This emphasis on flexibility is changing the very meaning of work, and so the words we use for it.

"Career", for instance, in its English origins meant a road for carriages, and as eventually applied to labour meant a lifelong channel for one's economic pursuits. Flexible capitalism has blocked the straight roadway of career, diverting employees suddenly from one kind of work into another.

The word "job" in English of the fourteenth century meant a lump or piece of something that could be carted around. Flexibility today brings back this arcane sense of the job, as people do lumps of labour, pieces of work, over the course of a lifetime.

Flexibility is used today as another way to lift the curse of oppression from capitalism. In attacking rigid bureaucracy and emphasising risk, it is claimed, gives people more freedom to shape their lives. In fact, the new order substitutes new controls rather than simply abolishing the rules of the past but these new controls are also hard to understand. The new capitalism is an often illegible regime of power.

"Today, a young American with at least two years of college can expect to change jobs at least eleven times in the course of working, and change his or her skill base at least three times during those forty years of labour."

Character particularly focuses upon the long-term aspect of our emotional experience. Character is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through the pursuit of long-term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratification for the sake of a future end. Character concerns the personal traits which we value in ourselves and for which we seek to be valued by others.

How do we decide what is of lasting value in ourselves in a society which is impatient, which focuses on the immediate moment?

How can long-term goals be pursued in an economy devoted to the short-term?

How can mutual loyalties and commitments be sustained in institutions which are constantly breaking apart or continually being redesigned?

The most tangible sign of that change might be the motto "no long term". In work, the traditional career progressing step by step through the corridors of one or two institutions is withering; so is the deployment of a single set of skills through the course of a working life.

Today, a young American with at least two years of college can expect to change jobs at least eleven times in the course of working, and change his or her skill base at least three times during those forty years of labour.

"No long term" is a principle that corrodes trust, loyalty and mutual commitment. The short time frame of modern institutions limits the ripening of informal trust. Strong ties depend, in contrast, on long association. And, more personally, they depend on a willingness to make commitments to others.

Transposed to the family realm, "no long term" means keep moving, don't commit yourself, and don't sacrifice. How can we protect family relations from succumbing to short-term behaviour, and above all the weakness of loyalty and commitment which mark the modern workplace? In the place of the chameleon values of the new economy, family values emphasise formal obligation, trustworthiness, commitment, and purpose. These are all long-term virtues.

This conflict between family and work poses some questions about adult experience itself. How can long-term purposes be pursued in a short-term society? How can durable social relations be sustained? How can a human being develop a narrative of identity and life history in a society composed of episodes and fragments? The conditions of the new economy feed instead on experience which drifts in time, from place to place, from job to job.

What is peculiar about uncertainty today is that it exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism. Instability is meant to be normal, the entrepreneur is served up as an ideal Everyman. "No long term" disorients action over the long term, loosens bonds of trust and commitment, and divorces will from behaviour.

The declaration of "re-engineering" evokes efficiency doing more with less conjuring up a tighter operation achieved by making a decisive break from the past. But the overtones of efficiency can be misleading. Irreversable change occurs because "re-engineering" can be a highly chaotic process.

It became clear to many business leaders by the mid-1990s that only in the highly paid fantasy life of consultants can a large organisation define a new business plan, trim staff and re-engineer itself to suit, then steam forward to realise the new design.

Many, even most, re-engineering efforts fail largely because institutions become dysfunctional during the people-squeezing process: the morale and motivation of workers drop sharply in the various plays of downsizing. Surviving workers wait for the next blow of the axe rather than exulting in competitive victory over those who are fired...

Institutional changes, instead of following the path of the guided arrow, head in different and often conflicting directions: business plans are discarded and revised; expected benefits turn out to be ephemeral; the organisation loses direction, a profitable operating unit is suddenly sold, for example, yet a few years later the parent company tries to get back the business in which it knew how to make money before it sought to reinvent itself..."

In the early 1990s, the American Management Association conducted studies of firms which had engaged seriously in downsizing. The AMA found that repeated downsizings produce "lower profits and declining worker productivity..." Another study by the Wyatt Companies found that "less than half the companies achieved their expense reduction goals; fewer than one-third increased their profitability and less than one third increased their productivity..."

Inefficiency or disorganisation does not mean, however, that there is no rhyme or reason to the practice of sharp, disruptive change. Because institutional re-structurings signal to the finance markets that change is "for real", the stock prices of institutions in the course of re-organisation often rises, as though "any changes are better than continuing on as before." In the operation of modern markets, the disruption of organisations becomes profitable.

While the disruption may not be justifiable in terms of productivity, the short-term returns to stockholders provide a strong incentive to the powers of chaos disguised by that seemingly reassuring word "re-engineering". Perfectly viable businesses are gutted or abandoned, capable employees are set adrift rather than rewarded, simply because the organisation must prove to the market that it is capable of change.

The number of men aged 55-64 at work in the United States has dropped from nearly 80% in 1970 to 65% in 1990. The figures for the United Kingdom, France and Germany are similar. There is also a slight abridgement at the beginning of a working life, the age young people enter the labour force has been delayed a few years because of the increased emphasis on education.

The sociologist Manuel Castells predicts that "the actual working lifetime could be shortened to about 30 years (from 24 to 54), out of a real lifetime span of about 75-80 years". That is, the productive life span is being compressed to less than half the biological life span, with older workers leaving the scene long before they are physically or mentally unfit.

"What is peculiar about uncertainty today is that it exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism. Instability is meant to be normal, the entrepreneur is served up as an ideal Everyman."

Such risk-taking occurs in what economists call "winner-take-all markets". In this competitive landscape, those who succeed sweep the board of gains, while the mass of losers have crumbs to divide up amongst themselves.

Flexibility is a key element in allowing such a market to form. Without a bureaucratic system to channel wealth gains throughout a hierarchy, rewards gravitate to the most powerful. In an unfettered institution, those in a position to grab everything, do so.

Failure is the great modern taboo. Popular literature is full of recipes for how to succeed, but largely silent on how to cope with failure.

Failure is no longer the normal prospect of facing only the very poor or disadvantaged. It has become more familiar as a regular event in the lives of the middle classes. The shrinking size of the elite makes achievement more elusive. The winner-take-all market is a competitive structure which disposes large numbers of educated people to fail.

Downsizings and re-engineerings impose on middle-class people sudden disasters which were in an earlier capitalism much more confined to the working classes. The sense of failing one's family by behaving flexibly and adaptively at work is more subtle, but equally powerful.

Rico's experiences of changing jobs and becoming a consultant where he has no fixed role and never really belongs to a company have "set his inner and emotional life adrift." He is haunted by a sense that he cannot provide his children with the ethical discipline that his parents instilled in him.

Rico's working life, with its constant changes, doesn't provide his children with examples of values such as loyalty, trust and service. Rico told Sennett: "You can't imagine how stupid I feel when I talk to my kids about commitment. Its an abstract virtue to them, they don't see it anywhere ..." For Sennett, Rico is Everyman whose dilemmas show how "short-term capitalism threatens to corrode his character, particularly those qualities of character which bind human beings to one another and furnishes each with a sense of sustainable self ... the flexible self which has brought him success is weakening his own character in ways for which there exists no practical remedy..."

Corrosion of Character
-- The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism
by Richard Sennett
(pub 1998 by WW.Norton and Company)
ISBN 0-393-04678-8

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