Citizenship and Employment in an Age of High Technology†
| Date | 01 July 1987 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1987.tb00709.x |
| Published date | 01 July 1987 |
British Journal
of
Industrial Relations
25:2
July
1987
0007-1080
$3.00
Citizenship and Employment
in
an
Age
of
High Technologyt
by
Ronald
Dore*
This paper raises an old but recently neglected question. Are technological
changes creating a society in which, however good the educational system,
there are
too
few people capable
of
doing efficiently all the complex jobs
there are to do, and too few jobs
of
the kind that almost anybody can be
trained to do
-
jobs,
that is, the market valuation
of
the product of which
allows the wage to be above the welfare minimum? And if that were to be
so,
what would happen to our notions
of
citizenship and democracy?
A good place to start is
Citizenship and Social Class,’
those splendid and
influential (Alfred) Marshall lectures given by T.
H.
Marshall a quarter of
a century ago. They read now, in our less optimistic era, not just as a
broad- sweep historical analysis, but also as a celebration. From Cromwell
and Restoration England to
1949,
he is saying, we have come a long way.
The story is a story
of
progress, the establishment
of
civil rights in the
definition of citizenship in the eighteenth century,
of
political rights in the
nineteenth, of social rights in the twentieth. He quotes Trevelyan with
approval, speaking
of
‘the
work
of the Hanoverian period’ to establish the
rule
of
law
-
as if men and events had their appointed place in the
unfolding
of
a great story: a story
-
with frequent setbacks, to be sure
-of
continuing progress.
Now the idea of progress has not been fashionable for
70
years, and the
sources
of
disillusionment are well known. And yet, for all the general
depreciation
of
the idea of progress, some
of
us remain unregenerate.
The basis of my own unregeneracy lies in the following beliefs. First, that
there
are
some reasonably consistent long-term trends which can be dis-
cerned in the history
of
European societies, roughly since the Renais-
sance, and that
if
they are not exactly, in the words
of
Nisbet2 as he
sought to heap on them the maximum
of
ridicule, characterised by ‘uni-
linealism, continuity, directionality and uniformitarianism’, they are at
least unidirectional. Secondly, that they are the consequence, sometimes
through long chains
of
knock-on effects,
of
the steady cumulation
of
t
This paper
is
based on a T.
H.
Marshall Memorial Lecture given at the University of
Southampton, March,
1985.
*
Director
of
the Centre for Japanese and Comparative Industrial Research at Imperial
College
of
Science and Technology.
202
British Journal
of
Industrial Relations
scientific knowledge and applied technologies allowing machines to do more
accurately and rapidly things that used to be done by men with the
occasional help
of
animals. Thirdly, that
for
thinking about the future, an
extrapolation of these trends, while not quite as safe a use
of
the principle
of
induction as assuming from past experience that the sun will rise tomorrow,
is at least the road to useful working hypotheses. Fourth,
I
cannot deny a
residual urge to cling to the principle of optimism, the belief that the net
effect of these trends is, on balance, a secular improvement in the sum of
human happiness.
It is true that clinging to that optimism has in recent years become
increasingly difficult. The reasons have to do partly with what is happening
in society and the economy as a result precisely
of
those long-term
technological trends just mentioned, and partly with the related develop-
ments in dominant ideologies.
EGALITARIANISM
The long-term trend whose continuance seems most problematic is the
growth
of
egalitarianism, a recurring theme in
Citizenship and Social Class
where Marshall referred to the growing strength of equality as a principle
of
social justice, the growth
of
a conception
of
‘equal social worth’, not merely
of
equal natural rights.
He
quotes3 Alfred Marshall’s Whig-optimistic view
of the future:
The question is not whether all men will ultimately be equal
-
they certainly will
not
-
but whether progress must
go
on steadily,
if
slowly,
till,
by occupation at
least, everyone is a gentleman.
I
hold that
it
may and that
it
will.
And as for what he meant by everyone becoming a gentleman, he saw it
happening around him, skilled artisans, soon to be called the labour
aristocrats,
.
.
.
steadily developing independence and a manly respect
for
themselves, and,
therefore, a courteous respect for others; they are steadily accepting the private
and the public duties
of
a citizen; steadily grasping the truth that they are men, and
not producing machines.
Tom Marshall’s ‘conception
of
equal social worth’, Alfred Marshall’s
‘status of gentlemen’, Alexis de Tocqueville’s earlier ‘basic equality
of
~ondition,~
-
they all had in mind the same thing. But the concept turns
out on examination to be a somewhat elusive one. It is not just a matter
of
measureable institutional features, the changes in which Marshall
charted: the steadily added-to bundle
of
rights accorded by public in-
stitutions to all citizens irrespective
of
their personal characteristics,
hereditary
or
acquired. Nor is it that with the addition
of
other features,
also in principle measurable, like the degree of formal respect revealed by
the terms
of
address people use to each other in society. We all know
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