Chapter 4: Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and Post-toasties

Author(s): Joe L. Kincheloe

Source: Counterpoints , 1995, Vol. 7, Toil and Trouble: GOOD WORK, SMART WORKERS,
AND THE INTEGRATION OF ACADEMIC AND VOCATIONAL EDUCATION (1995), pp. 75-
102
Published by: Peter Lang AG

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42975000

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 Chapter 4

Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-

industrialism, and Post-toasties

With our understanding of good work, critical theory, demo-

cratic notions of diverse communities, and a critical postmod-
ern pedagogy of work, we are beginning to put together a pro-
gressive vision of work and education. It is now essential that
we examine the changes that are occurring in the socio-
economic world and how these changes affect good work and
intensify our concern for a progressive education. Great debate
surrounds the attempt to classify, to name contemporary soci-
ety. In the following pages I will use the concept of the post-
modern condition to facilitate understanding of work and
education in our day to day lives. Traditional modes of under-
standing do not work when applied to this media saturated,
image dominated era at the end of the twentieth century. Such
conditions demand new ways of seeing, new ways of working,
and new ways of educating. The chapter begins with a descrip-
tion of the economic foundations of the twentieth century -
Fordism.

Fordism - Let's Make a Deal

For many nineteenth century economists the iron law of wages

dictated that the affluence of business and industrial managers
depended on the poverty of workers. For profit to be made, raw
materials would have to be procured cheaply and wages would
be kept to the lowest rate possible. Many observers understood
that such realities produced an inevitable conflict between
management and labor. Cheap raw materials demanded eco-
nomic imperialism with struggles between weak nations and
strong nations, while the attempt to keep wages low necessi-

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76 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . .

tated sweat shops, packed tenements in the cities, and danger-

ous working conditions. Marx argued that such a situation
would eventuate in a worker revolution and the opening of a
new era (Nelson and Waters, 1981, p. 50). Henry Ford offered an
alternative. His factories would produce more at reduced
costs - this would boost sales. As sales increased so would
profits, Ford contended, leading to more prosperity for every-
one. Some of the huge profits would be used to pay higher
wages which, in turn, would create a larger group of con-
sumers. Marxism would, thus, be defeated, as workers with
free time and money in their pockets were unlikely revolution-
aries. Thus, a Faustian deal was made between workers and
owners. Workers would tolerate the meaningless and boring
work of the factory in return for consumer rewards. Workers
would buy into the system (with a little help from advertising
and time payments), working hard with one hand and spending
freely with the other (Aronowitz, 1992, p. 238; Wirth, 1983, p.
219).
The Fordist era began in 1914 when Henry Ford introduced
his five dollar, eight-hour day at his car assembly line at Dear-
born, Michigan (Harvey, 1989, p. 125). The mass production
system employed would not only shape the workplace but
would mold social institutions, education in particular. Draw-
ing upon the rationalism of modernism, Fordist production
procedures became the highest expression of modernism and
the lowest expression of worker dignity. Ford's four production
principles included: 1) the standardization of products; 2) the
development of special purpose machinery to be used in the
construction of each separate model; 3) the fragmentation of
tasks into their component parts and task assignments devel-
oped around the time-motion principles developed by Freder-
ick W. Taylor; 4) flowline replaced static model assembly, in
that instead of workers working around the static product, the
product (the car) flowed past the workers on a flowline. Ford, of
course, was not the originator of mass production and assembly
lines. There are examples of such methods being used as early
as the eighteenth century, but Ford was the first to bring the
forms of modern industrial organization together at once with
higher wages for workers. Once brought together, the new

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 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and ... 77

technology marched across the American landscape like a

plague of cultural locusts devouring the traditions of the soci-
ety. Fordist production strategies and their socio-economic con-
sequences in only a few years changed America forever
(Murray, 1992, p. 267; Nelson and Watras, 1981, pp. 49-50).
The one nineteenth century critique of industrialization that
Ford could not address was the tendency of industrial work to
separate itself from the creative spirit of the worker. A form of
existential death accompanied a job where a worker tightened
bolts to wheels over and over again, day in and day out. Like
other forms of modernist fragmentation, Ford's assembly line
made every task a standard self-contained unit. As a worker
became an integral portion of the line, he or she was rendered
just as interchangeable as any other part. When scientific man-
agement and industrial psychology were added to the recipe,
workers were progressively deskilled. Ford brought Taylorism
and the gospel of efficiency to the automobile plants, supplant-
ing traditional notions of fairness with the magic of efficiency
(Nelson and Watras, 1981, p. 51; Kellner, 1989, pp. 179-80;
Harvey, 1989, pp. 135-36).
Other industries separated managerial conceptualization and
control of work from worker execution. What made Ford's
project unique was the totality of his scheme. Ford wanted to
create a new type of worker and man (sic) - not just homo eco-
nomicus but also homo consumerus. Homo economicus/consumerus
would live, work, and consume in a new society, a modern,
rationalized world. Writing from one of Mussolini's prisons,
Antonio Gramsci recognized Fordism as a new "mode of living
and thinking and feeling life" (Harvey, 1989, p. 126). So total
was Ford's system that in 1916, concerned that workers would
not learn how to consume properly, Ford sent a division of
social workers into the homes of his workers to teach them
morality, proper family life, and the characteristics of rational
shopping. Fordism became synonymous with scientific forms of
regulation associated with modernism (Grossberg, 1992, pp.
345-46).
The phrases, regime of accumulation and mode of socio-
political regulation refer to the consistent, long-term ways that
products are produced and consumed and the way the popula-

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78 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . .

tion is regulated to support such production and consumption

(accumulation) processes. Fordism working as Ford envisioned
it is the quintessential example of a regime of accumulation and
a mode of socio-political regulation. Between 1914 and 1945,
Fordism faced numerous problems that disrupted its attempt to
function smoothly in these roles. Two of the most serious issues
involved labor's resistance to the devaluation of craft skills in
the routinized, deskilled jobs produced in Fordist factories and
the reluctance of the state to employ activist fiscal and monetary
policies to accommodate capitalism's inability to control discon-
tent resulting from its unequal distribution of wealth. Only after
World War II were these problems dealt with in a way that
allowed for the ascendancy of Fordism as a fully operating
regime of accumulation and mode of socio-political regulation.
In this capacity, Fordism set the stage for the economic boom
that lasted until 1973. Fueled by strong growth in cars, ship-
building, transport equipment, steel, petrochemicals, rubber,
electrical goods, and construction, the American economy
devoured massive supplies of raw materials from the non-
communist world and came to dominate world markets with its

products (Harvey, 1989, pp. 121-33).

Labor still presented a problem for Fordism with its tendency
to resist the degradation of work. With the defeat of radical
labor movements in the immediate post-war period, Fordism
began to devise strategies of labor control. Vicious attacks were
launched against unions for communist infiltration, while the
Taft-Hartley Act of 1952 undercut union organizing power in
the workplace. Though unions retained some say in collective
bargaining, social security benefits, and the minimum wage,
they maintained this influence in return for their acceptance of
Fordist production strategies and corporate schemes to boost
productivity and worker discipline. A grand compromise was
arranged that charged corporations with assuring stable growth
in investments, guaranteeing growth in productivity, and rais-
ing living standards. This would be accomplished through the
corporation's commitment to technological upgrading, mass
capital investment, greater expertise in production and mar-
keting, and the use of economics of scale by way of even greater
standardization of products. Corporations would extend and

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 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and ... 79

sophisticate their use of scientific management in order to better

control production, personnel relations, on-the-job training,
product design, and even planned obsolescence in their struggle
for bigger profits.
The grand compromise was grounded on the faith that if
wage increases were linked to increased productivity, profits
were sure to increase. Business and labor were partners in a
common economic struggle. Government would serve as a
bow-tied referee, protecting in theory each institution from the
excessive power and the low blows of the other. For example,
the traditional exclusion of African-Americans from the main-
stream labor force was beginning to cause everyone problems.
The state forced the inclusion of the excluded into the world of
labor and business, even sending troops when necessary to
overturn the forces of discrimination. Giving the appearance
that it was operating in everyone's best interests, government
presented itself as the neutral guardian of the egalitarian
impulse. In reality, however, the leaders of this consensus
(political liberalism) while avoiding the control of corporate
power, found themselves subordinated to it. While there were
differences between the major political parties, in the long run
they were insignificant. Both Republicans and Democrats
agreed to the goals and strategies of Fordism as a politics of
general consensus blessed by the ghost of Henry Ford. Thus, the
Fordist compromise dominated the political and economic
landscape of post-war America (Harvey, 1989, pp. 126-27;
Grossberg, 1992, pp. 139-40).
The Decline of Fordism - And Modernism Too?

As the Fordist compromise began to break down, observers saw

not simply an economic decline but a decline of a way of life as
well. Fordism as the economic expression of modernism carried
the torch of Western civilization, as it reflected the modernist
faith in progress, technological development, and rationality.
These very elements and the arrangements of the Fordist econ-
omy based upon them undermined the supremacy of the
American economy (Borgmann, 1992, p. 62). For schools and
other institutions grounded on this technocratic rationality, the
news is not good. Technique became an end itself while human

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80 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . .

concerns and the goal of deeper forms of understanding were

devalued. The decline of Fordism signaled a decline in the post-
Enlightenment faith in rationality as a panacea. As American
products became shoddier and shoddier, as profits from
planned obsolescence rose, as students emerged from schools
seeming to understand less and less about the world, the
evidence of decline mounted (Bellah, et.al., 1991, p. 92).
As the recession of 1973 destroyed the stable environment for
corporate profits established by Fordism, the transition to a new
regime of production and mode of social regulation began.
Many economists locate the beginnings of the end of Fordism in
the mid-1960s with the rise of the Western European and
Japanese economies, the displacement of American workers as
a result of the success of Fordist rationalization and automation
strategies, the decline in corporate productivity and profitabil-
ity, and the beginning of an inflationary trend (Harvey, 1989, p.
140). The ability of Fordism to contain the contradictions of
capitalism began to be seriously weakened during this period,
as the inflexibility of American economic arrangements became
more apparent. In long-term, large scale fixed capital invest-
ments in systems of mass production, inflexibility undermined
attempts to adjust to new designs necessary in changing con-
sumer markets. In labor markets and contracts, inflexibility
subverted attempts to reform workplaces with new forms of
worker deployment. As social security, pension rights and other
entitlements expanded, government revenue collection was
thwarted by a stagnant economy. The only avenue of flexibility
led to a change in monetary policy that involved printing
money at an accelerated rate to keep the economy stable. Thus
began the inflationary spiral that ended the postwar boom. All
of these specific rigidities were fastened to a configuration of
political power that united big labor, big capital, and big gov-
ernment in the embrace of a set of narrow vested interests that
undermined the productive capacity of the national economy.
Of course, many Americans were excluded from the benefits
of Fordism and as time passed their discontents became more
and more apparent. Only certain sectors of the Fordist economy
benefited from the compromise, those spheres where demand
was volatile or where there was insufficient investment in mass

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 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism , Post-industrialism, and ... 81

production machinery never prospered. Therefore, workers in

so-called monopoly sectors benefited from the compromise,
while workers in the competitive sectors did not. These
excluded men and women were beset by social tensions that lay
the foundation for civil unrest and social movements based on
race, class, and gender. The civil rights movement unleashed
resentments that expressed themselves in a revolutionary anger
that particularly affected the inner cities. As women found
themselves confined to low-paying jobs, the stage was set for an
angry women's movement. As expectations increased and
mobility declined, discontent with the Fordist arrangements
festered (Murray, 1992, p. 269; Harvey, 1989, pp. 137-42).
As the oil crisis exacerbated the serious recession of 1973, the
ability of American capitalism to extend the consumerist dream
to a citizenry with sky high aspirations was thwarted. No
longer did even middle class Americans believe that their
economic lives were destined to improve. The 1970s and 1980s
witnessed a series of attempts to begin an economic
restructuring in an effort to respond to the collapse of Fordism.
These restructuring efforts represented the first manifestations
of an emerging economic paradigm shift. Even with the
evidence of an economic crisis, the American middle class did
not perceive any dramatic economic change until the 1980s.
Indeed, even in the mid-1980s the changes were seen by a
majority of Americans as a moral breakdown, a loss of
American economic, political, and military hegemony in the
world. The "American decline" was framed as a question of
will that could be addressed by a renewal of nationalism and
military preparedness.
This conservative response to the decline set the tone for
policy making on a variety of fronts - political, military, educa-
tional, and economic. Committed to economic policy with faith
in the "wisdom of the market," the conservatives attacked the
liberal Fordist compromise with its embrace of the welfare
state. As they attempted to dismantle the welfare state's safety
net for the disadvantaged, conservatives in the 1970s, 1980s, and
1990s redefined freedom in economic terms. Freedom, they
argued, implies the right to compete and fail, more an
entrepreneurial liberty than a civil liberty. With the corner-

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82 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . .

vatives in power, the state abandoned its Fordist role as the

"Great Mediator" of the competing interest groups and
unabashedly embraced corporate interests and their need for
profits. At the same time conservatives were winning their
political victories, many businesses were desperately seeking to
escape the confines of Fordist inflexibility in this workplace.
This work would lay the foundation for post-Fordism
(Grossburg, 1992, pp. 156, 250; Murray, 1992, pp. 269-70;
Borgmann, 1992, pp. 65-66).

Post-Fordism - Flexible Accumulation

Moving from assembly line production to flexible accumula-

tion, Post-Fordist business and industry began to go after the
consumption spending of the rich. Increasing their rates of
innovation, centralizing ownership, and advancing the auton-
omy of banks and financial agencies, the flexible specialists of
the new economy have changed the face of consumption
(Lather, 1991, p. 32). Business and industry in this new
paradigm are shaped to respond to rather than regulate mar-
kets. Innovative managers see their companies as a cadre of
learners who monitor the market, research patterns of taste, and
dissect the nature of style (Murray, 1992, p. 272). Management
builds economic SWAT teams rather than bulky police forces,
as they think of economies of scope rather than economies of
scale. Production is based on limited runs, reducing costly
reliance on large inventories. Such a strategy requires high-tech,
flexible machinery and workers as learners who change duties
with each alteration in consumer demand (Grossberg, 1992, p.
341). Business time is permanently altered, as the period
between design, manufacture, and sales is contracted. The
media-saturated hyperreality of the late twentieth century
demands the hyperadaptability of procedure.
Hyperadaptability requires producers to become anthropolo-
gists of consumption, first studying and understanding cultural
dynamics and then targeting products and services to different
"demographic groups" (Murray, 1992, p. 270). A retailer
founded, for example, in 1907 as a single store in Atlanta
expands into a mass production and marketing chain after 1945.

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 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and ... 83

As profits began to decline after 1973, the chain closes several

stores that it had established in small towns. Struggling to stay
afloat in the late 1970s the company, on the advice of its mar-
keting anthropologists, rearranges itself in the early 1980s as a
niche market retailer with a group of specialized stores.
Divesting itself from all manufacturing, the firm focuses its
efforts on research and specialty design. A cadre of designers
research lifestyles, linking consumption patterns via commodi-
ties from wine to outdoor equipment, from children's clothes to
investment counseling. They may even name the lifestyle in
question (e.g., neo-traditional cottage, postmodern innovative
chic, or outdoor health granóla) so as to better coordinate com-
modity development in clothing, furniture, domestic services,
food, travel, and recreation. New products are tested in the spe-
cialty stores with the successful ones being ordered for more
extensive distribution. By the mid-1990s, the company's profits
skyrocket as a result of this policy of flexible specialization.
The crowded market of the contemporary era privileges such
specialized forms of production. With the level of computerized
information access, transportation, and communication that
exists in the late twentieth century, a businessperson can put
together from his or her immediate environment what previ-
ously demanded months of time and a small army of experts.
Such realities allow for giant corporations to decentralize their
structures in such a way that lifestyle-based production can
efficiently proceed. Original descriptions of the economic
paradigm shift were typically based on the distinction between
the goods-production orientation of the old economy and the
service orientation of the new one. Flexible accumulation or
specialization is a much better representation of the shift that
has occurred, as it directs attention to the ways postmodern
capitalism is using information and anthropological market
data to expand its economic power and social presence
(Borgmann, 1992, pp. 72-75).
New information and supply systems allow businesses to
order supplies to keep up with demand. For example, every
evening a firm receives detailed computer print-outs of the
movement of thousands of products in its various outlets.
Based on such data, warehouse deliveries are immediately set

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84 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . .

into motion. With computerized access to stocks in the individ-

ual outlets, transportation matrixes and automatic loading and
unloading, this flexible system has overcome Fordism's stock
dilemma. In its shift from mass production/consumption to
flexible accumulation/ specialization, post-Fordism has accom-
modated a social change that Robin Murray describes as not
"keeping up with the Jones" but attempting to "be different
from the Jones" (Murray, 1992, pp. 270-71). Basing their organi-
zation of this consumer desire for uniqueness, Benetton, for
example, developed an automatic dyeing plant that enables it to
modify the color of its clothes based on unexpected changes in
demand. Toyota, for example, has reduced the time General
Motors took to change the dyes on its presses from nine hours
to two minutes. In the process, Toyota was able to cut the aver-
age lot size of body parts from 5,000 to 500. Obviously, such
changes have altered the textbook on manufacturing - rather
then using specific machines to produce large quantities of
standardized products, post-Fordist flexibility employs general
purpose equipment to make an assortment of products.

The Emergence of a New Society:

The Um . . . Whatchamaycallit Era

As the U.S. and Western industrial nations began to move to a

new regime of accumulation, a debate erupted over whether or
not a new society was being formed. A major event in the
development of this debate was Daniel Bell's publication of The
Post-Industrial Society in 1973. The term, post-industrial, has
proven to be an awkward concept, as many of its assumptions
are amorphous and contradictory. Bell maintained that while
industrial societies are goods-producing, employ machine tech-
nology, and are geared around the principle of economic
growth, post-industrial societies are grounded on services,
employ intellectual technology, and are dependent upon theo-
retical knowledge. Critics claimed that many of the changes Bell
documented were already important features of industrial soci-
eties. Services, for example, were said to be important in West-
ern economies since the development of industrialism. In
addition, critics asked what exactly constitutes a service job -
nursing, teaching, warehousing, insurance sales, garbage pick-

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 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and ... 85

up? Interestingly, even as the theory of post-industrialism was

dismissed, the term was appropriated into the every conversa-
tion. It has come to mean, simply, that which follows industrial
society. Thus, the popular use of the term and the theoretical
discrediting of the term exacerbate the confusion over what we
should call the contemporary era (Smart, 1992, pp. 32-38; Block,
1990, pp. 5-6).
Even though many economists reject a number of the post-
industrial assumptions, they admit that the issues the post-
industrial theorists raised are worthy of further study and anal-
ysis. Bell and others pointed out the increasing centrality of
knowledge and information in everyday life. They documented
the changing nature of work, class composition, and social
organization. By around 1955, white collar workers in clerical,
professional, and technical jobs exceeded blue-collar workers.
At the same time service sector jobs were rapidly replacing
industrial, manufacturing, and agricultural jobs in both the U.S.
and other western capitalist countries. In the 1960s and 1970s
these trends were exacerbated, as economists watched dramatic
declines in the industrial and agricultural sectors of the econ-
omy. By the 1980s and 1990s, automation, computerization,
information, and robotization were dramatically rearranging the
economy (Kellner, 1989, p. 188).
The post-industrial theorists made their biggest mistakes
when they placed great faith in the power of technological
change to usher in an affluent techtopia where alienating work
would be relegated to a distant past (Pollin and Cockburn, 1991,
p. 234). Educators and young people were told to get ready for
the technological changes, to learn to cope, to acquiesce to the
expert-produced technological blueprint for the future (Simon,
Dippo, and Schenke, 1991, p. 186). In their enthusiasm for the
possibilities of the techno-future, Bell and the other post-indus-
trial prophets were seduced by the assumption that technology-
produced white collar work is better work than blue collar
occupations. People-processing and information-processing are
rarely more prestigious, participative, democratic, learning-
oriented, or better paid than jobs that require workers to stuff
bread into a plastic bag on an assembly line (Harris, 1981, p. 46).

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86 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . .

Unguided by a social vision or a theory of good work, the

post-industrialists failed to understand the dignity of work and
the interconnection between economic structure, technology,
education, government, and culture. Bell proposed what he
called a disjunctive view of society, meaning that social interre-
latedness around a major determinate no longer holds. Offering
descriptions of three distinct social levels (social structure,
polity, and culture), Bell saw no need to establish connections
that would facilitate understanding of cultural movement or
social change. My attempt in this work is the diametrical oppo-
site of that of Bell and the post-industrialists. Although the post-
industrialist theorists delineated a set of extremely important
economic issues, they provided no framework to make sense of
how such changes affected society or what society might do to
humanize their social effects (Smart, 1992, p. 33). Educational
strategies based on post-industrial theory consisted of little
more than: adjust to the coming technological changes; close
your eyes; and hold on tight. In the following pages I seek to
contextualize the post-Fordist economic changes within a
broader postmodern cultural theory. Something has happened
over the past quarter century that has ruptured social develop-
ment in industrialized cultures. Let us explore the contours of
the postmodern condition as it relates to economic and techno-
logical change, work, and education for work (Kellner, 1989, p.
174). Given the dynamic nature of postmodern social change,
education for work cannot be considered outside its
boundaries.
Contrary to the claims of Bell and the post-industrialists that
we have entered a post-capitalist era, I agree with Douglas
Kellner that late twentieth century capitalism is more pure and
more developed than the earlier stages described by many
economists. The private connection between post-Fordism and
postmodern culture involves post-Fordist capitalism's coloniza-
tion of and penetration into the lived world, the private domain
of individuals. Indeed, knowledge, spheres of information, con-
sciousness, and experience itself have been commodified, that is
they have become features of the market, closely related to
exchange relations. For example, post-Fordist marketers must
construct consumer consciousness in such a manner that they

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 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and ... 87

will be prepared to adopt certain lifestyle choices. After the

acceptance of the lifestyle in question, consumers will be psy-
chologically prepared to purchase entire lines of related prod-
ucts. Postmodernism, thus on one level, becomes the cultural
logic of a new form of capitalism - a landscape littered with TV
images and consumer goods combined to create new cultural
forms that modify social relations (Lash and Urry, 1987; Smart,
1992, p. 143; Kellner, 1989, p. 174).
Before we go any further, a quick discussion of the term
postmodern is required. Go back to the discussion of mod-
ernism in Chapter 1. Understanding the failure of Medieval
ways of seeing the world, modernist thinkers sought new
methods to understand and control the outside environment.
Cartesian science, thus, became a foundation for this new
impulse, as science set out to make sense of complex phenom-
ena by reducing them to their constituent parts for detailed
analysis. Along with this scientific dimension existed the socio-
economic feature of modernism - capitalism with its unyielding
faith in the benefits of science and its handmaiden, technology,
its doctrine of progress, its cult of reason, and its logic of orga-
nization that would culminate in Fordism in the twentieth
century.
Postmodernism has something to do with the questioning of
these modernist tenets. More specifically, postmodernist
observers subject to analysis those social assumptions previ-
ously shielded by the modernist ethos. They admit previously
inadmissible evidence, derived from new questions asked by
previously excluded voices, challenge hierarchical structures of
knowledge and power that promote "experts" above the
"masses," and seek new ways of knowing that transcend
empirically verified facts and "reasonable" linear arguments
deployed in a quest for certainty (Calinescu, 1987, p. 41; Heb-
dige, 1989, p. 226). When grounded on a critical democratic
system of meaning that is concerned with analyzing knowledge
for the purpose of understanding oneself more critically and
one's relation to society and their own work, naming and then
changing social situations that impede the development of
egalitarian communities marked by a commitment to economic
and social justice, and understanding how world views and

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88 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . .

self-concepts come to be constructed, postmodernism becomes

a powerful tool for progressive social change (Kincheloe, 1991;
Giroux, 1988; Giroux, 1991).
A warning. Do not confuse what I have just described, post-
modernism, as a form of social critique (a critique of mod-
ernism) with postmodernism as social condition. In the attempt
to describe the emerging new era, the whatchamaycallit era, I
will utilize the postmodern critique (a way of seeing) to
describe the features of the postmodern social condition.
Obviously the postmodern critique and the postmodern
condition are intimately connected - yet the attempt to
distinguish them is the point where many individuals become
lost on the postmodern landscape. As we ponder the new
regime of accumulation and its social effects, we are attempting
to make sense of the postmodern condition. Jean-Francois
Lyotard uses postmodernism to refer to the general condition of
contemporary Western civilization. The "grand narratives of
legitimization" (that is, all-encompassing explanations of
history like the Enlightenment story of the inevitable victory of
reason and freedom) in the postmodern world are no longer
believable; they fail to understand their own construction by
social and historical forces. Reason is undermined because of its
cooption by those in power who speak the authority of a science
not subjected to self-analysis (Giroux, 1991, pp. 19-20). Thus, the
postmodern condition has arisen from a world created by
modernism and extended by technology; the postmodern
critique attempts to take us beyond the nihilism and ennui of
the postmodern condition.
There is no way to simplify this discussion of postmod-
ernism - it is an ambiguous and contradictory concept. The
postmodern condition can never be viewed as a simple homo-
geneous historical period. All cultural expression in the con-
temporary era is not postmodern (Smart, 1992, p. 186;
Borgmann, 1992, p. 75). For example, post-Fordist flexible
accumulation coexists with mass production of standardized
products. Advocates of a postmodern frame of reference always
run the risk of overstating the uniqueness and newness of the
concept. While we cannot simply deny the existence of a post-
modern condition, neither can we simply celebrate it without

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 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and ... 89

hard-nosed interrogation and deep analysis. Such analysis ten-

tatively reveals that most dimensions of postmodernism share a
reaction against modernist forms. While the postmodern cri-
tique refuses to accept modernist elitism and authoritarianism
and thus decenters the stability of the established, the postmod-
ern condition is marked by a social vertigo that emerges from a
cultural hyperreality caused by a loss of touch with traditional
notions of time, community, self, and history. New structures of
cultural space and time generated by bombarding electronic
images from local, national, and international locations shake
our personal sense of place. Electronic transmissions move us in
and out of different geographical and cultural locales instanta-
neously, juxtaposing nonlinear images of the world with
homey, folksy, and comfortable personalities who reassure us
in the midst of the chaos (Gergen, 1991, p. 74; Aronowitz and
Giroux, 1991, p. 115; Smart, 1992, pp. 185, 192).
Allowing these personalities to become our trusted guides,
we are rendered vulnerable to image, relinquishing the desire
for self-direction in the thick informational jungle of hyperreal-
ity. As we involve ourselves in hyperreality, we relinquish our
ties with our once close-knit community. Trading community
membership for a sense of pseudobelonging to the mediascape,
residents of hyperreality are temporarily comforted by procla-
mations of community offered by "media personalities" on the
6:00 p.m."Eyewitness News." "Bringing news of your neighbors
in the Tri-State community home to you" media marketers
attempt to soften the edges of hyperreality, to medicate the
social vertigo. The world is not brought into our homes by tele-
vision, as much as television brings its viewers to a quasi-
fictional place - hyperreality (Luke, 1991, p. 14).
Our contact with hyperreality diminishes our ability to find
meaning to engender the passion for commitment. With so
much information bombarding our senses, we lose our faith
that we can make sense of anything. If nothing makes sense
then what possibly merits commitment. This condition is what
David Byrne and the Talking Heads addressed in their album,
Stop Making Sense. If the postmodern condition is doomed to
hyperreal meaninglessness, they assert, then stop trying so hard
to deny it, stop making sense. Raised in the hyperreality, indi-

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90 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . .

viduals (though unable to name it) reflect the emotions (or lack
of such) that hyperreality engenders. The postmodern peda-
gogical mission involves rescuing meaning even as we under-
stand its destruction by the postmodern information landscape
(McLaren 1991a, pp. 233-36).
Many analysts trace the emergence of this loss of meaning,
this postmodern condition to the late 1960s. If one moment is
chosen to mark the beginning of the condition, it is July 15, 1972
at 3:32 p.m. At that moment the Pruit-Igoe "modernist" public
housing complex in St. Louis was torn down. Of course, this
event has been cited as the birth of postmodern architecture, but
it holds serious cultural implications as well. Pruitt-Igoe was
conceived in an orgy of rationalistic expert planning for the
masses. This "machine for modern living" signified the defeat
of irrationality, the triumph of Cartesian science in all spheres of
life. With the fall of Fordism precipitated by the demise of the
post-war boom, the society entered an era of rapid change and
uncertainty.
Faith in reason was shaken; after all "the best and the bright-
est" had led America into the moral quagmire of Vietnam, just
as the creme de la creme of California's business schools would
walk down the path to Watergate chanting the mantra of rea-
son. With the loss of faith in reason and the corresponding
decline of meaning, ideological identification began to decline
and the relation between affect and desire fell apart. To under-
stand these subtle features of the postmodern condition, com-
pare movies depicting adolescent behavior from before the
disconnection of affect and desire to those of the postmodern
era. Cause-effect reactions characterized by adolescent enthusi-
asm in response to specific circumstances in the old movies
appear camp and dated in light of postmodern adolescents'
severance of such relations. Listen to the reactions of postmod-
ern children to what they perceive as un-hip, uncool behavior -
indeed, the world has changed. Care must be taken not to
inscribe any facile explanation to this dissolution of affect and
desire, any simple cause-effect explanation of it. The point is
that its meaning revolves around the rejection of meaning itself
(Smart, 1992, pp. 191-92; Grossberg, 1992, p. 221).

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 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and ... 91

Postmodern Culture, the Postmodern Economy

While a cause-effect relationship does not exist, the postmodern

loss of meaning inhabits the same place as the postmodern loss
of faith in the master narratives of modernism. These master
narratives involve the stories men and women tell about the
nature of the society. These social stories, in turn, direct the
stories they tell about their own lives. In the autobiographical
stories individuals become heroes or heroines who act on par-
ticular understandings of why they are here, what demands
their attention, and what is significant. Within the stories about
what constitutes a good society, an ethical act, or an authentic
way of being human, the sub-stories of work and education take
place. Work and work education can no longer be considered
outside the postmodern rejection of the traditional stories, the
master narratives of modernism. This is why the integration of
academic and vocational education as a response to the degra-
dation of work and the failure of education to address such
degradation, must be conceived within a context that under-
stands the social, economic, and educational effects of the
postmodern condition (Postman, 1989, p. 122; Giroux and
McLaren, 1989, p. xii; Harvey, 1989, p. 9).
Postmodernism rebels against the modernist tendency to
validate master narratives that tell a universal story of human
history - the progress of reasonable men, the march of civiliza-
tion, the conquest of the primitives, the white man's burden, the
benevolence of the brave missionaries, etc

stories silence the narratives of mar

society - women's stories, the sagas o
tales of victims, and the chronicles
with safe readings of the world (
American society has watched the
Fordism, defenders of the status qu
decline as failure of moral will, a
morality, and discipline. During the
listened to the right-wing stories of
ated by a "spineless" liberalism com
In the educational sphere the right-w

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92 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . .

decline by pointing to a decline in educational standards.

Movement to a "relevant" curriculum and attempts to develop
innovative forms of teaching destroyed traditional standards,
the conservatives argued. When liberal permissiveness allowed
disruptive students to go unpunished, the conservatives main-
tained the decline of standards was exacerbated (Kincheloe,
1992, pp. 1-19).
In the economic sphere the right-wing story of economic
decline was a tale of excessive liberal spending on welfare and
other social programs for the poor. Conveniently ignored were
issues involving the exhaustion of the corporation's market and
habitat. After the post-war boom started to subside the corpo-
rate economy began to run into obstacles of its own creation:
shrinking natural resources, depleted soil, polluted lakes and
rivers, and saturated markets. A Cartesian universalism was
realized in a development of giant corporations. But even the
most invincible icons of economic modernism have stumbled
upon confusing times. The majority of recent economic growth
has not taken place in Fordist industries but within post-Fordist
small specialized firms. Indeed, U.S. Steel no longer exists by
that name and in its old form, GM's share of the market keeps
declining, and IBM has undergone dramatic organizational
upheavals. Taking their cue from such experiences, the rest of
the great corporations have modified their organizational skele-
tons. Giving up a methodical universality that attempts to con-
trol production from raw materials to retailing, the postmodern
corporation seeks flatter hierarchies and more decentralized
forms of management (Borgmann, 1992, pp. 61-63).
The fact that the post-Fordist restructuring of capitalism has
changed the nature of Western culture cannot be denied. A
recent wave of literature written by business people docu-
menting the economic changes and their implications for educa-
tion chronicles the growing perception and acceptance of these
changes. Contrary to many pronouncements, we still live in a
capitalist society. Indeed, post-Fordist flexible accumulation has
increased the power of capital to shape social and individual
life. Existing institutions, though they have faced new obstacles
and have encountered the need to change their structures, have
become even more powerful in the postmodern era. The corpo-

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 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism , Post-industrialism, and ... 93

rations, the state, and especially the military have controlled

research and development resources since the late 1960s. In
their domination they have gained control of innovative infor-
mation technologies and have employed them to increase their
social, economic, and political power. Information and knowl-
edge are not, despite claims to the contrary, independent orga-
nizing principles in the postmodern economy - their use is
directed by the power needs of capitalist institutions (Smart,
1992, pp. 142-43; Kellner, 1989, pp. 176-77, 186-88).
In this context David Harvey reminds us that despite its
changing organizational strategies and inclusive rhetoric, post-
modern capitalism is still capitalism. The three key features that
characterized it in the nineteenth century take-off phase still
persist: 1) Capitalism is growth oriented. It is only by way of
growth that profits can be guaranteed. Under this growth
imperative managers have sought to achieve growth no matter
what the human, social, geopolitical, or ecological conse-
quences. 2) Growth has traditionally demanded that workers be
exploited. This doesn't mean that labor gets nothing, but it does
mean that growth is based on the differences between what
workers create and what they get. 3) Capitalism places great
emphasis on technological and organizational innovation.
Competition demands that entrepreneurs constantly search for
an edge over their business rivals. In addition, organizational
and technological change can be used to sophisticate the control
of labor that is necessary in the effort to increase profits. One of
the features of post-Fordist capitalism that becomes extremely
important in light of our concern with work education involves
innovative developments in postmodern labor control. Such
labor control strategies will be examined in more detail later,
but suffice it to say much of the strategy involves rendering
workers passive observers of social phenomena, objects of reg-
ulation (Harvey, 1989, p. 180; Wirth, 1983, p. 5).
Thus, many of the concepts employed by earlier generations
of critical theorists studying modernist capitalism remain valu-
able in an era of flexible accumulation or, as Douglas Kellner
puts it, techno-capitalism. In Kellner's techno-capitalism,
machines and technology supersede workers in the productive
process. Accumulation is fed by technological innovation and

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94 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . .

automation, not simply by more efficient use of the workers.

Techno-capitalism becomes increasingly multinational as new
technolo'gies such as satellite TV and computers carry forms of
mass consumer culture throughout the world colonizing previ-
ously private spaces. Making use of these new technologies,
techno-capitalism moves money, ideas, information, images,
technologies, and goods and services quickly from one country
to another. If the "business climate" is not good enough in one
place, a corporation will move or at least threaten to move to a
more profitable venue. Such threats can facilitate a corpora-
tion's attempt to consolidate power, as they effectively under-
cut a locale's attempt to tax or a group of workers' attempt to
gain benefits or improve their wages (Kellner, 1989, pp. 177-81).
Techno-capitalism uses consumer goods, film, TV, mass
images, and computerized information to shape desires and
consciousness throughout both the developed and the devel-
oping world. In this hyperreality or techno-culture the image
and the spectacle help shape new forms of mass culture that
mold desire, commodity everyday life, and modify the nature of
politics. Thus, post-Fordism helps shape a world-wide post-
modern culture that enhances the power of those who control
techno-capitalist institutions. As techno-capitalism has evolved,
power has become increasingly difficult for individuals to iden-
tify. Perpetually disguised, power has exerted its influence so
subtly that most people are unaware of the insidious oppres-
sion at work in their own lives. This is why corporations and
their right-wing supporters can enjoy such dominance in the
post-Fordist era. In the postmodern condition, techno-capitalists
have realized that power requires coproduction by those who
generate electronic information and those who consume it. In
this situation those who produce information must seduce the
consumptive public into collaboration. The production and dis-
persion of seductive images requires so many financial
resources that it can only be accomplished by extremely large
firms and industries. In this context, class and racial inequalities
are perpetuated by new technologies and at the same time ren-
dered more impervious to exposure by the removal of those
with limited access to information from the techno-capitalists
who produce it. In postmodern hyperreality TV viewers are

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 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and ... 95

continuously baffled by the nebulous "they" who control infor-

mation, in the process exercising some mysterious form of con-
trol over their lives (Kellner, 1989, p. 181; Luke, 1991, pp. 15-17).
This mysterious form of control, this exercise of power in
hyperreality is chameleonlike in that it can assume a variety of
forms. One of the most important forms, however, involves its
power to entice. Utilizing advertising representations of subjec-
tivity, power interests in hyperreality absorb the antagonistic
and irreconcilable resistances that grow in relation to dominant
society. Rebelling, properly managed, is not only not a threat to
the social order, but it also can be appropriated for the benefit of
the status quo. All citizens can style themselves as something of
a rebel similar to Jeff Daniels' "Charlie" character in Jonathan
Demme's Something Wild. A little bit rebel, a little bit yuppie
businessman, Charlie poses no threat to the status quo with his
occasional failure to pay his check at restaurants. Affecting a
James Dean persona or joining in the Nike Revolution as John
Lennon sings the theme do not require a stakeout by the ghost
of J. Edgar Hoover. As a dominant motif in selling products and
services, the image of the rebel enlists us all as collaborators
(Ashley, 1991, p. 72; Luke, 1991, p. 15).
Peter McLaren captures this point when he writes that post-
modern power organizes life along affective or emotional struc-
tures as it mobilizes desire, mood, and pleasure (McLaren,
1991a, p. 234). Social control in the mediascape involves the
organization of attractive conditions for collaboration. Seduced
by the pleasure of the image, individuals imagine themselves as
self-managed entities who are too rebellious to be controlled.
Failing to understand their own seduction, the conditions for
collaboration, they jump headfirst into the society of consump-
tion. Science fiction has long played with the themes of individ-
uals controlled by an electronic device implanted in their brains.
The electronic information providers of hyperreality bring
science fiction (maybe cognitive science fiction) to life, control-
ling postmodern men and women not by coercion but by the
"freedom" of consumer gratification or choice of lifestyles
(Langman, 1991, p. 185; Luke, 1991, pp. 15-16).
By engaging individuals at the level of emotion and the for-
mation of their subjectivities, the messages of hyperreality gain

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96 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism , Post-industrialism, and . . .

a power never before achieved. Indeed, in the advertisements,

political pronouncements, and entertainment of much electronic
information, we find a postmodern culture of manipulation.
Hyperreality, then, often creates a climate of deceit. Just as the
CIA has been known to produce disinformation designed to
undermine the enemy and create conditions favorable to CIA
interests, advertising and political discourse often distribute a
similar form of data. Such media disinformation creates a
facade of understanding while actually moving individuals in
an opposite direction. Indeed, techno-capitalism has produced a
set of master manipulators capable of by-passing reason and
focusing on affect.
Take, for example, a Levis 501 jeans' commercial. No claims
are made about the quality, durability, or stylishness of the
pants. The viewer is rushed through a barrage of shots of young
people indifferent to the camera who are wearing 501 jeans. The
image created can be read as young, sensual, alive people wear
these jeans - but that's not the major point. We (the people here
at Levis) are so engaged in the culture of "cool," marked by its
low affect and its knowing indifference that we are not going to
make an overt appeal for you to buy our jeans. James Dean
would have never done it that way. Now, associate that image
with these jeans. While multiple readings are possible, many of
them will involve at some level an emotional identification of
Levis 501 jeans with the culture of "cool." We (the audience) get
it because we are experts in the media culture of advertising.
We are tired of the more overt, less "cool" attempts to gain our
attention. Do these powerful images not demand in response a
form of education that attempts to explore the genesis of our
ways of seeing the world? Does it not demand a form of analy-
sis that is capable of understanding the way consciousness is
constructed and uses this understanding to emancipate social
actors from the domination of techno-capitalism?
Any critical pedagogy of work must address the post-Fordist
changes with their new dialectic of technology and capitalism.
Any advocate of good work must understand the role that tech-
nology plays in the postmodern culture in structuring both
production and the lived world of individuals. Smart workers
who are self-directed and on-the-job learners must appreciate

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 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and ... 97

the ways that techno-capitalism brings together the economic

and political spheres to consolidate its power over labor. For
example, few American realize that when computers were first
produced by IBM and others, they were designed primarily for
corporate and governmental use. IBM specifically rejected
"open architecture" configurations that make it easy for every-
day people to insert and create theirwn programs. IBM also
resisted the marketing of home computers that would democra-
tize their use, as ordinary women and men would gain access to
data-banks and powerful word-processing tools. IBM and other
agents of techno-capitalism were worried about the democratic
potential of such technological systems. Workers need to know
such "dangerous knowledge" and work education needs to
frame such understanding in a broader political context
(Kellner, 1989, pp. 181-82, 189).

Postmodern "Dissin"' - Social Disintegration

and Disempowerment

In many ways the postmodern condition can be described as an

era of social disintegration. Unifying ideological perspectives
make little sense to individuals whose consciousness has been
constructed by role models of low affect and dogs selling beer.
Individuals are taught, in a sense, not to understand the political
dimension of everyday life in the powerful media curriculum of
postmodernism. In this postmodern social disintegration,
workers are rendered particularly vulnerable to the power
plays of corporations and their political sponsors (Lash, 1990, p.
38). For example, the post-Fordist discourse of America's inter-
national economic competition constructs a justification for the
manipulation of workers: if America is not to be economically
surpassed by the developing economies of disciplined and
authoritarian Asia, we must cultivate more social obedience
and commonness of purpose and less democracy and liberty. In
other words, the consent of workers and all citizens for that
matter must be mobilized. This mobilization process involves
the way in which individuals come to see themselves and their
role in society as a result of their identification with meanings
produced in popular media and social institutions. For exam-

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98 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . .

pie, the conservative manipulators have been able to draw upon

male identification with the view of masculinity promoted by
the films of Clint Eastwood or with Sylvester Stallone's Rambo.
While the identification is often subtle and subliminal, George
Bush made the relationship explicit with his famous evocation
of Eastwood's "read my lips." What is especially important
here for students of work and education is that the recognition
of the way consent is mobilized alerts us to the fact that
ideological production and even learning itself are processes
that take place outside the boundaries of rational thinking
(Giroux and Simon 1989, pp. 15-16). Feeling and desire are often
more important in the individual quest for identity than is
reason. Conservatives of our era have recognized this reality
and have rather cynically used it for their political gain. Ronald
Reagan did not attempt, for example, to logically convince the
public of the need to return to traditional values; he mobilized
the electorate's consent by appeal to the image of traditional
values, by connecting them to the pleasure of a romanticized
notion of a bygone golden era. We miss a major point when we
assume that thinking is a rational process "untainted" by feeling
or cultural identification.
It is this aspect of thinking, its emotionality and symbolic
identification, that allows the postmodern culture of manipula-
tion to operate so effectively. At the same time, however, this
aspect of thinking holds emancipatory possibilities as we come
to understand the array of moral and ethical identifications that
move individuals to perform courageously and heroically. With
this understanding individuals can come to think in a manner
that connects their logic to an ethical identification with a poli-
tics that rejects the manipulation of human beings and the sub-
ordination of people to external ends, while supporting an
emancipatory politics of self-directed men and women working
and learning together in democratic communities and work-
places.
Work education programs must alert students to the nature
of manipulation and information in the postmodern hyperreal-
ity. Historically, information has been packaged in many forms.
Long before the electronic image, information was communi-
cated through speech, writing, print, and the painted image.

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 Post-Fordism , Postmodernism , Post-industrialism , and ... 99

The nature of our thinking has been shaped in part by the

dominant discursive form for transferring information. In order
to understand the way events are shaped and history flows we
must understand the influence of information formats. We can

talk at great length about the way politics has changed over the
past decades, but we will never approach understanding the
reasons for the alterations until we analyze politics in relation to
information form. Not attentive to abstract and ambiguous
ideas, television focuses our gaze on images. George Bush
standing tall, smiling broadly, and waving to the crowd like a
leader is the issue; Bill Clinton giving the appearance of a com-
passionate man in charge is the issue - not the question of
trickle-down economics, not the question of the reconceptual-
ization of the American health care system. Work education and
schooling in general must address this change in information
format, as they prepare workers and citizens in a democratic
society to protect themselves from this epistemology of hyper-
reality. Indeed, such a social change demands a new form of
literacy - a postmodern literacy - to "read" the effect of 5,000
hours of television before we start to school, 800 or more televi-
sion commercials a week (Postman, 1985, pp. 408), and a
cultural knowledge dominated by Fred Flintstone, Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tiny Toons, Captain M, Super Mario
Brothers, and Ren and Stimpy.
In a postmodern reality saturated as it is by corporate-
produced media imagery, critical educators are faced with a
difficult but not impossible task in their attempt to unmask the
hidden political dimensions of work. Critical postmodern edu-
cators must "capture the image" of what it means to be a
worker, to be a thoughtful, educated person. We must become a
part of the struggle to name popular culture, as we induce our
students to question the basic assumptions grounding the way
the culture views work; indeed, the questioning of society's
political ideology is a basic act of critical thinking. And a
dangerous act it is. Whenever we talk of challenging the tacit
political dimensions of mainstream thinking, of advocating a
pedagogy that admits to its political allegiances, we open our-
selves to attack on our alleged attempt to indoctrinate our
students. Even in these days of qualitative analysis of educa-

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100 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . .

tional research and educational policy that has exposed the

pseudo-objectivity of so-called value-free and politically neutral
positions, many educators continue to charge indoctrination
when analyzing critical pedagogy.
We must keep politics out of education, many mainstream
educators argue, not understanding the inseparability of politi-
cal and educational questions. Critical educators such as Henry
Giroux and Peter McLaren suggest, as I do here, that educators
should be made more political - that we should expose the
hidden politics of neutrality. Our calls are equated with advo-
cacy of a pedagogy of indoctrination. Henry Giroux responds to
such changes, arguing that such criticism is theoretically
flawed, as it confuses the development of a political vision with
the pedagogy that is used in conjunction with it. He then asks:
"How can educators make their own political commitments
clear while developing forms of pedagogy consistent with the
democratic imperative that students learn to make choices,
organize, and act on their own beliefs (Giroux, 1988a, p. 69)?"
Drawing upon the work of Paulo Freire, Giroux envisages an
ethically grounded, democratically committed answer. Educa-
tion is never neutral - indeed, when we attempt to remain neu-
tral, like many churches in Nazi Germany, we support the
prevailing power structure. Recognition of the political implica-
tions of working suggest that teachers should take a position
and make it understandable to their students. However (and
critical pedagogues are very clear about this), teachers' political
commitments do not grant them the right to impose these posi-
tions on their students.
It is not the critical pedagogues who are guilty of imposi-
tional teaching, Giroux contends, but many of the mainstream
critics themselves. When mainstream opponents of critical ped-
agogy promote the reductionist notion that all language and
political behavior that oppose the dominant ideology are forms
of cultural imposition, they forget how experience is con-
structed within a social context marked by an inequitable distri-
bution of power. To refuse to name the structural sources of
human suffering and exploitation is to take a position that sup-
ports oppression and the power relations that sustain it. The
mainstream argument that any oppositional way of seeing rep-

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 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . . 101

resents an imposition of one's views on somebody else is simi-

lar to the nineteenth-century ruling-class idea that raising one's
voice, struggling politically, or engaging in social criticism
violated a "gentlemanly" code of civility. Who's indoctrinating
whom? In the name of neutrality, the mainstream promotes
particular forms of decontextualized thinking - the irony of
objectivity. Simply put, a critical pedagogy of work attempts to
balance the public conversation about work in hyperreality.
The deception of the postmodern corporate world can be
discouraging for advocates of critical democracy. Using a glori-
fication of individualism and individual self-direction as a cover
for uninhibited profit-making, corporations promote a cult of
individualism that plays well to American pre-dispositions. In
the neo-classical economics invoked by conservative corporate
leaders, unimpeded individual striving is a central concept.
Failure to achieve success is always framed as an individual
failing not a social one. From the individualist perspective edu-
cation ensures equal opportunity for all - inequality results
from disparities in natural talent and in one's will to exert one-
self (MacLeod, 1987, p. 1). Collectivity and social solidarity in
this view are positioned as potential threats to economic suc-
cess: within the frames of this cult of individualism economic
success demands the rationalistic division of labor and the
fragmentation of consciousness. Abstract individuals whose
identities are formed outside the boundaries of the society priv-
ilege self-interest as the measure for participating in social rela-
tionships. Whenever society grows wary of corporate abuses
business leaders begin to incant their tributes to an unbridled
individualism that relies only on the competitive features of the
free market to restrain those who would undermine the collec-
tive good. Corporate conservatives have gained tremendous
working-class support with such an argument over the last two
decades. Henry Giroux believes that workers respond posi-
tively to such a case because of their encounters with state
intervention as a negative imposition into their lives (Giroux,
1988b, pp. 36-37,180).
A critical work education rethinks this abstract notion of
individualism, drawing upon feminist notions of connected-
ness. Women's ways of knowing have traditionally drawn upon

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102 Post-Fordism, Postmodernism, Post-industrialism, and . . .

the importance of attachment in the human life cycle, conceiv-

ing their role as co-workers in terms of support and connected-
ness. Refusing to glorify the abstract individual, feminist
connectedness rejects the patriarchal icons of unbridled
individualism. The Clint Eastwood man-with-no-name charac-
ter, the self-contained high plains drifter who asked nothing
from nobody, is the anti-matter opposite of the connected indi-
vidual. The man with no name had no need to establish connec-
tions with a core of friends, to seek new perspectives on the
conditions that he faced. Feminist connectedness, on the other
hand, operates within a network of relationships linked by an
ethic of caring. In this way, feminism protects us from the
appeal to unbridled individualism that has justified so much
anti-democratic, if not sociopathic behavior. Also, based on this
notion of connectedness, feminist theory enters the conversation
concerning the formulation of a democratic response to the
social disintegration and disempowerment of the techno-capi-
talist driven postmodern society.

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