Here is where culture enters the picture. I mean“culture” in its anthropological rather than artisticsense. What values and practices can hold people to-gether as the institutions in which they live fragment? My generation suffered from a want of imagination inanswering this question, in advancing the virtues ofsmall-scale community. Community is not the onlyway to glue together a culture; most obviously, strang-ers in a city inhabit a common culture, even thoughthey do not know one another.

But the problem of asupportive culture is more than a matter of size.Only a certain kind of human being can prosperin unstable, fragmentary social conditions. This idealman or woman has to address three challenges.The first concerns time: how to manage short-term relationships, and oneself, while migrating fromtask to task, job to job, place to place. If institutions nolonger provide a long-term frame, the individual mayhave to improvise his or her life-narrative, or even dowithout any sustained sense of self.The second challenge concerns talent: how to de-velop new skills, how to mine potential abilities, as re-ality’s demands shift.

Practically, in the modern econ-omy, the shelf life of many skills is short; in technologyand the sciences, as in advanced forms of manufactur-ing, workers now need to retrain on average every eightto twelve years. Talent is also a matter of culture. Theemerging social order militates against the ideal ofcraftsmanship, that is, learning to do just one thingreally well; such commitment can often prove econom-ically destructive. In place of craftsmanship, modernculture advances an idea of meritocracy which cele-brates potential ability rather than past achievement.The third challenge follows from this. It concernssurrender; that is, how to let go of the past. The head ofa dynamic company recently asserted that no one ownstheir place in her organization, that past service in par-ticular earns no employee a guaranteed place.

from The Culture of the New Capitalism by Richard Sennett