by Richard Sennett

This book takes a very different angle of looking at the shift towards flexiblity, network structures, team work and all the elements that we have come to equate with ways of organising that are replacing the old, and often bureaucratic, organisational hierarchies. However Sennett is not wishfully asking us to go back to a better past (he clearly outlines both the pros and cons of what we are coming from). He is pointing out many of the detriments and strains of what we are moving into.

Let me give a few examples: His look at the increasing use of team work, in many places showed up as people learning to wear the ‘mask of co-operativeness’; the focus on flexibility showed up as an irreverence for older people - youth is in, and age becomes equated with being stuck in old ways; his look at increasing technologicalisation of workplaces (to make work easier for the workers) showed him a resulting superficial engagement with their work, since they lacked understanding of what they were doing (as their work moved from a craft to operating a computer). And so on.

This short, but potent book, is divided into chapters, each with a theme he looks at – from flexibility, to risk, to the work ethic, and more. The book is based on thorough historical knowledge (he teaches sociology at the London School of Economics), which is brought to life in the flux of the present which he tries to describe through the lives of a handful of people through whom he is witnessing the strain the new capitalism places on people, their character and their sense of self.

One of his strong findings is that in today’s capitalism of flux and uncertainty it becomes increasingly difficult to shape and form your life as a narrative, as a continuous story, that has a plot, a long term purpose and a steady development of value. Because in systems praising flexibility and shorter time horizons (change is the name of the game), what people achieved yesterday is of little value today. Today is what counts. "Yet to fail to wrestle some sense of continuity and purpose out of these conditions would be literally to fail ourselves."

His book makes the need for such a network as Pioneers of Change even more clear. Our desire to continuously pursue personal meaning is in part what this book points to as being threatened in the new capitalism. How closely we manage to stay connected, to and recognise each of our journeys, may be what makes the difference for each of us, immersed as most of us are in a context of change and flux. As he says:

"Who needs me?" is a question of character which suffers a radical challenge in modern capitalism. The system radiates indifference. It does so in terms of the outcomes of human striving, as in winner-take-all markets, where there is little connection between risk and reward. It radiates indifference in the organization of absence of trust, where there is no reason to be needed. And it does so through reengineering of institutions in which people are treated as disposable. Such practices obviously and brutally diminish the sense of mattering as a person, of being necessary to others."

He leaves us with more clarity of how our system is taking its toll on our humanity and our sense of community and contribution. And for those reasons, we need to set about changing this unsustainable situation. That it will happen, he does not doubt. How it will occur, he does not know.

"If change occurs it happens on the ground, between persons speaking out of inner need, rather than through mass uprisings. What political programs follow from those inner needs, I simply don’t know. But I do know a regime which provides human beings no deep reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy."

• Reviewed by Marianne Knuth

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