08th September 2010

In “Capitalism 4.0” Anatole Kaletsky takes a huge, global bite of history and disgorges the view that the most recent financial crisis is the beginning of a new sort of Political Economy. In his version of history capitalism 1.0 came after Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon in 1815, capitalism 2.0 after the 1930’s Depression and capitalism 3.0 after the inflation period of the 1970’s.

Anatole tells us that the defining characteristic for capitalism 4.0 will be a re-framing of the relationship between markets and government as there is less cash in the bankrupt state to do stuff and more cash demanded by us citizens for the things we hold most dear – healthcare, education and pensions.

I think the classification is clunky and arbitrary and the ideas probably more sizzle than sausage, but I’m not enough of an economist to seriously argue with someone who is clearly a bright bloke and the central idea is consistent enough with what I see in the workplace to borrow a small sprinkle of credibility. Anyone even paddling in the shallows of HR over the last decade or so is used to running up the beach to avoid drowning in the annual flood of new legislation. Taken individually each measure either makes some sort of sense or not but taken as a whole there does seem to be an increasing flow of responsibilities being passed from government to business. In this respect, the recent US Healthcare Act, the forthcoming UK Equality Act and employer’s mandatory pension contributions are only the latest examples of increased costs for business to bear on the state’s behalf and increased admin. for HR to suck up while the rest of the firm gets on with making the money. For someone who has spent years encouraging HR people to understand that they were not there as social workers for the firm’s employees this all looks very difficult but it might be a scintilla of good news for @GrumpyLecturer.

Writing over at Michael Carty’s excellent XpertHR series of guests blogs, he also takes a big bite of history. His antiperistalsis is more of the ‘everything’s the same’ rather than ‘everything’s different’ variety and he tells us that the downtrodden masses in call centres and chain stores are just roped to the yoke of management control in a different way from the mill workers and coal miners of the past. For Grumpy Lecturer the role of HR has become to create ‘mass levels of false consciousness about employment’ as we disguise the fundamental conflict between workers and management over pay and conditions by some ‘social reengineering’ that encourages everyone to believe that their interests and those of their employer are the same.

I doubt that Anatole’s view of the future would be enough to convince Grumpy that we shouldn’t abandon our keyboards and man the barricades, ASLEF-like, against, well, something, but its interesting that they take such different views of the importance of the HR profession. On balance, I rather prefer Grumpy’s ‘capitalist running dog’ idea to Anatole’s rather dreary (implied) administration version of the future for my friends and colleagues. ‘Devious manipulator’ sounds so much better on a business card than ‘social worker’.