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Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of

Cooperation About Richard Sennett, Together: The
Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation (New
Haven, Yale University Press, 2012).
Gary Alan Fine
European Journal of Sociology / Volume 53 / Issue 03 / December 2012, pp 372 - 375
DOI: 10.1017/S0003975612000276, Published online: 11 January 2013

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0003975612000276

How to cite this article:
Gary Alan Fine (2012). European Journal of Sociology, 53, pp 372-375 doi:10.1017/
S0003975612000276
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together: the rituals, pleasures, and

politics of cooperation*

C o o p e r a t i o n i s a honeysuckle construct. In a world often

seen, from Hobbes onward, as fiercely bloody in tooth and claw,
cooperation feels like a summer afternoon. It provides a model of how
we should live, overcoming challenges that are impossible to achieve
alone. We imagine a world made possible through the solution of what the
social psychologist Muzafer Sherif termed superordinate goals in his
Robbers Cave Experiment. These are challenges that caused competitive
preadolescents to work in productive fellowship. And as sociologists never
tire of pointing out, the miracles of culture, even those that are treated as
works of individual genius, are in reality a function of collective action. It
takes a village.
In American politics, the issue of collective action has been joined in
the 2012 electoral cycle. President Obama wisely (or infamously) spoke
of the importance of a State-constructed infrastructure, reminding
entrepreneurs, in the reading of his critics, that they do not deserve the
credit for establishing their businesses. You didnt build this! became
a mantra that stood in moral opposition to the view that shared and
communal effort is essential. This was the recognition of Tocqueville
who depicted a society that was simultaneously firmly individual and
firmly collective. President Obamas argument was true as delivered, but
the subtext was that the balance between the individual and the
government must be shifted, if ever so slightly, to the latter.
No man is an island, and no society is a crowd. The contrast is
crucial for understanding how cooperation benefits groups and how its
reach has lately become limited. This is Richard Sennetts challenge.
Because the concept of togetherness is so complex and multi-layered,
its presence applies more strongly to some occasions, scenes, and relations than to others. And, if truth be told, we do not necessarily wish
for people to be too joined. Separation contributes to progress, as does
unity. As Sennett recognizes, conflict may be a goad to creativity and to
justice. Part of the difficulty with a model that enshrines consensus is
that change becomes a thorny problem. Cooperation and unity can produce undesirable outcomes. Totalitarian regimes, for instance, depend
*

About Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics

of Cooperation (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012).

372
Gary Alan FINE, Northwestern University, Evanston [g-fine@northwestern.edu].
Arch.europ.sociol., LIII, 3 (2012), pp. 3723750003-9756/12/0000-900$07.50per art + $0.10 per pageA.E.S.,
2012

cultural changes
upon cooperation among the forces of control. It is not only craftsmen,
but soldiers who rely upon their fellows.
One of the great pleasures of reading Richard Sennett is his deep
and generous erudition. Sennett strolls through history, spending delightful pages on unexpected but crucial human moments. The chapters
of Together provide this satisfying comradeship. We learn about the
history of Catholic communion, the biology and the sociology of anxiety,
and the politics of gesture. Sennett is a classically-trained cellist, and he
draws upon his experience to examine how musicians depend upon each
other to create the sounds that we treasure as well as the constraints of
architectural design on the efficient production of stringed instruments.
Music is, as Sennett well-recognizes, a profound case in which comrades
working together is crucial to the outcome, not just in the performance,
but on the production of those objects on which performance depends.
But this is one of many cases. We learn, too, of Sennetts research with
Wall Street brokers, their challenges in coordination and the problems
and failure of Internet collaboration: the crash of GoogleWave, a system
too constrained for the give-and-take of craft creativity.
At various points in the argument Sennett returns to a remarkable
painting of the 16th century German artist Hans Holbein the Younger.
The Ambassadors is a work of art, of history, of politics, and of sociology, intriguing art historians throughout the centuries. (Unfortunately
Sennett does not include an image of the work, easily available on the
web.) For Sennett, The Ambassadors is iconic, incorporating three fundamental changes in Renaissance European society: the transformation
of religious ritual, new forms of production in workshops, and a changed
perspective on sociability. These became the origins of what Sennett
suggests is a golden age of cooperation. What is characteristic of these
changes is social involvement. Citizens are embedded in social institutions: religion, the production economy, and the public sphere. Holbeins
painting, in its glorious and complex symbolism, reveals symbolic indicators of this change. Sennett notes the presence of the open Protestant
hymnal, the mariners technical tools, and the two young men themselves, envoys in a state system that relies on civility and diplomatic
language. Rather than a top-down authority system, ordinary people
constitute the very fabric of society. It is inaccurate to suggest that prior
to these changes people did not work in tandem to achieve common tasks.
However, Sennetts point is not the mundane reality of the process of
getting things done in families and communities, but rather that togetherness became linked to the very ordering of society. Sennett writes
not as a social psychologist, who would emphasize that any form of social

373

gary alan fine

order depends upon people working together from hunter-gatherers to
rocket scientists, but as a theorist of social organization in which certain
systems of collaboration create the modern institutional state.
Sennett refers to hard cooperation (p. 6). By this he means something
beyond the sense that working together is an interpersonal challenge.
Growing out of his commitment to the idea of craft, Sennett argues that
working collaboratively is a skill, that which Aristotle refers to as techn
e,
the art of good work. This is the underlying theme of Sennetts current
writings, building on the century-old analysis of Thorstein Veblen that
craftsmanship matters, but that craftsmanship is not embedded in the
skill of an individual, but in the skill of a community. What is important
about this perspective is that it provides critical traction on understanding a set of baleful changes in the contemporary work process.
What makes Sennetts writing provocative is that after he has described the changes that produced a golden age of cooperative engagement, he argues, perhaps too strongly, that this cooperation has waned.
Our society has become noticeably less groupy. Central is the metaphor of the silo as a replacement for the workshop. The image of the
silo suggests that increasingly, in part as a function of how society has
institutionalized a sharply defined division of labor, we are less inclined
to work together. Collaboration has less value than it once had because
community is trumped by zones of expertise. We have become an I
know best society. This reflects a rosy romanticism of an earlier moment
that might well be challenged. While in certain organizational configurations people work in isolation, owning preserves of knowledge, the
growth of what has been labeled team science has been rapid. Best
practices in many work domains incorporate communal assessments and
collaborative meetings. High-visibility domains, such as space travel and
risky medical interventions, demonstrate the reality of shared responsibilities. If, as the Challenger accident demonstrates, such collaboration is
imperfectly organized, the rarity of such disasters is equally impressive.
If cooperation has not been weakened, then strengthening it is less
an act of recuperation than of improvement. With his emphasis on the
embodiment of community through ritual and shared meaning Sennett
argues that while togetherness is linked to wider, structural domains, it
must also be interpreted as a form of local practice. This emphasis has
linkages to the golden age imagery. Prior to the immediacy of big media,
people operated within local contexts. They held tight affiliations to their
co-workers, even while these groups were linked to institutions. To the
extent that there is a need for bolstering cooperation in this time of cyberrealities and global control systems, it is this meso-level of interaction

374

cultural changes
that must be bolstered. A robust cooperation depends on seeing ones
tasks as simultaneously local, national, and global. Work can be treated as
an individual process and as a universal process, but the argument of
Sennett is that it is also an embedded process, tied to place and to social
relations. It is the ability to listen to others and to heed them to attend
that gives sociality a richness and lasting significance. This ability
provides the skills on which everyday life is sustained.
My greatest concern with Together relates to a need to emphasize the
salience of the interaction scene. Sennett has written a book that
enshrines working together, but he devotes scant attention to group
dynamics and micro-cultures. Yet, if we are to understand how people
create together and why this matters, we must recognize the particular
type of interactional achievement that is involved. Every gathering from
its opening moments establishes a set of shared references, creating
a self-reflexive world. In his late work, Forms of Talk, Erving Goffman
speaks of the existence of a referential afterlife of shared understandings.
By this he meant that groups and communities develop a set of common
signals that participants in that world understand, while being opaque to
those who are outsiders. These cultural referents anchor ones identity in
the community. They serve as a form of collective memory within these
micro-worlds. It is a sense of group history and shared understandings
that permit the forms of togetherness to be possible. Yet, despite many
moments of explanation and uncovering, we see these groups in action
too infrequently. This would not upend the argument, often linked to
effects of and on larger structures, but it would provide a grounding in
collective understanding. Recognizing that cooperation is built on these
cultures reveals the processual basis by which individuals become more
than themselves.
In conjunction with The Craftsman, the first work in Sennetts
trilogy on the challenges of doing good things, Together provides wise
counsel explaining what modern organization allows and what it limits.
Together we can and do produce evil and exclusion but, without the
possibility for good, community becomes impossible and Pandora s
Box is shut tight.
gary alan

F I N E

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