Work Smarter, Not Harder

Aims of the program*

This study program develops the historical and conceptual territory established in my previous research on new media technologies and the workplace. It aims to provide a prehistory for the efficiency logics guiding contemporary office cultures in tandem with the processing capacities of online and mobile communication devices.

Considering the broader history of technologies adopted for use in professional office settings, the study looks for consistencies in the types of anxieties and problems that the introduction of new media technologies are taken to solve. In this way, it questions the fetishization of online platforms in new media studies at the same time as it provides a history of white collar work and the affective dimensions of professional life.

Visiting the extensive library collections at Harvard Business School, MIT and Stanford University, and meeting various [insert your name here!] scholars, the program includes a period of approximately 4 months in the United States. Substantial archival work will provide the opportunity to consult original sources and documents. A range of material will be gathered, read and viewed, including books, pamphlets, business manuals and films, documenting the history of communication technologies and their relation to workplace efficiency.

A feature of the program will be to consult the research papers associated with key figures in the development of management studies, organizational critique and business self-help. The project charts a path connecting the motivational training methods of Dale Carnegie in the 1930s to the mid-century sociology of C Wright Mills and William H Whyte. It also notes the overlap in fascination with efficiency regimes stretching from the Hawthorne studies of Elton Mayo to the management priorities of the present (Mayo’s interviews at General Electric are taken by many to mark the birth of HR).

The technology-driven ‘getting things done’ (GTD) and ‘life hack’ movements that have emerged in online fora in recent years extend these legacies to the digital era. Typically celebrated as acts of worker empowerment and liberation, these movements appear in convenient proximity to dominant management priorities that invite employees to ‘work smarter, not harder’ and display their autonomy and responsibility in flexible, decentralized organizations.

Emanating from the male-dominated fields of IT design and hacker subcultures, GTD movements barely acknowledge their debt to the history of management self-help and the discourses of professionalism that typified mid-century modernity. This project responds to this lack by highlighting the repetition that plagues business strategizing across the decades. Moreover, the research identifies the durability of concerns that the philosophy of time management seeks to overcome, and that, in the absence of any explicit labour politics, the white collar worker seems destined to experience alone.

[Details of specific site visits omitted]

Significance of Program

With three book publications, an extensive list of journal and book chapters, and a succession of international plenary and keynote invitations, this research program consolidates my growing profile in the study of new media technology and work. Its significance will be to show how today’s online practices extend a much longer tradition of professional etiquette, workplace performance and social networking for the purpose of maintaining reputation and employability. Its further significance will be to reveal that the urgencies of the contemporary workday that appear to be exacerbated by new media devices are an identifiable feature of white collar work throughout history. What this means for the labour conditions affecting professionals heading in to the future is the broader imperative driving the research.

The project enhances and accords with the research priorities of the School** in its attention to the historical and philosophical aspects of technology design. Its unique interdisciplinary approach moves cultural studies’ focus on ‘the ordinary’ and ‘the everyday’ to the professional context of the workplace. This methodological combination remains novel in both national and international settings and marks a point of distinction for the Department in which I teach.

Support for this project will demonstrate that the university is responsive to pressing policy concerns drawing on the genuinely interdisciplinary promise of the new humanities. In the fields of workplace studies, IT and management more broadly, concerns are growing about the sustainability of workloads that thrive on a culture of busy-ness, in which many employees feel unable to ‘switch off’ from the job. When the office is available within reach of a phone handset, the responsibility for limiting work’s intimate reach lies literally in the hands of the individual. The productivity of Australian workers is a recurrent policy issue, particularly in light of this country’s ageing population and its unusual reliance on the part-time hours of working women. Technology is regularly touted as the means by which the workplace can become more accommodating for women in particular, and yet my own research has shown the extent to which efficiency logics leave working women little time for leisure or relaxation: at work or at home.

This research extends the ambition and remit of my previous work, which has had limited historical reach due to the constraints of employment contracts and semester schedules. SSP offers a suitable timeframe for a period of engaged empirical research in institutions that have been definitive in shaping the worlds of business, management and technology use in the workplace. If the project seeks to demonstrate the resilience of efficiency logics in the history of organizational studies, it also notes the persistent optimism that surrounds technology design as a fix for workplace ills. The study’s ultimate purpose, then, is to contemplate what forms of protection will be necessary for employees who are increasingly unable to rely on organizations for long-term employment and security. The mandate to ‘work smarter’ is a feeble directive for the growing ranks of workers who are exposed to the volatility of networks to earn a living.

*This is an edited version of my Special Studies Program application, which may be of use for other early career scholars looking for an idea of the “tone” of grant applications

**The Department of Gender and Cultural Studies is located in the School of Philosophical & Historical Inquiry.