Theorizing Gets Personal: Management Academia in the Mirror of Independent Work

Abstract

With the rise of a global marketplace for research ideas, and the increased precarity of teaching positions, academic labor occurs more so than ever in conditions that resemble those faced by independent workers. We came to this realization in the process of bridging these two worlds, so dissimilar institutionally and yet so resonant existentially. The freedom that must be coped with, the personal investment work, and the precariousness experienced, for both independent workers and academics, contribute to an obsession with productivity as a way to manage strong and conflicting emotions attendant to work. This essay offers a lens to interpret that obsession, and some advice for countering it and crafting a viable and vital working life, by cultivating connections to significant people, a specific and evocative place to work, soothing routines, and an overarching purpose. We must examine the experience of those who theorize for a living, this essay argues, if we aspire to bring theories to life. Focusing on the personal, existential experience of “being” an academic, the essay complements work on the social and institutional challenges of “doing” academia, and contends that sustaining personal investment in work is essential to developing more pluralistic and potent theories about the contemporary world of work.

Discipline that cultivates a greater capacity means sometimes doing things when you don’t feel like it. And by the same token, allowing yourself to have feelings in the midst of something that you think is important is equally right. We lose ourselves when we don’t have the combination of discipline and surrender, to know when it’s right to do one or the other.

We were working on the first draft of this essay when the Covid-19 crisis reached its peak. Or so we thought. We did not know, back then, that it was only the first wave and that with each successive one, the tightening of social restrictions and loosening of personal fears would become more familiar yet no less disturbing. And that, like for many others, our capacity to keep doing the work we needed to do while making space to process a range of feelings would become more necessary. Every day since, the warning we chose as epigraph has felt more timely. Without balancing discipline and surrender, especially when work makes little sense or when it feels like too much, one might indeed end up losing their mind—and their self— and not just at work.

We had collected the epigraphs’s admonition years before, from a freelancer we interviewed for a study of independent work (Petriglieri, Ashford, & Wrzesniewski, 2019). Those workers, today, seem like a vanguard of sorts. As early settlers in what has come to be regarded a “new world of work” (Ashford, Caza, & Reid, 2018), they were accustomed to the need to work through isolation and anxiety long before the pandemic made those experiences widespread (Kniffin et al., 2021). In the mirror of those workers’ struggle to stay alive and feel alive at work, we had caught a glimpse of our own, of the struggle of many colleagues, and perhaps of our profession, management academia, as a whole. We had already decided to “write differently” (Grey & Sinclair, 2006), that is more personally, about what we had learned about our working lives while studying those of others, when the pandemic amplified the pressures and passions that we had become attuned to. We realized that a way to regard those experiences differently—a lens that focuses on doing liberating work rather than on coping with demanding institutions—could make a unique contribution to the study of academic work and to the quality of academic lives. The aim of this essay is to put forward a theory that enriches the former and improves the latter.

We argue that we must examine and support the lives of those who theorize for a living if we want to bring theory to life. What is at stake is not just academics’ sanity and ability at work, but also the vitality and utility of that work. To paraphrase the freelancer in the epigraph, we contend that unless we can make space for the wishes and worries that shape our theorizing, both in our working lives and in our written works, our disciplines won’t help us build a broad range of meaningful, novel, and useful theories that represent organizations, organizing, and the organized accurately and help change them for the better. In the pages that follow, we explore that contention in the context of recent calls for a more pluralistic (Cornelissen, Höllerer, & Seidl, 2021), personal (Cunliffe, 2022), and potent (Howard-Grenville, 2021) organization theory and of a burgeoning literature on the challenges of neoliberal management academia (Billsberry, Köhler, Stratton, Cohen, & Taylor, 2019). We then call upon our experience of doing academic work among independent workers to draw a parallel between those two worlds, and examine the resonance that our field encounters evoked. Seeing academia in the mirror of independent work, we found, highlights the promise and perils of a passionate engagement with one’s work. The bulk of the paper focuses on the liberation and loneliness such engagement entails, and on how to sustain the former and mitigate the latter through cultivating connections that “hold” us (Winnicott, 1964). We conclude with some reflections on the value of personalized theorizing about the experience of academic work. Focusing on how to hold our selves and our work together so that productivity enlivens us, we contend, this essay complements work on how to navigate and resist the pressures of institutions that often deplete us. And it might even help us to defy those pressures in the daily doing of our work, and in that doing, reclaim the meaning and purpose of academic working lives.

Towards a More Human Organization Theory

As management academics, we seldom write about how we “do” academia beyond the restrained accounts we provide in the research methods sections of our papers. We sometimes give fuller accounts of our practices and careers in publications such as Frost and Stablein’s (1992) Doing Exemplary Research, Cummings and Frost’s (1995) Publishing in the Organizational Sciences, or Frost and Taylor’s (1996) Rhythms of Academic Life, crafted as roadmaps for the publishing process and the demands of academic careers. By and large, however, we have long kept our personal experiences and agendas hidden behind the veil of impersonal accounts that bolster the scientific status of management studies and those who conduct them (Khurana, 2007), but which also confine us, as producers of such work, into a dehumanizing frame (Petriglieri, 2020) that saps our bodies of passion (Courpasson, 2013) and bodies of work of morality (Ghoshal, 2005) and meaning (Alvesson, Gabriel, & Paulsen, 2017).

Recently, however, a number of scholars, emboldened by exhortations to “write differently” (Gilmore, Harding, Helin, & Pullin, 2019; Grey & Sinclair, 2006; Tourish, 2020), have chosen to break the “taboo” (Anteby, 2013) that surrounds the lived experience of academic work. It might have taken an existential threat to make us question what we are doing with our (working) lives. Howard-Grenville (2021) has observed that the Covid-19 pandemic surfaced questions about the meaning of academic identities and the value of academic work that had long been lingering below the surface of our theorizing, provoking unease about the relevance (Hambrick, 1994) and value (Davis, 2015) of organization theories. Lately, scholars have been acknowledging that speaking up and writing about our involvement in what we study, and in how we study it, might make our working lives more meaningful and our theories more valuable (Amabile & Hall, 2021).

This shift in attitude towards personal involvement is long overdue. It supports a move towards a more capacious organization theory, that is, a pluralist field that embraces a broad range of conceptions of organization and motives for theorizing (Cornelissen et al., 2021). Indeed, “bringing back the ‘lost human’ (both researcher and research participants)” (Cunliffe, 2022, p. 8) and examining scholars’ investment in the theoretical lenses that “define ourselves and our work” (Cornelissen et al., 2021, p. 2), might be essential to realize that pluralist dream given the historical marginalization of forms of theorizing that acknowledge authors’ personal investment and political agendas (Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2020, 2022). Efforts to personalize theorizing by linking scholars’ private preoccupations to their public concerns, and to pluralize it by broadening our conception of what theorizing is and can do, might also make organization theory more potent. For example, such efforts would equip us to engage with a “new world of work” (Ashford et al., 2018) in which organizations are more demanding yet less reliable, and work is, for many, more self defining and precarious than ever (Kalleberg, 2009). That world of work, we contend, is not just “out there,” requiring novel theories that reflect workers’ lives (Barley, 2016) and demanding more engagement in improving those lives (Contu, 2020). That world is ours, too. The journey towards more pluralist, personal, and potent theories starts within.

Beyond Silence and Hysteria

A scholar does not need to look far to find a world of work where people long to do meaningful work that matters to them and others, but many fear that, given their circumstances, they just cannot afford it. Looked at that way, in fact, the new world of work looks a lot like academics’ world of work. Or so it seems if one reads a growing literature on the experience of “being” a management academic amid a neoliberal transformation of universities in general (Ergöl & Coşar, 2017), and business schools in particular (Huzzard, Benner, & Kärreman, 2017). Special issues in Management Learning (D. R. Jones et al., 2020) and the Academy of Management Learning and Education (Billsberry et al., 2019) have cast light on the challenges of working, and living, in academic institutions besieged by market pressures. Academics have documented, often in the first person, the erosion of collective governance in favor of a corporate-like administration (Gerber, 2014; Ginsberg, 2011), the apathy of the professoriate in response to such changes (Parker, 2014), and the struggle of junior scholars to meet publication targets (Bristow, Robinson, & Ratle, 2017; Prasad, 2013; Ratle, Robinson, Bristow, & Kerr, 2020) by playing a “game” that leaves little room for intellectual depth or playfulness (Butler & Spoelstra, 2020). While they might be futile when it comes to producing meaningful work (Butler & Spoelstra, 2014; Lund Dean, Fornaciari, Bento, & Asarta, 2020; Mingers & Willmott, 2013; Willmott, 2011), those administrative practices and performance target have become a source of stress (Chandler, Barry, & Clark, 2002), anxiety (Hall & Bowles, 2016), depression (Jago, 2002), despair (Fleming, 2020), and alienation (Alakavuklar, Dickson & Stablein, 2017) for many academics around the world.

The picture of academia that emerges from this work is grim. It highlights circumstances far more likely to generate resentment and anxiety than pluralism and potency, such as the economic precariousness of a growing number of contingent faculty (referred to as “adjunct” professors in the United States; Childress, 2019), and the intellectual captivity of a shrinking cohort of tenured and tenure-track ones (Fleming, 2020). Taken together, these voices break the silence surrounding academics’ experience of work in a way that resembles the choir in a Greek theater, loudly lamenting the unfolding of a tragedy they are part of, for the catharsis of a quieter crowd. Some, building on the perspective of Jacques Lacan, have compared these voices to a form of “hystericization” (Alakavuklar et al., 2017; see also Fotaki & Harding, 2013). That is, a public rejection of conformity and alienation through voicing issues, felt under one’s skin, that everyone needs to deal with. Noting that the “neoliberal business school causes despair because we are alienated from the values, processes and identities that many believe should define what we do,” Fleming (2020, p. 1309) has argued that “calling it out” is a way to resist alienation.

This stream of work offers a more subjective, impassioned, and ultimately political alternative to the (main)stream of impersonal, restrained, and ultimately instrumental productivity advice that scholars are often subjected to, such as prescriptions for making space to focus on “deep work” (Newport, 2016) or learning to move to the rhythm of academic life (Frost & Taylor, 1996). Whereas instrumental prescriptions focus on learning to meet the demands of academic institutions, and in so doing take those demands for granted, political prescriptions exhort scholars to resist doing either. They advocate instead for a rejection of the reckless pace of contemporary academia (Berg & Seeber, 2016), and for a view of the scholar as an intellectual activist, whose work involves critiquing organizations, theorizing new ways of organizing, and being “concretely engaged in the service of social, economic and epistemic justice” (Contu, 2020, p. 737). These diverging streams of work, or approaches to scholarship, have one feature in common. Both making time for daily “deep work,” and writing about “organizations with less obscure theorizing, with more variety, and with a little more humor, curiosity, and passion” (Tourish, 2020, p. 108) are efforts to deal with demanding and unreliable institutions. Instrumental and political prescriptions also converge on focusing on one’s scholarly work; reclaiming all that one can author and may be able to control, investing in it, and making it a refuge for one’s self and a vehicle for one’s truth.

We contend that such a move, common beyond academia, needs examining too. Investing in one’s work (rather than in institutions) can become another source of pressure. To understand how that happens and avoid it when possible, we argue, requires seeing academics not just as members of demanding institutions, but also as independent workers in a profession that is as precarious as it is personal. This interpretive lens (or mirror, as we will argue later) opens a “third way” to interpret academia and our lives within it. A way that is distinct from and complementary to the functionalist and critical analyses of extant work and to that work’s instrumental and political prescriptions. Seen in the mirror of independent work, our preoccupation, or more precisely obsession, with productivity conceals a longing for connection. We bring that longing to the surface and, in keeping with interpretive theorizing, offer advice for dealing with it in generative ways. That is, ways that might lead to less alienating practice and sustain discerning critique. Our advice is pragmatic even if not instrumental, and radical even if not quite critical. It is advice with a humanistic bent. We are as concerned with what it takes to stay and feel alive while doing one’s work as we are with how to produce the kind of work that makes a difference in the world.

Others, whose work we reviewed above, have noted that doing work that makes a difference requires breaking the silence about personal involvement and turning hysteria into agency. To do that, we argue, the academic-as-independent-worker requires enough holding. In a few pages, we will elaborate on what holding is, why it matters, and how to cultivate it in the crafting of our work, if not in our instuitutions. We will argue that besides helping academics work with vitality, a focus on holding might help us foster a more pluralist, personal, and potent academy. It takes holding, we contend, to defy complacency and despair, and to raise a critical consciousness in our own fields and among people we study and teach. But first, in the spirit of doing what we advocate for, we must account for the personal work experiences that moved us to write this essay.

Why We Write

We gained the insights and distilled the advice presented in this essay from what might appear an unlikely source, workers in knowledge-intensive and creative occupations, trying to craft a successful working life in a fast-growing “gig economy;” where people work independently, shape their work’s content and process, and sell that work directly to a market. This working population might look unlike academia at first sight. The term “gig economy” has become associated, in the popular imagination, with Uber drivers and other low-income workers at the mercy of digital platforms. In reality, however, those represent less than 20% of the vast and varied universe of independent work. The majority consists of “knowledge workers” in outsourced occupations that were once within the realm of full-time employment and who now labor as freelance software engineers, designers, consultants, writers, and so on (McKinsey & Co, 2016).

According to an international survey (McKinsey & Co, 2016), the majority of independent workers engaged in knowledge work, at least before the Covid-19 pandemic forced many more to labor in solitude and through much uncertainty, claimed to do so by choice. They’d rather struggle with the precariousness of independence than with the pressure and nonsense of corporate jobs. It was a sentiment that we encountered often in our research. People portrayed independent work as equally insecure but more fulfilling than employment. One freelance consultant, for example, revealing that she had to continue working well into her seventies to support herself, claimed that she would not have it any other way. Working for oneself, she explained, “is inherently more enlivening. You have to make compromises wherever you are, but the compromises required in many, maybe most organizations are so damaging. The bulls**t you have to put up with is very falsifying.” Such workers, in short, were an extreme case of the move described above—removing one’s investment from alienating organizations and placing it into one’s work, precarious as it might be. A move that is familiar to many academics, if not structurally, at least psychologically; and one that became necessary, too, for millions of knowledge workers who lost the sociality of the office if not the relative security of employment as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and the changes of working practices that are still unfolding.

We did not start this project looking for personal insight onto our selves and our approach to theorizing. We started by looking outwards and keeping our distance, as academics typically do. The rise of the “gig economy” in general, and its burgeoning white-collar segment in particular, is a significant and understudied trend in the world of work (Ashford et al., 2018; Barley, Bechky, & Milliken, 2017). Our engagement with those workers began in the most conventional way. We selected informants who were just striking out on their own and others who had decades of experience, those in more business-oriented occupations and those in more artistic ones, and we sought to understand their habits and struggles. As our work unfolded, however, another story emerged in parallel to that which eventually became a published study (Petriglieri et al., 2019).

We began seeing our selves, our fears and longings and those of others in our profession, reflected in the mirror of those workers. Their accounts reminded us of who we are as academics, of who we fear becoming, and what is at stake when we try to make a living while doing what we hope might be our life’s work in ever more demanding and unreliable institutions. That emerging story explains what moved us about the workers we had set out to study. As a senior scholar with deep roots in the field, aware of the privilege and responsibility of such position, and a junior one nearing a tenure review, neither of us needed to be reminded of institutional pressures. We only experienced their push to prove ourselves in different ways. Therefore, we were fascinated with the liberty of workers who had no organizations to travel to daily, had no teaching or administrative duties, no colleagues to check their progress or convey the dean’s concerns. Studying the freedom of those workers might have been a bout of escapism, if their precariousness did not evoke our fears so sharply, too. We had both chosen to live within the pressures of academia, in part, because of the security it offers, having had experiences with not having a secure job, a regular paycheck, and the anxiety that goes with it. Sue retained a vivid memory of a father’s layoff and the anxiety it caused in the family. Gianpiero had been an “adjunct” for years, dreading the sleepless nights worrying about the future. We set out to research, it seems, what we didn’t want to remember. Maybe everyone does, when they look close enough.

The more we spoke to consultants, coaches, novelists, painters and the like, listened to their joys and sorrows, visited their workplaces, and learned about their ambitions and routines, the more similarities we recognized between their working lives and ours. In the challenges they faced, we saw reflections of the ones we face. In their pride and craft, fear and clumsiness, we caught a glimpse of ours. Working to craft theory that reflected “them,” we developed a new image of “us.” We came to see academia, on the surface so focused on institutional discipline, as a form of independent work, involving a lifelong existential struggle to attain and make the most of our freedom, even if that freedom might be imperiled or only imaginary. This impression was reinforced each time we presented our study at conferences or seminars. Colleagues resonated with our informants. “I know I work in an organization, but I feel just like that!” they would often remark. That resonance reminded us that, like novelists and artists, many academics feel that the meaning and value of their working lives, at least in principle, rest on being able to make a contribution through their work. Whether we are doctoral students trying to figure out a dissertation topic, senior professors trying to make a difference through our writing and teaching, or lecturers finding meaning in our classrooms, many of us aspire to demonstrate the “care, courage, and curiosity” that Howard-Grenville (2021) calls for. Work becomes our way of being in the world. Our informants’ accounts, in that respect, helped us understand why academic lives are as difficult—and sometimes as blissful—as they are and how we might make the most of them.

Our findings also challenged our and our audience’s Maslowian preconceptions. Many expected us to find systematic differences in our sample, with economic concerns dominating the accounts of informants in the most challenging conditions, and concerns with the meaning of work more prevalent among the most established of the people we spoke to. But time and again, our least financially secure informants highlighted their quest for personal expression, and those with a steady revenue stream told us about their enduring sense of precariousness. Meaning was a necessity for our informants, not a luxury good. And no one took their income for granted. That finding also struck a chord with our academic colleagues. The most precarious claimed that their longing for and pride in their intellectual contributions was the reason they put up with their challenging circumstances. And the most established never shook off a sense of having to remain productive and relevant least their privilege might appear unjustified, or in some cases disappear.

Eventually, we decided to turn a personal mirror into a lens, so to speak, and write about it. About us, that is, and about academia as independent work. As we began crafting this essay, however, we faced two challenges. The first was making sure that our mirror was not a narcissistic one—that in sharing our learning from independent workers we offered insights that resonated with, and might be of use to, other academics. Therefore we consulted with colleagues, presented these insights at conferences and in workshops, and sought feedback on various drafts. We also drew on the published accounts of academic working lives that we reviewed above. The second challenge was to honor our informants’ mirror, so to speak, as much as our interpretive lens. To convey how the insights that we report here emerged from mutual engagement, over time, as the convenient construction of “us” (employed, researchers, objective) and “them” (independent, researched, subjective) gave way to an unconventional conversation about circumstances and concerns we had in common. We chose to honor their mirror and our lens by going back and forth between quotes from informants and our reflections as well as those of other academics we spoke to. Addressing these two challenges led us to write an essay that is personal and yet borrows material from a study. It is an unusual combination. But concealing either voice, we believe, would be disingenuous given how we came to reflect on the lived experience of academic work.

An Imperfect Comparison

While we will focus on existential similarities here, we are well aware that the institutional circumstances of academics and those of independent workers differ. Even the most precarious of assistant professors has an office, salary, and other benefits that independent workers do not have. They might be at risk of losing their jobs at a particular university, but they still have one, and might get one elsewhere. Contingent professors who struggle most with uncertainty have to grapple with institutions that might or might not renew their contract next year (Childress, 2019). The people we studied had no organizational affiliation at all, were not expecting to have one anytime soon, and would view the multi-year contracts (with a year’s notice of termination) that some academics enjoy as a luxury. Also, while enjoying a degree of autonomy, academics have institutional demands on their time, demeanor, and activities while independent workers do not.

Despite the structural differences, however, we found striking parallels between academics and independent workers in their psychological experience of, and relation to, their work. We don’t claim that these parallels are universally true for every academic, or that they represent the totality of the work experience of every academic. We are well aware that the aim of personalized theorizing is to evoke resonances among some, not to uncover universal truths that apply to all (Cunliffe, 2022). That said, freedom—as an ideal, an opportunity, and a challenge—is meaningful both to academics and independent workers. For example, consider doctoral students. In the American system, halfway through their programs, they go from a regulated life full of classes, tests, feedback, and so forth, to a fairly independent one in which they need to figure out what project will become their dissertation, choose where to focus their energy, and try to set themselves up to obtain a permanent job. In other systems, as in much of Europe, they have to balance teaching or tutoring commitments, develop the research they were hired to conduct, and find ways to pursue new projects. Everywhere, they are exhorted to demonstrate that they can make it as independent scholars, and assessed on their ability to take that identity on credibly and productively. Every project then becomes a kind of gig. Or consider contingent faculty members, who need to craft a path within an institution, or between several ones, with little guidance, remuneration, or support. Even professors lucky enough to have tenure often face the anxiety of doing the “bold work” that they didn’t dare do before tenure; work that they “must get to” before it is too late. These academic experiences have parallels with the experiences of independent work, where those in less fortunate circumstances at times feel that they labor in vain and freedom is out of reach, while those in more fortunate circumstances worry about how to make sure that their freedom is put to good use.

Many management academics we know, for example, have had thoughts similar to those expressed in the opening epigraph to this essay. It is a quote from a freelance consultant, but it could be a quote by one of the many colleagues who told us how their discipline could be empowering and still feel suffocating. Below we describe four conditions that characterize independent and academic work, offer some suggestions for dealing with them, and conclude with some musings on the implications of the experiences and adaptations that we have witnessed, heard about, and lived through. Focusing on the existential alongside the institutional, on being academics while doing academia, and on humanistic longings as much as instrumental prescriptions might, we contend, help counter the turn towards a managerialist academia. It might allow us to revisit, study, and advocate for spaces that fosters better organizing and more meaningful work. Cultivating such a space would yield richer knowledge, more humane organizations, and more vital working lives.

Seeing Academia in the Mirror of Independent Work

On freedom

Just as many management academics do, independent workers relish their freedom. The more elusive the freedom, it seems, the more it becomes a marker of accomplishment. If I am still free, or even better, getting freer, I must be doing well. Failing, conversely, means being forced to conform to others’ bidding, taking a gig for a client with whom one feels no affinity, or, for us as academics, joining a research project of little interest just because one has to keep playing “the game” (Butler & Spoelstra, 2020). When independent workers told us about their travails, freedom was the reward they mentioned. As one excutive coach explained, “You manage your own schedule, you say yes and no, you don’t have to respond to anybody. There’s a freedom from process, rules, and regulation. . . . That’s the number one advantage.” We have heard many doctoral students and junior professors cheer themselves up in a similar way, highlighting the freedom to pursue their own intellectual agenda in comparison to friends and acquaintances in corporate jobs.

Freedom, however, can be a double-edged sword. If no one tells you what to do and by when, then it might never get done. And even if your only boss is yourself, it is no guarantee that such a boss will be well informed or caring at all times. “It takes a lot of emotional and sort of psychic energy,” a consultant told us, “to keep everything going.” One artist occasionally wished that he could work in a company, “under somebody who would basically tell me what needed to be done.” If what you do is only your choice, you have no one to blame when things appear not to be working out. Freedom, these workers suggest, is a blessing and a burden. And seeing it this way highlights its existential alongside its social nature. Freedom becomes a responsibility that we cannot escape as much as a privilege that we must earn. Freedom is to be as much as to (not) join.

Academics love to have freedom, suffer without it, and many would not give it up. We tell ourselves that the freedom to do our scholarly work makes our alienation less acute than workers in other managerialist institutions (Alakavuklar et al., 2017). For example, academic colleagues often describe administrative tours of duty, at least to peers, as a captivity of sorts, much in the same way that one artist we spoke to described traditional employment. “When I think of myself,” he said, “I think of an animal that has been free its whole life and it could never be happy being put in a cage.” But freedom introduces its own demands. Central among them are the demands to make choices that define one’s professional identity, such as where to situate oneself in a field lacking a common paradigm (Pfeffer, 1993). And on a daily basis, to manage one’s own emotions. With freedom comes the responsibility to manage all that, at least to some degree, on one’s own.

On loneliness

While relishing freedom and autonomy, independent workers also acknowledge the loneliness that goes with it. It is more than an episodic feeling. It is a defining feature of their working lives. Loneliness only amplifies the lack of structure and direction that comes with freedom. It looms large even in little choices, as one software engineer explained to us. “I’ll eat lunch at 4:30. I’m sitting at my desk, working, shaking because I’m so hungry. And you just forget, you just lose track of things, because there’s nobody around you. There’s nobody around you.” Having nobody around is not just a social deprivation. It can also be an existential affirmation. There is pride in doing work that can bring one much joy all on one’s own. But it still needs enduring, and dealing with. As a consultant put it, “when you get up each day, it’s just you.”

Loneliness is a central part of the picture in our lives, too. While academic work has its classrooms full of people, seminars, and committee meetings, the most creative and career defining work is often done alone, with only sporadic contact with co-authors and colleagues. While writing this essay, for example, we bounced drafts back and forth across continents, so that our collaboration unfolded mostly through the digital platforms that scholars find most isolating. We worked alone in front of the computer, often while the other was asleep in their time zone, mindful of reviewers whose identity and location we ignored and readers we were not sure we would ever even reach. With a little help from technology, we were “alone together,” in Turkle’s (2017) poignant turn of phrase. The phrase is an apt description for the daily experience of doing academic work, in which our closest collaborators and crucial evaluators often reside at a distance. Making a quintessentially existential association between loneliness and mortality, one colleague told us that as a graduate student, in the long months in which she was analyzing data for her dissertation, alone, she sometimes fantasized that she might die in her cubicle and no one would notice for days. In the Covid years, we heard similar fantasies in relation to the isolation of working from home, which forced many of us to collaborate remotely even with colleagues who were once next door.

Like freedom, however, loneliness has another side. It is not just a painful absence of social support, or guidance, or companionship. From an existential perspective, it is a calming presence too. A precondition of sorts for mining depth and finding truth in the process of doing our work. Independent workers kept reminding us, and perhaps themselves, that their loneliness was daunting yet integral to producing work that was unique, novel, and significant. Work that was theirs and no one else’s. Even when it was for sale, it was first and foremost their gift to the world. When one artist told us that in the solitude of her studio, “my work becomes almost something I give birth to, and it becomes a companion,” we heard echoes of academics who claimed that stretches of uninterrupted time alone were essential to be generative. Enduring loneliness, seen this way, becomes a precondition for mastery, and for its reward—freeedom. An academic who cannot bear or does not get to be alone, it seems, might risk feeling like they are not one at all.

On precariousness

Freed up and isolated more than most workers in traditional jobs, independent workers live with a painful awareness of the precariousness of their working lives. Regardless of how many years they had been on their own, of how much success they might have enjoyed, the independent workers we met often felt close to the edge. So do many professors, or at least they express this when their guard is down. Precariousness can take two forms. The first, socio-economic, is perhaps the more familiar. Like academics, independent workers are keenly aware that remaining visible, and cultivating their network, are crucial to their livelihood. As a consultant told us, “if I don’t market myself into viable work then guess what, I can’t pay myself anything and I’m in dire straits from a financial standpoint. I live very close to that awareness.” This awareness, of depending on the ability to hold on to one’s audience, did not seem to dissipate even with commercial success.

Socio-economic precariousness is a significant presence early in all academic careers, where every article review has potential implication for one’s reputation and economic prospects (Ratle et al., 2020). It remains a constant presence for those who work as contingent faculty and lecturers (Childress, 2019). But it is a relatively short-lived experience only for those who receive tenure and are, at least in principle, protected from economic dire straits. At the time of this writing, however, the financial distress of academic institutions in Europe and the United States following the Covid-19 pandemic had led to attempts to downsize the tenured faculty ranks (Belkin, 2020). A second form of precariousness, however, is an existential one that remains an ongoing concern for academics as much as for independent workers, perhaps even more so for the successful ones who end up being highly invested and closely identified with their work. Once that identification occurs, what you do is who you are. Continuing to do good work means continuing to exist. Working becomes, from an identity perspective, a matter of life or death.

“You’re not a writer unless you’re writing,” one novelist told us. Another added, “yesterday’s thousand words were yesterday’s thousand words. It means nothing for today.” Such doubts are common in academia, at least in our experience. While we have institutional cues reinforcing that we are academics (e.g., our names appear on teaching schedules and office doors), it can be easy to lose one’s moorings. Do research that is too close to practice in some schools, or not close enough in others, too critical or not critical enough, and you might begin to feel like an impostor (Bothello & Roulet, 2018). Get drawn into service and you might question if you are still a “real scholar.” Get poor teaching evaluations, and your sense of what you uniquely bring to an institution, your teaching prowess and care for students, might be at stake.

As academics, we often feel like the software engineer who told us that working independently “is emotional because you own it, because you own your future. . . . You are so directly accountable for every single thing that you do that it’s remarkably rewarding, and also very stressful.” One might question how true this statement is, when even the most independent of workers is influenced by socio-economic forces as much as we are by academic norms. What matters, however, is what the conviction or perhaps illusion of freedom affords. That is, the opportunity to own our work. That opportunity comes at a price—that we give our selves to work.

On personalization

The precariousness of independent and academic working lives is all the more unsettling because the freedom of those lives allows us to make our work personal. Once you claim to be free, and to own your work, it is harder to justify your work as other than your choice or as a reflection of who you are, where you come from, and what you care about. “[When I was employed,] my identity was the organization. Now it’s me,” one consultant told us. “I’ve always felt that my work is personal. It’s harder when something goes wrong. There are instances where I question if I really am who I think I am,” said another. Those statements resonated with many academics who heard them, academics who had been socialized to have a clear identity tied to original work, or to reflect and claim on their position and involvement in their research fields.

We could not help hearing echoes of our experience over the years rendered in poetic terms when one consultant told us that, over time, people like her “come to embody the work. It becomes part of our identity. It’s who I am in the world. It’s what I do in the world.” It is a blessing to be able to pursue one’s interests. But it can also be exposing. Criticism and rejection cut into the self. “You become your work very much,” a writer told us. “You have to be able to accept that, and also [be] able to realize that failure might define who you are to yourself.” Put bluntly, having a personal entanglement with work means that you don’t just experience a failure. You become one.

We were keenly aware of the beauty and risk of personalization, as we worked on this study. Sue felt the project could make an important statement about the changing world of work, and yet had put it aside for years while taking up a demanding institutional role. Gianpiero was wrestling with doubts about his ability to continue fitting into a mainstream academic career. He was, quite frankly, struggling to survive as a scholar, while Sue was keen to return to work that made her feel alive as one. There we were, in different career stages and positions, both experiencing this project as a vehicle and a test for living up to the academic identity we aspired—and struggled—to hold on to. Not the title. Maybe the affirmation. Mostly, the experience of it.

We have learned that we are not alone. Many academics love the opportunity, indeed the privilege, of doing work that is personally meaningful and that they believe is useful. As a result, they feel the anxiety that comes with putting that work out into the world for others to respond, react to, or ignore. Many of us accept the anxiety that comes with freedom, and have been taught that the only way to exorcise it or keep it at bay is to stay productive no matter what.

Our Productivity Obsession

The freedom and loneliness that academic and independent working lives have in common, and those lives’ precarious and personal nature, fuel an intense preoccupation with productivity. There is varied practical advice to deal with the social, institutional, and economic challenges of working in both arenas. Remain visible, look the part, build your network, be prudent. There is political advice too. Speak up, slow down, join the strife. It’s publish or perish—or persist and resist. You pick. But when it comes to existential challenges there seems to be only a single, short, prescription: Just. Keep. Doing. The. Work! Keep at it or none of the above will matter. For most of the independent workers and academic colleagues who told us about their lives, productivity was a mantra, a virtue, and a preoccupation. However, we prefer to characterize it as an obsession. Because the need to be productive is often a persistent thought that focuses the mind away from the preoccupations outlined just above and slowly becomes a source of anxiety in its own right.

Being productive, understanding and guarding against conditions that might impede it, finding time, staying focused, making progress, and so forth, are efforts as central to academic lives as they were in the lives of the workers we studied. We ignore them at our peril. These efforts are attempts to stay in control that end up controlling us (Bristow et al., 2017). Two writers described a preoccupation similar to the one that tops the list, in our experience, of many academics’ working lives: “Am I writing every day or almost every day? Am I writing to the best of my ability?” One explained that such a concern “is separate from the question of publishing, making money, being qualified to teach and mentor younger writers.” His view elevates the concern with productivity to a place above those tied to security, status, or financial rewards. It ties the concern to the self instead, as a second writer noted, musing on his compulsion.

I’m always feeling this East Coast thing, where you feel like “Produce, produce, produce, keep it coming. You’re only as good as your latest thing.” There’s some sort of fear that if you’re not productive, I don’t know, . . . We peg our self-worth to how productive we feel that we are.

Most academics, who also write for a living and pour their life’s interests in their work, wrestle with the challenge of staying productive, and render harsh judgment on themselves when they fail to do so. While many of us might also wonder, at times, where our compulsion to remain productive comes from, here is one suggestion: It comes from the belief that if you do not produce, you do not exist, reinforced by a million subtle and not always well-intended hints. That colleague who slacked off, who taught too much, who was always up for a coffee and a chat . . . did you not see what happened to them? The idea is that in life, we have to make long-term bets, and stressful choices, for outcomes that are not guaranteed and that we seldom feel we can control. But our minds and bodies, those we should control. We must keep them focused on productivity or else.

Many academics, in our experience, take it as an article of faith that staying productive will keep them safe, and can relate to the feeling of threat that independent workers experience when being unproductive. “The tragic truth of academic life is that everyone I know is constantly trying to be more productive while feeling anxiety and shame about not writing ‘enough’,” Jensen (2017, p. 4) suggests at the outset of a book dauntingly titled Write No Matter What. Like independent workers, academics too might begin to question our selves, not just our competence or motivation, when we find ourselves unable to stay productive—and have strong feelings about it. That is how productivity becomes an obsession, a fanatical pursuit that brings us occasional relief, some joy, and much angst when it eludes us. Sometimes all of those in the same day. The independent workers we met also claimed that the nature of their working lives—the freedom and solitude, the personal and precarious quality of their work also exposed them to strong and conflicting emotions.

Independence gets emotional

At times the emotions that independence heightens are unpleasant. One artist’s comment that “when you’re independent, you can steep yourself in your anxieties a bit more,” reminded us of the temporary relief that even a meeting can bring when we have been wrestling with a manuscript alone for too long. “You’re alone in the studio, or in your office, you’re not in an environment with people around. . . . I can get involved in the moods of the day more because I’m here alone.” The lack of restraint offered by the presence of colleagues and office norms, she reflected, lets anxiety run loose. Working harder to numb it does not always make the work better. Other times, however, the emotions that we savor in doing our work are pleasant and sometimes extremely so. Then our experience resembles that of a consultant who described “moments when everything outside of that specific moment just fades away to the background.” You are not alone and anxious, in those moments of flow. You are at home in your work.

Those who make work the wellspring of their existence, and have an ear to their inner voice, not infrequently find that anxiety and delight speak to them in quick turns or quarrel. A writer, for example, wrestled with mood swings and mixed feelings associated with the reception of her work in the way that many academics we spoke to also do.

You put [work] out there and nobody pays attention, and yet you still think on some level, “I’m proud of it, I wish better things were happening for it.” I remember how bleak I felt, and then suddenly [my book] got nominated for an astonishing award and I felt simultaneously happy that this was happening, but also really disgusted with myself for needing that sort of external approval.

Doesn’t this sound familiar?

Academic work exposes us to similar emotional high and lows. It can involve great pride and crippling anxiety. The highs associated with doing research that illuminates a problem that is personally significant, is well-crafted, and has the chance to make a difference in the research of other academics or the lives of managers is a blessing of the profession. But rejections and lulls in productivity can leave us facing intense worry. Consider again doctoral students once they finish their coursework or start teaching. Like the people we studied, they might experience strong and novel emotions, no longer related to their advisors and exams or to their ability to meet external demands, but in relation to their ability to move project(s) forward and be of service to other students. It is likely that several talented academics have dropped out of doctoral programs because they could not work a way through such a period, or misunderstood the source of their concerns.

While program structure and the related tasks of each stage create a predictable period of dislocation for doctoral students, faculty are likely to move in and out of periods of intense sociality. For example, in a heavy teaching term, faculty members’ schedules are usually shaped by the demands of teaching a class several times a week, grading, meeting with students, and so forth. Choosing what and when to teach is seldom within their control, but when they switch to a research term, choices are more controllable and thus more personal. The work feels more precarious as they are more isolated, without regular student or co-teacher contact, and in such situations, they too experience some of the preoccupations that independent workers describe.

Let us be clear. We are not saying that being productive does not matter. We are saying, however, that it sometimes matters too much because it is a cover for a range of existential concerns—the demands of freedom, the challenges of loneliness, the entanglement of identity and work that is precarious. As is the case for all obsessions, hiding from these through an enhanced focus on productivity displaces, but does not resolve, our struggles. Or put another way, we might work better and do better work if we were less obsessed with it. If we could balance our discipline to do work we love with our ability to surrender to it. Just do the work (and then you will survive), in short, is simplistic and perhaps even dangerous advice. We must instead look at what it takes to put an independent self in the conditions to get its best work done. We turn to this issue next.

Holding Our (Working) Selves Together

There is a paradox at the center of independent work, one we have experienced often as academics and revisited again in the course of our study. While independent workers cherish and struggle with their freedom, and take pride in and yet dread their solitude, the ones who are able to make the most of that freedom and solitude do not “just” do their work. They spend much effort cultivating connections that help them place boundaries, and channel their efforts, as they strive to produce self-defining and valuable work. We use the word cultivating deliberately, because those connections—to routines, places, people, and purpose—are demanding and require regular tending to, lest they wither. When present and relied upon, however, the four connections provide what clinical psychoanalysts (Winnicott, 1975) and psychodynamic organizational scholars (Kahn, 2001) call a holding environment that secures and emboldens independent working lives.

A holding environment is a “social context that reduces disturbing affect and facilitates sense making” (Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2010, p. 44), thereby supporting development and growth. In organizations, it consists of structures and relationships that direct people’s activities, shape their work identities, and shield them from disturbing emotions such as anxiety. For example, a mentor creates such holding when she helps a junior manager choose the most valuable among two potential job opportunities, gives him feedback to prepare him for a more senior role, and reassures him after a disheartening setback with a client. As the description suggests, a holding environment is a relationship with another, with an institutional structure in the background (Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2020). Much like children do not get to choose the quantity and quality of parental holding that will shape their early lives, adults can find various degrees of holding at work. Those who are not fortunate enough to get and benefit from it have to do without.

When an organization is absent altogether, as is the case for the independent workers we studied, or when an organization offers freedom and expects independent productivity, as is the case for academics who tackle long-term research, where is the holding then? Does passion for what we study, or awareness that it will determine our fate, provide sufficient holding? If not, how do we navigate the joys and sorrow work brings, and grow through it? Our encounters with independent work, with each other’s work, and then with colleagues’, convinced us that when we are left on our own recognizance, going it alone is not the answer. If anything, the illusion that “I did it alone” is afforded to those who manage to create conditions that serve as a container for the emotions that independence surfaces, and for sustaining the discipline that independence requires.

Once you do cultivate the connections that hold you to and in your work, then you might end up believing, as a writer told us, that your success depends on your ability to “nail your a** to a chair and get it done. You try not to be too much like a . . . jailer most of the time. But there are times when you have to be. You have to read yourself the riot act.” While the image of imprisonment is opposed to independence, this writer claims that his independence requires him to choose to “jail” himself. His reference to trying not to be too much of a jailer is also suggestive of the boundary that these workers (and all of us) need to keep between focusing on productivity and being productive and not engaging in self-exploitation. But the unsung hero, the key character, the means for the heroic deed of writing, in that quote, is the chair itself. It is a kind of chair entirely different from academic Chairs that signal status and achievement. It is a spartan symbol of the simple yet necessary conditions you need to put your self to work and pour your self into your work. The independent workers we studied built “chairs” that held them by cultivating four different sets of connections, as noted above: To place, routines, people, and purpose. Each of these has relevance for academics who wish to craft a holding environment for their work.

A connection to place

Place plays a significant role in sustaining a vital working life. The vividness and the complexity of independent workers’ descriptions of where they did their work were inspiring. Many of them talked about the importance of having a specific place to work. They used going to that place, particularly when they worked from home, to remind themselves that they were “at work” and no longer “at home.” Many spoke about the impact of place on their ability to do their most personal and creative work. Gianpiero decided to repurpose the smallest room in his home, one that was seldom utilized, as a writing cocoon after hearing a writer say that “I can concentrate more when I don’t feel that my mind is expanding in a large space, that . . . it’s closed.”

The juxtaposition of physical confinement and mind expansion is only possible when the space is not just given, or even chosen, but it is made one’s own. Another writer reminded us of both of our habits of personalizing our offices. “There is this feeling that I have about having my own space that’s very, very important to me,” she said. “I have photographs, paintings and mementos that remind me of past projects and inspirations in my career. So it’s a sort of safe haven for doing this strange thing.” A screen writer told us that she sketched her characters while in bed, because “it’s emotional. I just need to be kind of cozy and cosseted . . .”

Investing a place as a workplace was especially important for those freelancers who, like academics, could easily let work intrude into every corner of their life space. Courtesy of technology, many of us have been taking work home long before we were forced to work from home alone (Beckman & Mazmanian, 2020; Gregg, 2011). When our work stirs strong emotions, what strategies can we use to make a bounded workspace “cozy and cosseted,” for example? Or to evoke our creative self and authorial voice? The lesson from independent workers is to take active steps to find, and make, “a room of one’s own” as Virginia Woolf put it. That is, a place that both gives us the comfort and evokes the freedom that allow our minds to work most effectively and creatively. Sue set up her office to include inspirations from her life and work history, but also gave central place to a round table. While nominally a place to meet with guests, she moves to the round table whenever she is doing analytic or creative work. Away from the computer and all of its distractions, the move signals a more serious intent and puts her in a creative space. The loss of this space during the periods of confinement was more than a practical loss, it required making a similarly bounded space at home, which for many, was not possible.

For some, one place won’t do. Like some of the independent workers we spoke to, one colleague told us that he needed to move periodically. “I go to wherever I feel there’s good energy or a flow,” he told us, deploying language that almost animates the space. “If I have a really good writing day, let’s say for a couple days in a row in a coffee shop, then I’m going to that coffee shop for a month or two. Until the mojo kind of just dies, and then I go on to the next place.” Space, even among those who migrate between them, is still a cradle for the creative self. When it does not seem to hold it, when the self does not feel energized in it, space loses appeal. Because some seek containment and others seek variety, we found that confined spaces that keep one literally on the move have great appeal for independent workers and academics alike. Many of the former marveled at their ability to focus and be productive on planes and trains. Amtrak offers a “residency,” a subsidized ticket for writers like one of our academic colleagues, who explained that being rocked by a moving train freed her up to work. Sometimes she would take one just to finish a draft. “If I’m on a train, I click into my, ‘I am doing my job now and I’m not going to be on the Internet, and I’m not going to read the book that’s not work-related’.” Whether it is staying in a particular place, moving places, or sticking with one until your energy runs out, being conscious about place can be helpful to sustain productivity without letting it become an obsession.

A connection to routine

While much has been said about the downside of routines, we also know about their value from psychological research on automaticity and habitual behavior (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999) and work in organizational behavior on the power of routines (Feldman & Pentland, 2003). Making routines has been the go-to advice for dealing with the disruption and dislocation of work caused by Covid-19. We found that routines allowed independent workers to experience agency in their working lives. The ones we spoke to were thoughtful about their routines and cherished the ones that helped them to stay productive. But the function of routines is richer than just keeping us going through the motions of getting work done. They also seem, somewhat like with place, to contain and free up our emotional energy so that it is infused in the work.

One executive coach we spoke to, for example, reminded us of many of our colleagues who adhere to a set of contemplation practices that free their minds up to work. “Over the years, I’ve developed rituals or structures in a day that are really comfortable for me. I do particular things at particular times. Just knowing that, and having that consistency, gets me motivated and engaged.” She went on:

I have a certain meditation every day. I write a journal every day. When I start work, I have a 30-minute planning process for the day. I only answer emails twice during the workday. I don’t let that distract me. I regularly leave during the lunch hour . . . I take a break every 90 to 120 minutes, because scientifically it’s how they identify high performers.

Similarly, one colleague in our field described a very specific routine for ending her working day.

At the end of the day, I decide what I’m going to do the next morning and make a little object to tell me where to start the next morning. Usually it’s a post-it note that says, “page 17.”. . . I need to shut the computer and then put the post-it on and look at it for a minute. Then I’m like, “I’m not going to work anymore today. Tomorrow morning at 9, that’s what I’ll be doing.”

Advice for academic writers (e.g., Jensen, 2017) suggests to put aside the existential torment that comes with it by treating it like a craft. One of the writers we spoke to echoed it, if only because a craft evokes steady progress through routinized work. “I think it’s really important when you do this kind of job to do it like a bricklayer,” he said, “Not that bricklayers don’t have highs and lows about their work, and things that succeed and don’t succeed, but I think it’s very important just to kind of go at it every day and do it. And ignore the other things.” That is, distractions, doubts, and torment. Those “things.” Whether it’s an image that exhorts us to work in a routinized way (e.g., like a bricklayer), a practice for getting the most productivity out of the day (e.g., like a meditation), a routine for transitioning from one day to the next (e.g., like the post-it), or one for transitioning from work to home, routines can function to keep us focused on the work rather than distracted by other activities, or put off by the ebbs and flows of inspiration.

Routines also help in ways beyond simply discipline. Like athletes getting themselves “in the zone,” routines helped independent workers focus fully on their work. They can evoke inspiration. In the words of one of the coaches from our sample: “I need rest, nutrition, exercise, and meditation. Those are my foundational pillars to ensure that I can show up and dance in the moment.” Gianpiero routinely plans a run during writing days, in the middle between two three-hour sessions of writing. The running allows him not just to take a break and return to the document refreshed, but also serves as a meditation of sorts, during which sentences might “click” into shape or inconsistencies become evident. It is not unusual to find him typing notes on his phone by the roadside before stretching and returning to work. Academics can think about what routine elements they might add to their days and weeks to keep them focused on doing their best work, helping them to feel alive in it, and incorporate those into their work lives so as to keep their form, as runners must do, in the most important moments of their work lives.

A connection to people

The third set of connections that help independent workers, and academics, stay productive and find joy in their work, was to significant people in their lives. “I talk to my editor nearly every day,” one writer told us, making us chuckle at the prospect. “I have to bug him somehow! Because you don’t work at an office, you don’t have these little moments . . . like, ‘Oh, hey; how ya doing? Oh, fine, great; see ya later.’ So you make them.” Pay close attention to the quote. While an editor represents a professional contact for a writer, the value of calling him is not related to any instrumental aim, such as increasing the writer’s publication prospects, or even getting advice on a current piece. It’s related instead to soothing the isolation of working alone. Making a call is still a concrete move, but like the other suggestions in this article, it is not driven by the pursuit of a goal, it is driven by the pursuit of an experience. One can be pragmatic without being instrumental.

People that “hold” us need not always be in the same profession, or related to it. Reminding us of research on intimate relationships’ effect on professional identities (Petriglieri & Obodaru, 2019), an independent film producer talked about the role that her husband played in her success.

My husband is very supportive . . . of what I’m doing and the fact that I’m putting risk in now to get the reward later. Honestly, I don’t think I’m strong enough to do it myself. I hate to say that, but I don’t think I could if he just magically disappeared. I’d go get a real job because I don’t think I could do this. . . . He isn’t all “pro-me” either. He’ll hear me say stuff and he’s like, “I can’t believe you said that, that’s really dumb.” But he really helps me with recognizing that I’m doing something and that I’ve made progress rather than just waiting for the Academy Award to roll in.”

As her conclusion suggests, the people who help us keep working, and doing work that matters, are not just surrogates of the recognition one might get from clients, or the public, for one’s work. They help us stay focused on the work when recognition seems unlikely and far away. They help keep recognition out of mind, so to speak, thereby allowing us to do work with the potential to be to recognized because it is daring and new. They are significant others because they help us forget less significant influences and continue doing our best work. Cultivating such relationships can be an act of resistance (Courpasson, Younes, & Reed, 2021), and academics, who are often daunted by the importance of public recognition, are well aware of the importance of those who keep them on a productive path at work when that recognition is nowhere in sight.

Some, as both of us do, have a spouse who is also an academic. In a career punctuated with judgment, those spouses’ non-judgmental presence makes them most valuable as a sounding board. “My husband is also an academic,” a colleague told us, “and it’s nice to have someone who is not in your same field but gets what you are doing. They’ll just listen, because most of the time I just need to talk about things.” Many academics don’t have a significant other who intimately understands their work. And given that the work is often done alone and through electronic communication (email, shared docs, Zoom), finding significant, friendly human contact that support us when the work stagnates, or embolden us to focus on bigger projects, can be difficult.

For Gianpiero, besides his wife, the people who serve as a much needed holding environment, helping him to do work that feels important and vital, most personal and yet of use to others in the world, are a group of academics, coaches, clinicians, and close friends who embrace a psychodynamic perspective and use it to make sense of their lives and work. They serve as a living reminder of the value of this lens for understanding people in organizations, and for helping organizations become more hospitable for people. Had that community not been there, Gianpiero might not have had the resources or the resolve to turn his dreams into work. Given the importance of these connections to sustaining productivity and feeling alive in one’s work, then, for academics, devoting time and energy to those significant people is extremely important.

A connection to purpose

A lot has been written lately about the power of having a purpose and pursuing one’s purpose in life (Leider, 2010; Stretcher, 2016). Purpose is in vogue, but it is often portrayed as “nice to have” in one’s life, something that gives one extra motivation once every other incentive is spent. Spending time with independent workers, and focusing on the existential nature of work, reminded us that purpose is far more essential than that. It is a necessity. Given independence and freedom to make choices, along with precariousness, purpose plays an essential role: it informs choices, directs activities, and gives daily work meaning. Without it, anxiety can overwhelm us.

Having a sense of purpose sustains motivation for doing the work in the absence of institutional reinforcement, a sentiment that shows up in comments such as “I’m convinced by the importance of the type of work that I do, and that it’s helpful to other people and that gives me energy to go on.” The academics who believe this about their work have a different sense of urgency, and a buffer against the inevitable setbacks. This very sense, that what we had found had enriched us and could be of help to colleagues, moved us to write this essay more than the prospect of another paper or the wish to respond to another set of reviewers. Having a purpose does not just motivate. It also elevates independent workers’ perspective, giving a bigger frame to what they are doing, binding the motivation to work to a cause, not just an instrumental goal.

Having a cause changes one’s relationship with frustration and failure. The former gets normalized, the latter reduced to a setback. An artist showed us how purpose can turn both into resolve. “When I transitioned into my own independence,” she told us,

I figured, “If I’m going to have to work that hard and maybe experience some discouragement, I’d like it to be for work that I really value, personally,” and so that’s part of what gets me through the frustrations as an artist. The applications to art shows that I don’t get into. Bringing a car load of artwork to a show on Saturday and taking it all back on Monday, not a single piece sold. There’s tremendous ongoing frustration. It’s a commitment to your belief in yourself that keeps you going, a bit of optimism, and also a little bit of self-challenge.

Without frustration, in short, there could not be art.

For academics who face the equivalent of those discouraging art shows in the sometimes seemingly endless review and rejection cycles of publishing, a sense of purpose can help. We can use the fact that our best work is meaningful to us, and broadly helpful to others, to motivate us. For example, early on in this project on independent workers, when figuring out exactly what to make out of an overwhelming set of observations, Sue often felt a great deal of anxiety about getting it right. When that emotion came to the fore, she asked herself why she cared so much and felt a strong sense of purpose around wanting these people’s stories to be out there. She believed that the stories had the potential to help people understand the precariousness they experienced, and that precariousness could be dealt with in more hopeful ways if understood differently.

Purpose also can give us a sense of joy and pride to be connected to something beyond the self. One doctoral student reported gaining motivation during difficult stretches from her purpose to return to her home country to teach. “That keeps me going and is meaningful,” she told us. Another colleague described the shift from a focus on worrying about oneself to one on being of value to others as follows:

Sometimes when . . .. I’m getting frustrated with a particular paper and I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall, I will switch over from trying to have an impact by producing a paper that changes the field to going to a seminar and/or meeting with colleagues and talking to them about their own work.

One more feature of purpose emerges from this account: it can bring us closer to others even as we continue doing work that we must do alone. It reminds us that even a theory paper written about informants met long ago, with a remote coauthor, for imaginary readers, might well help name and address some real people’s challenges out there.

Making Organization Theory Personal, Plural, and Potent

This essay asked you to accept an analogy as a premise. The analogy is that the work we do as management academics, given our profession’s globalization, technology-mediated intrusiveness, and increasing exposure to market forces, is similar to that done by independent workers of various stripes. The premise is that those working in this manner have something to teach us or maybe to remind us. It’s not a perfect analogy, but we still find it thought provoking. And the thoughts it provokes complement those that focus on academics’ experiences as members of organizations. Others have documented what happens when the institutions that “people rely on . . . to fashion their sense of self” (Voronov & Weber, 2020, p. 881) become demanding and unreliable. We focused on pressures of a different kind than those placed by institutional demands, the pressures that come with investing in one’s work. To be generative, we argue, a move from investing in (and investigating) institutions to investing in (and investigating) work requires a focus on holding—on the cultivation of meaningful connections. There is no denying that the story we are telling is personal. We believe that it is not just about us. The lesson we learned as we saw our selves in the mirror of independent workers is that such work is as good, as meaningful and useful, as work gets. But only if we learn to manage the torment that comes with bringing it to the world.

We began with the claim that the path towards a more pluralist and potent organization theory passes through a more vigorous examination of our personal involvement in theorizing. In some ways, our experiences and observations contribute to emerging work on the merit of making scholars’ investment in their theorizing transparent (E. B. Jones & Bartunek, 2021). This work exhorts scholars to acknowledge the motives and lenses that we bring to our fields, to help us learn more in those fields and theorize in more valuable ways (Amabile & Hall, 2021), by “presenting insights that may connect, reverberate and provoke others into reflecting on an issue” (Cunliffe, 2022, p. 7). We add that it is also worth documenting how our research fields might serve as a mirror for our work and for our selves. Sometimes our personal investment might orient us to a field of work. Other times it might emerge from our work in that field. To those who call for more vigorous engagement with the problems and challenges of the world (Howard-Grenville, 2021), our perspective helps to clarify what it might take to sustain curiosity, courage, and care. Anxiety, we argued, is the enemy of all three. And without enough holding, anxiety will silence or agitate us. Normalizing and interpreting our struggles then, can ease their burden some, and make them available for theorizing too. Those efforts, in turn, might make our theories more useful.

A perspective on academic work as an independent enterprise, however, does not imply giving up on communion and communities. Quite the contrary. Because independent workers had no illusion of a benevolent institution that would provide incentives and space to do good work, they gave much consideration to cultivating connections that made their working lives viable and vital. That is what success meant to them. Not the status of earning a title. Not the equanimity of having a secure position. By cultivating the connections we described above, we contend, academics, like independent workers, might also be able to handle the disquieting emotions that accompany our work. When security and safety are hard to come by, we must find ways to make unsafety tolerable and even generative, using our anxiety to stimulate the craft, and to take the risk to put our hard-earned truths out into the world. That effort might allow us to avoid succumbing to the obsession with productivity while we remain invested in our work and in our institutions. The advice we gleaned from independent workers, to be clear, is not to make arrangements that allow us to meet intense and erratic demands. It is to cultivate connections that buffer us from them, and free us up to express, develop, and discover our selves at work in the face of those demands. Making our work more personal, we contend, can help make our theories more plural and potent.

The Guest Editors of a recent special issue on working lives in a managerialist academia (Billsberry et al., 2019) have noticed that since the publication of Frost and Taylor’s (1996) classic Rhythms of Academic Life, much has changed. Careers once marked by clear expectations and predictable passages, whose institutional challenges could be laid out alongside common strategies to address them, have given way to less predictable, more insecure, pressured existences in a global market for ideas. We need new chronicles of academic working lives, then, and new strategies to deal with them. The ones that emerge from extant work oscillate between the instrumental—such as the need to craft a personal path, to research topics that matter, and to network incessantly—and the political—such as a Harley’s (2019) exhortation for senior scholars to take up leadership in opposing the corporatization of management academia (Huzzard et al., 2017).

This essay follows the invitation to trace an interpretive third way between the conformity implied by instrumental studies and the resistance invoked by critical ones (Gabriel, 1995). We have argued that neither captures a core feature of academic working lives—cultivating connections that help us sustain a passionate engagement with our work. An interpretive lens is best suited to investigate the crafting of meaning, and in keeping with it, we have focused on how academia can be personal. However, this perspective does not deny that academia is practical and political as well. To those who just want to get on with their work, we offer ideas that might afford them a more meaningful and sustainable engagement with that work. To those striving to mobilize collective resistance against institutional injustices within and beyond academia, we offer a view of what might make those efforts more enduring and effective.

Focusing on doing one’s best work, we have argued, is not always a way to deny the institutional pressures that make that difficult. It can also be a visceral response to those pressures. Courpasson et al. (2021) suggest that for professionals in alienating institutions—we count academics as such—forging connections that help sustain pleasure and pride in a “job well done” is a form of resistance, “a moral effort aimed at taking back control over the content of work” (p. 3). Our perspective, in that vein, offers a path towards emancipation that goes through our very work. And traditional activism too, we contend, requires holding. Personal holding, in fact, might be what collective action provides, alongside an avenue for resisting and reinventing organizations. Furthermore, a willingness to engage in intellectual activism requires the kind of critical consciousness that, we believe, is unlikely to emerge or persist in the absence of solid holding.

Even if one might question the truthfulness of idyllic pictures of management academia past, there is little doubt that its present resembles independent work. A growing body of scholarship has documented the resulting instability of academic selves (Knights & Clarke, 2014), and questioned the viability of efforts to render them secure by doubling down on career strategies based on a frenetic individualism (Clarke & Knights, 2015; Ogbonna & Harris, 2004). Those efforts only make us more isolated and captive to pressures to produce (Belkhir et al., 2019). Scholars have also argued that a focus on the possibility of finding security and freedom in doing the work itself might help avoid the harm done by institutions. “The concrete and embodied experience of working—has a significant impact on workers’ selves and society,” argue Dashtipour and Vidaillet (2020, p. 132), while noting that studies and advice still focus on dealing with institutions far more than on doing the work and expresssing our whole selves through work.

We contribute to these observations and invitations, by offering a perspective and a set of prescriptions that do not do away with the aspiration to remain productive, but challenge our compulsion to be so. We invite academics to keep their eyes on what productivity stands for, and how they might fill the existential void in ways that productivity, or status, never will. We propose the cultivation of holding environments as an antidote to heroic conformity or outright resistance. It is a way to neither do nor deconstruct academia, but a way to be in academia that honors our connection to our selves and others through our work, and through the theory it produces. This perspective answers the call to focus on being alongside doing, on the existential alongside the instrumental, in order to humanize our theories and practices (Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2015).

“When we, as academics, plead powerlessness in choosing what we research,” Rynes (2007, p. 747) argues, “because of incentive and reward systems [. . .] we dehumanize our careers and our lives.” The same is true for teaching, Mirvis (2008) contends, since “the road to transcendent education is not just about pedagogy and course content, but about the integrity of the teacher” (p. 419). The ideas and practices presented here might help us sustain our humanity as scholars and integrity as teachers. They allow us to transcend the pressure to produce academic work simply to protect our academic selves. They might also make us more attuned to the ways people work and organize to render institutions more humane, a focus that has been deemed critical for revitalizing organization theory (Barley, 2016; Davis, 2015; Petriglieri, 2020; Voronov & Weber, 2020).

Access to a holding environment, clinical psychologists argue, allows people “to develop a life that they experience not as futile but vital” (Anderson, 2014, p. 393). The same, we contend, is true at work. The futility that many lament in much academic work (Pfeffer & Fong, 2002) might well be a result of lack of holding (Kahn, 2012). Scholars have argued that business schools need “an imaginative engagement with alternative ways of knowing and being in the world. . .” (Starkey & Tempest, 2009, p. 576). Through engagement with one such alternative, independent work, we realized that our theorizing might be most valuable when it emerges from connections that enliven working selves. We suggest that to humanize organization theory, then, a focus on connections is required. Even if the most significant academic work might always entail risk and be lonely, we can’t make sense of it, or space for it, if we are only let loose and alone.