Richard Sennett

Character is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through the pursuit of long-term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratification for the sake of a future end. Out of the confusion of sentiments in which we all dwell at any particular moment, we seek to save and sustain some; these sustainable sentiments will serve our characters. Character concerns the personal traits which we value in ourselves and for which we seek to be valued by others.
How do we decide what is of lasting value in ourselves in a society which is impatient, which focuses on the immediate moment? How can long-term goals be pursued in an economy devoted to the short term? How can mutual loyalties and commitments be sustained in institutions which are constantly breaking apart or continually being redesigned? These are the questions about character posed by the new, flexible capitalism.

What is missing between the polar opposites of drifting experience and static assertion is a narrative which could organize his conduct. Narratives are more than simple chronicles of events; they give shape to the forward movement of time, suggesting reasons why things happen, showing their consequences. Enrico had a narrative for his life, linear and cumulative, a narrative which made sense in a highly bureaucratic world. Rico lives in a world marked instead by short-term flexibility and flux; this world does not offer much, either economically or socially, in the way of narrative. Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connections. Creative destruction, Schumpeter said, thinking about entrepreneurs, requires people at ease about not reckoning the consequences of change, or not knowing what comes next. Most people, though, are not at ease with change in this nonchalant, negligent way.

The setting of this model factory—so pretty to our eyes—in fact dramatizes a great transformation of labor beginning in Diderot’s time: here home was separated from workplace. Up to the mid-eighteenth century, the household served as the physical center of the economy. In the countryside, families made most of the things they consumed; in cities like Paris or London, trades also were practiced in the family dwelling. In a baker’s house, for instance, journeymen, apprentices, and the baker’s biological family all “took their meals together, and food was provided for all, together, since all were expected to sleep and live in the house,” as the historian Herbert Applebaum points out; “the cost of making bread…included the housing, feeding, and clothing of all the people who worked for the master. Money wages was a fraction of the cost.”11 The anthropologist Daniel Defert calls this an economy of the domus; instead of wage slavery, there reigned an inseparable combination of shelter and subordination to the will of a master

Rigid forms of bureaucracy are under attack, as are the evils of blind routine.

This emphasis on flexibility is changing the very meaning of work, and so the words we use for it.

“Career,” for instance, in its English origins meant a road for carriages, and as eventually applied to labor meant a lifelong channel for one’s economic pursuits.

It is quite natural that flexibility should arouse anxiety

The new capitalism is an often illegible regime of power.

Perhaps the most confusing aspect of flexibility is its impact on personal character.

The old English speakers, and indeed writers going back to antiquity, were in no doubt about the meaning of “character”: it is the ethical value we place on our own desires and on our relations to others.