Globalisation contested

An international political economy of work

Louise Amoore

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719085703
• eBook ISBN: 9781847795427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Provides an illuminating account of contemporary globalisation that is grounded in actual transformations in the areas of production and the workplace. It reveals the social and political contests that give 'global' its meaning, by examining the contested nature of globalisation as it is expressed in the restructuring of work.

1

Globalisation, restructuring and the flexibility discourse

Industrialisation characteristically redesigns and reshapes its human raw materials, whatever the source … The development of an industrial workforce necessarily involves the destruction of old ways of life and work and the acceptance of the new imperatives of the industrial work place and work community. (Kerr et al., 1962: 193)

Industries and firms almost everywhere are said to be leaving behind the old, tired, boring, inefficient, staid past and entering into the new, highly efficient, diverse, exciting, and flexible future; and if they are not, they should be. (Curry, 1993: 99)

Throughout much of the twentieth century the social sciences have invoked ‘master concepts’ (Giddens, 1982) in the explanation and shaping of patterns of social change. The use of the action-process verb form¹ – in modernisation, industrialisation, globalisation – imbues the concepts with a sense of movement, logic and direction. Simultaneously, they operate as nouns that name and describe a historical condition, thus offering an elusive promise of a destination that can never quite be reached (Ashley, 2000). For a group of sociologists writing in the 1960s, the master concept of industrialisation captured the dynamics of transformation in a form that effectively enabled social change to be ordered and mastered. Industrial capitalism, with its inherent contradictions, was viewed as a temporary and transitory form of industrial society. The processes of industrialisation and technological advance defined all economic and social organisation, ultimately leading all societies passively to a convergent system of ‘pluralistic industrialism’ (Kerr et al., 1962: 266). The concept of industrialisation itself acquired an imperative logic that named and defined the parameters of new forms of production, work and social life. It offered the enticing prospect of a defined destination, coupled with an explanation of the transformations that should be expected along the way.

In contemporary times the new master concept of globalisation has become the explanatory tool that is applied to all areas of economy, polity and society. The concept has become a kind of horse for every course, infinitely malleable and amorphous, ‘vague in referent’ and ‘ambiguous in usage’ (Jones, 1995: 1). Indeed, some have concluded that the term should be abandoned to prevent its reification in political, academic and corporate debates. However, it is precisely the amorphous and empty nature of the concept that gives it the capacity to exercise power. It can be filled with multiple meanings and used to legitimate a range of restructuring programmes, from labour market flexibility and mobility, to privatisation. Of course, the contemporary period of globalisation is commonly defined as a break from the logics of industrialisation, taking the form of, for example, the ‘post-industrial society’ (Castells, 1989) or ‘post-Fordism’ (Lipietz, 1987; Piore and Sabel, 1984). However, the representations of industrialisation and globalisation make common appeals to notions of technological externality, epochal newness and novelty and convergence in economic and social organisation. As devices employed to explain the human and social world, the concepts of industrialisation and globalisation as ‘processes’ represent highly simplified understandings of social change. They embody ‘problem-solving’ approaches to knowledge (Cox, 1981: 128), reflecting a preference for generalisable and codifiable modes of thought, and informing the terms of a policy discourse.

In the attempt to highlight the contested nature of globalisation in production and work, a first step is to question its role in underpinning and legitimating the all-pervasive discourse of flexibility. In this chapter the common discursive dynamics of the industrialisation and globalisation theses are explored. The analysis focuses on five common aspects that reveal a central dominant representation of social change: the identification of exogenous transformative forces, disciplinary imperatives, historical convergence, social prescription and the death of conflict. I argue that it is these assumptions about social change that underpin and perpetuate the contemporary discourse of imperative labour flexibility. Flexibility itself has an amorphous quality that allows it to be applied ‘flexibly’ to describe the many facets of the contemporary restructuring agenda. In line with globalisation, flexibility comes simultaneously to mean all things and yet nothing precise at all. The discourse on flexibility pervades the policy agenda of the competition state (Cerny, 1990; Porter, 1990), the restructuring strategies of firms (Ruigrok and van Tulder, 1995) and the everyday experiences of workers (Pollert, 1991; Beck, 2000b). The conception of globalisation as a process reinforces the assumption that the state is compelled to ‘retreat’ or adopt new policy instruments (Strange, 1996), the flexible firm in a ‘global web’ is the essential corporate strategy for a global era (Atkinson, 1985; Reich, 1991) and that workers must accept greater risk and insecurity as they ‘make the leap’ to new practices.

Transformative forces

The proponents of the industrial society thesis identified exogenous factors as the central driving forces of industrialisation. A society is driven into adaptation by the challenges that exist ‘on the outside’ or ‘by the exigencies of the situation external to it’ (Parsons, 1960: 138). Viewed in this way, the principal characteristic of all industrial societies is that progress is dependent upon the absorption of exogenous technological advances and the adaptation of social practices to their dictates. The assumption is that the ‘more modern’ is always the ‘more superior’ (Kerr et al., 1962: 279) so that the diversity of the pre-industrial world is gradually homogenised through the advancement of technology: ‘Technology is a unifying force. At one moment in time there may be several best economic combinations or social arrangements, but only one best technology’ (Kerr et al., 1962: 284). Technology is presented as a universal force that imposes common challenges on all advanced states and societies. The progress of science, technology and production methods essentially determine the actions to be taken by state actors, industrialists and workers. In a sense technology becomes both structure and agent as it simultaneously acts to initiate change and defines the structures within which change takes place. Transformations in social relations, practices and values are held to emerge out of technological change and this unilinear logic is never reversed.

The predominant image in the orthodox accounts of globalisation is of similarly exogenous forces that act upon states and societies. Conventional logic would have it that a series of conjunctural events in the 1970s effectively freed the globalisation ‘genie’ from his lamp and marked the emergence of a distinctive global era. The collapse of the Bretton Woods System, the oil shocks, the claims to US decline and the subsequent emergence of globalised financial and productive systems, all are offered as explanations of a transformed world order. However, it is not the events themselves that have informed the predominant explanations of global change. Rather, it is the technological and market forces held to lie behind them that are most commonly perceived as ‘creating globalisation’. Susan Strange argues that ‘technology has got ahead of regulation’ (1997a: 54) with the effect that technological change has become the ‘prime cause of the shift in the state-market balance of power’ (1996: 7). Others assert that ‘at the heart of the flexibilization of both production processes and firms themselves has been the explosive development of information technology’ (Cerny, 1995: 615). Variants of post-Fordist analysis position technology as the driving force of change, arguing that the productivity gains central to the Fordist system become eroded by maturing technologies. The system of production itself then transforms from Fordist mass production and consumption with its associated technologies, to post-Fordist ‘flexible specialisation’ (Freeman and Perez, 1988). There is an overwhelming sense of inevitability in these accounts of the ‘domino effect’ of technology acting on states and societies that, in turn, act to restructure production and work. Strange writes: ‘Accelerating technological change … explains the rapid internationalization of production in the world market economy, a process which, inevitably, relaxes the authority of the state over the enterprises based and directed from inside their territorial borders’ (Strange, 1995: 59, emphasis added).

Globalisation is thus presented in terms of the opposing forces of, on the one hand, technology acting from without and, on the other, politics and society simply responding from within. The ‘deterritorialised’ forces of finance (Wriston, 1988; Cerny, 1996; McKenzie and Lee, 1991), production and trade (Porter, 1990; Reich, 1991) and culture (Fukuyama, 1992) are cast in opposition to the presumed territorial realities of state and society. States and societies are consistently positioned as passive receivers of technological transformation. We are left with the impression that global restructuring is nothing more than an effect of the ‘global process’ of technological interpenetration. As Marchand and Runyan argue, a mythical image is created in which globalisation becomes ‘a process generated outside our own (immediate) environment’ (2000: 7). When conceived as ‘outside’ our immediate experiences, the technologically-driven globalisation process becomes conveniently and safely insulated from the politics of negotiation, contestation and resistance.

Disciplinary imperatives

To represent globalisation and industrialisation as the products of exogenous forces is to assume that transformation is to some degree an inevitable response to irresistible pressures. It is but a short step from this inevitabilism to the assertion that there is no alternative for states and societies but to adapt and restructure their policies, structures and practices. For the scholars writing at the peak of post-war growth, the most significant transition was considered to be that from traditional to industrial society. This shift represented the underlying movement in all state-societies as they responded to external pressures. Talcott Parsons’ systems-centred social theory sought to understand the adaptation of social systems in line with pressures from ‘outside’: ‘In the present situation, for the “diffusion” of this organizational type [industrialism] from the Western world to other areas, it seems clear that the most favourable conditions will center on the right type of political initiative’ (1960: 128, emphasis added).

There is an in-built disciplinary imperative here – it becomes incumbent on states and societies to respond with the ‘right’ strategies. The imperative of industrialisation is expressed in terms of political responses that are ‘essential’, ‘rational’ and ‘right’. A reading of Daniel Bell reveals a belief in a generally held consensus on the ‘right’ forms of political organisation: ‘the acceptance of a welfare state; the desirability of decentralised power; a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism’ (1961: 402). Viewed in this way there can be no impediment to, or contingency in, the processes of restructuring and transformation. Social relations, institutions and practices are at once structurally determined, yet rendered inherently malleable and adaptable: ‘Even the most economically advanced countries today are to some degree and in some respects underdeveloped. They contain features derived from earlier stages of development which obscure the pure logic of the industrialization process’ (Kerr et al., 1962: 33). Social change is characterised in periods or epochs of social arrangements that prevail until external conditions dictate that they undergo further transformation. The disciplinary dynamic of the process is reinforced by a presumed desire for modernisation that ultimately drives out difference and distinctiveness, leaving one clear route. Societies are assumed to absorb the imperatives of transformation such that they sustain them with their own thoughts, actions and desires.

The notion of an epochal shift and essential political and social adaptation is inherent within diverse accounts of globalisation. In common with the industrial society theories, the external forces of the global economy are viewed as creating imperatives for the restructuring of state and society. In contrast with these theories, however, the norms that are established are for the ‘retreat of the state’ (Strange, 1996), the ‘hollowing out of the state’ (Cerny, 1996: 91) and the rise of the ‘competition state’ (Cerny, 1990). The transformations from a perceived old to a new epoch are characterised in terms of shifts: from ‘comparative’ to ‘competitive’ advantage (Porter, 1990); from the ‘decommodifying’ to the ‘commodifying’ state (Cerny, 1990); and from ‘industrial’ to ‘post-industrial’ society (Hepworth, 1989; Block, 1990). While commentators do not agree on the normative aspects of such transformations (some celebrate the process, while others condemn it), both liberal and neo-Marxist theorists share common ground on the extent of global change. Among the more extreme formulations we read that: ‘The nation-state has become an unnatural, even dysfunctional, unit for organizing human activity and managing economic endeavour in a borderless world’ (Ohmae, 1990: 93). The dissolution of state authority and the rise of marketised frameworks of authority are presented as imperative transformations in a globalisation process. Fundamental breaks with the past are staked out and labelled in diverse ways, though with remarkably similar effects. Among the diverse perspectives on post-Fordism, common notions of epochal shifts are communicated, whether through ‘regimes of accumulation’ (Aglietta, 1979; Lipietz, 1987; Boyer, 1986), ‘techno-economic paradigms’ of the neo-Schumpeterians (Freeman and Perez, 1988) or ‘industrial divides’ (Piore and Sabel, 1984).

In process-centred accounts of globalisation there is a certain predilection for claims to novelty, the staking out of a capitalist ‘crossroads’ and the establishment of a qualitative break with the past. As Rob Walker observes ‘… it is undoubtedly tempting to exaggerate the novelty of novelty’ (1993: 2). With the ethereal lure of industrialism or globalism on the horizon, it becomes possible to legitimate particular policy decisions on the basis of ‘no alternative’. The very idea of an imperative process of change creates a sense of urgency that dictates a particular response from society. While acknowledging the competing normative views within the ‘globalisation as process’ perspective, there is an identifiable common emphasis on discontinuity. It is possible to either celebrate or condemn the process but still to agree that it is essentially inexorable. A sense of ‘no alternative’ prevails and politics becomes confined to instrumental discussions of the ‘right’ and ‘competitive’ way to respond and harness the opportunities of the new stage. In effect, the ‘no alternative’ logic reinforces the sense of disciplinary imperatives. The hypermobility of foreign direct investment (FDI capital, for example, can be constructed and reinforced through the ‘talked up’ threat of exit (Watson and Hay, 1998). The state and public policy become disciplined by the need to prove their credibility and consistency and secure the confidence of their investors (Gill, 1999). In this way, sometimes wholly inadvertently, the ‘disciplinary forces of neoliberalism’ (Gill, 1995a) can be perpetuated and reinforced by the straightjacket effect of dominant modes of thought.

Historical convergence

The assumption that technological advances force change, and that this change is part of an inexorable and inevitable process, has tended to lead to the perceived logic of convergence. From divergent historical and cultural viewpoints, diverse institutional arrangements and distinctive social power relations, societies are believed to become increasingly alike in their basic structures. As John Goldthorpe argues:

This is the general model of society most consistent with the functional imperatives that a rationally operating technology and economy impose: and it is in fact the pressure of these imperatives which must be seen as forcing the development of industrial societies on to convergent lines, whatever the distinctive features of their historical formation or of their pre-industrial cultural traditions. (1984: 316, emphasis in original)

Industrial society was said to take precedence over capitalist society because all technologically advanced countries displayed similar structures, whether capitalist or not (Aron, 1967). In this sense capitalist industrialisation was but a moment in a longer historical drive to industrialism. Much of this argument was based on the analysis of the ideologically divergent US and Soviet Union, arguing that they were following a convergent path of industrialisation, as in Talcott Parsons’ work: ‘Virtually the whole world has, within our time, come to assign to economic productivity a very high value indeed. The essential differences between American and Soviet orientations, which some feel is the deepest difference in the world, is not primarily a difference over the valuation of productivity’ (Parsons, 1960: 100).

The suggestion is that despite divergence in ideologies, institutions and practices, the overriding trend is towards a convergence around basic organising principles. Societies may be ‘travelling at different speeds on different roads’ (Kerr et al., 1962: 2), but the consensus is that the direction and destination are the same. The ‘uniformity of texture’ and similarities in ‘patterns of behaviour’ are considered to be the significant features of social transformation (Shonfield, 1965: 65). The focus lies firmly on the commonalties between societies and these are then ‘aggregated up’ to form a systemic theory of social change.

The tendency to presuppose a process of historical convergence is characteristic also of many contemporary accounts of the globalisation process. It is striking that Susan Strange associates IPE with the study of the structural dynamics of the world economy as a whole: ‘As an international political economist, I am more interested in the pace and direction of change in the whole world market economy than in the pace and direction of change in particular parts of it contained within the rather arbitrary territorial borders of states’ (Strange, 1997b: 182). With a particular focus on the future of distinctive national ‘versions’ of capitalism, Strange argues that the ‘common logics’ of world markets would lead all states and societies on to a convergent pattern of change (1997b: 182). Of course, Strange does this to emphasise the extent of transnational sources of power and authority. However, it would seem problematic to represent globalisation as a singular process of political and social convergence and, in doing so, to ignore the many different interpretations of globalisation. Social change becomes a matter of common pressures promoting convergent solutions. Where difference is acknowledged this tends to be framed in terms of a ‘pathway’ that may temporarily diverge from the dominant route.

Within the convergence accounts there are specific policy instruments suggested as the common ground for states and societies. In the 1960s the convergent trends were identified as the extension of public power in a modern capitalist system, the preoccupation with social welfare and the acceptance of a steady growth in incomes and wages (Shonfield, 1965: 65). As discussion of globalisation took hold in the 1990s, convergent trends were mapped out that represented the complete reversal of these ideals. We see the extension of private power in the global system, the shift from welfare state to competition state (Cerny, 1990), and the acceptance of labour flexibility and wage restraint as policy doxa (World Bank, 1995). The global competition imperative is overwhelmingly adopted as a business mantra, provoking debates regarding the ‘right path’ for the twenty-first-century organisation of the production and labour processes (see Peck and Ticke...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Globalisation, restructuring and the flexibility discourse
• 2 International political economy and global social change
• 3 Producing hyperflexibility: the restructuring of work in Britain
• 4 Producing flexi-corporatism: the restructuring of work in Germany
• 5 The ‘contested’ firm: the restructuring of work and production in the international political economy
• 6 Globalisation at work: unheard voices and invisible agency
• Conclusion: an international political economy of work
• Bibliography
• Index