Philosophy of Money Question 1.
Marcia Helene Hewitt 10436125
September 6 2009
University of Western Australia
No one wants to see the old authoritarian return, but at least it could be said of him that what he wanted primarily from you was your sweat. The New Man wants your
soul.”
William Whyte
I’ve chosen the above quote from No Collar because I feel it aptly describes the dilemma of unbounded work space; that is, where does work end and leisure begin? I am going to underpin Andrew Ross’s work with the work of Airlie Hochschild’s study in The Time Bind (1997). Exploitation takes many forms, from the more obvious industrial forms that Karl Marx described in Alienated Labour, to the new more subtle form of time robbery. That is, the delineation between home and work, recreation and work, and waking and sleeping itself, is being blurred in what is now called the New Economy (Ross, p. 9), and specifically described in his ethnography about Silicon Alley and a company called Razorfish.
The “New Economic” doctrine appeals to the Bohemian, “anti structuralist’’ and artistic fringe. The appeal is ‘no management.’ To describe this in another way, each person feels that he or she is self-employed, that their creative work is valued, that their computer is as much an art object as a loom or a canvas, or even a musical instrument. Each person is part of a big family, with a culture, an ethic, and a big vision for a new future; a free world where human beings are no longer forced to work in dehumanising jobs. No more pyramid organisations of the postwar period, no more managers ‘breathing down your neck’ in these New Economy jobs.
Ross describes in great detail a company called Razorfish. In this company, the employees are part of the pioneer Geeks who had training in the arts, and were willing to put in long hours in low grade offices spaces, able to solve problems for long hours in exchange for other compensations. This type of person is easy to exploit in companies that operate on seventy hour workweeks and offer rewards in the stock market. After all, what’s a 10 hour work day when you are having fun?
In a similar light, Arlie Hochschild describes couples working for Fortune 500. She observed that most people there always said “my family comes first.” On the other hand, there was the alluring work culture, the emotional magnetism pulled towards work over the sometimes empty feeling at home. In modern times, there is an absence of community and kin support at home, so office culture offers a richer and more interesting life.
Hochschild interviewed 130 employees, including middle + upper management, clerks, and factory workers. She conducted ethnographic studies in a place which is called, fictionally, Amerco, a family friendly workplace. These workplaces are full of cliché-ish slogans such as “work-life balance programme”, “sweet joy”, “fun” carefree” and “emotionally supportive”.
Gwen, an employee of the family friendly company, arrives at work where a coffee is already made for her; she has had to put her child in a day care center in a rush, with her daughter crying out “take me with you mommy”. (Hochschild, p. 262). Gwen finds comfort from her torn emotions by ‘getting a lot of work done’ and knowing that the QT (quality time) with her child will be met later in the day. Gwen’s job has stretched to 9 hours, not including emails and faxes that she has to answer when she gets home. That’s ok though, her husband and she can protect their ‘dinner hour’ which is now from 8:00 to 8:30. Time to throw a ball around, do a puzzle, read a story to their child or have some fun and romance for themselves just isn’t there. This is the Time Bind that Hochschild describes, and it is the same time poverty that Andrew Ross describes so succinctly in No Collar. This is the New Economy, the utopian dream that will free people to enjoy their lives more than in any other previous decade.
The Managerial Dream
Managerial plans at Razorfish were also unbounded and often not by the book. The employees, who were referred to as ‘fish’ operated on a different level than previous generations of office workers. A fish might start his/her day with 30 minutes of doodling, then a bit of application time (work). Then a fish would need a break so an hour of chatting with other friends in the office, then a bit of even more focused work, and then perhaps a walk to the art exhibition. All of these different stages might get a fish to half the project being finished.
At No Collar companies, all creative thought is valued. Doodles and notepads are often collected to add to the quantum soup of the company.
An so this unmanaged, creative work day is again unbounded. Since creative ideas crop up as often at home as at work, the New Economy work place can exercise rights over what their employees do and think well beyond the physical workspace. (Ross, p. 147).
Unbounded money and unbounded space
Much of New Economy theory has created an ‘unbounded value system’.
The production of goods has been downgraded in favour of equity yields and speculation. As Enron proved, almost anything can be commodified and conjured into a financial instrument to be traded. Weather, or insurance are such commodifications. With this philosophical view, even a job was seen more as an opportunity to ‘cash out’ than any obligation to produce anything useful. In many companies, options are standard issues, and so stockwatch applications are on all desktop screens. In this way, office culture also provides emotional highs and lows, as their fluctuating stock provides emotional merry- go- round experiences for them. In some companies, Wall Street rewarded companies who sacked employees by boosting their stock valuation. Pensions of millions of employees float on seas of stock plans. This includes obligatory investment in the stock of their own company, such as Enron. This unboundedness in financial security is another form of exploitation: Many people transferred their family savings from government insured bank deposits to mutual funds.
Job security and financial security becomes another form of speculative profit making.
This notion also is underpinned in Hochschild’s work. In her book the Managed Heart (1983) Hochschild explains how corporations can even use people’s feelings ie a rising share dividend or the emotional labour of having the ‘right’ feeling for the job or the company. There is more profit to be made by people being happy than unhappy, and this can be documented by many scientific studies on dopamine and motivation (Depue, R. 2004)
Working hard in a fun-filled environment with no management shouldn’t really be viewed as economically exploitative, but many of the ‘fish’ felt that they were being somehow ‘co-opted’ or ‘sold out’. After all, in yesteryear, and supported by both John Locke and Adam Smith , was the notion that labour was the primary source of wealth and the only true measure of value. If you work it or improve on it, it becomes yours by right. (Ross, p.67). Locke’s core philosophical point was that free men and women owned their own labour and made things for themselves and the good of the community, the same idea that guided many of the alternative and hippie collectivist projects of the late 60’s and early 70’s.
But as soon as slavery was institutionalised, these values were corrupted. What Marx pointed out was that if the product of labour is no longer in the hands of the workers, then there is alienation. (Marx, 1880).
Has anything really changed.
The expectation that Razorfish employees had in regard to their Candyland jobs was not entirely disappointed. There was fun. Parties, dances, EST training courses, recreation areas, and a ‘stop and talk whenever you feel like it’ work environment. But somehow the fish felt that they were being fooled:
“Weaned on a generational culture that had been branded with slogans like No Fear, Kimen did, however, have one abiding dread–that she had been fooled. There were times, she confessed, when she saw the Internet industry as ‘the evil child of postmodernism’ and when she felt duped by her desire to believe in the magnitude of change. Her cohort had been ‘the good people who wanted to make stuff free, to give it all away, and find another way to live, and yet, because we live in an American world so shy on values, it was a perfect opportunity for capitalism to pull on our heartstrings’…”I thought I was some kind of rebel in the business world’, she confessed, ‘but I’m not. I’m the fucking target audience. And that is a weird, very weird, feeling.” (Ross, p. 107).
Kimen’s comment is another very good example of Hochchild’s work in The Managed Heart, where she examines how families, and males and females in families, are commercialised by their employees in the service sector. We have moved away from the traditional nineteenth century male mind of Weber, Marx and Durkheim who left little room for emotion, and fully embrace the postmodern holistic (and feminine) thinker. This type of person, as Ross points out in his chapter on The Industrialisation of Bohemia, are the best capitalist fodder ever. Capitalism, like a giant octopus with tentacles around everyone and everything, now can embrace, and derive profit from, the anti-capitalist, anarchists, left wing politicos and gays! Yes, the most marginalised people in socieity are often the most creative! Ross concludes that Razorfish takes capitalism to a ‘higher’ level. The fundamental hazard of this New Economy workplace is that it enlists workers’ thoughts and feelings (Hochschild, 1983) in the service of salaried time. The long hours worked by staff and their total allegiance to a given firm, followed by their later rejection by it, led employees to feel a profound sense of rejection. The same issues are found here that would be found in a flour mill in 1880, only in a different format.
Hochschild contributes in understanding this area by showing how symbolic interation can be used to help explain not only emotions, but also gender relationships and alteration of self by management through commercialization. Since large numbers of jobs today involve emotional labour, Hochschild makes an important contribution to the sociology of work and labour. She bridges the micro/macro gap in her studies on the organisation of feeling work in social institutions. (Adams, , p. 522).
In conclusion, Ross’s statement about ‘a traditional industrial model derives value from workers where and when the company can control their labour’ really shows that Razorfish , in many ways, fits the traditional industrial model. The only difference between Razorfish and the paternalistic practices used by early 20th century employers like mid -west meat packer in Chicago in the 1920’s (Swift and Company, 1920). is simply this: New Economy doctrine is simply better at getting more work for less money out of its workers.
References
Adams, B. and Sydie, R. 2001. Sociological Theory. Thousand Oaks Press. California.
Depue, Rich.2004. Neurobiology of the structure of personality; Dopamine, facilitation of incentive motivation & extraversion.
Dept. of Human Development, Laboratory of Neurobiology of Personality & Emotion. Cornell University. New York.
Hochschild, A. 1997. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. Metropolitan Press
Hochschild, A. 1983. The Managed Heart: the Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press. Berkeley.
Locke, John.
Marx, Karl. 1880. Early Writings. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Penguin Books. USA 1992.
Purcell, T. 1955. The Worker Speaks His Mind. Cornell University. School of Industrial and Labour Relations. New York.
Ross, Andrew. 2003. No Collar. The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs. Temple University Press. Philadelphia.
Smith, Adam.
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