Adam Arvidsson, on how the ethical surplus can be appropriated. Today, the last two (ouf of four) strategies.

This is part four of the new ‘Book of the Week’ experiment, where we will publish excerpts of new books. Adam Arvidsson’s book on the Ethical Economy is a draft, to which you are strongly invited to contribute. You may do so in the form of comments, separate blog entries, or by using the discussion page at the Wiki version.

Part 3, 2, and 1 were published each day earlier this week.

Wiki Entry to Ethical Economy

and the full chapter of the Ethical Economy Book Project

Adam Arvidsson continues his exploration of strategies of the appropriation of the social surplus:

enclosure

Often however the networks of ethically motivated productivity do not occur spontaneously but are the result of netarchic capitals own investments. Capital empowers cooperation so that it unfolds in ways that generate a desirable form of surplus. It could be argued that such forms of strategic empowerment of cooperation originated with the toyotist management philosophies that became popular in the 1970s, in part as a response to vociferous labour movements demanding more influence over the production process, and ‘industrial democracy’. Toyotism consists in empowering the ethical productivity of worker sociality so that it itself produces arrangements that are able to coordinate and organize the production process that are far more efficient than those invented by company engineers. Essentially a response to automation, toyotism constitutes an attempt to empower and steer the ethical productivity of worker sociality so that it produces the new kinds of immaterial assets- flexibility, just in time coordination, continuous innovation- that have now become the key strategic sources of corporate value. With the increasing centrality of ‘knowledge’ or ‘creative’ work in the 1980s and 1990s, similar strategies have become common in management. Unlike taylorist or bureaucratic models, contemporary management works with empowerment, rather than discipline. It is increasingly a matter of creating an artificial context, a corporate culture, a ubiquitous brand that enables the freedom of employees to quite naturally take the desired direction. In part this is about what Alex Galloway has called protocol, about providing deep preconditions of action that has a structuring effects- a bit like the basic ‘facts’ of a computer game: that the avatar can only jump a certain distance or only has a determined number of lives. In part it is something more comprehensive, an attempt to directly construct a functional employer subjectivity where freedom naturally evolves in a particular direction. This is the deep rationale behind the contemporary salience in management of psy-tecnologies like neuro-linguistic programming, or the organization of particular forms of corporate sociality or affectively intense experiences- like the weekend survival course. The brand of course works this way to. It strives to become a social medium which is able to organize the free unfolding of inter-subjectivity in particular ways.

financialization

But often the value stream is appropriated far from where the ethical surplus is produced. The $ 580 billion that Rupert Murdoch paid for MySpace, or the € 2.1 Billion that Ebay paid for Skype are figures that are entirely unrelated to the size of future revenues form either advertising or users fees that the two sites can generate. The price reflects the logic of financial markets. This logic is connected, if tenuously to the ethical economy of users, in the sense that the ethical surplus that they produce, and that a company is able to claim in some way, form an important part of the motivation of share prices. This development has been particularly clear in the case of brand values, where measurement systems, like that of Branchannel, serve mainly to construct data that can motivate financial decisions. This relationship is tenuous, however since nobody knows what these measurements measure (how to measure Love and Respect?), and even if there are accurate forms of measurement, nobody knows the value of what is, effectively measured- the ethical surplus that grounds these values is beyond measure. This way, the ethical surplus becomes yet one dimension to the complex calculus that guides what Keynes called the ‘animal spirits’ of investors and other financial actors. This separation between production and valorization- that the two processes unfold according to different economies: the ethical economy of users and the economy of speculation and reputation of financial actors- actually points towards a core characteristic of contemporary cognitive capitalism: the crisis of measure. As I shall develop latter, the crisis of measure, meaning that there is no unitary measure of value, actually entails that the capitalist valorization process is loosing its grip over the productivity of social life. This is a strategic opportunity for social transformation.

See for the full chapter of the Ethical Economy Book Project