The Society of the Federal Republic of Germany

(Last modified April 2010)

How the tertiarization of Germany’s economy has changed society and work is the theme of this research project. The study aims to describe pluralization processes in the job market and foster a deeper theoretical and empirical understanding of how work in the service sector is being transformed.

The early phase of Germany’s transition from an industrial economy to a post-industrial, service-based economy was marked by high hopes that this shift would mean a move "from the assembly line to people". Service-sector jobs were seen as heralding the humanization of work. In contrast to the routine, machine-based work of industrial production, jobs in the service sector were described as based on interactivity with clients or customers. Knowledge, it was believed, would become the new "axial principle" of society, guiding production, perfecting operations, and substituting stupefying monotony with flexible specialization. Predictions forecasted that work would take on new meaning, leading to greater personal autonomy, successful self-entrepreneurship, and better use of technological progress to serve society. In a service-based economy, the primacy of individual choice would replace the collective structures of dependence characteristic of the industrial age. Interactivity and specialized expertise would also create jobs that were immune to the threat of rationalization, so that society could return to full employment. The service-based economy became a symbol of hopes that contemporary societies could achieve a new balance, a stable "tertiary civilization" (Fourastié 1954).

By the end of the 1990s, Germany’s transition to a post-industrial, service-based economy had advanced considerably, and this shift had become the foundation of political programs that aimed to modernize the country’s labor market. German labor market reforms introduced in the first decade of the twenty-first century were founded on the premise that the expanding service sector would compensate for the loss of jobs in industry. Schemes such as state subsidies for so-called “Ich-AGs” [forms of self-employment] were supposed to promote individual creativity and entrepreneurship, in hopes that positive effects on unemployment rates would result. Even as late as 2009, Social Democrat chancellor candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier attempted to win over voters with an ambitious plan to create two million qualified jobs in the health care system and creative industries by 2020. The policies of the current federal coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Free Democrats (FDP) continue to emphasize the beneficial job market effects of tertiarization. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research held its eighth Services Conference in April 2010; the conference  title, “Creating the Future with Services”, reflects the government’s strategic approach. A strictly quantitative assessment reveals that, while the political goal of full employment has not been reached, the German employment market is at least remarkably stable and now dominated by service jobs: a good two-thirds of all employees currently work in the tertiary sector.

At the same time, service-sector jobs have created considerable challenges for the German labor market regime. To describe recent transformations of the world of labor that are accompanied by sweeping de-standardization, sociologists have developed concepts such as "self-entrepreneurship" and "post-corporatism". Empirical findings tend to support the view that developments in the world of labor are simply variations on the broader theme of contemporary societies’ new complexity that has been discussed by Habermas and others. Research has addressed employees’ subjective experience of the increasing loss of limits, both at the workplace and between work and social life; it has also examined macrosociological, functional linkages between tertiarization and developments on the labor market. At times the emphasis is on service employment as a means of liberating individuals from repetitive routines; at times the burden of individual responsibility is accentuated. Service employment has also been described as an economic zero-sum game, or, in contrast, as a multiplier of functional differentiation. In much of this work, the subjective perceptions of employees, the structural conditions under which they work, and macrosociological effects on the world of work are three levels that often remain strangely separated from one another.

The world of service work can be differentiated on the basis of three specific horizontal criteria that refer to both macrosociological structural elements and changing individual biographies. First, the growth of the service sector has been accompanied by the expansion of women’s paid employment, leading to public debates on how such paid employment can be facilitated (for example, by providing day-care for children). Working women also constitute a specific challenge for personnel management and leadership and for cooperative arrangements on a horizontal level. A similar observation can be made with respect to the second criterion: service work means ethnic heterogenization. From the providers of IT services, for whom English is now the main working language, to low-skilled service workers: securing a framework for communication has become a key determinant of whether companies operate successfully in the face of increasing social diversity. Third, specific elements of individualization also play a role in occupational qualification. Because flexible workplace profiles are a typical feature of service jobs, standardizing relevant knowledge and skills is difficult. In the horizontal teams typically found in the service sector, employees who have gained professional status via autodidactic routes frequently work side-by-side with those whose careers are based on formal training and certification. As a result, employees must constantly re-negotiate their status within a company in interactions with their co-workers.

Further theoretical analysis is needed to understand this shifting panorama of work organization. Key types of service work in the areas of consumption, distribution, social services, and production-related services will be investigated in this project. The study will probe the emergence and stabilization of actual work practices on the backdrop of biographical developments, group affiliations, and organizational contexts. It will also seek to identify and assess hybrid forms of subjectivity, changing concepts of collectivity, and internal organizational forms in today’s pluralistic world of labor.

Although this study explicitly follows the tradition of German industrial sociology, analysis of tertiarization in the world of labor calls for a revision of industrial sociology’s research agenda. The kind of theoretical generalizations generated by classic industrial sociology are ill-suited to understanding today’s pluralization processes. But it would be equally inappropriate to simply abandon the theoretical ambitions that have shaped research in the field. Instead, our goal is to reformulate key questions about work forms and practices, about the organization of work, and about employees’ concepts of society.

The logic of service work differs from that of work in classic industrial production. Consequently, this study begins with a phenomenological exploration and description of job profiles and work practices and activities. How do service workers assess the  implementation of work practices in a given context, particularly from an interactive perspective? Are conflicts indeed less frequent or less intense in service-based society than in industrial society, with its precarious compromise between “capital and work”? Or do changing job profiles and the pluralization of social relations merely mean that other issues and standpoints are now taking center stage in labor negotiations? What interpretations do employees develop to make sense of society, when they are expected to be both highly flexible at work and highly mobile in their private lives?

The study comprises three phases, each involving a combination of different methods:
(1) Expert interviews, analysis of secondary data, and workplace observation are used to investigate structural contextuality and the organizational determinants of work.
(2) Qualitative interviews with employees and observation and analysis of individual job settings have been designed to yield data for the main section of the study. Semi-structured interviews constitute an appropriate method for gaining both broad and in-depth insights into the subjective experience of employees, their biographical backgrounds, work profiles, and the dynamics of group formation processes. Evaluation of systematic observations at the workplace yields a framework for situating and interpreting data won in the interviews and thus facilitates a more precise analysis of each workplace situation.
(3) In the third phase, group discussions will be conducted in order to reconstruct group processes in which standpoints are negotiated.