Crisis at Work

Identity and the End of Career

J. Potter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349671854, 9781137305428
• eBook ISBN: 9781137305435
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how we make sense of ourselves when work is precarious and intrinsically alienating. We know little about how this experience of work impacts the lives of men and women, and less about the way individuals understand themselves in the face of institutions and organizations from which they feel marginalized. Based on the narratives of men and women who underwent extraordinary work life changes, Crisis at Work examines how we negotiate greater meaning and fulfilment when our productive lives fail to sustain and satisfy. Reflecting a growing fracture between what we value, believe in, and are committed to and the degree to which work and career have become incapable of assuaging those desires, Potter examines how individuals attempt to assemble working-lives they find rich and rewarding and how that work is negotiated within the constraints and possibilities of the contemporary moment.

1

Introduction

There is a huge difference, and actually, if you’re a barrister there’s a whole setup, it’s an institution, and it has boundaries that are very clear, you know, there is a system where you have clerks and you have solicitors and you have courts and you have judges. And there is this vast great net of stuff that all interlinks and you have your place in it and it is very clear where your place in it is. And if you’re running your own business all of that kind of grid reference completely disappears, because the buck stops with you … So it’s not, it’s never near so clear. Because there aren’t rules, you know, if you’re a barrister and it’s the crime court you’ve got to wear a wig and a gown. And this is much less clear. And I do think that’s, that’s probably the biggest difference of all actually, is that it’s effectively impossible to know where the boundaries are if you’re in your own business … And it’s much looser than being a barrister, and the bits don’t fit together so intricately, and, you know, it’s full of lots of cracks. And the problem is that you can disappear down those cracks. If you’re an employee, if you work for somebody then, you know, there is the system there which you’ve joined, there’s the firm, and the firm has rules, and there’s a contract, and it says, you’re allowed to take so many holidays and you mustn’t be late and you’ll get sacked if you swear in front of whoever it is, and so on. Effectively I have to make, there aren’t any rules … It’s just not clear cut, and I think that is quite a big difference

[Miles: Barrister ∼ Business Owner]

This book tells the story of dramatic work–life change. It is a story whose main protagonists are, on the one hand, working men and women and, on the other, the institutions, organization, and practice of work. The individual changes I focus on are movements by men and women between unrelated careers or occupations. They are movements that raise fundamental questions regarding the importance and meaning of work, the role that it plays in our lives, and the degree to which our work is aligned with our values, beliefs, and commitments. The institutional changes I focus on have been well documented. They describe changes to the structure, organization, and practice of work; that is, changes that have impacted the way work is experienced and made sense of. This book, and the research from which it has been drawn, takes place at the intersection of these institutional and individual changes. Through the stories of men and women who underwent significant and dramatic changes to their working-lives, I consider the extent to which contemporary work is able to sustain lives that individuals consider fulfilling, meaningful, and self-reflective. The stories told in these pages are therefore revealing not only the way personal identity is negotiated through work, but how that negotiation is tempered by the practice and organization of contemporary work and career.

Numerous authors have argued that work has become more flexible, precarious, and intrinsically alienating. Social scientists such as Casey (1995), Sennett (1998, 2006), Gorz (1999), Beck (2000), and Bauman (2005) have suggested that changes to the structural economy, as well as to the way that work is organized and practised, have undermined work’s capacity to be satisfying, meaningful, and predictable. This suggests a change in the relationship between individuals and their work, and I accordingly define the ‘crisis at work’ within similar terms: as a greater destabilization of the self–work relationship. Yet moving beyond the specificity of productive changes, my particular focus is on the experience of alienation, meaninglessness, and instrumentality – characteristics of work that seem all too prominent within the contemporary productive moment. I argue that these characteristics have a profound impact on the possibility for work being meaningful, fulfilling, and self-reflective, and it is therefore this point of tension that serves as a portal for the enquiry to follow.

The crisis that I speak of is thus, in many ways, a crisis of the self: a social problematic centred not only on ‘who we are’ in the face of work that may be unsatisfying or intrinsically alienating but how we navigate and negotiate working-lives that are fluctuating and decentred. It is these negotiations, these strategies for dealing with the shifting sands of contemporary (productive) life, that are at the heart of this book. Like most negotiations, they take the form of ‘conversation’, or discourse. In this book, these conversations centre on the accounts and articulations of men and women who made significant work–life transitions, dramatic and at times sudden movements between unrelated jobs and careers. I argue that their stories are suggestive of the contemporary self–work condition, revealing of how we make sense of ourselves and our lives, and do so in a landscape increasingly marked by fragmented career trajectories and disenchanting productive outcomes. At the same time, although exacerbated by the ‘great recession’, the brand of work–life negotiations considered in this book predate the current socio-economic moment. They thus suggest something more persistent about the way working-lives are navigated, negotiated, and understood.

There is considerable research exploring the changing form, practice, and organization of work. While this literature is informative in its description of the way work has become flexible and precarious, and how careers have become increasingly fractured and fragmented, there exists a gap between its description of these changes and an account of how they have impacted the lives of men and women. Specifically, Catherine Casey (1995), Andre Gorz (1999), Ulrich Beck (2000), and Zygmunt Bauman (2005) have all argued that changes to work have had personal consequences. While there is much sociological relevance in their arguments, conspicuously absent from their assertions are the stories and experiences of working men and women. If work is losing its primacy, then it is imperative that we explore the individual strategies for coping with that loss.

This task is at the core of this book. I argue that the condition of contemporary work is inextricably bound to issues of biography and selfhood and that a more complete understanding of self and work is only possible through personalized or biographical renderings. The issue of most salience, therefore, is not if we can find resonance between contemporary work and identity, but how the circumstance of work is negotiated within personal identity frameworks and what those negotiations tell us about contemporary selfhood. The stories in this book reveal that self and work only come together through a process that is incessant, tedious, and demanding. The contemporary productive moment sheds light on this process in that work that is precarious, alienating, or instrumental demands that we, for example, make adjustments to the way we work, or rationalizations for why work is unfulfilling, or exit strategies for jobs that are alienating or oppressive.

I argue that we don’t have a conversation for describing that process; the incessant negotiation between ourselves and our work is excluded from more dominant understandings of what work means, or how it is supposed to make us feel. In this manner, the way we actually make sense of ourselves within, around, and despite of work does not adhere to the dichotomous representations of the way selves are framed within work – for example, as either alienated or satisfied, or disenchanted or fulfilled. I argue that we are not either satisfied or unsatisfied, or alienated or fulfilled, but incessantly negotiating various levels of satisfaction, fulfilment, and alienation simultaneously, and doing so within a (changing) contemporary condition in which, for example, the boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘life’, ‘work’ and ‘non-work’, or even ‘public’ and ‘private’ are not always clear. In this way, the dominant discourses of work and identity do not do justice to the innumerable ways in which we make sense of who we are and the countless strategies and negotiations that are an inevitable part of that sense-making process. Understanding work as either meaningful or disenchanting, or as either self-reflective or alienating, ignores the incessant nature of constructing and reconstructing a self, and doing so within a shifting work–life environment. Within this context, understandings of what it means to be ‘successful’ in one’s work, or to have a ‘good career’, become open to interpretation. While the stultifying, fragmented, and precarious nature of work needs to be accounted for, it is the way we understand ourselves within the context of work – the actual ‘work’ of that understanding – that I argue is at the heart of contemporary self-making processes.

The crisis at work is thus twofold: it is not only, in the Marxian sense, that work is alienating, that it fails to account for the myriad of ways in which we express ‘who we are’, or that precariousness and flexibility preclude the possibility of personal identity formation within work, but that we are still establishing a language or vocabulary through which we can understand and negotiate how work has possibly changed and, subsequently, how we’ve changed along with it. While it might be debateable whether contemporary work has changed, and if changes have impacted the possibility for self-fulfilment within work, absent from mainstream work, discourse is an explicit conversation describing how we make sense of ourselves in the light of, or despite of, these possible changes. In other words, there is no dominant discursive repertoire, no set of practices or tools, or shared ways of talking about the process of self-understanding within, through, and around work, particularly work that is precarious or alienating. This constitutes a crisis, for if work is either alienating or fulfilling, or successful or stultifying, but can be, at times, alienating, fulfilling, successful and stultifying, then we are overdue for a more explicit framework through which this conversation may become available.

Changing ‘work’

There is debate as to whether contemporary developments have undermined work’s capacity to inform identities. This book draws on these debates, exploring the varying degrees to which a reshaping of the productive sphere has impacted personal identity construction. I employ the wider ‘sociology of work’ literature to further frame the problem, discussing the conceptual parameters through which the self–work relationship is understood. While much of the literature covered establishes an inextricable link between individuals and their work, it often fails to describe the negotiation that individuals face in navigating work as an institution – in making sense of what work means, dealing with the constraints it imposes, or harnessing the possibilities it presents. This is particularly the case for those authors who argue that profound structural and institutional changes have indelibly altered the self–work relationship. If it is indeed the case that recent changes have impacted the way men and women understand themselves within work, then it is a fundamental task to enquire into how these changes are actually experienced, by men and women, within their everyday working-lives.

While there are illustrations of changing work within particular industries and productive specializations, of interest will be the more sweeping accounts of how productive changes and societal shifts have impacted the nature of working-lives. These arguments centre around the notion that contemporary work is missing a particular permanence, significance, or centrality, characteristics argued to be a historically core feature. The past in these renderings is associated with an industrial mode of production, and these arguments posit a dichotomous split between ‘then’ and ‘now’, industrial and post-industrial, and Fordist and post-Fordist production. What have been lost, it is argued, are the aspects of work that once made it meaningful, namely its stability and centrality in individuals’ lives, and its omnipresent role in greater social order. This dichotomization extends beyond the past–post split and includes juxtaposed renderings of, for example, work as once collective and now individual, and society as once productive and now consumptive. It is argued that these shifts not only change the act of work, as well as the nature of productive life, but the possibility of work being a reliable source of meaning, satisfaction, and identity. What has replaced these features of past work is precariousness, alienation, and the need for flexibility, features of contemporary work argued to be intrinsically disenchanting.

Chief among the architects of these arguments is Zygmunt Bauman, who argues in Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998) that the possibility of work being self-reflective is a historically specific phenomenon. Bauman understands work as having played a central role in industrial society, where working careers were a reliable, resilient, and continuous source of identity, as well as collective norms and values (1998). In contrast, contemporary work calls for flexibility and impermanence as the need for constant reskilling, as well as the short-term nature of contemporary work contracts has undermined the stability and intrinsic meaning characteristic of work in the past (Bauman 1998). Bauman writes that alongside these and other changes there has been a prioritization of consumption and the way individuals consume; that whereas in the industrial past work constituted the stable core of an individual’s identity, the trend towards consumption-led social arrangements has left the individual, and his or her ‘ability’ to consume, at the centre of contemporary self-understanding (Bauman 1998). For Bauman, this type of identity work takes on a flexible hue: consumption, when done well, is neither about permanence nor stability, but the incessant process of selection and acquisition that are the hallmark of consumptive practices (Bauman 1998).

Similar to Bauman, Ulrich Beck argues that fundamental changes to contemporary work have left the onus for meaning and self-understanding with individuals. His observations, like Bauman’s, stand in distinction to an imagined industrial past, and the changes to work that he articulates – for example, the loss of full employment, the speeding up of global capital, the de-standardization of labour, and the flexibilization of human capital – are explicitly contrasted with the modern or industrial order (Beck 2000). For Beck, that historic order represents a time when one’s working-life might consist of a ‘job for life’, and where one’s work identity was harmoniously interconnected with one’s life story. Following his work on risk and individualization (Beck 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001), these changes to work, for Beck, reflect broader social and societal developments that he identifies as characteristic of modernity, developments that are claimed to have shifted the burden of what were social responsibilities from institutions to individuals (1992). In turn, men and women become responsible for their identity as the socio-cultural possibilities for self-understanding are passed to the individual, whose main task in life becomes the production and maintenance of self (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001).

Beck and Bauman’s work resonates with others arguing that changes to work and the economy have had personal consequences. Notable among those is Richard Sennett (1998, 2006), whose writing on the ‘new economy’ (or ‘new capitalism’) has explored with depth and nuance the intrapersonal consequences of contemporary developments to work. Similar to Beck and Bauman – though exceeding their work in empirical gravity and richness – Sennett argues that the contemporary employment relationship has become marked by superficiality and mistrust and has thus lost the stability characteristic of work in the past (1998). For Sennett, the primary attribute of successful new economy workers is their mobile and flexible approach to their productive lives. If, as Sennett suggests, employment relationships have become characterized by short-termism, then men and women compensate for increased impermanence through detachment and indifference (1998). In contrast to work in the past, which permitted the fostering of a stable, life-long sense of identity, work in the new economy has a corroding effect on the character of workers, where long-term attachments are sacrificed at the behest of flexible and fleeting capital.

Beck, Bauman, and Sennett all contrast changes to contemporary work with a particular rendering of work in the past. This past–post shift is generally characterized as reflecting decline – that changes to work have brought about a loss or absence of productive qualities deemed socially and intrinsically meaningful. Interestingly, as Tim Strangleman argues, assertions of changing work have been made through the course of sociology’s existence (2007). For Strangleman, these accounts characterize past work as being more stable, meaningful, and rewarding, and it is the ‘nostalgia’ for these qualities – what he calls the ‘nostalgia for permanence’ – that has been the driving force for much sociological and social commentary on changing productive forms (2007, p.88). Strangleman argues that within these accounts the ‘stability and ordered predictability of “traditional” labour is juxtaposed to the rootless impermanence of “modern” employment’, and that contemporary work, when contrasted to the ‘traditional’, ‘real’, or ‘craft’ work of an earlier age, is habitually represented in terms of decline (2007, p.88).

Strangleman’s comments double as a general critique of the ‘end of work’ literature. The conceptual and theoretical thrust of that literature (see also Casey 1995; Gorz 1999; Rifkin 1995) argues that contemporary work has become bereft of meaning, and that this loss has shifted the achievement of personal and collective identity away from the productive sphere (Strangleman 2007). Amongst the numerous flaws that Strangleman highlights is the literature’s proclivity towards stripping individuals of human agency; assigning men and women the designator of historical witness to work’s inevitable decline – as opposed to being active participants instrumental in structural and institutional shifts. The danger of removing human agents from the process of work and societal change is that, as Strangleman tells us, it ‘denies the transformative power of human agency’ (2007, p.98), silencing the stories of men and women as they negotiate(d) the challenges that these changes present.

It is here where this book takes up its primary purpose, exploring with empirical depth and narrative richness the work of self-fulfilment and personal identity in the face of a contemporary productive sphere which, at the very least, presents men and women with work they often find alienating and bureaucratic. While I take as my starting point the notion that the condition of work is indeed in flux, my rendering of the contemporary productive moment is less wholesale than that of Beck and Bauman’s. In other words, I understand structural and institutional conditions to always be made manifest in forms that are more finite, specific, and nuanced than are reflected in the grand scope of Beck and Bauman’s writings. Moreover, my concern is less in the particular variant or form of possible productive changes themselves and more in the marginalization of a particular discourse concerning what it means to negotiate, live with, and thrive within the context of work which is too often experienced as alienating, instrumental, or intrinsically dissatisfying. Just as – for many of the ‘end of work’ theorists – the observation of structural changes might be suggestive of personal experience, so does the account of personal experience and human agency, the way contemporary work is enacted by individuals, inform our understanding of those possible structural and institutional shifts. I argue that the crisis at work is where the enactment of working-lives takes place – in that the way we negotiate our work is rarely an explicit aspect of our primary productive activity – so it is at the level of enactment, of practice, process, and negotiation, that the core of this book is engaged.

Working transitions

The stories told in this book describe significant work–life transitions. The people who underwent these transitions shifted between substantially different productive activities. Their stories are germane to the book’s central enquiry in that they are understood as both symptomatic and descriptive of the crisis at work: symptomatic in that we can understand the necessity of these work–life shifts as emerging in a contemporary work landscape, where work is often fragmented, alienating, and instrumental; and descriptive in that their stories articulate the requisite complex and continuous work that I argue is the hallmark of self-understanding within a contemporary work environment. It is the detailed articulation of this process of self-understanding that is at the heart of this book.

These are not the stories of the extremely disadvantaged or the minimum waged. These men and women come from backgrounds and work–life trajectories that can be described as middle-class. While their work–life transitions originate at a precipice, it is one far less hazardous than faced by those below them on the social strata. Nevertheless, their social location places them at the razor’s edge of the contemporary productive and cultural moment, where the value and meaning of working-lives is amorphous and called into question. For these reasons their stories are of consequence and arguably transc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Work, Self, Identity
• 3. Changing ‘Careers’
• 4. Being ‘in between’
• 5. Exiting the Organization
• 6. Trade-Offs
• 7. The Politics of Self-Determination
• 8. Self-Understanding and the Changing Self
• Bibliography
• Index