Managing the risky humanity of academic workers: Risk and reciprocity in university work

Abstract

University work–life balance policies increasingly offer academic workers a range of possible options for managing the competing demands of work, family, and community obligations. Flexible work arrangements, family-friendly hours and campus facilities, physical well-being and mental health programs typify strategies for formally acknowledging the need for employees to balance work with other needs and commitments. This paper draws on examples from Australian university work–life balance policies to consider how the incalculable humanity of academic workers is constructed as posing institutional risks because of the potential ill-effects of an imbalance between work and life. We consider how work–life balance policies anticipate and attempt to manage perceived risks to the institution as a consequence of workers’ utilization of such policies for their own benefit. Informed by poststructuralist theoretical and cultural analyses of risk, affect, and governmentality, we argue that work–life balance policies stage a double maneuver. They offer heavily qualified workplace conditions, benefits, and supports predicated on notions of risk and reciprocity, while simultaneously extending the reach of institutional power to include the bodies, minds, families, and lives of academic workers.

Keywords

risk governmentality work-life balance higher education

Introduction: universities, academics, and work–life balance

That universities and the academic workforce have been significantly transformed and affected by social, political, and organizational change in recent decades has been widely documented (see, for example, Barnett, 2011; Kenway et al., 2006; Marginson and Considine, 2000; Portnoi et al., 2010; Thornton, 2012). As Wendy Sutherland-Smith succinctly puts it, “Universities in the twenty-first century experience numerous competing drivers that shape their sense of purpose and role in society, their perspectives of knowledge and its production and their overall sense of being in the world” (2013: np, original emphasis). The intensification of competition within the global knowledge economy, increasing levels of public scrutiny and policy intervention in university affairs, managerial regimes of corporate governance and audit cultures, casualization, increasing staff–student ratios, and continuous demands for improved efficiency, accountability, and productivity (Gill, 2009; Hugo, 2008; Randell-Moon et al., 2013; Saltmarsh, 2011; Schultz, 2013; Sutherland-Smith et al., 2011) have dramatically altered the nature of academic work in recent years. Within this context, our analysis of work–life balance policies highlights how Australian universities are attempting to respond to the potential ill-effects that such changes have on the academic workforce. However, rather than examine work–life balance policies in terms of their efficacy in assisting employees achieve balance, our interest here is in the ways policy discourses of balance encourage academics to integrate their lives into systems of institutional management for academics’ own (ostensible) benefit. We argue that work–life balance discourse is predicated on notions of risk and reciprocity, constituting academic workers as simultaneously posing risks to the university and as responsible for ameliorating those risks. By responsibilizing academic workers for life balance, the reach of institutional power is extended in an attempt to render the human dimensions of life beyond work visible, calculable, and governable.

The emergence of work–life balance in public and managerial discourse is linked to three interrelated shifts in labor policy and practice in the latter part of the 20th century: flexible working arrangements, family-friendly employment strategies, and post-industrial conceptions of work as leisure. Flexible work policies initially emerged in the late 1980s as a solution for high levels of unemployment in Western economies (Arthur, 2004: 140; Fleetwood, 2007: 393). These policies originated from neoliberal ideas that promulgated casualization as a necessary employment strategy to address fluctuating labor demands. Concomitant with flexible labor practices was a political and economic consensus encouraging women with children to return to work (Fleetwood, 2007: 387; Lewis et al., 2007: 360). The rise of what scholars refer to as the “cultural economy” in the last decade has also produced a proliferation of policy and popular discourse around “creative workers” who adopt working conditions and habits tailored to their particular lifestyles (Banks, 2009; Florida, 2002; Lewis, 2003). These shifts have produced what can be described as a flexible workforce and a populist managerial consensus that employees who derive autonomy and pleasure from their work become more productive and valuable to their place of employment (see Barber and Weinstein, 1999). Understood within this economic genealogy, work–life balance policies straddle organizational and management practices that both attempt to maintain coherency in work outcomes, alongside or despite different kinds of employment practices, while recognizing that the social and non-work aspects of employees’ lives are connected to the work they do. Employment rhetoric around flexibility and balance is particularly heightened in the professional industries, such as academia, which require autonomy and creative labor as part of their work practices.

It is notable that employee-friendly rhetoric, which ostensibly recognizes the exigencies of life beyond work, has begun to permeate the higher education sector in light of recent criticisms regarding the industrial practices of this sector. Research internationally has shown that work-related stress, inadequate resources, increased teaching workloads, excessive working hours, curtailing of autonomy and creativity, unsatisfactory workplace relationships, and fears about job insecurity are among factors that contribute to many academics’ attitudes toward and satisfaction with their work (Capelleras, 2005; Edwards et al., 2009; Kinman and Jones, 2008; Kinman et al., 2006; Lindholm and Szelény, 2008; Randell-Moon et al., 2013; Sutherland-Smith et al., 2011; Tytherleigh et al., 2005). A recent study of academics in the United Kingdom, for example, found that the majority of respondents considered that their work “had become more stressful over the preceding five year period.” Three-quarters indicated “that they worked longer hours and working during evenings and weekends had become commonplace” (Kinman and Jones, 2008: 43). Similarly, interviews with Australian academics (Randell-Moon et al., 2013; Sutherland-Smith et al., 2011) found similar tensions at play. Academics, driven by competition within the higher education sector, struggled to navigate excessive workplace demands.

In addition to the effects on work satisfaction and productivity, labor that exceeds normal working hours carries with it a number of well-documented risks. These include deleterious effects on physical and mental health (Edwards et al., 2009; Kinman and Jones, 2008; Kinman et al., 2006; Lindholm and Szelény, 2008; Tytherleigh et al., 2005), such as fatigue, headaches, irritability, damage to the body’s cardiovascular system, sleep deprivation, high levels of stress, psychological distress, withdrawal from family and social circles, and an increase in the likelihood of making potentially dangerous errors (see Burke, 2010b; Kinman and Jones, 2008). Such effects can have disastrous consequences in the lives of workers, and in workplace cultures more broadly. In short, the research literature is clear in its assessment of an overworked, under-supported, and overly stressed academic workforce, which highlights the need for greater recognition of and commitments to “the importance of an acceptable work–life balance for employee health, job satisfaction, and retention” (Kinman and Jones, 2008: 55).

We therefore situate our analysis here as concurring with calls from the literature for greater commitment on the part of universities to provide conditions of employment that facilitate work–life balance and the well-being of the academic workforce. However, we also want to take a position of critique regarding what we see as a disjunction between “promises made” and “promises kept” where work–life balance for university employees is concerned (Heywood et al., 2010). We find it ironic, for example, that amid the clamor of demands for enhanced productivity and continual improvement, the university sector in Australia has taken up a seeming counter-narrative regarding the importance of the health and well-being of its academic workforce. Academics continue to be expected to build track records, increase publication outputs and grant income, enhance their national and international profiles, and engage more intensively with community and industry sectors, all while working smarter and improving the quality and impact of their work. These expectations and the demands they place on academic workers are accompanied by encouragements to attend to their physical and mental health, well-being and happiness, and family and community relationships.

For institutions, there can of course be significant costs associated with managing—or inadequately managing—risks associated with work–life imbalance. As Burke (2010a) points out, institutional strategies for countering the costs of risks such as stress and ill-health, include the introduction of wellness and fitness programs, offering support and incentives for participation in such programs, and “identifying individuals with a high risk of leaving because of job stress, workload and work–life balance concerns” (p.41). Yet, work–life balance programs and policies that fail to address the causal factors of imbalance between work and life are unlikely to achieve their stated aims. As Gambles et al. observe,

Policies aiming to support people in combining paid work with other parts of their lives often have limited impact, not only because they fail to address the need for change at multiple levels, but also because the changes that they aim for in any one sphere, are too superficial. They do not address systemic change. (2006: 39)

It is within the context of these debates that we want to consider how university work–life balance policy discourse diverts attention away from external and systemic drivers of work–life imbalance, and instead constitutes academic workers as posing risks to the institution’s productivity and competitiveness.

Our recent research has examined the work–life balance policy statements of all Australian universities. We have found them to be predominantly framed around managerial concerns with the ways that personal, as opposed to organizational, risk might be managed. In these policy statements, the work of managing what is constituted as human risks to the organization is relegated to employees obligation or duty to self-govern their own happiness, good health, family, and social responsibilities in reciprocation of the institutional promotion of workplace flexibility, academic innovation, and creativity. Work–life balance policies, we contend, endeavor to discipline and “responsibilize” (Rose, 1996, 2000) what we term the “incalculable humanity” of academic workers and the embodied, affective, relational, and social dimensions of their lives beyond work. This discipline and responsibilization takes place via notions of risk and reciprocity, such that institutional power is extended to include the bodies, minds, families, and lives of academic workers.

Risk, reciprocity, and responsibilization, or, what to do about risky humanity

Whether embedded within enterprise bargaining agreements, flexible working arrangements, health and well-being programs, or articulated in policy documents, we see university discourses of work–life balance as concerned primarily with the management of risk on the part of institutions. In part, work–life balance policies provide examples of preventative risk management strategies. For example, they offer flexible work hours or well-being programs, as a way of minimizing risks such as absenteeism and burn-out. In part, they anticipate potential risks associated with employees taking advantage of work–life balance policies—by failing to meet productivity targets by working from home, for instance. Ulrich Beck considers the “flexibilization of working hours and the decentralization of the work site” as key features of the individualization of labor practices under a risk society (2004: 129, emphasis in original). This is because on the one hand, individual workers see themselves as responsible for maintaining productivity in a much more precarious and volatile capitalist environment. On the other hand, and as a result, any risks involved in fluctuating productivity that arise from flexible working conditions are then displaced onto the individual worker rather than the broader institutional and employment structures under which workers operate.

These risks—loss of productivity, unstable labor market, uncertainty that consumer demand will be commensurate with production—are managed through a discourse of reciprocity and mutual obligation in which the responsibilization of individual subjects (Rose, 1999) is seen as the means of addressing organizational, systemic, or social problems. For employees, reciprocity is cast in neoliberal parlance as a means of performing oneself as an ideal self-actualizing subject who behaves responsibly with respect to their employers, their families, and other social support systems so that greater personal satisfaction, enjoyment, and well-being is experienced as a consequence. As Brown and Baker put it,

The neoliberal citizen, self-reliant, constantly self-reinventing and perpetually enterprising is an austere being. Even his or her enjoyment is measured against the objectives of fulfillment, fitness or perhaps the achievement of an elusive “work-life balance”. (2012: 167)

The calculated management of the self as productive and fulfilled both within and outside the working environment effectively achieves the “extension of market dependency into every corner of (earning a) living” (Beck, 2004: 130). By tying life balance to labor productivity, work–life balance policies encourage academics to view themselves as responsible for reciprocating the flexible work practices offered by universities as a means of ensuring a seamless transition between a working and non-working self, a productive and personally fulfilled self.

Work–life balance policies function to individualize work patterns and practices by encouraging academics to calculate their work and productivity within the scope of their entire familial and social lives. Viewed within the context of neoliberal managerial reforms of higher education, work–life balance policies reinforce a form of “risk consciousness” (McWilliam, 2007) that is pervasive in the operational policies and procedures of contemporary universities. As McWilliam argues, it is important to understand “the impact of risk consciousness on the nature and purposes of universities as organisational systems, the assumptions that underpin such systems, and the implications of all this for work that academics actually do” (2007: 312). Rather than examine work–life balance policies in terms of whether or not they achieve balance, we are interested in how policy discourses of balance encourage academics, seemingly without coercion, to integrate their lives into systems of institutional management, and seemingly for academics’ own benefit (Foucault, 1991). Work–life balance and related policies therefore operate as technologies of governmentality that produce particular forms of academic subjection and self-discipline as ostensibly necessary features of institutional management and surveillance of employee health and well-being.

Following Beck and Rose, we view this subjection and self-discipline as inflected through the management and displacement of risk onto individual workers. Work–life balance and related policies principally attempt to mitigate the potential ill-effects that an imbalance between work and life poses to institutional productivity. Such policies also anticipate and attempt to manage perceived risks to the institution as a consequence of workers’ utilization of these policies for their own benefit. As a result, the incalculable humanity of academic workers, their life outside of the university, and the ways this might impinge on productivity must be brought within the purview of the institution and accounted for. Our examination of work–life balance policies is an attempt to “understand those practices, techniques and rationalities that seek to make the incalculable calculable, and the different ways they do so” (Dean, 1999: 132).

Mutual obligation and the institutional risks of work–life balance policies

In this section of the paper, we offer examples from our exploration of the work–life balance policy statements from Australian universities. It is worth noting that there is considerable variation in approaches and emphases across the higher education sector, making a straightforward comparison infeasible. In some cases, for example, work–life balance is the subject of standalone documents while in other universities work–life balance is mentioned within a general Human Resources (HR) policy framework or information package. Others situate work–life balance within specific domains of concern, such as flexible working hours, equity and diversity, or employee health and well-being. Finally, some universities are obligated to provide flexible work arrangements or wellness policies to achieve work–life balance for staff under Enterprise Agreements. Overall, 11 out of the 37 public universities in Australia had a standalone work–life balance policy. Ten mentioned or incorporated work–life balance into health and wellness policies, six located work–life balance under the auspices of equity frameworks, and four explicitly mentioned work–life balance in their Enterprise Agreements. Seven Australian universities made no mention of work–life balance in any of their existing HR policies, university frameworks, or publicity material (see the Appendix).

Our reading here of work–life balance policies involves an attempt to untangle the complex ways in which universities acknowledge that (desired and demanded) academic work practices can be detrimental to employees’ health, well-being, and intimate family relationships. Simultaneously, these policies attempt to manage the risks that human needs and relations pose to worker efficiency and productivity. The rhetoric and truth-claims of such policies overwhelmingly suggest that work–life balance policies reflect a commitment on the part of the institution to recognizing the personal needs of staff and show concern for their well-being. Yet it is the obligations of staff to the university that tends to be given precedence, such that the risks that human needs and relational obligations pose to institutional productivity become the primary focus of the documents in question.

Take, for example, the following excerpt from the Australian Catholic University’s Statement on work-and-life balance:

As an employer ACU strives to balance the needs of the individual employee and the University to enable work-and-life needs to be addressed appropriately. The overall aim is to optimise the contribution of employees in the achievement of both personal and professional outcomes in an environment that is co-operative, supportive and efficient…

Importantly, an effective work-and-life balance philosophy recognises that benefits, support and assistance need to flow reciprocally between the University and its staff…

Such a philosophy underpins the emerging coherency of the whole ACU workplace and scholarly community. It is expected, however, that this coherency will be grounded in the concept of mutuality. This means that the institution, staff, management and other bodies or groups who form a part of ACU community life (including employee associations) collectively share responsibility for its well-being. Shared responsibility in turn means that benefits warrant definite returns and that rights come with definite obligations. Community members throughout the organisation have roles to play in contributing to their and others [sic] well-being, and mutual obligations are fulfilled by ensuring efficient and effective quality service. (2008: 2, our emphasis)

Work–life balance policies such as this one, we contend, are underpinned by neoliberal discourses of efficiency, effectiveness, accountability, and productivity. As Chris Lorenz points out, through the interdependent operations of neoliberal discourse and managerialist techniques of control, “academic personnel are effectively robbed of their professional autonomy to determine their own behavioral norms, and these are replaced by norms determined by management, which are formulated in quantitative terms” (2012: 618). While the ACU policy ostensibly acknowledges the familial and social responsibilities of employees as it impacts their work, it is also explicit about quantifying this work through “definite returns”, optimizing “contributions” and “efficient and effective quality service”. Of particular interest is the extent to which the precariousness that underwrites neoliberal ideology is at once reiterated as a good (innovation, flexibility, competition) that simultaneously produces the conditions within which that good might be taken up by workers in unintended and (for the institution) less desirable ways. Thus entitlements, benefits, and rights warrant obligations and returns that secure the precarity of workers’ humanness within a web of tightly monitored and controlled procedural constraints.

Many of the features or entitlements listed under the auspices of work–life balance policies tend to be common features of academic work. As noted above, there is a degree of flexibility and autonomy inherent in academic teaching and research. The University of Tasmania for example, has a “Working From Home Policy” that codifies off-campus working arrangements for staff. These arrangements are framed as “assist[ing staff] in balancing the demands of work and family/personal life” (n.d.: 1). Working from home and outside the institution for research purposes or on a non-teaching day tends to be a typical work pattern for academics but is recast here as the university assisting with work–life balance. Features of work–life balance policies, such as flexible work arrangements, are often assumed to denote employee-friendly workplace conditions but may be experienced in ways contrary to their intentions. In their study of work–life balance among academics in the UK, Gail Kinman and Fiona Jones found that while respondents reported a high degree of autonomy and choice in how to complete work tasks (74 percent) in addition to the availability of flexible work schedules, 48 percent of academic nevertheless believed that their institutions did not help them to achieve balance “between work and family responsibilities” (2008: 52).

The discrepancy between offers of flexibility and balance and the experience of these institutional promises is hardly surprising in the current global higher education policy context. That is to say, invitations to work flexibly, to innovate, to compete—characteristics of the risk and precariousness embedded in neoliberal workplaces—themselves pose risks to employing institutions. Employees who work from home, outside the gaze of colleagues and management, are ostensibly at risk of producing less, not more, particularly if any portion of their time at home is devoted to non-work activity. Those who innovate, too, are a risk—potentially attracting the attention of competing institutions, or seeking out positions offering better pay and conditions elsewhere (Burke, 2010a). The highly competitive, similarly, pose particular risks—pursuing ambitions while potentially neglecting physical and mental health, meaningful relationships with colleagues, students and others, dominating opportunities through which the capabilities of others might be developed, sabotaging the credibility or morale of others (Sutherland-Smith et al., 2011)—such that the (desired) highly competitive worker can be at once asset and liability in the eyes of their employing institution. Thus, the flexibility that is offered through work–life balance policies must have guarantees of return for the institution so that employees utilize opportunities for flexible work productively.

Because institutions require return from employees, in terms of how they make use of employment policies, the offering of work–life balance by employers is often tentative and provisional. Many Australian universities mention or cite a commitment to work–life balance without having a standalone policy. For instance, Deakin University has a subsection on “Work/life Balance” in its Occupational Health and Safety Human Resources webpage (n.d.[c]) but when the link is followed it diverts to a page on “Flexible Work Arrangements” (n.d.[a]). The University of Ballarat has a webpage in its HR section, “Leave & Work Life balance,” described as a “resource” for assisting staff “to balance their work and family/personal responsibilities” (2013) yet consists simply of policy directives around leave entitlements, retirement, job conversion, and bringing children to work.

Given that the majority of universities in Australia make some mention of work–life balance, irrespective of whether they have a standalone policy or a clear structure for implementation, we would suggest that universities clearly want to be promoted or known as achieving employee-friendly workplace practices. In reality, though, such practices are offered as a future promise to employees as a means of recruiting and retaining them within workplace conditions that may or may not actualize the promise of balance and well-being.

Extending the reach of governmentality

The provisional nature of work–life balance policies attest to an institutional acknowledgment that liability for balance and well-being on the part of employers is limited. Even so, work–life balance policies are predicated on extending the institutional reach of workplace conditions into the personal lives and homes of employees. In this final section, we examine these policy agendas through the lens of governmentality in terms of the ways academics are offered incentives through wellness and balance policies to take on the institutional task of managing and calculating risk as the putative responsibility of productive and fulfilled workers.

There is no shortage of research demonstrating the deleterious effects work demands have in the everyday lives of employees. In the study by Kinman and Jones cited earlier, nearly a quarter of the 844 lecturers and researchers who participated “indicated that, for them, the work and home domains were virtually indistinct” (2008: 59). These researchers found that for participants in their study, the blurring of boundaries between work and home led to extended work hours and greater conflict in their lives:

On the whole, the more hours academics worked during evenings and week-ends, the more physical and psychological symptoms they reported, the less clear were their boundaries between the work and home domains, and the more work-life conflict they perceived. (p.55)

As “flexible” work is incorporated into home life, there is less available time for life outside formal work, with private time, space, and relationships repositioned within the discursive terrain as things to be juggled, demands to be addressed, and goals to be accomplished. Management of academic work (albeit from a distance) is required if the employee is to, firstly, meet the productivity goals of the institution, and, secondly, performatively produce themselves as balanced, risk-managing, goal-oriented, self-actualizing academic subjects without pesky social or familial impediments to their pursuit of excellence.

In this climate of intensified self-management and performance-monitoring, we find it significant that more than a quarter of Australian universities mentioned work–life balance in the context of health and well-being. The University of Melbourne’s Negotiating Flexible Work Arrangements Guidelines for Staff booklet states,

The most explicit tell-tale sign of imbalance is a deterioration in our health. It is vital that we listen to our body and what it is telling us. If we are tired, stressed or unwell what is this saying about our work/life balance? (2010: 8)

The link between health and the inability to “balance” work and life devolves well-being onto the individual worker even as the act of labor and working also involves a “wearing out” or bodily attrition of that same worker (Berlant, 2011: 27). The recent business trend in Western economies to adopt workplace wellness policies that encourage workers to invest in their health as productive subjects is another strategy of risk management to curtail the messy, complex, human bodies that inhabit workspaces (see Jaspen, 2013). A recent UK initiative, Healthy Universities, outlines perceived benefits thus:

For employers, because a healthier workforce is a more productive workforce; having healthier workers also provides an incentive to invest in their training and development, and such investment will yield a higher return. (n.d.: 3)

Similarly in an Australian example, Edith Cowan University has a “Wellness—Live Life Longer Program” that offers this observation, “we make time to service our cars, why not make time to service our body, mind and soul” (2010). The University of Western Australia meanwhile offers an all-encompassing “Life Balance” policy defined as

…a fundamental Human Resources strategy supporting diversity… [which] has improved productivity through increased attraction and retention and reduced absenteeism… Conflict between a person’s personal commitments and work can affect concentration, motivation and productivity, and have an impact on other staff and students. (2013)

Under this policy rubric, the University has “Health and Wellbeing Advocates,” volunteer staff who monitor and advocate for well-being activities in their departments and faculties (University of Western Australia, 2012). Deakin University’s Occupational Health and Safety website offers a “Remind Me” program that can be installed on staff computers to emit a reminder for staff to take work breaks (Deakin University, n.d.[b]). This reduction of workers to an economic metric of “return” or to the functioning of an automobile can be understood as an institutional technique of governmentality whereby individuals are encouraged to invest in themselves as healthy subjects, “to think of themselves as biological beings and biopolitical citizens” (Brown and Baker, 2012). In these wellness and balance statements, individual workers are cast as free, autonomous, and responsible, desiring that which is aligned to the interests of themselves as well as their employers. Promoting health in this way operates as a powerful technology of governmentality through which “individuals are addressed on the assumption that they want to be healthy and enjoined to freely seek out the ways of living most likely to promote their own health” (Rose, 1999: 86–87). Presenting such measures as being for their own benefit ultimately obscures the business imperatives for wellness programs and a normatively healthy workforce, to say nothing of facilitating the introduction of private health services into public universities. The application of work–life balance policies and rhetoric towards techniques and strategies of self-management also functions as a way of shifting employees’ attention away from the structural conditions of academic work that produce ill-health.

An insidious aspect of the common organizational and rhetorical link between work–life balance and health and well-being is the framing of work life in terms of stress management. For example, Murdoch University’s “Getting balance in your life” (2013) web resource is a direct link to a Department of Queensland Health fact sheet on mental health (The State of Queensland [Queensland Health], 2008). Under the Occupational Health and Safety page of Deakin University’s Human Resources website, there is a subsection on “Work related stress,” which is defined as “the capacity and ability of individual workers to balance stress in the workplace with stress factors in their personal life” (n.d.[d]). The effect of these institutional resources on balance and stress management is to obfuscate the structural conditions that might cause ill-health for university employees and place responsibility onto the individual through exhortations and reminders to be alert to their own mental health and physical well-being, as if this is separate from the mental attrition cause by academic labor.

We have argued thus far that work–life balance is an institutional technique through which the risky humanity of academic subjects, with bodies that wear and tear, is not only managed, but also appropriated into normative discourses of obligatory productivity and self-governance under the auspices of “flexibility,” “health,” and “well-being.” The ways in which the non-work aspects of academic lives are brought within the scope of institutional forms of surveillance and management is perhaps best illustrated in equity and family-friendly policies. For example, Monash University’s Workforce Management Policy states, “The University recognises that family responsibilities are matters which are not confined to social or private realms of life but are the concern of the University community as a whole” (Monash University, 2012). When work–life balance is connected to family-friendly policies under equity and diversity frameworks, it could be argued that these policies are translated into an institutional obligation and staff entitlement to health and well-being, as opposed to mere rhetorical promise. However, such policies are nevertheless embedded in the contractual arrangements that underpin academics’ relations to the university. The University of Wollongong’s Family Friendly Work Practices policy is careful to advise staff to assess

…their own work needs while also accommodating business needs of the work area and the needs of their colleagues. They also need to ensure that in taking flexible options, they do not adversely affect their career and job prospects or benefits such as superannuation and long service leave. (University of Wollongong, n.d.)

As argued elsewhere with regard to research management and systems of incentives, policy statements such as this one thinly disguise implied threats against the very workers they purport to advantage (Sutherland-Smith et al., 2011). Work–life balance is transformed as a space of risk that must be managed by responsibilized workers who will prioritize the economic viability of their employing institution. Taking advantage of incentives and benefits such as flexible working hours designed to facilitate a better balance between work and life—that is to say, to create the possibility that work might not comprise all of one’s life—is ultimately to risk one’s career and future prospects.

Conclusion

Although work–life balance policies are ostensibly predicated on overturning industrial conceptions of employees as laboring subjects without social or familial identities in the workplace, they also function to bring social and familial life into the purview of business imperatives and managerial control. As Mark Banks notes, one of the problems of the blurring of employees’ social and work lives within post-industrial labor is that subjects become enmeshed in a “continually active ‘total economic body’” (2009: 680). He argues that “the right to a life beyond work cannot be taken for granted and must continually be fought for and won” (p.680). As our analysis shows, under work–life balance policies, health, well-being, and family relationships—the life beyond work—are conscripted into the domain of strategic planning and governance of self and one’s risky humanity primarily for the purpose of maximizing institutional efficiency and productivity. We find that a risk consciousness permeates and explains the inherently provisional nature of work–life policies. Even when they are enshrined in Enterprise Agreements, “balance” is not a labor practice or workplace condition that is institutionally protected, it is a bio-cultural mode of laboring that academics are positioned as ultimately responsible for.

If work–life balance policies function to recoup all aspects of employees’ lives into the economic imperatives of a more productive workforce, the inherent bodily complexity and risky humanity of workers means that some aspects of life will necessarily exceed workplace management strategies. As Paula J Caproni points out in her excellent critique of the rationality of work–life balance policies,

…life is dynamic rather than static, so our best-laid plans are often out of date long before they are implemented. Joys and sorrows we never predicted enter our lives without warning, and the blessings we have today may be gone tomorrow. Such turns of event do not lend themselves to planning. A strategic orientation to life underestimates the degree to which life is, and probably should be, deeply emotional, haphazard, and uncontrollable. Balance, perhaps thankfully, may be beyond our reach. (2004: 213)

Although perhaps beyond our reach, the employee attractiveness of work–life balance policies arises precisely because they seem to offer a panacea for the encroachment of market forces into every aspect of our lives whilst simultaneously sustaining just that. It is the impossibility of achieving balance and the ongoing practices of self-regulation and calculation that define attempts to achieve this, which makes work–life balance and related wellness policies exemplary forms of risk management in neoliberal times.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Footnotes

Appendix

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Managing the risky humanity of academic workers: Risk and reciprocity in university work–life balance policies

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction: universities, academics, and work–life balance

Risk, reciprocity, and responsibilization, or, what to do about risky humanity

Mutual obligation and the institutional risks of work–life balance policies

Extending the reach of governmentality

Conclusion

Funding

Footnotes

Appendix

References