(Long-winded review warning...) This is a fascinating if occasionally frustrating piece, in part because of the over-use (mis-use, I would argue) of the term culture. Although this article doesnt entirely fall into the trap, its easy to go from culture to attitudes and then to claim that either an individual or a collective attitude change is both necessary and sufficient to rectify the situation; wrong turn that you find not only in journalism but also self-help and business-leadership literature. Also, theres a bit of reinvention of the wheel here; the implication that the overwhelm is somehow quite new. It does have certain new and intersecting characteristics, one of which is of particular importance -- in the last forty years, it has been feminized; it has also come to define both professional and service work (especially front-line work), and it now affects public as well as private employment. It is now also a more prominent issue precisely because it affects a swathe of articulate professionals, but that can also skew how the issue gets represented. But at the same time (something the article underplays) the overwhelm differentially affects the precariat -- those working two or three part-time jobs at a time -- and the population of the precariat is not gender-equal. However, the fundamental relationships and actions which produce the overwhelm in private employment were identified by Marx, in Wage Labour and Capital as early as 1847, and of course, they have been denied ever since. To understand its occurrence in public employment, one needs to look at the fiscal and revenue crises of modern states - which are structural, not simply a matter of politicians attitudes , and also at the (class) politics of taxation. And also at what Habermas called a legitimation crisis faced by the modern state, and at its attempts to deal with both fiscal and credibility deficits by imposing ever stricter terms of employment and more onerous accountability-regimes of the sort detailed by Donald J. Savoie, inhis recent book, Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher? But IS there, nonetheless, something importantly cultural AND new going on in the overwhelm epidemic, if such it is? I would say yes, though not at the level of personal attitudes (which I would suggest are better thought of, here anyway, as effects rather than causes). Whats both new and cultural is an increasing emphasis -- perhaps especially in public employment -- on producing quantified but also moralized *representations* of productivity (accountability), rather than *actual* productivity gains ... something Mark Fisher (in his 2009 book, Capitalist Realism) termed market stalinism. This seems too general a trend to be put down to individual managers who are unimaginative, and Im not persuaded its simply memes at work. What I think is happening is the *systemic* production (through actual, interconnected practices and work relations) of a productivity discourse. In other words, workers are required to produce *two* types of thing: commodified goods and services, and institutional justifications (the cultural capital of Capital). Which may hide a crisis in the economic exploitation of labour; the declining ability of employers to actually squeeze more economic productivity out of it. The feminization of work in this context brings with it attempts to super-exploit what is perceived as the more flexibly-exploitable labour of women, especially precariously-employed women, and also (I think?) a gendered imposition of accountability-work. Or at least, these are my speculations for the day. And now, back to marking papers ... er ... filling out the quantified grading rubric and appending appropriately-keyed comments. theatlantic/business/archive/2014/03/americas-workers-stressed-out-overwhelmed-totally-exhausted/284615/
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 19:05:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015