Index

9:  OPENING UP THE FUTURE OF WORK

Colin C Williams

The notion that we live in a  ‘capitalist’ society organized  around the systematic pursuit of profit  in the marketplace is something  commonly assumed by business  leaders, journalists, politicians and  academic commentators of all major  political hues. Wherever one looks, the  prevailing orthodoxy is that there has  been a shift away from (pre-modern or  traditional) non-market work in the  western economies and towards the  production and delivery of goods and  services for monetised exchange by  capitalist firms for the purpose of  profit. 

Here, however, I wish to question this  commonly held view of economic  development that closes off the future  to anything other than a commodified  world. How deeply has the market  really penetrated western economies?  Is the trend towards ever more  market-oriented economies? Or do  non-market economic practices persist?  If so, how can their persistence be  explained? And what are the implications for how the future of work is  envisaged? In answering these questions, the intention is to show that the  view of the market as  victorious, colonizing and  all-powerful needs to be  transcended and for  greater attention to be paid  to imagining and enacting  alternative futures for  working life beyond the  market.

THE COMMODIFICATION THESIS

Given that every society  has to produce, distribute,  and allocate the goods and  services that people need  to live, all societies have an  economy of one type or  another. Economies,  however, can be organized  in a multitude of different  ways. To depict the  configuration of economies, most analyses  differentiate three modes of producing  and delivering goods and services,  namely the ‘market’, the ‘state’ and the  ‘community’. Analysed in these terms,  the widespread consensus is that most  nations are witnessing a common  trajectory so far as the nature and  direction of their economies are  concerned. A view predominates that  the market is becoming more powerful, expansive, hegemonic and totalising as it penetrates deeper into each  and every corner of economic life and  stretches its tentacles ever wider across  the globe to colonize those areas  previously left untouched by its  powerful force.

This process of commodification, or  what is sometimes referred to as  ‘commercialism’ or ‘marketization’,  where goods and services are increasingly produced by capitalist forms for  a profit under conditions of market  exchange, is seen to be leading to a  predominantly market mode of  economic organization where firstly,  goods and services are produced for  exchange, secondly, these exchanges  are monetised and third and finally,  monetary exchange is imbued with the  profit motive. Given that the non-market sphere is by definition composed of economic practices not  possessing one or more these characteristics, this sphere can be here  divided into three distinctive forms of  work. Firstly, there is non-exchanged  work, secondly, non-monetised  exchange and third and finally, monetised exchange where the motive of  profit is not to the fore (see Figure 1).  According to the commodification  thesis, therefore, the shaded area of  Figure 1 is expanding and colonising  all of the other spheres of work. 

Table 1

Allocation of working time in western economies

 Country

 Canada
 Denmark
 France
 Netherlands
 Norway
 UK
 USA
 Finland
 20 Countries

Paid work
(minutes per day)

293
283
297
265
265
282
304
268
297

Non-exchanged
work (minutes per day)

204
155
246
209
232
206
231
216
230

Time spent on non-
exchanged work as % of all work

41.0
35.3
45.3
44.1
46.7
42.2
43.2
44.6
43.6

Source: Gershuny (2000, Table 7.1)2

One of the most worrying and disturbing aspects of this thesis that we  live in a ‘capitalist’ society organized  around the systematic pursuit of profit  is that despite its overwhelming  predominance, hardly any evidence is  ever brought to the fore by its exponents either to show that a process of  marketization is occurring or even to  display the extent, pace or unevenness  of its penetration.

If this was an insignificant process or  merely some ‘academic’ theory in the  most derogatory sense of the word  (i.e., of little or no importance), then it  might not even matter. However, the  commodification thesis is seemingly  the principal driving force underpinning the decisions to restructure both  ‘transition’ economies and the ‘third  world’ towards a market system. It is  also the main reason for the focus  upon the market in economic policy in  the western economies. It is thus  crucial that this thesis is interrogated.  Unless this occurs, then one will not  know whether the current focus of  economic policy upon the market  realm is built upon firm foundations or  not.

EVALUATING THE COMMODIFICATION THESIS

To gauge whether there is a displacement of non-market activity by a  colonizing market sphere, the component parts of the commodification  thesis can be investigated. If this thesis  is correct, then firstly, monetised  exchange should be expanding relative  to non-exchanged work and non- monetised exchange and secondly,  monetised exchange should be increasingly conducted for profit-motivated  purposes.

Non-exchanged work

Examining how people spend their  time in twenty western countries,  Table 1 uncovers that unpaid domestic  work (i.e., non-exchanged work)  occupies 43.6 per cent of total working  time. It appears, therefore, that the  reach of the market is rather narrower  than imagined by exponents of  marketization. Self-provisioning, so  long considered a marginal ‘other’, is  only slightly smaller than paid work,  measured in terms of the amount of  time spent on it. Indeed, in some  nations (e.g., Canada, France, Nether- lands, UK, USA), more time is spent  engaged in non-exchanged work than  paid work.

This finding should not be a surprise.  When Karl Polanyi in his 1944 book,  The Great Transformation, depicted the  shift from a non-market to a market  society, he strongly emphasized how  this was merely a shift in the balance  of economic activity from the non- market to the market sphere. He never  asserted that it would be total. These  data demonstrate that he was quite  correct not to exaggerate the reach of  the market.

It might be also presumptuous to talk  of an expansive and colonizing market  sphere. As Table 2 displays, the shift  of work from the unpaid to the paid  sphere has, at best, stalled over the  past forty years. Indeed, in some  nations, it has even gone into reverse.  In countries such as Denmark, Finland, France, the UK and the USA,  unpaid work now occupies a greater  share of people’s total working time  than it did four decades ago. Working  life, therefore, is not everywhere  becoming more market-orientated, as  propounded by exponents of the  commodification thesis.

Table 2
Non-exchanged work as a % of total work time across 20 countries, 1960 – Present

Country

1960-73

 1974-84

1985-present


Paid work
Subsistence work
 
Mins per day
309
237
-------------
546
% of all work
56.6
43.4
------------
100.0
Mins per day
285
212
-------------
497
% of all work
57.3
42.7
-------------
100.0
Mins per day
293
235
---------------
528
 % of all work
55.4
44.6
--------------
100.0

Source: Gershuny (2000, Table 7.1)3

Non-monetised exchange

It is not only the persistence of  non-exchanged work that casts doubts  on the commodification thesis. According to exponents of commodification, non-monetised exchanges are also  disappearing as monetary relations  penetrate every nook and cranny of  the world and into almost every aspect  of social, even private life, meaning  that what we are living through is the  accelerating passage of non-monetised  activity into the formal economy, its  colonization by market transactions. Is  it the case, therefore, that in ‘market  societies’, non-monetised exchange has  ceased to exist?

It takes only a moment’s reflection to  realise that this is not the case.  Throughout western economies, there  exists a tremendous amount of what is  variously referred to as voluntary work,  unpaid community exchange or mutual  aid. Take, for example, the UK. A  2001 UK government survey (the  Home Office Active Citizenship  Survey) identified some 3.7 billion  hours of volunteering occurred in the  previous 12 months. This is the  equivalent in hours to the total work  of just over 2 million people employed  on a full-time basis (i.e., at 35 hours  per week). Or put another way, for  every 14 hours worked in formal  employment in the UK (assuming 27  million people working an average of  35 hours), approximately one hour is  spent working on a non-monetised  basis. Given that non-monetised  exchange constitutes some 7 per cent  of the total time that people spend  engaged in formal employment in the  UK, such work is thus far from some  marginal leftover, especially and as will  be shown in the next section, given  that not all paid work is market work.

Not-for-profit monetised transactions

The notion that the only type of  monetary exchange is that which is  profit-motivated runs deep across  economic discourse ranging from  neo-classical to Marxist thought.  Reading monetised exchange as always  profit-motivated serves the interests of  both neo-liberals whose belief is that  this must be met with open arms and  radical theorists who use this as a call  to arms to resist its further encroachment. The result is the perpetuation of  a crude view of monetised exchange  that fails, as will now be seen, to get to  grips with the real diversity of monetary exchange in western economies.

The fact that monetary exchange does  not always have to be imbued with the  profit-motive can be clearly seen in  many ‘alternative economic spaces’  such as car boot sales, inflation-free  local currency experiments such as  Local Exchange and Trading Schemes,  sweat-equity money projects such as  time dollars and the realm of gift-giving. More importantly, it can be  clearly seen in many mainstream  economic sectors.

For all of the talk of the demise of the  public sector, which by definition has  not been oriented towards profit, this  sector still represents in western  economies the equivalent of somewhere between 30-50 per cent of  GDP. Indeed, even if it is no longer a  major direct provider of goods and  services, this does not mean that these  have been moved into the commodified sphere. To realise this, one has  only to look at the growth of the  non-profit sector in the western  economies, which now represents the  equivalent of some 5 per cent of GDP.  Examining the not-for-profit sector in  26 countries, the John Hopkins  Comparative Non-Profit Sector Project  (www.jhu.edu/~cnp/compdata.html)  displays that the pace of job growth in  this sector is faster than in the wider  economy. In the US, for example,  although there was an overall increase  in employment of 8 per cent between  1990 and 1995, the growth in employment in the not-for-profit sector was  20 per cent. In four EU nations  (France, Germany, the UK and  Netherlands), meanwhile, the 24 per  growth in not-for-profit sector employment far outstripped the 3 per  cent growth in the economy as a  whole, thus accounting for 40 per cent  of total employment growth. The  inference is that the relationship  between monetised exchange and the  profit motive might well be growing  weaker rather than stronger.

It might be assumed that whenever the  private sector partakes in monetary  transactions, the motive of profit is  always to the fore. In a bid to deconstruct this belief so as to deprive  capitalism of its solid coherent identity,  numerous studies have displayed that  private sector enterprises are not all,  and always, driven by a common  imperative of profit.

To take just one example, a recent  study4 explores how competing  discourses of management shape the  fluid entity that is unproblematically  represented as ‘the capitalist firm’.  Examining an Australian minerals and  steel multinational, this study produces  a disruptive reading that emphasizes  the de-centred and disorganized  actions taken in response to multiple  logics circulating within and without  the corporation. Their analysis represents the enterprise as an unpredictable  and potentially open site, rather than  as a set of practices unified by a  predictable logic of profit maximisation. No longer tethered to a pre- ordained economic logic, the enterprise  becomes recognisable as an ordinary  social institution; one that often fails to  enact its will or realize its goals or  even fails to come to a coherent  conception of what these might be.  Hence, even in the commercial sphere,  so dominantly perceived as the embodiment of the profit motive, enterprises  are not always tethered to the motive  of profit and profit alone.

The outcome, therefore, is that despite  the widespread belief that we live in a  commodified world, this is not the  case. Indeed, taking all of the above  estimates into account, Figure 2  provides a graphic display of the  nature of western economies, showing  how well under half of our economies,  at the very most, can be characterized  as commodified.

EXPLAINING THE PERSISTENCE OF NON-COMMODIFIED WORK

To explain the continuing prevalence  and even growth of non-market work  in western economies, one option is to  view its growth as the product of a  new stage of capitalism (often called  post-Fordism) that is off-loading social  reproduction functions from the  market sphere back onto the non- market realm. In this reading, the  breakdown of the post-war economic  regulations and welfare states through  a general trend of deregulation and  flexibilisation of production, and the  transferring of social services to private  and communal hands, has led to a  practice of de-commodification. Those  no longer of use to capitalism, in this  view, are thus being off-loaded onto  the non-market sphere to eke out their  living.

Is it the case, however, that all non-market activity can and should be seen  in such structural economic terms? As  the distribution of non-market work  has been unpacked and the motives  underpinning these economic practices  unravelled, it has become increasingly  apparent that this is a necessary but  insufficient explanation. Numerous  studies display that although affluent  populations lead more commodified  lives, their volume of non-market  activity is actually greater. For deprived  populations, engagement in non- market work tends to be confined to  routine, monotonous and unrewarding  work whilst for affluent populations, it  is more orientated towards non- routine, creative and rewarding activities. Unravelling their contrasting  motives, furthermore, the finding is  that although deprived populations  engage in such activity mostly out of  economic necessity, for affluent  populations it is more a matter of  choice.5 As such, economistic discourses need to be complemented with  more agency-oriented narratives to  fully explain this sphere.

One option in this regard is to read  the continuing prevalence of non- market work as resulting from cultures  of resistance to commodification.  From this viewpoint, the persistence  and growth of non-market work  displays for example, how the in- creasing dissatisfaction with formal  employment is resulting in participation in non-market activity as people  search for alternative sources of work  satisfaction and pleasure due to its  absence in their employment. Certainly, it would appear that this view of  non-market economic practices as  ‘spaces of hope’ is important for  explaining the non-market work of  affluent populations, even if the view  of them as ‘spaces of despair’ continues to have more resonance for  deprived populations.

CONCLUSIONS

Until now, the widely held view that  the market is reaching ever further into  every crevice of daily life has led many  to conclude that there is ‘no alternative’ to a commodified world. In this  article, however, a large non-market  realm has been identified that for the  past four decades, if anything, has  grown rather than diminished relative  to the market sphere, thus raising  doubts about whether the market is so  victorious, colonizing and all-powerful  as many previously assumed.  By allowing capitalist imperatives to  colonize our imagination, it appears  that adherents to the commodification  thesis have obfuscated the economic  plurality that characterizes western  economies and closed off the future of  work to anything other than a com- modified world. Here, however, the  future of work has again been opened  up to an endless array of new possibilities that now need to be explored and  discussed as serious options. If I have  here started to peel away the scales  that have covered the eyes of so many  and to encourage hope that it is wholly  feasible to open the future of work to  alternatives beyond a commodified  world, then this paper will have  achieved its objective.

May 2004

Colin C Williams

Professor of Work Organization

Co-ordinator, Collective for Alternative Organization Studies (CAOS)

University of Leicester Management Centre Leicester LE1 7RH United Kingdom

E-mail: [email protected]

NOTES

1. This paper introduces arguments  covered in greater detail in C.C. Williams  (forthcoming September 2004) A Commodified World? mapping the limits of capitalism,  Zed, London.

2. J. Gershuny (2000) Changing  Times: work and leisure in postindustrial society,  Oxford University Press, Oxford. 

3. ibid

4. O’Neill, P. and Gibson-Graham,  J.K. (1999) ‘Enterprise discourse and  executive talk: stories that destabilize the  company’, Transactions of the Institute of  British Geographers, 24: 11-22.

5. See Williams (2004)

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