ABSTRACT
The starting point for the discussion in this chapter is the widespread, generalized claim that today’s population of 16-24 year-olds – the most recent population to enter the labour markets of the industrialized liberal democracies – lacks a good, old-fashioned work ethic. In these discussions this generation, often referred to as Generation Y, is made knowable – at a very general level (the generalization of generations) – as a population that has a disposition to work that is characterized as being ‘street smart’, ‘lifestyle centred’, ‘independently dependent’, ‘informal’, ‘tech savvy’, ‘stimulus junkies’, ‘sceptical’, ‘impatient’ (Sheehan 2005, see also Berta 2001, Huntley 2006) For management consultants Real World Training and Consulting (2002), Generation
Y workers are ‘not like us … They don’t have the same work ethic. They don’t respect tradition.’ Now there is much that could be argued with in this sort of generalization. However,
there is not the space here to develop a detailed critique of the concept of Generation Y. Instead, in the discussion that follows, I want to argue that rather than not having a work ethic Generation Y, if there is such a thing, is confronted by the new demands of the globalized, individualized and more precarious labour markets of the twenty-first century. These demands require new work ethics: new orientations to the conduct of a working life. At the turn of the twentieth century, Max Weber published his provocative and
highly influential work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 2002). At a very general level, Weber’s purpose was to explore the particular virtues that should be seen as attaching to work, and the particular influence that certain Protestant sects had on articulating these virtues. My purpose in making reference to the understandings of the spirit of capitalism that Weber explores is to lay the ground on which I am able to identify and analyse the new work ethics that provide the motive forces for the spirit of twenty-first-century, flexible capitalism. I will suggest that the essence of the spirit of twenty-first-century, flexible capitalism is
that the cultivation of the self is the enterprise to which all efforts should be directed in the pursuit of success, measured in terms of labour market participation. A Protestant
ethic promised heavenly salvation and a good life now as the outcome of the pursuit of the individual’s calling. I will argue that twenty-first-century, flexible capitalism is energized by a spirit that sees in the cultivation of the self an ethically slanted maxim for the conduct of a life (ibid.). This new ethic provokes a range of possibilities and limitations for the conduct of a life by the members of Generation Y: these can only be hinted at here and will be discussed, in closing, via the later work of Michel Foucault.
