Abstract
“Our worlds of work are in sway,” concludes Christina Garsten in this collection of essays. Yes, they are! Whatever vocabulary one uses, globalization and a Third Industrial Revolution driven by increased use of ITC technology have reshaped work-life in a number of aspects. Flexibilization and individualization have been common ways to describe what is going on. The old Fordist assembly line has been replaced by computer work and robots. An increasing share of the working population is now employed in what is called “services” or in “knowledge production.” In a more negative way it is also possible to highlight the increasing elements of routinization and even neo-Taylorist control methods in the service and knowledge sector. Ever since Richard Sennet published his seminal The Corrosion of Character (1998), it is taken for granted that phenomena such as increased demands to be flexible at work and more mobile on the labor market also have fundamental influence on how people build their lives, how their expectations are formed, and how they feel.
Social scientists over the past decades have paid great attention to how a new discourse of work has been developed against the backdrop of technological change, globalization, and what is usually called “marketization.” Influenced by Hayekian notions of the market process, such studies have shown how a “market language” has come to permeate occupations that until at least the 1980s seemed sheltered from the whims of the marketplace, especially professional work as well as work in the public-service sectors. Increasingly, concepts like “lean production,” “flexibility,” or “transparency” have come to dominate areas such as health care, social services, and education. In several countries the breakthrough of market language has gone hand in hand with dramatic privatizations in the public sector and the introduction of massive competition from private actors.
This trend is not the case in Sweden even though private actors in health care and education have come to play an increasing role. In Sweden, most social services are still carried out by public-service providers, especially at the municipality level. Yet as Garsten et al. show in this interesting collection of essays, the introduction of market language even among professionals and in the public service has taken place. In Sweden this has been combined with an emphasis on transparency. Given that public taxation is the overwhelming source of funding for health care, social services, and education, there has been an increased emphasis on monitoring and auditing. As Renita Thedvall shows in her contribution to the volume, evidence-based methodology is increasingly used in hospitals and in the social services to assess cost and benefits of various practices.
A very valuable feature of Makeshift Work in a Changing Labour Market is that it shows in detail—with Sweden as the case study—how a new market language has been introduced in recent decades into new areas and how this has led to concrete changes in work and practices. Many of the book’s essays are dealing with public work and services, showing, for example, how home care work has become increasingly monitored (Taylorized) or how the emphasis on evidence-based practices change the role of social workers by downplaying the earlier era professional “gut-feeling” with recommendations made by scientists high above their heads. A number of essays also deal with work in other sectors; for example, ITC call centers are a good example to highlight the increasing demand of a flexible workforce that can be called in at any moment. In this connection the growing share of temporary workers in the Swedish labor force is emphasized is several essays. Here, of course, Sweden is no exception. As in many other countries, the downside of this development is obvious from the point of view of building stable lives, forming families, and so forth. Such workers have little security, and the feeling of being exchangeable on the labor market is always there.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this volume is a series of essays that deals with changes within the Swedish Public Employment Services during the past decade or so. In the last fifty years, Sweden has been recognized for its high ambitions when it comes to employment. In this, the Public Employment Services have played an important role. After the Right and Centre alliance came to power in 2006, however, there has been a change of emphasis from occupational learning, education, and big programs to what several of the authors here call “individualization” and making job seekers more “employable.” From being seen as redundant because of outside forces and as victims of competition in the marketplace, the unemployed’s own abilities now take center stage. While the so-called weak groups in the labor market are taken care of—and often “medicalized” as Julia Peralta shows in her essay—the majority of job seekers are supposed to care for themselves. For them, the Public Employment Services provide, with the help of private operators, basic training in becoming more “employable,” writing CVs, and so on. At the same time, the level of monitoring has stepped up dramatically as has the use of economic incentives. After 300 days of unemployment, job seekers are transferred from a position as a still quite generously paid person to having to rely on very low compensation from social assistance. For many years Sweden has been acknowledged for its so-called work-line. But what has emerged since around 2005 is perhaps better described as harsh workfare where the pressure on the individual has become increasingly marked.
Without doubt these authors contribute to a greater understanding of what is happening in the “worlds of work” today, both at the discursive level and with regard to new practices and policies. In great detail we are shown how “marketization” and “individualization” (or “responsibilization”) in the case of Sweden is changing the landscape of work. In addition, at least implicitly, this volume makes a number of wider claims. The first one is that these changes are a result of increased global competition. In a very general sense this claim is perhaps right. What this volume shows more than anything is how marketization has taken place, especially within the professions and the public sector. While it is true that competition from the private sector has increased in these areas in recent decades, in most cases the public sector still remains in a quasi-monopoly position. So perhaps we should look for answers to why market language has permeated this sector at a political or discursive level in the first place.
A second general claim of the book is that changes of the kind described in it have occurred in a fundamental way—or have even upset the so-called Swedish model. Whether this is true or not depends much on definition, of course. To answer this question, a longer historical perspective must be taken. Moreover, a general problem with this volume, which it shares with many other studies depicting the supposed demise of the Swedish model, is that it sometimes uses a straw-like version of this model as its point of departure. In some cases this even leads to nostalgia, weeping over a world lost. However, painstaking historical work has shown that this model was never a static phenomena but always in flux. It went through different stages and its core is not easily defined. It was often flexible and open to outside change. Perhaps it was not even so benevolent as we might want to believe. A longer historical perspective could perhaps also show its paternalist aspects and help us better ascertain to what extent it has really changed. From the outside it is not always easy to accept—even after reading this collection of essays—that Sweden is no longer an ambitious welfare state with a big public sector and where the so-called social partners have a great influence.