Changing Work Values: a Christian response
Gordon Preece, Acorn Press, 1995
Review by Bruce C. Wearne
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 60
Autumn 1998

Much of the current discussion of work in the discipline of sociology considers its changing character and the ambiguities of our post-industrial commercial practices. This is the continuation of a debate which has been in train since the onset of the industrial revolution, gaining increased intensity throughout this century. These days the key concepts are de-skilling, re-skilling and multi-skilling in an era of 'post-Fordism' (a style of industrial practice no longer constrained by the technology and routines of the assembly line).

Ours is an age of great diversity, and not just in the 'products'. New industrial practices re-shape work and work-places according to the diversity found within and among the workforce. The trend towards 'diversity management' is discussed by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis in Productive Diversity. The authors look beyond the variety of skills required by any one task or workplace. Their approach to the workplace focuses upon the variety of resources that are brought to the job by the workforce. Henry Ford, the assembly line and F.W. Taylor's time-and-motion studies are relegated to the past with this new managerial style. Cope and Kalantzis step forth as purveyors of 'difference'. They promote ethnic, gender and age diversity, as part of a move from 'multi-skilling' to 'diversity management'. This is a subtle shift. In many ways it looks and sounds the same. But 'diversity management' is not only a response to a shop floor situation in which multi-skilling requires complex training and sophistication; it is a strategy in which Cope and Kalantzis themselves have taken on (at least) two roles to safeguard and protect their place in industrial relations practice.

Alongside their academic position as industrial relations theorists they now become 'diversity management' consultants. The authors themselves have extended their skills. They are left-oriented consultants, believing that they can help employers see what is best for their shop-floor practices. In Australia since the mid-1980s business has been assisted by government to retain workers who lack requisite skills. Labour market programs have encouraged language and multi-skill training. But under the Coalition such programs have been wound back, challenging the optimism of Cope and Kalantzis. Their argument is caught, gridlocked in ideology and poorly thought-out rhetoric. Their diversity management is revealed as a mixture of romanticism and pessimism.

In their concluding comment, for example, we are told that workers no longer need to be treated en masse: "even if the system is endemically inequitable, it is possible to strip it of some of its blind prejudices. The system does not have to be racist. It does not have to be sexist. It does not have to be discriminatory. The boss may still drive off in a black Porsche while the workers still catch the bus. But it does not have to be a white person who is driving the Porsche. In the absence of realistic alternatives, this is better than nothing." Thus the socialist world-view is re-jigged with a new age tour de force.

What can be made of this conclusion? Does it not imply that a black Porsche-driving boss, by definition, is less racist that a similarly mobile white boss? Is a female less sexist than a male even if she was not behind the wheel of an up-market Porsche? Such an argument is sentimentalist, romanticist and nihilist. It is nothing but an ideological retreat, a case of intellectual 'deskilling'. So we must ask: should we ignore this stuff or try to unravel such postmodern argument?

It is to the merit of Gordon Preece that he has kept his Christian analysis of work to the industrial arena, neither idealising his alternative nor avoiding the real issues that confront us in everyday life. If I had to make a text-book choice for students in industrial sociology there might be good grounds for selecting Changing Work Values over Productive Diversity. Why? Preece's angle is 'public theology' and 'ethics'. He may not deal with the primary material of interest to the social theory of employment and industrial relations as outlined above, but there are intellectual benefits to be gained in the orientation he adopts. His consideration of Barth and Ellul could expand 'industrial sociology' to consider aspects of the Christian intellectual tradition. Max Weber might give an 'ideal type' of some Protestant and Catholic teaching, but The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is no real help to the secularised student who wants a better understanding of what she does not believe.

Indeed, students should be encouraged to look at issues they are not normally asked to consider or address questions they do not usually ask themselves. Changing Work Values might also raise critical questions about the internal decay represented by nihilism, implicit in the method of Productive Diversity. Changing Work Values, advocates a Reformed Christian approach to work. Preece's avoidance of Braverman and the post-Fordist discussion of de-skilling and multi-skilling is not a fatal flaw, but such absence does raise questions about the method of public theology and theological ethics.

Preece's perspective on work is a 'public theology of work'. This means that his discussion presupposes a critical appropriation of insights about work and employment gleaned from Gorz, Toffler and Jones, but the question is: how does Preece relate to a Christian critique of the neo-positivist perspectives at work in the theories of Gorz, Toffler and Jones? Can it be that these thinkers simply need to add a 'public theology' dimension to their thinking? Would that make their perspective compatible with a Christian sociology of work?

Preece does not critically analyse the structure of these neo-positivist industrial theories. The concern for a 'theology of work' must sooner or later supplement the insights made by these secularist writers about the ethics of the workplace and long-term industrial trends. But where there is no discussion of a Christian theory of society then a 'theology of society' will simply add a donnum super additum of biblical teaching to an argument provided by critical positivism. Changing Work Values is therefore not compatible with a Christian sociology of industry because it assumes that to be a Christian thinker one has to think as a theologian. The book finds its analytical focus in theology, and is aimed at those who would become multi-skilled theologians with developed rhetorical expertise in industrial and political issues. Preece's book is thus helpful in that it raises the question of a Christian perspective of work. This is commendable and no mean effort. My criticism is that it raises the question in a way that, upon a Reformed Christian basis, must be judged to be problematic. An outlook formed in a scripturally-directed way must be the basis for our vocation in all scientific disciplines, including sociology and theology.

But that statement is neither theology nor sociology. That statement is religious, gaining its meaning by its confessional orientation. If it is truly directed by biblical revelation in our lives it will form the presuppositions for our scientific involvement in whatever scientific field we are called to work.

Bruce Wearne lectures in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Monash University, Melbourne.