Abstract
This article explores the imagery and notions of personhood underlying the willingness to undertake extreme work among creative knowledge workers. The core argument is that extreme work is informed by pervasive win-win fantasies which can be recognized in a number of current organizational trends, ranging from New Public Management, over corporate culture, to project work. Each of these trends claims to transcend paradoxes by making contradictory extremes enhance each other rather than hamper each other. This is partly made possible by an increasing immateriality of both money and labor, I argue. Drawing on empirical data from creative knowledge industries, this article illustrates how ‘win-win’ workers subscribe to a set of norms promising that extreme work is a ticket to Never-Never Land. These norms are progression, passion, indispensability, and individual agency. The empirical analysis shows that win-win fantasies imprison us in ‘irreflexive modernity’, unable to escape the dream. In the end, the article discusses avenues for finding our way back into reflexive modernity through moderation, prioritization, and paying critical attention to the deferral between gain and cost practiced in win-win games.
Keywords
French sociologist Aldo Haesler never tires of pointing out that in 1972 the relation between the global amount of money and the global real wealth was 1:1. After 10 years it was 300:1 (Haesler, 2002: 177, 2011a). Put differently, as money was deregulated in the wake of abandoning the gold standard during the early 1970s, we have increasingly moved away from money’s grounding in material reality (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2002: 7; Papilloud and Haesler, 2014: 58). Money has become ‘virtual’, so to speak, which we witness in phenomena such as the globalization of finance and the digitalization of money via credit cards and so on (Bek-Thomsen et al., 2014: 2). According to Papilloud and Haesler (2014), virtual money in late capitalism facilitates dynamics which are very similar to pyramidal schemes: they promise win-win-scenarios to everybody through highly abstracted investment and credit procedures. In practice, however, the credit procedures depend on ever-increasing numbers of participants to keep afloat, and they ensure benefit only for the privileged investors. For example, in the previous decade, banks used customer money to speculate on financial markets and needed ever more customer money to cover eventual losses. In the ensuing crisis, the customers who suffered the most were the least privileged ones (Papilloud and Haesler, 2014: 60). One could say that the immaterialization of money facilitates fantasies about cost-free gains, all the while rendering the ensuing inequality and overconsumption invisible.
These money dynamics have engendered radical societal and cultural changes as well, Haesler (2002) claims: the social bonds fostered by the zero-sum game are replaced by ‘a society of “soap bubble” fantasies’ which spread like a “diabolical” force, penetrating not only the sphere of enterprise and business, but also our private relations, and even our relation to our Self.
In this article, I will explore these soap bubble fantasies as they spread among employees in creative knowledge work. I will show how they generate willingness to extreme work and extensive exploitation, not only of resources but also of Others and of the Self. This exploitation is veiled by the fact that believers in the win-win game permanently attempt to exorcise the notion of limited resources in favor of pyramidal promises about limitless gain. From this perspective, there is no such thing as exploitation, which instead takes on the specter of temporary flaws in the pursuit of the right optimization formula. Ultimately, the believers in the win-win game expect that with the right formula, no one needs to lose and no one needs to choose. The magic formula offers an escape from the zero-sum game similar to how alchemy promises to transform lead into gold. In this magic world, possibilities are endless, and the law of contradiction has been annulled: you can intensify control and freedom at the same time. You can also be both individualistic and collective, both instrumental and authentic, both short-term profit-driven and sustainable. Notably, the win-win vision is not one of compromise, but rather one of two extreme poles intensifying and strengthening each other: the more authentic you are, the better you can reach instrumental goals.
As employees are seduced by these alchemistic visions of cost-free rewards, they invent images of work which veil the pain of exploitation. Drawing on metaphors from extreme sport or romantic love, they laud ‘talent’ or ‘passion’ which allegedly render skills and routine obsolete. While skills and routine are solidly rooted in the zero-sum game, requiring long-term effort and humility, talent, and passion easily accommodate the images of creating endless wealth out of nothing. The talented employee can innovate without prior experience, and the passionate employee can be productive without need for recreation because his passionate work is his recreation. Human capital becomes an endless source of ex nihilo growth, and when this strategy fails, win-win illusions are achieved by sending the bill elsewhere: to third world countries, to casualized workers, or to the environment. Haesler puts it like this: ‘When two or more turn a profit together, look for the excluded third party who pays the entire bill’ (Haesler, 2011b; my translation). In other words, similar to the pyramidal scheme, win-win scenarios often depend on exploitation which becomes invisible due to their abstraction and fantasmatic rhetoric about cost-free gains. For example, the win-win situation of self-actualizing knowledge workers depends on the proletarianization of workers in outsourced functions.
My article will explore the phenomenon of extreme work generated by the win-win ideology, including the kind of personhood and morality it relies on. It is structured as follows: first, I will examine the notion of the win-win game which is characterized by alchemistic expectations of ex nihilo growth. Here, I combine Aldo Haesler’s research on money with research on working life in late capitalism, showing how the increasing immateriality of both money and labor helps intensify win-win fantasies. After this, I present a number of concrete examples from organizational literature of win-win fantasies which illustrate their pervasiveness in both public and corporate working life. Concretely, I describe the win-win fantasy of ‘freedom and control’ in New Public Management (NPM), the ‘individualistic and collective’ fantasy of corporate culture, and the ‘instrumental and authentic’ fantasy of project work. I show how each of the win-win imageries subscribes to the same ideal about a specific personhood who assumes responsibility, develops personally, thrives in intensity, and successfully fuses private and public life. This particular personhood is geared toward extreme work and is unable to apply successful strategies of moderation or prioritization. After this section, I move on to present data from my empirical studies among creative knowledge workers, whose work mode is commonly recognized as precarious and extreme (Gill and Pratt, 2008). My empirical data, stemming from a private sector publishing house and a state-owned broadcasting organization, will serve to illustrate the aforementioned personhood and the ways in which many employees in such contexts idealize and insist on extreme work in the pursuit of win-win fantasies. These employees participate in consolidating a pattern of exploitation, driven by the belief that the right optimization formula makes prioritization and moderation redundant.
In the end, I discuss the difficulties of escaping the win-win game and make some tentative suggestions for how the self-perpetuating nature of this world view might be challenged.
From zero-sum game to win-win game
The acceptance and even idealization of extreme work which we witness in numerous work settings, both private and public, rely on a specific worker personhood, I argue. This personhood is deeply embedded in fantasies about limitless growth and potential. It relies on a severing of the link between resources and possibilities, which I compared to alchemy above. In this section, I will show how the alchemistic ideology has roots in both financial and cultural aspects of late capitalism.
Starting with the financial roots of win-win fantasies, I return to French sociologist and economist Aldo Haesler who has studied money from a sociological perspective for more than 20 years. Haesler wishes to understand how our money practices affect the way in which we relate to each other socially. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s classical study on money, he argues that the more immaterial money becomes, the greater its potential to penetrate spheres which are not related to economy (Haesler, 2002: 179). The immateriality of money makes it possible to annul the correspondence between the medium and the actual resources it represents, thus engendering an ever-increasing amount of virtual capital. From this follows that the move from concrete trade encounters, to the Renaissance birth of modern banking, to the invention of the credit card has engendered an ever-intensifying spread of the logic of money—money which is increasingly divorced from the real amount of resources. In fact, Haesler claims that with the advent of banking and procedures such as interests, credit cards, and electronic money, the very principle of how money structures our interactions is inverted: originally, the act of trading was primary and money had to serve this purpose. However, as money liberates itself from the concrete trade encounter by virtue of its increased immateriality and technological sophistication, the trading subject now has to accommodate the logic of money. Money becomes omnipresent through digital devices, and financial transactions are increasingly determined via algorithms rather than human choices. In this process, individuals lose their autonomy of action, becoming more and more instrumentalized by the money game.
Put differently, while money was a means of exchange thoroughly founded in a correspondence between the medium and the resources it represented, people were bound to each other by it as though in a classical gift economy: if you cannot both give something and keep it at the same time, it follows that we clearly depend on each other, based on an inescapable principle of reciprocity. In the dynamic of reciprocity, we subject ourselves to the rules of giving and taking, thus binding ourselves to each other over time through debt and exchange, as Marcel Mauss (2000 [1950]) has described so beautifully. However, when money has emancipated itself from the reality of resources and concrete exchange, we enter the sphere of win-win games where limitless growth is possible, and money sets the terms. When money regulates trade rather than the other way around, we lose our ability to reflect critically on its consequences, Haesler claims. For this reason, he speaks of our current period as the ‘irreflexive modernity’ in contrast to Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens’ ‘reflexive modernity’ (Beck et al., 1994): A society without exchange [Tausch] whose dynamic is increasingly dictated by the erratic movements of financial markets is no longer capable of reflecting on its own terms of existence. The magic of money is that for centuries it has offered mankind the spectacle of an intoxicating Never-Never Land. Now the dematerialization of money prevents us from waking up from this horrible and sweet dream. (Haesler, 2002: 198, my translation)
If we reflect on the consequences described by Haesler of the ex nihilo mindset, we can see that it introduces radical elements of displacement between gain and cost in human interaction. This displacement can be temporal, that is, the bill is paid later, it can be social, that is, the bill is sent to an (invisible) third party, or it can be symbolic, that is, the bill is reframed as a gain. Either way, it manages to disrupt the immediate reciprocity of human interaction and offer a fantasy of cost-free gains, available to those who find the right optimization formula.
Haesler (2002) compares ‘irreflexive modernity’ to the Empire in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s terms: it is a Social Factory which can be endlessly tapped for profit potential (p. 190). The best way to capture the parallel between Haesler’s study of finance and critical studies on the culture of capitalism, such as Hardt and Negri’s, is by the notion of ‘immateriality’. While Haesler points out how the immateriality of money leads to a switch from zero-sum game to win-win game, many theorists point out how the immateriality of labor leads to a similar shift in working life. The term ‘immaterial labor’ was coined by Hardt and Negri (2000) and refers to the fact that an increasing number of workplaces focus on products such as knowledge, ideas, communication, and affect, all of which are social rather than material. This turns the social realm into a highly valuable reservoir of profit maximization, contrary to earlier times when it was separated quite clearly from the professional sphere. As Steffen Boehm and Chris Land (2012) put it, This means that all of ‘life’ potentially becomes ‘work’ as the very production of sociality functions to produce a common from which capital is able to extract a surplus. This flow of value occurs, to paraphrase Foucault (1980), at the micro-physical level, moving through the very capillaries of social production and friendship. (pp. 229–30)
When life becomes work, the alchemistic fantasies of endless potential intensify. Just like immaterial money no longer corresponds to an actual amount of financial resources, immaterial labor no longer corresponds to an actual amount of labor resources: life itself becomes the source of capitalist growth, and it knows no limitations. The limitlessness is augmented by pervasive information technology which generates 24/7 accessibility, thus removing the protection of a clearly delineated working day (Berardi, 2009). Terms like ‘precariat’ (Gill and Pratt, 2008) and ‘cognitariat’ (Berardi, 2009) attempt to capture this new vulnerability: the worker providing immaterial labor becomes a bottomless fountain of value creation because his very existence represents ever-available raw material for new products. When personal life and social relations are exposed to the alchemistic formula of commodification, they are apparently turned into gold.
Often, workers actively embrace the alchemistic fantasies, seeing life and work as two sides of the same coin. Many believe that working life is the best context for self-actualization, self-expression, and personal autonomy (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Ehrenberg, 1991; Fleming, 2009; Rose, 1999; Ross, 2003).
From this, it follows that in the Never-Never land of financial markets and in the Social Factory of labor, the law of contradiction is regarded as redundant, and what used to be mutually exclusive phenomena can now be combined with or even intensified by each other: the money one lends can be kept at the same time, and the all-consuming labor one provides to the workplace can be an expression of complete existential freedom. As we shall see below, this enticing vision has been taken up by modern organizations and their employees in numerous variations. I will go over three of the most widespread examples of win-win fantasies in organizational contexts: NPM, corporate culture, and project work.
Autonomy and control—the win-win fantasy of NPM
During the last decades, the norms and principles for public management have changed radically along lines similar to the win-win imagery described above. In the 1990s, traditional forms of bureaucracy came under intense critique for being ineffective, risk-averse, traditionalist, lacking in flexibility, and so on. A number of features from private business enterprises were selected as the way out of this deplorable state. These features were especially concerned with establishing relations of contract and performance appraisal between central government and local agencies or between central management and individual departments or employees. The magic word driving this intense wave of reforms was ‘accountability’ (Du Gay, 2004: 39; Hernes, 2005; Strathern, 2000: 4). Allegedly, the focus on accountability would ensure a perfect marriage between centralized administrative control and decentralized flexibility, innovation, and effectiveness learned from private enterprise (Christensen and Lægreid, 2001: 78; Du Gay, 2004: 42). (See Born, 2004, for an account of such reforms in BBC, including their focus on accountability. Very similar changes have taken place in the broadcasting organization, I studied.) In practice, this meant that NPM intensified two regimes which, although parallel to each other, were also in tension: on the one hand, devolution, local autonomy, ‘responsibilization’ of decentral agencies, and focus on ‘customer service’ (Du Gay, 2004: 40); on the other hand, increased centralized control, performance measurements, standardized administrative norms, and economic effectiveness.
More than 30 years of research have generated countless analyses of the paradoxes and tensions which this win-win imagery has caused for civil servants, politicians, citizens, managers, and employees. Some of these analyses point out the numerous unintended consequences arising out of a paradigm which promises to increase accountability and flexibility in the very same movement—and to increase service and effectiveness simultaneously too. For example, empirical studies show that the intense bench marking meant to ensure higher quality and entrepreneurial results has in fact simply quenched innovation and creative initiative, instead of establishing a culture of conformity and risk aversion (Hood and Peters, 2004: 270). Similarly, despite the intense critique of traditional bureaucracy and its over-reliance on regulations, many empirical studies show that NPM has increased rules and the forms of control it was meant to supplant (Hood and Peters, 2004: 271).
Other analyses focus on the way in which the intense paradox of control and autonomy is managed both discursively and subjectively. Discursively, NPM is often seen as relying on governmental techniques such as those described by Nikolas Rose. These techniques operate through ‘steering at a distance’ in a manner where local subjects willingly and unwittingly internalize the control mechanisms, thus complying with them all the while feeling independent and autonomous (Du Gay, 2004: 41; Strathern, 2000: 4). Agents in NPM are often depicted as having to conform to a specific ideal about personhood which stresses the merits and opportunities of ‘self-management’ (Du Gay, 2004: 41; see also Rose, 1999). The self-managing subject assumes responsibility rather than expecting authorities to take it for him. Consequently, he is always willing to accept the task of handling the permanent and irresolvable tensions inherent in the marriage of paradoxical expectations which NPM operates on. In practice, this plays out as intense cross-pressures and competing criteria of success which individual public employees must find ways to navigate. Scandinavian researchers have described different ways in which such cross-pressures can be handled, ranging from paralysis or decoupling to highly situational hybridity strategies (Hernes, 2005; Majgaard, 2008). However, the point is that NPM relies on a strong imagery of win-win scenarios which infuse discourses, steering technologies, and individual subject positions with intense paradoxical elements. This in turn leads to professional personhoods which accept extreme forms of work in order to navigate the soap bubble reality. As we shall see later, this kind of personhood is very prevalent among my interviewees.
Individualism and collectivity—the win-win fantasy of corporate culture
While public management has embraced a certain version of the win-win imagery based on control and autonomy as mutually enhancing, private enterprises looked to the social fabric of cultural inclusion and exclusion to establish their win-win promises. Boiled down to its essence, one could say that the imagery behind corporate culture is a mutual enhancement of extreme collectivity and extreme individualism. In other words, if the worker is willing to submit to a powerful corporate ideology, no questions asked, he will in turn be ‘brought to his greatest individual potential’ and ‘made to shine’. By becoming a member of the crowd or the team, the individual worker is on a path to originality and uniqueness, which only this particular collective can facilitate for him.
One of the most famous examples of this win-win imagery is Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman’s (1982) book called In Search of Excellence. In their book, they advocate a radical break with rational and bureaucratic principles of organization and management which have allegedly been responsible for numerous pathologies and dysfunctions such as worker alienation, rigidity, incapacity for action, and so on. What they propose instead is to establish companies with minimal formal organization and hierarchy, yet with maximum cultural intensity. This kind of company will be able to navigate ambiguity and paradoxes which older forms of management simply ignored. The most important paradox to navigate, according to Peters and Waterman, is the one between man’s desire to belong and his wish to excel, or put differently, the wish to be part of a secure collective and the wish to stand out as unique. In culturally intense organizations with minimal formal frameworks, employees would feel the safety of belonging to a visionary community, yet they would not be chained by the stifling regulations of rational management. Instead, within the parameters of the visionary community, they would be set free to pursue individual excellence. Such a corporate strategy would turn ‘the average Joe or Jane into winners’ (Peters and Waterman, 1982: 61), while at the same time generating explosive growth for the company. Any antagonism between employer and employee is wiped away, it seems, just like the most fundament existential ambivalence between belonging and individuation is resolved.
In a later book, Thomas Peters (1992) takes the visions one step further, arguing for an even greater extent of organizational dismantling in favor of intensity and even chaos. Here, the buzz words are ‘bonkers organizations’, ‘nuttiness’, ‘frenzy’, ‘carnival’, and ‘networking’. The ideal employee thus becomes the limitlessly engaged entrepreneur who submits wholeheartedly to corporate ideology, yet remains rebel to the extent that it serves product innovation (see also Fleming, 2009, for an analysis of instrumentalized rebellion).
Numerous critical researchers have analyzed the intense internal contradictions and power elements underlying this vision of companies as clans or families. Catherine Casey (1995) shows how the hegemonic family rhetoric in Hephaestus promises inclusion for everybody, yet exercises merciless exclusion of those who do not subscribe uncritically to the notion of workplaces as family. This precise paradox of promising complete inclusion, yet under the threat of radical exclusion, has led Hugh Willmott (1993) to compare the mechanism of corporate culture with those of Orwell’s Newspeak. Rather than accepting the Peters and Waterman tenet that cultural intensity provides a perfect platform for paradox management, Willmott argues that it emulates the totalitarian moves described by Orwell in ‘1984’, where language is drained of indexicality and instead used to claim that up is down, and control is freedom. In such an environment, management is free to do as it pleases, since there is no longer a language in which one can legitimately criticize the contradictory expectations one is met with. (Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse has made a similar examination of oxymoronic language used to mask tensions. He calls it ‘functionalization of language’; see Granter, 2014: 543.)
Gideon Kunda (2006 [1992]) makes a similar point in his analysis of Tech company, when he quotes a manager for saying about his employees: ‘You can’t make’em do anything. They have to want to. So you have to work through the culture. The idea is to educate people without them knowing it. Have the religion and not know how they ever got it!’ (p. 5). When you have a religion, without knowing how you got it, critical faculties have been put out of function.
Win-win imagery creates visions of personhood which are ripe with the promise of transcending paradoxes, yet which leave the individual alone with the task of navigating painful and intensified cross-pressures. On the one hand, this gives rise to extreme fantasies about work’s contribution to personal development and existential meaning. On the other hand, it prepares the ground for equally spectacular breakdowns when the tensions become too heavy for one person to bear (Ekman, 2013).
Authenticity and instrumentality—the win-win fantasy of project work
In the wake of popular management fads like Peter and Waterman’s call to tear down formal organization, project work became a generally accepted road to success. It adopted the celebration of flexibility, decentralization, and self-management, institutionalizing it in the kinds of short-term commitments which project work is based on.
The win-win imagery lying behind this kind of work is that by allowing employees the possibility to pursue authentic interests and authentic personal goals, the instrumental needs of the company will be met in the best possible way. In other words, the antagonism between authenticity and instrumentality is transcended. This point is made very clear in Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s (2005) study of capitalism. Project work has become so hegemonic, according to them, that they call the current spirit of capitalism ‘projective’. When analyzing this spirit, they particularly highlight the aforementioned promises of authenticity. Capitalism’s promise to deliver authenticity for workers is a response to the humanistic critique voiced during the protest movements of the 1960s. Here, employees complained of the alienating, imprisoning, and instrumental nature of capitalist work. They longed for creativity, autonomy, and self-realization instead. To accommodate this critique, the capitalist forms of moral legitimization, its spirit, changed so as to offer what was being requested. But as always the principle of profit maximization had to stay intact. These dual needs of authenticity and instrumentality could be met through the establishment of project work and its alleged win-win nature: project employees were selected based on their enthusiasm, personal devotion to the task, creative originality, and willingness to assume autonomous responsibility. This in turn created not only enormous flexibility for the company but also considerable increase in productivity, since highly involved workers representing only short-term salary costs contributed immensely to growth.
Boltanski and Chiapello argue that the presumed transcendence of the authenticity–instrumentality tension is in fact based on a veiled paradox. This paradox concerns the fact that authenticity has subtly changed meaning in the capitalist, project-work version: while it was originally defined by its incommensurability with opportunistic or monetary concerns, it has now become completely embedded in commodification (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 445–47). The market acts as the predominant vehicle for promises about authenticity, for example, through the experience economy or through narratives about sincerity and emotional depth as quintessential work qualifications (see Illouz, 2007, for an analysis of ‘emotional capital’ in capitalism).
According to Boltanski and Chiapello, this repressed paradox generates intense anxiety for employees, as they go through cycles of enchantment and disenchantment while enacting their commodified and instrumentalized authenticity (see also Ekman, 2013, for a Lacanian analysis of this process).
Numerous other critics of capitalism have pointed out similar versions of this win-win imagery. As mentioned above, Michael Hardt and Antony Negri argue that the social and subjective realm has become the primary source of productivity and profit, whereas in earlier epochs work took place in a zone clearly demarcated from private space. Similarly, Alain Ehrenberg (1998) and Nikolas Rose (1999) claim that intense preoccupation with the Self has become a mandatory practice which one puts at the service of various power regimes in current capitalism.
While several of these critics consider the advent of emotional self-scrutiny and the dismantling of the private–public divide as containing emancipative potential too, they all agree that there is an imminent danger of over-involvement and (self-)exploitation attached to it. It tends to generate strong tensions laced with promises of cost-free fulfillment, if only the individual is willing to assume the kind of personhood that project work endorses. The ‘projective’ person accepts endless responsibility, is permanently enthusiastic, never relies on routine, and never accepts that there are limits to the possibilities ahead. If this situation makes him anxious, he believes that he is personally responsible for not having found the spot where the win-win scenario unfolds for him.
Win-win fantasies and personhood
As one can see in the various versions of win-win imageries above, they have a specific ideal about personhood in common. Let us call this the win-win worker. First and foremost, the win-win worker is willing to assume individual responsibility rather than seeking refuge in hierarchical safety. In other words, he accepts and prefers self-management. As a self-managing worker, he is always concerned with how to develop himself because he believes that existential growth and work are two sides of the same coin. Furthermore, he has a preference for original, creative, and enthusiastic work, which means that he shuns routine and predictability. He is happy to and even feels enriched by drawing on his social and personal life in order to add new dimensions to his contributions at work. In fact, he believes that the reduction of work to simply work, that is, to an activity undertaken in order to achieve other ends such as security or salary, would equal a personal failure.
Because the quality of work is largely assessed by its degree of fusion between the private self and the work activity, the win-win worker is strongly informed by a notion of his own indispensability. When nothing can be boiled down to routine or procedure because good work is defined by adding something ‘extra’, the win-win worker becomes irreplaceable in his own imagination. No one else can add that particular extra just like he does. This is a blessing and a curse since it carries the promise of endless recognition, yet also contains the injunction for nonstop commitment.
To bear this injunction, the win-win worker adopts an attitude of extreme individualism. Basically, he believes that everything is a personal responsibility—and a personal victory—rather than ever being a result of structural circumstances. The win-win worker sees himself as the captain in his own life, and he believes that if this outlook is practiced skillfully, it will lead him to the place of win-win bliss.
As I analyzed the empirical data from my two case studies, I identified four specific norms about work and personhood. Each of these norms was extremely pervasive and served as legitimization and motivation for identity work and career practices among my interviewees. They corroborate the win-win personhood described above and can be seen as an empirical unpacking of it, allowing for more concrete details. Although the norms overlap, they nevertheless stress different features of the personhood and focus on different aspects of career choices and identity issues.
The norms are progression (i.e. the willingness to assume constant personal development in a workplace setting), passion (i.e. the assumption that good work can only be carried out in an intense and devoted manner, never just as routine), indispensability (i.e. the willingness to assume endless responsibility in return for being recognized as unique and irreplaceable), and finally, agency (i.e. the willingness to disregard structural injustices or limitations in return for the conviction that self-management can take you anywhere you want).
Below, I will present data from my two case studies in creative knowledge industries which show in more detail how these four norms make workers willing to accept extreme work. The creative industries are especially relevant as case material because numerous studies have shown how cultural work is precarious (Gill and Pratt, 2008), driven by ‘Utopian’ visions (McRobbie, 2002), generating anxiety due to inherent tensions between pleasure and obligation (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010), and prone to instigating widespread self-exploitation among employees (Ross, 2003). In other words, it features a combination of structural uncertainty, moral ambiguity, and emotional intensity which is often characteristic of extreme work.
Norms underlying the morality of extreme work in creative industries
The data in the following section stem from two pieces of ethnographic fieldwork. One took place in a large state-owned media organization with around 3000 employees, of which the majority engaged in creative journalistic work. The second took place in a publishing house with around 300 employees which forms part of a larger conglomerate of media companies. The majority of the employees in the publishing house perform creative editing work, networking, event making, and other combinations of creative and commercial activities.
In both organizations, there was a high degree of structural uncertainty for employees. First, there were a large number of freelance workers who never knew what the future would bring in terms of employment and affiliation. Second, there were frequent restructurings and lay-offs which left permanent staff uncertain about their prospects too. Furthermore, in both companies work was organized as ‘projects’ which meant that recurring periods of long working hours while filming or close to deadline were common. In fact, the workload was often so heavy that employees had to ‘fake it’, for example, by being responsible editor for books they had never read and so on. Finally, in the broadcasting company, production was organized as an internal market, meaning that departments competed against each other in pitching programs to managing editors. Those who repeatedly lost such pitches were also likely to lose their job. Altogether, this created an atmosphere of intensity and pressure which made moderation risky.
My data consist of 25 in-depth interviews with employees and managers, combined with notes from 6 months of fieldwork in the respective companies. My analytical approach was discursive, focusing largely on predominant norms and metaphors driving work and hierarchical interactions. Furthermore, I looked at the identity work and career strategies ensuing from the discursive tendencies. I was aware that I had a bias toward assumptions about creative work as being driven by existential agendas and excessive involvement with detrimental consequences for work–life balance. Consequently, I attempted to perform both interviews and observations in a manner which explored the existence of other forms of work ideals and practices. While I did find the existence of ideals such as craftsmanship, collegiality, and stewardship, which each in their way encourage moderation, the heavily dominant ideals concerned progression, passion, indispensability, and individual agency. For a detailed account of this, see (Ekman, 2012). Suffice it to say here that the existence of norms of moderation did not temper the ideals about extreme work and in fact often affected feelings of ambiguity which were dealt with by resorting to win-win fantasies. Below, I will illustrate in more detail the four norms encouraging extreme work.
Progression
In both case companies, there was a general agreement about the fact that work should serve as the platform for permanent individual development. This development usually consisted of finding a perfect marriage between career challenges and existential aspects in need of exploration or expansion. The absence of such a future trajectory was seen as synonymous with failed or flawed career management. Below, one of my interviewees explains why it has been ambivalent for him that he found his dream job right at the beginning of his career:
Maybe it makes it harder for me to strive for something else or to have an ambition about mastering something else or reaching something else, because I actually got it all in one go. […] Sometimes it feels like I would probably have an easier time developing or trying to learn something new if I had started in a field which didn’t really interest me. Then I could say: ‘One day I would really like to make Program X’. It can actually be a bit inhibiting. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m going to help organize a conference: Simply to whip myself into trying something else.
What would happen if you did not give yourself those kinds of challenges?
Well—what would happen is the thing which has kind of happened during the last two years: It all becomes a bit too much routine. I can feel it. I don’t know if anybody else feels it. […] I talked to a coach last weekend who mentioned something about needs and demands. It made me think that I’m quite convinced I fulfill all the demands. But the question is: Are all my needs met? And I don’t think they are. But I don’t think I have any problem fulfilling the demands.
There are a number of interesting aspects in Peter’s quote. First of all, it is obvious that an agenda of personal development via work is absolutely mandatory. Rather than rejoicing over his luck at finding a dream job so early in his career, Peter frets over the way in which it obstructs a mode of progression. He frets to a degree which leads him to consult a coach about the problem of having found his dream job! Second, it is also obvious that routine is a highly stigmatized mode of being which should be rooted out as soon as possible. Digging deeper into the problem of routine, one can see that its most significant danger is its failure to provide fulfillment of personal, existential needs. While routine work may indeed be sufficient to meet workplace demands, it is never sufficient to meet personal needs for meaningfulness. And meaningfulness is apparently antagonistic to satisfaction with status quo. This means that although Peter’s employers have no complaints about his performance, he feels obliged to worry about his own risk of simply accepting the current situation as good enough. One gets the impression that this worry is mobilized through self-discipline rather than through a spontaneous frustration: Peter is actually happy with his work, but he is deeply worried about this happiness because it fails to root out routine elements and it threatens to deactivate the permanent concern about breaking new ground.
As a remedy for this imminent danger, Peter agrees with the coach that he should help arrange a conference. They pick this particular activity because Peter has a phobia about speaking in large crowds. This phobia represents an existential issue which work may serve to develop or redeem. Here, we see the way in which the norm about progression encourages extreme involvement: it systematically questions satisfaction with status quo and instead demands the identification of personal vulnerabilities which the employee should attempt to overcome through intense commitment to a work project. In this norm, the question of ‘good enough’ performance becomes moot because the employee is not simply concerned about delivering what his employer expects of him. Rather, he is concerned about using work to push his own personality to its utmost potential, beyond any individual limitations.
Since the primary concern in the norm of progression is to be in a permanent state of overcoming limitations, challenges are seen as extremely vital. In fact, they are so vital that many employees would be willing to change job if they were not provided with challenges: I love the challenge of trying to reform everything with new energy—trying to convince the managers that it would be much cooler if we filmed outside, or did like this or like that. And keep making suggestions for how to change things. And then if they keep saying for years that it’s not possible, […] then I would rather just leave. (Lisa)
As we can see in this quote from Lisa, she does not see her contract with the employer as revolving around solving specific tasks relevant to the company. Rather, she sees the contract as one in which they get a highly motivated and talented employee whom they must promise the possibility to undertake extremely challenging assignments, so she can maximize her potential and be in a state of intense personal development. Often employees use metaphors such as plunging, jumping out at the deep end, and similar images of leaving all safety nets behind, when they talk about work and their most coveted or fondly remembered assignments. Taking risks is not only a necessary but rather a highly attractive aspect of working life. It is one of the key elements in the self-technologies which these employees subscribe to.
Carla relates a story of having worked as a radio host for many years. Then, one day she is approached by a manager who invites her to host a TV program without any further training. She is both thrilled and frightened at this prospect because it involves a significant risk of failure, given her lack of experience. However, this precise mixture of thrill and fear is one of the most coveted conditions for many employees, since it offers the perfect opportunity to practice the norm of progression: It was like: YES! I just grew several centimeters taller. It means a lot, I think: To try something new. To just be thrown out, and then: Woooow, finding out that you can manage the jump. (Carla)
Another employee makes a similar point: On the one hand, I had some very tough circumstances where I was just thrown in at the deep end. On the other hand, I could manage it. And they knew that I could. So they kept pushing me to do more things. And that is incredibly developing. That is fantastic!
As we can see, the norm of progression idealizes radical breakthroughs and intense personal development through work. Consequently, it disdains routine, safety, and acceptance of limitations. Its key metaphors are taken from extreme sports such as bungee jumping or parachuting which are at the heart of the experience economy, offering intense thrill and a sense of personal invincibility. The norm of progression is closely related to another norm, namely that of passion, which I will unpack below.
Passion
If the norm of progression dictates a specific orientation toward the future and permanent preoccupation with development, the norm of passion dictates a certain degree of intensity during work. Like the norm of progression, it is antagonistic to routine, but it is also antagonistic to the distinction between work and existence. In other words, it serves as a quintessential opposite to more traditional work ideals according to which one performs the required duties at work in order to enjoy the pleasures of leisure after work. In the norm of passion, work should always represent existential fulfillment in itself. It should never be a means to achieve an end. The metaphors in this norm draw on images of pure love as described by Giddens (1992): a kind of relationship expected to offer happiness and satisfaction for both parties, and whose continued existence depends on its permanent ability to do so. In other words, it is a kind of commitment which can never be prolonged based on external parameters such as duty, tradition, practical necessity, and so on. If it is no longer inherently satisfying, it should be terminated. Interestingly, the intense relationship with work can often seem more important and enticing than the relationships playing out in the private realm: I experience [conflicts between work and family] when I have the most energy. When I am at high speed, then I feel as if there is a family holding me on a really tight leash, and it’s killing me, because I just run in the opposite direction, like a bungee jumper. And then they pull me back. […] Quite frankly, I try to cheat. I simply try to cheat to add more work assignments. So for example at a time when I ought to sleep, I don’t sleep, because then I can do more work. […] I do it because I feel that I miss out on great experiences otherwise—and I’m a bit bored at home. I like it when things are intense and energetic, and busy.
As this quote illustrates, working life offers a kind of intensity which family life cannot match. Consequently, this employee is willing to go to fairly extreme measures to ensure her possibility for performing work and experiencing the rush of it. Many employees speak of the importance of burning, of fire, and of fuel when describing the ideal job. The nightmare scenario in turn is the industrial worker going to work only in order to earn his living. Below, an interviewee describes how she would feel working in a team of such industrial workers who are conscientious, yet driven by practical concerns rather than passion: Well. … no! Yes, sure they’d do their job. But it just wouldn’t be the same. I really don’t think it would be the same. They may claim that they do their job—and they probably do what they’re paid to do. Maybe they make small suggestions here and there. I just don’t think they’d be open to all the possibilities. I don’t think they see enough possibilities if they don’t burn for it. (Lisa)
In other words, burning for your work is mandatory. This can only be achieved by pure internal motivation, never external aspects such as salary, necessity, and so on. Passionate work ceaselessly explores new possibilities, whereas duty-driven work would conceivably be willing to say ‘enough is enough’ or be happy with routine. The very prospect is forbidding for Lisa and her peers: I think it’s incredibly good fuel if you get to try something new and different. This thing where you know your assignments forwards and backwards can really make me stagnate. Then I have a hard time finding the motivation after a while. For me it’s gasoline to try something new. (David)
Notice again, how David draws on metaphors of fire and spark. Unless work is intense, it is a failure, according to the norm about passion. A consequence of the disdain for duty-driven or routine work is that each individual employee is seen as unique and indispensable. This norm about indispensability will be examined below.
Indispensability
In the norm about indispensability, the employee expects to be recognized as unique and irreplaceable. This happens by combining the ideals about craftsmanship, training, and explicit criteria of success with the much more opaque and grandiose notion of talent. While good craft is presumably something one can achieve through repeated and sustained practice, talent is something one either has or does not have. No matter how much you practice, you can never learn talent. It is a unique gift, inimitable by others, and thus the most promising way to position oneself as indispensable. So although craftsmanship and experience are important, they are never enough. Talent adds that ‘something extra’ which sets you apart from others and makes you indispensable. Consequently, the indispensability norm has a strong focus on validation and recognition from managers. This validation counts as attestation to the fact that one has the vital and irreplaceable talent. Since talent cannot be defined according to explicit success criteria due to its unique and often unpredictable character, one depends on informed ‘witnesses’ to recognize its existence, preferably a manager.
The small quote below illustrates the importance of recognition and validation:
I would like you to finish the following question as quickly as possible, without giving it any thought: ‘For me, the purpose of work is—?’
‘—to be validated!’
Other employees use the word ‘feedback’ rather than validation. Interestingly, the employees who focus intensely on getting frequent and extensive feedback from their manager are the same employees who underscore the importance of getting freedom and large responsibility. Again, when one is expected to accomplish something grand, yet opaque, one becomes dependent on a spectator who is able to recognize grandeur when he sees it. Below, an employee describes how she feels when she does not receive the vital feedback: Then I feel that I don’t get the thing from my managers that I want. Ergo, I don’t know if what I’m doing is simply crap, or what! Then I begin to distance myself … I become less ambitious. I kind of put a lid on myself, and then I usually start surfing for another job. […] I don’t want to be there. If no one can give me a medal for what I’m great at or tell me what I’m bad at, then I don’t want to be there.
This quote illustrates how entirely dependent the ‘talented’ employee is on manager response. When this validation or feedback fails to arrive, her sense of quality and success criteria evaporates because her talent can never just be captured by standards or other explicit definitions of quality. This would quench the originality and potential which lie at the heart of the indispensability norm.
Conversely, when employees do get manager validation, they are willing to accept pretty much any challenge one hands them. Once they are convinced of their uniqueness and consequent indispensability, they will undertake projects and assignments which they are completely under-equipped for. This under-equipment could relate to lack of experience, lack of training, or lack of resources. But all this is irrelevant to the indispensable employee who sees it as a great privilege to prove that she can accomplish the impossible when given the chance.
Below, we see a quote from an employee who describes precisely such a situation of feeling deeply privileged by the fact that she is given assignments which are far beyond her experience level and training: Right from the first day, having studied only one year at university, I was offered a position as manager. It was just …! [Widens her eyes in awe] I mean, I spoke at the Royal Exchange, addressing the national power elite. Little me, 20 years old, stood in front of that famous painting with all those men, you know, and felt completely in awe. It was truly grand to be there and talk to them about the importance of what we were doing. And I was allowed to circulate the whole system—I did everything from practical work to strategy and communication. The organization did not limit me in any way.
As this quote illustrates, extreme or unrealistic expectations are perceived as flattering and validating in the indispensability norm. Obviously, those very same expectations generate frequent anxiety and fear of failure in the employees. In order to handle this anxiety, they can resort to the norm about individual agency according to which anything is possible if only you are given extensive freedom and responsibility.
Agency
Just like the other three norms, the agency norm is concerned with maximizing opportunities and overcoming limitations. Concretely, the agency norm promotes this by claiming that ‘you can do what you want’. This attitude is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it furnishes the employees with the impression that in a context of freedom and self-management, the sky is the limit; on the other hand, it consistently prevents them from attributing hardship to structural circumstances. For example, according to the agency norm, stress is always a result of dysfunctional self-management rather than the result of unrealistic cross-pressures. The majority of my interviewees were willing to let go of the protection offered by a structural or collective perspective in order to win the grandiosity and freedom fantasies of the agency narrative.
One of the recurring key words in the agency norm is ‘responsibility’. Interestingly, responsibility is often referred to as a kind of individual prerogative, rather than a duty to be assumed. Somehow, being equipped with extensive responsibility was seen as a confirmation of one’s prowess in the virtue of self-management. Below, an interviewee describes what matters most to her in a job: Some would call it the right to get responsibility. I mean, that you are given some big projects which you handle by yourself. That has been really important to me … it is the greatest feeling.
From the opposite perspective, an employee describes how she feels after returning from maternity leave only to be given routine assignments rather than challenging and original projects: It was simply an assembly line. I felt that I was just editing other people’s stuff—I mean other people’s interviews which I had to cut down to ten seconds, blop, blop! […] Suddenly I was somebody who didn’t have any competencies. Coz’ there had to be a reason why I was put there, right? (Karen)
As we can see, Karen feels her professional identity threatened by having to perform routine tasks—regardless of the fact that this kind of editing was a key assignment in the media company. She felt especially grieved by having to edit ‘other people’s stuff’, which shows the importance of being at center stage in the agency norm. The magic of self-management fantasies relies on two components: responsibility and freedom. As the ‘blop, blop’ in Karen’s comment indicates, she felt deprived of both and could thus no longer entertain the notion that the sky is the limit. In fact, the routine assignments had left her struggling with depression and meaninglessness instead.
Conversely, when employees were offered the coveted combination of responsibility and freedom, they were willing to invest enormous effort to prove worthy of it: I can’t imagine finding another job where I get the same degree of freedom. And that’s really what matters to me: I get to prove that what I believe in can become a success. Instead of being told: ‘Take this money, and do like this and this and this’, they say: ‘Here is some money. How much will you bring back to us when you have done your thing?’ And I say: ‘I will bring back so and so much’. […] To get to prove that …! (Jacob)
As Jacob proceeds to explain, he tends to work extreme hours to the detriment of his personal life and his health. But he has a hard time resisting it because the freedom and opportunities associated with being given such responsibility are so precious to him. Neither he nor any of his colleagues reflected on the irony of calling this self-sacrificing involvement ‘freedom’. Rather, getting the opportunity to undertake intense involvement was regarded as a privilege.
To stay worthy of this privilege, many employees were concerned about accomplishing something 24/7, as Clarissa’s comment below attests to: I’m not good at allowing myself to think: ‘I’ll just watch some telly tonight, or I’ll just do nothing’. I prefer to accomplish something. Then I just have to read some chapters in a good book, or I have to work a little on a children’s book I’m writing, or I just need to think about something at work. I guess I have this thing where I feel I should accomplish something all the time. (Clarissa)
Other employees describe that they have 20-hour working days because they continue chasing original ideas or ground-breaking concepts long after they have returned home.
As we can see from the analysis of the norms above, they each in their way promote extreme work and shun moderation. The progression norm preaches that one should never settle for satisfaction in the moment, the passion norm preaches that one should always be intense, the indispensability norm preaches that one should pursue grand and original projects which no one else could manage, and the agency norm preaches that one should pursue extensive freedom and responsibility while never seeking refuge in structural or collective perspectives.
While many employees complain about the anxieties and exhaustion of extreme work, their attempts at moderation frequently fail. This leads us back to Haesler and his claim that we are prisoners in an irreflexive modernity: captured by our own soap bubble fantasies.
Discussion—the lure of win-win images, and how attempts at bubble bursting often fail
As already mentioned, numerous theorists point out how the win-win imagery and its pervasive logic of creating gold out of nothing have become a game that plays us rather than the other way around. We are caught in a honey trap, so to speak, unable—and probably unwilling—to find the way out.
In organizational contexts, the win-win imagery has taken on different kinds of rhetoric which all rely on the promise that contradictory extremes can be married, thus annulling the costs associated with the zero-sum games. Whether it is the marriage of control and autonomy, individualism and collectivity, or authenticity and instrumentality, the win-win game endorses a specific kind of personhood who scoffs at moderation and relies on the extreme metaphors of the experience economy for ideals and guidance.
For those employees uncomfortable with or unequipped to extreme sport and romantic love as the new workplace norm, the risk of becoming a ‘lose-lose’ garbage can for all the displaced bills of the soap bubble economy is imminent. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) show how successful project work is always dependent on a group of workers who secure the stability, consistence, and reliability which the star employees are free to disregard (p. 449). This group of workers is paying the structural price for the privileges of those with the ‘win-win’ personhood: they get lower salaries, fewer benefits, less recognition, more sinister prospects for future employment, little additional training, and hardly any security. Both my case companies relied heavily on freelance workers, not least for a number of routine assignments such as basic text editing. While text editors are easily replaceable, talented networkers and event-makers or ingenious mavericks are harder to find. Consequently, one group becomes proletariat and the other group becomes elite—albeit a precarious elite.
Many of the elite workers were frequently disenchanted with the suffering ensuing from win-win work practices. However, they quickly learned that the price of moderation may be relegation into the proletariat. Instead, they attempted to find relief through other remedies than moderation: they countered their extreme progression with practices of extreme being-in-the-moment such as mindfulness and yoga. They countered their high-speed, limitless work with home-baked bread, home-sewn children’s’ clothes, and home-grown vegetables—in other words with intense (and exhausting) practices symbolizing limitless free time. And they countered their individual agency with extreme states of powerlessness such as adopting diagnoses of stress or depression to legitimize their limitations. As much as the purpose of these countermeasures was to relieve the symptoms of the win-win game, they only served to intensify them. This is because they rely on the very same alchemistic principle as the soap bubble they are trying to burst: two extremes are expected to enhance each other while the costs of prioritizing or choosing evaporate. Or put differently, the cost of intensity is dealt with by introducing another kind of intensity, rather than reducing intensity through moderation.
The organization theory literature features numerous examples of how the win-win game plays us to an extent that attempts at resistance are reabsorbed. Contu describes how the so-called carnivalesque forms of resistance, that is, the forms based on individual countermeasures rather than collective protests, mostly serve to feed the very mechanisms they are trying to struggle against. This happens because the individual countermeasures are driven by ‘the fantasy of ourselves as liberal, free, and self-relating human beings to whom multiple choices are open and all can be accommodated’, as Contu says (2008: 270).
Similarly, Spoelstra and Butler show how university professors see themselves as resisting the instrumentalizing publishing game, all the while being played deeply and thoroughly by it. The professors argue that they only write articles for highly ranked journals in order to buy themselves the time and freedom for their ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ research. However, this condition of performing instrumental research output never really ends, and the narrative of authentic research is reduced to a legitimizing fantasy (Butler and Spoelstra, 2012).
Caught as prisoners in the totalitarian landscape of soap bubbles, we are willing to exploit ourselves and each other so as to continue the dream of getting everything out of nothing. While there are no signs of the win-win fantasy coming to an end on a global level, we can nevertheless experiment with erecting local ‘pockets’ where the alchemistic elements are reduced. As should be evident by now, the only resistance against soap bubbles which is not immediately reabsorbed by the win-win games is the one which advocates moderation and insists on choice, prioritization, and paying the bill. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) call for ‘slowing down, deferring, delaying, spacing’ (p. 469). More concretely, I would argue for practices in which we systematically scrutinize the mechanisms of cost deferral on which soap bubbles depend. This means pursuing the ways in which the bill is displaced temporally—that is, when will we need to face this cost, and what can we do now to ready ourselves for it? It also means pursuing the way the bill is displaced socially, that is, exploring which marginalized or casualized workers pay the cost of our current privileges, and how we might compensate them. And finally, it means pursuing the ways in which the bill is displaced symbolically, that is, exploring the Newspeak rhetoric and extreme sport metaphors which make us willing to claim that permanent enthusiasm is recreational and that extreme individualism is a form of collective security.
Most significantly, the attempts to moderate extreme work and its underlying alchemistic beliefs would benefit greatly from sacrificing the fantasy of the limitlessly potent individual. This means that collective countermeasures based on a fundamental willingness to pay a price for the cause of dismantling soap bubbles would get us a long way. In short, enduring limits and painful ambiguity rather than feeling entitled to freedom and endless choices might just open the door back into reflexive modernity.