The corrosion of character Book

This book was written in 1998, the year I entered the corporate world Richard Sennett describes, one of networked authority, teamwork, and above all "flexibility" in the face of relentless change. So I'm intimately familiar with much of what he discusses in this slim, bleak, but humane book - particularly the way the change and 'disruption' of globalism are presented as impersonal, irresistible forces.

The Corrosion Of Character is about what happens to people's sense of themselves in these conditions. The embrace of impersonal change, Sennett writes, means a removal of agency - while the operations of power remain, there is a diffusion of responsibility at every level of work except the strictly personal. But even personal responsibility and independence - the paramount virtues of this new world - begin to lose meaning and satisfaction as the ability to make a narrative of one's life diminishes.

Sennett's concern is character - "character as Horace first described it, character as a connection to the world, as being necessary for others". The classical allusion is typical: Sennett's book mixes sociological fieldwork with an overview of philosophical attitudes to work, from the Classical era to the Enlightenment. The range of reference gives the book a thoughtful, subtle backbone which keeps it relevant even as the specific case studies begin to ever so slightly date.

Have circumstances changed at all since Sennett wrote the book? As the operations he describes continue, they affect an ever wider group of people. If the book has a flaw, it's the concentration on skilled working and middle class labour - Sennett has little to say about the unskilled working class, or those who have found themselves outside the labour economy entirely. But I still found it an illuminating book - it offers ways to understand how our particular economic arrangements have altered our personal, social and cultural expectations. 21st century trends, from the rise of social media to the twilight of welfare, can be usefully analysed with Sennett's ideas in mind.

He draws hard conclusions. Of the people he meets, the only ones who seem to have recovered some level of meaning and personal narrative are a group of laid-off IBM workers. But this has come at a cost: the narratives they now see themselves in are ones of failure. Accepting and coming to terms with failure, Sennett suggests, represents some kind of victory over the corrosion of character, even if it's by nature a pyrrhic one. It's by rediscovering and processing the very things modern capitalist culture abominates - failure and dependence - that we can recover some sense of meaning.