Authority by Richard Sennett

Author:Richard Sennett [Sennett, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

INFLUENCE

To understand this disguise, we need first to take note of an important historical fact. In the old regime, how the masses of people survived was thought to have very little to do with the principles and persons of authority. Work was thought akin to the life of beasts. Montesquieu does not frame his principles of just and unjust authority according to the work people do, nor even did Rousseau. In the letters of Madame de Sévigné, labor is invisible. It was Diderot’s great Encyclopedia, published toward the close of the 18th Century, in which the awareness of work dawned as important for a more general understanding of society, and it is the writings of Marx and Engels which brought this awareness to fruition. How people are conscious of their work, their bosses, and themselves is the basis of authority in society.

The ideologies of paternalism in the 19th Century were one acknowledgement of the need to justify hard work to those who were laboring for others. By the First World War, this justification was beginning to wear thin, as was the promise of the market ideology itself to include more and more individuals among its beneficiaries. The problem could be measured. In the 1920’s, American, German, and British employers began to take the sort of statistics which showed that the productivity of their workers was declining compared to the productivity of workers a generation before. Appeals to the glories of market competition did not seem to be of much help, nor did professions of a desire to take good care of employees.

By now a great deal is known about the relation of worker motivation to productivity. The relation is not a direct, positive correlation. For instance, a study conducted in American factories after the Second World War found that alienated workers can be highly productive; they simply do their jobs without thinking about them, getting through the day with as little fuss as possible because they feel so disconnected. It is also known that there are many work situations in which workers become less productive when they get interested in the work; they savor the tasks they do, and so do them slowly, or they begin asking questions about why the work is organized one way or another rather than just taking orders.

Motivation fluctuates over time as well; it depends upon a complex set of economic, demographic, and cultural factors. At the present moment, North American and many European countries are experiencing a “crisis” in worker motivation comparable to that which appeared in the 1920’s. Signs of sheer discontent have been deftly characterized in a book by Robert S. Gilmour and Robert G. Lamb, Political Alienation in Contemporary America, who have uncovered some startling statistics about the discontents workers feel about their work, and the suspicions they harbor about their bosses. While less than a tenth of the professionals in their study were highly disaffected and suspicious, 40 percent of the service workers and a third of the industrial operatives felt so.

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