Cooperation is a honeysuckle construct. In a world often seen, from Hobbes onward, as fiercely bloody in tooth and claw, cooperation feels like a summer afternoon. It provides a model of how we should live, overcoming challenges that are impossible to achieve alone. We imagine a world made possible through the solution of what the social psychologist Muzafer Sherif termed “superordinate goals” in his Robbers’ Cave Experiment. These are challenges that caused competitive preadolescents to work in productive fellowship. And as sociologists never tire of pointing out, the miracles of culture, even those that are treated as works of individual genius, are in reality a function of collective action. It takes a village.
In American politics, the issue of collective action has been joined in the 2012 electoral cycle. President Obama wisely (or infamously) spoke of the importance of a State-constructed infrastructure, reminding entrepreneurs, in the reading of his critics, that they do not deserve the credit for establishing their businesses. “You didn’t build this!” became a mantra that stood in moral opposition to the view that shared and communal effort is essential. This was the recognition of Tocqueville who depicted a society that was simultaneously firmly individual and firmly collective. President Obama’s argument was true as delivered, but the subtext was that the balance between the individual and the government must be shifted, if ever so slightly, to the latter.
No man is an island, and no society is a crowd. The contrast is crucial for understanding how cooperation benefits groups and how its reach has lately become limited. This is Richard Sennett’s challenge. Because the concept of togetherness is so complex and multi-layered, its presence applies more strongly to some occasions, scenes, and relations than to others. And, if truth be told, we do not necessarily wish for people to be too joined. Separation contributes to progress, as does unity. As Sennett recognizes, conflict may be a goad to creativity and to justice. Part of the difficulty with a model that enshrines consensus is that change becomes a thorny problem. Cooperation and unity can produce undesirable outcomes. Totalitarian regimes, for instance, depend upon cooperation among the forces of control. It is not only craftsmen, but soldiers who rely upon their fellows.
One of the great pleasures of reading Richard Sennett is his deep and generous erudition. Sennett strolls through history, spending delightful pages on unexpected but crucial human moments. The chapters of Together provide this satisfying comradeship. We learn about the history of Catholic communion, the biology and the sociology of anxiety, and the politics of gesture. Sennett is a classically-trained cellist, and he draws upon his experience to examine how musicians depend upon each other to create the sounds that we treasure as well as the constraints of architectural design on the efficient production of stringed instruments. Music is, as Sennett well-recognizes, a profound case in which comrades’ working together is crucial to the outcome, not just in the performance, but on the production of those objects on which performance depends. But this is one of many cases. We learn, too, of Sennett’s research with Wall Street brokers, their challenges in coordination and the problems – and failure – of Internet collaboration: the crash of GoogleWave, a system too constrained for the give-and-take of craft creativity.
At various points in the argument Sennett returns to a remarkable painting of the 16th century German artist Hans Holbein the Younger. The Ambassadors is a work of art, of history, of politics, and of sociology, intriguing art historians throughout the centuries. (Unfortunately Sennett does not include an image of the work, easily available on the web.) For Sennett, The Ambassadors is iconic, incorporating three fundamental changes in Renaissance European society: the transformation of religious ritual, new forms of production in workshops, and a changed perspective on sociability. These became the origins of what Sennett suggests is a golden age of cooperation. What is characteristic of these changes is social involvement. Citizens are embedded in social institutions: religion, the production economy, and the public sphere. Holbein’s painting, in its glorious and complex symbolism, reveals symbolic indicators of this change. Sennett notes the presence of the open Protestant hymnal, the mariner’s technical tools, and the two young men themselves, envoys in a state system that relies on civility and diplomatic language. Rather than a top-down authority system, ordinary people constitute the very fabric of society. It is inaccurate to suggest that prior to these changes people did not work in tandem to achieve common tasks. However, Sennett’s point is not the mundane reality of the process of getting things done in families and communities, but rather that togetherness became linked to the very ordering of society. Sennett writes not as a social psychologist, who would emphasize that any form of social order depends upon people working together from hunter-gatherers to rocket scientists, but as a theorist of social organization in which certain systems of collaboration create the modern institutional state.
Sennett refers to hard cooperation (p. 6). By this he means something beyond the sense that working together is an interpersonal challenge. Growing out of his commitment to the idea of craft, Sennett argues that working collaboratively is a skill, that which Aristotle refers to as techné, the art of good work. This is the underlying theme of Sennett’s current writings, building on the century-old analysis of Thorstein Veblen that craftsmanship matters, but that craftsmanship is not embedded in the skill of an individual, but in the skill of a community. What is important about this perspective is that it provides critical traction on understanding a set of baleful changes in the contemporary work process.
What makes Sennett’s writing provocative is that after he has described the changes that produced a golden age of cooperative engagement, he argues, perhaps too strongly, that this cooperation has waned. Our society has become noticeably less “groupy”. Central is the metaphor of the “silo” as a replacement for the workshop. The image of the silo suggests that increasingly, in part as a function of how society has institutionalized a sharply defined division of labor, we are less inclined to work together. Collaboration has less value than it once had because community is trumped by zones of expertise. We have become an “I know best” society. This reflects a rosy romanticism of an earlier moment that might well be challenged. While in certain organizational configurations people work in isolation, owning preserves of knowledge, the growth of what has been labeled “team science” has been rapid. Best practices in many work domains incorporate communal assessments and collaborative meetings. High-visibility domains, such as space travel and risky medical interventions, demonstrate the reality of shared responsibilities. If, as the Challenger accident demonstrates, such collaboration is imperfectly organized, the rarity of such disasters is equally impressive.
If cooperation has not been weakened, then strengthening it is less an act of recuperation than of improvement. With his emphasis on the embodiment of community through ritual and shared meaning Sennett argues that while togetherness is linked to wider, structural domains, it must also be interpreted as a form of local practice. This emphasis has linkages to the golden age imagery. Prior to the immediacy of big media, people operated within local contexts. They held tight affiliations to their co-workers, even while these groups were linked to institutions. To the extent that there is a need for bolstering cooperation in this time of cyber-realities and global control systems, it is this meso-level of interaction that must be bolstered. A robust cooperation depends on seeing one’s tasks as simultaneously local, national, and global. Work can be treated as an individual process and as a universal process, but the argument of Sennett is that it is also an embedded process, tied to place and to social relations. It is the ability to listen to others and to heed them – to attend – that gives sociality a richness and lasting significance. This ability provides the skills on which everyday life is sustained.
My greatest concern with Together relates to a need to emphasize the salience of the interaction scene. Sennett has written a book that enshrines working together, but he devotes scant attention to group dynamics and micro-cultures. Yet, if we are to understand how people create together and why this matters, we must recognize the particular type of interactional achievement that is involved. Every gathering from its opening moments establishes a set of shared references, creating a self-reflexive world. In his late work, Forms of Talk, Erving Goffman speaks of the existence of a referential afterlife of shared understandings. By this he meant that groups and communities develop a set of common signals that participants in that world understand, while being opaque to those who are outsiders. These cultural referents anchor one’s identity in the community. They serve as a form of collective memory within these micro-worlds. It is a sense of group history and shared understandings that permit the forms of togetherness to be possible. Yet, despite many moments of explanation and uncovering, we see these groups in action too infrequently. This would not upend the argument, often linked to effects of and on larger structures, but it would provide a grounding in collective understanding. Recognizing that cooperation is built on these cultures reveals the processual basis by which individuals become more than themselves.
In conjunction with The Craftsman, the first work in Sennett’s trilogy on the challenges of doing good things, Together provides wise counsel explaining what modern organization allows and what it limits. Together we can and do produce evil and exclusion but, without the possibility for good, community becomes impossible and Pandora ’s Box is shut tight.
