Misappropriating 'trust'

By Neera Chandhoke

Theories of trust wish away exploitation and social struggles by a clever piece of semantic engineering.

THE AGITATION launched by the workers at the Maruti factory in Gurgaon is significant for one main reason. It has challenged the basic assumptions that lie beneath the post- Fordist, or more precisely Japanese, strategies of factory management, that the historically tension ridden relationship between the workers and the management has been radically transformed. Or that our societies have transited to new ways of negotiating the relationship between proprietors and labour on terms of cooperation, partnership, and trust. If Fordist regimes of accumulation were marked by a hierarchically organised labour process, vertically organised assembly line mass production, and clear divisions between the workers, the supervisors, and the management, post- Fordist factory regimes are characterised by the abolition of both vertical integration as well as hierarchies.

These business methods were to completely invert the Fordist regime of factory management, inasmuch as they inserted the shopfloor worker into what was till then an exclusive managerial ethos. Conversely, managers should be able to take the place of a shopfloor worker in cases of shortages. The managerial staff is available to the workers at all times, and deals with vexatious matters immediately. This system has found its most expressive form in the famed single status uniform and canteen imagery. Many companies, anxious to emulate the Japanese success story, closed the managerial dining room, bid goodbye to the supervisors, and integrated the shopfloor workers into the decision-making process. It is not surprising that one of the earliest examples of the flow line assembly plant - the Fiat motor works at Lingotto in Turin - has been transformed into a museum.

The assumptions that lie behind such strategies are in the main three. First, that what has been historically theorised as the basic tension in capitalism - that between the propertied and the working classes - has been transcended. Second, that the interests of the working classes are and should be subordinated to the interests of the company, rather that the interests of the working classes are the interests of the owners of the company. And third, that collective life whether in the work place or in the wider society is and should be marked by cooperation and trust rather than conflict and struggle.

The logic that underlay business methods was not confined to the work place. It spilled over into theorisations of political and social life; theorisations that bordered on naivete at best, and neo-conservatism at worst. But it found ready resonance in a world which had triumphantly declared an end to socialism. Encouraged by the demise of actually existing socialist societies, Francis Fukuyama, of the clash of civilizations fame, suggested, in his 1995 `Trust. The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity', that the key to economic prosperity as well as healthy democratic life is trust. Fukuyama traced the economic success of a society to one simple fact - that the community should be defined by shared ethical horizons, which bind all people into networks of trust.

For long, theorists have recognised that economic activity cannot occur in a vacuum and that it requires as a condition certain social attributes. Adam Smith insisted on the need for sympathy as a binding force among economic actors in his lesser known but infinitely richer work - The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And contemporary works on civil society identify an otherwise troubled sphere with what is called social capital. In other words, theorists have been concerned with setting in place the social context of accumulation.

But in the hands of Fukuyama, notions of trust border on neo- conservatism subordinating the individual to the community, and the non- propertied classes to the propertied ones. Defining trust as the expectation that people will abide by the shared norms that define the ethical horizons of a community, he argues that generalised trust is important for the efficient functioning of the economy. Whereas particularised trust is confined within the clan, it is generalised trust across community boundaries which facilitates the coordination of economic activities across time and space. Generalised trust in other words enables economic activity to occur without the need for a host of laws, contracts, and explicit rules that are both cumbersome as well as costly. Shared ethical horizons on the other hand enable low transaction costs.

Accordingly, trust allows economic activities to extend beyond the boundaries of the community or clan, the construction of large-scale economic activities, and the sustenance of an intricate division of labour. That is why those societies that possess high degree of trust such as the United States, Germany, and Japan exhibit high degrees of economic success whereas those countries that possess low degrees of trust such as southern Italy, China, and Korea do not show much results.

But what is happening in the U.S., he warns us, is that the stocks of trust are eroding precisely because of the `rights revolution', which occurred in the second half of the 20th century. Rights promote individualism and self-seeking behaviour and weaken group solidarity. Therefore, whereas we find in American life stores of trust from earlier times, we also find the increasing tendency of asocial individualism that isolates and atomises individuals and hampers economic creativity.

Note that in Fukuyama's thesis there is absolutely no mention of a commodity called power, which organises society along the axis of power and powerlessness. He completely and perhaps deliberately ignores the fact that linkages between the participants of a production process are not horizontal but vertical, and that this vertical and hierarchical organisation pre-empts any kind of trust among people whose interests, and whose world views, are not only different but incommensurable. Fukuyama's rejection of rights extends this power blindness, for it is only rights that have enabled the dispossessed to speak back to history, and to demand what is rightfully theirs. But for Fukuyama, rights are primarily the means of advancing selfish individual interests against group norms that may well be unjust, inequitable, and inhospitable to the dignity of the individual. This borders on neo-conservatism, for, as history has shown us, only rights can guard us against vulnerability to power - the right to associate and agitate against unfair managerial practices for instance. And when we look at history, we realise that it is only when workers began to assert rights against what Marx called the `extraction of absolute surplus value' that working conditions improved - relatively speaking. We should be able to see quite clearly why an analysis of trust in terms of the moral dispositions of a community, does great disservice to the rights of all disprivileged and dispossessed citizens to demand a place in the sun, a place that is rightfully theirs, by reasons of right.

But theories of trust wish away exploitation and social struggles by a clever piece of semantic engineering. Correspondingly, when such theories are applied in the work place, the basic conflict between the workers and the propertied classes is conjured away by common dining rooms and one uniform as in the Maruti factory. It is, however, one of the major accomplishments of history that theories that do not take into account the basic contradictions of society are doomed to irrelevance. Nothing illustrates this more than the happenings in the Maruti factory. The workers have been agitating for a month for better production incentives. On October 12, the management demanded that the workers sign an undertaking that they would not engage in any activity that may affect production and discipline. Those workers who do not sign, warned the management, would not be allowed to enter the factory, and would be deemed to be on illegal strike.

Note the use of the term `discipline'. This makes it quite clear that all notions of shared moral norms collapse when it comes to the interests of the managers and the proprietors. The main body of the workers refused to sign such an undertaking, accordingly the production of about 1,500 vehicles a day has been jeopardised. And this in a company that once under the influence of Japanese business methods delivered 140 per cent productivity! The approach of generating trust through a common uniform and one canteen has obviously run its full course.

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