Sabotage, anomie, and the economy

...And what could be a more natural and direct response to dehumanizing jobs than deliberate underperformance...

...Although explicit conflict-resolution mechanisms and institutional reinforcement for greater cooperation need to be developed, most important is to make the start...

...If work does not draw upon a full range of skill and effort, is it likely that these capabilities will be brought to bear on the shriveled tasks the worker confronts...

...but where adversarial relations are prominent, intensified supervision usually breeds new forms of sabotage...

...Something is wrong with the world of work...

...Trust will decline, and its absence will matter more...

...Consider anomie first...

...Alan Fox, a British sociologist, has termed this process a "low-trust dynamic...

...The other road is one of responding more positively to the underlying social pressures that generate sabotage and anomie...

...But the longest journey must always begin with the first step, and the sooner begun, the better off we'll be...

...But in sharply divided and low-trust societies, it is unlikely that such income policies can be successfully implemented...

...If workers do not fully use their productive capabilities, the cumulative impact upon productivity is bound to be significant...

...1) The classic Veblen case is still very much alive: fears concerning job security—not wanting to work oneself out of a job—cause many workers to slow the work pace...

...A three-part attack is required...

...Sabotage becomes a form of revenge against all those larger and unreachable forces that frustrate one's ambitions...

...Group loyalty grows at the expense of broader allegiances...

...Small wonder that when the public is thus confronted with disturbing outcomes, rigged rules of the game, and unavailing reform, anomie is the most likely response...

...H: Anomie WHAT ARE THE MAJOR CONSIDERATIONS behind a conscientious withdrawal of trust...

...Getting even" and "getting back" then can become important motivators, as deteriorating trust finds outlet for expression in one's work...

...Sabotage thus can arise from unmotivated, resentful, and antagonistic attitudes induced by bad work conditions...

...Our usual defense against high rates of inflation has been to renege on the high-employment commitment and deliberately engineer an economic slowdown...

...Clearly, increasing trust among modern society's diverse and conflicting elements is no easy task and flies in the face of much history and many counterpressures...

...What brings about this guarded, egocentric, mind-your-ownbusiness, life-is-a-jungle outlook where, as described by British sociologist John Goldthorpe, " . each group [focuses] on its own deprivations and on improving its own position within the existing institutional order or, at all events, with little apparent concern for the building of some radically different one...

...It seeks to counteract the consequences of anomie and sabotage by using the pain and fear of prolonged high unemployment to restrain wages and intensify work effort...

...365...

...In both areas, once the present economic policies have failed, there will be opportunities for more constructive measures...

...As Richard Edwards has suggested, the workplace is "contested terrain...

...Several factors magnify the impact of lessened trust...

...Although most explanations for declining productivity do not stress sabotage, the morale and attitude factors behind sabotage must have profoundly retardant effects...

...Although a seemingly reasonable and proper response from each individual's point of view, in the aggregate such behavior turns out to have undesirable consequences...

...Policy commitments to high employment, by strengthening the bargaining position of organized economic interest groups, lead to intense jockeying among such groups to enlarge or maintain their income share by raising the price of what they sell...

...Second, the large and unjustified disparities in income, wealth, power, and privilege must be narrowed...

...How do these tendencies manifest themselves...

...Anomie also feeds upon itself...

...2) Working conditions themselves induce sabotage...

...Clearly, this low-trust dynamic heightens self-absorption and narrow participation in groups, inhibits common action, and usually entails less sympathy and understanding for, and hence less accommodation to, the views of other groups...

...4) A low-trust society that seems unfair to large elements of its population and thereby forfeits its claim for respect can cause increasing sabotage...

...Mutual suspicion and seemingly unbridgeable differences of goals prevent the formation of lasting coalitions...

...The consequent chaos is a vivid reminder of how workers can influence their work pace...

...Even when work is highly controlled, some self-pacing will be possible...

...Our American myths—such as equality, the melting pot, abundant opportunity for all, classlessness—were always larger than life and, however useful as ideals, they could not meet the test of comparison with reality...

...After another half-decade of stagflation, the fear of acceleration is likely to be as great an impediment to expansion at 7 or 8 percent unemployment as it has recently been at 6 percent...

...Feelings of distrust find expression in the single activity that most ties one to others...

...Such disparities are widely (but not universally) perceived as unjustified, excessive, and rigged ar363 rangements benefiting the minority of the rich and powerful...

...The virulence, persistence, and intractability of inflation in modern industrial societies, despite extensive efforts to control it, suggest that traditional monetary-fiscal policies alone are unable to achieve the joint goals of high employment and reasonable price stability...

...I: Sabotage WHAT IS IT about contemporary work and life that leads to the conscientious withdrawal of efficiency and trust...

...Both sabotage and anomie, I believe, already pose significant social problems, and their influence is likely to grow...

...In a different political climate, reorganizing work and augmenting economic opportunity will have their chance tomorrow, if the coalitions needed for such programs can be built today...

...The inconsistency between the fundamental condition of extensive linkage and the presumption that a resurgent individualism can conquer all dooms this effort to failure...

...it is also an increasingly ineffectual and therefore costly one...

...Slowdowns and pressures against high performance can also be motivated by the fear that today's production overfulfillment will become tomorrow's output norm...

...Or will the economy lapse into its old ways as expansion proceeds and the fear of unemployment recedes...

...One powerful tactic in a labor dispute is to follow work rules and job duties meticulously and to the letter...

...in the process of narrowing socioeconomic disparities, sources of hope and trust for many people will be renewed...

...Groups formerly subordinated are insistently, if often unsuccessfully, demanding their long-deferred share...

...Continuous adjustment of work rules and monitoring/surveillance takes place in response to changing work performance...

...V: Remedies Two SHARPLY CONTRASTING OPTIONS are possible...

...As James Tobin wrote prophetically in 1980: Conceivably the economy is moving to ever higher rates of unemployment that impose no greater discipline on wage increases...

...practical accomplishments are necessary...

...Prolonged recessions, argue those who recommend this option, are necessary to bring about fundamental changes in worker attitudes —improving work incentives, wage behavior, and labor discipline...

...Because one group assumes that another will act on short-run and selfish considerations, and vice-versa, the combined effect of each group acting upon these assumptions produces the worst outcome of all...

...The centrality of the work role and the fact of its major claim on our time influence our leisure activities...

...Economic interdependence in a modern industrial order runs counter to the strong drives for greater privatization and small-group association...

...Ultimately, such singleminded pursuit of private interest will prove futile, because it undermines the social order whose health is a precondition for the realization of private ambitions...

...And, of course, the worst of all possible strategies might be to place undeserved or unrequited trust in others...

...If life appears to be one big rip-off, work presents opportunities for getting even...

...III: How It Works ONCE SABOTAGE AND ANOMIE TAKE HOLD, for whatever reason, each will get worse, and will exacerbate the other, as diminishing efficiency undermines social trust and diminishing trust impairs efficiency...

...Taking work first, at least four separate considerations tend to promote sabotage...

...Increased sabotage becomes a likely response to intensified and malign supervision...

...Anomie will become irrelevant, and sabotage virtually eliminated...

...These attitudes, in turn, will motivate more sabotage, setting in motion an action/reaction process in which the "cure" may be worse than the "disease...

...Such price increases are, in turn, "validated" when policy-makers are pressured to expand money demand sufficiently to honor their high-employment commitments...

...The mechanisms behind this incompatibility of objectives have been largely sociological...

...the benefits from a more equal society flow in many directions, and improve all our lives in numerous and complex ways...

...The uprootedness and mobility of modern society, the declining sense of identification with place, a consumerist ethos with its emphasis on quick gratification, the exaltation of individualistic goals, the growth of large bureaucratic organizations, and the depersonalization of much work and social contact—all push us toward a concern for private goals...

...Has the medicine worked, so that the period of economic suffering has, by disciplining workers, paved the way for sustained and vigorous growth...

...The focus of our lives has become increasingly privatized...

...Increased monitoring/surveillance seems a natural managerial reaction to declining effort and efficiency, but in an environment that fosters sabotage it will increase resentment and hostility...

...Thus public responsibilities are abdicated...

...And will the Administration's divisive domestic and reckless foreign policies create circumstances that strictly economic measures cannot possibly overcome...

...The productivity slowdown also seriously exacerbates the difficulty of accommodating the various income claimants...

...In this way pluralism may be linked to anomie, which will erode more widely held universalistic beliefs...

...Sabotage, in this connection, is significant 364 largely because of its consequences for productivity...

...The reserve army of the unemployed will make workers more accommodating, more content with less, and more willing to work harder...

...Declining productivity growth rates have been perhaps the most discouraging feature of our recent economic history, and they contribute importantly to the sense of economic malaise...

...Despairing of successfully grappling with very complicated issues, or relying on people who seem to know more, we seek to escape into our private worlds...

...From this perspective, recent economic policy can be most charitably viewed as a last-ditch effort to resolve the complexities of an interdependent economy by relying on the principle of eachmanfor-himself...

...In principle, joint employment price-stability goals would be attainable if incomes policies, or "social contract" agreements in general, could be used in conjunction with monetary-fiscal policies, since bargaining over income shares would then take place within the context of standards of fairness generally accepted by all parties...

...Anomie, thus, can be interpreted as individualized response to the fact of social impotence...

...I shall extend this Veblenian notion of sabotage to: (1) the numerous work situations where adverse conditions also tend to generate this "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency," and (2) a parallel and more general phenomenon whereby social interactions in modern industrial societies tend to generate "anomie" or "the conscientious withdrawal of trust...

...Unfortunately they may also seem, from an individual perspective, optimizing and rational responses...

...Attempts to achieve individual and small-group solutions are unlikely to succeed...

...The odds are, in my view, heavily against the Administration...

...Increasing suspicion of others and greater privatization tend to be both self-justifying and self-perpetuating...

...Not only is this a tremendously wasteful policy...

...He then enlarged its meaning from signifying spiteful and covert destruction to embracing all restrictive practices—of firms as well as of workers—that aim to reduce supply as price-raising and marketmanaging strategies...

...Anomie also has consequences for the job, which becomes the natural channel for a strongly held sense of generalized resentment...

...Once started, an upward spiral is likely to be in operation, as each positive step sustains the next...

...Now that recovery is under way, this policy confronts its critical test...

...3) Conditions on the job reflect an ongoing conflict...

...These trends reflect, first, powerful sociocultural influences that long have been molding attitudes— most significantly, factors directly touching our individual lives...

...Social experimentation generates its own data for refining, modifying, or rejecting different approaches...

...Independently of the growth of pluralism, finally, the power of unifying ideological beliefs has declined...

...The absence of trust sustains this process by encouraging preemptive price increases, and inflation becomes the inevitable accompaniment of relatively high levels of employment...

...Yet even as our lives are privatized, we enter an era of increasing organization...

...For one thing, to the extent that previous ideologies projected a false consciousness of the real world, their demise was inevitable...

...Closely related is the growing significance of "prisoners' dilemma" choices that face society, when the structure of rewards and penalties often leads to choosing the worst alternative...

...Although we may strive for perfection, modest improvements on what is can yield substantial benefits over what would otherwise be...

...and anomie can take the form of an increased desire for privatization, aloof and unsympathetic attitudes toward others, and a disbelief in the possibility and/or efficacy of collective action...

...Anomie and sabotage cannot be magically dissolved, and trust established, by promises of wonders-to-come...

...Such coalitions can be based on some simple and compelling ideas: new forms of work organization can liberate great economic energy and respond to people's desires for more satisfactory jobs...

...By reinforcing the motivation for lowered trust, the decline of trust is made certain...

...Mean and dispiriting jobs cast a long shadow over off-the-job lives...

...One last factor determining the growth of anomie is the persistent inequality in the distribution of income, wealth, power, and privilege in the face of public expectation of greater equality...

...monotonous, repetitive, short-cycle, dead-end jobs do not call forth Veblen's "instincts of workmanship...

...Such adjustments— some tightening supervision, others meliorating harsh conditions—are the most likely countermoves to sabotage...

...Work becomes a natural channel through which social antagonism finds expression...

...To emphasize group identification is also to accentuate differences with those outside the narrowly defined group...

...Inflation has been termed by Fox the "supreme symbolic expression of low-trust society...

...Chastened and subdued workers, after having faced the harsh pressures of market forces, will no longer be a source of trouble for the economy...

...Given the increasing complexity of choice and the consequently high cost incurred by the necessary search, information, and organization associated with common efforts, individual solutions may offer more promise than group actions based upon trusting others...

...But only after the first two steps—work reorganization and narrowing disparities—can the third initiative, increasing trust, make rapid progress...

...First, work itself needs to be restructured to overcome the inherent contradiction between worker aspirations and the reality of inadequate jobs...

...One, the current Administration's, is the path of fear and threat...

...IV: Economic Implications IN THE CONTEXT of the recent recession and the present recovery, these implications of sabotage and anomie may have special relevance...

...For another, the complexity and magnitude of major public questions are overwhelming...

...In these more favorable circumstances, more cooperative solutions to the conflicts over income shares will be forthcoming...