What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society

by Paul Verhaeghe

  [* This, of course, relates to the most serious problem confronting us today, which is only obliquely touched upon in this book: the damage that human overpopulation and the economy in its current form have done to the environment. The minimal priority given to this issue — green parties almost universally lack political clout — bodes extremely ill for our survival as a species and raises serious doubts about our much-vaunted power of reason.]

  Managers are increasingly beginning to appreciate this, even if they cannot always voice these views publicly. Some see an urgent need for the creation of a political support base to tackle this issue, preferably on an intra-country scale. That there is such a need is clear. Take the way in which politicians ‘saved’ the banks at the expense of the public. At the very least, that episode testifies to a lack of political vision and nerve, and many see it as an illustration of corruption and cowardice. Realpolitik has created a generation of nondescript politicians who dance to the tune of the stock market. Society lacks truly different political parties that promote their own ideology in democratic competition with others. In that respect, I concur with General de Gaulle: ‘La politique … ne se fait pas à la corbeille.’ (‘The stock exchange should not be the forum of politics.’) The economy must serve society, not the other way round. That sacrifices will have to be made is clear; we are living far beyond our means in the West. But those sacrifices should benefit society, not the economy. Anyone who finds this statement surprising should be more surprised at themselves.

  A well-functioning society relies on a balance between parity and disparity, between the communal and the individual. Authority and the way in which it functions are part of this balance. Today’s blend of neo-liberalism, digitisation, and obsession with figures has an ambiguous effect: we live in an extremely controlling society in which authority has disappeared. That control is evident in endless rules and regulations and an increase in CCTV surveillance. That absence of authority is evident in a lack of accountable authority figures.

  In modern times, the West has evolved into a democracy in which delegates are elected by a majority. They are vested with the authority to draft policy, in accordance with existing legislation that cannot be arbitrarily altered. Formerly, priests were representatives of divine authority. Today, parliamentarians are representatives of the people. In the middle of the previous century, authority became suspect, as a shift in meaning shows: an ‘authoritarian’ system became synonymous with a dictatorship. Every authority came to be viewed as a tyrant to be overthrown, whether priest, teacher, police officer, or CEO.

  With hindsight, it’s not so difficult to spot the faulty logic underlying anti-authoritarian movements. In Western democracies, we are no longer governed by absolute rulers, but by people ‘in authority’. In other words, authority is temporarily vested in an individual, making the person distinct from the function. And such functions are embedded in a broader symbolic structure that collectively sets out rights and obligations. It’s not for nothing that authority figures are traditionally assigned external badges of office — a mayor’s chain, a judge’s wig — so that they can be publically held to account. The fact that these badges nowadays come across as slightly ridiculous shows how we have lost the ability to distinguish between authority and those who hold it. These days, they tend to be conflated, so that traditional authority, with its symbolic underpinning, is lapsing into brute force.

  We respond very ambiguously to this trend. Either we find power suspect and oppose it with might and main, or we go to the other extreme and call for a strong leader who will take action to solve our problems. Often, we do both at once: people want more authority, but get incensed when a teacher punishes their child. ‘Who does she think she is?’ we might ask, whereas that is actually the key issue; teachers are vested with the authority to teach. If a teacher abuses her position, she must be called to account. But the function itself must be exempt from criticism; otherwise, teaching will become impossible.

  The loss of a distinction between power and authority, between rulers and those in authority, means that nowadays things too often come down to power struggles. We end up in situations where ‘might is right’. Ironically, people seize on this to justify the notion of the survival of the fittest. And, at present, this struggle for survival is particularly apparent in the workplace.

  Labour organisation

  The content of our identity is, as we know, bound up with those closest to us: we are the child of, partner of, parent of, or sibling of someone. Alongside these influences is another equally important pillar: our professional identity. In both cases, relationships with the other determine our self-respect. In the best-case scenario, mastery of professional skills is added to the mix. Our self-image and sense of wellbeing are greatly affected by our workplace and our relationship with colleagues.

  What makes labour efficient, and what makes people happy at work? And how can both be achieved? Studies of burnout dating from long before the economic crisis show that work-related depression results not from overwork and excessive pressure, but from the way in which work is organised and, most particularly, from its impact on social status and on one’s relations with others. Lack of respect and appreciation are some of the main causes of burnout. More recently, these findings were both confirmed and expanded in a TEDGlobal talk by Dan Pink on motivation in the workplace.10

  Pink’s explanation is particularly important in the light of the current debate about financial bonuses and the ‘culture of greed’. Beyond a certain level of income, extrinsic rewards have scarcely any effect. Financial stimuli increase motivation only in jobs that don’t involve any thought. As soon as thinking is involved, especially creativity, intrinsic motivation proves far more effective. In fact, in such cases extrinsic motivation — that’s to say, bonuses — has a negative effect, causing people to perform worse than those who are intrinsically motivated. In this region of the world, where the focus is on the knowledge economy, the majority of jobs fall into the second category. Jobs that entail little thought — for example, conveyor-belt work, are largely a thing of the past. In that sector, bonuses do have a positive effect, but ironically enough are rarely awarded.

  So politicians and captains of industry have everything to gain by dismantling the extrinsic-motivation model as fast as possible. Introducing intrinsic motivation becomes even more of a priority when one considers that the current system of bonuses heightens income inequality — an inequality that has been linked to almost every kind of negative psychosocial effect. Politicians aspiring to represent the interests of the entire community must take account of this fact. The key question is what constitutes intrinsic motivation. Dan Pink sums it up in three keywords: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

  Autonomy and mastery are closely related. Having a say over the organisation and content of one’s work enormously increases motivation and commitment. This, in turn, leads to greater mastery and expertise, thereby increasing job satisfaction even more. The process ties in with what Sennett has to say about craftsmanship. Its purpose must be perceived as a contribution to something that transcends ourselves; something that we cannot achieve in isolation. This gives us the feeling of belonging to a community, yet still having an individual role to play. Note that this again relates to the balance between sameness and difference, between being part of a greater whole and yet being autonomous.

  The way in which labour is currently organised increasingly conflicts with this approach. In the majority of cases, even highly qualified individuals possess only responsibility, not power. They are scarcely involved in decision-making, even when those decisions relate directly to their work. The combined dictatorship of figures and IT ensure that decisions from ‘the top’ almost always land directly at ‘the bottom’, without much scope for participation. It emerged in the previous chapter that the less freedom people have to organise their work, the more work will make them ill. This mainly has to do with social relationships; the more people are subjected
to the power of others, the less sense of control they have.11

  A top-down approach to labour organisation not only defines the objectives to be met, but also the way in which this must be done. As a result, knowledge and expertise decline, and feelings of powerlessness and passivity increase. Providing extrinsic rewards doesn’t help; indeed, it’s counterproductive. A work environment that stimulates autonomy and participation, and that gives people the feeling that they are working for a higher goal, on the other hand, is shown by all studies to have a positive effect. Production and efficiency increase, along with job satisfaction and loyalty to the company. The taking of sick leave plummets, and adult workers indeed act like adults.

  Many readers will dismiss this with a shrug, and urge me to ‘get real’. The above approach sounds very nice, they will argue, but the bottom line is that people are in it for the money. And even if this model works, it can only be applied in a limited number of cases involving highly creative work. Both criticisms can easily be countered, as plenty of reliable studies and examples show. People are in it for the money because that’s how the system is organised. I have already stressed elsewhere that the current reality is the consequence of a certain economic and social organisation; it should not be confused with an absolute reality. Very many people these days derive job satisfaction, and more broadly, self-respect and a feeling of belonging, from work for which they receive little or no pay. Every single voluntary organisation bears witness to this. I shall discuss two such organisations.

  At the dawn of the digital age, Microsoft had a brilliant idea: it would create a digital encyclopaedia, partly on CD-ROM, partly online, that would exploit the full potential of multimedia. Experts around the globe were enlisted; IT specialists wrote programs; a small fortune was invested in the project; and high hopes were entertained of its success. Things worked out differently, and in 2008 the Encarta project died a death. Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales and a handful of volunteers had started up Wikipedia. The rest is history. All over the world, enthusiastic Wikipedians (‘And proud to be one’) work without pay to produce entries whose quality has become extremely high. These days, scientists and academics are as proud as Punch when their work is cited on Wikipedia. Dan Pink uses Wikipedia as an example to rebut the ‘get real’ argument. Imagine, he says, if 15 years ago you had approached an economist with a business proposal to make a free, quality-controlled encyclopaedia using unpaid staff. The economist would probably think you needed a psychiatrist.

  Which brings me to my second example. In recent years, in both the Netherlands and Flanders, mental-health care has been the victim of top-down management. Directed by coordinators and supervised by branch managers, it features all the familiar symptoms, from registration and measurement to performance interviews and newspeak (such as ‘audits’, ‘gap analysis’, ‘benchmark’, and ‘key performance indicators’). It’s ironic that a workplace full of highly qualified psychiatric professionals is organised in a way that conflicts with every single finding of psychological studies of motivation. And the results are what you would expect.

  Therapists for Young People (TEJO), a voluntary organisation in Antwerp, set up in late 2009 by professionals frustrated with the system, provides a refreshing contrast. It offers free and anonymous frontline services. The therapists have thrown protocols overboard, and instead work on the assumption that the youngsters themselves know best what they want to achieve. There is no registration, only minimal administration, and almost no management. Its only aim, besides helping its young clients, is to ensure that the therapists can do their work. It is staffed entirely by volunteers, who provide their services for free. Three years on, there are over 60 of them, and their ranks are swelling. I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon at the organisation — I say ‘pleasure’, because their enthusiasm was heartwarming. Their working method ties in perfectly with everything that promotes motivation: having autonomy, a say over one’s work, self-management, social control by fellow professionals, and a common objective. Poignantly enough, many of its staff have regular jobs in the overmanaged mental-health system, but have lost motivation in their work. TEJO is the place where they recharge their batteries.

  These two examples fall within the non-profit sector. What’s the position when it comes to ‘real’ work? As it happens, the power of intrinsic motivation has meanwhile also been discovered by the production economy. Companies that focus on employee share ownership, profit sharing, and participatory management are noticeably more productive and efficient because the people who work for them are much more motivated. The self-management teams introduced by Volvo turned out to yield much better results than top-down organisations, even in the case of standard production work. And the same applies to official bodies. For over ten years now, Frank Van Massenhove has headed the Belgian federal government’s social-security department, using an entirely novel approach: ‘Our staff control their own lives. People work wherever, whenever, and however they want … But because they have so much freedom, we do need to know exactly what we can expect of everybody. That is the crux of the new approach to work.’ The results are stunning. The social-security department is Belgium’s best functioning public service, Van Massenhove was elected ‘government manager of the year’ in 2007, and his department is seen by federal officials as the best workplace in the country.12

  Information technology, and the fallacy that to measure is to know

  In many respects, TEJO is a liberal initiative, the brainchild of a single individual who, fed up with interference in his or her work, turns a new approach into a successful enterprise. Neo-liberalism, too, sets great store by the so-called free market and deregulation, but in practice soon establishes a millstone of rules and regulations that kill motivation. I discussed the reason for this in chapter five: the free market is merely a slogan — a neo-liberal organisation functions by virtue of strict central policy and constant evaluation, the aim being higher productivity, entailing competition. Its impact is nowadays greater than ever in a world dominated by figures, assessments, and computers. Earlier, I said that a feature of the modern-day Panopticon — the control centre — is that it is empty. That is not quite right. It is empty in the sense that it no longer has a central watchperson. That person has been replaced by a computer.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those prophets of doom who think that computers are going to take over the world. It’s just important to remember that information technology, like any other innovation, can magnify certain human obsessions — in this case, a wish for control and predictability. These days, you only have to hit a few keys to produce sheaves of statistics with beautifully coloured diagrams of every shape and size, creating the illusion of control. The speed with which these statistics roll out of the printer means that people just don’t have time to reflect. Time and again, I am amazed by the blind faith placed in spreadsheets. God is dead, but everyone prostrates themselves in front of figures. Just how they were reached and whether other interpretations are possible is something we don’t tend to ask ourselves.

  Take the following example from the field of macro-social labour organisation. The director of the Federation of Enterprises in Belgium, in an opinion piece in the Belgian newspaper De Standaard, lauded the ‘German model’, citing figures as proof of its effectiveness. He stated that it had halved the unemployment rate from 11.4 per cent in mid-2005 to 6.1 per cent in April 2011, and had considerably reduced the budget deficit. He added, for good measure, that it had been introduced by a socialist chancellor (Gerhard Schröder). The figures led to only one conclusion: Belgium needed to adopt this model without delay. The result would be lower unemployment and a smaller budget deficit: a win-win situation, surely?13

  Those statistics appear in a somewhat different light once you know that since the neo-liberal Hartz reforms (2003–2005), German jobseekers have been forced to take virtually any job offered to them, collective labour agreements aren’t enforced in half of Germany’s companie
s, and the other half are increasingly staffed by temps who have little or no protection and often earn 30–40 per cent less than the staff on fixed contracts working alongside them. The result is that one in five working Germans (almost seven million in 2008) receive a net hourly wage of four to six euros, forcing many people to take on two jobs. The reduction in unemployment is matched by an almost equal increase in the number of working poor. According to official EU figures, poverty in Germany increased from 12.5 per cent in 2005 to 15.5 per cent in 2009. Between 2000 and 2009, real wages shrank by 4.5 per cent, causing social inequality to soar. By way of comparison: in the same period, Belgian wages increased by 7.4 per cent, roughly keeping pace with the cost of living.14

  The news article celebrating the German model was followed shortly afterwards by a corresponding debate on the Belgian figures. A press release by the Flemish government, citing a study showing that only 0.4 per cent of Flemings lived in poverty, made front-page news. That same week, the authors of the study published a rectification. The press release had been wrong: the figure of 0.4 per cent had been based on a faulty interpretation of the study, and, according to the official European method of calculation, 11 per cent of Flemings were poor. Indeed, if the researchers applied their own norms, the percentage was even slightly higher. It seems there are different methods of calculation: official ones and others.