Knud Jensen, The Danish University of Education knud@dpu.dk
Stephen Walker, Newman College, Birmingham, UK s.a.walker@newman.ac.uk
Modernisation and the Transformation of the Social Relations of Work in the Public Services
During the last 20 years we have, as sociologists, recognised a series of new developments of the State in modern capitalist societies and we have been concerned with how these developments impact upon the daily lives of citizens and upon the discourses which condition our daily lives. Specifically, we have been concerned with trying to untangle what is popularly referred to as the ‘modernisation’ of the State. We need to be careful here. ‘Modernisation’ is used by some to refer to the movement towards some kind of marketised, deregulated civil society. But it is also the seductive slogan of those political leaders who desire to present their new hegemonic projects as both inevitable and devoutly to be desired. From our point of view, ‘modernisation’ refers to a series of gradual but unequivocal transformations of the processes of social control and of the possibilities for individual self-determination and development. The empirical instances of these transformations vary from one State politic to another. However, they share certain common characteristics – be they expressed in post-industrialist capitalist countries, in well-established liberal democracies, in the developing world or in newly emerging post-communist countries. Transformations through modernisation agendas seem to focus upon attempts to blur the distinction between the public and the private sectors of social life. It is well - known that, for the most part, this involves the promotion of political policies which, on the one hand aim to hand-over responsibility for the provision of public services to private individuals or corporations and, on the other, to pass on the obligation for the financing of public services to independently-acting, private individuals. Thus, summarised rather crudely but accurately, in the modernised State, the provision and the organisation of health, educational and welfare services are being progressively handed-over to privately owned and managed enterprises, and increasingly, the services are paid for from privately owned wealth, supported by minimal taxation. However, although modernisation is frequently depicted as a change in the processes of economic management it is also, clearly, a transformation of social relations. Changes to the ownership and regulation of the public services impact upon the relationships between individual citizens and the State, between individual citizens and public service workers and between public sector workers and their ’mangers’ and their co-workers.
Modernisation, then, impacts upon both the social structures of the organisation of labour and, at the same time, on the social relations of work. To recognise this will shape the kind of sociological perspective we use in our endeavour to chart these social movements and the biographies of the real individuals whose lives are transformed by them. At times like this, it is important to remember C. Wright Mills' question about sociological analysis of contemporary social trends:
"What are the major issues for publics and the key troubles of private individuals in our time? To formulate issues and troubles, we must ask what values are cherished yet threatened, and what values are cherished and supported, by the characterising trends of our period. In the case both of the threat and of the support we must ask what salient contradictions may be involved."
In this paper we will explore the ‘salient contradictions’ arising from State modernisation projects which provide structure and agency for the social conditions for those professional and semi-professionals who work in public sectors of employment. A great deal of sociological analysis of the professions and professional work has often been either descriptive (designed to chart the differences in status between professional groups so as to characterise differences between full and semi-professions) or protectionist (designed to use sociological analysis to assist professional workers to protect their rights and positions in struggles with economic or political power-holders. Mindful of the notion of ’salient contradiction, our discussion will develop a different perspective. Our concern is to reintroduce the notion of analytical dialects in the investigation of work and working. This means it will look for the positive and the negative valences of social situations and movements. In this particular paper, the dialectical analysis runs like this:
State transformation is real and has a destructive tendency on gains made to protect the individualistic rights of workers. It also produces new fields in which sociologists and workers can operate.
One of these new fields comes from the real need to train and qualify ‘flexible’ workers.
By definition, flexibility cannot be standardised or prescribed - it depends upon an ability to have transferable and creative competence.
We can use our understanding of the work process (the three elements) and of the new real conditions of work in the public sector to redesign professional education for them, which both - meet the demands of the modernisers AND provide new fields for reflective co-operation.
The State
For the purposes of this paper we accept, in broad terms, that changes in State formation, at least in Western European Union (and increasingly in ‘modernised’ Eastern European countries) can be characterised as a shift from a notion of the State as a Welfare agency to that of the State as a Responsive agency. Under the former – the Welfare State, the State acts to guarantee basic citizen rights agreed under some form of social democratic settlement. Under the latter – the Responsive State, the State acts as a caretaker, policing social arrangements by protecting the rights of citizens to determine their own social actions and futures as independent, self-evaluating, responsible citizens. This is basically an ideological shift, a change from a perception of a state, which cares, to one in which the state is seen as guardian. The ideological redefinition involves a determination to get rid of rigid rules and bureaucratic structures from within state-employee/citizen relationships. In the rhetoric of the Responsive State, the state official or administrator is understood as a consultant or adviser, a person who does not judge right or wrong but who tries to reach for a common understanding or compromise. The citizen or the employee is taken to be a responsible, resourceful and self-reliant individual.
It is difficult to know just exactly what is the social vision of the politicians who are behind this movement. Although, essentially, they are political pragmatists, they also share a broad goal of attempting to "modernise" the State. Part of this modernisation involves strategies aimed at shifting as much employment as possible from the public to the private sector so as to secure the increased productivity and efficiency, which the market-forces of the private sector are assumed to provide. It also involves a consistent political commitment to preserve and protect the authority of the State. State power-holders are to control and to manage those institutions or groups or individuals that pursue actions which impede the ‘free’ flow of market forces or who seek to resist the social consequences of market-regulated social exchanges.
In the past few years, it has become increasing apparent that the ’modernisation’ of one any particular public sector – health, education or social welfare – gets to be shaped and to be implemented in surprisingly similar ways. As we ourselves are occupied in and have our empirical studies within schools, we have used our research into the reorganisation of schooling and of teacher’s work experiences as a basis for exploring how the State elite in the Responsive or ‘modern’ State is managing certain professionals or semi-professional to become contract workers. But we are also aware that the development in this part of public sector is not so different from the development of other public sectors like health and welfare, of medical and social workers' professionalism. We can recognise the similar patterns in the sequencing of work in all sectors, we can identify similar processes of modernisation and we can detect a shared discourse growing across the public sectors. And all these public sector professions can be regarded as in crisis - a crisis often depicted as working at two levels - the visible and the invisible. The 'visible' dimensions of the crisis are to do with issues of reported feelings of anomie and of alienation amongst these professionals'. These feelings are frequently made manifest in high stress and low job satisfaction levels and these are accompanied by intractable problems of retention and recruitment to these public service occupations. The invisible or covert dimensions of the crisis are identifiable in the progressive redefinition of the function, performance and obligations of the modern public service professional - a redefinition manufactured and enforced by the new State elite.
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