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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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