Richard Sennett - Entrevista Exclusiva

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] I was working musician from the age of 14 on and I never expected to become a a sociologist and I had a hand injury and I had to change careers uh but I learned a great I mean what I learned uh about cooperation I learned from the fact that you know from this very early age um I had to work with other people uh to live you know I was on tour all the time and um constantly cooperating with others and I asked myself after I had to make this change well

was that all some that art stuff was that all some something that had nothing to do with everyday social life and maybe the very biased answer I said no no the life you knew when you were working as an artist has something to do with the with everyday life and this is this is one of the connections that to become a really good professional musician you have to cooperate professionally you have to be skilled in it you have to learn how to listen uh you need to know when to assert yourself and when to fall

back um you need to learn what people want to do but can't really get done in their fingers is very much similar to we have the situation we have in everyday social exchanges that people can't say what they mean so you have to begin to hear with as we say with the third ear so it seemed to me um maybe just as a as a matter of wanting to keep these parts of my life connected that I thought there was a relationship between art and society when I read teodor Dono the great uh Frankfurt School

sociologist uh I found a kind of Spirit uh kind of uh uh father in this because he was originally a musician he's not a very good musician but he became a great sociologist and for him it was the same sort of thing so my own life this is a very tight connection and it's worked for me because the work I do now is very concrete I interview people I work with data um you might work with technological par is technological studies and things but um a way of keeping it alive for me has been to

think what would this mean if I were thinking about productivity for instance as a musician and it keeps my keeps my mind going so I don't know maybe that's why it's a very odd kind of political economy that I practice my own View and this Manuel and I have always differed on this is that in my view the public realm is not necessarily A Realm that expresses itself in terms of social movements I think that's too narrow uh it expresses itself in terms of other forms of collective Behavior economic or purely social um if you

take something like Twitter it has a political side as a new public space in in Egypt or uh uh even in parts of of Syria this is not the destination of what social media are about they're creating a new kind of public realm which can use for many other things as well and as I say I've had I've known Manuel all my life and this is a friendly debate we've had all our lives um I think of Politics as an instrument for sociability and he thinks of sociability as an instrument for politics uh I think

of public space is performing many many other functions than connecting people for Collective action in a political sense massive workers are part of the organization as well they should have a voice in what happens uh and they should be able to get shares of the Enterprise so you know it's a matter Distributing both power and wealth if you have no structure for cooperation uh then they are peons they do what they're told and that is what I'm saying to you it's a very poor recipe for productivity uh and the most surprising thing to me about

the studies we've done is that [Music] um uh hourly or weekly wage gains are not much of a motivator for productivity and people want more they want want what Fels caused by flourishing they want to think that they they have a stake in the company that they're recognized they're given a certain measure of dignity and respect that their voice counts even if they're the simplest workers um so to me this is not I am very idealistic but this is not an idealistic proposal this is a better way to run the economy and it's more democratic

I have to admit that I'm dependent on other people well of course you know but in this Civil Society conservative Civil Society model dependence is humiliating you're not supposed to be dependent you're supposed to do it for yourself and I think that's what's really wicked about it is that it denies a fundamental human fact we need other people to do things which we can't do for ourselves and the moment we say yes I am dependent we're all dependent institutions which we have to support arise so the question is um what can we be independent about

and I think there are some things we can be independent about I think maintaining order in communities is something we can be independent about uh I think that um being responsive uh to Neighbors being sociable with them is something we can independently do something about um but you know these this is a domain of where which is small relatively we were talking about esops before to make that kind of cooperation work which is institutional means that your employees where just electricians are sweeping the floors have at the same time to cooperate to say yes I'm

dependent on you I'm not I'm not your equal and in my book on cooperation I try to look at that kind of complexity my view of Civil Society of this notion of this space in which people can deal with each other as equals it's another reason why it's for me sociable space which is what I think the domain of mutual equal sociability is about it's a kind of U and that's why I'm so interested in cities those are the places where this kind of sociability can be enacted Town centers bars clubs you know these are

places where you can have equal individual operating with each other but they their experience is an experience of sociability which seems to me very important um but I I just never bought that formula um you know as a factual matter it's not true that the reason that Civil Society is weak is because the welfare welfare Straits uh w States grow strong in um the Nordic countries for instance which have very extensive welfare states they also have a huge number of voluntary organizations so let's talk a little about what we mean by Civil Society okay uh

in the views of people like Nile Ferguson if we had less welfare state we would have more Civil Society more cooperation so on I think that view is wrong for two reasons um one of them rather particular and the other quite General the particular is this it's a very conservative view in a very British or anglosaxon sense which which is that you give people less and less money for instance to run schools or emergency rooms but you subject them at the same time to increasing State Control this is the Dirty Little Secret of [Music] thatcherism

that it was not a withering away of the state she increased the amount of surveillance the amount of regulation of the Central State at the same time she deprived local communities of resources so whenever anybody from the Anglo-Saxon World Hears this proposition you know the welfare state is destroying Civil Society our particular and first reaction is this conservative formula about this is not surrendering power but surrendering support we have this notion in all education systems that the goal of becoming educated is to do mental rather than manual labor and so uh crowded universities people graduate

with degrees they can't use it's a kind of the notion of skilled manual labor is something for people who are stupid that's how we think and so we create a you know we created a monster in which uh there are all sorts of new crafts being created all the time but they're not very sexy to to uh people everybody should be a lawyer a computer programmer rather than a skilled nurse right or an electrician God forbid you should be a skilled electrician so I mean I think part of what's happened is that we've sold people

a fantasy about mobility of in work rather than quality of work as it happens factually you can make a very good life in Europe as a manual skilled manual service worker better than uh graduating with a degree in media studies from a university and taking the odd job because there's not enough work for you to do but this calculation that upward Mobility is more important than quality work I think is something that um there are lots of reasons for it but that it's really set us as parents on the wrong path and I feel the

same thing uh if my son said to me I want to become a plumber I have to say that honestly I would say really you don't you don't want to try for something more manual more mental more upward you know I I would have a moment's pause but in reality we we've just got to have a different kind in my view different relation to what work is about and this actually connects the discussion we had before it means seeing that manual workers are a valued part of a firm When you mention your employer but this

takes us into something that would keep us here all day which is what are the skills that people need actually to develop given modern economic conditions how do you learn to additive skills and for instance to build one skill on top of another I've tried to to trace the ways in which the cooperativeness becomes a kind of um surface mask under which people feel increasingly isolated and behave as isolated actors which means that when the institutions work against them they have no Collective resource I give you a very concrete example of this as you know

I did a study of middle level employees in the finance industry when the Great crisis hit in 2008 the last thing these people could imagine was organizing together so they became individual victims of this crisis and what was not in their minds was the notion that they would be stronger if if they organized in some way not a traditional Union but some kind of collective um effort when we went into unemployment centers and we're talking about middleclass unemployed people we're not talking about you know yeah when we went into these unemployment centers everyone said well

yes this is terrible and I have no money and so on I'm going to become a consultant they never thought about starting firms together the idea was always that under these conditions you're on your own institutions are something you can suspend yourself from and it's one of the reasons that with the exception of the Occupy movements which are very small number of people no more than 700 in this country that there was no unrest because there was no Mass demonstrations in America and so on because the notion at least for these middle class these new

kind of unemployed people is that they're responsible for their own fate individually so that's a long background to saying that what I'm interested in now is the creation of a kind of social capitalism on new terms in which there the groups of employees and employers have a kind of social compact with each other in which Co cooperation is not a set of empty words but that it actually operates the management of a firm the Germans have this it's called codetermination and it goes back to the bismar in Era those are very stable firms they're very

Advanced they're very Innovative but they are collect Ive Enterprises they are a kind of social capitalism but under the rule of this flexible capitalism that kind of co-determination is absent elsewhere in the world people talk about the state versus the economy which is a wrong opposition we have to do more experiments which with what are called in English esops that is an employee owned uh company where the employees have shares in the business where they are small shares but nonetheless they are part of the structure of ownership I'll describe to you in Britain a very

um successful instance of this it's called the John Lewis organization uh it owns um Grocery Stores um what else furniture stores that has a big online service all the employees get shares in the company the longer they work the more shares they get it has very high rates of productivity because everybody has a stake in it beyond their jobs uh people contribute to their own pensions willingly which doesn't happen the rest in Britain it's what we call a a poster child you know that expression in English you know a kind of shining model of how

to have an ESOP uh operate in an advanced economy um one of the things that I find depressing is is that with all the talk about there was something else during this year of the Cooperative that we were talking about we think about cooperatives for very poor people microm man you know these micro Investments and so on what we don't think is that cooperatives this this ESOP form of corporate management is modern but in fact it can be very very modern another example of how it works is for instance large scale doctor's offices operate operated

as a shared Endeavor in which the and we have some examples of this like Kaiser Permanente in the United States which are Co Cooperative they don't look like um uh groups of very poor people together uh they're highly productive because they're highly motivating to everybody who's within the Cooperative so it's a question what Finance capitalism has now is that fewer and fewer people are owners of the businesses uh in which they operate um uh and you know Public public Li limited liable liability companies do you know what that is you know where you people at

the top uh have a limited liability are nonetheless very high archical structures in which the people at the very top determine the rewards everybody else gets so this Cooperative movement is the enemy of that uh it's about partnership about cooperation about the the the productive motivation that comes from including more people in the power structure of a company and let me say one more thing about this you pressed a button that's uh I I've given this speech everywhere in the world so uh we've done a lot of studies of employee productivity under conditions where there's

a boss and then a mass of employees and they're working for wages and where there's there is a boss but the mass of employees are earning shares you understand you know where they' be becoming and the productivity rates tend to be about 40% greater when people are working because they're going to own part of the company they work for and that relates to this question of of the short termism the short-term employment in flexible capitalism to the degree that people are owner workers they themselves are less liable to move to desert a company you know

in high-tech for instance is a huge problem because the assets or in media the assets walk in and out of the door every morning you know I mean what makes um Apple a valuable company is not that it has a nice office it's the people who work there so the creation of loyalty among these skilled employees and it goes all the way down you know people who accumulated institutional knowledge who know how to make things happen in the company depends on motivating them to stay and a purely neol liberal regime based on wages and wealth

won't necess on wage wealth won't necessarily do that so my very long answer to your provocative short question is that we have to think about new forms of productivity that are suited to this economy which are not those of how much do you earn in next year which are much more long-term and which are stable in new ways [Music]