Even the middle classes, for the first time in their history, are feeling the pinch. They have not known actual hunger yet, but more and more of them find themselves floundering in a sort of deadly net of frustration in which it is harder and harder to persuade yourself that you are either happy, active, or useful. Even the lucky ones at the top, the real bourgeoisie, are haunted periodically by a consciousness of the miseries below, and still more by fears of the menacing future. And this is merely a preliminary stage, in a country still rich with the loot of a hundred years. Presently there may be coming God knows what horrors – horrors of which, in this sheltered island, we have not even a traditional knowledge. – George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

At the time, this passage seemed to capture some of the texture of the 2008 financial crisis – an event that marked a turning point for many of the employees studied in my book.

Whether it was the sense of foreboding haunting the workplace as job losses became a reality, or the broader feeling of anxiety that the turmoil in global markets spelled for investors, the middle class office workers I interviewed in boom time Brisbane were far from encountering actual hunger or poverty.

Their tremendous work ethic, which saw them attached to their email from morning to night, stemmed from a different set of fears: that the happiness and success to which they felt entitled as ambitious professionals could suddenly not be their destiny. “I’m starting to realize I might have to go down almost 50 per cent of what I was getting paid,” a retrenched marketing manager told me: “maybe even less, because there’s just so much competition out there.”

The publication of my book in the past week has coincided with a renewed period of economic uncertainty. As the US battles the prospect of recession, and volatility reigns on the share market, riots have spread across Orwell’s “sheltered island,” to the disbelief of so many. We have witnessed scenes of horror as the extent of ordinary political disaffection has been revealed.

Watching these events – on cable television, Facebook and YouTube – an already clear division in the experience of power and participation in a knowledge economy is further reinforced. Our culture is one that values and rewards ambition, particularly when this is appropriately targeted to the pursuit of paid work. But it cannot afford to acknowledge that such aspirations will never be sustainable for all. It is abundantly clear that there are structural conditions that determine the distribution of opportunity, in spite of the ways neoliberal discourses try to make failure a personal responsibility.

A major motivation for my recent research has been to better understand a situation in which so many educated professionals remain protected from an awareness of others’ lack of access to work – how social inequalities fall off the radar in the course of busy day-to-day priorities. When your own job is both demanding and rewarding, it is hard to relate to the much larger majority in a global economy for whom (to use the words of Andre Gorz) the spoils of a merit-based society are forever distant, the prospect of fulfilling work “a bad joke.”

I wanted to mark this week by returning to Orwell, especially since the quotation above was cut from my manuscript in the production process. For the publisher, the difficulty of securing copyright for the passage outweighed the significance of its message. And right now this seems to be just another indication of our misplaced legal and political priorities.

Perhaps the only thing more upsetting than this is the explanation of yesterday’s research findings:

SHARON BELL: The metaphor that we use is that women’s career is like a labyrinth, and you need to actually be able to negotiate that complex labyrinth. There is a number of pressures that come to apply.

A labyrinth! Apparently this is the preferred term over the “glass ceiling” and “leaking pipeline” metaphors of previous studies. In any case, they are all attempts to explain this diagram, which will be familiar to many “mid-career” academics.

The report itself is fantastic, but many people may not bother to read it when it comes packaged in Management 101. This was the case on ABC’s PM last night:

DAVID MARK: What are the ramifications for the under-representation of women in science?

SHARON BELL: Well, I think the main ramifications are the fact that if we don’t have a diverse workforce, we’re not actually maximising our productivity through diversity and that will impact on innovation.

Sharon, how about this for your next presser:

“At least half the population faces implicit or explicit obstacles to following the so-called formal career path. This is the case in universities as well as other jobs. The singular career path is a fiction based on the experience of a minority. It is a premise that should be dispelled at every level of leadership and management if the word diversity means anything at all.”

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.