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Liv Sovik
©Liv Sovik 2008
It is undeniably for the good, is it not, that in the last thirty years the
privileges of class – and of race and gender - have faded under the
pressure of newly unleashed capacity of previously suppressed groups? The
career of E. Stanley O’Neal, the recently fired head of Merrill Lynch,
is illustrative. The grandson of a slave, he was born and raised in rural
Alabama and Detroit and, starting in 1974, rose through the ranks of General
Motors and then the brokerage firm. On the gender side, Angela McRobbie notes
in her critique of the process by which young women are offered opportunities
for education and work that “Across the spectrum from left to right,
the apparent gains made by young women are taken to be signs of the existence
of a democracy in good health.” Yet, under Britain’s New Labour
government, the “new meritocracy […] has become an abbreviation
for the more individualistic and competitive values promoted by New Labour
particularly within education.” The question here is about how to make
a critique from a more global perspective, given that the newly won individual
freedom to realise ambitions has been extended, if not to everyone, to motivated
and capable, elites everywhere. The management class includes all nationalities
and this seems to prove that talent is evenly distributed and democratically
used by companies and international organizations alike.
Richard Sennett’s work on craftsmanship takes on the problem of the
abundance of boring or apparently meaningless jobs, which is the flip side
of these new opportunities. In the new economy, he says, companies frequently
change business plans and, as a consequence, their criteria for defining success.
Top management is constantly changing and individuals network to stay on the
move, in a job market characterised by low levels of institutional loyalty
where adaptability is more important than experience. At lower levels, Sennett
notes, job evaluation is mechanized and middle management has increasing difficulty,
amid the chops and changes, in finding value in their work. Here, Sennett
argues, the values of craftsmanship and the job well done for its own sake
should be given another look.
But perhaps meritocracy and its links to power and promotion should be examined
too. At the Soundings seminar on January 18, Sennett mentioned efforts to
unionize low-level workers, in the back office of Goldman Sachs. These workers
were less interested in wages and benefits than mobility and retraining. They
wanted most of all to get out of what they called “Records Hell”.
The unionizing efforts at Goldman Sachs reminded me of my glimpse of the back
office at Irving Trust when I was a temp on Wall Street in the early 1980s.
Financial capital was beginning to dominate the economy; insider trading was
common but had not yet become a punishable crime; junk bonds were the order
of the day and people were already making fortunes before they were 35; and
Alice Walker had just published The Color Purple, initiating a boom
in black women’s literature in the US. The back office I visited was
a huge windowless room with rows of tables piled with paper, at which the
employees were busy: a Dickensian scene with air conditioning. Their work
could not be computerized, it required attention to detail and was very boring.
No wonder people at Goldman Sachs want to get out of Records Hell. I was struck
that these workers were almost all African American women and, already an
amateur sociologist, speculated that it was because they were the main breadwinners,
were therefore reliable, and didn’t have the educational qualifications
to take them where their intelligence and capacity to pay attention to detail
could be better employed. In any case, the homogeneity - and Alice Walker
- spoke to me of wasted human potential.
I remembered that scene in the late 1990s, when I was appalled by power structures
in Bahia, Brazil. Everywhere you looked, positions of authority were occupied
by whites, almost always men, promoted on the basis of affinity and allegiance
to the powers that be. Loyalty was rewarded with a certain support and latitude
to work: people are not born competent, they are made that way and their competence
was real, within the structures of power relationships. I remembered the meritocracy
of Wall Street that rewards “smart”, adaptable men and women,
black and white, while it hires black women to carry out miserably routine
jobs. While meritocracy hides its racism and sexism deep down in Records Hell
and low-skilled equivalents, clientelism naturalizes subordinate roles for
women and racialized population groups.
There may be parallels between contemporary job networking and the clientelist
and oligarchical systems that have for a long time been considered archaic
obstacles to development in the South. In both networking and clientelism,
connections are central to competence. In both, people are hired because their
behaviour is aligned with certain groups, rather than for their knowledge
and experience. In both, careerists are rewarded. The two kinds of management
have never been completely separate. For example, the government of the United
States, cradle of meritocracy, has known for years how to use oligarchies
in its favour. “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of
a bitch,” Franklin Roosevelt said of the first General Somoza. But the
ways people have resisted and evaded the grip of clientelism in the South
could be a useful reference, in a critique of contemporary meritocracy based
on making connections. Maybe a resurrection of the old critiques of clientelism
would be useful in thinking about networking and control under meritocratic
systems.
Liv Sovik is a professor at the School of Communication of
the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and writes on issues raised by
Brazilian identity discourses in a global context.
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