The New Spirit of Capitalism

THE NEW SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM

lUC BOlTANSKI

and

EVE CHIAPEllO

Translated by GREGORY ELLIOTT

VERSO London • New York

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Ouvrage publie avec Ie concours du Ministere fran simultaneously, and interactively, take charge of the definition/ categorization of the world.

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Paris, 27 May 2003 Notes 1. As indicated, for example, by the title of Oliver Williamson's work, The Economic Institutions

of Capitalism, published in 1985.

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2. A research centre at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, founded by Luc Boltanski in 1985: See Fran~ois Dosse, L 'empire du sens. L'humanisation des stiences humaines (La Decouverte, Paris 1995), for a history of French social science in these years. 3. See Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot, De la Justification. Les economies de la grandeur, Gallimard, Paris 1991. 5. See Luc Boltanski, 'The Left after May 1968 and the Longing for Total Revolution', Thesis Eleven, no. 69, Mar 2002, pp. 1-20. 6. Among the measures that were implemented, mention should be made of the mechanisms of VAE (Validation des acquis de i'expenence), which allow people who have accumulated skills in their working !lves to obtain equivalent qualifications without having to return to school. These mechanisms can be interpreted as attempts to give practical effect to the promise of employability, which is central in the projective city. Firms, for their part, have continued to work on the new management of human resources around the notion of skills. 7. See Olivier Favereau and Emmanual Lazega, eds, Conventions and Structures in Economic Organization: }darkets, Networks and Hierarchies, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham and Northampton (MA) 2002. 8. See Robert Boyer and Yves Saillard, T beone de la regulation. L'itat des savoirs, La Decouverte, Paris 1995. 9. See Eve Chiapello, 'Reconciling Two Principal Meanings of the Notion of Ideology: The Example of the "Spirit of Capitalism"', European Journal of S o"ology, vol. 6, no. 2, 2003, pp. 155-71. 10. L'ideologie ou i'ongine des idees rerues, Fayard, Paris 1986. 11. The other components involve propositions in terms of security and stimulation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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This work has been brought to a conclusion thanks to the contributions and help of numerous people who, in their various ways, have given us the benefit of their time, their knowledge and their solicitude -when itwas not also their friendship, their affection or, especially in the case of those closest to us, their unflagging endurance (and these forms of assistance are no less vital for completing a Long-term project). \X'e take the opportunity to thank them all. In preparing this work, we enjoyed the financial support of the HEC group and the HEC foundation, the backing of Gilles Laurent, then head of research, and of Bernard Ramanantsoa, director-general of the HEC group, as well as the support of the political and moral sociology group (EHESS-CNRS), where the group secretary Danielle Burre, in particular, was endlessly helpful. Without the aid of Sophie Montant, we would not have been able - or not in a-reasonable time-scale, at least - to complete the demanding and often thankless task of constructing the corpus of management texts and prepar-ing the computer files for processing by the Prospero@ program. Its inventors - Francis Chateauraynaud and Jean-Pierre Charriaud- taught us how to use it proficiently. Yves-Marie Abraham, sociologist and doctoral student at HEC, and MarieNoelle Godet, engineer at the CNRS (GSPM), helped us complete our documentation - the former by assembling a statistical dossier; the latter by perusing the political and trade-union press of the 1970s and 1980s. The final version of this book is the fruit of a protracted, thankless labour of clarification, refInement and also distillation, in order to make the transition from a manuscript almost too bulky to transport to an object which, while not exactly aerodynamic, is nevertheless manageable. That labour owes a lot to discussion with close friends, especially Laurent Thevenot, and our various readers. Francis Chateauraynaud, Bruno Latour, Cyril Lemieux and Peter \X'agner read extracts or earlier versions and criticized them vigorously: tflank you, Isabelle Baszanger, Thomas Benatoui"l, Alain Desrosieres and Fran' sa mise en valeur, La Decouverte, Paris 1998, p. 58) of the changes in production that have affected the clothing industry in the Cholet region attributes the breaking up of large units, the dispersion of production and the creation of workshops of subcontracting manufacturers to a desire on the employers' part to 'avoid social contagion'. The same author cites other examples:

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THE NEW SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM

the Solmer site at Fos-sur-Mer (p. 48), the Compagnie marseillaise de reparation (naval shipyards) (p. 53), a laundry firm in the Paris region (p. 80), all of which adopted modes of organization that made it possible for them to be exempt from union pressure. 34 Ibid., p. 49. 35 See Michel Pialoux and Stephane Beaud, 'Permanent and Temporary Workers', in Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World, trans. P. P. Ferguson et ai., Polity Press, Cambridge 1999, pp. 257-66; Pialoux, Weber and Beaud, 'Crise du syndicalisme et dignite ouvriere', p. 10). 36 Groux, Vers UII re120uveau du cooflit social, p. 20. 37 Launay, Le Syndicalisme ell Europe, p. 449. 38 Under the impact of the 'pedagogy of the crisis' and the endless reiteration that only improved skills can bring down unemployment rates, working-class families instead seek a way out in their children's scholarly success, everything else seeming doomed to failure (Pialoux, Weber and Beaud, 'Crise du syndicalisme et dignite ouvriere'). 39 See Labbe, Croizat and Bevort, La DisJlldicalisatioll. They are guided by remarks such as the follo\\'ing: 'In the factory, the fighter has nothing but problems and slanging matches. I'll end my life as a blue-collar worker. So I do my 8 hours. That's it' (ibid., p. 59). 40 In a study of union membership numbers from 1912 to the 1980s, Huguette Bouzonnie demonstrates the importance of factors that stabilize or destabilize work communities. Periods of decline in union membership in the interwar period were in part bound up with 'crises that destabilized work communities'. Contrariwise, the consolidation of union implantation in the years 1945-60 appears to be consequent upon 'the stabilization of industrial bastions constructed before the war' ('L'evolution des effectifs syndicaux depuis 1912: un essai d'interpretation', Revue Jranraise des affaires sodales, vol. 41, no. 4, October/December 1987, pp. 59-82). 41 To start off with, we can distinguish a first group pf small, highly unionized countries, with a low unemployment rate, legislation that affords workers significant protection, a socialdemocratic politics implemented over a very long period, and close collaboration between political leaderships and union headquarters (Austria, Greece, Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland). A second group is composed of countries that had an average unemployment rate in 1981 (between 4 and 9 per cent), where the law offers less protection to \\'orkers and government policies are more liberal (Denmark,.Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the Federal Republic of Germany). A third group contains couptries with high unemployment rates (above 9 per cent), some of which possess industrial sectors in serious crisis (mines, metallurgy, shipyards in Belgium or the Uo,ited I