Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism

Enterprising Selves in Changing Economies

Nicolette Makovicky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409467878
• eBook ISBN: 9781317088950
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite a growing literature debating the consequences of neo-liberal political and economic policy in the former Eastern bloc, the idea of neo-liberal personhood has so far received limited attention from scholars of the region. Presenting a range of ethnographic studies, this book lays the groundwork for a new disciplinary agenda by critically examining novel technologies of self-government which have appeared in the wake of political and economic liberalization. Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism explores the formation of subjectivities in newly marketized or marketizing societies across the former Eastern Bloc, documenting the rise of the neo-liberal discourse of the 'enterprising' self in government policy, corporate management and education, as well as examining the shifts in forms of capital amongst marginal capitalists and entrepreneurs working in the grey zone between the formal and informal economies. A rich investigation of the tools of neo-liberal governance and the responses of entrepreneurs and families in changing societies, this book reveals the full complexity of the relationship between historically and socially embedded economic practices, and the increasing influence of libertarian political and economic thought on public policy, institutional reform, and civil society initiatives. As such, it will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and geographers with interests in political discourse, identity, entrepreneurship and organizations in post-socialist societies.

Chapter 1
Selling, Yet Still Social: Consociational Personhood Among the Self-Employed in Eastern Germany

Gareth E. Hamilton

Introduction

Dear readers!

Difficult times produce courageous people. A comforting message because we live in difficult times: careers disappear, jobs cut, and factories close almost overnight.

Brave people however do not let themselves be dismayed. They trust their strength, creativity, ability to perform and decide to set up their own business. That’s what I call courageous. If you keep this book to hand, you’re on the right path! (Opoczynski 2006: 9)¹

This introduction to a guide to starting a business from one of Germany’s state broadcaster’s consumer-rights/financial advice programmes seems a message for our times. Although the book is from 2006, similar situations abound today, and the notion of setting up businesses has spread to British universities which encourage commercial ‘entrepreneurship’ among academics. Before hearing those exhortations, and of course researching individual start-up businesspeople, the thought had not particularly crossed my mind. My family were all employees. This sets me off badly for major business success, according to the biographies of major businesspersons as analyzed by Villette and Vuillermot (2009: 73–4). In their analysis of life histories of high-ranking entrepreneurs, owning large companies such as Ikea, Wal-Mart and AXA, their curricula vitae share common points:

Raised in a business family

Exceptional education compared to generational contemporaries

Early personal introduction to business practices

Benefitting from competitive advantages in comparison to others, and

A mentor who intercedes, like some deus ex machina, at decisive junctures. (Villette and Vuillermot 2009: 73–4)

This chapter’s subjects, people living in the area of the former German Democratic Republic with its former state socialist, economic and personal individualism-disapproving system, are likely to have been thus ‘unfortunately’ placed too. Further, eastern Germans have also been faced with multiple economic and social crises, such as unemployment brought about by the closing of former and now apparently inefficient state enterprises, and depopulation as people move westwards for work. Despite – or because of this – however, great rhetorical effort is made to encourage them to get onto Opoczynski’s ‘right path’ towards self-employment. As there is so much effort made to persuade and to mould persons to fit on this path, my analyses are based on that part of anthropological theory which deals squarely with persuasion as a social tool: rhetoric culture theory. I follow here mostly Carrithers’ (2005a, 2005b) formulation of culture as containing common items, understood by persons together, which form tools ‘used by people on one another, to persuade and convince, and so to move the social situation from one state to another’ (Carrithers 2005b: 581). These are placed into narratives, stories, which are used to persuade. Besides Carrithers, I will also make reference to Fernandez’s conception of pronominalism (2010), the strategic use of pronouns in such processes of persuasion. Alongside this, in narratives, metaphors are a further strong rhetorical tool.

No less important is its focus on the interaction of the meta with the micro by allowing us to analyse how narratives at different levels mingle, how cultural items come together and replicate and metamorphose. It does so by allowing us to trace the development of the narratives, of the trails of cultural items, of inferences and interactions – from far and wide both temporally and geographically. Carrithers notes ‘for ethnographers, [it] sets a high standard of achievement’ in that merely describing structures is not sufficient, but we are required ‘to go beyond that to their skilled use in one situation or another’ (2005b: 582). However, as will be seen below, there are so many sources of persuasion, and so many potential receivers of such messages, that the idea reveals linkages between the abstract and the more traditionally ethnographic. Further, the pure volume of persuasion requires a multilevel approach. Therefore in this chapter, I will demonstrate how and in which multiple circumstances this persuasion, and the reaction to it, takes place. I will show how government, the press and universities try to mould eastern Germans into so-called ‘business types’ who can succeed in the modern economic climate. Based on analysis of entrepreneurship manuals and mass media magazines for a wider German audience I show how this becomes linked to individual persons and their morality. I demonstrate, however, that in an eastern German context, the message is adapted to account for the importance eastern Germans place on sociality. Further, based on my attendance at various courses designed for potential and new start-ups, I highlight that while eastern Germans may tacitly accept the need for self-employment, there still remains a certain potential for criticism of its practices when these conflict with eastern German social values. However, it is first necessary to consider the precise space into which this rhetorical effort flows.

Plugins Narratively Assembled into ‘mini-corporations’?

The variety of ‘business’ Villette and Vuillermot refer to is the self-managing, entrepreneurial version not prevalent in planned economies. In 1990 there were relatively few persons in eastern Germany who had experience of self-employment, although it was not totally absent. In 1988, there were 181,700 full-time self-employed persons in the GDR (Pickel 1992: 78–89). However, ‘difficult times’ in the pan-German economy and the job market were one of the reasons for a 2003 root-and-branch reform of the welfare system due to persistent (costly) high-level unemployment. This infamous programme became known as the Hartz reforms, a word which was liberally peppered through the German daily press, especially due to Hartz-IV, the fourth measure in the programme concerning the alteration and reduction in magnitude of unemployment benefits. ‘Hartz-II’, the second measure itself provided a further neologism in its official nickname, ‘Ich AG’, perhaps best translated as ‘Me PLC’, or ‘Me Inc’. It enabled the long-term unemployed to receive a bonus besides their normal unemployment benefit in order to set-up their own, individual, business. A government brochure published to promote it does so by highlighting potential for ‘unlocking start-up potential in those who before had neither the courage nor the chance to realise their own business idea’ (BWA 2004: 27).

It appears that a certain type of person is being identified as the target of the encouragement offered in that particular case. This person has two characteristics: firstly, having had no chance to become self-employed, and secondly, lacking the necessary courageousness. The second of these characteristics is emotional and further carries a certain moral tone. Or rather, the overall message is ‘not courageous enough yet’, as the programme will allow this characteristic to be overcome. This focus on persons, and of their characteristics, is one which is quite common in the printed and online material in Germany on the topic of becoming a businessperson. In the book mentioned above, one of the noticeable sections of the first chapter entitled ‘Core question: are you the type for independence?’, is itself titled ‘to set up a business means changing yourself’ (Opoczynski 2006: 23). Much of the material I gathered is not specifically related to eastern Germany, but produced for the whole of the Federal Republic. And it seems that Opoczynski is quite adamant that Germans in general are in need of deep personal change – and changes take place in narrative space through time. The persons he would like them to become more like are apparently fearless Americans. After asking his readers if ‘we in “old Europe” are mostly “scaredy-cats” (Angsthasen)?’, he affirms that ‘we’ are. ‘Only’ 29 per cent of Americans, in contrast, believe that a business should not be setup when a risk of failure exists (ibid.: 11). Clearly, being the metaphorical ‘scaredy-cat’ is something which one should change away from, while holding onto hopes of a positive forward narrative. Fear should be expunged from our minds as we narrativise forward, imagining the business careers stretching before ourselves.

It would be patently unfair given a discussion of risks to accuse the writer of blithely ignoring the negative aspects of becoming self-employed or of joining the mega-wealthy. He does attempt to disabuse his readers of the notion that entrepreneurship is an easy option, with a bullet point list of how the ‘reality’ stands in opposition to the ‘aspiration’ (ibid.: 17–19). However, the message remains compellingly pro-risk and pro-entrepreneurship, the British getting an honourable mention for having amongst their number more ‘optimists’ than ‘pessimists’ in comparison to Germans (ibid.: 12). The reader is shown a narrative of stages ‘identified by scholarship’ which begin with ‘lack of perspective’ in a position of employment, followed by a transformation, via stages of ‘preparation’, ‘acting’, and ‘perpetuation’ (ibid.: 24–5). This narrative ends with the optimistically over-toned ‘arrival at the goal’, where ‘earlier problems are forgotten and the new identity as an independent person has become part of the individual personality’ (ibid.: 25).

The above narrative was presented in a section entitled ‘To set up a business means changing oneself’ (ibid.: 23). A story is told of a certain type of person who has negative personal characteristics and practices. Through the unfolding of the narrative, this person loses these negative aspects while simultaneously gaining the positive personal characteristics and practices of a positive type: a positive ending. The person themselves has changed. The message, in short, is that this process of positive change is one the reader is able to emulate, with positive results to follow. For example, the front cover of Opoczynski’s book shows a nameless, but shirted, man – obviously a ‘businessman’ – on the front cover. Another book in the genre, entitled Am I the business type? Judge, use and optimise personal characteristics (Schön 2008) shows a suited, blouse-wearing and pensive woman sitting in a blurred out location. Still recognizably ‘business-like’, the blurred, bland anonymity provide by its ‘anyplace’ nature gives it great imaginative potential for the creation of a blank narrative canvas which allows a reader to imagine themselves sitting in such a location.

Schön claims there is a dearth of books of the ‘how-to’ type on the market. Rather, she suggests, the real need is for a ‘what to be’ volume instead. Notably, she uses an acrostic, a list formed from the initial letters of the German words for ‘turnover and success’ as the headings for various sections in her book, and on the back cover. This list, although it has a number of items which relate to practical issues, such as having developed a business plan, is to a large extent a set of characteristics which are being ascribed to a successful person. The book, in short, promises to give the reader the necessary knowledge to gain these characteristics. Despite the old adage about using covers to judge books, it is a key location for the reader browsing a shelf, and also for analysis. From a rhetoric culture point of view, in such lists, the person is to a large extent a character, who is placed into the change narrative as mentioned above. There are a number of interesting points which the list thus raises. Firstly, this sense of characteristics to be adopted is reminiscent of the ‘plug-in’ person which Latour (2005) has proffered based on actor-network theory and on the model of the assemblage. This sense of collecting parts to make effective wholes he likens to ‘discreet pellets, or, to borrow from cyberspace, patches and applets, whose precise origin can be ‘Googled’ before they are downloaded and saved one by one’ (Latour 2005: 207, original emphasis). Humphrey argues against his general view that individuals cannot be said to exist in themselves, and asks in response, if there is no individual in existence then ‘who does the composing, Googling and saving, and why?’ (2008: 365).

Despite Humphrey’s critique, I believe in this case there is still value within the notion of parts of a whole. It is, for example, very much in alignment with Emily Martin’s conception of ‘mini-corporations’ (2000, 2007). Martin suggests that individuals are encouraged to think of themselves, through the teaching and adoption of neoliberal economic principles, as an entity ‘oriented primarily to its own interests in global flows of capital’ rather than ‘citizens, oriented to the interests of the nation’ (2007: 42). In this, they should think of themselves as ‘collections of assets that must be continually invested in, nurtured, managed, and developed’ (2000: 582). In Schön’s book, these bullet-points are almost like shopping lists, or the tick-boxes of modern ‘audit culture’ (Strathern 2000) – but they actually are not, or at least, not yet. It should not be overlooked that aside from the ‘how to and how to be’, the significant purpose of these texts is to persuade the reader to become self-employed. The list style is a means of making self-employment and the things necessary to engage in it seem a manageable task. However, whether one could indeed be persuaded that these things are able to be ticked off, and that the changes which such books suggest are both possible and desirable, in light of the difficulties self-employment can produce, is a different question altogether. It would represent a considerable achievement if anyone did have all these positive characteristics. If it is necessary to make myriad changes in order to gain the required ‘turnover and success’ by assuming the said characteristics, for many persons these changes could easily represent a task which sounds discouraging in its intensity. This poses a further question. If it is necessary to change into a different type of person, is this particular model of a self-employed person morally desirable?

It may be a linguistic coincidence, but Ich AG embodies this sense of person-as-corporation in its name. This was widely derided, being given the dubious honour of ‘Unwort des Jahres’ (‘anti-word of the year’) by the Society for the German Language who described it a ‘reduction of individuals to [something] on the linguistic level of a stock market’ (GdDS 2002). Even the otherwise business-friendly and liberal, weekly wide-circulation Stern magazine – from which, much more below – noted its name could potentially ‘sound like selfishness and stock-market lasciviousness’ (Röhrig and Halbauer 2003). These criticisms of the Ich AG concept were federal German criticisms. But what about the east? Firstly, the resurrected ‘Monday demonstrations’ (taking place on the iconic day of the week on which the mass protests against the GDR regime took place in 1989) against the 2003 Hartz reforms still taking place weekly during my fieldwork in 2008–09 highlight ongoing dissatisfaction amongst the public with state actions. The taking up of this iconic piece of eastern German culture of demonstration at injustice, and here specifically against the removal (or at least significant weakening) of an important tenet of social protection, is an example of the expression of what eastern German socialist Engler has called the ‘eastern German idiom’ (2004: 13ff.). In general, Engler suggests that eastern Germans are vocal in criticizing actions they see as furthering individual self-interest, and/or placing self-interest above solidarity with other members of society. While Hartz-IV constituted an erosion of social protection, Hartz-II, Ich AG, and similar schemes were easily portrayable as encouraging self-interest. These appeared in contrast to memories of work in the GDR, where factories or the larger Kombinate were, in comparison to the individual Ich AG, multiplexes ‘of both work and social life where people not only toiled but engaged and enjoyed collective leisure pursuits laid like a “corona” around them’ (ibid.: 116). Further, as reunification with the west, and the actions of western managers, were seen as responsible for the removal of this style of working and socializing (as well as the introduction of self-serving individualism), Engler’s idea of an East German ‘idiom’ easily becomes associated with the west, or rather against the West, itself. The fact remains, however, that it is in the individual – or the image of the individual – where much of the work to portray the self-employed person as worthy of emulation occurs. Below, I will show how this particular aspect of eastern German culture gets taken up rhetorically. In encouraging East Germans to become self-employed, certain aspects of individualist discourse are strategically employed and others avoided. However, before dealing with eastern Germany in particular, and as a means of comparison, it is necessary to show how this is done at a pan-German (and western-leaning) level.

Personalization of the Businessperson

At a national German level, a common rhetorical tool used by authors to render businesspersons attractive characters to be emulated, involves a shifting from the indefinite person to the definite. Until this point, the focus on ‘the businessperson’ was in the inchoate third person. The businessperson is defined by certain characteristics, and a ‘he’ or ‘she’. However, an interesting use of pronominals a shift to the definite person occurs in Schön’s acrostic-using text. With Schumpeterian overtones, the necessary abstract characteristics are shown via individual, named and successful persons in general. In Schön’s particular case, she herself receives the treatment in her introductory chapter where the reader learns of her family life in a business environment. While noting that she sometimes felt that her parents’ business was an additional ‘corporate sibling’, the author is no longer merely a voice which instructs, but transformed into a person who has a history and a narrative. In the terminology of Schütz (1962, 1967), the writer of the book becomes more than mere ‘contemporary’, someone not known personally, but by their social type or function. Rather, she takes on the form of a public consociate, as a person or persons ‘who are known intimately’ and whose life and ‘one’s fate is bound up with’ (Carrithers 2000: 365). Further, it is necessary to think of the strategic use of pronouns (Fernandez 2010) here. Alongside Schön’s photograph on the back cover, by giving us biographical information and be...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Me, Inc.? Untangling Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism
• 1 Selling, Yet Still Social: Consociational Personhood Among the Self-Employed in Eastern Germany
• 2 Work-Discipline and Temporal Structures in a Multinational Bank in Romania
• 3 Using Gender in Neoliberal Business: Reinterpretations of Female Utility in a Romanian Company
• 4 The Authorial Self and Acquiring the Language of Neoliberalism in Slovakia
• 5 Losing the Enterprising Self in Post-Soviet Estonian Villages
• 6 Good Work: State Employees and the Informal Economy in Cuba
• 7 Building on Trust: Open-Ended Contracts and the Duality of Self-interest in Romanian House Construction
• 8 Earning Money, Learning the Language: Slovak Au Pairs and their Passage to Adulthood
• 9 Old Minorities in a New Europe: Enterprising Citizenship at the Polish-Czech Border
• Afterword: Elias talks to Hayek (and learns from Marx and Foucault): Reflections on Neoliberalism, Postsocialism and Personhood
• Index