normativity as key to life? motivation, management, managers as agents of change? poststructuralism was a bad idea...

 

• Couldry, N., Gilbert, J., Hesmondhalgh, D., & Nash, K. (2010). The new spirit of capitalism: Roundtable discussion on luc boltanski and eve chapello's book. Soundings (London, England), (45), 109.

understand that social life necessarily engages 'ethical substance', that norms are not just epiphenomenal to structures of markets, the state, etc, 

they take networks seriously as a social reality and as a cultural reality, but without lapsing into technological determinism or the vitalism of Deleuze and Guattari (or some of their followers at least). 

But it's an important question if we're to take seriously the idea that normativity really makes a difference, that it plays a part in structuring social institutions rather than simply providing a mask for fundamental relations of force. That ideals only ever legitimate decisions made elsewhere, rather than entering into decision-making in a way that really makes a difference . . .

Boltanski and Chiapello seem to suggest that dull economic compulsion is enough for the workers, and it's only the managers who need to be motivated, because they're got other options.

I do think it's very important to look at motivation and how it's embedded in the self-identification of these managers; how they convince themselves that they are working for the common good, and how they do have ideas of liberty and authenticity about their daily working practices. But because Boltanski and Chiapello haven't done an ethnography of the managers' working lives, do we know that it's really these noble ideals that motivate them?

In this, Boltanski and Chiapello draw directly on Weber's famous analysis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit oj Capitalism. Put very simply, Weber starts from the observation that engaging in long-term capital accumulation is a rather strange thing for anyone to do; having accumulated a fortune through commerce, why not simply spend it lavishly (as did the merchant princes of medieval Italy), rather than investing it in still further accumulation?