The Corrosion of Character: The
Personal Consequences of Work in
the New Capitalism by Richard
Sennett
How Instability And Superficiality Destroy The Inner Meaning Of Work
In the brave new world of the flexible corporation, Richard Sennett
observes, workers at all levels are regarded as wholly disposable, and
they have responded in kind, ceasing to think in terms of any long-term
relationship with the organizations they work for. This, he argues, has
tremendous negative consequences for workers emotional and
psychological well-being. Even in menial jobs, we extract much of our self-
image from the idea of a career--a life narrative rendered intelligible by
specific loyalties, which is to some degree self-invented but also in some
respects predictable. Innovations like flextime and bureaucratic de-
layering seem to promise more freedom to define ones career, but in fact
they create jobs in which theres less freedom than ever to be had. The
Corrosion of Character is a short, anecdotal book, and while one might

wish that it included a discussion of the social and psychological costs of
the sheer increase of work time in the average workers week, Sennett has
created a pithy, disturbing picture of the cost of the corporate worlds
much-vaunted new efficiencies. --Richard Farr
Personal Review: The Corrosion of Character: The Personal
Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism by Richard
Sennett
Transient consultants have replaced entrenched bureaucrats. Teams and
teamwork have replaced adversarial labor/management and individual
ego-driven rivalries. Knowledge gleaned from marketing studies has
replaced knowledge gained from every day experience. New machines
have made the once complex extremely simple, and the once dangerous
safely sanitized. Companies that were once entrenched ethnic enclaves
are now look more closely like America.
While not totally disapproving, the author looks at these and other current
developments and finds them wanting. Work no longer generates the kind
of passionate commitment it once did, and he cannot blame the workers,
because their employers no longer show the loyalty they once did. In
newly created world of permanent transience, little is cumulative, and the
only test is who can do the best job now according to given specifications,
with little concern for the past or for the future. Individual personal
character is corroded--gradually destroyed--because sacrificing for the
future makes little sense and virtues like loyalty to coworkers and one's
employer are unrewarded, unexpected, and unappreciated.
The author finds the new arrangements are more about glib superficial
agreements rather than the creation of authentic human relationships.
Teams focus on short-term ends, with leaders who play down their
authority and assume the falsely modest role of facilitators. A more
adversarial assertion of self-interest and opinion would in the long run
serve the companies better, as people bind together from honest
discussion and disputes, the author asserts.
The author's individual chapters are each in themselves excellent essays:
they are entitled Drift, Routine, Flexible, Illegible, Risk, The Work Ethic,
Failure, and The Dangerous Pronoun. The most profound chapters are
perhaps those on (1) risk, which documents the odds against success and
the difficulty many people have adjusting to this reality; (2) the work ethic,
which shows how it is undermined in many different ways by transience in
co-workers and authority structures; and (3) failure, which shows both its
commonality and the difficulties workers have in dealing with it and crafting
a successful future because it is often experienced more as a personal
reckoning than as a result of powerful institutional and competitive forces
undermining their best efforts.
The author adds statistical tables which document the decline of
manufacturing and the rise of personnel and computer and data

processing services; declining employment and the rise of wage inequality;
lower productivity growth in the U.S. than in France, Germany, Japan; the
steady decline in union membership as a percentage of the workforce and
its plateau in actual number of workers covered; the rising percentage of
women from 22 to 44 in the workforce and the declining percentages of
workers in other generational categories; the rising number of workers on
flexible schedules; the rising number of workers using computers; the
generally falling earnings that job switchers get; the slow rise in jobs
requiring a college degree; and the great rise in percentage and numbers
within the labor movement of public sector workers.
The strength of the author's approach is that he mixes analysis of
anecdotes with scholarly research touching on both workers and working
conditions and life in general. The author not only brings a lot of fresh
material to the analysis of corporate working conditions, but he provides
original and creative analysis to familiar material so that we see it with new
significance in new contexts.
No one should consider taking a corporate job, or a job in a large
organization, without reading this book. It is sociology at its best, both the
critiquing economic trends and relating them to lives of individuals who are
both representative and compelling. The author's writing is gripping,
passionate, and thought-provoking. He manages simulaneously the
difficult tasks of both synthesizing past scholarhip and breaking new
ground extremely well.
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