Abstract
Precarity is the purest form of alienation where the worker loses all personal association with the labour she performs. She is dispossessed and location-less in her working life and all value is extracted from her in every aspect of her life.
Precarious, quantified workers are always-on, overworked and anxious. In this book, Moore draws on feminist new materialism and Marxist new materialism to develop a framework for the investigation of tracking technologies in the precarious workplace. Recognising the multiple disciplines in which work on this topic has been developing, the work seeks to bring together discussions about quantification and precarity from across the social science disciplines in partnership with the author’s own empirical research. The structure of the book reflects the complexity of this project: alongside its substantial engagement with ontology and political theory, the book’s analysis ranges across the topics of self-tracking, the gig-economy, dignity, happiness, surveillance and affect, among others, attempting all the while to view these within the conditions of precarity.
Moore tracks the trackers, with regard to their incarnations in the modern workplace and the history of management. Through the eras of Industrial Betterment, Scientific Management, Human Relations, Systems Rationalisation, Organisational Culture and Quality, Moore charts a transformation in the relation, as it has been understood and acted upon, between mind, body and machine. The occupation with ‘numeration’ within labour process theory serves as a useful lens to view the current era of what Moore calls ‘Agility Management Systems’ (p. 58). Drawing on the agile systems of working that have been cultivated among software developers, which build on Toyota Production System principles of kaizen and kanban, the notion of agility described here relies on an understanding of the modern world as unpredictable and uncertain, the response to which is the prizing of iteratively working, self-organising and self-tracking teams. Precarity and agility necessitate and facilitate one another. Moore suggests that where Taylor’s scientific management sought a ‘science of shovelling’, wearable tracking technology offers a new ‘science of measure’ (p. 11). Building on this, and drawing on Moore’s descriptions of the present climate, I suggest that where we might see Taylor’s management as concerned with efficiency and a science of action, agility seeks adaptability and a science of being. Being agile entails intensified personalisation, individualisation and responsibility for being employable, or, more precariously, as Moore asserts, hireable.
The author emphasises that this constant adaptation requires emotional management and entails affective control. The mid-sections of the book wrangle with the corporeal, specifically the unseen labour of affect and emotion and their relation to how capitalism seeks to obscure labour through the abstraction of suffering. Moore notes that we measure productivity and stress through heart rate and sleep, but never joy or distress. Precarious workers are measured insofar as they do not collapse and become unable to work, cared for only as machines that need oiling. Our subjectivities legitimate only as neoliberal ‘doer’, ‘go-getter’ and entrepreneur’ (p. 39), identities that require hidden corporeal labour to be enacted and maintained. Wellness is equated with resilience, the responsibility for which is placed firmly in the hands of the worker who monitors and regulates the self. Moore argues that management pursues the capture of affective labour through tracking technologies, ‘not to give it value and perhaps, to start to pay for it, but because worker collapse, due to expectations of inevitable change endemic to agility, could also lead to mass resistance’. (p. 110).
The era of agility is distinct, it is argued, in the prominence of technology (in particular of tracking), and crucially that this technology leads change. The capacity to measure becomes the compulsion to do so. Explicit in the book’s discussion of the ways in which machines are increasingly integrated into management is the question, Are machines really becoming the ‘tool bearers’ in organisational relations? Are we to be technology-led or technology-ruled? Moore persistently engages with the question but is not definitive in her response. In discourse, certainly the latter is given the appearance of Truth, but we are reminded throughout that it is data’s use that is key, its interpretation the key terrain to be won. Moore shines light into both theoretical and practical corners where we might find a glimmer of hope for the human: examples of resistance to tracking technologies are presented, such as watching the watcher in ‘sousveillance’ (p. 26); tracking unpaid overtime, opportunities to game quantifying algorithms; resisting comparison to others (see Fotopoulou and O’Riordan, 2016); unionising of precarious workers and mobilising health-related data as evidence of injury (Crawford, 2014). In addition, Moore sees the potential for the insidious ‘all-of-life’ ambitions of agile management to be met with, and challenged by, affective solidarity.
I would argue that it is the affective relation between the self and others at the heart of the thing – as our concern with self-optimisation and internalised connection with the capitalist agent atomises us as individuals, we are increasingly compelled by management not only to be ourselves (Fleming and Sturdy, 2009) and to know ourselves (Fejes and Dahlstedt, 2013) but to open up ourselves completely. In her reference to The Circle, Moore seems to agree (p. 216). I suggest that in seeking to generate knowledge through the quantified ‘people analysis’ that the text describes, we find ourselves moved apart from one another. It is a feigned connection. To ‘profile’ someone is to look askew, both at others and a misdirection of our internal gaze. Self-awareness, found through self-tracking by some of Moore’s research participants, is a gaze upon the self derived externally from an economically rational neoliberalism and Cartesian dualism: the managerial self subordinates the (risky) body to the (rational) mind (p. 115). Drawing from Spinoza, the fundamental relationality of the human existence, and the inseparability of the mind/body, the author suggests a hopeful opening: the recovery of affect – something that transcends consciousness – as relation to others. Affective solidarity enabled by a recognition of class consciousness becomes a way of re-locating power in the collective.
The book calls for more research on resistance to tracking and on corporeal experience of precarity. In addition to this, I would advocate for further attention to the false neutrality of quantification, something that Moore highlights throughout her analyses. The book warns of the potential for discrimination based on health and wellness and considers entrenched forms of discrimination with regard to how gender inequalities may be reproduced and exacerbated by quantification, but the same critique notably needs to be extended to the marginalisation of people of colour and to Whiteness in quantified precarity. Similarly, where the book points to the ways in which the levers of biopower, operating at a distance, have crept into the intimacies of our autonomic selves, the idea that data generated by self-tracking enable a learning about ourselves warrants further thought regarding the possibilities for eudaimonia in the era of agility: let us consider how we might know and value ourselves outside of, and resisting, agile’s intensification.