EDM 6210
Educational Policy and Society
Lecture 12
Education Policy and Globalization:
Individualization and the Debate on the Death of Social Class
A. Ulrich Beck’s Theory of Individualization and Beyond Status and Class
1. The process of individualization
a. “Modernization does not just lead to the formation of a centalized state power,
to concentrations of capital and to an ever more tightly woven web of division of
labor and market relationship, to mobility and mass consumption, and so on. It
also leads …to a triple ‘individualization’: disembedding, removal from
historically prescribed social forms and commitments in the sense of traditional
contexts of dominance and support (the ‘liberating dimension’); the loss of
traditional security with respect to practical knowledge, faith and guiding norms
(the ‘disenchantment dimension’); and …re-embedding, a new type of social
commitment (the ‘control’ or ‘reintegration dimension’). (Beck, 1992, p. 128)
Life Situation
(objective)
Consciousness/Identity
(subject)
Liberation
Loss of Stability
Reintegration
b. Beck’s definition of individualization: “‘Individualization’ means, first, the
disembedding and, second, the ‘re-embedding’ of industrial society ways of life
by new ones, in which the individuals must produce, stage and cobble together
their biographies themselves. Thus the name ‘individualization’, disembedding
and re-embedding …do not occur by chance, nor individually, nor voluntarily,
nor through diverse types of historical conditions, but rather all at once and
under the general conditions of the welfare in developed industrial labour
society, as they have developed since the 1960s in many Western industrial
countries.” (Beck, 1994, p.13)
c. Zygmunt Bauman’s definition of individualization: “’Individualization’ consists of
transforming human ‘identity’ from a ‘given’ into a task and changing the actors
with the responsibility for performing that task and for the consequences (also
the side-effects) of their performance. ….Human being are no more ‘born into’
their identities. … Needing to become what one is is the feature of modern
living - and of this living alone. …Modernity replaces the heteronomic
determination of social standing with compulsive and obligatory
self-determination.” (Bauman, 2000, p. 31-2)
d. Institutionalized ‘beds’ - identity bases - for the re-embedment of modern
individuals
i. ‘Beds’ in capital market, e.g. occupations, professions, social-class positions,
etc.
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ii. ‘Beds’ in institution of marriage and family, husband, wife, father, mother, etc.
iii. ‘Beds’ in modern political arenas, e.g. citizens, members of new social
movements, such as environmentalists, feminist, anti-gloabizationists, etc.
3. Periodization of individualization
a. Individualization in Reformation: In the Enlightenment in Europe, individuals
were liberated from the Church and then from the Christian worldview and
resumed and achieved the identity of the modern men.
b. Individualization in industrial capitalism: In the process of industrialization,
commodification and capitalization , democratization, and urbanization in the 18
to 19th centuries, individuals were disembidded from traditionally ascribed
identities of families and clans, local villages, ethnic communities, religious
groups, guilds, etc. and re-embedded into achieved identities of urban factor
workers, union members, professionals and citizens of the nation-state. As a
result, two of the modern identities have emerged
i. Class identity
ii. Nationality-citizenship identity
c. Individualization in informational-global capitalism: In the Informational-global
age, individuals are disembedded from identities of national citizenship and
social class and re-embedded into identities of global migrants or citizens,
employees of multi-national corporations, or even any free-floating identities in
the internet.
2. Individualization in Informational Age and Liquid Times
“What distinguished the ‘individualization’ of yore from the form it has taken in ‘risk
society’ …. No ‘beds’ are furnished for ‘re-embedding’, and such beds as might be
postulated and pursued prove fragile and often vanish before the work of
‘re-embeddment’ is complete. There are rather ‘musical chairs’ of various size and
style as well as of changing numbers and positions, which prompt men and women
to be constantly on the move and promise no ‘fulfilment’, no rest and no satisfaction
of ‘arriving’, of rearching the final destination, where one can disarm, relax and stop
worrying.” (Bauman, 2000, p. 33-34)
B. Changes in Class Structure in Late Modernity
1. Beck’s thesis of structural contradiction in late-modern society
a. Persistence of social inequality
b. Waning of class effects: Questions concerning inequality are no longer
perceived and political handled as class struggles.” (Beck, 2006, p. 143)
c. Thesis of beyond status and class: “Individualization actually leads to a
dissolution of lifeworlds associated with class and status group subculture.
2. Structural changes in late-modern society contributing to further individualization of
class structure in industrial capitalism
a. The emergence of the “New Classes”
i. The emergence of the managerial class in private sector: As (i) corporate
ownerships are transformed into shareholderships and (ii) ownerships of
means of production are further divided into legal/nominal shareholdership
and the managerial power control over use of means of production in actual
production process; there constitutes a class of managers who are employees
and yet have direct control over the process of production in private sector.
ii. The emergence of the class of technocrat and bureaucrat in public sector: As
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state apparatuses expand, employees who manage the technocratic and
bureaucratic know-how of governmental and public agencies increase
substantially.
b. The emergence of the knowledge class: As information technology spreads and
knowledge production replaces manufacturing industries to become the core
section of wealth accumulation in knowledge economy, there emerges a new
class of know as “symbolic analysts” (coined by Robert B. Reich). The
employments of the symbolic analysts may include scientists and researchers;
programmers, designers, engineers, marketer and advertisers, consultants in
enterprise management, ecology, public relation, etc.
c. The emergence of the McProletariats: It refers to “new proletariats” who are
unskilled and poorly paid service workers employed in outsourced centers. Its
“reigning symbol is the McDonald’s worker, decked out in the colors of the
corporate chain, working near the minimum wage without basic benefits,
repetitively performing carefully monitored simple task.” (Kingston, 2000, p. 184)
d. The emergence of the cybertariats: Cybertariat is coined by Ursula Huws in her
collection of essays entitled The Making of a Cybertariat (2003) to indicate
growing number of low-level, routine, non-manual office workers who are
aligned by numbers of structural changes in office work into a common class
position, comparable to proletariat in industrial capitalism. These structural
changes include
i. Automation and digitalization of productive process of traditional
manufacturing industries have given rise to growing number of routine
non-manual workers, who fall between the class divisions between bourgeois
and proletariats in orthodox Marist’ sense.
ii. Changes in marketing strategies in regard to customization of manufacturing
goods and provision of after-sale services have given rise to another large
number of non-manual white-collar workers.
iii. Growth of service industries ranging from life-insurance sales to tourist guide
or from website designer to image consultants has boosted yet another
sector of non-manual labor.
iv. Automation and digitalization of clerical, information-processing and filing
work and the shift from Fordist to “information-intensified” noe-Fordist
management have not only expanded the population of white collar workers
but also “disaggregated”, “unbundled” and made outsourcing of white-collar
work possible. (Huwa, 2003)
v. The development of global telecommunication has made office work
“delocalizable”, i.e. it can be outsource to any part of the world. As a result, it
has put white collar workers in developed countries in a global labor market
and in competition with clerical workers in third world countries.
Taken together, these changes have constituted a relegating or downward
mobility effects on white-collar workers, i.e. making of a cybertariat.
C. Changes in Class Formation in Late Modernity
1. Globalization and denationalization of class relation in capitalism
a. In informational-global capitalism, bourgeoisie as a class are no longer
restrained by borders of nation state. They and their production lines are
practically globally mobile.
b. Proletariat or more general wage laborers are fragmented into various or even
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antagonistic sectors. They range from executive workers in multi-national
corporations, “core labor force” of information-global economy made up of
information-based managers and “symbolic analysts” to “disposable labor force”
that can be automated and/or hired/fired/off-shored.
c. Proletariat as a class has not only been fragmented economically but they have
been dismantled geographically. They range from worldwide recruited experts to
nationally or even locally pit-downed unskilled manual workers.
d. As a result, antagonistic class relations, not to mention class struggles, are
practically unable to constitute.
2. Globalization and polarization of class situations among wage labor: As Robert B.
Reich underlines, globalization does not only insert relegating effect on working
class in general but also insert elevating or upward mobility on the upper-strata of
the knowledge class, in Reich’s own term symbolic analysts. It is because
knowledge or skills possess by symbolic analysts are now put onto the global
market for sale. As a result, any knowledge and skills that of really profitable or
marketable will be auctioned globally. That explains “why the rich are getting richer
and the poor, poorer.” (Reich, 1996)
3. Disorganization effects of welfare state on the communal ties of working class
(Beck, 2006): Policy effects of welfare state: Social policies of welfare state have
caused the traditional working class communities built around manufacturing
plants hard to sustain. These social policies include
a. public housing policies, which uproot working class families from their working
class locality;
b. universal education policies, which not only changes the class habitus of
working class students, but also provide them with chances for upper mobility
from the working-class origins.
c. other social-wages policies, which substantively improve the living standards of
the working-class households.
4. The emergence of flexible work and flexible family
a. “The very concept of a job is changing. In the years after World War II,
industrial societies constructed the ideal of a full-time, secure job working thirty
years for one company with ever-rising real wages. Pay in this job would be
high enough that within American family households, only the man had to work.
His wife could stay at home, raising the children and managing the household.
The ideal of secure work and increasing consumption was matched by
government policies that constructed social security (old-age pension,
unemployment insurance, and health insurance) largely around the ideal of a
men and very little paid work for women is going by the boards, and the new
information technology is only one cause of change. The simplest description
of the nature of this transformation is increased flexibility.” (Carnoy, 2000,
p.64-65)
b. Flexibility in work implies:
i. Flexible in work schedule as well as work duration
ii. Flexible in work locations as well as positions
iii. Flexible in work conditions, flexibility has replaced fixed-term contract and
long-term commitment between employers and employees
c. “With increased competition in the globalized economy and the rapidly rising
capacity to use ‘world time’ to enhance productivity, the very best workers are
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now those who never sleep, never consume, never have children, and never
spend time socializing outside of work.” (Carnoy, 2000, p. 143)
d. Fundamental contradiction in functions of flexible family
“What result is a serious social contradiction: the new workplace requires even
more investment in knowledge than in the past, and family are crucial to such
knowledge formation, especially for children but also for adults. The new
workplace, however, contributes to greater instability in the child-centered
nuclear family, degrading the very institution crucial to further economic
development.” (ibid, p.110)
4. The advent of the culture of consumerism
a. The proliferation of mass consumption, mass communication and mass media
has spawned the culture of consumerism. As a result, the culture of work
ethics has been replaced by aesthetics of consumption and populism.
b. Zygmunt Bauman's thesis of the culture of consumerism: According to Bauman,
the culture of consumerism bears the following definitive features
i. Hedonism: Consumption as need-satisfaction was replaced by
consumption as desire-creation, i.e. "desire does not desire satisfaction. To
the contrary, desire desires desire." (Bauman, 1998, p. 25)
ii. Ephemeralism: "Consumer goods are meant to be used up and to
disappear; the idea of temporariness and transitoriness is intrinsic to their
very denomination as objects of consumption" (Bauman, 1998, P.28)
iii. Instantaneousness: "Ideally, the consumer's satisfaction ought to be instant,
and this in a double sense. Consumed goods should bring satisfaction
immediately, requiring no delay, no protracted learning of skills and no
lengthy groundwork; but the satisfaction should end the moment the time
needed for their consumption is up, and that time ought to be reduced to a
bare minimum." (Bauman, 1998, p. 25)
iv. Fetishism: From consumption of commodity to collection of commodity;
from consumption as act of desire-satisfaction to consumption (or
possession) as identification of status and life style.
c. Class identification and class culture, which nurture and precipitate in work life
has been eroded if not totally replaced by ephemeral identification of consumer
goods, taste and style in ever changing culture of consumerism.
5. The rise of networked individualism and cyber-balkanization
a. Manuel Castells indicates in his work The Internet Galaxy that identity is the
information age can be characterized as network individualism.
“Networked individualism is a social pattern, not a collection of isolated
individuals. Rather, individuals build their networks, on-line and off-line, on the
basis of their interests, values, affinities, and projects.” (Castells, 2001, p. 131)
It is basically a virtual identity in the virtual community of the Internet in self
discretion.
b. This self-selecting virtual identities have also posed significant to formation of
the cultural-spatial based identity of social class.
D. Learning to Labor in Global-Informational Capitalism: Reproduction and Resistance
Theories Revisited
1. Paul Willis' three waves of 'bottom-up' responses of foot soldiers of modernity
a. Willis construes subordinate and working-class students' educational
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attainment paths in post-WWII England as helpless foot soldiers in the long
front of modernity.
b. Willis makes the distinction between
i. 'top-down' practices and initiatives of planners and decision-makers in
education policies and
ii. 'bottom-up' responses of working-class youths in schooling system
c. Willis relates his ethnographic studies of youth cultures to three waves of
bottom-up responses to educational changes in English society.
2. First wave responses to "competitive modernization" and universal schooling:
a. Willis' ethnographic studies of working-class 'lads' in the 1970s (1977)
Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs.
b. Working-class students waged forceful resistance to school culture in form of
anti-intellectual, anti-authority and hard-tough masculine counter-culture.
c. However, Willis underlined that the lads were in fact faced with double
entrapment of schooling and work, in which education achievement seemed to
be the only way out.
3. Second wave responses to "deindustrialization" or postindustrial modernity:
a. Willis and his collaborators published The Youth Review in 1988. It reported a
studies of youth cultures in the in 1980s UK.
b. Willis et al. reported that "In the early 1980s UK became the first industrialized
country to experience massive losses of the manual industrial work that has
previously available to the working classes. …Form the point of view of the
working class, work opportunities have shifted away from well to reasonably
paid skilled or semi-skilled industrial work to much lower-paid service and
out-of-research white-collar work." (Willis, 2006, p. 511)
c. Report on the waning culture of the working-class lads
i. "The dominant experience of the young unemployed is one of very limited
sociability. They are isolate and homebound, traversing acres of boredom
by themselves or in conflict with parents for whom their enforced depence
is often wholly unwelcome. The young unemployed have more free time
than any other social group but, ironically, they are excluded from leisure
activities, which overwhelmingly now require consumption and commercial
power." (Willis, 2006, p. 512)
ii. "The pride, depth, and independence of a collective industrial cultural
tradition, forged from below and neither reliant on patronage nor punished
for its cultural impertinence, is giving way to the regulated indignities of
becoming client to a reprimanding state." (Willis, 2006, p. 513)
iii. "Forms of working-class masculinity are being thrown into crisis…,
uprooted from their secured and central lodgings within proletarian relations
of manualism, 'pride in the job', and breadwinner power. …The
anti-mentalism of the counter-school culture cannot be securely cloaked in
traditional proletarian masculinity. Antimentalism loses the counterpoint with
a viable predictable future in manual work." (Willis, 2006, p. 514)
4. Third wave response to "commodity and electronic culture"
a. In 1990, Willis and another group of collaborators published yet another
ethnographic study entitled Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the
Everyday Cultures of the Young.
b. The advent of the commodity and electronic culture:
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"New global electronic forms of communication are sideling old sensuous
communities — face-to-face interactions with known others — with now
literally hundreds of TV channels available through digitalization. …The
postmodern cultural epoch is characterized by this qualitative expansion of
commodity relations form the meeting of physical needs — food, warmth, and
shelter — to the meeting and inflaming of mental, emotional, expressive, and
spiritual needs and aspiration." (Willis, 2006, p. 515)
c. Evaporating of working-class identity among youths in the face of the
"Common Culture" of consumerism:
"At the level of culture, young people are becoming less defined by
neighborhood and class than they are by these new relations of commodity
and electronic culture. …Most young working-class people in the UK would not
thank you now for describing them as working class. They find more passion
and acceptable self-identity through music on MTV, wearing baseball caps and
designer shoes, and socializing in fast-food joints than they do through
traditional class-based cultural forms." (Willis, 2006, p. 515)
d. The significance of common culture and expressive self
i. Concepts of cultural work and creativity
ii. “The connection of the ‘given self’ to variable external symbolic forms
reflects the desire not just to take up social or material space in a way
governed by others, but to matter culturally. Without some cultural marking,
youth feel in danger of being culturally invisible, which increasingly means
socially invisible.” (Willis, 2006, p. 517)
iii. “It is crucial here to recognize the blurring of the line between production
and consumption in what I call Common Culture. Active consumption is a
kind of production. ….Selecting and appropriating popular cultural items for
one’s own meanings is a kind of cultural production.” (Willis, 2006, p. 517)
v. “Young and working-class people are caught up in the front line of
engagement. They acculturate the materials of commodified culture almost
as a matter of cultural life and death, not least because they find
themselves with ever-diminishing inherited folk cultural resources and with
little or no access to legitimate and bourgeois form of cultural capital.”
(Willis, 2006, 536)
iv. “While the continuing educational question for first wave modernization
concerns whether state education is a means of liberation or ideological
confinement for the unprivileged majority, the late modernist question for
the same social group concerns whether the commodification and
electrification of culture constitute a new form of domination or a means for
opening up new fields of semiotic possibility. Are the young becoming
culturally literate and expressive in new ways, or are they merely victims of
every turn in cultural marketing and mass media manipulation?” (Willis,
2006, p. 517)
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