Nowadays, a fundamental change is in progress, which is often attributed to the so-called network society. Network society is structured by a new cultural technique, the digital technique. Digitalization radically alters the knowledge basis of the society and implies deep transformations of the realm of everyday experience, as well as of the self-construction of individuality, subjectivity, and identity (Baecker 2018: 23; Baecker 2010; Kaufmann 2012).
In this process of transition to a new, digital order of knowledge, one can observe profound changes in social and political institutions, as well as the reflexive formation of other modes of subjectivity, whereby the emergent subject is dealing with different possibilities and a more fragile and contradictory self-relation (Byung-Chul 2013). In such context, the world of work undergoes radical mutations that have an important impact not only on the structure of the organizations, but also on the entrepreneurial self and the competencies and requirements of the employees (Reckwitz 2019: 181ff.). The basic features of the post-industrial working world largely pertain to precariousness, immaterial labor, subjectivation of work, flexible specialization, elimination of physical borders, and the establishment of the organizational form of “project” in the knowledge work.
Within the network society, it is observed a restructuring of the organization, as it was noted in the preceding society of organizations, whose dynamic functioning is weakening in the last third of the twentieth century. The knowledge order of the modern society of organizations was strongly characterized by the construction of social norms and representative organizations, such as political parties, trade unions, entrepreneur organizations, media companies, and so on, which addressed common interests to the (social) state and systemically reformulated social conventions, institutions, etc.
This “order” was primarily based on the reflexive self-generation of common practices and ideas by the representation of reality through social organizations and groups, which nowadays are losing their integrational capacity in the digital era of social change (Ladeur 2015: 228). The differentiation of social interests, the dissolution of social relations and structures, and the fragmentation of production processes and production knowledge (Revault-d’Allonnes 2006: 124) make difficult the formulation of a generalized interest by the representative associations of entrepreneurs, employees, and so on, as well as its addressing towards the state.
Experience in known paths of development in economy and technology, as well as a united forum of expression of public interest, directed to political decision making, are also losing their centrality and give their place to an experimental designing of new spaces of option (Ladeur 2015: 229). On the contrary, the society of networks, based on the rise of (cognitive and action-oriented) knowledge and information as production resources, constitutes a new paradigm that forms a different order. The networks are developing in a rather heterarchical way, without a “top”, and are taking the shape of a project.
In this sense, the new paradigm pertains to more complex processes of knowledge generation and tends to create new “quasi-subjects” that follow mobile project-like patterns of cooperation, focusing on “high knowledge”, which involves permanent “processes of self-transformation” (Reckwitz 2019; Ladeur 2016). The distribution of knowledge through networks takes place in different modes, and is more formalized, re-engineered and reworked (Burke 2014). The main emphasis is placed on the rising of project-based hybrid networks, accompanied by the tendency of transgressing the borders through heterarchical connections between market and organization, the overcoming of a hierarchical order, and so on (Ladeur 2011: 152).
In the network society, computerization helps the linking of knowledge and the establishment of new control-regimes (White 2008), which structure and use knowledge in totally new ways. Science and technology are now more application-oriented and combined for the production of goods. On such basis, they are developed project-like connections between production processes which have a profound impact on the forms of the knowledge infrastructure. An important characteristic of the knowledge production within the networks is that new intermediaries of knowledge are arisen, such as Google and Amazon, which radically differ from the knowledge brokers of the industrial era (publishers), because they are not only distributing knowledge, but also change it through a systematic process (Ladeur 2015: 231; Groys 2012).
Together with the change of the common knowledge in the postmodern society of the computer networks, it takes place the transformation of the “individual of the society” (Schroer 2001), whose complicated infrastructure alters in conjunction with the change of the respective knowledge order of the society (Simondon 1998). Actually, there is always a collective dimension and a trans-subjective component in individuality-formation. In the society of individuals, individuality is constructed on the basis of socially produced and instituted conventions (Descombes 2004: 442), complex patterns of behavior, private and public stocks of knowledge (common knowledge) (Mokyr 2004), which are generated unconsciously as emergent effects of spontaneous self-organization (Blumenberg 2010).
In the society of organizations and groups, the individual is defined by their affiliation to a group, or by their functional status as employee, civil servant, consumer, tenant, and so on, whereby the status relations are mediated by the working relationship. In contrast to the relatively stable form of individuality in the society of individuals and the standardized group identities in the society of the organizations, the individual of the society of networks is a volatile “hybrid project” in a shifting environment that loosens its social rooting (White 2008). A shared social knowledge has no more a paradigmatic function. The arising quasi-subjects, based on data driven technologies, are “surfing in a fluid reality” and follow mobile cooperation patterns (Bahrami & Evans 2011).
The fluid self, however, does not repress the former paradigms of the “figure” of individuality, but it rather supplements them; it is dynamically reflexive and finds its unity in the internalization of the external patterns of information connections through which the social sense is generated within the network society (Ong 2003). The new subject goes along with different possibilities, variations, unpredictabilities, fragmentations, and weak elements of an unstable relation to itself. The collective, trans-subjective order, or the postmodern “society of mind” (Minsky 1988), inscribes itself in the symbolic self-perception of the individual in the network (Lein & Hawrylycz 2014). Social meaning arises in every society unconsciously from “cognitive commons”, a stock of practical patterns, social rules, and hidden presumptions (Taylor 2004: 23).
In the contemporary, oscillating and heterarchical society of networks, what it is also observed, in parallel with the singularization processes, is the rise of a “cult of singularities”, marked by the singularization of an emphatic self-view of the individual (Reckwitz 2019), which replaces the general subject figure. As a result, the individual tends to become decoupled from common public issues (or tends to become more private) and cannot be subsumed under a general form. The very conception of the singular is based on the idea that the individual, unlike in previous cultural eras, cannot be subsumed under a universal order as a particular which was already characterized by universality.
Objective norms and standards have no value for the “singular” (Le Goff 2006), for whom diversity constitutes an eigen-value that questions the social bindings. The singulars fight against the generalization; they tend to a “cognitive individualism” (Dieguez 2018), the will to experience the political in its directness. Yet, the general knowledge, as well as the generation of knowledge, cannot be sidestepped; instead, knowledge would be productive, if singularities could contribute to “the formation of a liquefied mode of common interest” (Ladeur 2020).
The singularization of society signifies an overarching structural change which is expressed in the singularization of the world of work and its various forms. In contrast to the industrial system of work until the ‘80s, based on standardized and formalized work and the achievements of the working subject, now in the era of the knowledge economy, where experience has different value (Lehmann 2022), classical organizations give their place to a project-like work based on the model of work as performance (Muniesa 2014), on the criteria of competence, potential, and profile. In this analytic setting, projects can be generally defined as “a set of diversely skilled people working together on a complex task over a limited period of time” (Goodman & Goodman 1976). In the late modern society, projects constitute a singularistic form of the social, based on an heterogenous collaboration of a plurality of singularities, and differ from the structure of the traditional organization oriented to the general (Reckwitz 2019: 193).
With the transition to the network society and the knowledge economy (with its project-based work), it occurs a fundamental transformation of the system of subjectivation of the individual. In the industrial system of work, central for the recruitment of employees were used to be their formal qualifications, academic curriculum vitaes, university degrees, and so on. The objective achievement of the subject of work, according to the formalized logic, was closely connected to the professional position, with defined activities and tasks, as well as with agreed working time and a permanent working place (Reckwitz 2019: 211).
In the economy of singularities, what it matters for the late modern working subject is not the formal educational attainment, but their actual (certified or self-reported) skills, emotional competence, experiment-friendly spirit, originality, open-mindedness, cosmopolitanism, and so on. All these correspond to the demand for the “highly qualified”. The bureaucratic employee of the (modern) achievement society is displaced by the (project-oriented) collaborator or freelancer as a particular and creative personality for whom the formal qualifications are simply a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Arguably, more important for the recruitment (even with the use of data-driven tools) of the postmodern working subject and the project work are now the informal competences of the singular individual, such as cooperation ability, enthusiasm for new roles, entrepreneurial competence, and versatility as the most central requirement (Reckwitz 2019: 204); in addition to social engagement, hobbies, knowledge of an unusual foreign language, etc. An important element of the profile of the postmodern subject of work includes some competences and experiences acquired both inside and outside the work and not through formal vocational training. In such context, Professor Maren Lehmann (2022) notes about the late modern subject of work: “man does not know what is a firm, man learns it, man does not know what is a form, man learns it”.
The remodeling of the working world into an economy of singularities finds its vivid expression in the orientation of the activities of the subject of work. Whereas in the industrial era the implementation of the competences into a practice was connected with the objective achievement of the subject of work in a fixed place, now in the late modern culture of work, the practice of the working subject is expressed in the singularistic logic of the performance economy. Artists, authors, or architects, as working subjects, are performance workers in the sense that they stage something before the public and demonstrate personality characteristics in the attempt to attract and win the other.
In another sense, performance takes place inside the organization whereby colleagues and teammates constitute the public (Funken et al. 2015). Work in the performance economy is assessed according to its success, which means that a performance will be valued as singular by the public (Reckwitz 2019: 211). Contrary to the importance of a fixed working time in the achievement of the working subject in the industrial society, for a successful performance, now in the late modern society, it is almost irrelevant when, where, and for how long the work takes place; in the last instance, what it is really relevant is whether a successful singular performance is recognized by the market.
References
Baecker, D. (2010). Der Mensch wird neu formatiert, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 31.05.2010
Baecker, D. (2018). Gesellschaft 4.0 oder die Lücke die der Rechner lässt. Leipzig: Merve Verlag.
Bahrami, H., & Evans, S. (2011). Super-Flexibility for Real Time Adaptation: Perspectives from Silicon Valley, Cal. Man. Rev. (53), 21.
Blumenberg, H. (2010). Theorie der Lebenswelt. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Burke, P. (2014). Um 1808: Neuordnung der Wissensarten, Deutscher Kunstverlag: München/Berlin.
Byung-Chul, H. (2015). Im Schwarm: Ansichten des Digitalen. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlag.
Descombes, V. (2004). Le complément du sujet. Paris: Gallimard.
Dieguez, S. (2018). Total Bullshit. Au Coeur de la post- vérité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Funken, C., Rogge, J.C., & Hörlin, S. (2015). Vertrakte Karrieren. Zum Wandel der Arbeitswelten in Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.
Goodman, A.R., & Goodman, L.P. (1976). Some Management Issues in Temporary Systems. Administrative Science Quarterly 21 (1976), pp. 494-501.
Groys, B. (2012). Google: Worte jenseits der Grammatik, 100 Gedanken, Nr. 46. dOCUMENTA (13), 2012.
Kaufmann, J. K. (2012). Quand le Je est un autre. Paris: Fayard/Pluriel.
Ladeur, K. H. (2011). Die Netzwerke des Rechts. In Netzwerke in der funktional differenzierten Gesellschaft (pp. 143-171). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Ladeur, K. H. (2015). Die Gesellschaft der Netzwerke und ihre Wissensordnung. Big Data, Datenschutz und die relationale Persönlichkeit. Süssenguth, Florian (Hg.): Die Gesellschaft der Daten. Bielefeld: transcript, 225-251.
Ladeur, K. H. (2016). Wissenserzeugung im Sozialrecht und der Aufstieg von “Big Data”. Wissensgenerierung und-verarbeitung im Gesundheits-und Sozialrecht, Tübingen, 89-105.
Ladeur, K. H. (2020). Für ein neues Recht der digitalen Netzwerke. In Digitalisierung, Privatheit und öffentlicher Raum, Hrsg. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Göttingen: Universitätsverlag.
Le Goff, J-P, (2006). La malaise dans la démocratie. Paris: Stock.
Lehmann, M. (2022). Wie kann die nächste Gesellschaft beginnen? Online Lecture, 26.01.2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4JbwttVqLY
Lein, E., & Hawrylycz, M. (2014). The genetic geography of the brain. Scientific American, 310(4), 70-77.
Muniesa, F. (2014). The Provoked Economy. London: Routledge.
Reckwitz, A. (2019). Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Revault-d’Allonnes, M. (2006). Le pouvoir des commencements. Essai sur l’autorité. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Schroer, M. (2001). Das Individuum der Gesellschaft. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Simondon, G. (1998). L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de France.
Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.
White, H. C. (2008). Identity and control: How social formations emerge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
