The Brave New World of Work by Beck Ulrich

Author:Beck, Ulrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745623979
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-08-25T12:34:53+00:00

But the downward elevator effect into the world of job insecurity does not affect everyone equally. As in the past, it is true internationally that insecure and temporary forms of employment are increasing faster among women than among men. Women make up by far the larger part of the working poor, and for them in particular the systemic change that is opening up a grey area between work and non-work takes place as a descent into poverty. Nor does the growing number of men confronted with insecure and fragmented working lives result in any positive easing of the gender conflict. Indeed, in so far as the reign of the short term also undermines relations of partnership, love, marriage, parenthood and family, men suffer as much as women – and public life too dies out.

How can what is happening be understood? In a striking reversal, countries of so-called ‘premodernity’, with their high proportion of informal, multi-activity work, may reflect back the future of the so-called ‘late-modern’ countries of the Western core. This change in who predicts whose future is what I mean by the ‘Brazilianization of the West’; it indicates a world that can no longer be understood according to the schema of core and periphery. Such an emphatic image may arouse suspicions of a reverse Eurocentrism, whereby Western measures of value and ideas of development are deconstructed with the aid of a negative stereotype called Braziliani-zation. It also exposes itself to the well-nigh insoluble problems of cultural comparison. But if this means that we can discuss (and criticize) only by reference to an ideal-typical content, what are we to understand here by ‘Brazilianization’ as an ideal type?

By way of self-criticism, and self-irony, it may be said that the Brazilianization thesis does appear at first sight to renew, through negative inversion, the romantic image that Westerners tend to have of Brazil. Whereas Europeans set off in the nineteenth cen-tury looking for a South American ‘paradise’, ‘the German papers nowadays carry an almost ritual annual report on how many people were killed during the Rio carnival. Usually the reporter forgets to mention, however, that a large number of these are “mundane” deaths in traffic accidents, the carnival period also being peak holiday time.’64

Brazil's development is broken in many different ways and full of contradictions: economic development does not coincide with social development; individual regions and federal states have their own histories and are themselves anything but homogeneous; Brazilian political discourse often has little to do with reality; wishful thinking, belief in miracles and a longing for salvation can here be unproblematically dressed up and ‘marketed’ in ‘modern’ social and economic terminology. There is no stabilization programme without its pro-fessorial justifications, no election without its new saviours.65

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