On Being At Work

The Social Construction of the Employee

Nancy Harding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136763953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Inspired by the work of the philosopher Judith Butler, influenced by Marx's theory of alienation and intrigued by theories of death, this book develops an anti-methodological approach to studying working lives. Distinctions are drawn between labour (the tasks we do in our jobs) and work (self-making activities that are carried out at the workplace): between the less than human, zombie-like laborer and the working human self. Nancy Harding argues that the experience of being at work is one in which the insistence on practising one's humanity always provides a counter-point to organisational demands.

1 What Is ‘Work’? A Tale of Two Sisters

I am writing this opening paragraph on a July night in 2009. As I type, there is a thunderstorm raging outside my window, a window that looks, from its fifth-floor vantage point, over the rooftops of a city in northern Sumatra. I am here to do research, and the hotel in which I am staying has a swimming pool, a gym and all the accoutrements of a four-star business hotel anywhere in the world. It is a Saturday night: I have spent the morning exploring the working lives of women in the emerging industrial powerhouse that is Indonesia and the afternoon being treated like royalty by schoolchildren keen to rehearse their English with a native English speaker. Is this work, and, if so, what is it about it that qualifies it as ‘work’?

Figure 1.1 Five siblings (Mary, Shan, Robert, Fifi, Julie, and with apologies to Adey who had wandered off)

In contrast, my sister Julie will have spent today much as she has spent every day for the past 15 years. She will have walked to our father's house in the village a mile from where we grew up, will have lit his fire, cooked his breakfast, done his shopping and cleaning, and gone back to her own home to cook the midday meal for her sons before continuing with the chores necessitated by caring for a frail elderly relative. Her day is full of what she describes as drudgery. Is what Julie does ‘work’, and, if so, what is this thing called ‘work’ that encompasses two such very different ways of employing one's time?

Here are two sisters carrying out very different forms of labour for which the rewards are hugely different: Julie receives in return for her labours minimum state benefits, while I receive the salary of a senior academic, which is extremely generous in contrast to my sister's income. My job allows me to travel; Julie has never been out of the UK and has not had a holiday for 15 years. My working life is adventurous, challenging, stimulating, rewarding, prestigious and (save for time spent in meetings) extremely interesting; my sister's, as we will see, is full of unremitting toil, care and responsibility and deprives her of ‘a life’. In this chapter I am using this account of two sisters whose destinies have diverged so greatly to develop the thesis that, in the 21st century, labour and work are two very different, albeit conjoined, things: labour refers to the tasks that one does as part of one's job; work to the aspects of one's job through which the (working) self, that ongoing project through which one constructs the ‘me’, is constituted. This, of course, is only one of the forums in which the self is constructed, but my focus in this book is on working lives and workplace selves. I introduce in this chapter the thesis that the desire for work is a desire to construct the ‘me’ I wish to be. I will argue in Chapter Six that these future me's are killed, or murdered, by organizations.

My inspiration in this chapter is what was at the time of writing Judith Butler's most recent book, Frames of War (FW, 2009), and the related Precarious Lives (PL, 2004). Frames of War is Butler's response to the violence perpetrated on Moslem and other cultures by the US and its allies following the 9/11 atrocities in New York. In it, she calls for a revivified left politics based on a new ontology of the body. Her analysis focuses on how atrocities may be freely committed upon some people by others because those upon whom violence is visited are not recognised as living human beings. This requires Butler's development of a thesis of what is ‘a life’ and what is ‘a human being’, with the first being a condition for but not a guarantor of the latter. In other words, the very fact of being born into the species Homo sapiens does not necessarily allow the individual to become human. The questions to which she pursues answers are therefore:

• What are the conditions that facilitate the recognition of some people as human and others as less than human?

• What forms are taken by the violence enacted in and as a consequence of the process of exclusion from the categories of the human?

Butler's distinction between ‘a life’ and ‘a human being’ set me wondering if such a distinction could be usefully transposed to the workplace. Critical analyses of management and organizations that focus on management's desire to control every aspect of working lives (see Jermier and Knights [1994] for an overview, Thomas and Davies [2005] for an insightful discussion and other recent useful analyses in Fleming and Spicer [2003; 2008]) suggest the utility of such a distinction in that it offers ways of thinking through the effects on the person of being treated like some recalcitrant and particularly complicated piece of machinery. This leads to the distinction in this chapter between labour and work. My thesis is that it is ‘a life’ (or what I am calling a zombie-machine) that labours, but ‘work’ elevates that life to the status of the human; management¹ requires that we labour (as material objects that are alive but not human), but we, as living, breathing, emoting human subjects, desire to work and, through so doing, constitute a sense of self. Labour is carried out by zombie-machines who are denied access to the human; work encompasses activities over and above labour so that selves which are human are performatively constituted. In other words, paraphrasing Butler, my questions are:

• What are the organizational conditions that distinguish between the human and the less than human?

• What are the forms of that organizational violence which places labourers outside the categories of the human? and

• In what ways do we evade that violence and constitute ourselves as human while at work?

These questions will not be answered in this chapter alone but will be developed as the book progresses. The book's thesis is that organizational violence takes the form of the murder of the selves who might have been had they been nurtured through work rather than suffocated by labour.

Butler seeks to explore in Frames of War two problems, one epistemological and the other ontological. The epistemological problem concerns the issue of framing, or how we develop the politically saturated ‘frames through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured (lose-able or injurable)’ (2009:1). The ontological issue is: what is a life? Questions about how ‘life’ is defined and understood and what brings into visibility those who are regarded as alive, rendering others invisible, never having lived, arise, she argues, from operations of power. Her thesis concerns the wars that the American state and its allies have perpetrated since 9/11, but similar questions can be asked about organizations. I am thinking particularly of abuses in workplaces, some of which critical theorists are very much aware of (such as the pain experienced by many people following mergers and acquisitions ‘justified’ on the grounds of competitiveness [Ford and Harding, 2003]) and others that are so taken for granted they are regarded as ‘normal’ or as impediments to productivity (for example, the relentless tedium of many jobs [George and Jett, 2003]). What frames are used when organizing people at work, and how are the lives of working people defined and understood?

However, in turning the lens away from war and towards organizations, the ontological and epistemological questions I must pursue involve not only what is life but its very necessary other: what is ‘death’? In arguing that death takes forms other than that of biological death, as I will do in Chapter Six, I would seem to be traducing Butler's intent, while at the same time predisposing my arguments towards an angry denunciation of workplaces. In doing this, am I not stealing a necessary spotlight away from where it matters, those injured and killed in wars, so as to shine it, again, on the privileged West?

My answer to the first charge is that I am borrowing the questions posed by Butler and asking them of my own field of interest because such an acute thinker as Butler facilitates our reframing our thoughts and asking questions which otherwise lie dormant, albeit waiting to be asked, at the very tips of our tongues. And indeed Butler provides a licence for the extension of her arguments to the field of work. She calls, in Frames of War, for a new bodily ontology that would imply ‘the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work and the claims of language and social belonging’ (FW:2, emphasis added). She thus calls specifically for a rethinking of work, providing a licence for the arguments in this book. We must rethink work: what would be a rethought bodily ontology of work in which the structure of bodies is ‘socially ecstatic’ (FW:33):

We can think about demarcating the human body through identifying its boundary or in what form it is bound, but that is to miss the crucial fact that the body is, in certain ways and even inevitably, unbound—in its acting, its receptivity, in its speech, desire, and mobility. It is outside itself, in the world of others, in a space and time it does not control, and it not only exists in the vector of these relations, but as this very vector. In this sense, the body does not belong to itself. (FW:52–53)

The body is given over to others, cannot exist without others—and in workplaces another dimension is added to this ek-stacy, that of giving over one's body to labour for a certain time each day in exchange for a wage or salary. It is this condition of interdependency that is, in my reading, the most important aspect of Frames of War, for Butler's arguments in this book form a sustained and profound critique of individualism and the Western cult of the self. Her argument is that the self can exist only through its connectivity with others. She develops a thesis on modalities of violence, and in this book my intention is to use Butler's thesis on one modality of violence to think through another such modality, that is, the violence that organizations do in inhibiting the constitution of aspired-to selves. This may occur when recognition is refused or when the only recognition that is forthcoming is that of a denigrated identity; it may arise when possibilities for flourishing are so restricted that only stunted forms of the self can live; it may just be the casual destruction of dreams and aspirations.

That my ‘empirical data’ in this chapter come from the life story of one of my sisters is not self-indulgence nor guilt nor gloating at being the one who has escaped from the working-class poverty of our childhood. Rather, it is a recall of the feminist slogan of, as we might term it nowadays, the imbrications of the personal and the political: that two sisters who are in many ways similar could live such different lives and have such divergent experience of their selves as a result of the occupations they follow reveals much about the labour/work split, as the chapter will show. I am the oldest of the seven siblings, Julie the middle child (there are almost four years, as well as a brother and a sister, between us). We are about the same height, weight and shape, and our hair colouring is similar, although Julie was the pretty one of the family, while I was the brainy one, with Mary not far behind. We had similar childhoods: ate the same food, wore similar clothes, shared a bed with a third sister, Mary, quarrelled over toys, went to the same village school until we were 11, and grew up with a love of reading and writing (Julie nearly published children's books when she was younger). We each suffered from crippling shyness as children and young adults, had our first children in our late teens and settled into relationships at what seems, in hindsight, like a precocious age. We are both now divorced (and very proud) grandmothers, and each of us lives days bursting with activity. So, to tease out a thesis of what ‘work’ is, this chapter draws on two hard-working women whose life trajectories would seem to have been destined to run in parallel but whose positions are now fundamentally different. I will first summarise Julie's story of her life, told to me using the interview format followed when gathering the other working—life stories found in this book, interposing some aspects of my own life as I do so. That will provide the focus for the introduction of Butler's thesis of what it is that defines the human at and through work.

TWO SISTERS

In contrast to my own memories of a tough childhood, Julie's are of a happy time when

‘we didn't have much but there was always things going on’ … I knew [emphasis on ‘knew’] we didn ’ t have the money other people had, we didn ’ t have all the clothes and that, but when I look back I remember the nice things like going to chapel in our new dresses, all looking the same.²

The little mining village in which we grew up, surrounded by farms, was an idyllic place for this animal lover, and she spent as much time as possible riding a friend's horses and smuggling a menagerie of pets into the bedroom we five sisters shared. (Because of these activities, I always saw her as confident and outgoing: not until I used a formal interview format for our talk did I find out that we had shared a crippling shyness.) She left school at the first opportunity when she was 15, after having opted out of education at 13 because of that overwhelming shyness, which made her feel as if she didn't and couldn't fit in. Julie's first job was 100 miles away from home, working at a zoo, but she left after six or nine months because she couldn't stand the cruelty of keeping animals in cages. Her next job was at a kennel about 40 miles from home, but she was expected to spend the nights alone in a remote mansion, so one night she left, walked miles to the nearest bus stop and, having missed the last bus home, waited until daylight in the women's toilets at the bus station. Her next job was in a local dry cleaners where she ironed clothes all day. She remembers hating the work but loving the camaraderie of her colleagues. She worked there for two and a half years and left to have the first of her four sons, just before her 19th birthday. Apart from some part-time work as a barmaid she has not been in paid employment since. At the time of our discussion she was 52, living on an £85-a-week³ carer's allowance paid by the State.

I, meanwhile, left school at 16 with a clutch of G.C.E certificates, and went to work in London as a trainee typist. I returned to Wales nine months later and worked on the lines in a factory, making condensers for the insides of radios, experiencing at first hand what I was to learn much later were Taylorist principles of production. I married at 18, had my two sons within 15 months of the marriage, worked part time in the factory for a while, was registered as unemployed for a short period, got onto a government-run course to learn shorthand and refresh my typing skills, and then worked as a secretary for two years, studying ‘A’ level G.C.E's at evening class, until, at 27, I went to university. It is at this point that our lives diverged, so that my income is now ten times that of my sister, and the other rewards of my job (despite its many frustrations [Willmott, 1995; Harding, Ford and Gough, 2010; Fotaki, 2011; Clarke, Knights and Jarvis, 2012]) are inestimable. I need not describe the life of an academic, familiar to most readers. What follows is an account of the life of a carer.

Julie's first experience of caring was for our widowed aunt, Ethel, who shared her house with Julie and her four sons after Julie's marriage broke down. As Auntie Eth grew older and more frail, Julie, who was then in her late 30s,

had to bathe her … and then when she had cancer was down [the specialist hospital] everyday and then it was the worry then, cos I mean not only is she going to die but it was was I doing everything right for her, so er [pause] you know it was, it's hard because you've got that focus, that's your focus, even though you've got the boys, you've got to focus on make sure she's alright, as you know she was back and fore hospital, she'd broke her hip and um and then she was in [the specialist hospital] and it was always, got to do this, got to do that, so you forget about yourself… . I worry so much if I had a chance of a night out I'd worry about leaving her.

But eventually Auntie Eth became very confused and needed to go into a home, where she was happy, but, Julie said,

I always feel guilty about it, and I will say I will go to my grave guilty.

A few years later our mother's health deteriorated. Julie, now in her mid-40s, took on more and more responsibility for her care.

I started coming up quite a few times a week, and then when she was really ill I was up every day then, and sometimes twice, twice a day from Aberbargoed [two miles away, up a very steep hill], walking up, cos they would phone me, I'd come up, do what I had to do, go home, and then they'd phone me that they didn't have no milk, … so I'd have to come all the way back up, so through all winds and weathers, every day then.

N: That was walking?

J: That was walking, yeah.

Our mother died four years before this interview, when our father was 84, after which Julie became his carer. I asked her to describe a typical week:

A typical week apart from being boring, it's, it's just [coughs] it's coming over, doing his tablets, every morning and every evening, do his lunch and cook his dinner, do his shopping for him, get his prescriptions, go up [to the local town, five miles away] get his prescriptions, um… . .

N: That's on the bus?

J: Yeah, on the bus there and back, and that's twice in a week that is, because the prescription ends so I go up and get it. Um, do his shopping, keep him company, listen to him whinging, so that's a typical week, and it's always like, it's never ending, it's Christmas Day it doesn't matter. It's 24 hours he's on your mind and if he's ill and if he's at the hospital you're back and fore there, the same as it was with Mam, it was always back and fore the hospital, and the same now if like oh, every-body's going out but I can't g...