POSTMODERN EXTENDED FAMILIES

In the postmodern West we increasingly find children living in two households, one of their divorced mother and of one their divorced father. Not uncommon is that they meet children from the earlier marriage of their mother’s new man. Similarly their father may have a new wife with children from her earlier marriage and those children can also meet each other.

The children of those new partners may also live in the household of their other parent where they can meet, again, children of a new parent there. In  this way, chains of children meeting each other in different households arise.

It would be interesting to know how such kids adapt to the laterally extending family lines and how they bring their absorbed experiences into the wider world. As the new kinship system shows both more fragmentation and more integration, which is typical for postmodernity, this system may further contribute to postmodernity.

WOMEN AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD

Quite likely, women never ruled the ‘outside’ world. Matriarchal communities have been rare, whereas female figurines are shown to be unrelated to domination of either sex.

People in tribal societies, onwards from about 25,000 years ago, made small, voluptuous female figurines that are thought to represent nature, motherhood, fertility, creation, destruction or the bounty of the earth. Others believe these figurines were made by men to express their sexual longing for women.

Some believe the female figurines represent matriarchal or female-dominated society but there is no evidence for that belief, whereas in tribal societies women and men tend to only have a division of labor, with women mostly collecting plant food and men mostly collecting animal food, which remains unrelated to domination by either sex.

Furthermore, agrarian societies, from over the last 10,000 years, also made female figurines whereas these societies are clearly patriarchal or male dominated. Male dominance arose with agriculture with men gradually leaving the domain of hunting and pushing women out of control in the domain of plant food, although women kept working a lot in agriculture.

But we may not underestimate the indirect power of women if it comes to the ‘outside’ world. In the ‘inside’ world, women have a strong influence on what men do in the ‘outside’ world. As spouses and even more so as mothers they shape the behaviors of men, mostly along the lines of the particular cultures that women and men live in.

COMPUTERS, MANAGERS AND MERGERS

Three historical reforms blew through the company when I worked there before I could go for university studies. But they were far from the idealistic flower power, democratization,  decolonization and anti-racism movements of those revolutionary 1960s. Sure, the sixties brought revolution, but in the world of business revolution had other faces.

Most conspicuous for us, workers at Spaarnestad, leading magazine and book publishers, was the invasion of the computer. Reliable, respected bookkeepers were swept under the table or disappeared with heart diseases and stomach ulcers when the new wind demanded to adjust or perish, while others relished about the new opportunities provided by the dynamic computer department headed by Mr. Tuinman. I can still see him before me.

The second trend that emerged was the shift of emphasis from technical leaders to financial managers. Mr. De Goeij, a sophisticated printing engineer, got the smart economist Mr Emondts at his side, if not above him. Emondts rapidly transformed the company of technicians, writers and artists into a machinery geared towards pleasing the shareholders and paying bonuses.

The third change came when a series of mergers with other printing and publishing companies took place, Geïllustreerde Pers, headed by Mr Charles De Roy van Zuydewijn, being the largest partner. The new company came to be called United Dutch Publishers (VNU). The aim was to get bigger and bigger, with higher and higher positions for the managers, a not unattractive prospect for the leading negotiators. The managers physically cut the ties with the workers by leaving their buildings and settling as the central board of directors in a luxurious villa.

Predictably, the leaders shifted their interest from content matter to the selling and buying of companies at the international market. In fact, their focus moved from Holland to Wall Street. They sold the magazines for € 1.25 billion to the Finnish company Sanoma in 2001. For € 5.8 billion they bought IMS Health, a company that sells data for the sales of medicines to companies in the pharmaceutical and medical sector, if you can still follow me.

Sometimes I think back of those days in the sixties, when I did research on behalf of advertisers in VNU publications, clients that provided 80% of all income. The three new trends were introduced to us as refreshing and promising innovations, while many of us understood they might bring more alienation, uncertainty and income loss for workers and consumers than for managers.

                                        Spaarnestad directors Lucas, De Goeij and Emondts

 The Spaarnestad office building where I worked

                                       VNU head quarters in the rich village of Aerdenhout

EXPLAINING DUTCH CULTURE

Dutch tolerance and cooperation relate to water but do not, as is often said, come from living in low polders that frequently risk to be flooded. Polders are the result of a city culture that, in turn, derives from the culture of tribal groups canoeing around in the creeks and rivers here. They started to settle at dunes consisting of sand and pebbles transported from the mountains and deposited in the lowlands by those rivers. In their tiny dune villages, the tribal groups adjusted their typical culture of deliberation and cooperation to the new circumstances and some of them managed to survive by fishing in the water bodies and gathering and hunting at the seasonally drier lands. Gradually villages and towns developed on the higher sand dunes, while the marshlands were left uninhabited.

In later stages, agrarian societies developed in mainland Europe, with kings and emperors fighting wars with each other and subduing societies at the outskirts of their domains, including the present-day coastal provinces in the Netherlands. But their heavy armies, trained to battle on dry lands, found it hard to enter the wetlands. They either left the area to itself or met with losses and defeat if they tried to subdue the tribal communities here. Meanwhile the tribals interacted with the agrarian societies for trade and transport and acquired parts of those cultures that they found useful, while preserving key tribal traits. Their villages developed into towns thriving on maritime and river transport which, in turn, reinforce their capacities to defend themselves in military ways. The burgers of those towns also built the financial, technological and organizational capacities to turn the surrounding marshes and lakes into polders and start cultivating and inhabiting the new, fertile lands.

Unlike the European kingdoms and empires where hierarchy and intolerance was growing, in the towns of the Dutch coastal provinces tolerance, deliberation, cooperation, equality, freedom and independence were preserved. The group portraits of city guards and male and female regents of the seventeenth century, the Night Watch as the most famous one, tell the story of the relatively large equality and independence in the towns. This culture deserves not to be called ‘polder model’ but ‘burger model’. It is this burger model that is not the effect but the cause of collectively managing the polders.