The Transformation of Work and Employment: Networkers, Jobless, and Flex-Timers
In The Rise of the Network Society,
Castells examines various aspects of network society, including in chapter 4,
consideration of how the information society has changed the world of
work. One reason for making work a key
topic is the claim that “the process of work is at the core of social
structure” (p. 216).
Castells
argues that a valuable way to trace the ways that information networks have
transformed work is to look at statistics related to employment and
occupational structures for a number of advanced societies. For that reason, the first main section of
the chapter is “the historical evolution of employment and occupational
structure in advanced capitalist countries: the G-7, 1920-2005.” To support the discussion, the chapter also
includes a lengthy appendix where the data are captured in charts. In fact, before
Castells wades into the data, he makes another rhetorical move, namely, to
challenge the commonly held beliefs about how so-called information societies
have changed the world of work. He notes
the predictions of “classical theory of post-industrialism,” (p. 218) to wit,
that knowledge provides the key source of productivity permeating economy, that
the economy will decrease the creation of the products of manufacturing and
shift to service jobs, and that “occupations with a high information and
knowledge content in their activity” will be increasingly valued (p. 219). He argues that all three of these premises
need to be qualified. In reference to
the first point, he notes that knowledge was also important in driving the
manufacturing economy. Related to the second, although shifts have been
conspicuous in advanced economies, plenty of manufacturing continues globally
and also remains important even in advanced economies. Finally, the shift not
only fosters the development of highly-skilled knowledge jobs but even more the
proliferation of low-skilled jobs. It is
the middle that is disappearing. Later
in the chapter he takes a more detailed look at the second and third of these modifications
to the usual narrative, but at this point, he moves back to a discussion of the
data from the G-7 countries.
His
basic road map is to look at the evolution of each economy, to compare the relative
importance of the types of service within that country, and to conclude by
looking at the trends of employment as correlated with “post-industrial
societies” by other researchers. Along
the way, I noted a few points that particularly caught my eye, for example, the
fact that fast food employment is not as pervasive as sometimes assumed (only
4.9 percent of total employment in USA, for example) (p. 230). A more striking feature was that Castells
points to a fair amount of variation between different countries. In broad terms, the UK and USA are similar,
Japan and Germany are similar, and France and Italy lie somewhere between the
two models. In other words, the
consequences of cultural, social and political practices in these countries have
played out in different ways. The usual
explanatory models fit the American case more closely because the commonly
discussed model, namely, that manufacturing jobs have moved off-shore and
service jobs have increased, was a “theorization of the evolution of the US
employment structure” (p. 233). To
capture one difference, Japan has maintained greater stability in terms of
manufacturing jobs than the US. Another
difference involves levels of self-employment. Self-employment has fallen in the
USA and slightly in Germany and Japan while France and Italy retain stable
levels of self-employment. Self-employment has increased in Canada and UK.
Again, the USA does not serve as a model for what must automatically happen in
information economies.
The
information society has made the labor force less stable and more flexible in
many ways globally, however. Whatever the model—whether an advanced society
looks more like Japan or more like the US—the overall principle is similar,
argues Castells. “As technological and organizational innovations have allowed
men and women to put out more and better product with less effort and
resources, work and workers have shifted from direct production to indirect
production, from cultivation, extraction, and fabrication to consumption services
and management work, and from a narrow range of economic activities to an increasingly
diverse occupational universe” (p. 243).
Globally,
labor has also become a more interdependent dynamic system. In other words, for the US to move away from
manufacturing, for example, means that someone else has to be doing it. Each model has an “employment structure…
[that] reflect[s] their different forms of articulation to the global economy
and not just their degree of advancement in the informational scale” (p. 246). Castells argues that this articulation of the
global market means that there should be new approaches to analysis in order to
capture “the sharing of technology, the interdependence of the economy, and the
variations of history in the determination of an employment structure spread
across national boundaries” (p. 247). All
regions and most countries are seeing an “intensification of labor mobility” and
advanced economies are seeing pervasive immigration (p. 249-250). However, human capital does not flow as
freely as financial capital. International migrations are indeed increasing,
but constraints apply. Interestingly,
Castells notes that “there is indeed a global market for a tiny fraction of the
labor force, concerning the highest-skilled professionals in innovative R &
D, cutting edge engineering, financial management, advanced business services,
and entertainment, who shift and commute between nodes of the global networks
that control the planet” (p. 250-251).
My brother Mike has been able to take advantage of the global market for these types of workers. His experiences, in fact, illustrates several of Castells points in the chapter. After a number of years working for Intel in programming and database management, Mike leveraged his Intel experience into job offers in Kuwait, Hong Kong, and Manila. He chose Manila, working in IT for Deustche Bank. This also illustrates the role of multinationals as an example of growing interdependence of labor across global networks, one of three ways that Castells mentions that global labor is moving across and affecting workers across national boundaries. The other two manifestations Castells mentions are international trade and its impacts across countries “both in the North and in the South” (think outsourcing, for example), and global competition and flexible management with its impact in countries (p. 251). While my brother Mike worked in Manila, he decided to try to start a business in the Philippines developing Smart Phone apps, taking advantage of the same low labor costs that are attracting outsourcing to the Philippines. For various reasons, this venture did not succeed, so Mike moved on to a contract job for Intel in Malaysia. Since then, he has worked in Berkeley, California, and from the beach in Puerto Rico, both as a private contractor whose skills are in demand and who can work from anywhere he has a good internet connection.
My brother Mike has been able to take advantage of the global market for these types of workers. His experiences, in fact, illustrates several of Castells points in the chapter. After a number of years working for Intel in programming and database management, Mike leveraged his Intel experience into job offers in Kuwait, Hong Kong, and Manila. He chose Manila, working in IT for Deustche Bank. This also illustrates the role of multinationals as an example of growing interdependence of labor across global networks, one of three ways that Castells mentions that global labor is moving across and affecting workers across national boundaries. The other two manifestations Castells mentions are international trade and its impacts across countries “both in the North and in the South” (think outsourcing, for example), and global competition and flexible management with its impact in countries (p. 251). While my brother Mike worked in Manila, he decided to try to start a business in the Philippines developing Smart Phone apps, taking advantage of the same low labor costs that are attracting outsourcing to the Philippines. For various reasons, this venture did not succeed, so Mike moved on to a contract job for Intel in Malaysia. Since then, he has worked in Berkeley, California, and from the beach in Puerto Rico, both as a private contractor whose skills are in demand and who can work from anywhere he has a good internet connection.
Satellite internet connection makes office on beach a possibility
Mike working, Rincón, Puerto Rico, December 2015
A key theme for
Castells, however, is that the flexibility of markets offered by information
networks actually has a powerful effect on the internal labor market within
advanced economies. Castells notes that “while
America is an extreme case of income inequality and declining real wages among
the industrialized nations, its evolution is significant because it does
represent the flexible labor market model at which most European nations, and
certainly European firms, are aiming” (p. 299). In other words, it is precisely the fluidity
within the global labor market that has created an hourglass-shaped
polarization in the United States. In
fact, the process is not always a matter of simply adding low-paid, service
jobs at the bottom of the pay scale. It
turns out that the “managerial/professional labor force” is growing faster than
the class of “semi-skilled service workers” in the US. However, skill level is obscured by the fact
that these jobs may be clerical and sales jobs that are also not highly skilled
and not necessarily well-paid. “Thus, while there are certainly signs of social
and economic polarization in advanced societies, they do not take the form of
divergent paths in the occupational structure, but of different positions of
similar occupations across sectors and between firms” (p. 235). Technology has sometimes not decreased jobs
but replaced higher priced workers for lower priced ones, effects with clear
gender and race correlations: “while machines mainly replaced ethnic minority,
less-educated women at the bottom of the scale, educated, mainly white men
began replacing white men in the lower professional positions, yet for lower
pay and reduced career prospect than those which men used to have” (p. 266). Such trends were sometimes obscured when job
titles were tweaked to sound more impressive while pay and benefits were
unimpressive.
Meanwhile, the
countries that attracted manufacturing jobs also have seen the effects of the
information society lead to dramatic internal changes. An example that Castells gives for the second
of these is factories in China’s Guangdong province that were populated by
rural migration in the mid ‘80s and the 1990s.
I saw this in a striking way in the late 1990s riding a train across
Guangdong. This southern province has
traditionally been of great agricultural significance for a country as populated
as China is, so it was amazing to me to see a great deal of fallow land and overgrown
rice paddies from the train window. This
was striking because in Sichuan, the province where I was living at the time,
every bit of land was cultivated. I
remember seeing cornfields that were not more than three or four rows wide
tucked into hillsides in Sichuan. As
Castells says, “In sum, the more the process of economic globalization deepens,
the more interpenetration of networks of production and management expands
across borders” and thus, the greater its effects on internal labor dynamics
within each country (p. 254).
Yokahama, March 2013
Beyond the trends in
terms of what jobs are created and where, Castells also looks at how an
increasingly networked society has also impacted working time, job stability,
and “the social contract between employer and employee” (p. 282). Flexible job arrangements are increasing
globally. For example, Japan has been known
for lifelong job security attached to employment in major companies. However, Japan has a “dual labor market logic”
in which “it has combined the benefits of the commitment of a core labor force
with the flexibility of the peripheral labor market,” namely, foreign workers,
day laborers, and part-time female workers.
In fact, women part-timers are extremely important in Japan, where the typical
pattern is that women work before marriage and then later return to the
workforce part-time after raising children.
Castells also believes that the lifelong employment will decrease in
Japan because of same trends affecting countries like the US, namely, shortened
work life within companies, age discrimination for younger, cheaper workers making
upper mobility trajectory much shorter, and as a result, decreasing job
stability. An increasingly interdependent global system also means that trends
in one country can affect practices in other countries. As a matter of fact, says Castells, “the
indirect effects of such tendencies on the conditions of labor in all countries
are far more important than the measurable impact of international trade or
cross-border direct employment” (p. 255).
He goes on to point out that “this model is not the inevitable
consequence of the informational paradigm but the result of an economic and
political choice made by governments and companies selecting the ‘the low road’
in the process of transition to the new, informational economy, mainly using
productivity increases for short-term profitability” (p. 255). In an increasingly interdependent,
rapidly-changing world, the lure of short-term certainty is likely to be
attractive almost everywhere than long-term possibility.
References
Castells, M. (2000). The
rise of the network society. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers.
