Bousquet raises similar issues to those addressed in Andrew Ross’s latest book when he writes:

Higher education has played a crucial, innovative role in the new order of the global workplace, trading on the willingness of most of us to discount our labor-time in exchange for a little dignity and partial autonomy. It isn’t just faculty work that’s being spoiled; most people’s work is being ruined in similar ways.

What’s particularly interesting is how Bousquet charts some of these changes in relation to managerialism:

the tenure-track faculty now retain professional status in at least partial relation to their managerial function—they manage a vast range of parafaculty (adjunct lecturers, tech support, undergraduate tutors, graduate teaching and research assistants). Just as much legal work is done by paralegals supervised by lawyers, and physicians increasingly function to manage non-physician medical practitioners, nurses of various grades, students, nurses’ aides, technicians, secretaries, and other personnel.

And the economies of corporate campuses:

The smoothly-functioning campus is a post-Fordist company town, with a churning pool of self-subsidizing cheap labor that takes loans to spend in the company store, voluntarily poses for company marketing materials, pays for the privilege of serving as a “brand ambassador” for the campus, and so on.

These are problems I hope we can think through at the State of the Industry conference in November. Well worth reading Bousquet’s book in preparation for those discussions.

The reactions I’ve been getting from the talks so far – beyond incredulity at the Bogan Gifts application on Facebook – show degrees of identification with the thoughts of workers in my study. A number of the older academics seem to recognise the participants’ acceptance of a gradual increase in work demands and the ways that technology allows work to enter into spaces and times that were previously free of its presence. In this context, in response to these comments, so what if some industries have always had blurry divisions between paid hours and off-the-clock? The point is that companies of all kinds now use this model as the basis for efficiency regimes on a massive scale because they have found a workforce that no longer feels the need to differentiate between what is paid and what is not.

Here it is precisely academics with tenure that have a case to answer, more so than the freelance journalists Mel speaks of (but who could equally do with some labour consciousness). The bulemic work practices freelancers face and the entrepreneurial effort required to generate ongoing opportunities have more in common with research-only contract jobs than the generation of long-term teaching staff who have largely been protected from the competitiveness of the portfolio career.

That said, these latter jobs have become subject to an incredible amount of self-auditing with the uptake of neoliberal management techniques that encourage autonomy and flexibility as long as ALL the work continues to be done. It is not simply coincidence that in so many cases this work consists of entering information into an array of online databases quantifying outcomes or Microsoft Office documents that are downloaded, edited, repackaged and uploaded in response to thousands of solicitous emails politely requesting urgent compliance.

These are some of the specificities worth mentioning before we dismiss the role of technology in any of these issues. It should not be necessary to point out that people simply do not have the time to negotiate intimacy rules and terms of access with 189 Facebook “friends”. What inspired my previous anecdote was a wider frustration I was feeling – perhaps even channelling, in response to discussions with others – to do with the kinds of autonomy I want to enjoy and sustain beyond the industrial demands of my job. They are questions of etiquette and politeness that pertain to any era of professional life and are about respecting people’s legitimate attempts to carve out small semblances of non-work space so that daily life is tolerable.

There may be some people who find pleasure or even glamour in blurring the boundaries between friendship and professional obligation, but I imagine we each have a limit point where we would like to be treated as human. At least in my definition, this still involves being being assumed to have a life outside of work – and wishing the same for others.