The Role of Post-Fordism in Understanding the Contemporary Working-Class Culture - Coursework Example

The Role of the Processes of Post-Fordism in Understanding the Contemporary Working-Class Culture Introduction The agreement of production and communication becomes the power house of economic progress in the post-Fordism age, simultaneously bringing about an obstacle in the institutional movement from individual to collective consciousness (Amin 1995). Instruments of representation, such as social group, rank, and party of class, become more and more multifaceted. Each individual has a tendency to represent him/herself (Watson 2008). The contemporary human context owes a great deal of its current character to the processes of production presently called Post-Fordism. Henry Ford originally launched in 1914 the continuous-flow assembly line. This progress to the use of interchangeable and standardised products, components, and labour had ground-breaking consequences beyond the instant productivity aimed by the automobile manufacturer (Beynon & Nichols 2006). The assembly line, in de-labouring work and worker to produce cheap and uniform products, marked the complete shift from traditional production to an age of mass production where in skill in the process of production was taken away from the hands of the worker (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 2006). The enhanced efficiencies and productivity encouraged by these developments entailed increased demand for products and facilitated the availability of more inexpensive products and higher wages (CCCS 2006). The working class benefited from a considerably higher quality and standard of living as products and services that were formerly limited to a select few were now manufactured for a growing mass market (Beynon & Nichols 2006). Nevertheless, just as the process of production required the implementation of isolating standardisation inside the factory, the massive increase in ready-made consumer products assumed a purchased instead of a locally built culture (Edwards 2007). The expansion of Fordism in the postwar era included subdivision, factory, leisure, and work. In recreating the practices of production and consumption of the Western world (Beynon & Nichols 2006), it became identical with an entire way of life enjoyed during the economic prosperity continuing until the 1970s (Amin 1995). A second revolution in production, made largely possible by developments in transportation and communication technology, pushed the collapse of Fordism in social organisation and production at the end of the twentieth century (Beynon & Nichols 2006). The expansion of just-in-time production processes revolutionised the factory, and the burgeoning of export processing zones weakened the function of industrial centres in Western Europe and North America (Berberoglu 2002).The ever more liberalised international market, ratified in international treaties such as General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) enabled the rapid transfer of capital and products across borders (Watson 2008). Big businesses became less bonded to domestic markets and as a result began to pull out their support of welfare state agencies, supporting instead competition-oriented circumstances such as loose regulatory norms, lower corporate taxes, and relaxed regulations over foreign rights (Watson 2008). This emergent regulatory setting forced a transnationalisation process where in corporations economised operations domestically and transferred production to sites typified by poor working conditions and cheap labour (Berberoglu 2002). Within the highly industrialised capitalist countries, the cutback in core production employment resulted in a deindustrialisation process and growing income gap (Beynon & Nichols 2006). The emerged ‘sunrise’ sectors were capable of maximising high levels of automation, communication, and education to develop more sensitive and smaller units concentrating on tailored manufacturing, provision of services, and information technologies (CCCS 2006). The importance of communications, information technology, and automation in Western societies has supported a newly well paid rank of managers and technicians responsible for the almost faultless production and multifaceted currents of Post-Fordism (Watson 2008). Production in these domains has a tendency to be typified by enhanced worker involvement, flexible work schedule, and fluid job assignment (Watson 2008). Nonetheless, in order to realise the highest productivity and elasticity, these units have a tendency to weaken job security by using outsourced, contract, and part-time labour (Berberoglu 2002). As a social system, Post-Fordism generates a diversity of products and services equipped towards the diversification of commercialised ways of life and culture. The emphasis on modernisation and individuation has undermined numerous of the collective individualities and political regimes built within Fordist structures, enabling the creation of a postmodern culture where in numerous of the inflexible divisions of gender, sex, race, and class have been displaced by recognised diversities from multiculturalism to homosexuals (Beynon & Nichols 2006). Since the 1970s, the emergence of multinational firms, flexible production, and information technologies has defined a shift to Post-Fordism as a social discourse (Amin 1995). The restructuring along the paradigms of a global niche consumption and division of labour is presently identical with the globalisation experience of Western nations (Watson 2008). Nevertheless, the objective of this essay is to discuss the influences of these underlying processes of Post-Fordism on our understanding of working class culture today. The first section will discuss the various social discourses on working class culture, namely, historical, communication, social, and political perspectives. The second section will discuss the traditional and contemporary cultures of trade unionism. The third section will talk about the function of the concepts habitus, cultural capital and experience in explaining working class cultures. And lastly, the essay will discuss the ways in which the ‘working class’ has been an object of academic investigation. Social Discourses on Working Class Culture One of the primary debates within class analysis in Britain since World War II has focused on the downfall of the working class as a demographic structure and, more significantly, as an individual socio-political unit (Shilling 2004). For instance, in the 1950s and 1960s, advocates of the British rendition of the ‘embourgeoisement’ argument claimed that the working class had espoused middle-class values and standards as they attained comparatively high wages and living standards in the post-war era of affluence (Shilling 2004). Prosperity created and maintained ways of life which focused on the individual family and home, motivated individual consumer desires and encouraged working-class members to support the political party which would excellently fulfil those individual consumer desires (Watson 2008). In other words, the customary occupational community of the working class and related proletarian unity of the early twentieth century had heralded working-class individualism, privatism, and instrumentalism (Barker 2003). The class structure had transformed, and the working class became increasingly indistinguishable from the middle class. Numerous political scientists and sociologists, in the 1980s and 1990s, have traced the progress of working-class individualism, privatism, and instrumentalism still further (Watson 2008). The persistent rise in prosperity, of enhanced living standards, high consumption levels, prospects for social mobility, and others, all over social classes has altered aspirations and lifestyle of the working class (Shilling 2004). Furthermore, enlarged individual levels of consumption within mass society have weakened political solidarities and traditional class divisions (Watson 2008). Working-class members no longer perceive themselves inferior or at the foot of a rigid class-structured society nor experience the necessity to support themselves with the instruments of working-class advocacy, specifically, the Labour Party and trade unions (Watson 2008). While negligible interest has been given to the espousal of middle-class values and standards among working-class members today, the restoration of fragment or the entire embourgeoisement premise, as other have emphasised, continues to highlight a transition in the norms and ideals of British working class (Barker 2003). A discrete working-class socio-political characteristic, as has been argued, has all but vanished. Hence, the premise of individualism, privatism, and instrumentalism has sustained its popularity over a significant amount of time (Barker 2003). The explanation of the transition of the socio-political tendencies of the British working class has continued unaltered in spite of the bumpy economic environment of the last five decades (Watson 2008). The strong points of this leading perspective is rather astonishing, since the original account of the embourgeoisement premise was rejected over three decades ago by Jennifer Platt, David Lockwood, and John Goldthorpe (Barker 2003). Undoubtedly, the major findings of these academics have been integrated into the comprehensive social, political, and economic theory since World War II (Barker 2003), particularly in the discourses of political scientists. Traditional and Contemporary Cultures of Trade Unionism One of the most essential features of the globalisation process has been the integration of Post-Fordism and flexible production. This mechanism, adopting the principles of neoclassical economics, has a tendency to reinforce the interests of capital weakening state sovereignty to safeguard workers’ rights and other underprivileged social sectors (Beynon & Nichols 2006). Contemporary trade unions, with various features, have emerged in the South to contradict the impacts of new competitive and flexible labour guidelines that have brought about high unemployment in those societies (CCCS 2006). Traditional unions have been deprived of the ability to represent marginalised workers. Thus, trade unions have turned to ways of mobilisation and representation which embody the interests of the citizens by expanding and harmonising class concerns (CCCS 2006). These unions require not just the workers but also the enlarging population of informal workers or not ‘wage earners’ (Swartz 1998). Traditional trade unionism is distinct from social movement unionism. The latter not only stands up for workers’ rights within the labour market or the workplace but also fights for the political, economic, and social rights of non-workers, such as the unemployed, indigenous groups, neighbour-based associations, the retired and students, who endured the consequences of joblessness and poverty (Berberoglu 2002). In order to embark on the task of making economic recovery consistent with democratisation at the international and national level it is very important to take into account social and labour movements as fundamental contributors in economic strategy and supporters of democratic politics. The Function of the Concepts Habitus, Cultural Capital and Experience in Explaining the Working Class Culture Pierre Bourdieu (1987) demonstrates comprehensively and thoroughly how the use and knowledge of the body and cultural capital, and the preference which individuals develop for culture, such as clothing, music, lifestyle and food, make up diverse understated transformations of a distinct relation of ruling and ruled class; restraining the multitudes of struggles between class division and classes in contemporary capitalist society and educating individuals to adjust their aspirations and their own perception of themselves to their position in a political power hierarchy and their contribution in the social product; simultaneously as offering means to defy the position a class division has in that class structure and for an individual to assert a position in a particular class division. Habitus The notion of ‘habitus’ plays an essential role in understanding of working class culture. According to Bourdieu (1987), To reconstruct what has been pulled apart [the different practices performed in different fields]... one must return to the practice-unifying and practice-generating principle, i.e., the class habitus, the internalised form of the class condition and of the conditionings it entails (p. 101). Social class is not defined solely by a position in the relations of production, but by the class habitus which is ‘normally’ (i.e., with a high statistical probability) associated with that position (Swartz 1998, 146). Hence the ‘habitus’ is the assimilated type of the class situation and of the orientations by which a class member knows, without reflecting on it, just how to respond to various cultural forces, what s/he finds ‘improper’ or ‘deceiful’ or ‘showy’ rather than ‘beautiful’ or ‘decent’ or ‘remarkable.’ Habitus is not a personal consideration of the situations of presence of a class, but rationality gained through existence and a nurturing in those situations and the prospects they exclude or include, with a prospect which provides opportunities, or on the other side, a bygone age remembered when everything was better (Swartz 1998). Hence, whether an individual truly has family, education, skills, or money, in practice becomes inferior to the habitus they have attained, which may, within unusual situations, be incompatible with their attitudes and lifestyle, language proficiency, tastes in art, colleagues and contacts, the way of exercising the body and aspirations, etc., which are commonly related with those circumstances. Cultural Capital and Experience Cultural capital is the ability to function in the culture sphere (Barker 2003)-- to identify the references made in a literature, what is being ‘cited’ or rejected in an artistic piece of work, to discern what and how to agree and disagree, how to sidestep the question if needed, to have adopted proper conducts and acquired a preference for decent art, to distinguish the characters or directors of movies, be they revolutionary or traditional, and others-- all those ways which reliably identify an individual to another individual of a culture, legitimate, radical, or mainstream, with a likely course in life, likely to have membership to particular groups or communities, and with essential right to have a say on political issues or whatsoever (Barker 2003). Hence, the social order is more and more internalised in the minds of the people. Social hierarchies become rules of division, structuring the representation of the social dimension. Objective restrictions become a sense of restrictions, a realistic expectation of objective restrictions attained by knowledge of objective restrictions, a sense of belongingness which encourages an individual to rule out oneself from the persons, places, products, and others from which an individual is prohibited. Ownership of cultural capital is strongly determined by cultural experience (Swartz 1998). For instance, the upper-class child has knowledge of the monetary value of an Avant-garde painting at auction. Educated people know from childhood who is an exceptional director, just as a young working-class boy distinguishes the actors and actresses of mainstream pictures. Conclusions In spite of the interest that the issue of Post-Fordism has enjoyed, the major findings of social, political, economic, and cultural discourses attracted practically no further deliberation in the area of class analysis. It is just recently, as critics have started to reassess explanations of shifting lifestyles of the working class and related values and norms from the viewpoint of historical accounts of developments in the last two centuries, that the notion of working class culture has been critically debated. Nevertheless, efforts to locate the working class culture among the earlier working class have successfully diverted attention from the issue of whether the notion sufficiently portrays the working class culture at present. In other words, the argument that the working class is a distinct socio-political unit continues to be taken for granted. This essay was carried out to somewhat correct the oversight. The discussion set out to examine the level to which the working class culture focus on the immediate family. An additional intention was to explore the means in which such a presence may create and maintain a set of values and standards inclined towards high degrees of material convenience and domestic comfort in the home. In other words, the general objective of the discussion was to explore critically the interrelationships between the processes of Post-Fordism and our understanding of the working class culture today. Thereby, it has also attempted to acquire some ideas into the level to which working-class values and culture may have transformed; the mechanisms of change; and the character of the traditional working class culture. The essay was intended to examine thoroughly the meaning which individuals link to their family lives and their values and expectations today. It is positioned within the relation of the creation of value, but the domain where this takes place is dislocated. The social foundation is favourably exercised. Social life becomes the essential foundation and production of value. Social support makes up the network of relations created in the life of the people. Each interaction is activated and, separate of its formal understanding thus reckoning, it is in itself efficient. Whether one functions or not, one by no means stops producing. The division between free time and labour time disintegrates. The mere division can be made between unpaid and paid existence. Between life structurally assimilated within take-home pay and labour time, relations of capital, and life actually assimilated within the efficient time and relations of capital, which comprises time expended working and not. References Amin, A. (Ed.). (1995). Post-Fordism: A Reader (Studies in Urban and Social Change). UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Barker, C. (2003). Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage Publications Ltd. Berberoglu, B. (2002). 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