Dr. Jörg Neuheiser

Work Ethic between Discourse and Social Practice:
German Attitudes towards Work from the late 19th Century
to the “Silent Revolution of Values” in the 1970s and 1980s

Ever since Ronald Inglehart's famous description of a “silent revolution” in the realm of values in Western societies around 1970, intense discussions of related issues such as the role of traditional work ethics, the willingness to work especially among the younger generation, and the nature of contemporary attitudes about work have been highly prevalent in Germany. Correspondingly, a broad public debate was provoked in 1975 by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s assertion that a general “loss of values” had taken place. Based on polls, Noelle-Neumann outlined a dramatic decline in the acceptance of traditional middle-class values and emphasized the disappearance of the German work ethic across all social strata.

At this time, social scientists around the world began working with Inglehart’s thesis and extensive research programs were set up to examine these value changes in detail. Interestingly, despite longstanding debates on methods and the quality of the initial polls, almost all scholars today agree on a similar story of changing values. They maintain that, after 1965, most western societies experienced a sudden transition towards new post-material values. This shift radically challenged traditional sets of so-called material values, and established new attitudes towards work that have continued to shape contemporary views of work even in today’s global economic structures.

Despite recent calls for a historical re-examination of sociological research from the 1970s and 1980s, most contemporary historians of Germany tend to accept this picture without question and use these initial poll results in a rather uncritical way. The result is a linear narrative that traces the transition from a society marked by an unquestioned middle-class work ethic towards a society shaped by post-material values of individual self-expression. Given the extensive debates on the nature of work in Germany before and after the so-called “silent revolution”, and the fact that the very term “value change” has continued to play a prominent role in German debates since the 1970s, it is especially troubling that this assumption has gone unchallenged for so long.

Some critical questions that can be asked in terms of this rather simplified dominant narrative are quite obvious: How, for instance, can we account for the role of the National Socialist “cult of (Aryan) work” in broader perceptions of work in Germany after 1945? Did the extensive attempts of the GDR government to establish work and labor as foundational values of East German communist society have no effect on this century-old work ethic?

In a more transnational perspective, however, other questions arise: For example, what effect did the influx of Fordism, the drive for rationalization in the factories of the 1920s, and the radical changes brought about by the need to transform national economies into war economies have on traditional work values? Could these values really survive unscathed until well after World War II? What about religious and regional differences? What about class distinctions between middle-class “Bürgers” and workers, social elites and the lower classes?

Moreover, if we accept this common story of a sudden “silent revolution” during the last third of the 20th century, how do we explain the abrupt nature of this change? Inglehart’s explanation pointed to a generational shift that occurred around 1970 when the first generation that had grown up in these new affluent societies moved into influential positions across the Western world. Yet, polls from the 1990s and the 2000s show ongoing processes of value change that cannot be explained by economic factors alone. How are such values actually established and which mechanisms influence the way they change? And, in which ways do contemporary debates on changing values influence the very processes of value change that they analyze?

The book I am writing is a long-term study of German attitudes towards work that links extensive research on work in the nineteenth century with a historicization of social science research on values from the late 1960s onwards. The project follows prominent calls for a historical re-examination of key sociological terms from the 1970s. The term “value change”, especially with regard to work in a German context, is a prime candidate for such a critical review, especially since most of the West German pollsters and social scientists active in the 1970s were part of a closely-knit network of political parties, trade unions, and employer associations. Results and findings were often published in a deliberate attempt to influence public opinion.

Moreover, my project is closely related to debates on labor relations, consumption, and the changing meaning of work in the context of the emergence of a “new capitalism” in the last third of the 20th century. Historians tracing the rise of consumer society, for instance, prominently argue that the concept of work increasingly lost its meaning for the construction of individual identities over the course of the 20th century. Their thesis (i.e. consumption replaced work), however, has to be balanced against the research of sociologists like Richard Sennet, Eva Illouz or Luc Boltanski/Ève Chiapello, who have analyzed new precarious forms of work, the development of new emotional regimes and a “new spirit of capitalism” in order to describe a dramatic subjectivation of work in recent decades. They find increasingly blurred boundaries between work and non-work in the life of the individual, and a rapid extension of economic principles to every aspect of human life as well as the subordination of all private activities to the realm of work. Consequently, from this perspective, work today appears to govern individual lives and identities more than ever before. However, even these scholars see structural changes in the early 1970s as a decisive caesura in the history of work, and they all integrate the concept of value change and the sociological results from the 1970s into their arguments.

Reflecting on these fields of scholarship, my projects answers two key questions: How did the German middle class work ethic change over the course of the 20th century? Which general changes in attitudes towards work occurred during this century, especially around 1970? In terms of methods, this project uses discourse analysis to examine general debates on work at a national level in combination with praxeological approaches to shop floor studies that deal with everyday work situations and labor or work-related conflicts in companies and public institutions. This combination of discourse analysis and “real work” case studies makes it possible to draw a clear distinction between attempts at discursive “value setting” by actors such as political parties, churches, trade unions and employer associations and “values in practice”, i.e. values operating in actual work situations. In contrast to the rather one-dimensional picture that can be drawn from polls, this mix of methods allows for a careful examination of the relationship between semantical changes on a discursive level and the implicit acceptance of values as seen in social practices such as job training, everyday workplace communication, labor conflicts, and specific ways of “doing work”.

By examining the legacy of Weimar and Nazi work experiences after 1945, the migration of so-called “guest workers” from the 1960s onwards and the German experience of economic, technical and cultural change in the 1970s, the book draws a much more nuanced picture of the development of German attitudes towards work than current narratives of a German post-war identity based on hard work and its sudden lapse in the course of a “silent revolution in values” during the 1960s and 1970s suggest. Instead of detecting a sudden shift in attitudes, my book traces surprising continuities between early 20th-century and postwar ideas of “German work” while also outlining the development of new kinds of devotion to work even within experiments that moved towards a “negation of work” in the 1970s. The text deals intensively with experiences of mass unemployment both in the period between 1948 and 1954 and from the mid-1970s onwards, and it examines frequently forgotten labor disputes in early West Germany as well as wide-ranging discourses about the changing nature of work from debates about rationalization in the 1950s to the calls for new alternative ways of work coming from the New Left and the environmental movement after 1968. It also follows the ground-breaking transition in the gendered perception of work that occurred after 1945 and emphasizes shifts in work practices and debates in the 1950s which seem just as relevant for this change as the impact of a new feminism from the 1970s onwards. Empirically, the book combines thorough shop floor analyses from major industrial factories like Daimler-Benz and case studies on work-related social practices both in New Left work projects and among the white-collar workforce in a local city administration with a detailed examination of fundamental discourses on work and their meaning for both society and the modern individual.