The New Spirit of Capitalism - Dark Matter Archives

7ExcitementFairnessSecurityFreedom from localcommunities ProgressA mix of domestic andmarket fairnessPersonal property,Personal relationshipsCharity,PaternalismCareer opportunitiesPower positionsEffectiveness possiblein “freedomcountries”Meritocracy valuingeffectivenessManagement byobjectivesLong term planningCareersWelfare stateNo more authoritarianchiefsFuzzy organisationsInnovation andcreativityPermanent changeNew form ofmeritocracy valuingmobility, ability tonourish a network,…Each project is anopportunity to developone’s employabilityFor the mobile andthe adaptableCompanies willprovide self-helpresourcesTo manage oneselfThe transformations of the last decades have been accompanied by a relatively radicalchange in the definition of what comprises a fair work situation, and a fair treatment of someemployees as compared to others. The following section allows us to identify the nature ofthis change.3. The emergence of a new value systemTo be able to identify the exact nature of the notion of fairness as depicted in themanagement texts we studied, we used a theoretical construct that Luc Boltanski haddeveloped together with Laurent Thévenot in an earlier publication (Boltanski, Thévenot,1991): the “justificatory regime ”model (“Cité ” in the French). This construct had initiallybeen designed with a view towards highlighting the conditions that make it possible to saywhether an evaluation or distribution of goods was being done in a fair and legitimate manner.These situations are characterised by the fact that whatever judgement peopleultimately make, they face a certain amount of criticism. Refusing to remain within theconfines of the opposition that is usually drawn between the sociology of consensus and thesociology of criticism, Boltanski and Thévenot argued that these “legitimate orders” can beused to reach agreement as well as to support criticism. They called these constructs Cités,thus referring to classical political philosophies whose object had been to design a legitimateorder based on a principle of justice. However, as opposed to political philosophies that hadusually attempted to anchor this social order in a single principle (utopianism), they arguedthat, in complex modern societies, several justificatory regimes can coexist within the samesocial space, even though their relevance may vary in accordance with the situation’scharacteristics (i.e., with the material or symbolic nature of the objects involved). Finally,unlike the “linguistic turn”, and in order to avoid an idealistic construction that is overlyreliant on verbal argumentation, Boltanski and Thévenot considered that people’s claims hadto be confronted with the real world, hence pass a series of more or less standardisedprocedures they called tests (“épreuve” in the French). In the end, it is the outcome of these