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A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Sennett, Richard Article A conversation with Richard Sennett economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter Provided in Cooperation with: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), Cologne Suggested Citation: Sennett, Richard (2009) : A conversation with Richard Sennett, economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter, ISSN 1871-3351, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), Cologne, Vol. 10, Iss. 2, pp. 27-32 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/155920 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu A Conversation with Richard Sennett 27 A Conversation with Richard Sennett Richard Sennett is Professor of Sociology at New York 1930s. So, they were resolutely on the left. I just swam University and the London School of Economics and in this as a child. And even though my mother and my Political Science. Before becoming a sociologist, he stud- father and my uncle left the party – in 1939 my mother ied music professionally. Richard Sennett was born in left, and my uncle left in 1956 – this was always there; Chicago in 1943. He grew up in the Cabrini Green Hous- this was social reality for me. When I started in sociol- ing Project, one of the first racially-mixed public housing ogy, I reacted quite strongly against some of the more projects in the United States. Richard Sennett trained at doctrinaire aspects of it. This happened to many people the University of Chicago and at Harvard University, in my generation from the extreme left, which was very receiving his Ph.D. in 1969. He then moved to New York tiny in the United States, a sect more than a political where, in the 1970s he founded, with Susan Sontag and group. So when I was in graduate school, I was very Joseph Brodsky, The New York Institute for the Humani- attracted to in-depth interviewing and to ethnographic ties at New York University. In the 1980s he served as an work, because it seemed so corrective on the ground advisor to UNESCO and as president of the American that a lot of the ideological nostrums that the American Council on Work. In the mid 1990s Richard Sennett communist party was able to say were the least intelli- began to divide his time between New York University gent and the most rigid of all the modern communist and the London School of Economics and Political Sci- parties. You know, I reacted very much against that. ence. I suppose what’s happened in my career is that I re- Richard Sennett is one of the world’s most prominent turned to the left, but from a different kind of data, and critical sociological thinkers. He has received many prizes that has produced a different kind of social analysis. I and honours, amongst them the Hegel Prize for lifetime have studied two things in my career: work and cities – achievement in the humanities and social sciences, and work and place. These are the two things I am interested the Amalfi and Ebert prizes for sociology. He is a fellow in. And [in the late 1960s, early 1970s] I started doing of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the research on the sociology of work for a book called the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Society of the Arts, The Hidden Injuries of Class, which is just about to be and the Academia Europea. He is past president of the published again in Britain, after thirty years of being out American Council on Work and the former Director of of print. It was a book that looked rather sceptically at a the New York Institute for the Humanities. proposition about the United States, and at a proposition about class. The proposition about the United States His central publications include: The Craftsman (Yale was that American workers had very low levels of class University Press, 2008), Practicing Culture (Routledge, consciousness. And the proposition about class itself was 2007), The Culture of the New Capitalism (Yale Univer- about its bourgeoisification, a thesis that was in the sity Press, 2006), Respect: In a World of Inequality (Nor- 1970s quite dominant. The book used intensive inter- ton, 2003), The Corrosion of Character (Norton 1998), view data from a hundred people to combat that idea. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civili- And then in the nineties when the current phase of zation (Norton, 1994). globalised capitalism started to become apparent, I got really interested in the subject of work. And the last four At the beginning of the interview I ask Richard Sennett of the books I’ve written have taken up that interest. I to tell me more about how he got interested and in- still use a lot of ethnographic and intensive interview volved in the study of sociology, and in particular the material, but I also tried to introduce more of a historical study of forms of new capitalism and its social and po- frame into the study of capitalism. But again, I focused litical consequences. on the labour process – that’s what these last four books have all been about. And I have to say that the more I’ve Richard Sennett: Well, I’d say two things. One was that studied the effect of modern capitalism on ordinary I grew up in a rather unusual family, because all mem- workers the more I feel I return to the radical roots of my bers of my family worked for the communist party in the childhood. This system is obscene. And I think it’s really economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter Volume 10, Number 2 (March 2009) A Conversation with Richard Sennett 28 hard on ordinary workers, culturally and socially, not just economics. Why did you find behavioural economics in terms of familiar things like inequality gaps or wages, very fruitful and useful to engage with? And what but also in terms of conducting a family life, relations to strands in economic thinking would you say do you write other people in the community, sense of life merit. It’s a against? culturally destructive system. Well, whatever I would write against, obviously, is neo- How would you see your work in relation to the field of liberal economics. I’m afraid a bête noir of mine is Jeffrey economic sociology? To what extent has your work been Sachs. The kind of work he did, you know, did enor- influenced by works that have been done within the mous harm when it was applied in the real world. As field of economic sociology? you know, I am a critic of the social and cultural consequences of neoliberalism. Against those economists I feel Well, part of the answer is a very personal one, since I very strongly. And I would say my work is set against am married to an economic sociologist [Saskia Sassen]. I particularly rational choice forms of economics. The have learned every twist and turn in this field as it were economists I found very sympathetic are people like on the pillow. But more generally I’ve had good relations Edmund Phelps and Joseph Stiglitz who are both of with people like Mark Granovetter, people who did course critics of neoliberalism. I think Phelps for example network analysis, even with Harrison White. My interac- has made enormous advances in understanding the role tion with people in this field has been about the relation that skill plays in structuring work life. So, those have in work between social networks and what you would been really positive stimuluses for me. I’ve been more think of as more functional productive networks, and ambivalent about people like Richard Layard who is a particularly the relation between informal and formal friend, but – and what I say to you I have said to him networks. And I really learned quite a lot from Harrison endlessly – it’s misplaced to confuse the respect that White and Mark Granovetter. That was very useful work people get from work, and the sense of having integrity, to me. with happiness of gratification, and that kind of economics is, it seems to me, not very sociologically sophis- In what way? ticated. – That basically is where I have had contact with – both positive and negative – with economics. I mean I Well, because if you are a cleaner from Portugal in a read somebody like Galbraith, of course, as we all do, it British office, or a Mexican farm worker in North Amer- is a great pleasure, because he is a great writer, but in ica, it’s the informal networks you have that keep you my own work it has not meant that much.

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