The provider and the customer both conclude that they have sufficient control in the premodern setting because the parameters (especially social norms) are clear and consistent for both parties. Furthermore, the market exchange is easily blended with a social exchange, for the transactions occur within a close premodern community. “Worthy” relationships are readily sustained. Successful market exchanges are not hard to achieve.
Then comes modernity and post-modernity with VUCA-Plus conditions disrupting the transactions and market exchanges (Bergquist, 1993)! Market and social exchange break apart, with transactions occurring among strangers or even among people relating to one another in a virtual setting. There is no certainty of control by either the provider or customer, in part because the exchange often extends across cultural boundaries and at great distances. Mass production requires mass marketing. We must convince someone to buy our newly produced chair because we have many chairs to sell (Bergquist, 1993).
Trust is difficult to establish under conditions of a hard sell by a stranger or virtual avatar. Legal forms replace a handshake of Trust, while resumes replace personal knowledge of another person’s background, competence, and intentions. Given manufactured and alternative realities, we can’t even trust the legal form or resume. The Worth of another person is elusive when we have no control over the veracity of information received about this person.
Our sense of personal Worth is also hard to establish, for we are forced to “hard-sell” our competencies and intentions to strangers. As Ken Gergen (2000) has proposed, most of us suffer from post-modern “multiphrenia.” We choose to display so many different selves that it is hard to find any of them to be “authority.” None of these conveniently created selves is “Worthy” of being valued by us (or other people). Market exchange becomes a challenge.
Social exchange is also now in trouble, as we move from small communities and close neighborhoods to a world in which there might be temporary “lifestyle enclaves” (Bellah, and others, 1985) that provide community but no sustaining community where we live or even where we work. The “temporary society,” predicted by Bennis and Slater (1968) many years ago, had morphed into a “virtual society” thanks to the Internet and mobile communication devices. Our social exchanges tend now to be based on temporary (often transactional) relationships as well as relationships engaged on a computer screen or handheld device. Trust is established minimally via text messaging; control comes through the manipulation of reality. Worth is bought and sold on the digital marketplace.
Conclusions
While much of the deterioration in relationships and Worth can be attributed to the new technologies, we must not ignore the roots of this deterioration in the two-century-long reign of capitalism in American life (and in the life of many other societies). With the emergence of capitalism, we find the premodern clarity and consistency regarding control giving way to the modern (and eventually postmodern) loss of this clarity and consistency. In the next essay, I specifically consider the ways in which capitalism has challenged our sense of control in the workplace and accompanying sense of personal Worth.
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