Work's Intimacy E-Book

Melissa Gregg

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 383

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew "knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment.

Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways.

This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: Work’s Intimacy

Performing Professionalism Online and On the Job

Part I: The Connectivity Imperative: Business Responses to New Media

1 Selling the Flexible Workplace

The Creative Economy and New Media Fetishism

The lifestyle city

The Smart State

The Brisbane boom

The rise (and rise) of the frequent flyers

Unlimited work

Workstyle

Creativity’s limits

2 Working from Home

The Mobile Office and the Seduction of Convenience

Making the choice

Home duties

Keeping in touch

The catch-up day

Lucky mummies

The cost of convenience

3 Part-time Precarity

Discount Labor and Contract Careers

“People don’t really care”: working at the margins of the organization

Smart casuals: Care without responsibility

The student worker

Masters’ apprentices

Part II: Getting Intimate: Online Culture and the Rise of Social Networking

4 To CC: Or Not to CC:

Teamwork in Office Culture

Team players

CC: inadequacy – multiplying the message

Rising above it

Lingering connections

5 Facebook Friends

Security Blankets and Career Mobility

The logic of likes

Facebook intimacy

Friends in need

6 Know Your Product

Online Branding and the Evacuation of Friendship

Participation’s infrastructure

Up to speed

The essence of youth

Part III: Looking for Love in the Networked Household

7 Home Offices and Remote Parents

Family Dynamics in Online Households

Making space for work

Partial presence

Work as the new family?

Closing down communication

8 Long Hours, High Bandwidth

Negotiating Domesticity and Distance

The language of love

Ships in the night

Leaving home

Together alone with everyone

9 On Call

The one-hour radius

Under pressure

Not working out

Conclusion: Labor Politics in an Online Workplace

The Lovers vs. the Loveless

A labor politics of love

References

Index

@Jason_a_w

Copyright © Melissa Gregg 2011

The right of Melissa Gregg to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2011 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5027-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5028-9 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3747-1 (Single-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3746-4 (Multi-user ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

List of Figures

Figure 0.1 Open-plan newsroom, Brisbane, 2007

Figure 0.2 Arts festival workstation; Outlook running on Dell

Figure 0.3 Brisbane suburbia

Figure 1.1 Selling the Brisbane Boom: a cover page from the Courier Mail’s weekly careers lift-out halfway through the study; Within a few months the financial crisis was threatening hundreds of jobs © Newspix / Kevin Bull

Figure 5.1 Selection from “Bogan Gifts” Facebook application

Figure 7.1 Miranda’s dining table

Figure 7.2 Kitchen office

Figure 7.3 Geoff’s home office (1)

Figure 7.4 Geoff’s home office (reverse view)

Figure 8.1 Bringing home to work

Figure 8.2 Domesticity at a distance

Figure 8.3 Bedroom offices

Figure 8.4 Patrick’s bedroom office

Acknowledgments

A three-year Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Discovery Fellowship supported this research from 2007–9. Thanks to Graeme Turner for his help in the draft stages of the application and for so much more since. Further assistance for the project came from a University of Queensland Foundation Research Excellence Award in 2007. This grant helped to fund the team of research assistants that made this book possible: Neil Harvey, Ian Rogers, Nadia Mizner, Sarah Xu, and Bo McGrath. I am grateful to all of them.

Colleagues at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland and the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney have been wonderfully forgiving of my own work habits. I have made many close friends in the long hours spent in the Forgan Smith Tower and the Quadrangle, with and without the assistance of technology. On the domestic front, thanks to Rachel O’Reilly, Jason Wilson, and Catriona Menzies-Pike. Also to the many online friends who have kept us occupied in and out of each other’s company.

For help with the manuscript, special thanks to Geert Lovink, Graeme Turner, Terry Flew, and Michelle Dicinoski. For invitations and support to present this material overseas, I particularly thank Rosalind Gill, Andy Pratt, Mark Banks, Stephanie Taylor, Adi Kuntsman, David Hesmondhalgh, Gavin Stewart, Alexis Wheedon, Greg Seigworth, and Trebor Scholz. For feedback, references, solidarity and provocation thanks to Lauren Berlant, Kris Cohen, Genevieve Bell, Mark Deuze, Jo Littler, Helen Kennedy, John Clarke, Mark Andrejevic, Zala Volcic, Jack Qiu, James Hay, and Jack Bratich.

Anyone working in the field of cultural labor owes a great debt to Angela McRobbie and Andrew Ross. Their pioneering studies of work have been major inspirations for this project. I would also like to thank John Caldwell, Alan Liu, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Arlie Russell Hochschild for writing books that demonstrate the kind of analysis I would like to aspire to.

A publishing subsidy from the Australian Academy of the Humanities allowed images to be included in the book. Thanks to John Thompson for supporting this request and for the opportunity to publish with Polity. I am deeply grateful to the University of Sydney for the support to travel regularly in the last stages of this project and test the ideas to larger audiences.

My greatest thanks are to the participants who gave their precious time to provide material for this study. May your work and home lives continue to animate and secure the intimacies you most desire.

Preface

When I moved to Brisbane in early 2004, a number of Sydney friends made it clear I should expect few visitors. To Australia’s southern residents, the large north-eastern state of Queensland remains a curiosity, summoning images of sun-drenched lethargy, backward attitudes, conservative farmers, and corrupt law enforcement. The state capital Brisbane has long been regarded by residents and outsiders alike as a “sleepy little town.” Indeed, in the period this book describes, glossy tourism brochures began to use this phrase as a slogan, adding, “can you blame us?” in an attempt to celebrate the developing night-time economy. In spite of such prejudice, I was one of the thousands of interstate migrants who moved to the Sunshine State for a full-time job in the past decade. And even though substantial newspaper coverage and government rhetoric placed great hope in these statistics, the experiences of actual workers largely went missing from the public record. This book captures just a few of them.

This research is based on a three-year Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2007–9. Working From Home: New Media Technology, Workplace Culture and the Changing Nature of Domesticity aimed to offer empirical evidence of technology’s impact on the work and home lives of employees in the information and communication spheres of the knowledge economy. Large organizations were chosen – in education, government, broadcasting, and telecommunications – to contrast the many depictions of self-employed, entrepreneurial workers at the leading edge of the “new economy.” From four employers, 26 participants were recruited at different levels of the workplace hierarchy. Employees were interviewed annually for the three-year period when this was possible. Their names have been anonymized for publication.

While constraints on time prevented extensive ethnographic engagement with workers, a number of wider social developments inform the reflections that follow. At the level of politics, a federal election with a strong emphasis on workers’ rights saw the Australian Labor Party triumph in 2007 after 12 years in opposition. Within just a couple of months, the global economy endured a violent downward swing, which pushed Australia from prosperity to near recession, bringing unprecedented levels of national debt. Meanwhile the project’s focus, communications technology, facilitated the tremendous uptake of social networking sites – from MySpace to Facebook, and a later surge to Twitter. In the final year of the study, the commercial release of the iPhone in Australia changed the telecommunications landscape significantly. The book now stands as an archive of this phenomenal rise of social media, and the growth of Internet use in everyday life.

In describing the lived impact of the new economy’s “flexible” workplace, however, the project originates from an earlier downturn. The sustained glamorization of entrepreneurial business culture since the dot.com boom is the lasting legacy of a complex historical moment that few studies have interrogated sufficiently. Across any number of cultural artifacts today, computers and networked devices remain the resilient index of a variety of social changes, from family relations to commerce, even dating practices. But nothing has been more evident – and more absent from political discussion – than the way that online connectivity consummates the middle-class infatuation with work.

This book shows the extent to which new media technology encourages and exacerbates a much older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of all other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. The growing magnetism of mobile communication devices is one of the strongest indications that there is now a significant number of people for whom paid employment is the most compelling demonstration of virtue, accomplishment, and self-identity that society makes available. With a range of online subcultures also developing in support of these tendencies, the mutually reinforcing benefits of chronic connectivity among educated professionals are highly circular. At a time of declining civic participation, pressures on the institutions of marriage and the family, and persistent religious and racial intolerance in the West, this book offers a new lens for analytical attention. It explains how ordinary workers may withdraw from a range of more complex human relationships to focus on a proven source of personal esteem – their job – since its rewards are so openly celebrated in the dominant register for modern relationships: the capitalist marketplace.

All books are difficult to write, but this one has been especially affected by my own implication in the phenomena under discussion. Coming to terms with work’s intimacy has entailed moving states and cities more than once in search of what may be an elusive fit between personal and professional motives. On a more troubling level, it has also meant learning alongside others the grammar of hunched shoulders, clandestine drinking cultures, RSI prevention, and enforced leave. This project has presented a complex scholarly dilemma, which is the difficulty of distinguishing among participants’ revelations about work, the behavior of peers and colleagues, and my own lived practice. It concludes with a strong conviction that the present generation of academics must be among the first to see their lives and loves as potentially open to change.

Introduction: Work’s Intimacy

Performing Professionalism Online and On the Job

No-one’s job is safe.

Australian Federal Industry Minister

Kim Carr, February 2009

This book provides an overdue account of online technology and its impact on work life. It moves between the offices and homes of today’s salaried professionals to provide an intimate insight into the personal, family and wider social tensions faced by workers in a changing employment landscape. For any number of years now, new media technology has been marketed as giving us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, in flexible arrangements that apparently suit the conditions of the modern office. But little has been written to illustrate the consequences of this development, where work has broken out of the office, downstairs to the cafe, in to the street, on to the train, and later still to the living room, dining room, and bedroom.

Online technology has brought some significant problems to the work and personal lives of ordinary office workers – the information workers at the heart of the so-called “knowledge economy.” This book describes the experiences of these employees, focusing on the information, communication and education (“ICE”) professions that complement the heavy-hitting “FIRE” sectors of finance, insurance and real estate.1 The latter have enjoyed their own chroniclers of late. The global economic downturn generated a predictable flurry of insider accounts of work cultures at the top end of town, as well as the housing and loan schemes that precipitated much of the wider disaster. Work’s Intimacy provides a different white-collar story. It reflects the lives of those in much more mundane office environments, in a city with a significant case of suburban sprawl. But in a digitally connected “network society” (Castells 2000), these workers’ livelihoods are no less affected in the shift from prosperity to recession – and back again.