At the Sydney Gleebooks launch of Graeme Turner’s new book Broken, an audience member said:
I spend more time on admin than doing my job.
I raised the microphone to my mouth to say ‘that is because of moral deskilling’. But it was not my gig, so I didn’t. It would have been very inappropriate. Look at how I’ve grown. Well. Sometimes.
Before I explain, let us go back a few years.
It was one of those Covid lockdowns. Like many others, we built nice rituals. Checking on the garden. De-slugging, by hand in the evenings (ok that was less nice). Bushwalks with such silence that the swishing of the trees seemed very loud. A drink while watching the sunset after a day of zoom meetings – sometimes from the empty outdoor cafe at the eerily abandoned theme park called Scenic World1.
And I was writing Virtue Capitalists.
My days were yet to degenerate into 3.30am starting times, but I was already working before breakfast.
My beloved would call me in to poached eggs2 served on locally made sourdough. I’d finish typing my sentence3 and arrive still mid-thought.
One morning I arrived babbling about the changes to professional work in the 1980s. Previous breakfasts had already included an interrogation of why, in tangible terms, globalisation led to so many more managers (all that flexibility required lots more decisions) and why, exactly, they needed to be ‘tough’. And what this had to do with masculising management and feminising the professions – especially what I had come to call ‘virtue’.
The formula is something like this:
Moral goodness + Excellence of Expert Achievement = Virtue.
Moral goodness4 was the key characteristic of the old British middle class, from which the professional class was derived. Having colonised half the world to administer Empire, in the settler colonies this moral goodness took on a new urgency – and sense of optimistic possibility. In the latter half of the nineteenth century it also became economic. How? By connecting it to achievement.
Achieving class status was central to the Protestant Ethic. No longer born into a class, expert achievement was the moral way to gain status. It required work and was rewarded by elevated status in formal and informal hierarchies.5
If you ever wondered why your great work is rewarded mainly with more work, this is why.6 So the next formula (important in settler colonies imbued with moral anxieties) was something like this:
Virtue + Work = moral and economic profit
Virtue included some pretty questionable stuff (looking at you nursing and ‘purity’), but also things that were – and are – actually needed. Virtue is what ensured engineers chose cladding that wasn’t excessively flammable and were conscientious in the calculations that ensured the bridge didn’t collapse. It was what made teachers prepare well to ensure their students had access to the best current knowledge. It caused doctors to focus their minds on the best pathway to recovery, accountants to put enough time into thorough, honest audits. You know what I mean.
By the 1980s this was something managers made fun of. As hoardes of them moved into organisations, all those experts attached to virtue were an impediment to the logic of ‘management, not science’.
When they complained that neoliberalising everything was going to make the work crap, dangerous or worthless, lots of managers thought (and think) this seemed old-fashioned and ‘ossified’ at best. Or worse, possibly the bleating of an old elite desperately clinging to the rewards of their esteem.7
So the split between the P and M of the PMC (professional-managerial class) grew.
Systematising Virtue Seemed Like a Good Idea.
But perhaps not all was lost. When the logic of ‘management not science’ claimed that this needed to be about ‘systems not people’, there was something that kinda made sense.
Professions – all of them – had just had a major moral crisis in the 1970s. Many saw that the hierarchies that came with achievement – a necessarily individualised thing – were responsible for a whole lot of the social problems that now needed to be tackled.
Decolonisation was throwing off the racial hierarchies that had justified imperialism and global inequality. And its logic was being brought to bear on the hierarchies of the professional class.
Systematising what had been virtue seemed like a good idea. Codes of ethics, quality management and risk management not only sounds more modern, but relies less on the good character of each expert – those ones who, like Tilly the Chicken, might also be scrambling over one another to grab all the professional treats.
There were (and are) good versions of systematising virtue. Maximum class size regulations once actually kept tutorials small enough for everyone to participate. Minimum hours of learning certain subjects protects teaching time. Ratios of healthcare workers to patients to ensure they have time to be attentive. Maximum shift hours that ensured doctors are not too tired to do their jobs well.
But why did it work out so badly? This was what I was trying to figure out over that mid-Covid breakfast.
But it turned into managerial control
OK so it seemed like a good idea. But. Systems, not people, I suggested to my beloved, means that those same people were no longer in charge of the central feature of their work.
Systematising virtue handed control to managers. Who, endlessly mistrusting these expert folk who were always trying to do things the expensive way8, converted that mistrust into endless, endless paper work.
It was endless because it broke every little aspect of what had been virtue into tiny components. Fearful of losing control of any scrap of virtue, managers needed to relentless check on every little task.
In academia this has long been known as ‘audit culture’, but I was hearing it everywhere. Healthcare workers said they could barely spend time with patients because the forms were all that mattered. Teachers struggled to prepare deep content or get to know their students because the reporting requirements are excessive.
Because the logic of ‘management not science’ was combined with the logic of ‘work smarter, not harder’, management also sought to find as many corners they could cut as possible. Simultaneous enshittification + too much admin.
Sipping my soy coffee I said to my beloved: it is like management took virtue, broke it into tiny components that they could control and, ideally, reduce.
It is a kind of deskilling.
Deskilling was something we knew from the industrialisation of manufacturing. Rather than artisan work, where the expert (say) baker knew and controlled the entire process of bread making, each step was broken down and put along a factory assembly line. We know from longstanding labour history that this ‘deskilled’ expertise, handed control of the entire process to management (foremen, traditionally) and meant that bosses could reduce wages – and, often enough, job satisfaction.
From the 1980s this happened to professional work, and to virtue specifically.
I called this moral deskilling.
And it not only reduces wages and job satisfaction, just as the normal old deskilling did for artisans, but because virtue is actually important to professional work it also means that no one can really do their jobs. This is now causing massive system failures.
And occasionally really awful things happen: flammable cladding is installed on the buildings of the most impoverished, bridges collapse, students are not given the opportunity to learn, patient anxieties are overlooked with dreadful consequences and accounts or annual reports conceal illegal or immoral management.
F*cking managerial capitalism.9
{ 27 comments }
Jim Harrison 07.31.25 at 4:22 am
The managers lose too. If the Elizabethans played by our rules,Shakespeare would have written Titus Andronicus and been promoted to management.
Moz of Yarramulla 07.31.25 at 7:13 am
Amusingly or bleakly depending on how you look at it, the moral deskilling affects even the richest and most powerful. This has always been a problem for the despotic, they can’t trust their immediate advisors let alone the professional class. But now that oligachs are stepping into the despot role they’re discovering that shift flows upwards – they struggle to buy high quality products for any price because the ingredients for those products are now themselves (per Cory Doctrow quoting an economist the other day) “the lowest quality that will not force switching to another supplier”.
Want a large business jet? The two suppliers are Boeing and Airbus, except Airbus have a five year+ queue for new orders. Good luck. Want high quality navionics for your new yacht? They didn’t sell enough of the bespoke stuff to justify keeping that team on, you get the top level of the standard line or nothing.
In Australia you see this especially with mansions. They all meet the legal minimum standard (at least the bits where the inspector has to check), and that’s about it. You can pay more, and get “award winning eco architect” pretty looking minimum quality, or pay a lot more and get a grudge project from a passivhaus certified architect who hates bloated mansions but for the money will suck it up, assembled by contractors who loathe your fussy project manager and hate the rework and the lawsuit and eventually just give up and walk off. This annoys rich people who want nice houses, but they can’t change the world any more than you can.
Kent 07.31.25 at 3:37 pm
Systematizing virtue only seems like a good idea if you don’t actually believe in the importance of virtue! Which I definitely didn’t in my early years (1970s/80s) because those who made much of their belief in virtue in those days were the wrong sorts of people (old Republican assholes) who believed it in the wrong ways (as part of self-aggrandizement and a cudgel against others) for the wrong reasons (to shit on blacks, gays, and poor people).
I studied virtue ethics in grad school and parts of it seemd pretty ok actually. Now that I’m in my 50s, maybe it’s time for a real virtue renaissance. How old did Aristotle say you had to be in order to profitably study moral philosophy?
Kent 07.31.25 at 3:41 pm
If you actually believe in virtue, then you know it’s the kind of thing that can’t be systematized. Virtue must be taught and learned — and its teaching and learning are a difficult, painful, complex process that often fails even with a good teacher and a willing learner. The idea that virtue can be systematized and thereby mass produced may perhaps be even more foolish than the idea that everyone can be taught to think well.
somebody who sees the u s a in a chev ro let 07.31.25 at 4:41 pm
Excellent OP. i have been sitting here thinking about it for a while. I recall seeing a 1950s management training film for people who were promoted to manager who had never been a manager before. In it, an employee came and asked for some extended time off to care for a sick relative. The “bad manager” turned them down and said they had to be back after one day or they would be fired. The “good manager” gave them the time off and asked if they could visit the sick relative and bring some food. This expenditure, it was pointed out, was extremely small, confirmed the employee’s story, cemented the employee’s loyalty essentially permanently, created goodwill in the community (“oh the nice manager came around with some groceries”) and made that employee more likely to pitch in in the future when another employee might have needed some additional help in a similar situation. I found that illuminating because, having entered the job world full time in the 1990s, I have never in my life had a supervisor who would ever, under any circumstances, do anything like that, period.
Naturally every employee and manager depicted in the film was a white man. As the notion of work became deracialized and demasculinized in the intervening decades, I wonder if your observations are in part seeing that. A person who is not in community with those they supervise, and who even has racial or gendered resentment towards their perceived lessers, wishes to be cruel to them, but must sleep at night, so they say they’re cutting costs, or implementing a plan, or Just Following Orders. I have heard others argue that the core of the Trump movement in America is “anyone who has been in a HR meeting with the door closed”. Surely this is part of the picture as well.
engels 07.31.25 at 5:43 pm
I wonder if this applies more widely. Eg social media and dating apps are routinising and transforming the pursuit of friendships and romantic relationships into forms of low-level admin ruled by box-ticking and quantitative targets.
Neville Morley 07.31.25 at 6:52 pm
This is rather wonderful, not least, I think, because you do acknowledge the positive aspects of systematising virtue; from the perspective of someone who had low-level academic managerial responsibilities for a while, it’s not so much about trying to routinise the teaching and acquisition of virtue as setting up guardrails to protect the interests of students and staff from those who are lacking in virtue and disinclined to try to develop it.
I initially read ‘deskilling’ as ‘desk-killing’, which isn’t wholly irrelevant.
TF79 08.01.25 at 3:39 am
I wonder if there was an uptick in moral hazard/principal-agent talk in business schools around this time in the 1980s. There’s an asymmetric information problem between managers and experts, experts call for A but managers can’t adjudicate themselves if A is good or not, so managers create a bunch of hoops to jump through, figuring that if the expert really believes A is good, they’ll go through the hassle of putting together all that paperwork to make A happen. I don’t know enough of the time line of various fads that have swept through MBA programs, but it wouldn’t shock me if “moral hazard” was one of them (dovetails nicely with the Reagan-era right wing panic that someone, somewhere, might be getting something they don’t deserve, which is why we need to end welfare programs)
Charlie W 08.01.25 at 2:00 pm
The OP argument / claim might be right about universities; I don’t know. I’d offer some context for the architecture & construction part of the claim, though.
First, construction is one of the basic human activities, practised everywhere, in a highly diverse range of ways, although with some convergence of method over time. Most of the world’s buildings now use concrete, for example. And most designs for buildings are unique; buildings are not (typically) serially produced; in fact we value that in itself. The professionalisation of building design has only had a relatively small impact on this diversity, and only some buildings—typically in the wealthiest countries—are designed to a high degree of technical rigour. Further, those professionals are encouraged to practice in an artistic way to help their societies avoid a monotonous built environment. The upshot is that societies rely heavily on building codes. In other words, ‘admin’ and a checklist approach is by default pervasive, and professional ‘moral skill’ only applies in some cases and to some degree.
Second, past application of professional ‘moral skill’ didn’t in any case do much to avert construction’s contribution to the climate crisis. This is why structures like Grenfell received new insulating cladding. So there’s a question: when did the ‘moral deskilling’, as it relates to construction, begin? Some time in the early 1970s, when Grenfell was originally designed? This question—of gaps in professional rigour—remains live. Even the most competently (and let’s assume for argument honestly) designed buildings will have aspects of their design that could be considered under-tested. We take it on trust, with our codes and all, that none of the under-tested aspects are safety related (but only, say, comfort related) and to be fair, only very few buildings collapse. But as just said: climate awareness was a blind spot for decades. Both codes and professional ‘moral skill’ missed it.
Third, professional design firms (and, I would say, prime contractors as well) are small players. They have limited capacity to investigate suppliers; for example, to make sure that the supplier’s claims about the combustibility of their product are true. Contrast this with the power of a large car manufacturer, say, over its suppliers. So there is an economic way of understanding a problem of a building that burns when it should not.
Fourth, in the case of Grenfell, product vendors are said to have lied about their product. How would ‘moral skill’ have detected that, bearing in mind the point above?
some lurker 08.01.25 at 4:07 pm
The PMC and the MBA class, when I recall my fellow students in the 80s studying “business…”
What kind of business? Shoemaking? Oil and gas exploration? TV/film production? With an MBA it doesn’t matter. You put the inputs and outputs into Excel, make sure labor is a liability, not an asset, and squeeze as hard as you can. Shareholder value is all that matters.
engels 08.01.25 at 7:27 pm
Also joining Somebody and Neville in saying this is a great post. I would like know how this argument relates to Alasdair Macintyre’s.
Ebenezer Scrooge 08.01.25 at 9:22 pm
Managers deskilling professionals is not always good, but it’s not always bad, either. Consider the “wash your hands” movement in American hospitals. Senior physicians often resisted this affront to their autonomy, but management insisted, and won. The virtues of compulsive hand-washing have been known since Semmelweis. Hospital infection rates went down.
This was accompanied by a general move to check-listing medical procedures, such as demanding that surgeons get confirmations from patients on which knee to replace.
Productive dialectics are hard to maintain.
both sides do it 08.02.25 at 12:45 am
I’m curious how the virtue shift interacts with the following factors that contributed to the rise of paperwork and managerial control (might be in the links somewhere):
The shift from government control / fines / inspections to lawsuits as safety mechanisms
The alignment of upper manager action with shareholder profit through stock compensation
Increases in computation technology which can generate, process and store paperwork faster and cheaper
Mass cheap college
Shift during and after Cold War from “our societal machine needs to beat their societal machine” to “our societal machine is everyone’s societal machine and its purpose is to make me rich”
Broad outlines of dime store Weber and James C Scott “Seeing like a State” stuff: institutions can only react to what they can know; rationalization, bureaucratization and increased paperwork is a one-way ratchet that increases and clarifies what an institution knows; expansion of institutional capability happens in same timeframe as virtue shift
AllanJW 08.02.25 at 9:11 am
I’m with ‘both sides do it’ at #13; without accepting the ‘virtue’ and moral framing I’d echo their list and add the one, huge, other of “The enormous shift in middle and senior management to as little accountability for their actions as possible”. This may simply explain almost all of the bureaucracy being described.
J-D 08.02.25 at 11:01 am
Management in organisations that don’t have shareholders can be found shafting people in much the same ways as management in organisations that do have shareholders. ‘Shareholder value’ is an expression often used by grifters and by suckers: people who are lying about their reasons for doing the things they are doing and people who have been taken in by those lies.
somebody who remembers that public school administrators are only slightly less bad than columbia's 08.02.25 at 8:45 pm
JD-s observation at #15 aligns with my 1990s-present work experience. i’ve worked in many places, for the public and for a private boss, never in a business with shareholders, and managers everywhere are the same, some diligent, some feckless, but none fundamentally different from what is described here.
other posts here over the last few weeks have included consideration of workplace authoritarianism – we accept from “the boss” what we would never accept from a politician or a cop. is there a feature of this that lies not in our vision of managerial function in this or that context, but in our vision of what all power is? lacking the restrictions of the cop or the politician, the manager must force their full monstrous nature to emerge in order for us to imbue them with sufficient power. “burn a thousand grenfells; i did my part to come in on time and under budget.” you can find this aggrandizement of being a “hard man making hard choices” throughout management books and instructions; how often can you find someone who says “i knew it would be wrong to be cruel, so I chose not to be. the project went over budget and I was fired but I did the right thing” in the pages of an airport business/grindset best seller? such people are banished to the cultural hinterlands; no new york times journalist with a harvard degree will ever interview them for any reason. where’s the drama in failing and being a loser?
the #metoo revelations, if they revealed anything, for example, showed us that our social notion of power includes the ability to sexually harass, grope and assault underlings in the workplace. there seemed to be no number of eyes on the crime large enough to stop it from happening or even slow it down. no workplace so small that someone at the top couldn’t force themselves on someone at the bottom with no significant consequences to them even if exposed. it was a revelation of a cultural fact, not of a particular person. perhaps #metoo was a singular example of what is observed here in the general.
Moz of Yarramulla 08.03.25 at 12:11 am
Neville@7: I read the MeToo campaign as partly about this issue: it’s very easy to have formal policies that look virtue enforcing, and possible to have policies that are virtue reinforcing, but in practice forcing virtues that are in opposition to social mores is very difficult (another example is Australia’s regular ‘police still murder aboriginal people’ complaints. There have been innumerable reports showing the problem and suggesting possible fixes, but the problem persists. “don’t be racist” is an easy virtue to describe, but a hard one to enforce)
Are there counter-examples of systems that successfully enforce virtues opposed by the society they’re embedded within? I can think of individuals like that, but no systems.
TM 08.04.25 at 9:29 am
somebody 5: “I have heard others argue that the core of the Trump movement in America is “anyone who has been in a HR meeting with the door closed”.”
This is obviously a side issue but this claim is obviously and quite fundamentally false. How do we know this? Because a large portion of the Trump movement are business owners from the small store owner to the oligarch and they are not mad about having been in an HR meeting. Also, the myth that HR is a powerful force is really just a myth. It’s not generally HR who fire people or tell them bad news, it’s the regular managers whose job this is. The “HR as a poswerful force” myth has probably to do with the fact that HR is usually the only department where female managers have a visible role so obviously they are vilified.
TM 08.04.25 at 10:15 am
Regarding the OP, I have to say it sounds a lot like “things used to be better than they are” nostalgia, with the unusual feature that the good old times when experts still could be ethical were somehow tied to colonialism, a connection that I fail to understand.
Charlie 9 makes some interesting observations about construction and architecture, which the OP is not concerned with and maybe the author’s argument isn’t meant to apply to these fields but it made me think of an exhibition I saw recently of Le Corbusier, that architect/artist/expert who was so influential in the 20th century (although few of his projects were actually realized). They showed a documentary from the 1950s in which happy children were shown playing on the roof of his famous Cité Radieuse in Marseille. It was a concrete desert. Nothing but concrete. None of us would want our children to play in such an awful place. You can see pictures here (https://dreamtravelshoot.blogspot.com/2013/08/la-cite-radieuse.html), they added a tiny bit of greenery but you still see how terrible it is. They thought it was the future.
I’m generally suspicious of “how things weere better i nthe past” arguments, in part because I’m old enough to know that a great many things have actually gotten better over my lifetime. I don’t doubt that some things have gotten worse. In my perception this has less to do with “systematizing virtue” and more with a movement of know-knothing nihilists increasingly gaining power, nihilists who fundamentally reject virtue, ethics and expertise.
JimV 08.04.25 at 3:58 pm
This is an old-fashioned, anecdotal, get-something-off-my chest comment worth what you paid for it, sparked by the mention of HR above.
I worked for GE as a mechanical engineer (I had to qualify that as I have heard computer programmers referred to as “software engineers”, and garbage workers as “sanitation engineers) from 1971 to 2003. I started under managers who had fought in WWII and were tough but quite fair. We had a personnel guy (I forget his exact title, HR had not been invented yet) who knew everyone’s name and said hi to us as we walked by in the corridors. He would show us short reel-to-reel films about how managers should treat people at work the same way they would treat friends at a weekly poker game, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and so on. Unit managers did all the hiring and yearly evaluations.
Welch, yada, yada, yada, then we had HR. I was never in a closed-door meeting with any of them. They worked for the General Manager of their division (there was one for the plant when I was hired and 16 when I quit), period. I and another employee had some issues we wanted to discuss with HR circa 2002. We had about 70 years with GE between us. She was located at the new corporate HQ in Atlanta, Georgia, we were in Schenectady, NY, but she had to come there for an afternoon meeting and we were able to get on her schedule afterward at 4 PM for him and 4:30 PM for me. He left for the meeting (in another building in the plant, about a quarter-mile away) around 3:50 PM and came back around 4:10 PM, to tell me. “Don’t bother going over there, her meeting got out early and she got an earlier flight back to Atlanta.” That’s the closest I ever came to a meeting with HR. (I was supposed to, by company regulations, have an exit interview when I quit, but the HR person “was too busy”.)
I’m not now and have never been a Trump voter, but I don’t get a connection between HR meetings and Trump voters either–unless it is reverse-english where HR is meeting with a boss to get the party line. Or maybe it’s different in other corporations. The issues I had with HR were more likely to be caused by people like Trump than cured. He loves brow-beating and firing people.
(My idiocentric explanation for how things have gone downhill since my youth is the business Cult of Welch, as in “You can always squeeze more blood out of the lemon.”–when asked by Business Week when all his layoffs were going to end.)
hix 08.04.25 at 9:39 pm
“What kind of business? Shoemaking? Oil and gas exploration? TV/film production? With an MBA it doesn’t matter. You put the inputs and outputs into Excel, make sure labor is a liability, not an asset, and squeeze as hard as you can. Shareholder value is all that matters.”
Having lots of mandatory maths heavy classes does not seem to be a typical feature of prestigious US MBA’s and neither seems taking them voluntarily a prerequisite for a successful career.
J-D 08.05.25 at 1:09 am
An illustration of my point comes to hand. I haven’t heard that the board of Tesla has explicitly invoked ‘shareholder value’ in justifying their decision to award 96 million shares of the company to Elon Musk, but where do those shares come from? In effect, the slice of the company that is being given to Elon Musk is being taken away from all the other shareholders. I don’t know specifically the reasons for this board decision, but I do know that anybody who wanted to find out would have to ask ‘What’s in it for the board members?’ and not ‘What’s in it for the shareholders?’
reason 08.05.25 at 1:19 pm
Forgive my ignorance, but what is “management not science” about? A quick google, made me none the wiser. I tend to think of managers as salesmen. And often what they are selling is themselves. I think what they should be at best is enablers – people who ensure the technologists have the resources they need to do their jobs, and ensure that what they are doing is useful.
reason 08.05.25 at 2:37 pm
J-D @22
The justification for the award made to Elon Musk was that it is needed to keep Elon Musk at the company. In what world is Elon Musk an asset to the company and not a liability?
some lurler 08.05.25 at 11:31 pm
@15 every business has an owner…they are the shareholders. Doesn’t have to be publicly traded or even have joint ownership of any kind.
@21 Not so much math as numbers…formulas and optimizations that ignore value. Labor — the people who actually build or design the products — as a liability, not an asset. As far as many of these execs are concerned people are as expendable as jet fuel or copier paper.
J-D 08.06.25 at 2:50 pm
The expression ‘shareholder value’ is used as if it explains the management of businesses which actually are structured that way, with shareholders. Nobody tries to explain the management of organisations which aren’t structured that way and don’t actually have shareholders (to take a topical example, Columbia University) with reference to a supposed obligation to maximise ‘shareholder value’. I suppose it would be possible to argue that Columbia has some kind of ‘owners’ who are not specifically shareholders, but the point I’m making would remain: the actions of the organisation should be explained with primary reference first to the interests and preferences of the people making the decisions. It is true that in some organisations (usually small ones) the people making the decisions are in fact the owners, but with most big organisations they are not; it is also true that non-owning managers do at least part of the time, for a combination of reasons, give at least some consideration to the interests of the owners; but the times when ‘shareholder value’ is explicitly invoked (by themselves or by others) as an explanation/justification of the actions of board members and other senior managers are exactly the times when it is least likely to be true. The more it’s talked about, the more likely it is to be a smokescreen. If you think otherwise, show me the cases where board members and other senior managers actually harmed their own interests in order to promote the interests of shareholders or other owners. I don’t say it can’t ever happen, but it’s not something I would want to have to bet on.
Hannah Forsyth 08.06.25 at 11:29 pm
Hi everyone, I am a bit overwhelmed by these comments but thank you for reading them.
Easy one: @23 ‘management not science’ refers to Valeant Pharmaceuticals, which I wrote about here: https://hannahforsyth.substack.com/p/plastic-fish-the-logic-of-management
There was supposed to be a link to it, sorry if it didn’t work.
Other comments:
I haven’t read the whole Grenfell Inquiry report, but the consensus seems to be neoliberal management pressures people into poor decisions. Neoliberalism is, of course, not the only source of poor or immoral decision making, but geez it doesn’t help.
Virtue/morality are not the only frame by which to understand bureaucracy, but it was the one that helped me to understand class conflict in white collar workplaces.
I am certainly not nostalgic for a pre-1970s professional class at the height of their power. The problem with a ‘rise and fall’ narrative is that it makes it seem that rise = good whereas in this case it is rather that rise = powerful, whereas fall = less powerful.
What’s it got to do with colonialism? The professions grew far faster in the Anglo settler colonies than in Britain and Europe. What had been imagined to be the US dominance in human capital investment turns out to be common to each of the settler colonies. Why? The British middle class spread through Empire (and former Empire) bringing their middle class morality. In the financialising phase of the global economy beginning c.1870 (this is Arrighi) they turned this morality into economic stuff by growing the professions. Why why? There were lots of moral things to worry about in the settler colonies (‘savagery’, and down this way, convicts) and also brand new economies to build on the basis of middle class morality, backed by the city of London. And then what’s it got to do with colonialism? The professional class is all about hierarchy…which helped embed the racial hierarchies settler colonies needed, plus some others too esp gender. How? Some aspects of merit were to be achieved, but some were ‘natural’, the way it was perceived that women made better nurses.
Full details, naturally, are in the book: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/virtue-capitalists/E5DEC7049458F3FAE69C77AF6317CB51
Warmly,
Hannah
Comments on this entry are closed.