“Holidays”

Posted on | January 6, 2006 |

Andrew Bartlett writes about the exact problem I’ve been nutting out for my ARC application:

Mobile phones and being online at home do make it hard to completely switch off unless you’re really determined, and often it also hard to separate ‘work-related’ reading to ‘non-work’ reading…

While I’m generally taking it easy and doing ‘non-work’ things, it’s still hard to draw a solid line between holiday and work. This is always made harder when one can work from home. Instead, I usually tend to think about it as being in slack mode (such as sleeping in and generally ignoring things I don’t want to do) or non-slack mode.

I wonder how common this feeling is? Amongst what kind of workers? In some of the material I’m writing about in my final book chapter, Andrew Ross argues that the information economy benefits from exploiting the sacrificial work ethic that the artist and the educator developed in the wake of the industrial revolution - in particular, the traits of flexibility, creativity and voluntary overwork. Where do politicians fit in to that description? It’s work that can also be described as ’service’ to a cause or a calling, though it tends to be a little better rewarded financially. Anyway, my argument is that new media technologies are making the potential for self-exploitation more common amongst middle class professionals generally. To the extent that they act to dissolve any firm distinction between work, home and leisure space, people seem increasingly unable to fully ‘turn off’.

Anyway, I’m off to the Sunshine Coast for a night to try to do just that.

Category: Reading, Research, Web(log) Stuff

Comments

4 Responses to ““Holidays””

  1. Nick Caldwell
    January 6th, 2006 @ 3:07 pm

    Mobile phones might be historically a useful marker for the trend you’re discussing. They were, of course, once a pretty reliable signifier for high professional status, due I suppose to cost and relative scarcity; they’re ubiquitous now, in Australia at least, and the thing they really connote in a work context is that the user isn’t powerful enough to be un-contactable at their own discretion.

    Although, thinking about it, even that observation might be stale by a couple of years.

  2. Nick Caldwell
    January 6th, 2006 @ 3:13 pm

    And of course, in the male-dominated IT industry, the weird machismo about pulling all-nighters at work — even to the total impairment of your ability to do actual useful work — and being totally emotionally available to your UNIX server is still dominant.

    Low levels of unionisation, too, of course. Not that I’d argue that IT professionals are in greater need of a union’s protection than Walmart workers.

  3. Mark Bahnisch
    January 9th, 2006 @ 11:16 pm

    As well as the “sacrificial work ethic”, the traditional availability of the professional is another model which has been disseminated more widely downwards among workers in order to blur the work/personal life distinction.

  4. melgregg
    January 10th, 2006 @ 9:01 am

    Nick: spot on. Most people I’ve talked this over with think the mobile phone is the best way to chart the shift. As a colleague mentioned yesterday, what’s also interesting about the telephone in this context is that it’s a technology women have used to maintain kinship ties and affective networks - ’soft skills’ that have only recently been deemed valuable in workplace culture and new economy discourse.

    On the topic of all-nighter machismo, Ross’s work talks about

    employees so complicit with the culture of overwork and burnout that they have developed their own insider brand of sick humor about being “net slaves,” that is, it’s actually cool to be exploited so badly. Industrial capitalists used to dream about such a workforce, but their managerial techniques were too rigid to foster it. These days, the new-wave management wing of the New Economy worships exactly this kind of decentralized environment, which “empowers” workers, banishes bureaucratic constraints on their creativity, and delivers meaningful and nonalienated labor for a grateful and independently minded workforce.

    In “The Mental Labour Problem” he describes how this corresponds with the permanent ‘volunteer low-wage army’ of academic labour which is

    the natural outcome of a training in the habit of embracing nonmonetary rewards—mental or creative gratification—as compensation for work. As a result, low compensation for a high workload becomes a rationalized feature of the job. In the most perverse extension of this logic, underpayment can even be regarded as proof of the worth of the academic vocation—the ultimate measure of the selfless and disinterested pursuit of knowledge.

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