So, I'll start by describing these two concepts.
Individualism is about how new generations expect to be able to assert their individual personality on their life-choices, who they work for, what they buy, who they are friends with.
The term participative society describes how technology is making it possible for individuals to share their thoughts and experiences in an always-connected digital environment that makes it easier for a single voice to have global influence.
There you go, didn't even take a page to cover it!
This is an excerpt from chapter that didn't make it into my book 'Agilization' because it explains in almost too much detail where Individualism has come from.
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The constancy of demand no longer exists as it did in the infancy of capitalism. Consumers are less prepared to settle for the ‘standard Model-T Ford’ and below average service. They want attractive designs, nice smells, tactility, deep emotional support – they want to be different.
There is a new dynamic set to change the way capitalism works. It's called individualism.
Individualism has emerged in the past decade to describe amongst new generations, a psychological self-determination to make life choices without interference. Whilst there can be no doubt that we are all individuals, individualism is now being used by economists and social commentators to explain the impact of this socio-economic phenomenon. How I identify with this evolving socio-economic group is perhaps best exampled through my own personal experiences.
One of my business clients was the chief executive of a rural borough council in the black country. 'John' had previously held the position of deputy chief executive in another rural district council that our company had done some work for. We had helped them to transition from being an inward looking process-focused organisation to one that put its customers first. John had led the project and I knew it meant a lot to him. Through this experience we developed a mutual respect.
John came from a mining family. His father was a coal miner. In fact mining had been the way the family had made its income for generations. Most of John's peer group went to school expecting to become miners when they left. But one day, as John reached the end of his schooling, his father said, "You're not going to be a miner. You're going to work up at City Hall. They make better money there and it's a job for life." Well in John's case, his fathers' vision for his future had come largely true. The next week, John applied for a job at his local Council and over 30 years later there he was a chief executive (albeit not for the same council but close enough).
My own father, now retired, was an engineer and with few employment options that paid enough to feed a young family, in the early 1960’s established his own engineering business producing machine parts for Leicester’s textiles industry. I still remember the occasion when it was the turn of my father to present me with my future. I remember my anticipating a lecture that would chart my course and leave me with a final outcome. Instead my father simply said, "Just do something that you enjoy. But don't worry, if it doesn't work out you can come and work with your mother and I at the factory."
Strangely that little piece of reverse-encouragement was enough. The thought of working in a factory all day, starved of sunlight, then to arrive home late, with lacerated fingers, smelling of suds (a water and oil lubricant used by engineers to keep cutting tools cool that has a particularly pungent smell - once smelt never forgotten) and covered in black casting dust. It was enough to power me through my exams and find another path. I had no idea of what I wanted to be, but I did know one thing - I was not going to be an engineer. For me personally, anything was better than that!
And now today, reading my children their bedtime story I realise that I am fast approaching the other side of that same life event. What will I say to them? Will it matter what I say? For the first time in our society we face a new reality. Our children will not be expected to follow in their father's footsteps. That generation was my father's generation.
They do not need our direction to tell them what they are to become (would they listen?). They are a generation with an open book of opportunity. They are not expected to put their family or their community before their career. Our children will decide who they are, what they want to be, what they believe in. And they know that we, their parents, will do more than support them financially and emotionally.
As parents we will endeavour to provide the essential building blocks that go to make up ‘good people’ – social values, empathy, respect, selflessness, charity – but we will also encourage individualism; the quality and importance of being an individual. This is not an easy option for our children. When someone offers you unlimited career choices, but you’ve no experience of them, how can you possibly decide?
My friend and colleague, Nick Lawrie, told me one time about a conversation he had had with his teenage daughter. Talking about her school friends she reflected the frustrations and apathy of her peers by describing themselves simply as the hopeless generation; a generation without hope. As a father of two young children it was one of those 2-minute conversations that make a mark on your soul and comes totally from out of the blue.
Individualism is a right of birth that countless generations have fought for. The Suffragette’s attaching themselves to the gates of Buckingham Palace to demand voting rights for women, Martin Luther King, Jr. as he campaigned for freedom from racism not to mention countless other acts of selflessness and bravery.
Individualism has been brought about by increased economic freedom, longer life expectancy, greater access to education, equality and a fractured class system. It is something that will impact all of us and it will change society both significantly and rapidly.
Individuals are today embracing technology in different ways to find new relationships, sharing experiences and developing new virtual communities. If you’re not convinced and have a moment on the Internet, visit http://www.youtube.com/, http://www.flikr.com/, http://www.myspace.com/, http://www.aim.org/ or http://www.elog.com/ and you will find thousands of individuals expressing themselves.
It would take some time to describe each of these examples but taking YouTube™ as an example: http://www.youtube.com/ is a web site founded in February 2005 providing a place for people to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube™ is a place for people to engage in new ways with video by sharing, commenting on, and viewing videos and has grown into an entertainment destination with people watching more than 70 million videos on the site daily. This is an online community powered by people. It is visual evidence of a society on the move.
Here’s another example of the changing attitudes that evidence the move towards individualism:
On the 26th May 2004, I was driving home late back from a business trip and tuned into a late night radio talk-show. The subject was a document called ‘Cherishing Life in London today’, published by the catholic bishops of England and Wales. It documented their new instructions on how people should live in today's society. The document offered a new set of ground improvement work streams for a new age that addressed a range of issues including sex education, abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia, infertility and the importance of marriage.
The panel of notables and its contributing audience soon found themselves positioned into two camps. One (for now I'll call them the traditionalists), made up of clergy and a collection of mature, verging on elderly, contributors, made the point that bishops are chosen by God and therefore were ordained by God to set boundaries of behaviour. They said it was a good thing that the bishops were setting moral values on modern human issues such as gay rights, gene cloning etc. because if they didn't, who would?
The other camp, headed by the editor of major European men’s magazine (I'll call it the nouveau view) argued that as an individual, he set his own moral position on these issues and did not need a group of bigoted old men telling him what moral values he should observe. Instead, he argued, the world would be a much safer and friendlier place if people honored their own core values, respected one another’s ways, and people stopped telling other people how they should live - especially religious leaders that create segmentation that leads to friction in society. His argument was quickly interpreted by the 'traditionalists' as being typical of today's selfish generation who only think about themselves and do not respect authority.
I found the two sides of the psychology underpinning the debate interesting and a mirror of the way society is shifting towards individualism. If not the clergy, who else should define the values of people? But there was a deeper argument; that educated individuals living in a multi-cultural society no longer recognise the authority of the traditional institutions. They're not anti-institutional, or bad people, they're individuals demanding the right to determine their own values of behaviour.
Looking at the reluctance of the new generation to engage with traditional community structures as their parents did before them can be viewed in a negative way. Our children might be seen as a generation of wasters that only care about themselves and don't give anything back to society. I take a more positive outlook. Knowing my children as I do, I know they will want to contribute to their community, to help others, but as individuals and not because god or politicians think that they should.
Commerce and the individual
So what does this change of the values of ‘self’ mean to business and commerce?
Today, young people are choosing to opt out of relationships that do not recognise their individualism. When they don't feel that their interests or their opinions make a difference to organisations working by old improvement work streams, they elect not to participate. They don't want to mandate a political party, church or association to speak on their behalf; or to buy from a faceless corporation that sees them as a transaction rather than as an individual.
They have the confidence and expectation to make their own choices.
Aging organisational command and control structures that were developed to help a small number of educated people to manage the ill-educated majority no longer have the relevance that they once did.
Individualism is set to cascade its influence through commerce like a tidal wave. And with confidence in a stable international banking and trading environment, and the advent of internet communications extending consumer reach to global markets, new generations have an unsurpassed level of choice in what they buy and where they buy it from.
As individuals start to give consideration to their own values, they are likely to form values of the people within their peer group, or those that they aspire to be. Their buying decisions will reflect the values they believe in determining the style of products they buy. The task of marketers is going to get ever more complicated to appeal to these individuals – or will it?
Is individualism good or bad?
The growth of individualism does not have to mean that human-kind has lost its soul. On the 26th December 2004, the day of the Asian Tsunami, one of the most devastating natural disasters of the Century, sparked a response of selflessness and charity across the world that has scarcely been seen before. The power of the digital age was demonstrated once more. Within hours of the disaster, pictures were transmitted around the world bringing millions of the world’s people in full view of the disaster; able to see the suffering faces of mothers, fathers, grandparents and children. In our armchairs we think, ‘There for the grace of god go I.’
Should we treat individualism as an unwanted friend after countless generations have worked so hard to offer it to their children as a birth-right?
Can we blame our children if our systems of capitalism and government fail to keep pace with a change in our social conscience? Should we be disappointed that the outcome of greater social care, better education, longer life expectancy, the fight to remove inequality and discrimination from our society, moulds a generation of people that demand more control over their self-determination and to make their own life choices?
Just because the young don't want to be sold to (treated as a face-less transaction), doesn't mean they don't want to buy. A reluctance to pledge allegiance to a political party or association does not mean young people are not interested in politics, or the social privileges of their work colleagues.
In time individualism might be seen as the good thing that I believe it is, but it will only become known, and its value assessed, when examine the impact of change as social commentator Thomas Carlyle did on the consequences of the industrial revolution.
"Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we hould be tempted to call it, not an Heroic, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practices the great art of adapting means to ends. There is no end to machinery. With individuals, in like manner, natural strength avails little. No individual now hopes to accomplish the poorest enterprise single-handed and without mechanical aids; he must make interest with some existing corporation, and till his field with their oxen. In these days, more emphatically than ever, 'to live, signifies to unite with a party, or to make one."
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