Competitive society

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term competitive society (or competitive society) describes a form of society that is essentially characterized by competition as the dominant form of interaction among its members. In competitive societies, competition can be observed both on the macro level (society as a whole and, above all, the economic and political systems) as well as on the meso level (above all in educational institutions) and the micro level (in the mentality of individuals). Competition is seen as the “epoch paradigm” of contemporary Western societies.

The term competitive company is also used to denote a company that competes with another company from whose perspective the statement in question is made.

Macro level

economy

Competition is seen as the mainstay of market economy systems. The main task of antitrust authorities is to protect such systems when competition is restricted or put out of action in the case of cartel , oligopoly or monopoly formation . Competition should prevent monopolists from setting prices at will, since the other side cannot switch to alternative offers. Monopoly providers can also decide for themselves what quality their offer is and under what conditions customers receive it.

In functioning market economy systems with sufficient competition, this ensures that the market price is always an equilibrium price that reliably signals the degree of scarcity of an offer. High prices create incentives to increase supply and thus reduce scarcity. Proponents of the market economy stress that there is no better way of allocating factors of production . Market participants who are unable to cope with prices that are “too high” (buyer) or “too low” (supplier) for them, in extreme cases, are eliminated from the market, which leads to a “ market shakeout ”.

The efficiency of the competitive economy enables prosperity and thus ultimately creates the surpluses that can be made available for expenditure by the welfare state .

politics

The western model of democracy is essentially based on the competitive model of democracy . According to this, it is not important (unlike the identity model of democracy ) to enforce the supposedly “objectively correct” “ popular will ”, but competing parties must endeavor to get as many votes as possible from the electorate so that they can be based on the majority of can put their ideas of politics into practice on a temporary basis. If, in the opinion of the voters, politicians have “failed”, they can be voted out of office in the next election by withdrawing their votes. The aim of the parties is to ensure that as many voters as possible will vote for them and non-competing parties in the next election.

society

Market behavior can be observed in members of a competitive society in all areas of life. Your labor is considered human capital , which should receive or maintain the highest possible value. For employees, the rent should the commodity labor power lead to the highest possible salaries or wages. The category of value generally takes on an economic tint: “valuable” is defined as people who are interesting, attractive and, above all, “ useful ” for the evaluator. Rankings are very popular in competing societies. Everything possible is made measurable and therefore comparable and can receive a purchase price that can be “objectified” through the ranking. In the field of care, for example, it is not a question of “care-giving attention”, but rather being able to account for “tasks” (as is the case with “love for sale” ). In general, there is a strong motivation in competing societies to surpass or defeat others.

It goes without saying that many people today speak of “ partner markets” in connection with love relationships and partnerships and the opportunities and risks of partner seekers in these markets, thus showing that they too choose the partner they “want” according to their “ preferences ” (a Term from consumer research that is intended to explain the customer's choice between different goods or services).

Sport is an important domain of competitive thinking. Not only in football is it about emerging as a winner from a game and making the other a loser. In other sports, the best are awarded, e.g. B. in the style of the Olympic Games with a gold, silver or bronze medal. The fourth and all subsequent ones come away empty-handed. The example of sport also clearly shows that the interaction modes competition and cooperation are not mutually exclusive. Particularly in team sports, it can be observed that successful teamwork increases a team's chances of success. Similar effects can also be found in individual sports such as B. be observed in athletics during the relay race .

Willingness to perform plays a central role in a competitive society . 2012 warned z. B. Oliver Kahn , that the Germans without ambition threaten a fall into mediocrity. The educational philosopher Matthias Burchardt assesses this attitude as a “ categorical comparative of unleashed self and external surpassing”.

Meso level

Schools are institutions where children and young people are to be prepared for a life as adults in a competitive society. That is why Heinz-Peter Meidinger , chairman of the German Association of Philologists, thinks : "A stress-free school is poor preparation for life." Time pressure has been part of the school ever since this institution existed. School stress is unnecessary, however, which is caused by excessive expectations of parents or because children are overwhelmed at a certain type of school. The "ability to learn a week or two before final exams or the hardship of dealing with time-limited pressure to perform are eminently important not only in school, but also in later life," says Meidinger. "Abitur graduates in particular like to report in retrospect in the Abitur newspapers that, apart from the few weeks before graduation, their school days were not as stressful as they say."

On the other hand, Meidinger opposes a further consolidation of the teaching: “Education needs time, time for practicing, reflecting, deepening and critical examination. We need our children in the face of major challenges facing society rather more time to learn and tires offer than less. "The concern that under the" late "career of young German and Bildungsinländer the competitiveness of Germany could suffer Meidinger does not share.

The extent to which the level of aspiration has increased in German-speaking schools can be seen in the irritations that verbalized report grades trigger if you take them seriously: A 4 is supposed to be sufficient, and a 3 "satisfies" the recipient of the grade result (and his parents) . H. satisfy. In Bavaria , elementary school students in grade 4 need an average grade of 2.33 if they are to attend a grammar school and an average of 2.66 if they are to attend a secondary school. An average of 3.0 usually leads to the schoolchild registering at the responsible secondary school.

In marketing circles it is said: "Being good [= grade 2] is not enough if customers expect better".

Micro level

Susanne Gaschke dealt with the “Generation Too Much” by which she means those born between 1965 and 1985: “Too much information. Too many choices. Too much competition. Too much uncertainty. Too many obligations at the same time. ”According to Gaschke,“ German reunification did not move into the harmonious end of history, but directly into a very large, suddenly globalized confusion with the crises of an unleashed financial capitalism, with '9/11', incomprehensible terror and seemingly archaic religious wars worldwide ”. The side effect of the major educational reform of the 1960s is an intensified elimination battle. University and career starters have an extremely cautious, "zero-error" mentality that always keeps all options open. The competition on the skilled labor market has spoiled prices. Because there are now so many better educated, so Gaschke, they all earn less on average.

For the few and on average relatively late born children who belong to the “Generation Too Much”, the following applies from the parents' point of view: “The Abitur is a must”, because only the Abitur appears as a “competitive educational goal”. In fact, a course of study usually offers future academics in Germany a high return on education , which is what the above. The thesis of the “spoiled prices” on the labor market is relativized and the risk of becoming unemployed is reduced.

Criticism of the competitive society

Limits to growth

Hartmut Rosa advocates what he calls the “competition thesis”, which ultimately leads to the thesis according to which people of the present no longer run towards a promising future, but rather run away from the abyss of a comprehensive catastrophe (“con-currere = together [from where away? where to?] race "):" If growth , acceleration and the concentration of innovation form the structural 'dynamization imperatives' of modern society, they are conveyed logically through the competitive allocation not only of goods and resources , but also of privileges and positions , of status and recognition, of friends and life partners etc. The logic of competition leads to an unlimited dynamization of all competitively organized social spheres. It is always important to do a little more and invest more energy than the competitor - who in turn has to follow suit. This logic can be observed everywhere: especially in parenting practices, but also in dealing with one's own body. What doping is in sport , which sooner or later ends up with every competitive athlete [sic!] Who wants to remain competitive, is called 'human enhancement' in other areas. The spiral of growth induced by competition cannot be closed. "

According to Rosa, the acceleration of the tempo at the transition from modern to late modern is clearly recognizable. The positional competition has turned into a performative competition. If a competitor for an office had won this, then in the era of positional competition he was undoubtedly what his official title signaled, and this position was usually not constantly endangered. In the era of performative competition, everyone (like the coach of a soccer team in the Bundesliga) has to fight for a position that they have acquired and that they could lose at any time. In doing so, it must deliver a consistently positive "performance". If he fails to do this, it will be assessed as his personal failure. In the age of performative competition, all positioning of the individual (not only in working life) would have the tendency to be provisional (examples: the trend towards serial monogamy , which finds its apt expression in the term “life companion”, or the shrinking of the regular electorate of parties ).

Failure to shape young people by the older generation

Gerald Hüther cynically comments on the relationship between schools and contemporary society: “For this consumer society as we have it today, school as it takes place today is just right. It produces people who are sufficiently dissatisfied with their life and their creative possibilities and are therefore very susceptible to the offers of industry, media and politics. [...] At the moment, the school [...] is acting as a vicarious agent of a substitute satisfaction industry . "

The Danish psychologist Jesper Juul complains that even preschool children are misinterpreted by their parents' “ botox culture”. "For more than a decade we have been living in a botox culture [sic!], In which even intelligent and highly educated, adult people spend masses of precious time and energy on narcissistic attempts, the 'right' surface, the 'ideal' [means: getting the 'ideal'] weight, muscles of the 'right' size [sic!] in the right place, etc. They have learned to justify what they do with the fact that it strengthens their 'self-worth', which is a meaningless hybrid term that now means something like social self-confidence, exaggerated [to] alleviate chronic fear and insecurity; the fear of failing and the fear of losing the competition for praise, attention, sex and the perfect life. All external features for which there is no internal counterpart. [...] Children take on this obsession with the senseless very early on, and even as five-year-olds many of them are preoccupied with how fat, stupid, ugly and uncool they are instead of how funny and secure they feel. Nobody can withdraw that or pedagogue it away once it has established itself in the soul of a child ”, says Juul, who ultimately operationalizes the diagnosis of“ living a life in alienation ”.

Oliver Nachtwey criticizes the fact that schools, in cooperation with many parental homes, especially with “ helicopter parents ”, “ create lots of little narcissists, trimmed for competition”. The main concern of these parents is that their children have skills at an early age that the curriculum does not require them to have, so that they have an early lead over other children. Later on, young adults who have been socialized in this way acquire additional qualifications and make determined professional experiences, not because they want to do it (as many persuaded themselves), but because that, as well as speedy studies, offers them competitive advantages, says Nachtwey.

The idea that people should primarily see themselves as “carriers of human capital” or accept that others see them that way and endeavor to be “marketable” as humans (not just as workers) is what Erich Ribolits holds for a perversion of the idea of education . According to the words of Wilfried Breyvogel, who paraphrases a twelfth grader, real education in the sense of the neo-humanist concept of education consists in "becoming someone else in the moment of happiness of understanding, to beautify oneself and to 'shine'".

Competitive people lack empathy

In his essay Generation Supercool: Lack of empathy and social coldness among young people - a consequence of a competitive society? analyzed Bernhard Heinzlmaier deformation "cool" teenager. Living conditions, which are a “constant source of insecurity and fear of decline”, promoted the emergence of a youth culture that presents itself as callous and untouchable. “The youth of today live in cliques with weak ties, are clever when it comes to their own advantage, naive because they think they can somehow get through, and in love with their artfully designed, cool surface. The coolness of boys is primarily about their own self. The HOW of their life is more important to them than the WHAT. In other words, when choosing a career, the factual content of the work is relatively irrelevant to them, it is much more important whether they can be used to stage brilliant success. "

The "successful person" as an "anthropological mutation"

For Robert Misik the “successful person” is the typical product of a competitive society; “Above all, he is successful in being successful. [...] Success is primarily habitus. Do you have the body language that identifies you as successful? The casual self-evidence that is difficult to distinguish from insolence [...]? This posture and charisma are the key to success today, not skill in any subject area. The successful person is an anthropological mutation . "

Volker Kitz, a representative of a “new world of work pragmatics”, counters the self-stagers with his “Manifesto for honest work” in 2017: “We [employers] appreciate the mass of normal people who do their work normally every day, without fuss and noise, without theater fog and hot air. It is you, not the others, who keep our organization running. "

Generating resentment, envy and fear

The sociologist Alfred Vierkandt already established at the beginning of the 20th century that “competition divides. It [sic!] Marks everyone as possible opponents and gives everyone a certain value that is placed in relation to their own. This opens up hierarchies, brings resentment, envy, fear, insecurity and also implies the possibility of not being good or valuable enough. ”In Germany, nine out of ten pregnancies would be terminated if the result of a PND examination led to the diagnosis of trisomy 21 because Correspondingly many women or couples answer the questions: “Will my child be able to survive? Will I be able to live my life with this child? ”Answer negatively. The idea of ​​competition is therefore present even when it comes to the question of whether life is allowed.

Systematic burn-out production

Sighard Neckel and Greta Wagner see a connection between the expansion of competitive zones in society and the increase in burn-out syndromes: With the spread of neoliberalism since the 1990s, there has been a delimitation of the time and content of competitions, so that competitions are increasing determined the social order as a whole. On the one hand, more and more goods are being distributed through competitions; on the other hand, competitions are also introduced as a means of increasing effectiveness where no market previously existed, such as in universities and public administrations. Today, this leads to the delimitation of competition. In particular, fixed-term contracts increased the pressure to perform on employees and forced them to repeatedly have to prove their worth to the organization. The fact that individuals are ultimately only forced to invest in their own competitiveness contributes to a massive destruction of resources in the form of the mass production of “losers”. A particularly large number of losers would be produced on “winner-take-all” markets, where the first get far more than all the runners-up put together. More and more competitors wasted their resources on a mode of competition that had become destructive. This means not only that the efforts of the many losers are not recognized, but also that a worker never knows when enough has been worked and whether the time invested is already sufficient to be better than the competition. Burn-out often arises from an interplay of overexertion and gratification crisis, i.e. as the result of permanent stress that does not lead to any reward. Competitions as the dominant form of interaction in the present wear out those subjective powers that they claim to be increasing.

Conflicting goals between competitiveness education and the imperative of inclusion

Since Germany joined the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009, Germany has been obliged to teach children and young people with disabilities in mainstream schools if this is in line with the parents' wishes . “ Inclusive education benefits everyone” is a central motto of the “European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education”.

Freerk Huisken and Bernd Ahrbeck, however, doubt that it is the rule that children and young people with mental impairments (for some time now also called " people with learning difficulties ") would be happy through "learning together" in target-differentiated lessons , as long as it is the main goal of the schools is to make students competitive. In his book The Inclusion Lie , the theologian Uwe Becker argues that competition results in exclusion and not solidarity. There cannot be only winners in the competition. Instead of unsuccessfully forcing disadvantaged people such as people with disabilities or those who have lost education into the dominant social functional logic, it is better to abandon this logic.

literature

  • Hartmut Rosa : Competition as a mode of interaction. Cultural and socio-structural consequences of the competitive society. In: Berlin journal for social science. Issue 1, 2006, pp. 82-104.
  • Dietmar J. Wetzel: Sociology of the competition. A cultural and economic sociological analysis of market society. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2013, ISBN 978-3-658-01062-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hartmut Rosa: Competition as a mode of interaction - cultural and socio-structural consequences of the competitive society. In: Berlin journal for social science. 2006. Issue 1, pp. 82-104.
  2. ↑ Thomas Kirchhoff (Ed.): Competition. Historical, structural and normative perspectives . Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2015, p. 7.
  3. ↑ Hartmut Rosa: Critique of the time relationships. Acceleration and alienation as key concepts in a renewed social criticism. In: Rahel Jaeggi, Thilo Wesche (ed.): What is criticism. Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 20.
  4. ^ Hans Willgerodt: Lexicon of the social market economy. Article merit principle . Konrad Adenauer Foundation .
  5. ↑ Ulrich Schneider : Why money and profit thinking make us worse people. In: Huffington Post . 23 October 2014.
  6. ↑ Jakob Schrenk: Predictable love . neon.de . November 30, 2008.
  7. ↑ Hannes Foth, Svenja Wiertz: The economization of proximity as a challenge for ethics. In: Matthias Mahring (Ed.): On the future of area ethics - challenges posed by the economization of the world. (= Series of publications by the Center for Technology and Business Ethics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Volume 8). Karlsruhe 2016, ISBN 978-3-7315-0514-3 , pp. 401-420.
  8. ↑ Sonja Römer: Competition stimulates cooperation. In: Image of Science . October 2, 2008.
  9. ↑ Peter Seiffert: Unconditional willingness to perform - Without ambition Germany sinks into mediocrity . focus.de . 22nd August 2012.
  10. ↑ Matthias Burchardt: Inclusion or emancipation of people with disabilities? Critical analysis of the politically propagated inclusion model . In: German Federal Association for Logopädie (Hrsg.): Forum Logopädie . Issue 5, No. 29 , September 2015, p. 9 ( online [PDF; 732 kB ; accessed on November 9, 2018]). Inclusion or emancipation of people with disabilities? Critical analysis of the politically propagated inclusion model ( memento of the original from January 5, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / test.dbl-ev.de
  11. ↑ Anna Petersen, Anika Wacker: A school without stress is poor preparation for life . die-journalisten.de GmbH . January 12, 2017.
  12. ↑ Katja Schnitzler: Burnout in the fourth grade . sueddeutsche.de . January 28, 2013.
  13. ↑ FMVÖ Recommender Award 2017: "Being good is not enough when customers expect better" . APA-OTS Originaltext-Service GmbH. Vienna 2017.
  14. ↑ Susanne Gaschke: How the "Generation Too Much" overwhelmed itself . welt.de . January 28, 2015.
  15. ↑ Peter Draheim, Gitta Egbers, Annette Fugmann-Heesing, Bernd Schleich, Uwe Thomas, Marei John-Ohnesorg, Alexander Schulz: Education Makes You Rich - More Practical Orientation in Education and Further Training Theses Paper of the Working Group on Education, Research and Innovation Policy of the Friedrich Management Group -Ebert Foundation. 2009.
  16. ↑ Hartmut Rosa: Resonance instead of alienation: ten theses against the logic of increase in modernity . Conference of the SFB 580 "Social developments after the system upheaval" and the college "Post-growth societies" on 14./15. June 2012 in Jena, p. 3 (thesis 5.)
  17. ↑ Hartmut Rosa: Critique of the time relationships. Acceleration and alienation as key concepts in a renewed social criticism . In: Rahel Jaeggi, Thilo Wesche (ed.): What is criticism. Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 21f.
  18. ↑ Alexandra Grass: Pedagogy on the move . wienerzeitung.at . September 1, 2015.
  19. ↑ The botox culture damages the self-esteem of children . Dagbladet . 5th November 2014.
  20. ↑ Eva Thöne: Lots of little narcissists, trimmed for competition. In: Spiegel online . August 14, 2016.
  21. ↑ Erich Ribolits: Education without value. Against human capitalization . Löcker Verlag, Vienna 2009, p. 58f.
  22. ^ Wilfried Breyvogel: Contradictions in the living and educational world of children and young people - practical consequences. In: Rolf Wernstedt / Marei John-Ohnesorg (ed.): The concept of education in change. Seduction to learn instead of compulsion to buffalo . Documentation of a conference of the education network of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung . 5th-6th July 2007, p. 23.
  23. ↑ Bernhard Heinzlmaier: Generation Super Cool: Empathielosigkeit and social indifference among young people - a consequence of the competitive society? Institute for Youth Culture Research, Vienna 2017.
  24. ↑ Robert Misik: The successful person . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . February 6, 2015.
  25. ↑ Volker Kitz: After work! Myths of the world of work. Let's be honest: What companies should urgently tell their employees . In: manager magazin. March 27, 2017.
  26. ↑ Susanne Brem: On the value of people: What competition means for one another . uni.de GmbH . October 14, 2016.
  27. ↑ Annett Stein: Nine out of ten couples have an abortion with trisomy . In: The world . March 8, 2015.
  28. ^ Sighard Neckel, Greta Wagner: Burnout. Social suffering from growth and competition . In: WSI-Mitteilungen. 2014, p. 539.
  29. ↑ European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education: Five key messages about Inclusive Education. From theory to practice . Odense 2014, p. 5 (7)
  30. ↑ Freerk Huisken: Inclusion in the competitive society - How should that work? . Audio recording of a lecture. University of Hanover. May 23, 2013. 124 minutes
  31. ↑ Bernd Ahrbeck: Inclusion - an impossible ideal? . Audio-visual recording of a lecture. Linz. March 7, 2016. 46 minutes
  32. ↑ Felix Ekardt: Inclusion: How equal opportunities and capitalism get in each other's way. on: zeit.de , July 15, 2015.