The cultural contributions of capitalism?
Until I heard Radio 4’s Last Word yesterday evening I didn’t know about the recent death of Daniel Bell, the pioneering sociologist and futurist (although he didn’t like that label).
As someone who is both an internationalist and enthusiastic about decentralising power, I have been fond of quoting Bell: ‘the national state has become too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems’.
But the phrase for which Bell will probably be most remembered comes in the title of his book ‘the coming of post-industrial society’. Bell was both fascinated and troubled by changes in the nature of capitalism and the culture which those changed spawned. He returned to those themes in 1978 a book – which despite its mixed record in terms of prediction – I would strongly recommend.
In ‘The cultural contradictions of capitalism’, Bell argues that the values such as industriousness, responsibility and deferred gratification necessary for the emergence of industrial capitalism (an idea taken from Weber) are now being undermined by the ‘naughty but nice’/'because your worth it’ (neither campaign existed in 1978 but you know what I mean) culture of consumerism
Glancing this morning at Bell’s foreword to the book, I came across this statement:
‘I am a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture’.
In the early nineties an American political strategist (I have never been able to source the quotation) said something like ‘in modern politics the left has won the social argument, the right has won the economic argument and the centre the political argument’. This may have seemed true through the nineties as the Democrats and New Labour embraced the free market and the right reluctantly endorsed social liberalism, but in 2011 I suspect Bell’s combination of perspectives may look a lot more enticing.
The credit crunch, the slow and uneven recovery, high levels of economic inequality, and our continued dependence on the naked and unaccountable interests of finance have all undermined the popular legitimacy of modern capitalism. The excesses of statism under the last Government have led to a reassertion of liberalism in the political sphere shown for example in support both for strengthening civil liberties and decentralising power. Meanwhile concerns about the weakening of social norms and bonds and clashes of cultures and religious values in a shrinking world have given new voice to social conservatives on the left and right.
These thoughts touch on the emerging topic for my 2011 annual lecture. Bell’s values triptych provides part of the background against which companies are facing higher expectations – and in some cases setting themselves more ambitious objectives – for social engagement. The hypothesis is that citizens need in aggregate to change their ways and companies can use their brand-based relationship with customers to encourage better ways of living.
I suggested last week that ‘organisations need to be aiming for a sweet spot…which combines their competitive edge with levering their brand and relationships for social good. I then came across this piece in the Guardian
I suspect a hard headed scholar like Bell would have been quite sceptical about the ability of consumer capitalism to foster individual and civic virtue. Whether the benign behaviour change encouraged by Flora or Nike can be real and long lasting, whether it’s a strategy open more generally to companies and what such a strategy means for the way a company organises itself are issue I intend to explore further. Perhaps as a tribute to Bell I should think about calling my lecture ‘the cultural contributions of capitalism’?
The defenestration of central Government (in seven minutes)
Preparing for my annual lecture I pushed everything in my diary into the second half of June and early July. This means I have, on average, about ten free minutes a day for the next four weeks. So get ready for my ten minute blog blasts….
Assume:
a) The British people decide (regardless of the voting system) that they want coalition Government for the foreseeable future. This, by the way, is already the situation in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as most of Europe. This will mean it simply won’t matter as much as it used to who runs Whitehall and Westminster as whichever is the lead Party, it will always have to compromise.
b) This Government really has embarked on a fundamental downsizing of the centre through dismantling aspects of the surveillance state, through the abolition of the target culture and through a huge reduction in centrally funded functions.
The conclusion is that the locus of power shifts. Increasingly, it will feel like the place where people make a difference locally rather than nationally. Being a Mayor or a Council leader will be much more important than being an MP. Politics will become more local and more civic.
Meanwhile, looking up: it was fascinating that George Osborne, the Chancellor of a fiercely anti-European Party, told the House that he has secured agreement from France and Germany to a coordinated approach to bank levies.
The American sociologist, Daniel Bell, famously said something like this:
‘in the future the nation state will seem too big for the small things in life and too small for the big things in life’.
Our national government will come to be judged not by what it does itself directly (it will do a lot less) but by its effectiveness as a global player and its ability to create the right strategic framework of local initiative.
These are big and fascinating questions. They should be discussed by anyone interested in politics and society. Sadly, they are about as likely to be debated intelligently in the Labour leadership campaign as Emile Heskey is to score a hat trick this afternoon.
7 minutes 38 seconds. Not bad eh?
It does what it says on the label
Reading Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’ I came across a reference to James Hunter’s ‘The death of character’, published in 2000. Haidt describes Hunter’s thesis: as America moved in the twentieth century from being a nation of producers to being a nation of consumers it replaced the intrinsically moral idea of ‘character’ in favour of the amoral term ‘personality’.
I haven’t read Hunter’s book, and he may well recognise his intellectual debt, but this thesis is very reminiscent of the core argument of one of the classics of twentieth century American sociology, ‘The cultural contradictions of capitalism’ by Daniel Bell.
Every day, it seems, new books are being published applying insights from neuroscience and behavioural science to big philosophical and social questions like ‘what is happiness?’ or ‘how do we get people to behave well towards each other’. The danger is that we ignore the insights of past thinkers who did not have access to the new science. The opportunity is to use new insights to refurbish the elegant structures of past masters.
A recent post by Chris Dillow over at Stumbling and Mumbling offers yet more evidence of the effect of self esteem and status on performance. This time it’s about students and participation in sports, but Chris also refers back to ‘the Obama effect’ on African American SAT scores, which I discussed last week.
Maybe I haven’t been reading carefully enough, but rarely in the discussion of these findings have I seen reference to the theoretical framework they strikingly reinforce.
It may be that the first time I heard about ‘labelling theory’ was when my father was lecturing on deviance as part of his sociology courses in the 1970s. No doubt, Laurie started with the ideas of Howard Becker, the man who first developed the theory.
It turns out that Becker is still alive, that his accomplishments stretch well beyond labelling theory into areas like instructing social scientists on how to explain ideas intelligibly (that’s what I call a service to society). Becker lives his life between California and France (who wouldn’t?) and he even has a funky personal web-site.
Labelling theory was subject to a nasty and aggressive neo-liberal backlash in the 80s and 90s, smeared with the allegation that it was a way for lefties to excuse bad behaviour by the underclass. But the new evidence shows that Becker was right. I hope he gets the praise he deserves and that some of his erstwhile detractors are ready to be labelled as charlatans.
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