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.

In the wake of that happy event I felt momentarily obliged to stave off my cynicism about ECR life, since it seems I may have finally graduated from that particular purgatory. But the euphoria hasn’t lasted too long.

I should write separately about the performativity of promotion applications, which are a pretty horrible subspecies of the application genre. If you are looking for resources on career things of this nature Jonathan’s site is well worth consulting. I don’t really want this to be a career advice blog though, despite the fact that lots of you seem to like it when I write this stuff. I need my own advice – and not just on careers! So let’s help each other out, please…

In the talk I basically just explained that networks are the basis for career opportunity. Not a revelation in itself – especially to anyone who knows my research interests. But what I was trying to emphasise was that integrating yourself in a field beyond your department is crucial at an early stage. Personally, I think it’s the only way to learn the resilience and context you need to stay sane in a profession that is so affected by institutional politics of one kind or another. For postgrads, looking beyond the local is about the only way to position yourself confidently if and when you finish.

I would even go so far as to say that the very successful graduates I have seen in recent years (and here I’m measuring success in a range of ways, beyond paypackets) are those that remained modestly invested in their department during candidature. Looking beyond the intensity of close role models is an important way to cope with the human failings that are inevitable in any large workplace. You will probably never feel as vulnerable as when you are writing your PhD. So, protect yourself.

This means getting involved in what you care about – your disciplinary association, perhaps, or working for a relevant journal (for free). Pursue tangents beyond the immediate scholarly problem: films, music, reading groups, sport, politics. Travel. Go to conferences. Get your research heard, known about and tested by an audience beyond your particular university context. Consider starting a blog.

Why? Because publicity brings benefits. Don’t kid yourself otherwise. Once your name is known in relation to a topic, you are more likely to be remembered when panels need presenters, chapters need authors, and jobs need filling. You may even get asked to write about things that you don’t care about precisely because of the strength of your research identity. Your name is your asset.

When I was a grad student, I volunteered to set up an email list, csaa-forum, for the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia. This was pre-blog, pre-Facebook; a different world of online experiences. It played an active role for a while, hosting some memorable exchanges between colleagues. A side effect of this initiative – one that the application genre lets me count as “service” – was that my name regularly appeared in people’s inboxes all over the country for several years. If people didn’t know what my research was about, at least they knew my name. I’m still convinced this was the main reason I was shortlisted for my first job interviews.

Bottom line though: publications are your best currency for career mobility. They are also the fastest way to get more publications. There can be a very swift transition from the PhD experience of thinking no-one will publish your work to the point where you are struggling to respond to multiple invitations. The strategy and etiquette needed to navigate that problem are part of the phenomenon we might call the “mid-career abyss”.

You don’t necessarily have to publish during your PhD if it means you finish it on time. Your biggest test is to show you can design, manage and complete a large project without getting side-tracked. But sure, publishing is key to the job market, and going to conferences is one of the surest ways to make it happen (see how these things start to reinforce each other…?). A physical audience is an initial and immediate peer review that can improve the quality of what you eventually submit to journals. Remember conferences are always attended by journal editors and board members. There are so many journals and they all need filling.

People will give you plenty of advice on the relative prestige of journals. But you know what? Getting used to the experience of peer review is what matters. It’s an imperfect and inconsistent practice, which is why it’s often worth learning through less prominent journals. These are the ones that tend to have a personal dimension to the editorial process (no robot emails from online repositories) and the commitment to give your work due guidance and attention.

Certainly I would question anyone thinking they should only submit to highly ranked journals. At the last ECR event I attended at Sydney this was literally the advice given. In the majority of university settings (that is, beyond the elite) you need fast publications as much as quality ones – you need to show there is an appetite for what you do. When I submitted my thesis I had 5 publications out or in press. “In press” is an important category to exploit because it shows that you have momentum.

In the pathways session I was also asked to talk about the transition from postdoc to teaching & research. I had to say: it’s hard. The skills you learn as a postdoc are limited and focused, so it should be obvious that all of the above advice is biased. Going straight to a postdoc after your PhD, you learn to view your research as the sole measure of your worth. In a teaching department, by contrast, you can show up for work every day without ever having to mention it. Research can even feel like a taboo topic, and for many it seems to be the thing you do on weekends since the rest of the week is overrun by teaching and admin.

I will say more about the inevitability of teaching and admin later. What I’ll say now is that serial postdoc fellowships risk giving you an unrealistic idea of research metrics. It’s a poor apprenticeship in learning a sustainable publication rate. To get a fellowship in the first place you have to show publishing form. To get another one you have to show that you used the privilege of a “research only” position wisely. (For the record: Sydney’s “research active” definition is currently 5 publications averaged over 3 years.)

The research career path also has collegial consequences that would be worth discussing more openly. That is, it can have a knock-on effect on the expectations placed on teaching colleagues trying to get a foot in the game. Your productivity affects others. I’m not at all convinced that the industry as a whole is adequately supporting teaching and research as the ideal model for academics. That would require a lot more serious attention to the question of workloads at every level, and the gendered, raced and classed bodies that are carrying them.

Chris’s comment prompts me to write a little more about academic labour in the lead up to the anniversary of this event. A number of people have been asking my advice about postdoctoral fellowships at Sydney, and I have been quite honest in offering caution to those thinking of applying. Increasingly I don’t subscribe to the view that smart people should spend untold hours writing proposals for grants with an insanely small success rate, just as I don’t ever want to contribute to delusional ideas about open fields for applications. In the current operating environment, universities only favour particular kinds of work. As one of my correspondents put it – showing a ruthless pragmatism that is itself symptomatic of the state of the industry – there is much to be said for minimising the pyschological damage in desiring opportunities that are actually “out of reach for all sorts of inscrutable reasons”.

I was reminded of this when reading Nina Power’s article, Axiomatic Equality: Rancière and the politics of contemporary education (thanks to edu-factory for the link). Amidst her elegant reading of Rancière, Jacotot, Bourdieu, and others, comes this insight on the British system:

The supposedly elite institutions are still there at the top, the old-boys and girls networks still churning out elite fodder for the same kinds of jobs – politics, diplomacy, high-end culture industry work, etc. At the same time, the expansion of higher education and the re-branding of ex-Polytechnics as universities in the UK has created a situation in which no one need be excluded. It is no longer a question of keeping them out, but of ensuring they go where they are supposed to.

This relates to some other articles I was sifting through this afternoon, which add to Power’s observations about the economic changes affecting university life:

fees have created a kind of split-subject of the university: the “client” who pays for a service and yet is still a subject “supposed to be criticized” or even failed. Endless feedback forms, along the lines of customer satisfaction surveys, entail that students are supposed to know how well that which they don’t yet know is being conveyed. We could call this “the subject supposed to know how it will know what it doesn’t yet know.”

It’s 18 months since I started working full time at the University of Sydney, and 12 months since I began a teaching position. Power’s article, and the further sources I’ve been mulling over the past few hours, slightly minimise my shock – still fresh from a staff meeting announcement on Friday – that my university is now embarking on a cost-benefit analysis of its units. This audit, which asks staff to tally the amount of preparation time for courses offered in 2008, will have who knows what consequences. But it’s another example of the forms of value currently dominant where I work.

This week I have been asked to present at a “Career Planning” workshop for “Early Career Researchers”, which will involve me speaking for 10 minutes about my “career pathway” to a room of my peers. I’m the person speaking as an example of the Postdoc to Tenure path, I suppose; the other two speakers will talk about the challenges of taking on administrative roles immediately post-PhD (X became Chair of his department upon submission of his thesis) and entering academia as a career change following other professional experience (Y was a journo and came to Sydney from a more teaching-intensive university).

The mere fact that this kind of session is conceived – as part of a package of “Learning Solutions” for personal and professional challenges – is a sign that Sydney is a leading university. Career training sessions, indeed the ongoing fantasy that one might have the luxury of planning a career, comes straight out of the management textbook. Yet it’s a major incentive to join the competitive queue to enter research active universities, even when the reality of the training sessions may counteract the intent.

The irony that will need to be downplayed on Friday is that given the competition for Go8 jobs, Sydney University ECRs are already likely to have shown more career productivity than many non-metro “MCRs” and even Professors. For me, this was one of the stand-out lessons from the State of the Industry conference. What we’re dealing with is as much a geographical divide as a generational one.

Well, I’ll report back on the session later in the week.

Anyway, this a phatic post. I’m excited because today is my first ever keynote. Hope I don’t stuff it up; it’s going to be recorded and podcast. See, this proves my point – digital technologies exacerbate the already manifold anxieties of the white collar worker.

Wish me luck!

More seriously, what I’m talking about is developing a personal response to the things I found in writing the book, particularly chapter seven, which talks about home offices and their impact on relationships and families.

On the one hand, there’s something interesting going on in working couples where one partner is “entitled” to use the home office for paid work – and therefore entitled to solitude or intimacy with work – while the other “enjoys” the alleged benefits of domesticity: open rooms, noise, food, tv, phone calls, hanging out with kids (insert favourite pursuit here).

There’s also the family that spends a lot of time in separate rooms on separate screens – messaging each other if they interact at all. Parents worry that they aren’t being domestic in the right way by spending nights alone and apart from others in the house. But how does this compare over time, across history? Does the concern come because these parents grew up with television, which somehow facilitated domestic unity better? Or is it something else entirely? What is the function of domesticity anyway?

In the book I suggest that online sites like Facebook actually take on some of the characteristics of domesticity if this means having reliable companions and witnesses at routine hours of the day. So what does this mean for co-habitation for work-focused online types? What becomes of the actually physically present people professionals live with when they spend so much time online?

Another issue I want to think about when it comes to home offices is how they so often look like work offices: with all of the corporate mundanity such an aesthetic implies. A sample of photos from the study helps to illustrate this.

Some immediate questions that strike me are: who can afford to have a separate room of the house for work in addition to an office at work? Is a home office or study a necessity? What are the reasons people think it is a necessity? Are they right?

By extension, what would happen if we thought about labour politics in terms of space – that is, if we decided not to invest in real estate to make up for workplace inadequacies? Here I am specifically avoiding the situation of students and freelancers, which I take up in other chapters of the book. But some of the photos above are of part-time workers’ home offices which they used during days away from “the office”.

In future I think I might need to explore a materialist account – OMG even an actor-network-theory account (?!) – of how objects bring a set of affects and associations that can infect the home space with work anxieties. I’m reminded of the television producer who had to shut the door on her home office sometimes so she couldn’t see the objects that had such power to symbolise WORK; or the part-time worker who had to hide the laptop at home on Fridays so that she wouldn’t log in to her email.

For the moment, a big question coming out of the study is: to what extent do we willingly set up these domestic cubicles and enslave ourselves to a continuum of corporate culture stretching from work to home? Is having a home office a luxury, a convenience, and also a significant means by which we accept certain logics and vistas (the pun on the Microsoft name is intended) and therefore become habituated to an all-encompassing grid of productivity?