Richard Sennett

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Richard Sennett at re: publica 2016

Richard Sennett (born January 1, 1943 in Chicago , Illinois ) is an American - British sociologist .

The son of Russian immigrants teaches sociology and history at New York University and the London School of Economics and Political Science . His main areas of research are cities , work and cultural sociology . Sennett is married to the urban sociologist Saskia Sassen .

Richard Sennett was known as a theorist and historian of urban life. His main themes are the isolation, disorientation and powerlessness of modern individuals, the superficiality and instability of interpersonal relationships and - against this background - the exercise of domination. In his early works in particular, he remains Chicago, the city of his childhood, and the experiences he made in it. The high topicality of his topics and his catchy, essayistic style made his books bestsellers .

Sennett became known with his book Decay and End of Public Life (1977). In his work Handwerk (2008) he calls for the restoration of the intrinsic value of practical work , as opposed to the working conditions of financial capitalism , and for people to work in such a way that they strive to do their job as well as possible. Handwerk is the first book in a trilogy in a Sennett project called Homo faber . It is about people as "makers" of things. The second volume was the book Cooperation: What Holds Our Society Together . His theses are always related to the history of religion and art. The Christian term agape as a common meal is symbolic of common action.

Life

Richard Sennett (2010)

Richard Sennett grew up in Cabrini Green, a poor neighborhood in Chicago . Both parents were staunch communists. The father, whom he never met because he fled after Richard was born, fought in the Spanish Civil War and later made a name for himself as a translator of Spanish and Catalan poems. His mother, Dorothy, made a living as a social worker.

Sennett tried to get out of this world, which he later described as narrow and threatening, initially through music. At a young age he learned the cello, composed and had success in public appearances. He had to give up studying musicology and the violoncello in New York in 1962 due to a failed operation on his left hand. He then studied sociology and later history with David Riesman and Erik Erikson in Chicago, then with Talcott Parsons at Harvard University . a. with Hannah Arendt .

After receiving his doctorate in 1969, he researched and taught at Harvard, Yale , Rome and Washington, among others . Since 1971 he has been professor of history and sociology at New York University , where he headed the newly founded New York Institute for the Humanities from 1977–1984 . In 1999 he started teaching as a Centennial Professor of Social and Cultural Theory at the London School of Economics.

Since his main residence is now London, he became a British citizen in 2016.

plant

The flexible person

In his work Der flexible Mensch (The Corrosion of Character) , 1998, Sennett describes the effects of the new flexible capitalism on character. As the world of work becomes more flexible , values and virtues are becoming less important. B. loyalty, a sense of responsibility and work ethic as well as the ability to forego immediate satisfaction of wishes and to pursue long-term goals. For Sennett, the reasons for this development are the acceleration of work organization, the steadily growing performance requirements, the increasing insecurity of working relationships ( precariousness ) and the need to change residence at any time for professional reasons.

Sennett also notes a profound change at the macro level. He studied after he has dealt with the history of industrial work, the transition from trained industrial capitalism , the Fordism , to a system of flexible specialization . In the automotive industry, for example, assembly line production in a factory has been replaced by specialized production and supply companies that are constantly adapting their location and their work processes to the needs of the globalized economy . Strict hierarchies have partly been replaced by small, self-responsible groups with high risk. The pressure on the individual, which is also reflected in a changed understanding of the concept of time, increases immensely. In addition, there is close monitoring of the entire production process - including the workers - through the use of modern means of communication. Sennett also describes a conflict between values that parents want to pass on to their children and those that determine their professional lives.

In everyday life - here follows Sennett Mark Granovetter's network theory - weak ties, i.e. fleeting forms of commonality, gain in importance. These become more useful to people than long-term strong connections that have lost their meaning.

All of this contributes to an atmosphere of fear, helplessness, instability and insecurity in large parts of society. According to Sennett, this instability and insecurity create a society of elbows. The gap between rich and poor is growing. The middle layers are thinned out. There is a polarization between a smaller group of profiteers and a large number of losers of the new system to be observed.

The culture of the new capitalism

The culture of the new capitalism (The Culture of the New Capitalism) , 2005 is the sequel to his bestseller The flexible man . Sennett is once again interested in showing how the new culture that emerged from the New Economy of the 1990s led to profound changes on a social, organizational and individual level. Since then, Sennett said, a global economic elite has exercised moral and normative influence on the rest of the economy as well as on politics and society as a whole.

His analysis focuses on the effects of "New Capitalism" on the structure of large companies and on the demands on workers. He notes that consumer behavior and political action are increasingly similar.

In the first chapter, Sennett describes the phase of "social capitalism". During this phase, which lasted roughly from 1870 to 1970, companies were more or less like military organizations . The hierarchies and chains of instructions in these pyramid-shaped buildings were clear. The individual employee knew his place in this bureaucracy-like organization, but could hardly break out of this “steel-hard housing” (coined by Max Weber as “steel-hard housing of bondage”; incorrectly translated by Talcott Parsons as “iron cage”). By the time these ventures began to open to new management methods, borrowed capital and “impatient capital”, and to adopt novel production technologies, the steel-hard casing ceased to exist. He was replaced by international corporations with flat hierarchies that demand one thing above all from their employees: flexibility.

Sennett then speaks of the arrival of "mp3 capitalism", which has arbitrariness and speed as its maxim. It is no longer so important that a person learns a trade and ultimately masters it well. Rather, the New Capitalism requires the ability to constantly adjust to new circumstances.

Sennett believes that the educational system produces too many highly qualified potential workers. In fact, the economy could work with a small elite and increasing automation . About 30 percent of the total labor force in an industrialized country would be sufficient to maintain the economy. The remaining 70 percent therefore become aware of their uselessness. The unemployed and underemployed part of the population, which is marginalized in the culture of New Capitalism , should, according to Sennett, be made "useful" again through new types of employment, especially in the social field. “Talent and the specter of uselessness” are the subjects of the second chapter.

In the third chapter, Sennett shows how politics becomes a business, a commodity , both on the supply side and on the demand side . The politics business and its products (election programs, laws, decisions, etc.) are consequently permeated by the culture of New Capitalism . Again, it is more about quick decisions than information and extensive debates. The citizens become politics consumers. Like branded goods, parties give themselves an image and do marketing in order to conceal the principle of interchangeability among themselves.

Fonts (selection)

honors and awards

See also

literature

  • Sven Opitz: Richard Sennett . In: Stephan Moebius , Dirk Quadflieg (Ed.): Culture. Present theories . VS-Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 3-531-14519-3
  • Jürgen Raab: Richard Sennett . In: Bernd Lutz (Hrsg.): Philosophen-Lexikon. From the pre-Socratics to the new philosophers . Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2003, ISBN 3-476-01953-5 , pp. 667-669.
  • Markus Schroer: Richard Sennett . In: Dirk Kaesler (ed.): Current theories of sociology. From Shmuel N. Eisenstadt to postmodernism . CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52822-8 , pp. 250-266.
  • Dominik Skala: Urbanity as Humanity. Anthropology and Social Ethics in Urban Thinking Richard Sennett . Schöningh, Paderborn 2015, ISBN 978-3-506-78394-3 .
Interviews

Web links

Wikiquote: Richard Sennett  - Quotes

Footnotes

  1. ^ David Runciman: Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation by Richard Sennett - review . In: The Guardian , February 3, 2012
  2. ↑ Richard Sennett: Respect in the Age of Inequality , Berlin, 2004, p. 20
  3. ↑ zdf.de
  4. ↑ Franz Schuh: Everything is a radiant surface . In: The time . No. 38 . Hamburg 2001 ( zeit.de ).
  5. ^ Membership directory: Richard Sennett. Academia Europaea, accessed January 7, 2018 .
  6. ^ "Cultural materialism" - Richard Sennett's acceptance speech on the occasion of the award of the Hegel Prize in Stuttgart, May 2007.
  7. ↑ Gerda Henkel Foundation as award winner
  8. ^ Richard Sennett, winner of the European Crafts Prize 2008. North Rhine-Westphalian Crafts Day e. V., March 5, 2012, accessed March 10, 2015 .
  9. ↑ Richard Sennett receives Heinrich Tessenow Medal (PDF; 62 kB)
  10. ↑ Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book 2018 to Julian Nida-Rümelin and Nathalie Weidenfeld . OTS report from January 1, 2019, accessed on January 1, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Sennett, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago