Not another mentoring talk
My own feelings about mentoring – and the category of ECR – are at best ambivalent. Mentoring in the professional neoliberal workplace of is one of those classic words that can be used to invoke or simulate institutional benevolence when there is actually a waning of reciprocity in the employment relation. Whereas once academia resembled a vocation, with a clear model of apprenticeship that led to security and stability, this is no longer the reality we face. This is part of the post-Fordist shift in economic capital and employment that is moving from organizations to networks. The form of recognition encouraged by the current regime is less about accumulation and duration of service, and more about flexibility and productivity. Put simply: you are only as good as your last five years, or even, it seems, three years. You only need to look at what is happening at my own university to see how this can play out.

Mentoring also suggests an ongoing interest in the development of a career, the gradual realisation of your individual potential. It’s not enough to have gotten the job. No, landing the job is just the first step in a constant process of planning, assessing and maximizing “opportunities”. From now on, there will be little if any time to sit back and acknowledge your achievements, and yet part of what I want to suggest today is that you must fight for this time. And beware of people offering “opportunities”!

This is because the system is set up to make you feel that you are never doing enough, just as technology has accelerated the amount of things we are expected to be able to do. This results in us all feeling like we are constantly behind, always “catching up”. How many times do you hear yourself saying that to people: “we must catch up soon”. The “catch up” is one of the principal manifestations of our present ontological bearing. At work, it occurs in small and large ways, whether it is the sense of defeat you feel in “wasting” an hour deleting email or the failure you might feel at not seeing your colleagues regularly for coffee. But mostly it presents as a chronic low level internalized suspicion of incompetence, that there just isn’t enough time to do everything you need to do properly.

While it feels highly personal, these are in fact the routine affects of organisational life today. It is worth recognizing the extent to which they are also the principal conditions of your labour that you can control – that is, once you appreciate that there is no temporal or spatial limit to the networked information economy that employs you. The network, which is to say the office, which is to say work and the prospect of doing it, will always follow you home. So part of what we need to imagine collectively is the degree of compensation we want for that new reality, as well as strategies to cope with it.

But I want to approach this in a slightly different way by focusing on the often forgotten fact that the university needs you. There is plenty of discussion about the competitiveness of the job market right now and an impending war for talent resulting from difficulties overseas. But there, as here, the system as a whole can’t afford to lose you. The market for higher education in English speaking countries may be transforming, and in Australia reconfiguring, but on a global scale it is not declining (Marginson 2011). Locally, recent research puts the figure of sector wide job losses through retirement as high as 35% (Hugo 2008, in Bendix Petersen, 2011). Current studies of workforce patterns being conducted here at the University of Queensland continue to identify the large numbers of employed academics who regularly contemplate leaving the industry, whether annually, month to month, or on a weekly and daily basis (I for one certainly count myself in most of these categories). There is genuine concern, which is to say that there is existing policy discourse, that recognizes a “lost generation” of academics that may or may not be recoverable. And while there are obviously many more PhD graduates now than previous decades, what I think this calls for is a level of strategic complacency among entry level staff that is currently under utilized.

By now you will have heard a lot about what you should be doing to get an academic career, and what to do once you’re on the cusp. You’ll have plenty of thoughts on the limitations of that formula. But the point at this stage is that you are all here; you’ve done something right to finish a PhD, or be hired, publish a book or win a grant. So now’s the time to make space to think about the kind of work you want to focus on doing more – and less – of. This involves identifying different styles of academic practice.

Expand your imagined audience
You can begin doing this by thinking about the audiences you want for your thinking and research. It’s tempting to think that the audience for your contribution is the reader, the person who happens to find your article or buy your book. This is only a very small audience. In relation to the multiple publics you address day to day, your readership may be the smallest. In teaching and research jobs, your audience includes your students (undergrad, postgrad) and your colleagues (department peers, committee colleagues, superiors). You probably engage in written communication daily with all of them – but do you count that writing as output? Do you count it as part of your intellectual project? If not, why not?

Here I’m trying to offer ways to think about scale: the audience for your work can have local, national, and international reach. It’s a continuum of interaction and it all matters. One nice email can change the course of a student’s day, even her year; but we tend to want to think that it is our scholarly papers that will change the world. Identifying the many audiences for your practice is an empowering thing.

Publishing: realistic outputs, actual numbers.
How many publications is enough? Homework: check your university’s minimum requirements for research output. Some of my closest colleagues with dozens of publications still think they haven’t done “enough”. Yet they have already published more than most Professors had at the same age. There is a self-punishing dimension to the productivity imperative that today’s PhD graduates have experienced. It has genuine effects on people’s sense of self-worth as well as damaging effects on the research being conducted.

What helps with planning your writing and pacing it? Counting each stage of writing. When you are considering submitting something for publication, or wrestling with the fantastic “opportunity” that’s been offered, take account of how much time it takes to write even a short academic article. I can think of this many steps, but there are more:

Planning the proposal, proposing, planning the writing, writing, rewriting, proof-reading, peer review, recovering from peer review, response to peer review, proof-reading, editing.

Double that for co-authorship (done well).

From what I’m told, writing is like having a baby. We have amnesia about how painful it is, because the end product is so amazing. To push the analogy: try to remember the pain, and that it can be very hard to make happen by force! Also think realistically about how much time you have free to write without interruption, at which times of the year. i.e. without teaching, without meetings, without someone waiting for you to come home for dinner.

Grants: motivations for them – different types – which one is right for you?
DECRA. Discovery. Collaboration. Linkage. Non-ARC (all external income counts). On ARCs, it’s a known secret that the best track record for an ARC is a previously funded ARC. But there are exceptions. Time spent working up a collaboration should be weighed against more time spent on your own writing (track record). Also against how much the focus will change. Assessors will reward something that’s coherent and distinctively yours. Assessors will also be wise to opportunism, and don’t necessarily favour seniors who are overcommitted. Again, be cautious about accepting “help” from mentors: what’s in it for you vs. them?

Teaching and service: making it work for your research goals.
• Course design and content – rarely will your teaching directly match your research. But even overview courses can help keep you in touch with the field (and you can turn lectures into writing outcomes too, eg. book reviews for peers, feedback to colleagues whose work you set, etc).
• Don’t give written lectures every week. Find alternative delivery modes (eg. radio, TV documentaries, student participation). This maintains your energy and encourages others to get involved in the course content/experience.
• Marking: Plan to have it happening regularly over the semester to avoid binges. Continuous assessment helps, eg. small tasks to mark in class or during consultation hours.
• Approach marking in relation to your workload. How much does your workload formula give you for marking? Preparation? Supervision? eg. Honours. Stick to it. Tell your students. Keep records.
• Committee work: inevitable, so try to find things relevant to your research. But don’t go every time. Every third meeting, perhaps. And not when it challenges a research deadline.

Offloading: Claiming time for research
Make time to plan what you want to do. Keep that time factored in to each week. Often we avoid scheduling research time because it’s not face to face – other people won’t notice if we don’t show up. Think of your research hours per week in the same way you do face to face teaching.
• Try to write for a short period every day rather than blocks and binges.
• Maximize the best part of the day. PRIME TIME! Tell others when you are writing so they learn to contact you later.
• Write lists. Try to distinguish between things that you must do, should do, or what would be nice to do. Have daily/weekly lists and don’t be hard on yourself if you need more time.
• Learn to say no, and when you do, say why, or suggest alternatives. Recommending other people for a job can save several people time – and help others.

Invoke strategic complacency
Academics, like other professionals, navigate a range of internally and externally imposed pressures to be productive – and to conclude I want to get you to start getting in the habit of asking: to what end? The model of worker that is rewarded today is that which is endlessly, limitlessly productive. The university will take everything from you if you let it. There are minimum performance levels but you’ll note that there are no maximums. You will rarely be told that you are publishing too much.

In universities today, it is also unlikely that you’ll meet anyone who doesn’t feel overworked. In this context, some of the strategies that can be most useful are discursive. To draw on some cultural studies terminology, you can use the hegemonic language – the commonsense of the university – to pursue counter-hegemonic goals. As academics, your goals are probably not even that radical: you want more time to read books and write. Have a weekend now and then. But it is increasingly obvious that these privileges, the ones that motivated many of us to join the profession in the first place, are unevenly distributed, particularly by age, race and gender. You need to understand that to be able to fight for it.

Replace productivity with strategic complacency. Use the discourse of productivity against itself. Start by using the language you hear routinely around you: “I’m just so busy”; “I can’t do it that day, today’s impossible”; “This week/month is crazy, I just can’t”. The best line I’ve ever been told to use is the simple: “I’m sorry, I’m fully committed”. If what people say is true, who will have the time to check what you’re actually doing? Take your own goals seriously, and set boundaries on doing more.

Setting up these strategies will help to see clearly the source for the multiple pressures you encounter – where they come from. Are they intrinsic (part of the make up of being an intellectual) or externally imposed? Are you just being polite when you don’t say no? Can you still be polite and excuse yourself from certain things?

Making time to organize and rationalize your time can mean you maximize the “good” parts of your job and make better decisions about minimizing what takes you away from them. This is also about developing some institutional nous. Learn whose job it is to take responsibility for things, who has the last say, so you don’t take on more responsibility than you will ever be recognized for.

P.S. The phrase “strategic complacency” is a hybrid term that is inspired by both the autonomist “refusal of work” tradition, and some very sound advice offered by my colleague, Chris Gibson, at the State of the Industry conference in 2009. In the closing session of day one, Chris urged us to exercise some “institutional irresponsibility” as an appropriate response to the more ludicrous conditions of our labour. This post is an attempt to bring these different influences to bear.

References
Simon Marginson (2011) ‘It’s a long way down: The underlying tensions in the education export industry’, Australian Universities’ Review, 53 (2): 21-33.

Evea Bendix Petersen (2011) ‘Staying or going? Australian early career researchers’ narratives of academic work, exit options and coping strategies’ Australian Universities’ Review, 53 (2): 34-42.

A section of the protest group then stormed the office of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The final photo here captures Dean Duncan Ivison addressing the group after he was made to wait in turn following other speakers.

Thanks to Save USyd Jobs, USyd Greens and NTEU NSW for these images.

I love the photos especially because of the cubicles. Students fighting for their education in the very scene of administrative labour. But it made me think, how many will end up in a workplace just like this, whether or not their course options are cut? Does the consciousness-raising of this rally partly come down to realising what professional work now looks like? Especially given key staff in the faculty office – many of whom are themselves past and present students of the faculty – were live tweeting the events with empathy?

Protester/student/worker: the hybrid identity of cognitive capitalism.

Preparing for a talk later this week, I have just been reading this article by Kieryn McKay and Kylie Brass published in the September 2011 issue of Cultural Studies Review. The authors, both graduates from PhD programs in Sydney, draw ‘a parallel between the appropriation of podcasting technology into the university and the current system of casual academic employment’. Their argument is that ‘the podcast and the casual academic represent “new” interfaces of outsourced academic labour’ (141), and that this poses a similar problem of isolation for academics and students.

The article is a textured and mobilising account of the material pressures on sessional staff, who share ‘an overarching experience of disenfranchisement’ (148). It highlights the consequences of a university sector that is apparently content to allow what is effectively a ‘simulacrum’ of both the traditional academic employment relation and the student experience – all in the name of flexibility.

What is all the more fantastic about the piece is that the authors use a mix of foundational cultural theory (Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’), higher education research and current industrial campaign material to make their point. It is just the kind of activism fitting an increasingly professionalised discipline.

One of the reasons I started MACS was to provide a space for these kinds of debates to gain traction. Current working conditions in academia rely on the isolation of students and sessionals to continue. So if you have thoughts to share in response to the article, please do so here, or get in touch.

As students take on more and more loans to fund their education, their education changes form. Anyone who teaches at a University is perhaps aware of the chilling effect that student debt has an intellectual inquiry and education. Students do not ask themselves the questions: what interests me? And what discipline or field do I show talent for? But ask instead: what will get me a job? What will the market demand? Debt is the future acting on the present. The idea of future debt, of the cost of student loans, acts on the present, determining choices and limiting possibilities. Debt is mode of governmentality, a way to restrict and curtail actions; a mode that is all the more effective in being internalized.

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Student debt can be understood as a transformation of the educational experience and the university, one that uses the power of the state, taxation and the allocation of funds, to restructure the university from below. Indebted students, students desperately seeking wages adequate to their debt, are less likely to demand courses and programs engaging in critical thinking, let alone engage in the political activism that made the “student” a political transindividual individuation, defined by its liminal position between home and work, immaturity and maturity. Debt produces students who are desperately try to match their actions to the mercurial job market, rather than rethink society and their place within it. The politics of debt are produced from above, but the effects are felt from below in the daily actions of not only students, who ask only “how can this course get me a job,” but also an increasingly precarious adjunct teaching faculty forced to tailor their teaching to whatever can get them work. 

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It is very difficult to say “we” debtors, in the way one could say “we” citizens or “we” workers. Part of debt passes beneath us, in the calculations, quantifications, and aggregations that make up our digital self, our virtual identity, and is this respect we cannot even say “I.”

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debt is seen less as a collective condition, as part of a new regime of accumulation and a new governmentality, than as an individual fate.

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we should not spend too much time mourning the lack of the worker as an identity organizing Occupy Wall Street, or hold out hopes for unions to be revitalized. Such actions can only lead to reforms, to better wages and more work, and would return us to the division of worker and student, waged work and unpaid reproductive work.

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debt is dependent upon a new technological regime of surveillance and data sharing, is part of a political strategy of neoliberal governmentality, and perpetuates a subjectivity of isolation and anxiety. 

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Work, even the work at a given office, call center, or distribution site, is no longer that of a “we,” of a collective identity, but is individualized into temporary contracts, continual performance reviews, and dispersed incentives. To call this an “I” with all of its connotation of independence and autonomy, is not entirely accurate. As with debt the balance sheet of any one’s particular performance and hard work remains completely outside of their efforts.

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This is a situation in which any lateral connection, any connection with other workers, students, or even other customers of insurance, that is not networking, not oriented towards maximizing one’s potential is unnecessary or avoided. It is perhaps more accurately described as class decomposition than composition, as students and workers are isolated and fragmented into individuals and aggregates of fragmented bits of intelligence and knowledge. The identification is not between other individuals, any collective, but with capital itself, with the enterprise. The worker becomes an entrepreneur of the self, and the student an investor in one’s own human capital. It is perhaps in this sense that “corporate personhood” should be taken as issue: it is not that capitalism would be better if we could some how just return it to individual’s exploiting individuals, but capitalism functions by modeling a person that aligns his or her striving, with its functioning.

I love this last paragraph in particular. But it makes me wonder whether anyone would ever claim that this situation is true of their own actions. Do we need a more subtle language for our descriptions of these experiences? Or is the manifesto tone a necessary part of the genre? I am interested because it is a problem I have all the time with my own writing – and my own problems with writing are the reason I am doing a blog post right now rather than my conference paper for next week!

One of the many thoughts this piece prompted for me was a sense of the varied force and scale of the student debt problem in different national political cultures. If #occupy has effectively mobilised awareness of the debt issue in the US and in Europe, our government-led student loans system in Australia presents another front for analysis. The funding of universities here involves particularities that matter, even while our campuses reflect in practice some of the same tendencies shaping the experience of university life elsewhere (thanks again for these ideas, MFD).

What I suspect is even more important is the role our education system plays in the wider region of Asia, and how this does or doesn’t equate to the same kinds of imperial legacies of Anglo-American capitalism. We have already seen inklings of what an #occupy movement of international students would look like in the streets of Melbourne. Have these connections been made in the wave of more recent commentary? (Scholars like Brett Neilson have been writing about transformations in worker/student relations for some time.) Ultimately it is my parochialism, my lack of understanding of the routes our “international” students take to enrol in our courses, that makes me pause before disowning the traditions I am now implicated in perpetuating as faculty. Because who am I to know – how does my own employment situation even encourage me to know – what difference a Western education might make in a range of other countries? This seems to me one of the more crucial philosophical questions raised by these times.

I guess another way of saying all this is: where is Asia in the global economy, of knowledge and its debts, imagined by #occupy?

The first time we interviewed Jodi* she was enjoying working from home once every few weeks. These were days when Jodi was encouraged to think about the big picture, to be “less operational and more strategic”. A typical day at work for the telco involved wall-to-wall meetings: “you have half an hour break and then you run to another one, or you have one that goes all day”. So working from home was a chance to work on longer term projects without this sense of coercive presenteeism.

On her home days, Jodi claimed she would have her email open an extra hour at each end of the day, from 7.30 in the morning until 10.30 at night: “Just because I’m addicted to it and I have to see and respond to everything because often a lot of urgent things come up”. Even though she cherished working from home to get away from the office schedule, Jodi felt obliged to stay connected nonetheless. Putting an “out of office” reply on her email account sent the wrong message, she felt:

if you put an ‘Out of office’ on saying ‘I’m working from home today and not available on email’, then they’d be like ‘Well, how are you working?’ People don’t understand that you could just be working on a project when you need to just spread out and think.

Another reason Jodi monitored email around the clock was because on any given day it was the main source of directives from superiors asking for tight turnarounds.

Like this morning… I planned all this stuff I needed to get done today and then something came up this morning that needed to be done by close of business at 8, and it was going to take up quite a bit of time, so lucky I saw that email and responded to it and was able to manage it and get it done before close of business today.

Jodi’s use of email, which she calls an “addiction”, is actually a matter of having learned to prepare for perceived emergencies, and adapting to the communication preferences of more powerful colleagues in the organisation. With her managers so often in meetings, face-to-face contact was rare. Email was the one constant in a chaotic schedule.

Following our first interview Jodi’s role changed to include being placed on an on-call roster in addition to her regular duties. For 48 hours every fortnight, she had to be available for conference calls to deal with critical incidents affecting the company. Service faults and coverage issues were among the key problems. Our meeting transpired in the middle of this period:

I was on-call all day Sunday, Monday and today… I was on a teleconference last night until 7.30, and I was on one again at 8 a.m. on the train this morning, and I was going to go to the gym in my lunch hour and I got called to another business bridge, and these are just urgent things. We have 20 minutes notice that you have to hop on, and they’re critical incidents that are happening to our customers and we have to work out how to manage them.

Jodi was conscious of how this new requirement of her role was affecting her usual routine:

it’s really hard for me to have that work/life balance when I – like I was doing my conference call last night while doing the groceries and driving to the grocery store, and this morning trying to do it on the train with all these people around me who are not supposed to know this confidential customer incident. And then, you know, again trying to have some balance in your lunch hour with some gym, and that doesn’t ever happen. I’ve had a membership for six months now and I’ve gone maybe for the first two months, and then I had it scheduled today to go and then a bridge was called in the middle of it. So I couldn’t go.

The urgency and unpredictability involved in Jodi’s new job obligations made it difficult for her to make the simplest of plans. Her efforts to place limits on work’s invasiveness sound like a series of traps or enclosures, as work follows her every turn once she leaves the office. Not knowing when work would be required while she was on call also affected her home life.

I had to keep my mobile on last night because they told me at the 8.30 bridge they were going to call one at 6 o’clock in the morning. So normally I would have my phone on silent and only turn it on when I woke up, but because I knew this one was coming, I had to have my phone on so that – I didn’t sleep very well, actually, and I had this by my bedside and I was just thinking about this stuff I had at work and I had to get up, about 3 o’clock in the morning, and write down the things that were running through my head that I had to do for work because my head was racing with all the stuff I have to do and I couldn’t relax until I’d written it down and my mind could forget about it.

To make matters worse, this on-call extension to Jodi’s job was unpaid. It was a mandatory add-on for an indefinite time, justified by the fact that the telco she worked for was going through “a five-year transformation period”.

We’re migrating our customers from one platform to another and things happen all the time, like ten a day, incidences of things going wrong. So one example this morning was 100 per cent of our systems were freezing and they couldn’t do any transactions at all, at all. So whenever a customer comes in: ‘Sorry, can’t help you; system frozen’. We had to develop a work-around and some comms for our staff to be able to tell customers what to say in the situation.

Jodi acknowledged that these improvements to the company were unavoidable:

The annoying thing is like it’s not something that you’d ever get recognition for or not something you’re going to make the business money; it’s just something that has to be done and we just have to do it as part of our job.

Even though she hated the extension to her role, Jodi modulated her frustration by saying: “my manager’s also on-call, so she understands what it’s like, so that’s something”. But her manager, Holly, was paid a higher salary for this level of responsibility. By contrast, Jodi had simply been told: “Someone has to do it and you’re the one that’s skilled to do it”. Like the technology she was using to stay in touch with work, Jodi’s job had become subject to function creep.

Jodi’s relatively junior position gave her few choices. While she would be entitled to time off in lieu, she seemed unlikely to claim back the hours. Too much individual complaint would look like trouble-making in this team-based workplace: “I haven’t heard of anyone asking for it. I think if I did ask, my manager would probably say ‘Well I’m doing it and I haven’t asked for it’, so I don’t think so”. Within a few months it became clear that the five-year “transformation period” for the company also involved offloading 800 workers across the country. Jodi’s manager was one of the redundancies, and most of the team was wiped out entirely.

Jodi’s story gives us clear evidence of the impact of the iPhone on the 8 hour day. Most obviously, online technology changes our sense of availability when it comes to job commitments. Work can invade spaces and times that were once protected from its reach. This is a process we might describe the presence bleed of contemporary working life, where firm boundaries between personal and professional identities slowly dissolve – and when work becomes so intimate that it carries in to the grocery shopping, even sleep.

Presence bleed explains the now familiar experience whereby the location and time of work become secondary considerations faced with a “to do” list that seems forever out of control. It captures the sense of responsibility workers feel in making themselves willing to work beyond paid hours, and the anxiety that can arise in jobs that involve a never-ending schedule of tasks that must be fulfilled – especially since there are not enough workers to carry the load. Checking email, monitoring phones and maintaining online awareness are the inevitable outcomes when technology design has meant that our office is now in our phone. And when the phone is always within reach – in your pocket, by the bed – how can you claim to be unavailable for work contact?

As the office has become virtual, work is no longer a noun, a physical space for labour to be contained. It is instead a verb: a practice that takes place wherever it seems most convenient. The challenge for labour politics today is that a growing number of us exist in workplaces no longer governed by “clock time” but by an unpredictable schedule of rolling “events” – and transformation periods that never end because managers stay employed by enacting them.

What Jodi’s story also tells us is technology plays a role in naturalising and disguising this additional, unmeasured and therefore unacknowledged labour. How many of us regularly check email on a mobile device, at random times of the day, because it is “convenient” to do so – or because email doesn’t “count” as work? And how many people today realistically have a job where answering email isn’t expected as part of the daily requirements? In my study, people would regularly get up at dawn, before the rest of the house woke up, to get on top of email before going to the office to do “real work”. Others, especially mums, would wait until late night, the dinner cooked and the kids asleep, to “catch up” on work. These are the dawn raids and midnight attacks in the ongoing war on email. And like the war on drugs, it is a war that can’t be won. By its very design, network technology delivers more information than it is humanly possible to process – so why do we think that tomorrow morning will be any different?

In the guise of “convenience”, the iPhone has helped to ensure that there is no excuse for workers not to be on top of information, up to speed, and ready to answer the call. The irony is that managers regularly see these devices as key to better workforce productivity. Now, I grew up on a farm. My first workplace was my dad’s shearing shed. People in this audience will know that shearers fought for a workplace with the clearest 8 hour day you can imagine: 4 x 2 hour shifts, with smoko and a lunch break in between. In the work worlds I live and study today, people are sleeping with their phones, and checking email over breakfast. Is this the kind of life that a relatively wealthy country gives rise to? What room does it leave for social participation beyond paid work? If we are moving to a knowledge economy, as ALP leaders regularly tell us, it is time we came up with a new language to put limits on these seemingly inescapable labours.

*Not her real name.

Between marking and closing off the semester’s grades I’ve been working full time on the Willunga research. The final report was actually due last month but I’ve reconfigured the scope of the project slightly and the timeframe too. Essentially this is to capture more data by way of the local primary and high schools. Right now every Willunga student from grade 3 upwards is taking an online survey about their technology use and their thoughts (if any!) on the NBN. This will offer some better and more extensive comparative material to analyse in relation to the established older residents that were the focus of the first version of the survey. I’m looking forward to sharing the results soon.

In the meantime, I’m heading to Paris and Leeds this week to speak at some more conferences. The American University of Paris is hosting a two-day event premised on the longstanding influence of Stuart Hall’s essay, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’. The lineup looks terrific. I wasn’t sure of the best way to tackle “the popular” in my work right now, until I thought more generally about the politics that have surrounded the NBN roll-out in Australia. So that will be the basis for my talk.

The Moral Economies of Creative Labour conference also features a great selection of speakers. It’s so great to see this field developing strongly now, and the work of the conference organisers in continuing to generate energy through these gatherings is a considerable part of that.

For me, it is a big moment because this will be the last conference I speak at before my book is finally (!) published next month. The abstract for my presentation is below.

Labour Politics and the State of Exception

In State of Exception (2005), Giorgio Agamben describes how nations temporarily suspend the usual rule of law under conditions of sovereign threat. When the state is in danger, strategies are developed to justify heightened and/or extended powers for the period of presumed risk. Adapting this notion to the workplace, this paper draws on a three year study of information and communication workers to discuss the “state of exception” affecting labour claims in the technologically mediated workplace. It shows how employees learn to cope with a growing number of job related communication requirements, including email, instant messaging and social media, to maintain the viability and relevance of their positions. For these workers, the “normal” working day is suspended in order to maintain the outputs of the organization, just as attempts to quantify or articulate labour claims are suspended in the face of technology’s unique properties. This is despite the fact that communicating via technology can only ever be a structural feature of these jobs. The paper analyses the shared rhetorical strategies of workers who justify the extent of their labour given their exceptional status in privileged professions. This leads to a broader set of questions about the morality of academics who draw on similar discourses to justify their location in careers that enable them to study such circumstances.

Women comprise 46% of all academic staff at the university.
Women make up 52% of staff at Levels A, B & C.
Women make up 35% of staff at Level D.
Women make up 21% of staff at Level E.

According to the Provost, women apply for promotion less often. But when they do apply, they are usually more successful.

Go figure.

Deconstructing Foxconn from Jack Qiu on Vimeo.

Jack presented some of this material in a heartwrenching paper during the Production Cultures spotlight session at Crossroads back in June. The images and stories from factories, dorms and hospitals are deeply shocking.

As SACOM researchers point out, with 900 000 workers already, Foxconn plans to increase that number to well over a million in the near future. Pledges to improve workers’ entitlements received plenty of coverage in the business press to allay market fears. Yet these reforms seem to be facing difficulties in implementation on the ground. Should we be surprised?

Digital labour has so many hidden meanings…

Crawford’s lament about the decline of skills training in school curricula is the basis for a serious critique of post-industrial labour – the white collar cubicle in particular. He worries that “the experience of individual agency has become elusive” in today’s office jobs:

The rise of “teamwork” has made it difficult to trace individual responsibility, and opened the way for new and uncanny modes of manipulation of workers by managers, who now appear in the guise of therapists or life coaches (8).

He doesn’t speak about skills training for girls in schools, and unfortunately this avoids crucial questions about the value of women’s physical – and often unpaid – labour. But I have to admit enjoying Crawford’s description of office life as a schoolgirl clique. With the dominant management mantra all about displaying “sensitivity to others”, he writes:

This sounds to me like being part of a clique of girls, where one can commit a serious misstep without knowing it; where one’s place in the hierarchy is made difficult to know because of the forms and manners of sisterhood. Under such proprieties, even one’s sense of being on probation may be difficult to bring to full awareness, taking instead the form of a dull and confusing anxiety. (158)

Of course unwritten rules also govern the performance of masculinity and the manners of mateship. But on a bad day, I’d say there are few better descriptions of working in a gender studies department than Crawford’s passage above.

Thankfully his concern isn’t academia so much as the wider world of knowledge work. The basic argument is that manual trades are useful because:

For the apprentice there is a progressive revelation of the reasonableness of the master’s actions. He may not know why things have to be done a certain way at first, and have to take it on faith, but the rationale becomes apparent as he gains experience. Teamwork doesn’t have this progressive character. It depends on group dynamics, which are inherently unstable and subject to manipulation. (159)

Crawford’s “case for working with your hands” hinges on this further dimension: “when there is no concrete task that rules the job – an autonomous good that is visible to all – then there is no secure basis for social relations”. In office life: “Maintaining consensus and preempting conflict become the focus of management, and as a result everyone feels they have to walk on eggshells.” (157)

For some years now, I’ve been talking about the “compulsory friendship” of the modern workplace. “Teamwork” operates by hijacking the best elements of friendship and manipulating it for corporate profit. Crawford’s analysis of cubicle affect is similar:

Given our democratic sensibilities, authority cannot present itself straightforwardly, as authority, coming down from a superior, but must be understood as an impersonal thing that emanates vaguely from all of us. So authority becomes smarmy and passive-aggressive, trying to pass itself off as something cooperative and friendly; as volunteerism. It is always pretending to be in your best interest, in everyone’s best interest, as rationality itself. (152)

For Crawford: “The risk is of being deceived into thinking there is a common good where there is not one.” (152)

Chapter Four of Work’s Intimacy, “To CC: or not to CC: Teamwork in office culture”, talks about the function of mission statements in private sector organisations. I suggest that the solace of value statements is that they absolve workers of the need to generate intrinsic motivations for the job. Repeating corporate mantras that are extrinsically imposed and transparently common sense makes identifying with them low risk. The obvious contrivance of such HR strategies is one of their main benefits.

Crawford puts this more optimistically when he writes:

The corporation has to become in the eyes of its employees something with transcendent meaning: something that can sustain the kind of moral demands normally associated with culture. Some notion of the common good has to be actively posited, a higher principle that can give people a sense of purpose in their work life… But the absence of specific content to this higher purpose is its main feature. All the moral urgency surrounding it seems to boil down to an imperative to develop a disposition of teaminess. (153)

The rest of my book shows what happened to some of the study participants who were fantastic team players at work but still faced lay-offs as the financial crisis set in. The point is that loyalty to co-workers does not and can not translate to loyalty in the employment relation. A better vocabulary for labour politics would differentiate between loyalty and obligation, friendship and rights.

Crawford’s distinction between a “team” and a “crew” is useful, since it allows particular skills to be recognised without the fallacy of a level playing field. His book is important because it shows what is at stake for those entering the employment market today:

The college student interviews for a job as a knowledge worker, and finds that the corporate recruiter never asks him about his grades and doesn’t care what he majored in. He senses that what is demanded of him is not knowledge but rather that he project a certain kind of personality, an affable complaisance. (9)

Some years ago my colleague Mark McLelland faced scrutiny for suggesting the need for an “affable persona” to succeed in academic life. But Mark was stating a useful, if cynical fact. In academia we know that qualified PhD graduates don’t necessarily get jobs. And it’s because the terms for hiring are never limited to those that appear on paper. Being the right candidate involves mobilizing a range of ineffable as well as affable qualities, none more so than a feeling of confidence that one has “potential”. Is there a better way of explaining the relevance of affect theory for labour politics?

This leads to some bizarre outcomes, as Crawford explains:

Maybe we can say, after all, that higher education is indispensable to prepare students for the jobs of the information economy. Not for the usual reason given, namely, that there is ever-increasing demand for workers with more powerful minds, but in this perverse sense: college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representations and reality. This cannot be called cynicism if it is indispensable to survival in the contemporary office.

The implications of this argument are significant, since they reinforce how little pedagogy has changed to meet the requirements of the new, “flexible” workplace. Crawford’s view may be generalizing, but he is surely right to suggest that:

Once upon a time, the passing of examinations, the meeting of course deadlines, and disciplined study for the sake of mastering a body of knowledge broadcast a willingness to conform to organizational discipline, and displayed the dispositions needed to develop competence in a bureaucracy. But the new antibureaucratic ideal of the flexible organization puts quite different demands on people, requiring the cultivation of a different sort of self… one has to have certain personal qualities, more than a well-defined set of competencies tied to the fulfillment of specific organizational ends. What the recruiters are looking for is a manner of personal comportment, a collection of psychological and social aptitudes, that is difficult to codify. (This makes sense for a workplace that has little in the way of objective standards such as one finds in a machine shop.) (147-8)

For the moment, Crawford sees the credentialising role of higher education can only be useful:

if the official items appearing on a transcript are supplemented with extracurricular items that signal the possession of a complete personality package. Students and their parents understand this. An important part of the package is that one be a joiner, as this signals the possession of a self that is ready for “teamwork.” (148)

On things extra-curricular, in the past few weeks I started watching Glee, thinking that it would add some fluff and fun to my holiday. Little did I know it would prove to be such a handbook for the Type-A personalities that dominate Sydney Uni! Still, it’s a wonderfully queer antidote to Crawford’s concerns about the role of education in preparing kids for a lifetime of fulfilling work. The gender politics of the show are far from simple – I was in awe watching the football team’s Beyonce moves – but what’s notable in the story so far are the limited options available to the straight girls. In a schoolyard as diversity-friendly as the knowledge workplace, het ladies still rely on their bodies or the lottery of genetic talent to strut their way out of a dead-end town.

What does Crawford’s vision of manual labour offer them – and the thousands of girls that are bullied out of manual trades because of gendered workplace cultures? A return to home economics classes is no match for the boredom of routine jobs women perform in low-wage, pink-collar and white-collar sectors of the economy. Crawford’s ideas demand that we think deeply about the different forms of value placed on labour. This involves better attention to the “immaterial” contribution a range of talents and dispositions can make to a wider social good. It’s heartening to find another writer so unapologetically ambivalent about the rewards of professional, white-collar ambition. The book should is well worth reading if you also suspect “that the official story we’ve been telling ourselves about work is somehow false” (9).

While the structure of the funding scheme means this is an invite-only event, there is room for just a couple of extra people to come along at this late stage. Do get in touch if you are interested.

In preparation for the event, we’ve been using a delicious tag “GLT” to assemble a list of references that speak to the workshop themes. Anyone is welcome to add their own suggestions to this list.

I’ve posted an overview of the project – taken straight from the grant application, for those of you wanting an insight into the genre – on a new research page. I’ll add more details and give an update on the outcomes from the event when I have a bit more time.