Extreme work/normal work

Deadline: 31^st October 2013

Guest Editors:

Maree Boyle, Griffith University, Australia

Ed Granter, Manchester Business School, UK

Leo McCann, Manchester Business School, UK

Intense work and long-hours cultures are increasingly understood as ‘the norm’ in contemporary workplaces. Discussions of excessive hours, exhaustion, and burnout are far from new, but it seems that notions of ‘extreme jobs’ have recently become central to our conceptualizations of the world of work (Hewitt and Luce, 2006). Many people take long hours and very intense work for granted, believing it to be inevitable; an unspoken part of the employment contract. In an attempt to characterise this situation, commentators have used seemingly paradoxical or tautological phrases such as ‘normalized intensity’ (McCann et al., 2008). For many in the twenty- first century workforce, extreme has become normal, normal has become extreme.

What drives this normalizing of intense – even extreme – work? Part of the explanation is structural. What were once extreme demands become normal as demand and expectations are ramped up while employee resources and support are cut back. Large organizations are notoriously greedy with salaried employees’ time, but those working in SMEs and the self-employed are also forced to work long and often antisocial hours in order to maximise their incomes. While high-end software developers face ‘crunch time’ as deadlines loom, workers in international export-processing zones are put under intense pressure to meet orders or face fines for missing delivery target times. Staff at all levels are pressured by arrays of targets, KPI dashboards, bullying from above, and the standard ideological line that shorter time horizons and higher competitive demands are the ‘tough new reality’. This is the case even in organizations that are not ‘under the gun’ to realize short-term shareholder value or profit targets, such as public sector organizations. Structural conditions seem to make extreme work unavoidable.

Other parts of the explanation are agential and cultural. While workers widely bemoan the intensity of their extreme jobs, they simultaneously describe them as varied, worthwhile and exciting. Some seem almost addicted to the buzz and social kudos attached to certain extreme jobs. Many claim that long hours are self-inflicted, wearing their commitment to long hours ‘as badges of honor’ (Hewitt and Luce, 2006: 52). Sociocultural norms into which work is embedded also seem to reinforce the extreme/normal paradox. ‘Extreme work’ is portrayed in metaphors of battle, crisis, violence, and emergency, and everyday life seems infused with a culture of fear as militarized language abounds. Organizations enact security cultures or safety cultures that assume high-risk relationships between staff and/or customers. This is another mechanism whereby seemingly mundane work is acculturated as extreme. Ticket inspectors become ‘Revenue Protection Officers’. Administrators work in ‘credit capture’. Meteorological offices issue ‘extreme weather warnings’. Films and reality TV reproduce and sensationalize tropes of workplace intensity.

We invite paper submissions on subjects relating to the broad theme of ‘extreme work/normal work’ as this special issue of Organization aims to describe, explain, and theorize the problematic of intense/normal work in a wide-ranging and imaginative fashion. We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions that engage with the broad theme of ‘extreme work/normal work.’ Possible (but far from exclusive) areas that may be addressed include:

• Explorations of naturally ‘intense’ or ‘extreme’ kinds of work such as military and security services, emergency services, and medicine (see Boyle and Healey, 2003; Palmer, 1993; Klein et al., 2006).

• Environments where more ‘ordinary’ forms of work become ‘extreme’, perhaps because of crises, systematic work overload, bullying, and resource cutbacks. Explanations of how such work regimes become ‘extreme’ will be particularly valuable.

• The long-run historical trajectory of extreme work in the context of changing social and organizational structures. Is ‘extreme work’ anything new? Is it exaggerated? How might we trace the contours of extreme work from high industrialism to post-industrial society?

• Responses to extreme work – how have managers, workers and activists sought to resist the intensification of work? Have they had any success?

• How and why do employees accommodate, accept, or even embrace extreme work? What mechanisms do employees and employers use to ‘normalize’ intensity, and do these mechanisms bracket out or move beyond more classical forms of ‘control and resistance’?

• How do gender and identity roles intersect with the features of extreme/normal work? To what extent are notions of ‘extremity’ and the military/fire-fighting metaphors gendered concepts?

• The problematic of intense/normal work as an ontological, as well as an organizational issue; can we imagine different ways of working and living? What would happen if we challenged norms and cultures of intensity and extremity, replacing metaphors of battle, conflict and emergency with tranquility, collegiality and dignity? (Parker, 2002, Granter, 2009).

• International dimensions of ‘extreme work’. To what extent, for example, might work considered ‘extreme’ in the global North be considered ‘normal’ in the global South?

• The culture industry’s role in how we imagine work as extreme. Have popular culture renderings of extreme work helped to made it alluring, even a key part of our identity? Why has extreme work taken on ‘badge of honour’ status (Hewitt & Luce, 2006)?