The Library and the Workshop: Social Democracy and Capitalism in the Knowledge Age

209 Pages·2009·1.43 MB·English

by  Jenny Andersson

The Library and the Workshop

The Library and the Workshop
Social Democracy and Capitalism in the Knowledge Age
Jenny Andersson
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or
in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission
of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Andersson, Jenny
The library and the workshop : social democracy and capitalism in the knowledge age /
Jenny Andersson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-6263-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Mixed economy—Europe. 2. Human capital—Europe. 3. Knowledge, Sociology of. 4.
Europe—Economic conditions—1945– I. Title.
HC240.A799 2010
330.12’6094—dc22
2009014490
Typeset by Thompson Type in 10/14 Minion Pro
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Dilemmas of Social Democracy 7
2 The Political Economy of Knowledge 24
3 Defining Old and New Times: Origins of the Third Way 43
4 Capitalism? 62
5 Politics of Growth 79
6 Knowledge Societies 97
7 Investing in People 117
8 Creating the Knowledge Individual 133
9 The Future of Social Democracy: Epilogue 148
Notes 161
Index 195

Acknowledgments
I have been working on this book for a rather long time, and I’m grateful to
many people for their generous help. Thanks go in particular to Ed Miliband,
Patrick Legalès, Olivier Borraz, Chris Howell, Alan Finlayson, Magnus Ryner,
Geoff Eley, Peter Hall, Andrew Martin, Jonas Pontusson, Andrew Scott, Mary
Hilson, Victor Perez Diaz, Bo Rothstein, and Joakim Palme. I would also like
to thank the Swedish Institute for Futures Studies and my colleagues for their
interest in this book. As I write the last words, my thoughts go to two wonder-
ful people in a beautiful house in Somerville, Massachusetts, who gave me a
home during my stay at Harvard: Ann Gallagher and Frank Roselli.
vii

Introduction
In recent years, much attention has been devoted to the repositioning of social
democracy known as the Third Way, particularly in its Anglo-Saxon form, but
far less to its place in the history of social democracy. The first wave of stud-
ies of the Third Way saw it as neoliberal, as a continuation of significant ele-
ments of Thatcherism as regards the economy, industrial relations, and social
justice.1 Rather, I suggest, the Third Way draws on fundamental continuities
in the social democratic project, continuities that are, however, not unprob-
lematic. In particular, this book explores the Third Way’s relationship to the
knowledge economy and the way in which the Third Way’s understanding of
the knowledge economy leads to a reinterpretation of fundamental postulates
of social democracy around capitalism.
The knowledge economy has been a central element of the Third Way, al-
most to the point of being its raison d’être. Just as earlier processes of social
democratic revisionism took place around processes of industrial transforma-
tion, so the Third Way can be understood as the rearticulation of a set of ideo-
logical postulates in relationship to its conception of a new economic and social
order. Similar to the way in which Social Democrats in the 1950s and 1960s
tried to provide ideological coherence to the industrial economy and the social
and cultural changes it brought with it, the Third Way is an ideological project
that attempts to establish coherent articulations of the knowledge economy.
Some of its articulations are indeed strikingly similar to social democracy’s
discourses on the need for adaptation to the industrial economy during the
Wilson era in the United Kingdom and the Erlander years in Sweden. Since the
1