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The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 301
EAN: 9780393319873
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0393319873
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: 2000-01
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Editorial Review:
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 one's career, but in fact they create jobs in which there's 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 worker's week, Sennett has created a pithy, disturbing picture of the cost of the corporate world's much-vaunted new efficiencies. --Richard Farr
In The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett, "among the country's most distinguished thinkers . . . has concentrated into 176 pages a profoundly affecting argument" (Business Week) that draws on interviews with dismissed IBM executives, bakers, a bartender turned advertising executive, and many others to call into question the terms of our new economy. In his 1972 classic, The Hidden Injuries of Class (written with Jonathan Cobb), Sennett interviewed a man he called Enrico, a hardworking janitor whose life was structured by a union pay schedule and given meaning by his sacrifices for the future. In this new book--a #1 bestseller in Germany--Sennett explores the contemporary scene characterized by Enrico's son, Rico, whose life is more materially successful, yet whose work lacks long-term commitments or loyalties. Distinguished by Sennett's "combination of broad historical and literary learning and a reporter's willingness to walk into a store or factory [and] strike up a conversation" (New York Times Book Review), this book "challenges the reader to decide whether the flexibility of modern capitalism . . . is merely a fresh form of oppression" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Should have been better.
This should have been a better book. It focuses too much on downsizing (which is important, but is a different topic) and not enough on how actual people experience work inside corporations. I don't really disagree with anything Sennett says, but would like a richer insight into how people are actually working these days. Fear of layoffs is part of it, but how work today impacts people socially and psychologically is equally important. I'd recommend Lilian Rubin's Worlds of Pain: Life in the ... Read More
Rating:  - How Instability and Superficiality Destroy the Inner Meaning of Work
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 ... Read More
Rating:  - fight against "de-characterization"
An important book, in which some of the undesirable effects of the ways our every-day working lives are organized are put under scrutiny and criticized. All those who want to continue to work with real human beings rather than with post-modern robots should read this book.
Rating:  - Sympathetic to workers' problems but you may find little new here
A doctor warned me once that people weren't built for rapid mentally jumping from one thing to another and that hi-tech companies tended to use people up. Sennett's warning came quite late.
Sennett's findings seem well intended but not surprising at all to anyone who has worked in hi-tech. I suspect many other workers have noticed the consequences of the "new" capitalism. Similarly, there seems nothing wrong with trying to simplify what is happening by noting a few key characteristics and ... Read More
Rating: - Yes, but...
I don't know yet if I learned something I didn't knew from this book. The examples Sennett gives are really entertaining; so much that I think maybe he should follow the Clifford Geertz road (or a more mainstream Barbara Ehrenreich one!). It was also refreshing to listen to old classic names as Smith, some old greek and that one of the Encyclopedia (ah, yes, Diderot). The use of the classics was especially good in Sennett's discussion of character and work, from antiquity passing by Christendom, Calvinism ... Read More
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