The globalisation of financial markets, when joined with the
progress of information technology, ensures an unprecedented
mobility of capital. It gives investors concerned with the
short-term profitability of their investments the possibility of
permanently comparing the profitability of the largest
corporations and, in consequence, penalising these firms’ relative
setbacks. Subjected to this permanent threat, the corporations
themselves have to adjust more and more rapidly to the exigencies
of the markets, under penalty of “losing the market’s confidence”,
as they say, as well as the support of their stockholders. The
latter, anxious to obtain short-term profits, are more and more
able to impose their will on managers, using financial
directorates to establish the rules under which managers operate
and to shape their policies regarding hiring, employment, and
wages.
Thus the absolute reign of flexibility is established, with
employees being hired on fixed-term contracts or on a temporary
basis and repeated corporate restructurings and, within the firm
itself, competition among autonomous divisions as well as among
teams forced to perform multiple functions. Finally, this
competition is extended to individuals themselves, through the
individualisation of the wage relationship: establishment of
individual performance objectives, individual performance
evaluations, permanent evaluation, individual salary increases or
granting of bonuses as a function of competence and of individual
merit; individualised career paths; strategies of “delegating
responsibility” tending to ensure the self-exploitation of staff
who, simple wage labourers in relations of strong hierarchical
dependence, are at the same time held responsible for their sales,
their products, their branch, their store, etc. as though they
were independent contractors. This pressure toward “self-control”
extends workers’ “involvement” according to the techniques of
“participative management” considerably beyond management level.
All of these are techniques of rational domination that impose
over-involvement in work (and not only among management) and work
under emergency or high-stress conditions. And they converge to
weaken or abolish collective standards or solidarities (3).
In this way, a Darwinian world emerges - it is the struggle of
all against all at all levels of the hierarchy, which finds
support through everyone clinging to their job and organisation
under conditions of insecurity, suffering, and stress. Without a
doubt, the practical establishment of this world of struggle would
not succeed so completely without the complicity of all of the
precarious arrangements that produce insecurity and of the
existence of a reserve army of employees rendered docile by
these social processes that make their situations precarious,
as well as by the permanent threat of unemployment. This
reserve army exists at all levels of the hierarchy, even at the
higher levels, especially among managers. The ultimate foundation
of this entire economic order placed under the sign of freedom is
in effect the structural violence of unemployment, of the
insecurity of job tenure and the menace of layoff that it implies.
The condition of the “harmonious” functioning of the individualist
micro-economic model is a mass phenomenon, the existence of a
reserve army of the unemployed.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Essence of Neoliberalism