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Brave New World of Work, The

Capital & Class, Autumn 2001 by Heartfield, James

The Brave New World of Work Polity Press, 2000, pp. 216 ISBN 0-745-62398-0 (pbk) L13.99 ISBN 0 745-62397-2 (hbk) L45.00

Reviewed by James Heartfield

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In the Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (1986, 1992 in English), Ulrich Beck took his sociology away from the realm of work, on the grounds that the unintended consequences of modernity-manufactured uncertainties, like pollution-outweighed the intended product, wealth. Projects based on the role of working class as subjective agent, he suggested, must fail, as organised labour defended the old modernity of industry. The accumulation of risks frustrated planned change. `The motor of social change is no longer considered to be instrumental rationality, but rather the side-effects: risks, dangers, individualization, globalization.' (The Reinvention of Politics, p.23) Agents of change, then, were not to be found in working class collectivities, but a new ,solidarity from anxiety' that comes with action against environmental degradation (Risk Society, P.49). `We look for politics in the wrong place' in industrial processes (Reinvention of Politics, 99). However, just as it seems that Beck's concerns with the risk society are to take him away from industrial sociology, production is brought back into the picture. Production is now not a site of struggle between classes, but a focal point of the conflict over the impact of industry upon the environment: `the politicization that is brought into industry by environmental threats' (Reinvention, p.129).

With his latest book, The Brave New World of Work, Beck's investigations have come full circle. His new investigation brings the worker and work back in. But this return to work is informed by the concepts and theories developed in the original re-orientation from monological modernity to the `reflexive modernity', in which `supra-national and non-class specific hazards' predominate (Risk Society, p.13).The dominant motif of reflexive modernity is risk, the manufactured uncertainty produced by industrial society. In the ironically titled Brave New World of Work, the worker is conceived not as collective subject, but as individuated victim. The `Job for life' is gone, Beck insists, and what the worker can look forward to is the Brazilianisation (he means deregulation and fragmentation) of work. In the Brave New World of Work, Beck assimilates work to his own conceptual schema of risk, by emphasising uncertainty at work. De-regulated labour markets put the worker into the same `at-risk' bracket.

Beck writes as if he were giving a seminar presentation to a policy thinktank. The text bubbles with bullet points, subheads and one paragraph sections. In the past, this method of free speculation has served Beck well, in his many exciting and fruitful essays into reflexive modernity. The Brave New World of Work is thought provoking, but there is nonetheless an awkwardness at the heart of the book: is it really about work at all, a topic that Beck seems unwilling to stick with?

There are many more questions raised that answered. Before and After analyses of modernity often trade in caricatures of Before. There never was a `Job for Life' outside of managerial grades.Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the car workers at Cowley (or Pressed Steel, as it was) were regularly laid off when the market was glutted. Industry, though central to the economic transformation of European societies never accounted for a majority of the employed workforce. Even at the height of the industrial revolution, more people worked in domestic service in Britain than manufacturing.

Beck's impressionistic style is upto-date, but also suffers for making too much of immediate events. The meltdown in the Far East is the 'Chernobyl' of free market economics, Beck predicts. But already the world's financial and industrial players have absorbed much of the shock, if the Far East itself has been made to take some tough medicine. Apparently indifferent to the claims of the New Economy, Beck writes as if it was immediately apparent that USA's and British economic models were failures. Despite consistent growth in employment, he assumes that new technologies will inevitably displace labour. Beck writes of the industrial society as if it was a thing of the past. But the ILO'S World Employment Report estimates 561.7 million industrial workers in the world-about a fifth of the total labour force-growing at a rate of 1.8 per cent a year (1998-9). Repeating the arguments of post-Fordists, that selfemployment and fragmented labour markets are the norm, Beck has not taken note of the falling rates of selfemployment in Britain and the us. All too often, it appears that The Brave New World of Work confuses the organisational defeat of the working class with its wholesale disappearance.

Following Andre Gorz's arguments (most recently rehearsed in Reclaiming Work, Polity, 2000), Beck looks forward to the eclipse of the world of full employment as itself a curse. The `multi-activity society', where activities in the home or for recreation have an equal footing to labour, is here to stay. Beck recoils from the conclusion that leisure replaces work, reflecting that enforced leisure could be a curse in itself. Rather he prefers to see `civil labour' gradually replace wage labour. He means the kinds of voluntary activities that younger, middle class people get involved in, like working for Non-Governmental Organisations, or voluntary work. Civil labour should be rewarded, he thinks, but rejects the obvious conclusion that this would merely be an expansion of the state sector. Beck's is a conclusion based on the relatively narrow experience of philanthropy, long the preserve of those whose incomes are secure. His underlying assumption that work itself could never be a site of real creativity and fulfilment takes the capitalist condition of alienated labour and assumes it to be an inescapable fact for all time.

Business Services Industry

Brave New World of Work, The

Capital & Class, Autumn 2001 by Heartfield, James

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