Richard Sennett

The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life—how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls “the specter of uselessness” haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving. In recent years, reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies Max Weber once called an “iron cage.” Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience. In a concluding section, Sennett examines a more durable form of self hood, and what practical initiatives could counter the pernicious effects of “reform.”

A fascinating study of the search for shelter and the fear of exposure to strangers and new experiences in Western culture and how these two concerns have shaped the physical fabric of the city. Sennett's exploration of the development of urban society and structure jumps back and forth from the ancient world to the present: from the assembly hall of Athens to the Palladium Club; from Augustine's City of God to the Turkish baths of the Lower East Side.

In the brave new world of the "flexible" corporation, Richard Sennett observes, workers at all levels are regarded as wholly disposable, and they have responded in kind, ceasing to think in terms of any long-term relationship with the organizations they work for. This, he argues, has tremendous negative consequences for workers' emotional and psychological well-being. Even in menial jobs, we extract much of our self-image from the idea of a "career"--a life narrative rendered intelligible by specific loyalties, which is to some degree self-invented but also in some respects predictable. Innovations like "flextime" and bureaucratic "de-layering" seem to promise more freedom to define one's career, but in fact they create jobs in which there's less freedom than ever to be had. The Corrosion of Character is a short, anecdotal book, and while one might wish that it included a discussion of the social and psychological costs of the sheer increase of work time in the average worker's week, Sennett has created a pithy, disturbing picture of the cost of the corporate world's much-vaunted new efficiencies.

This vivid history of the city in Western civilization tells the story of urban life through bodily experience. Flesh and Stone is the story of the deepest parts of life? how women and men moved in public and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed them, where they ate, how they dressed, the mores of bathing and of making love? all in the architecture of stone and space from ancient Athens to modern New York. Early in Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett probes the ways in which the ancient Athenians experienced nakedness, and the relation of nakedness to the shape of the ancient city, its troubled politics, and the inequalities between men and women. The story then moves to Rome in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, exploring Roman beliefs in the geometrical perfection of the body. The second part of the book examines how Christian beliefs about the body related to the Christian city? the Venetian ghetto, cloisters, and markets in Paris. The final part of Flesh and Stone deals with what happened to urban space as modern scientific understanding of the body cut free from pagan and Christian beliefs. Flesh and Stone makes sense of our constantly evolving urban living spaces, helping us to build a common home for the increased diversity of bodies that make up the modern city.

Ablaze with intellectual and social change, Paris in the 1830s and 1840s beckons to two English brothers-Frederick and Charles Courtland, an architect and a priest-each of whom is struggling for self-definitionand social recognition. Of their lives and this world Sennett has made a remarkable work of fiction that transports the reader into nineteenth century Europe and into the nature and inconsistencies of culture and faith, and the way each is shaped by the passage of time.

A young cellist is headed for success based upon his technical mastery of his instrument. But, he is stunted, detached from the music itself. It is through the music of Brahms that he seeks his release. Finally, he learns to allow the music to dominate him, to let go and to help him feel.

The fictional memoirs of Tibor Grau, a leading Marxist thinker, recounts his public and private lives from the early revolutionist period to the time of Stalin, detailing his official career, philosophical development, and homosexuality.

Families against the City portrays the life styles of middle class families in a Chicago community during the decades following the Civil War, when major American cities were experiencing massive development. The study focuses on Union Park, a section of Chicago that had been wealthy and elegant in the early years but gradually became a solidly middle class neighborhood of native-born lawyers, clerks, bookkeepers, and office workers. From three directions, Sennett explores how urban middle class families were structured, and how family structure, work, and the urban community influenced each other over two decades. He finds that the dominant mode of family life was of small “nuclear” units – a father, mother, and one or two children – that tended to withdraw from the city and make their homes places of refuge from the alien and fluctuating world outside. This was a refuge not dominated by the father, whose role was gradually weakening, but by the mother. He shows how this shift in family authority became a poignant source of strain between the generations: the sons looked to their fathers for guidance in dealing with the urban work world, but the fathers were as passive in the larger society as they were in the home. He suggests how this situation could have formed the root of that feeling of “father absence” and “mother-centered homes” which psychologists remark in modern, urban, middle class families.

A landmark study of urban society, reissued for the 40th anniversary of the original publication with a new epilogue by the author. A sweeping, farsighted study of the changing nature of public culture and urban society, The Fall of Public Man spans more than two centuries of Western sociopolitical evolution and investigates the causes of our declining involvement in political life. Richard Sennett’s insights into the danger of the cult of individualism remain thoroughly relevant to our world today. In a new epilogue, he extends his analysis to the new “public” realm of social media, questioning how public culture has fared since the digital revolution.

This book deals with class not as a matter of dollars or statistics but as a matter of emotions. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb isolate the “hidden signals of class” through which today’s blue-collar worker measures his own value against those lives and occupations to which our society attaches a special premium. The authors uncover and define the internal, emotionally hurtful forms of class difference in America now becoming visible with the advent of the “affluent” society. Perceiving our society as one that judges a human being against an arbitrary scale of “achievement,” that recognizes not a diversity of talents but a pyramid of them, and accords the world’s best welder less respect than the most mediocre doctor, the authors concentrate on the injurious game of “achievement” and self-justification that result. Examining intimate feelings in terms of a totality of human relations within and among classes and looking beyond, though never ignoring, the struggle for economic survival, The Hidden Injuries of Class takes a step forward in the sociological “critique of everyday life.” The authors are critical both of the claim that workers are melting into a homogenous society and of the attempt to “save” the worker for a revolutionary role along conventional socialist lines. They conclude that the games of hierarchical respect we currently play will end in a fratricide in which no class can emerge the victor; and that true egalitarianism can be achieved only by rediscovering diverse concepts of human dignity to substitute for the rigidly uniform scale against which Americans are now forced to judge one another- and validate themselves.

The excitement of the brilliantly innovative book is that it challenges the reader to revise his concept of order—and to consider the seemingly disparate problems of the individual personality and the urban society in the light of a fresh, unified framework that has the shock of new truth. Drawing on recent ideas in psychology, sociology, and urban history, Sennett shows how the excessively “ordered” community freezes adults—both the fierce young idealists and their security-oriented parents—into rigid attitudes that originate in adolescence and stifle further personal growth. He explains how the accepted ideal of order generates patterns of behavior among the urban middle cases that are stultifying, narrow, and violence-prone. He demonstrates that most city planning has been conducted with the same rigidity, and shows, in specific and human terms, why that approach has not solved and cannot solve our cities problems. The Uses of Disorder is not only a critique of the ways in which the affluent city has failed as a place where the individual—even the affluent individual—can grow. It is also an exploration of new modes of urban organization through which city life can become richer and more life-affirming. The author proposes and projects in concrete terms (including a new use of the police) a functioning city that can incorporate anarchy, diversity, and creative disorder to bring into being adults who can openly respond to and dealt with the challenges of life. Thus, Richard Sennett, more aware of the nature of human nature than most Utopians of the past, sees progress in the creation of new urban relationships that will protect, not stability, but diversity and change. Out of his books, with its free and imaginative insights grounded in a strong sense of present-day realities, emerges the vision of a fully affluent and libertarian society—an arena that will welcome a rich variety of individuals, and accept the conflict that stem from such variety as not merely inevitable but life-giving.

Research on the frontiers of urban studies was the subject of a conference on nineteenth-century cities held in November 1968 at Yale University. These papers from the conference attempt to define what is coming to be known as the new urban history. The cities studied range from small communities - such as Springfield, Massachusetts, and Poughkeepsie, New York - to giants like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston. While the majority of the contributions deal with American cities, four essays examine cities in Canada, England, France, and Colombia. The studies focus on the dimensions of mobility and stability in the social structure of nineteenth-century cities. Within this general frame, the essays explore such areas as urban patterns of class stratification, changing rates of occupational and residential mobility, social origins of particular elite groups, the relations between political control and social class, differences in opportunities for various ethnic groups, and the relationships between family structure and city life. In all these fields, the authors relate sociological theory to the historical materials; a complex yet readable, interdisciplinary portrait of the origins of modern city life is the result.

The MAK exhibition handiCRAFT: Traditional Skills in the Digital Age reflects on the significance and status of handicraft as an integral component of material culture and cultural identity. In six sections, this comprehensive MAK exhibition encompasses handicraft from historical times to current European perspectives, examines how handicraft can help preserve natural resources, explores new developments on the interface to digital technologies, and presents masterpieces from a range of craft disciplines. handWERK Tradiertes Können in der digitalen Welt Die Publikation analysiert die verschiedenen Aspekte rund ums Handwerk. Sie ergründet die Ursachen für den weltweiten Hype um das Handwerk sowie die Begeisterung für "handmade", aber auch die Schwierigkeiten, mit denen HandwerkerInnen heute am Markt zu kämpfen haben. Acht Interviews mit WissenschaftlerInnen und HandwerkerInnen – Ludwig Kyral, Annette Precht/Sandra Thaler, Roman Sandgruber, Martin Schreier, Richard Sennett, Akio Tanaka, Christian Witt-Dörring und Peter Zumthor – beleuchten dieses Spannungsfeld facettenreich. Darüber hinaus werden die öffentliche Wertschätzung, die materielle Kultur und zukunftsweisende Strategien des Handwerks thematisiert. Erschienen anlässlich der gleichnamigen Ausstellung (14.12.2016–9.4.2017) im MAK.

Discusses why people tend to avoid social engagement with those unlike themselves, why increased cooperation is necessary to make society prosper, and the skills necessary for strengthening cooperation.

Practicing Culture seeks to revitalize the field of cultural sociology with an emphasis not on abstract theoretical debates but on showing how to put theoretical sources to work in empirical research. Culture is not just products and representations but practices. It is made and remade in countless small ways and occasional bursts of innovation. It is something people do – and do in rich variety and distinctive contexts as engaging case studies from the book reveal. For example; in Russia’s most Western city, Kaliningrad, residents dig for artifacts symbolizing a German past – even though their parents only migrated to what was once Konigsberg after WWII in the USA, fans of professional wrestling pride themselves on being smart enough to know how much is trickery and how the tricks work yet still believe in the contest. Practicing Culture will reshape and invigorate the sociology of culture not only through internal development but through enhanced connections to the interdisciplinary social theory and to related fields like the sociology of knowledge and ethnography. It will prove an essential tool for students and researchers of cultural theory, contemporary social theory and cultural sociology.