness, cold, and physical exertion? Or contra-wise, how can the relatively low wages people accept for work which offers unique opportunities for selfdevelopment or self-expression, such as casual academic labour, be explained without reference to how this work is experienced as especially satisfying in itself? Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize winning economist and developer of the “human capital” approach to labour supply,28 responds to these questions by modeling work as producing two distinct types of income or reward: (1) money wages; and (2) “commodities” such as satisfaction, which enter preference functions directly, and which he alternatively terms “psychic income.”29 Psychic income captures the utility or disutility that people are assumed to derive directly from the act of work, and explains why some people accept lower wages for work that they find more intrinsically satisfying over higher paid alternatives. Becker’s example is of a college graduate who chooses to enter the ministry when that person would have earned substantially more over their lifetime working in business.30 Their lost wages are offset by the

  See Pressman, Fifty Major Economists, pp. 185–188.   G. Becker, “A Theory of the Allocation of Time,” Economic Journal, Vol. 75, 1965, p. 498; Becker, Economic Theory, p. 170. 30  Becker, Economic Theory, p. 166. 28 29

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“psychic income” the graduate presumably receives from ministering to the needs of others, or otherwise put, by an equivalently valued commodity of satisfaction which working produces. Unlike in Model B, Becker’s model does not represent the pleasure or pain people derive from work as a “matter of indifference,” because these experiences have a clear explanatory role in how wages are determined, and in what motivates workers to move between different professions. However, in common with Model B, and in contrast to Model A, Becker’s model makes no attempt to explain the specific circumstances under which work is pleasurable or painful, or when the act of work will develop or repress human skills and capacities.31 Instead, Becker claims that differences between the “psychic income” from different forms of work can be sufficiently measured via differences in wages, while “whether work is pleasant or irksome cannot even be ascertained from observed behaviour and is thus a meaningless, although frequently discussed, question.”32 Becker’s position then is that there must be satisfactions or costs derived from the act of work because this is the only way that certain observed differences in wages and behaviour can rationally be explained. However, it is not up to economists to explain either the substance or source of these experiences, which is to say, whether work is pleasurable or painful overall, or what would tend to make one form of work pleasurable rather than painful. Rather, economists need only to observe the consequences of such experiences for the efficient allocation of labour. Becker’s stance is augmented by an analysis of labour markets where workers are modelled as seeking work that maximises their total income (that is, wages plus psychic income). Given a competitive labour market, a relatively high supply of workers seeking more satisfying work will tend to push money wages for these positions down, while a relatively low supply of workers seeking less satisfying or more painful work will tend to push money wages for these positions up. All other things being equal then, money wages in competitive markets are held to adjust so as to “penalise” people with relatively satisfying work with lower wages, and to compensate people for enduring 31   Note that Becker does analyse when workers will invest in further education to improve their market wage. However, this is a separate issue to the one considered here. 32   ibid., p. 170.



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relatively more painful work with higher wages.33 Becker’s model of work thus not only suggests that there is no scientific basis to a substantive model of labour, but also that there is no real need for such a model since market wages can adjust to take different experiences of work into account. 3.  A Constructive Response: Work, Recognition, and the Craft Instinct This section sets out a constructive response to the economic models of work outlined in Part 2. It first sketches out two alternative “noneconomic” approaches to work, as elaborated by Christophe Dejours and Richard Sennett. It is then shown that while these approaches reveal problems in contemporary orthodox economic models of work, they can in fact develop key themes from earlier economic analysis. Dejours: Resistance and Recognition Christophe Dejours is a consulting psychoanalyst, who has developed a model of work from his efforts in clinically diagnosing workrelated pathologies. Dejours’ definition of work centres precisely on the act of work as a source of injuries and pathologies. He writes that “for the clinician, work is not above all the wage relation or employment but ‘working’, which is to say, the way the personality is involved in confronting a task that is subject to constraints (material and social).”34 Dejours’ concept of work differs from economic models first of all in using a psychological rather than an “economically rational” model of the working human agent, which follows from his aim to understand real human pathologies rather than ideally efficient choices. A second difference is that for Dejours, the constraints the worker faces are not relatively abstract opportunity costs, but are rather all the concrete ways the physical and social world resists the worker’s efforts to control it: machines that break down, strategies that fail, and colleagues that undermine or resist their plans.   Although Becker states that this is relative to differences in worker opportunity, talent and education. See ibid., pp. 177–183. 34   C. Dejours, “Subjectivity, Work, and Action,” in eds. J.-P. Deranty, D. Petherbridge, J. Rundell, and R. Sinnerbrink, Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory, Leiden, Brill, 2007, p. 72. 33

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If to work is to confront a world that resists one’s efforts, then working is always experienced as an encounter with the limits of one’s powers to act in the world, which Dejours insists is a deeply felt experience. He writes: The real world resists. It confronts the subject with failure, which gives rise to a feeling of powerlessness, indeed, irritation and anger, or alternately disappointment or discouragement. The real manifests itself to the subject in the form of an unpleasant surprise.35

The experience described here is not equivalent to Jevons’ analysis of work as essentially painful, because, as Jean-Philippe Deranty explains, it is set within a very different model of the subject.36 On Dejours’ model of the subject, the resistance of the world to one’s efforts is in fact a constitutive moment in practical identity: human subjects know themselves in part through their experience of a world that limits their actions. Following on from this perspective, the experience Dejours describes above has the potential to become both self-revealing and self-developing, because if the inevitable experience of encountering one’s limits in action are met and managed, then the worker may emerge strengthened and affirmed by the experience. Work as pain is in a sense comparable to Jevons’—it is something  injurious and to be avoided—only where the worker feels incapable of coping with the inevitable constraints and resistance of working life. The different possible effects of the resistance of the world encountered in work can be illustrated by the phenomena of workplace stress and anxiety. At low levels, and in a sufficiently supportive work environment, these experiences may accompany the healthy development of a person’s skills or capacities through progressively more challenging work. Yet, the same phenomena may become injurious or pathological, leading to extreme suffering or even complete breakdown, when workers are overwhelmed by the fear that circumstances have moved beyond their capacity to manage them. Work is not essentially painful in Jevons’ sense then, but rather becomes so because of the way the work task and work environment are organised.

  ibid., p. 73.   See Deranty’s analysis of Dejours’ model of the subject in J.-P. Deranty, “Work and the Precarisation of Existence,” European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 11, No. 4, 2008. 35 36



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Where an opportunity cost approach to work directs attention to the efficient allocation of time, what Dejours’ analysis directs attention to is how people either cope or fail to cope with the perpetually confronting experience of working life. Central to his analysis is the recognition co-workers can provide of a person’s work, and so of the contribution workers make to others through the struggle or suffering they endure. Dejours writes: When the quality of my work is recognised, all my efforts, angst, doubts, disappointments, discouragements become full of meaning. All that suffering had not been in vain; not only has it contributed to the division of labour, but it has made me, in return, a different subject from the one I was before recognition…Without the benefice of recognition of his or her work, and failing the power to thereby access the meaning of his or lived relation to work, the subject faces his or her own suffering, and it alone.37

Such restorative recognition requires witnesses to a person’s work, and further witnesses who are motivated to (positively) evaluate the contribution a worker has made through their efforts. However, Dejours claims that the trend to more insecure, individualistic and competitive workplaces over recent decades has undermined such recognitive relationships between workers by fragmenting the work collectives they require. The more fluid the workplace, the less likely there is to be a strong collective to bear witness to one’s struggles. Further, the more insecure, individualistic and competitive the workplace, the less likely that there will be colleagues motivated to positively acknowledge the contribution of others, for fear it may undermine their own relative contribution. Dejours argues that the re-organisation of work across advanced capitalist nations has in this manner driven an unprecedented increase in the incidence and severity of work related injuries and pathologies, by undermining people’s ability to cope with working life. Sennett: Work as Craft Richard Sennett is a sociologist by training, who also takes fragmentation of work organisation as a source of injuries. His focus is on the fragmentation of work time, and especially on what he perceives as an increasingly short-term orientation in share, product and labour   Cited in ibid., p. 453.

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markets. Sennett argues that due to the demand by shareholders for immediate results, the successful firm must be “quick on its feet,” constantly seeking out new opportunities and abandoning the old, which requires an equally adaptive and flexible workforce. Emblematic of the new flexibility in labour organisation is the replacement of old bureaucratic hierarchies with the work “team,” where the team is a functionally defined network of workers with no clear hierarchy, and which is continually refigured into new teams as each new project— and “team member”—comes and goes. Sennett’s critical focus is on how such forms of work organisation fail to provide healthy working conditions. A recurrent theme is the conflict between flexible work organisation and what he terms the craft motivation to work: “an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.”38 The conflict here first of all concerns the availability of time, since if doing a job well requires honing skills over many years, then the craft ethic will be inherently long term in orientation. But this orientation is undercut by work organisations which require immediate results, and which reward the ability to shift between tasks as new opportunities arise, rather than to persevere at one task or career over the long term. As Nicholas Smith observes though, craftsmanship also picks out a specific structure to time, which follows from the process of skill development that learning to do a job well implies.39 Unlike “prodigy” or “genius,” the term “master craftsman” suggests a kind of story or journey, from novice to journeyman to master of a skill or trade. Each stage of skill competency provides a marker of achievement, where a worker’s performance is judged by, and reflected in, their successes in mastering the standards internal to their craft. For Sennett, this process of skill development is intimately connected to the well-lived life, via the markers skill development provides to self-development and progress. His position follows from an essentially hermeneutic concept of human identity as a form of narrative: if humans understand their lives partly as a story unfolding over time, then a craft motivation to work supports just this kind of understanding. Again, “flexible” capitalism undermines this understanding, in as much as it rewards workers able to constantly redirect their efforts  R. Sennett, The Craftsman, London, Allen Lane, 2007, p. 9.   See N. H. Smith, “The Hermeneutics of Work: On Richard Sennett,” Critical Horizons, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008. 38 39



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towards new tasks and networks as the firm or market changes: in Sennett’s words, those with talent rather than a craft. But talent in Sennett’s sense lacks the structuring dimension of craft, since the ability to perpetually move from one new task, network or career to another does not provide the same markers of skill or self-­development, and so of where the worker is heading or has been in his or her life’s trajectory. Consequently, new forms of labour organisation undermine two connected forms of satisfaction derived from work: the satisfaction derived directly from realising an instinctive human desire to perform a task well, and the satisfaction of living a certain kind of life, one characterised by the growth and development that learning to do a task well entails. The Economic Relevance of Dejours’ and Sennett’s Clinical Analysis of Work Both Knight and Becker present their theories of work as identifying  various effects of different forms of work organisation without evaluating the desirability or otherwise of these effects: what is termed “positive” rather than normative economics. However, putting to one side the controversial distinction between describing and evaluating in economic theory,40 the relevant point here is that it is not possible to judge the desirability of phenomena that are not first brought into view. In this context, Dejours and Sennett identify ways that work can affect worker motivation and welfare which are ignored or marginalised by mainstream economic models of work. This has both critical and constructive consequences for orthodox economic analyses of work. Critically, the injuries and pathologies Dejours and Sennett identify  challenge prevalent economic interpretations of recent trends in workplace organisation. In particular, if Dejours and Sennett are right, then while the last twenty-five years may have witnessed a substantial growth in wages, this has been accompanied by a substantial growth in certain types of injuries and pathologies, which are consequences of new organisations of the act of work. Indeed, both these trends have the same putative cause: the cultural and legislative 40   For further discussion of this distinction see D. Tweedie, “Economics in Social Policy: A Philosophical Analysis,” in Mobile Boundaries, Rigid Worlds Conference Proceedings, Macquarie University Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, 2004.

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shift to more “flexible,” individualistic and competitive forms of work organisation. Yet as noted above, an opportunity cost approach to work (Model B) only registers one of these trends, since this approach ignores how changes in the organisation of work affects suffering at work. For example, an opportunity cost analysis of a program to increase workplace productivity by offering individual performance bonuses would note the positive effect of a growth in wages. However, it would ignore the negative effects on the worker which may follow from cultivating more individualistic, competitive, and transitory relationships at the workplace, as diagnosed by Dejours and Sennett. Hence, the injuries and suffering Dejours and Sennett identify are external to analyses of the desirability or otherwise of contemporary forms of work organisation based on this approach. Becker’s model (Model C) does recognise that different levels of pleasure or pain can be derived from the experience of work, because such differences are revealed in observable differences in wages. Yet, as regards the concerns Dejours and Sennett raise, what is revealed here is very minimal. At best, wage differentials measure whether people experience one form of work as more or less painful or pleasurable than another, which is reflected in the wages they are willing to accept for different types of work. However Becker himself emphasizes that wage differentials do not measure whether work is in fact pleasurable or painful overall, nor do they reveal what causes one form of work to be pleasurable rather than painful, and under what circumstances. Hence, if Dejours and Sennett are right and working conditions have deteriorated in significant respects across the board (for example, to a roughly proportional degree across different types of work), there is no reason to believe observable wage differentials would reveal either the existence of such deterioration or the causes. Nor is it a sufficient response to rely on market mechanisms to ameliorate or compensate workers for the forms of suffering Dejours and Sennett claim they are experiencing, because this suffering is precisely a consequence of the widespread cultural and legislative organisation of work along market lines (that is, flexible, individualistic, and competitive). Given the dominance of market forms of work organisation, people cannot simply choose to participate or not participate in these work environments, short of exiting the workforce in part or whole. In contemporary society then, a competitive market-based working environment is not the outcome of people’s choices but the background



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condition of their choice, which structures their working lives, and indeed their lives more generally. As a result, if Dejours’ and Sennett’s concerns about contemporary forms of work organisation are taken seriously, the desirability of market forms of work organisation must themselves be assessed. In particular, it must be assessed on not only how market forms of work organisation may act to organise wage incentives, but also how market forms of work organisation—both between and within firms—affects people’s work experience. This requires a substantive account of exactly what the act of work contributes to the well-lived or flourishing human life, in order to determine how different structures of work organisation augment, or detract from, this contribution. Yet, as I showed in Part 2, such models are conspicuously absent from the contemporary orthodox models of work (that is, Models B and C). However, as demonstrated in Part 1, early orthodox economic analyses of work do present more or less substantive models of work, and Dejours’ and Sennett’s analysis can potentially make a more constructive contribution to these models. In particular, as shown in Part 2, it follows from Model A that the satisfaction or dissatisfaction people derive from the act of work can causally influence labour supply, as well as human welfare. Further, unlike in Becker’s approach, there is no aversion in this model to investigating the exact circumstances under which work will produce satisfaction or suffering overall.41 If Model A is correct, then theories of work which specify more precisely the circumstances under which labouring causes satisfaction or suffering—as both Dejours and Sennett do—directly advance the economic analysis of labour supply and human welfare. The phenomena of work related stress leave and breakdowns, as highlighted by Dejours, are extreme but clear examples of how the act of work and labour supply are connected, because they constitute a radical breakdown of the worker’s ability to labour due to working conditions that are unmanageable for them. If Dejours and Sennett are right though, these breakdowns may be manifestations of a less dramatic but broader phenomenon in modern “fragmented” forms of work organisation: a desire amongst workers to withdraw their labour time from working conditions that are hostile or damaging to them. Following the logic of Model A, forms of work organisation   See Spencer, “Deconstructing the Labour Supply Curve,” p. 449.

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more conducive to human welfare at work will not only make labourers better off by that very fact, but may also create an additional incentive to supply labour hours. Dejours and Sennett then provide insight into the conditions such alternative forms of work organisation would need to fulfil. Finally, if Marshall’s broader economic conception of work is also retrieved, then the possibility for a constructive contribution is greater still, since Dejours and Sennett both connect the development of human capacities through work to the good life as such. Dejours develops a far more nuanced analysis than Marshall of how working conditions may prompt self-development rather than injuries or pathologies, and in the process, Dejours makes an even stronger case for the centrality of the act of work to the good human life.42 Sennett’s distinctive contribution is to draw out how the structure or shape that different types of capacity development provide to life may be relevant to the well-lived life. While the gradual and progressive development of craft skills is conducive to the well-lived life, the development of a chameleon-like capacity to shift between tasks, projects and co-workers, as cultivated by modern forms of work organisation, may have the opposite effect. If Sennett is right, the desirability of different kinds of work depends not just on the extent to which they develop or repress human capacities, but also on whether they develop the right kinds of capacities: those that provide depth, meaning and structure to human life.

42   See Deranty, “Work and the Precarisation of Existence,” especially pp. 447 and 452.

Chapter Thirteen

Liberalism, Neutrality and Varieties of Capitalism* Russell Keat 1. Introduction Should political choices between economic systems be made without reference to the conceptions of the good they respectively favour or disfavour? That considerations of this kind should be excluded from political deliberation would seem to follow from the principle of state neutrality (assuming that the systems concerned depend upon the state). According to this principle, which has been supported by many modern liberal theorists, the powers of the state should not be used to encourage or discourage the realisation of particular conceptions of the good. Instead, its functions should be limited to providing a just framework within which individuals can pursue their own, freely chosen goals.1 Using the term ethical to refer to questions about “the good,” as distinct from “the right,” one can represent this neutralist liberal position as the view that whilst individuals may properly act for ethical reasons, that is, on the basis of what they regard as worthwhile or fulfilling ways to live, the state—or rather those who decide how its powers should be used—must not. This is the view that I shall oppose in this chapter.

*  This is a revised version of a paper given in September 2006 at the Political Theory Workshops, Manchester Metropolitan University. I am grateful to Lynn Dobson, Ricca Edmondson, Jonathan Hearn, John O’Neill and Jonathan Seglow for their comments on earlier drafts. 1  Amongst influential proponents of state neutrality are J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971, and R. Dworkin, “Liberalism,” first published in 1978 and reprinted in A Matter of Principle, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 181–204. A defence of state neutrality against many of its critics is presented in W. Kymlicka, “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality,” Ethics, Vol. 99, 1989, pp. 883–905. For an overview of these debates, see S. Mulhall and A. Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, second edition, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996.

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I shall argue that the principle of state neutrality—henceforth PSN— should be rejected, at least in its application to economic systems, and hence also the exclusion of ethical considerations in making political decisions about these. But I shall also argue that the rejection of PSN need pose no threat to basic liberal principles.2 I will develop this argument by considering the case of a political choice between two different kinds or “varieties” of capitalism: specifically, the kind generally regarded as operating in countries such as the U.K. and the U.S.A., on the one hand, and the kind in countries such as Germany on the other. Drawing on some recent work in comparative political economy, I will describe the key differences between these in Section Two. In policy-oriented debates about the comparative merits and defects of these (and other) varieties of capitalism, the focus is normally on issues of economic performance and social justice or welfare. I shall assume here that these considerations are consistent with PSN. But I shall argue in Section Three that these varieties differ also in ethically significant ways, that is, in the conceptions of the good they respectively favour or disfavour. In doing so I shall focus on the possibilities for realising certain conceptions of the good in the sphere of production. An important element of the argument will be the claim that (at least many) conceptions of the good are “institutionally dependent”: their realisation, and hence the possibility of their being realistically pursued, is dependent on the specific character of various (and varying) social institutions: in this case, primarily economic ones. For example: suppose that someone’s conception of the good is to engage in work that involves relations of trust with others. It is unlikely that

2  My position has been strongly influenced by the defences of perfectionism in J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, and G. Sher, Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Like them, I understand perfectionism as the view that ethical considerations are legitimate grounds for state action, but not that they are the only such grounds: considerations of right or justice—in Habermas’s terms, moral considerations—are also important (J. Habermas, “On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason,” in Justification and Application, trans. C. Cronin, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1993, pp. 1–18). Both Sher (Beyond Neutrality, pp. 31–34), and Raz (Morality of Freedom, pp. 110–112) note that formulations of PSN differ in the “levels” of state action to which it applies, ranging from constitutional provisions to any item of public policy. I shall assume that it applies (at least) to the basic institutions and legal provisions that serve to constitute a certain kind of economic system.



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this could be realised in the absence of firms which operate in ways that are conducive to such relationships. Suppose, further, that how firms organise and conduct themselves is significantly influenced by the nature of the macro-level institutions within which they operate, and that these in turn depend in various ways on actions by the state. One might then reasonably expect economic systems to differ ethically, that is, in the extent to which they favour (the possibility of realising) this conception of the good. In Section Three an attempt will be made to confirm this expectation in the case of these two varieties of capitalism, by identifying some of their (institutionally dependent) ethical differences. This will not of itself show that PSN is untenable, since what that principle excludes is the intentional use of the state’s powers to favour particular conceptions of the good, and hence any role for ethical considerations in deciding upon such uses, as distinct from the “mere fact” of its actions having non-neutral consequences. But I will go on to argue in Section Four that there is no good reason to ignore ethical differences of this latter kind in making political choices between these varieties of capitalism (and more generally between different economic systems). In particular, I shall argue that there is no reason for liberals to be concerned by the rejection of PSN, since state neutrality is not necessary for liberal purposes. These are better served by placing constraints on the means by which the state’s favouring of conceptions of the good is effected, securing the requirements for individual choice. Such constraints, I shall claim, are clearly met by both varieties of capitalism being considered here. With state neutrality replaced by liberal constraints, perfectionist debates about human goods can play their part in political deliberation without threatening liberal principles. I shall call this view liberal perfectionism, distinguishing it from a somewhat different form of non-neutralist liberalism, which I shall call perfectionist liberalism. In the final section, some broader questions about the relationship between liberalism and the market will be considered. Market economies are often supported on the grounds that they alone are consistent with state neutrality. That the two kinds of capitalism I examine are non-neutral undermines this view of market economies. Thus choosing to establish a market economy, in any of its possible forms, does not absolve members of a political community from the responsibility for making collective decisions about human goods.

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The following account of two specific kinds of capitalism will draw mainly on the analysis presented by Peter Hall and David Soskice in the Introduction to their co-edited Varieties of Capitalism.3 They focus on the institutional differences between what they call “Liberal” and “Coordinated” Market Economies: henceforth, LMEs and CMEs. Taking the U.K. (and U.S.A.) as exemplary cases of the former, and Germany of the latter, they give particular attention to how these differences impact on the behaviour of firms. I will describe in turn three key areas in which these different institutional arrangements obtain: ownership and finance, the internal governance of firms, and interfirm relationships.4 There are major differences between patterns of share ownership (and access to finance) in LMEs and CMEs.5 In the U.K., for example, 3  See P. Hall and D. Soskice, “An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism,” in eds. P. Hall and D. Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 1–70. The account that follows reproduces in part the more detailed one provided in R. Keat, “Practices, Firms and Varieties of Capitalism,” Philosophy of Management, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2008, pp. 77–91, especially section two. My reliance here on Hall and Soskice’s analysis is primarily for expository convenience: there is a large body of literature in comparative political economy in which broadly similar characterisations of these differences are presented, including eds. C. Crouch and D. Marquand, Ethics and Markets: Cooperation and Competition within Capitalist Economies, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993; eds. J. Hollingsworth, P. Schmitter and W. Streeck, Governing Capitalist Economies: Performance and Control of Economic Sectors, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994; eds. C. Crouch and W. Streeck, Political Economy of Modern Capitalism: Mapping Convergence and Diversity, London, Sage, 1997; R. Whitley, Divergent Capitalisms: The Social Structuring and Change of Business Systems, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999; V. Schmidt, The Futures of European Capitalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002. The theoretical and methodological debates within this literature that would be important in other contexts need not be addressed here; notice, though, that many authors, including Hall and Soskice, also recognise the existence of other varieties of capitalism, so that LMEs and CMEs are not the only kinds. 4   “Liberal” is used here in its economic, rather than political, sense. Other countries whose economic institutions are regarded by Hall and Soskice as LMEs include Australia, New Zealand and Ireland; others regarded as CMEs include the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria (“Introduction,” pp. 19–20). In theoretical terms, the distinction between LMEs and CMEs is between capitalist systems which rely on markets and hierarchies alone as the primary means of economic coordination, and those in which there is also extensive use of other means. On different forms of coordination (or “governance”) see Hollingsworth et al, Governing Capitalist Economies, pp. 3–16. 5  For more on these differences see S. Vitols, “Varieties of Corporate Governance: Comparing Germany and the U.K.,” in eds. Hall and Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism, pp. 337–360.



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the dominant shareholders are typically pension funds and similar institutions, whose holdings in any one company form only a small part of a large portfolio, and whose managers have strong incentives to switch funds in response to relatively short-term changes in company profits. In Germany, by contrast, the major shareholders are other companies and banks, whose holdings in one company form a large proportion of their total holdings, and whose concerns are often strategic as well as financial. U.K. companies are also more vulnerable to takeovers than their German/CME counterparts, due partly to regulatory differences. In broad terms, then, there is a contrast between the “impatient capital” of LMEs and the “patient capital” of CMEs. With respect to internal governance, firms in LMEs display high degrees of “managerial prerogative” and hierarchy by comparison with more consensual forms of management in CMEs. For example, the membership of supervisory boards of German companies, which are responsible for major strategic decisions (such as dividend policy), consist of equal numbers of employee and shareholder representatives; for lower level decisions (such as redundancies), managers are required to consult with works councils. In the U.K., by contrast, equivalent forms of representation and consultation are rare. Combined with other legally sanctioned differences, these varieties of governance give rise to higher levels of job security in CMEs than in LMEs. Finally, the exclusively competitive nature of relationships between firms in LMEs is significantly modified or complemented in CMEs by various forms of cooperation. In Germany, the main institutional support for this is provided by formally organised, industry-based associations, which play a central role both in education and training, and in research, development and technology transfer.6 In the German system of vocational training and apprenticeships, employers’ organisations and trade unions negotiate agreements on skill categories and training protocols. The result is a high level of industry-specific skills and knowledge (that is, applicable across different firms in the same 6   These associations between firms in the same industry, in Germany, differ from the keiretsu, or “families” of firms from different industries, in Japan (Hall and Soskice, “Introduction,” pp 34–35; see also M. Sako, “Neither Markets nor Hierarchies: A Comparative Study of the Printed Circuit Board Industry in Britain and Japan,” in Hollingsworth et al, Governing Capitalist Economies, pp. 17–42, and R. Dore, “The Distinctiveness of Japan,” in Crouch and Streeck, Political Economy of Modern Capitalism, pp. 19–32. Here I follow Hall and Soskice in concentrating on the former (“German”) type of CME.

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industry). In the U.K., by contrast, formal public education, which focuses mainly on generic skills and knowledge (that is, applicable across different industries), is combined with training conducted by individual firms.7 Turning to research and development, in LMEs this is primarily conducted within individual firms in competition with others, the winner then protecting its technological superiority by the use of patents; technology transfer (that is, the diffusion of new developments across an industry) takes place through licensing arrangements, the movement of employees between firms, or company takeovers. In Germany, by contrast, a good deal of research and development takes place through cooperation between firms, and the industry associations which facilitate this are also involved in technology transfer and the specification of technical standards. In LMEs, the weaker role of industry associations is reflected in the relative absence of such standards, and inter-firm collaboration is more difficult to achieve because of legislative regulation such as the U.S.A.’s anti-trust laws. Hall and Soskice emphasise the complementarities between the various institutional elements in each kind of capitalism, such that the specific behaviour by firms that each element facilitates or requires is at least compatible with, and generally reinforces or supports, the behaviour required or facilitated by other elements. For example, firms in LMEs will often be under pressure from shareholders to rectify shortterm declines in profitability, and cost-cutting measures such as shedding labour will be facilitated by managerial prerogative. For firms in CMEs such measures would be less easy to take, given the need to negotiate with workers’ representatives, but their relationships with shareholders make it less likely that such measures will be required. It is therefore easier for them to make what Hall and Soskice call “credible commitments” to employees, and likewise to suppliers and clients. This is closely related to the tendency for CMEs to operate with a “relational” understanding of contract, by contrast with its predominantly “classical” form in LMEs.8 7  For more on generic versus specific skills training, and the relationships between production and welfare systems, see M. Estevez-Abe, T. Iversen and D. Soskice, “Social Protection and the Formation of Skills: A Reinterpretation of the Welfare State,” in eds. Hall and Soskice Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, pp. 145–183. 8  On the classical v relational distinction, see I. Macneil, “Contracts: Adjustment of Long-Term Economic Relations under Classical, Neoclassical, and Relational Contract Law,” Northwestern University Law Review, Vol. 72, 1978, pp. 854–905. Note that the



liberalism, neutrality and varieties of capitalism353 3.  Ethical Differences between LMEs and CMEs

I will now make use of Hall and Soskice’s analysis to indicate how the institutional character of each variety of capitalism differentially favours or disfavours the realisation of certain conceptions of the good. It should be emphasised, however, that what I will argue is in no way sanctioned by their own work and reflects quite different theoretical interests to theirs. Hall and Soskice use their analysis to develop a theory of “comparative institutional advantage” which enables them, for example, to explain the dominance of different economic sectors in LMEs and CMEs, and to assess the implications of globalisation for the convergence or otherwise of different kinds of capitalism. By contrast, I shall be applying the idea of comparative institutional advantage to conceptions of the good. As noted in the previous section, Hall and Soskice are concerned to show how the institutional differences between LMEs and CMEs impact on the organisation and conduct of firms. These latter differences, I will now argue, may be expected to affect the relative ease or difficulty with which individuals can realise various conceptions of the good related to the work they do, since it is firms that provide the immediate institutional settings for their possible realisation. The cases that will be presented are intended only as illustrative; they are by no means the only ones, nor necessarily the most important. Consider, first, the ease or difficulty with which conceptions of the good involving different kinds of work-satisfaction might realistically be pursued. Here it could be argued that CMEs are more conducive than LMEs to the achievement of “intrinsic,” as distinct from “extrinsic,” satisfactions. There is a good deal of evidence that intrinsic satisfactions are most readily experienced when the work that people do combines high levels of skill with significant degrees of autonomy.9 That this is more likely to be available in CMEs is implied by the claims that Hall and Soskice make in the following passage, where they identify the characteristics of firms in CMEs that make them better suited sense that I give to “complementarity” differs slightly from the more technical definition provided by Hall and Soskice: “Introduction,” p. 17. 9  See the analysis of this evidence by Robert Lane, including his depiction of the “privileged class” of workers, whose jobs offer “self-direction, substantive complexity and challenge, variety, little supervision, and intrinsic satisfaction of excellence or selfdetermination” (R. Lane, The Market Experience, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 302). My suggestion is that, if Hall and Soskice are right, the “size” of this class will be greater in CMEs than in LMEs.

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than those in LMEs to what they call “incremental innovation”; as will be seen, these include just what is also conducive to intrinsic worksatisfactions. Thus: It will be easier to secure incremental innovation where the workforce (extending all the way down to the shop floor) is skilled enough to come up with such innovations, secure enough to risk suggesting changes to products or process that might alter their job situation, and endowed with enough work autonomy to see these kinds of improvements as a dimension of their job. Thus, incremental innovation should be most feasible where corporate organization provides workers with secure employment, autonomy from close monitoring, and opportunities to influence the decisions of the firm, where the skill system provides workers with more than task-specific skills and, ideally, high levels of industry-specific technical skills, and where close inter-firm collaboration encourages clients and suppliers to suggest incremental improvements to products or production processes.10

A second example of the different conceptions of the good likely to be favoured by these varieties of capitalism is indicated by the reference here to industry-specific skills and inter-firm collaboration. In CMEs, I would argue, it will be easier than it is in in LMEs for people to engage in work that has at least many of the features attributed by Alasdair MacIntyre to what he calls productive practices.11 A key feature of such practices is the existence of “standards of excellence” that are shared by those who engage in a specific field of productive activity, and by reference to which the quality of what they produce, and the value of their contribution, can be judged. By comparison with LMEs, I suggest, the industry-wide associations and training typical of CMEs makes them more conducive to such shared standards, and more generally to the successful pursuit of what MacIntyre terms “internal,” as distinct from “external” goods. The institutional differences between CMEs and LMEs that make them more or less conducive to practice-like production can be expected also to favour different conceptions of a successful career. In CMEs, it would seem, the favoured kind of career will be one in which  Hall and Soskice, “Introduction,” p. 39.  See A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. I develop this argument much more fully in “Practices, Firms and Varieties of Capitalism,” building on my earlier discussion of MacIntyre in “Markets, Firms and Practices,” in R. Keat, Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, pp. 111–132. The argument applies only to the “German,” and not to the “Japanese” type of CME (see Note 6 above). 10 11



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success is understood in terms of the development and exercise of knowledge and skills in a specific kind of productive activity, of the contribution that has been made to this, and of its recognition by others. But this conception of a successful career will be more difficult to realise in LMEs where, as Hall and Soskice argue: Financial market arrangements that emphasise current profitability and corporate structures that concentrate unilateral control at the top deprive the workforce of the security conducive to their full cooperation in innovation. Fluid labour markets and short job tenures make it rational for employees to concentrate more heavily on their personal career than the firm’s success and on the development of general skills rather than the industry- or company-specific skills conducive to incremental innovation.12

This institutional context provided by LMEs thus favours, I suggest, a significantly different conception of a successful career, and of the kinds of goods that it can provide. It will be one in which what counts as success is defined without reference to judgments of contribution or achievement within any particular field of productive practice, but instead, for example, in financial terms. And the skills and abilities needed to achieve this kind of success will be those that can be utilised in multiple settings, “transported” from one to the other, and regarded as the property of the individual concerned, aiding them in a career that is likewise very much their own. As a final example I return to the case of trust, introduced in the opening section to illustrate the possibility of conceptions of the good being institutionally dependent. It should now be clearer how this might be so. Hall and Soskice explain why it is that employers in CMEs are better able than their LME counterparts to make “credible commitments” to employees, and why in more general terms CMEs are regarded as “high trust” economies. One may also surmise that the recognition by workers of one another’s validated competences and their dependence on each other’s practical judgments are conducive to the kinds of relationships and attitudes that anyone who valued trust as a feature of their working lives would find attractive.13 This is not to say that this conception of the good cannot be realised in LMEs, but only  Hall and Soskice, “Introduction,” p. 40.  Individuals can persist in “acting trustingly” in situations where there is little prospect of reciprocity. But this does not enable them to achieve the good of trust, which requires mutuality, and the costs of unreciprocated trustfulness are probably too high for most people to sustain. 12 13

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that in this case, as in others, it may well be more difficult to do so than in CMEs (whereas for other conceptions of the good the reverse may be true). What is involved here is the differential favouring and disfavouring of conceptions of the good by institutional arrangements. In the next section I shall consider the implications for neutralist liberalism of these kinds of institutionally based ethical differences between varieties of capitalism. But before doing so I shall comment on the nature of the relationship between institutions and conceptions of the good that is implied by what I have said so far. First, it is the realisation of conceptions of the good that has been said to be institutionally dependent, as distinct from their adoption. Institutions are being claimed to “favour” certain conceptions of the good over others (and to differ in those they favour), not in encouraging people to regard them as desirable aims to pursue, but in making it possible, or at least easier, to realise them, were they to be adopted.14 Institutions may also influence which conceptions of the good individuals actually adopt, and one way they may do this is through the “adaptation” of people’s conceptions of the good to what is realistically achievable, but that is a separate matter. Second, if the idea of “conceptions of the good” is replaced by that of “preferences,” the claim that institutions affect the realisability of conceptions of the good can be seen as a central thesis of rational choice institutionalism. But what I am claiming differs in certain respects from this influential form of institutional analysis, and also from its main theoretical rival, sociological institutionalism.15 According to rational choice institutionalists, institutions affect the likelihood of preferences being satisfied by affecting the costs of actions aimed at doing so. In particular, institutions can reduce the costs of mutually beneficial cooperation between calculatively rational agents, and hence overcome or mitigate the (supposed) problems of collective action. This generic feature of institutions is used to explain (in apparently functionalist or evolutionary terms) the existence and nature of

14   The neutrality principle may be formulated in terms either of realisation, or of adoption, as Raz notes (Morality of Freedom, p. 112); I take it in the former sense throughout. 15  On these two forms of institutionalism, see P. Hall and R. Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” Political Studies, Vol. XLIV, 1996, pp. 936–952. I put aside what they identify as a third form, historical institutionalism, since in the respects that matter here it tends to draw on one or other of the first two.



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various specific kinds of institution, including that of the firm, and also to explain the behaviour of individual agents, given certain preferences, by reference to the institutionally determined costs of satisfying these in particular ways.16 Sociological institutionalists have criticised rational choice institutionalism on a number of important grounds. One of these is for its failure, or refusal, to explain preferences themselves: more specifically, for regarding preferences as exogenous, rather than endogenous, with respect to institutions.17 But such institutional determination or “shaping” bears only upon the adoption of preferences (or conceptions of the good), and not their realisation, and hence is not relevant for my purposes. Rather, the key departure from rational choice institutionalism that my claims imply concerns the relationship between institutions and what may be termed the objects of people’s preferences, that is, what it is that they desire or wish to achieve, as distinct from the fact of their having such a desire. For rational choice theorists, these “objects” can be specified without reference to the institutions concerned and the social activities they encompass: institutions are conceived as instrumentally useful for the satisfaction of preferences whose objects can exist without these institutions (and are presumed actually to do so, prior to the ‘creation’ of the relevant institutions). By contrast, in the kinds of examples I have presented, institutions are conceived as supporting (or undermining) the complex social relationships and activities which the objects of these preferences either consist in or depend upon.18 It is the

16  An important application of rational choice institutionalism is the transaction costs analysis of the firm, as in O. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting, New York, Free Press, 1985. For criticisms, and alternative forms of institutional analysis in this area, see W. Lazonick, Business Orgamization and the Myth of the Market Economy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, and N. Foss, “Theories of the Firm: Contractual and Competence Perspectives,” Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Vol. 3, 1993, pp. 127–144. 17  See, for example, S. Bowles, “Endogenous Preferences: The Cultural Consequences of Markets and Other Economic Institutions,” Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 36, no. 1, 1998, pp. 75–111. Hodgson argues that what chiefly distinguishes the ‘new’ institutionalism in economics (roughly, rational choice institutionalism), which he opposes, from the ‘old’ institutionalism, which he supports, is the former’s treatment of preferences as exogenous to institutions: G. Hodgson, “What Is the Essence of Institutional Economics?,” Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. XXXIV, 2000, pp. 317–329. 18   This claim might best be developed through Raz’s account of collective goods and what he terms “social forms,” in Morality of Freedom.

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existence of the institutions that makes it possible for the objects of these preferences to exist. Thus, returning to the terminology of “conceptions of the good,” my claim is that their realisation is dependent on institutions because the goods themselves depend on, or consist in, social relationships and activities that require suitable institutional conditions. It is here that a second major criticism made of rational choice institutionalism by sociological institutionalists becomes relevant, namely of the narrowness of its motivational model and its inability to grasp the character of the social relationships and activities that form, as it were, the inner life of institutions, including that of firms.19 But the issues raised by these criticisms cannot be explored here. 4.  From State Neutrality to Liberal Constraints I will now consider the implications of these ethical differences between LMEs and CMEs for liberal neutrality. As I noted in the opening section, the existence of such differences does not imply that the principle of state neutrality (PSN) is untenable, since what that principle rules out is the deliberate use of the state’s powers to favour particular conceptions of the good, and hence the appeal to ethical considerations in justifying such uses, as distinct from the “mere fact” of its actions having non-neutral consequences. However, I will now argue that there is no good reason—or at least, no reason that liberals need accept—to ignore these ethical differences in making political choices between these varieties of capitalism. Although the distinction (implicitly just made) between so-called “justificatory” and “consequential” neutrality is reasonably clear, the rationale for requiring state action to conform only to the former, and not to the latter, is much less so.20 Justificatory neutrality is certainly 19  For example, March and Olsen argue that we need to replace, or at least complement, rational choice theory’s “logic of consequentiality” by a “logic of appropriateness” (J. March and J. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics, New York, Free Press, 1989), and Searle argues that institutions provide “desire-independent reasons for action” (J. Searle, “What is an Institution?,” Journal of Institutional Economics, Vol. 1, 2005, pp. 1–22). 20  On the distinction between justificatory and consequential neutrality (or neutrality of effect, or outcome) see D. Miller, Market, State and Community, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990, ch. 3; Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, pp. 25–34, and J. O’Neill, The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics, London,



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less demanding than consequential neutrality, since it will permit many kinds or instances of state action that the latter would not; further, the endorsement of PSN defined in justificatory rather than consequential terms protects it from objections based on the difficulty or impossibility of achieving consequential neutrality. However, this reduced vulnerability comes at considerable cost, since it is difficult to see why the state’s acting in ways that have ethically non-neutral consequences should be unacceptable only if the political decisions leading to these actions were intended to have these effects and were hence justified in ethical terms. Applied to the case being considered here, this would mean that the political choice of one variety of capitalism rather than another would only be acceptable if no reference were made to the conceptions of the good they respectively favoured, and no attempt made to justify this choice on ethical grounds, even though those involved in making this choice had good reason to believe that it would have ethically nonneutral consequences. But this seems hard to justify. It is as if what justificatory neutrality permits is the refusal by political actors to take responsibility for the foreseeable consequences of their decisions, encouraging them to turn a blind eye to these rather than subject them to ethical reflection. This surely cannot be the intention of those who advocate PSN. Rather, given their liberal commitments (and ancestry) it seems reasonable to assume that its primary rationale is connected to “traditional” liberal concerns with placing limits on the legitimate role of the state so as to protect individual liberty. These concerns have given rise to a number of long-established (and recognisably liberal) political principles and practices, such as the enforcement of various basic rights, the rejection of paternalistic legislation, and a more general commitment to providing individuals with a range of reasonably attractive options from which they may choose. I would argue that PSN adds nothing of (liberal) value to these kinds of principles. By prohibiting ethical aims (and hence justifications) for state action it imposes restrictions on political reasoning that serve no

Routledge, 1998, ch. 2. Most proponents of neutrality define it in justificatory rather than consequential terms, though in doing so they encounter problems in identifying specific actions by the state that PSN rules out, since such actions are typically open to different possible justifications: see Sher, Beyond Neutrality, ch. 1.

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recognisable liberal purpose; further, it fails to prohibit things that liberals would wish to prohibit, since some of the consequential nonneutralities it allows may be generated in ways that liberals would find objectionable. Liberals, I suggest, should abandon PSN, and instead focus their attention (as they traditionally have) on whether there is anything illiberal about the particular kinds of institutional arrangement and uses of state power that are being proposed in political debate, independently of whether these are being supported on ethical grounds. Then, provided that liberal requirements are met, ethically based considerations may play their part in political deliberation. How would this apply in the case of a political choice between LMEs and CMEs? Advocates of PSN would insist that the various conceptions of the good they differentially favour should be excluded from consideration in debates about their respective merits and defects. By contrast, those who endorse liberal principles but are not saddled with the unnecessary burden of PSN will be concerned with the “liberal credentials” of each economic system and their supporting social institutions and forms of state action. I will now argue that there is no reason to regard either of these varieties of capitalism as seriously problematic from a liberal standpoint.21 First, in actual examples of both LMEs and CMEs, such as Britain and Germany, the standard array of civil and political rights is clearly present, including religious freedom, freedom of contract, political freedom and so on. In particular, CMEs do not depend upon “strong,” that is, intrusive and interventionist states, by contrast with supposedly ‘weak” states in LMEs; rather, as Hall and Soskice emphasise, what distinguishes the German state from its British counterpart is the former’s willingness to assign powers or functions to “intermediate associations.”22 Further, the specific ways in which the differential ethical effects of these systems are generated should not be seen as

21   The “logic” of the following considerations might be expressed like this: the fact that these two economic systems, with their different ethical characters, can and do operate in a liberal-consistent manner, implies that it must be possible to construct a justificatory argument for each of them, and their respective uses of state power, which relies upon ethical reasons but does not thereby threaten liberal principles; there is thus no “need” for liberals to accept PSN. 22  Hall and Soskice, “Introduction”; the same point is made in Whitley, Divergent Capitalisms. See also Schmidt, Futures of European Capitalism, on the differences between the “managed capitalism” of Germany and the “state capitalism” of France (not a CME, in Hall and Soskice’s terms).



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objectionable by liberals. The paradigmatic object of liberal concern is the direct use of the state’s coercive powers either to require people to act in some specific way deemed ethically desirable, or to prohibit them from similarly specific actions deemed ethically undesirable: for example, laws requiring certain religious observances, or prohibiting certain kinds of sexual behaviour. But the ways in which “outcomes regarded as ethically desirable” are generated in LMEs and CMEs differ radically from this, since: (i) there is no direct attempt to require or prohibit the ethically relevant behaviour of individuals through legislation; (ii) to the extent that the state can be regarded as ‘acting upon’ the ethically relevant behaviour of individuals, it does so only indirectly, through the various institutions it establishes or supports; (iii) to the extent that the state acts directly and coercively through the law, it does so “only” in shaping and regulating these institutions, not the “ethically desired or undesired” behaviour they may favour; (iv) the ways in which the institutions themselves favour certain kinds of behaviour does not involve coercive requirements and prohibitions. Consider, for example, the “favouring” of relationships based on trust in CMEs. This is not achieved by state legislation that requires people to develop relations of trust with their co-workers, and punishes those who do not. Rather, legislation is involved in protecting workers from redundancy, in requiring consultation through works councils, in ownership rules which protect firms from the threat of take-overs when profitability is under pressure, and so on. These ‘coercively enforced’ measures establish a framework within which firms operate, and make it in their interests, or at least not unduly against their interests, to act in ways that make long-term working relationships and commitments relatively easy to secure, and hence facilitate the development of trust between workers (and between workers and managers). This is how CMEs “favour conceptions of the good involving relationships of trust”: the powers of the state are certainly involved, but it is hard to see how the form that this takes poses a threat to individual liberty. Finally, there is the liberal concern for individuals to be able to make genuine choices, and hence for the existence of a range of available options to choose between. Admittedly there is a conceptual problem in addressing this requirement, since the “counting” of alterna­­ tives depends on the level of generality at which, or the criteria of ethical relevance with which, such alternatives are described: that is, on

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defining “what is to count as” a single or different option. It is easy to multiply alternatives by making the descriptive categories more finegrained; it is easy to reduce their number by making them less so, and it is difficult to identify and justify the relevant form or appropriate level of description. However, putting this conceptual problem aside, one could say the following. On the one hand, there are clearly many options in the domain of production for people to choose between in both LMEs and CMEs. On the other hand, each system restricts its options to an overall set with a specific and partly distinctive character. Because this is so, individuals who wish to pursue a conception of the good that does not belong to this set will have difficulties in doing so. But this kind of limitation on “realistic options” is an inevitable consequence of the institutional basis of any economic system, combined with what I have called the “institutional dependence” of conceptions of the good. To conceive of choice in such a way that these kinds of restrictions are seen as unduly limiting would imply opposition to any kind of economic structure. Further, such opposition (if intelligible at all) would be counter-productive, given that many conceptions of the good can only be realised, and sometimes even conceived, through such institutions and the social relationships they secure. Institutions enable as well as constrain. The specific nature of these institutions will determine which range of options is available, but there cannot be a limitless range. So what has to be decided politically is which set of possibilities, which set of goods, are to be made available. The general position for which I have been arguing here can be termed “liberally-constrained perfectionism,” or liberal perfectionism for short. It is perfectionist in rejecting PSN, and hence in regarding ethical reasons—considerations of the human good—as permissible grounds for state action. Its liberalism consists in requiring that how the state acts be constrained by various liberal political principles. Defined in this way, liberal perfectionism should be distinguished from what I shall call perfectionist liberalism. Like liberal perfectionists, perfectionist liberals accept the legitimacy of ethical reasons as grounds for state action. But these ethical reasons are exclusively liberal ones, based on a distinctively liberal vision of the good life for humans. What this vision consists in varies somewhat between different perfectionist liberals, but it typically and centrally includes some conception of autonomy, according to which it may then be said that



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“the good life for humans involves deciding for oneself what kind of life to pursue.”23 This autonomy requires both the (inherited or acquired) capacity to make such decisions and a range of options between which to choose. But crucially, for my purposes, what might make these options good or bad ones to choose is not itself part of this liberal ideal: the value of autonomy is distinct from that of the options chosen, about which perfectionist liberalism insists on saying nothing.24 So although perfectionist liberals allow the state to act non-neutrally with respect to the (liberal) good of autonomy, this “permission” does not extend to its favouring specific ways in which this autonomy may be exercised: there is no place for ethical reasons related to the (supposed) “substantive value” of the kinds of life between which autonomous choices are made. By contrast, liberal perfectionism as I have defined it here permits the state (also) to act on the basis of these latter kinds of ethical reasons, provided that various liberal requirements are met.25 One might put this by saying that, for the liberal perfectionist, the state may legitimately act to favour (both liberal and) non-liberal conceptions of the good, but in doing so it must not act il-liberally.

23  My distinction between “perfectionist liberalism’ and “liberal perfectionism” is stipulative: the two phrases are used interchangeably in the literature, both normally referring to what I identify as the former position. Both positions, as I define them here, are concerned with the permissible grounds for state action, and reject the neutralist exclusion of ethical grounds for this: that is, they reject PSN; but liberal perfectionism is far more “permissive” than perfectionist liberalism. As Mulhall and Swift point out (Liberals and Communitarians, pp. 249–252), these debates about state neutrality should be distinguished from another set of debates, at a “deeper” level, about whether or not liberal political principles are to be grounded in a distinctive ethical position (“comprehensive” versus “political” liberalism). I shall ignore these latter debates, merely noting that ‘comprehensive’ liberalism does not entail rejection of PSN. 24  As Sher notes (Beyond Neutrality, p. 14), there is no inconsistency in claiming both that liberalism rests on a certain conception of the good, namely autonomy, and that the state should be neutral with respect to the value or “goodness” of the options between which individuals are to make autonomous choices. 25   Liberal perfectionism, as I characterise it here, has much in common with the position taken in J. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994. Raz argues that the state has a duty to provide people with an adequate range of valuable options between which they can choose, as well as ensuring that they can develop the various capacities required for the autonomy exercised in making these choices. Crucially, for Raz, as for “my” liberal perfectionist, the criteria by which the value of the options are judged are not themselves based on, or derivable from, that of autonomy.

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What liberal perfectionism implies, in effect, is that liberalism should not be regarded as a “complete” political theory, but rather as a set of constraints on actions that may themselves be justified by nonliberal ethical values. From this standpoint, the specific content of, and differences between, various ethical traditions and their conceptions of the human good (including, for example, Aristotle and Marx) become significant resources for political debate, and for political theory. By contrast, as Dworkin’s seminal defence of neutralist liberalism made clear, “all perfectionist theories,” whether socialist, conservative or whatever, are equally mistaken or at least equally irrelevant, once we have decided to exclude ethics from politics.26 5.  Liberalism, Markets and Neutrality As noted at the outset, state neutrality is typically presented by its advocates as an essential principle for a liberal society in which individuals can freely pursue their own conceptions of the good within a just framework established by the state. Although debates about PSN rarely address its implications for economic systems, focusing instead on issues of secularism, multiculturalism and the like, its proponents seem generally to regard market economies as consistent with this principle, and quite possibly as uniquely so.27 Correspondingly, it is departures from the market that are seen as problematic, at least when argued for in ethical terms. For example, in debates about state subsidies for the arts, it is widely accepted that only by rejecting PSN can such exceptions to market-based provision be justified.28 Ethical reasons, it would seem, are to be reserved for non-market solutions, 26  See Dworkin, “Liberalism.” I discuss this feature of his position in R. Keat, “Social Criticism and the Exclusion of Ethics,” Analyse und Kritik, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2008, pp. 229–253. 27   This seems to be the view taken in Dworkin, “Liberalism”; also in R. Arneson, “Meaningful Work and Market Socialism,” Ethics, Vol. 97, 1987, pp. 517–545, and (arguably) in W. Booth, “On the Idea of the Moral Economy,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, 1994, pp. 653–667. I criticise Arneson’s neutralist defence of the market in R. Keat, “Anti-Perfectionism, Market Economies and the Right to Meaningful Work,” Analyse und Kritik, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2009, 121–138; see also Miller, Market, State and Community, ch. 3. 28  Although Dworkin attempts to justify arts subsidies consistently with neutrality, in R. Dworkin, “Can a Liberal State Support Art?,” in A Matter of Principle, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 221–233. For criticisms, see S. Black, “Revisionist Liberalism and the Decline of Culture,” Ethics, Vol. 102, 1992, pp. 244–267, and Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, pp. 300–308.



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with the market itself being regarded as satisfying the requirement of neutrality. That market economies are (perhaps uniquely) consistent with PSN is often upported by their depiction in such a way that they appear directly to embody the neutralist ideal of a liberal society. In particular, the operation of market economies is represented as consisting essentially of a series of contractual exchanges between free and equal legal parties, each pursuing their own goals.29 The powers of the state are required to regulate and enforce such contracts (and likewise the property rights being exchanged), but in supporting this system it appears neither directly nor indirectly to discriminate between the various goals that individuals attempt to achieve through voluntary cooperation with one another. Of course, individuals’ prospects for realising their goals—their conceptions of the good—depend on their financial resources, and neutralist welfare liberals such as Rawls and Dworkin see this as justifying intervention by the state so that these resources, and hence prospects, are distributed fairly. But this is (rightly) viewed as quite different from the state favouring or disfavouring conceptions of the good themselves. My discussion of the two kinds of capitalism in Sections Two and Three implicitly challenges this view of market economies and their neutrality (that is, their consistency with PSN). Made explicit, the argument goes briefly as follows. Liberal and Coordinated Market Economies differ in the conceptions of the good they respectively favour or disfavour. Thus neither of them is neutral. Yet both may justifiably be regarded as ‘market’ economies. Since neither of these two kinds of market economy are neutral, a fortiori “market economies” cannot be.30

 As it is by Hayek, for example: see O’Neill, The Market, ch. 5, on the relationship between neutralist and perfectionist liberal elements in Hayek’s view of markets, exchange and individual autonomy. 30  More generally, that market economies can take significantly different institutional forms is itself an important “fact,” since political and theoretical debates about economic systems often assume that “choosing to institute a market economy” identifies a determinate institutional or political project, thereby ignoring the normative relevance of institutional variation. For criticism of Habermas in this respect, see W. Forbath, “Short-Circuit: A Critique of Habermas’s Understanding of Law, Politics and Economic Life,” in eds. M. Rosenfeld and A. Arato, Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998, pp. 272– 286. I criticise Habermas’s view of the place of ethics in political judgments about economic systems in R. Keat, “Choosing Between Capitalisms: Habermas, Ethics and Politics,” Res Publica, Vol.15, No. 4, 2009, 355–376. 29

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To this it might be objected that LMEs are more deserving of the title “market economy” than are CMEs: that the former are “more market-like” than the latter.31 But even if this were accepted, it would not rescue the neutrality of the market, since what would now be described as an “ethical comparison between market (that is, LMEs) and (partially) non-market systems (that is, CMEs)” would still demonstrate the non-neutrality of both. One must therefore avoid thinking that the conceptions of the good favoured in CMEs are somehow being “subsidized” by the state, by contrast with the “neutrality” of LMEs and absence of subsidies for their conceptions of the good. Instead, one should either regard both systems as involving “state subsidies” for their respectively favoured conceptions of the good, or (preferably) neither.32 As well as challenging the supposed neutrality of market economies, my analysis of these varieties of capitalism also implicitly suggests two (interlocking) reasons for this non-neutrality not being recognised. First, there is the failure to recognise the institutional dependence of conceptions of the good, so that all that is seen as required for their realisation by individuals is a sufficient supply of financial resources (and willing partners). Second, there is the corresponding tendency to ignore various institutional features of market economies and the influence upon these of the state: in particular, the organisational character of firms, which themselves provide the institutional settings for realising conceptions of the good, and cannot be understood through the model of exchange. However, the non-neutrality of market economies need not concern their liberal defenders. In Section Four it was argued that neither

31   This view is encapsulated in Schmidt’s labelling of what Hall and Soskice call LMEs as “market capitalism,” as distinct from the “managed capitalism” of what they call CMEs: Schmidt, Futures of European Capitalism. The strongest argument for LMEs being “more market-like” than CMEs would be based on the greater scope of “markets” in the former, especially with respect to financial markets. 32  I develop this argument in Keat, “Anti-Perfectionism,” in the case of what might be seen by neutralists as unacceptable “subsidies for meaningful work” in CMEs. More generally, I argue there that political theorists who attribute neutrality to the market rely on the kind of individualistic understanding of markets to be found in neoclassical economics and its conceptual successors, and that the opposing position I have outlined here depends on replacing that with an institutionalist (but not “new institutionalist”) alternative.



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LMEs nor CMEs posed any threat to liberal principles, and it seems reasonable to infer that the same is true of other kinds of market economy, whether capitalist or non-capitalist. Whether this compatibility with liberal principles extends beyond the category of market economies is an issue I shall not pursue here. But even if it does not, so that liberally constrained perfectionism turns out to require the choice of some kind of market system, one can expect there to be significant ethical differences between these kinds, and according to the position I have argued for, judgments about these ethical differences can play a legitimate part in political choices between them. Of course, there will also be many non-ethical differences, which will also be relevant to these political choices, since liberal perfectionism’s inclusion of ethical considerations does not imply the exclusion of non-ethical ones or their lesser significance. As well as standard measures of economic performance, these will include issues of distributive justice and social welfare that (have been assumed here to) belong to the category of “the right” rather than “the good.”33 Further, even restricting oneself to ethical considerations, the kinds of differences between LMEs and CMEs suggested in Section Three are by no means the only or necessarily the most important ones, since not only was the analysis primarily illustrative in purpose, but it was restricted to conceptions of the good within the domain of production. What would also need consideration are the goods of consumption, along with the ethical impact of both production and consumption on the character of non-economic practices, relationships and institutions.34 Admittedly, the more that the extent and complexity of the relevant ethical issues is recognised, the more it may seem that their inclusion

33  For example, Hall and Soskice (“Introduction”) claim that CMEs are more compatible with social or Christian democratic welfare systems than are LMEs, and generate lower degrees of income inequality. However, whilst supporting these claims, it is argued in Estevez-Abe et al, “Social Protection and the Formation of Skill,” that CMEs are less egalitarian than LMEs with respect to issues of gender: rates of workforce participation by women are lower in CMEs than in LMEs, there is a higher degree of gender-based job segregation, and the gaps between female and male (rates of) pay are greater. 34  See Keat, Cultural Goods, on various aspects of the justification for “market boundaries.” In “Consumer-Friendly Production or Producer-Friendly Consumption” (ibid., pp. 133–148) I discuss Lane’s argument (Lane, The Market Experience) that production is more important than consumption as a source of human well-being.

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as permissible grounds for choice between economic systems makes impossible demands on political reasoning and democratic decisionmaking.35 Indeed the impossibility of arriving at remotely consensual decisions about human goods has often been advanced as a reason for excluding them from political deliberation.36 I shall not try to address these problems here. But I do want to point out, in conclusion, that if the overall argument of this chapter is correct, it undermines an influential and seemingly attractive way of avoiding them. What I have in mind is the argument presented by Hayek that the adoption of market economies obviates the need for collective, societal level decisions about the (in my terms, ethical) purposes to be served by economic production.37 This is held to be a major advantage of the market since, at least in modern, pluralistic societies, no agreement could be reached about such social purposes (and/or their prioritisations) and failure to do so will lead either to serious conflict or the forcible imposition of a powerful minority’s decisions. The market, it is claimed, enables the political system to avoid these undesirable consequences of attempting the impossible by, as it were, “devolving” the relevant decisions to individuals, pursuing their own freely chosen goals within the (ethically) neutral framework of the market. At one level of analysis this argument has merit, since market economies clearly remove the need for a certain kind of “ethical micromanagement” by the state with respect to economic production and its goals. But at another level it is defective, since it ignores the various institutional processes through which market economies in general, and their specific varieties in particular, differentially favour and disfavour the realisation of certain conceptions of the good, and hence delimit the sets of possible goals that it is realistic for individuals to 35  My claims about the ethical differences between LMEs and CMEs are not to be understood as ethical judgments about their respective merits or defects; rather, they are intended to identify some of the relevant features of these systems about which substantive ethical judgments would need to be made as a basis for political choices between them. See Keat, “Social Criticism,” on the conception of value-free social science assumed by this. 36  But I agree with Raz’s view (Raz, Morality of Freedom) that consensual decisions about matters of justice or “the right” are no more easily achieved than those about ethics or “the good,” and also that scepticism about the possibility of justifying ethical judgments is not a persuasive argument for PSN. 37  See F. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976, especially ch. 10.



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pursue.38 The question thus arises of which set is to be preferred. The members of a political community may decide not to answer this question, refusing to take collective responsibility for the foreseeable consequences of different institutional structures supported by the state.39 But they should at least acknowledge that by keeping ethics out of political processes, they will not keep ethics out of economic ones.

38  Rawls argues that no society can be equally hospitable to the realisation of all conceptions of the good; my point here is that, having recognised this, the members of a political community should decide collectively on which set of possible conceptions of the good are to be favoured by their society’s economic institutions. “Choosing the market” is not a way of avoiding this decision. 39   That is, they can adopt the justificatory version of PSN, accepting that its consequential version cannot in practice be realised.

Notes on Contributors Christophe Dejours is Chair Professor (Psychoanalysis, Health, Work) at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris. He is the author of many books on psychoanalysis, psychosomatics, pathologies of modern work and the social impact of work pathologies. In 2009 he published Travail vivant (Payot), a two-volume monograph presenting the main aspects of the psychodynamics of work. His most recent publications include Suicide et travail. Que faire? (with F. Bègue, PUF, 2010) and as editor, Observations cliniques en psychopathologie du travail (PUF, 2010). Jean-Philippe Deranty is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. He has written extensively on French and German philosophy, notably on Critical Theory and recognition. His recent publications include Beyond Communication. A Critical Study of Axel Honneth’s Social Philosophy (Brill, 2009) and, as editor, Jacques Rancière. Key Concepts (Acumen, 2010). Russell Keat is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory in the School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh. His research is concerned with the ethical character and implications of market institutions. Publications include Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Recent papers are available at www.RussellKeat.net. Craig MacMillan is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Economics at Macquarie University. His research interests include the moral limits of markets, institutional approaches to labour markets and child labour. His recent work on internal labour markets in Australia has been published in the Australian Journal of Labour Economics. Pascale Molinier is Professor in Social Psychology at the University of Paris North. Her research is dedicated to the links between work and mental health from the perspective of gender. Her publications include L’Enigme de la femme active (2003); Les Enjeux psychiques du

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travail (2006); and with Sandra Laugier and Patricia Paperman, Qu’est-ce que le care? (2009). Paul Redding is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Hegel’s Hermeneutics (Cornell UP, 1996), The Logic of Affect (Cornell UP, 1999), Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge UP, 2007), and Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche (Routledge, 2009). He is currently working on a book project on the relation of religion and metaphysics within the philosophies of Leibniz, Kant and Hegel. Emmanuel Renault teaches Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. His publications include Marx et l’Idée de Critique (PUF, 1995); Hegel, La Naturalisation de la Dialectique (Vrin, 2001); Où en est la Théorie Critique? (co-edited with Yves Sintomer, La Découverte, 2003); Mépris social. Ethique et Politique de la Recon­ naissance (Editions du Passant, 2nd ed., 2004); L’Expérience de l’Injustice. Reconnaissance et Clinique de l’Injustice (La Découverte, 2004) and Souffrance Sociale (La Découverte, 2008). Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Münster University and Scholar at the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. His areas of research include nineteenth century European philosophy and contemporary social and political philosophy. He is the author of Hegels Begriff der Arbeit (Akademie, 2002), Religiöse Hingabe oder soziale Freiheit. Die saint-simonistische Theorie und die Hegelsche Sozialphilosophie (Felix Meiner, 2007), and ‘Anerkennung’ als Prinzip der Kritischen Theorie (de Gruyter, 2011). He has co-edited Heinrich Scholz. Logiker, Philosoph, Theologe (with K. F. Wehmeier, Mentis, 2005), Hegelianismus und Saint-Simonismus (with L. Siep, H.-U. Thamer, and N. Waszek, Mentis, 2007), and The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (with C. F. Zurn, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). Nicholas H. Smith is Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of Strong Hermeneutics (Routledge, 1997) and Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity (Polity, 2002). He is also editor of Reading McDowell: On Mind and World (Routledge 2002). His current research focuses on issues of recognition, philosophical anthropology and the philosophy of work.



notes on contributors373

Dale Tweedie recently completed his doctoral thesis at Macquarie University, Sydney. The thesis examined the links between economic, sociological and philosophical theories of work and contemporary workplace organisation. His ongoing areas of research include the philosophy of economics, social philosophy, Australian social policy, and accounting ethics. Stephan Voswinkel (Dr. habil.) is a sociologist at the Institute for Social Research (IfS) in Frankfurt/Main. His research focuses on the meaning and importance of recognition in modern societies, especially in work relations. He has worked on several empirical research projects at the Sociological Research Institute (SOFI) in Goettingen, at the Universities of Goettingen, Marburg and Duisburg, and the IfS. His publications include Welche Kundenorientierung? Anerkennung in der Dienstleistungsarbeit (Berlin, edition sigma 2005), Anerkennung und Reputation. Die Dramaturgie industrieller Beziehungen (UVKVerlag 2001) and Anerkennung und Arbeit (co-edited with Ursula Holtgrewe and Gabriele Wagner, UVK-Verlag 2000). Gabriele Wagner is Professor of Organizational Sociology at the Leibniz University of Hanover. Previously she worked at the University of Duisburg, the University of Bielefeld, and the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt. Her main research interests are work organisation, globalisation, “world society” and sociology of recognition. Her publications include Ein “Neuer Geist des Kapitalismus?” Paradoxien und Ambivalenzen der Netzwerkökonomie (co-edited with Philipp Hessinger, 2008) and Anerkennung und Arbeit (co-edited with Ursula Holtgrewe und Stephan Voswinkel, UVK-Verlag, 2000)

Index action as distinct from work and labour  58, 155, 188–189, 191 collective  12, 112, 117, 277, 356 instrumental  189, 190 theory of  27 activity coordinated  142, 143, 166 deontic  146, 209, 224 productive (poietic)  3–5, 54, 137, 142, 157, 167, 354, 355 professional 18 subjectivising  222, 234 self-forming 15 technical 141 working  16, 22–27, 37–38, 137–139, 141–146, 152, 155, 172, 182, 193–194, 197–199, 206 agency  14, 16, 19, 31, 56, 201, 204 alienation  22, 33, 114, 135, 148, 155, 193, 203, 210, 212, 245–249 animals  5, 11, 53–54, 58, 113, 310, 314 non-human 55 rational  2, 7 Anscombe, E.  50, 51 anthropology  6, 214 expressivist 5 philosophical  12, 15, 16, 372 of work  152 Arendt, H.  2, 9, 58, 60, 135, 154, 188–192, 328 Aristotle  14, 44, 47–54, 188–190, 195, 334, 364 atomism, versus holism  19 authority  15, 79, 80, 108, 116, 154, 214, 247, 278, 281, 321 automation 222 bargaining, collective  20, 118–121, 127–128 Behrens, J.  286–288, 319 biography  309, 313 Boltanski, L.  4, 92, 98, 137, 186 bond, social  9, 177 Bourdieu, P.  99, 134, 237, capacities  116–117, 127, 154, 157, 170–172, 197–199, 204, 257–258, 270, 276, 313, 363

development of  28, 329, 334, 346 distinctive human  5, 7, 12, 46, 49–50, 55, 72–74, 240, 265, 277, 280 capitalism  16, 18, 68, 97, 99–105, 156, 296, 342 critique of  63, 64, 70, 159–162 kinds of  38, 66, 348–369 neoliberal  66, 67, 71 spirit of  4, 98 transformations of  13, 36 care bodily  252, 255, 260 versus cure  253–254, 265–266 invisibility of  29–30, 257, 260 versus love  253, 259–260 and transgression work  261 career  73–77, 125, 267, 283, 306, 313–314, 342–343, 354–355 Castel, R.  99, 137, 147, 279 character  3, 16, 37, 56, 262, 275–278, 293, 333–334 civil society  14, 16, 60, 62 ethical basis of  17, 18, 72–79, 81, 88, 93 class  6, 7, 9, 17, 77, 115, 161, 201 Commons, J. R  18–20, 101–103, 112–129 communication  9, 28, 84, 316, 320 community 8 distortions of  10–11, 227 compensation  69, 94–96, 285 competence  7, 30, 35, 81, 83–87, 90, 254, 258, 291, 315, 326 consumption  16–18, 21, 55, 58, 75, 79, 86–97, 184, 188, 332–333, 337, 367 conspicuous 17 contract  43–44, 107–108, 121, 129, 187, 266, 310, 316, 352, 360 cooperation  6, 27–29, 101, 113, 116, 173–178, 206, 209, 223–234, 249, 252, 264, 299, 351–356, 365 versus coordination  144–145, norms of  24, 135, 138, 152–157, 162–163, 178 corporations, Hegel on  16–17, 72, 78–91, 94, 96, 107–108, 112, 176 craft  61, 121–125, 267, 343, 346 craftsman ideal  102–104, 152–159, 168, 198–200, 205, 342

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critical theory  16–21, 63, 97, 190 criticism external  101–105, 160, 162, 199, 205 immanent  21, 101, 152–153, 156, 158, 197, 205 internal  67–70, 97, 205 normative foundations of  21, 25, 157, 181–183, 203, 206 rational basis of  22 social  4, 22, 158, 162, 178 utopian 20–21 culturalism 69 decompensation  211, 229, 231 defence strategies  30, 211, 226–227, 230, 263–264, 266, 269, 315 Dejours, C.  23–30, 37, 134–153, 164–178, 185, 193–194, 212, 216–237, 247–258, 264, 328, 339–346 democracy  22–23, 135–140 industrial 118 dependence  6, 30, 56–59, 81, 106, 117, 154–157, 253–259, 263, 269, 355, 362, 366 desire belief-desire analysis  53, 54 Dewey, J.  135, 139, 140 disqualification 239 domination  23, 138–144, 147–149, 190, 203, 323 Dubet, F.  136–137 Durkheim, E.  19–21, 101–109, 118, 128–129, 158, 176–177, 204, 216 duty  106, 279–282, 285–286, 316, 320, 325, 326, 363 ethos  302, 305, 326 economics neo-classical  18, 36, 37, 103 institutional  38, 70–71, 102–103, 109–126, 128, 350, 353–362, 366, 368 orthodox  14, 18, 25, 36–37, 102–103, 109–111, 327–333, 339, 343, 345 homo economicus 19 economy market  17, 20, 38, 106, 204, 349, 365–367 psychic  162, 168, 173, 250 as system  21, 61, 136, 160 emancipation  7, 10–11, 58, 156, 181–182, 195, 213, 235, 241 employee  117–119, 178, 203, 289, 299, 301, 305, 306, 312, 351

employer  34, 109, 111, 117–123, 203, 258, 289, 306 Enlightenment  5, 7, 12 equality  20, 115, 116, 118, 119, 160 ergonomics  27, 165, 215, 217–221 esteem  84–85, 90, 94, 100, 129, 201–206, 319 self  65–67, 71–72, 90, 94–95, 97–99, 129, 143, 177 social  77, 107, 127, 137, 194, 201, 202, 322 ethics  112, 217, 239, 253, 364, 365, 368, 369 ethical basis of society  17 professional 230 evaluation  32–34, 67–70, 94, 98, 140, 145, 167–169, 239, 268, 275–277, 292–293, 298, 313, 323 exchange  69, 113, 159–160, 173, 225, 291, 305–307, 315, 323, 366 of commodities  114 fairness of  19–21 normative presuppositions of  153, 204, 206 of services  20–21, 32, 105, 183, 201, 204–206 execution  60, 61, 166, 218, 222 exit  34, 290, 295, 298 expression, norm of  155, 157 expressivism  193–200, 206 extravagance, love of  17, 87–89, 93 femininity  258, 262–263 Fordism  211, 285 crisis of  33 form  15, 242, 257, 279 distinct from matter  44–50, 53 Frankfurt School (see critical theory)  32, 190 Fraser, N.  18, 63–70, 78, 97–98, 105, 151, 201 freedom  1–3, 10, 14, 49, 55–57, 135–140, 159–160, 211–212, 219, 223, 273, 287, 360 Geist (see spirit)  48 gender  28, 210, 249, 258, 263, 282, 367, 371 good (the)  37–38, 53–54, 192–198, 347, 367, 368 common  21, 106–107, 124, 175 conceptions of  37–38, 156, 205, 347–369 life goods  184, 192

index377 Habermas, J.  2, 42, 63, 69, 135, 153, 163, 189–192, 198, 201, 233, 241, 348, 365 colonisation thesis  304, 323 health  120, 138–140, 149, 167, 200, 217, 243, 254–256, 264, 267, 290, 296 mental (psychic)  140, 145–146, 210–213, 220, 226, 229–230, 250, 256 as norm  23, 139, 140 Hegel G. W. F.  1–21, 41–62, 71–107, 118, 128–129, 145, 159–161, 175–177, 194, 204 Idealism  43, 45, 51, 55 master-slave dialectic  14, 43, 52, 59, 60 Phenomenology of Spirit 14–15, 41–43, 52–53, 59, 194, 277 Philosophy of Right  14, 16, 43–44, 61, 64, 71–93, 98, 101, 176 Heidegger, M.  2, 29, 41 hierarchy  30, 54, 136–137, 141–143, 147, 165, 169, 174, 257, 342, 351 history, philosophy of  6 Hobbes, T.  14, 43–45, 48, 53, 57, 60 Honneth, A. The Struggle for Recognition  42, 104, 151, 200 Work and Instrumental Action  3, 21, 22, 104, 138, 151, 196 Work and Recognition: A Redefinition  3, 20, 67, 101, 104–105, 115, 125, 128, 151, 154, 158, 197, 200, 204 honour 282 bourgeois 16–18 Horkheimer, M.  63–64, 190 Hughes, E.  133–134, 141, 143, 252 human distinctive faculties  14, 45 factor  27, 174 soul  44, 47, 60, 61 Hume, D.  14, 45 identity ego-identity  275–276, 288 formation  3, 34, 275–276 versus personality  227 professional 325 ideology  183, 264 neo-liberal  22, 133 illness  27, 80–82, 211–212, 231, 306 income  17, 69–70, 74, 80–100, 115, 136, 175, 183, 327–328, 335, 337–338, 367 individualisation  12, 172, 277

inequality  19, 250, 282, 367 injustice  23, 102, 105, 136, 138–148, 153, 161–162, 178 institutionalism  18–19, 102–105, 110–111, 115, 125–129, 331, 356–358 new  102, 125–126, 357 institutions  43, 49–50, 57, 83–85, 108, 111–113, 245, 257, 293, 323, 357 integration  158, 223, 257, 303–306, 310, 315, 323 social  34–35, 101–107, 177, 206, 275, 277, 304, 323–324 intelligence  27–28, 47, 213, 216–218, 222, 225–228, 234–235, 244, 251, 255 practical  5, 176, 197, 200, 206, 222 worker 222–223 interaction, social  12, 13, 112, 114, 137, 276 justice  115, 136–140, 148, 166, 179, 329, 348, 367, 368 Kant, I.  14, 19, 45–48, 57 Kojève, A.  41, 55 labour (see work, workforce) casual  137, 147, 148 centrality of  28, 210, 256, 334 division of  7, 20–26, 61, 101–109, 136–144, 151–162, 171–177, 192, 249–252, 263, 268, 330, 341 force  122–129, 342–344, 354, 355–367 gang 191 the labour problem  19–20 market, organisation of  17–24, 101–102, 105–107, 115–117, 123–124, 128–129, 137, 157, 192, 195, 204, 307, 334 supply  6, 327–337, 345 waged  255, 259, 280 Lacan, J.  41, 258, 259 language  2, 7–12, 49, 112, 163, 230, 233–236, 240–243 anthropological significance of  8 linguistic turn  2, 3, 8–9, 11 versus production  4, 7 Latour, B.  147 leadership  296, 310–316 Leistung  33, 171, 174, 177, 274, 278, 280, 286 leisure  37, 273, 330, 333, 335–337 liberalism  9, 37, 73, 349, 356, 362–364 perfectionist  349, 362–363

378

index

life as core norm of work  17, 30, 36–37, 54, 73–86, 136, 156, 184–199, 206, 242, 261, 330–335, 342–346, 358 goods  184, 189, 192 world 137 love  65–66, 81, 201, 248, 253, 259–260 Luhmann, N.  293, 310 Lukacs, G.  6 luxury  16, 17, 72, 87–89 MacIntyre, A.  19, 195, 354 management  220, 224–225, 230–231, 268–269, 288, 292, 297, 302, 310, 318, 320–322, 351 methods of  33 Marcuse, H.  193 market economy  106, 209, 364 coordinated versus liberal  38, 350–356, 358, 360–362, 365–367 market -centred  303, 306, 321, 322, 324 constraints 311–312 deregulated  67, 99 ethical basis of, 17, 21 financial 355 internal labour (ILM), 121–125, mechanism  110, 299, 344 -orientation 307 secondary 125 success  36, 305, 308, 317, 319, 322, 325 marketization  35, 293–296, 299, 301, 303, 309, 322–323 Marx, K.  6, 41, 59–60, 64, 103, 133, 161, 196, 364 Capital  154, 158, 160, 162, 167, 177 Grundrisse 159 Manuscripts of 1844 193–194 Mead, G. H.  32, 127, 145, 275, 288 mind, and body  44, 47–48 misrecognition  3, 202, 295, 299 modernity  14, 58, 61, 160–162, 172 morality  46, 184, 277, 279 Murphy, J. B.  185, 188–189, 192, 194, 334 mutual benefit  19, 21 narrative  59–60, 242, 265, 342 naturalism 45 needs  5–9, 21, 86, 91–92, 100, 106, 157, 188, 204, 253, 291–292, 338 system of  60–62, 74 neo-liberalism 66–67

normativism 19 normativity  49, 57, 139, 153, 164, 182, 188, 194–195, 201–204 normative content of work  23, 24, 141–143, 190–191, 196, 206 normative surplus  31 norms (see expression, cooperation, work) of efficiency  141, 145, 192 of health  23, 139–140 moral  105, 187–188, 190, 192, 197, 280 nursing  31, 195, 252, 267–268 ontology ontological significance of work  193 social 12 organisation formal/informal  218, 304 pain  113, 134, 155, 184, 238, 354, 265, 329–340, 344 Papin sisters  258, 259 paradigm  9–11, 13, 28, 115, 156, 168, 196, 201 interactionist 147 language 4 production 4–7 recognition  1–4, 12, 14–15, 201 pathology  168–169, 249 mental  212, 245 social 4, psychopathology  25–26, 174–175, 209–210, 212–217, 229, 231, 240, 247–248, 250 perfectionism  348–349, 362, 363–364, 367 performance  29, 35, 61, 84, 94, 167–174, 183, 274–299, 302–326, 342–344, 348–350, 367 Plato 47–48 pleasure  113, 143–145, 184, 191, 209, 213, 223, 229–232, 245–249, 261, 329–338, 344 poiesis 54-58, 188, 224, 241–242 power bargaining  20, 108, 117–118, 128–129 relations  27, 218, 220–221 pragmatism  112, 135, 139, 140 praxis 215–216 revolutionary 6 versus poiesis  54–58, 188, 224, 241–242

index379 precarious work  186–187, 252 production mode of  37, 103, 172 relations of  129 professions hierarchy of  141 profit  69, 102, 105, 134, 203, 307, 311, 317, 351 quest for  16–17, 72, 87, 89, 98 psychoanalysis  214–215, 234, 241, 244–245 psychodynamics  23, 25–31, 152, 174–175, 178, 209–250, 251, 256, 258, 263 psychology  12, 19, 66, 111, 113, 116, 147, 212, 229, 245, 249–250, 328 of work  144, 215, 218 Meadian 127 negotiational  114, 126–127 rational choice theory  18, 358 rationality  7, 8, 12, 24, 28, 46, 205–206, 213–214, 233, 264 axiological 231–232 instrumental  182–183, 192, 197, 231, 244 rational animal  2, 7, 11, 14–15 rational society  64 recognition and  14, 231 subjective  212, 221, 231–232, 242 teleological  221, 232 real (the)  28, 57, 137, 143–145, 147–148, 166–167, 169, 174, 298, 267, 340 reason as human-making feature  3 instrumental  45–46, 60–61, 182, 187–190, 192 practical  48, 51, 62, 199, 215, 348 space of reasons  15 reciprocity  11, 32–33, 204, 299, 355 recognition and income  18, 69–70, 88–93, 95–96 and success  295–298 as admiration  34–36, 294 as appreciation  33–36, 282 as gratitude  227 as ideology  13 as practical attitudes  11 as prestige  32, 141, 274, 278–279, 286 claims  288, 294, 298–299, 313, 316, 319, 324 deficit of  257 denial of  140–141, 145

mutual  24, 49, 77, 127, 204–205, 248, 278 order of, 87, 305, 312, 316 paradoxes of  273, 298 priority over cognition  12 psychodynamics of  209 struggles for  3, 13, 32, 67, 151, 326 struggles over  41, 68 trap of  35–36 versus redistribution  65–68, 70, 141 reputation  35, 291, 292, 298 respect  65, 72–73, 119, 183, 201, 206 legal  66–67, 71 responsibility  12, 236–239, 264, 288, 293, 297, 302–303, 308, 314, 321–324, 349, 359, 369 Ricoeur, P.  2, 251–252 rights abstract right  77–78, 82, 86 political  23, 360 to contribute  230–231 Romanticism  5, 7, 159 sacrifice  35, 184, 278–280, 282, 289–290, 296, 318–319, 331, 335–336 self (the)  32–33, 184, 291 self-development  288, 342–343, 346 self-exploitation  320, 324 self-expression  1–2, 5, 33, 183, 193–194, 197–198, 337 self-fulfilment  227–230, 253 self-making 5 self-organisation  284, 289, 294, 303 self-realisation  13, 19, 24, 32–33, 159, 162, 171, 188, 194–197, 281–282, 286–291, 295–299 self-regulation 303 self-respect  16, 73, 105, 107, 127, 201, 204, 207 self-sacrifice  33, 258, 260, 285, 294 self-transformation 56 social 127 triangulation with object and other 16 Sennett, R.  9, 37, 99, 154–155, 175, 185, 199, 203, 291, 315, 328, 339, 341–346 shareholder  35, 283, 285, 342, 351–352 Simmel, G.  278, 306 skill(s) inconspicuous  29–30, 256–259 Smith, Adam  6, 154, 159, 275, 330 socialisation  12, 31, 42, 142–143, 201, 237

380

index

sociality  1, 6, 8–9, 12, 138 society bourgeois  65–67, 71–75, 82, 86, 97, 273–274, 279 consumer 7 sociology  33–34, 111, 125, 186, 197, 203, 214, 217, 236, 341, 249, 282 interpretive 323 organisational  34, 302 qualitative  25, 34 specialisation  101, 103, 106, 213 species-being 197 spirit  14–15, 41–48, 52–53, 59–60, 194, 277 objective 46 state (the)  54, 78–79, 108–109, 111–113, 127, 135, 262–263, 281, 347, 349, 358–369 neutrality of  37–38, 347–349, 358–359, 364–365 stress  140, 170, 185, 212, 317, 340, 345 subject (the) capacities of  33, 167, 276 mobilisation of  224–231 writ-large 6 sublimation  146, 229, 250, 253 suffering  24, 337, 140–149, 153, 164–179, 185, 209–249, 256, 263–268, 326, 328, 340–345 Taylor, C.  2, 5, 50, 184 Taylorism  211, 279, 282–285, 297–299 technique  55, 177, 216–228, 248 technology  5, 7, 178, 182, 188, 211, 216, 351 Thompson, E. P.  13, 105, 156 trade union  20, 102, 109, 112, 118–119, 134, 185, 281, 351 trade, rules of the  224, 257, 261 trust  38, 174, 185, 223–224, 307, 315, 348, 355, 361 under-employment 186 unemployment  19, 22, 120, 134, 189, 328 utilitarianism 334 utility  19, 102, 112, 142–145, 189, 257, 345 utopia  19, 195 value horizon  277, 280, 308 shareholder  283, 285

virility  262, 270 voice  34, 178, 295, 298–299 vulnerability  30, 148, 162, 169, 253, 260–261, 264–265, 359 wage  21, 78–74, 98, 105–107, 117–129, 136–141, 162, 204, 255–259, 279–286, 327–345 Walzer, M.  274 welfare  33, 328, 336, 365, 367 state  34, 67, 362 human  327, 330–331, 334, 345–346 worker  332, 333, 335, 345 work as activity  143–144, 155, 166, 182, 188, 192, 197, 219, 229, 289 centrality of  28, 210, 256, 334 collective  31, 209, 242 critical conception of  21–24, 104, 138–142, 146–152, 196–198 denial of  133–134 dirty  32, 252–260, 270 as disutility  36, 337 domestic  142, 253–259, 282 emotional 253 as employment  141–147 ethic  32–33, 184, 186, 273, 286 health and  23, 120, 138–140, 145–149, 167, 210–213, 217–226, 229–230, 250–268, 290, 296 hermeneutic of  27, 187, 241, 342 honour  17–18, 282 industrial  210, 282 invisibility of  22 irksome  18, 338 love and  25, 248–250, 253, 259–260 malaises of  183 meaningful  7, 62, 198, 204, 206, 366 norms of  24, 161–163, 178, 182, 187–189, 193, 200, 203–205 as opportunity cost  36, 335–337, 341, 344 organisation of  21–22, 26, 101–105, 128, 137, 152, 165–167, 175, 198–205, 210–231, 239–245, 268–270, 327, 344 philosophical exclusion of  134–136 pleasant 338 prescribed  144, 146 psychic function of  144 psychodynamics of  23–31, 152, 209–223, 228–250, 256–258, 263 psychology of  144, 215, 218

index381 psychopathology of  26, 209–217, 229, 231, 240, 247, 249 quality of  25, 37, 107, 123, 184, 186, 198, 206, 298 rationalisation of  169 real  26, 144, 146, 155, 166, 168, 219–220, 224, 233 rules 230 satisfaction  186, 353 sciences 209 situation 217 sociology of  25, 33–34, 282 struggle for  42, 153, 245, 320–321, 341

subjectivisation of  283–288 Taylorist  211, 282–285, 297, 299 to-rule 223 work/life balance  183–186 workers’ movement  22, 133 workforce  122, 125, 129, 342, 344, 354, 355, 367 working conditions  119, 125, 137, 145–146, 156, 165, 171, 179, 243, 288, 296, 329–335, 342–346 class  6, 17 day  318, 332, 333 workloads  297, 316, 317