Forthcoming in Disturbing Differences: Working with Affect in Feminist Readings, Marianne Liljeström &
Susanna Paasonen (eds) London: Routledge. Please do not cite without permission.
Working with affect in the corporate university
Melissa Gregg
The INSIGHT Project Team would like to invite all staff to attend a
presentation on the development of [the university’s] brand values, new
visual identity and plans for our brand launch and rollout in 2009.
Presentations of all the latest developments and material will be held at
various locations in December…
Email to all staff, 2008
Over recent decades, scholars have experimented with a range of methodologies
to describe the emotional and affective investments involved in everyday media
consumption. From studies that highlight the role of popular culture in ‘making it
through the day’ (Grossberg 1997: 115) to accounts of fan cultures that develop
around particular television shows or book characters (e.g. Tulloch & Jenkins
1995; Penley 1997; Saxey 2001), researchers have sought to explain what is
meaningful and pleasurable about favoured texts and objects – the ‘mattering
maps’ (Grossberg 1992) that guide people’s media and cultural preferences. In
these situations, academics have occupied an ambiguous role given that, as
Henry Jenkins (1992) has perhaps most forcefully demonstrated, scholars are
often also fans of the media products they seek to study. Subsequent
generations of critics have shown that researchers blur the line between expert
and fan in studies of media texts and their accompanying subcultures (e.g. Hills
2002; Jenkins et al. 2003). This is not to say that their work cannot be considered
authoritative as a result. Rather, it is this partial perspective that allows insight
into a cultural phenomenon (Morris & Frow 1993). In this way, one of the
foundational premises of cultural studies approaches to media and popular
culture has been to recognise that the distinction between scholar and fan is
often secondary in understanding how something works. Cultural studies insists
that the judgment of the scholar is itself affected by the culture of which he or she
is part. By admitting this from the outset, researchers can be held to account for
the benefits and limitations of the techniques they adopt to study others.
This chapter develops this principle in relation to the growing interest in the
concept of ‘affective labour’ in media and cultural studies. It begins with an
overview of two discernible trends in the field: the fan tradition pioneered by
Jenkins and a range of other media scholars, and a developing area of research
which studies the conditions of the contemporary workplace. Drawing
connections between these two trajectories, the second half of the chapter
describes recent changes to the white-collar workplace and discusses the
consequences for scholarship given that academics encounter a range of
incentives to hold a strong investment in the workplace as a source of identity.
Just as fan studies encouraged academics to recognise their complicity in the
Forthcoming in Disturbing Differences: Working with Affect in Feminist Readings, Marianne Liljeström &
Susanna Paasonen (eds) London: Routledge. Please do not cite without permission.
leisure cultures of consumption they sought to study, the chapter suggests a
companion move is necessary in studies of affective labour: that academics must
acknowledge the context of their own labour to provide more comprehensive
accounts of the contemporary workplace—specifically the production cultures of
knowledge work. More reflexive studies of the academic workplace can reveal
the ways that scholars are already “working with affect” as part of the portfolio of
attributes and responsibilities expected of employees in today’s corporate
university. Urging increased attention to the experiences and motivations shared
between academics and other white-collar workers, the chapter considers which
methodologies best assist in understanding the seductive appeal of the
information workplace and the production cultures it rewards and sanctions.
Affective labour: Two histories
The work of media consumption
In media and cultural studies, affective labour has most often been illustrated in
studies that reflect the amount of energy and time that fans dedicate to
discussing and consecrating love of a particular book, character, series, game,
brand or application (e.g. Harrington & Bielby 1995; Green et al. 1998; Harris &
Alexander 1998; Baym 2000; Gray et al. 2007, Deuze et al. 2007). Here affective
labour is used to explain meaningful and productive human activity that does not
result in a direct financial profit or exchange value, but rather produces a sense
of community, esteem and/or belonging for those who share a common interest.
These practices have enjoyed accelerated scholarly interest in the wake of
technological changes and the amount of ‘user-generated content’ now being
produced online (Bruns, 2008; cf Peterson, 2008; Jarrett 2008). Tiziana
Terranova (2000) was among the first to note the trend for new media industries
to deploy the free labour of fans in the service of profitable designs and
innovations. The ‘gift economy’ characteristic of online and hacking cultures fits
neatly with the profit-seeking, crowd-sourcing aspirations of both established and
budget-conscious start-up media companies.
Mark Andrejevic (2008) suggests that interactive websites such as Television
Without Pity harness fan labour to a new level. He observes content producers
incorporating user recommendations to adapt scripts and communicate with fans
who take such recognition as further encouragement to perform what amounts to
unpaid market research. Indeed, for Andrejevic (2004; 2007) the most pernicious
and highly developed form of affective labour to date is the ‘work of being
watched’, where consumers embrace the participatory ethos of web 2.0 to
willingly engage in peer monitoring, behaviour broadcasting and self-surveillance
through digital and online networks. While ostensibly reporting activities and
tastes for the knowledge of friends, such practices also provide an intricate
archive of cultural preferences for savvy marketers to exploit.
Forthcoming in Disturbing Differences: Working with Affect in Feminist Readings, Marianne Liljeström &
Susanna Paasonen (eds) London: Routledge. Please do not cite without permission.
Terranova describes the significance of affective labour is to combine specific
technical skills which are often unpaid and self-taught with ‘forms of labour we do
not immediately recognise as such: chat, real-life stories, mailing lists, amateur
newsletters, and so on’ (2000: 38). Her account complements the history of fan
activity represented by Jenkins and others such as Matt Hills (2002), as well as a
further group of scholars who note the significance of ‘vernacular theory’
(McLaughlin 1996) and ‘vernacular creativity’ (Burgess 2007). The significance of
this branch of research has been to show that ‘academic knowledge remains
permeated by forms of “common sense”’, displaying ‘tacit “subcultural”
assumptions’ that decide which knowledge and which forms of labour will be
institutionally sanctioned and rewarded (Hills 2002: xii).
Immaterial labour?
Terranova’s account also develops from a tradition of theory which uses affective
labour to describe the work of those employed in the service of information or
symbolic manipulation in the new economy. Mario Lazzarato (1996), Michael
Hardt (1999; 1996) and Hardt & Negri (2000) write about so-called ‘immaterial
labour’, drawing on principles from Italian autonomist Marxism. This writing
highlights the shift to ‘more immaterial and cybernetic forms of labour, flexible
and precarious networks of employment, and commodities increasingly defined
in terms of culture and media’ (Hardt 1996: 4). A further feature observed by
these writers is the growth in labour activities ‘that are not normally recognized as
“work”’:
in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural
and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more
strategically, public opinion. (Lazzarato 1996: 133; cf. Bourdieu 1984)
In this way the notion of immaterial labour contributes to, at the same time as it
sits uncomfortably with, an already strong legacy of writing on affective labour in
feminist research (Huws 2003; Fortunati 2007; 1995). This awkward relationship
stems from the problematic division in conventional economic theory that
segregates private (unpaid) and public (paid) spheres, implying that work in the
home is less ‘material’ than that in the formal workplace. The affective labour of
the household sector has in these formulations often been measured in terms of
‘consumption’, meaning that all of the work women do to reproduce the economy
– housing, feeding, clothing and resting the worker – counts for nothing. Fortunati
offers the clearest evidence that ‘the real promoters of the recent discourse on
immaterial labour have been feminists’ (2007: 139) because debates in other
circles ‘completely ignored the material labour of the domestic sphere… as well
as the other fundamental parts of the immaterial sphere (affect, care, love,
education, socialization, communication, information, entertainment,
organization, planning, coordination, logistics)’ (2007: 144).
Forthcoming in Disturbing Differences: Working with Affect in Feminist Readings, Marianne Liljeström &
Susanna Paasonen (eds) London: Routledge. Please do not cite without permission.
Feminist studies have been vital to overturning the conceptual divisions
underpinning these assumptions (see also Gibson-Graham 1996). Key among
these achievements has been highlighting the significance of the ‘emotion work’
involved in care and service jobs such as the airline and retail industries
(Hochschild 1983). By explaining the consequences for workers whose job it is to
manage the concerns and feelings of customers, Arlie Hochschild has offered
exemplary studies to prove that ‘working with affect’ can be physically tiring in the
same way as apparently more physical, ‘manual’ work. Service industry jobs rely
on the emotional lives of employees for company benefit – as captured in the
adage ‘service with a smile’. With this realisation, research is now beginning to
explore how other industries, such as the entertainment professions, also involve
a high degree of affective labour (Dowling et al. 2007; Hesmondhalgh & Baker
2008).
Hochschild’s ethnographic and interview techniques – which include methods like
listening to the number of footsteps that women take in the home compared to
their partners – have provided important contributions to research into the lives of
employees and especially the time pressure felt by working families (Hochschild
1989; 1997). One of her most significant findings has been to explain how
women regularly work a ‘second shift’ once they come home from paid work,
given men’s ongoing refusal to share the burden of household maintenance. i
Hochschild demonstrates that for both women and men, paid work provides a
reliable source of self-esteem, fulfilment, happiness and control that rivals many
home-based or personal leisure pursuits. While this was often assumed to be the
case for well-educated employees, she suggests this to be so for workers across
class and hierarchy in organisations. Hochschild is one of a number of scholars
contemplating what it means for society that work has come to take such a
prominent role in affirming identity (see also McRobbie 2002; Lewis 2003). What
remains important to acknowledge, however, is that this change pertains to
academics’ own work lives as much as it does to others’ – a point developed in
the remainder of this chapter.
Workplace affects: Learning to love labour
Alan Liu has suggested that, in order to gauge ‘the tone of modern emotional
experience’, attention must turn from the private sphere to ‘the great impersonal
organizations of modernity—above all, the workplace’ (Liu 2004: 89). Hochschild
also confirms that in her studies the workplace is a ‘vast, compelling, dramatic,
socially shared world’ for employees compared to the lifeless, empty suburban
neighbourhoods they leave behind each day (Wilson & Lande 2005: 276).
Indicating the central importance of work for sociality and fulfilment, Liu explains
how the salaried class came to negotiate ‘the allowable range and intensity of
productive affect’ in the workplace and how the office took a leading role in such
attempts at regulation:
Forthcoming in Disturbing Differences: Working with Affect in Feminist Readings, Marianne Liljeström &
Susanna Paasonen (eds) London: Routledge. Please do not cite without permission.
However important it was for a child to learn to manage anger in the
presence of father or mother, it was now even more important that father
and mother learn to manager their anger, resentment, joy, lust, distraction,
or boredom in a workplace cut off from the farm or town that had been the
customary, ambient field of emotion (2004: 90).
The modern white-collar workplace relied on perceptions of competence and
professionalism for its functioning - ideals that are fundamentally affective
judgments. Developments in management techniques also allowed workers to
exercise growing autonomy, giving rise to the feelings of enterprise and esteem
central to the psychological appeal of work. The ‘new spirit of capitalism’
Boltanski and Chiapello describe ‘guarantees the workers’ commitment without
recourse to compulsion, by making everyone’s work meaningful’ (2005: 76). The
fulfilling nature of one’s job makes employees self-motivated agents, ready and
willing to work. In Boltanski and Chiapello’s account,
everyone knows what they must do without having to be told. Firm
direction is given without resorting to orders, and employees can continue
to organize themselves. Nothing is imposed on them since they subscribe
to the project. (2005: 76)
From this point of view, affect is the route to bringing about employee complicity
with the new demands of the workplace. Workers can be relied upon ‘to control
themselves, which involves transferring constraints from external organizational
mechanisms to people’s internal dispositions’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005:
79).
In the academic context, this situation plays out in scenarios where academics
are entrusted to define their own objectives, which will be assessed in a
continuing cycle of annual appraisals. In an environment of benchmarking and
auditing, it is taken for granted that academics carry the weight of responsibility
for the university’s reputation. They share traits with other employees I now study
– they check their work email late into the night, take business calls while grocery
shopping or schedule catch-up work for their days off – who have little need to
modulate their subjectivity to fit workplace demands. They are already
subscribed to the firm’s project far beyond paid hours: the affective labour these
workers engage in is the psychological preparation to be ready for work’s
potential (Gregg, forthcoming). Online technologies and the sheer convenience
of being able to log on to see what is awaiting them before they reach the office
adds a new ambient awareness of work in locations that were once reserved for
leisure, which changes the venue for performing a professional persona. The
‘anticipatory affects’ of the constantly connected information workplace include
the anxiety of missing emails and a general concern with staying on top of
information. In the worst instances, it can culminate in a subtle but pervasive
paranoia about being ‘off the grid’, making time ‘the medium of pressure’ for
today’s young professionals (Morris 2008).
Forthcoming in Disturbing Differences: Working with Affect in Feminist Readings, Marianne Liljeström &
Susanna Paasonen (eds) London: Routledge. Please do not cite without permission.
This preparatory labour is part of the wider requirement placed on white-collar
workers to continually demonstrate their ongoing employability. The ‘activity par
excellence’ for today’s academic, as for other workers in information jobs, ‘is
integrating oneself into networks’. Taking advantage of networks is ‘to put an end
to isolation, and have opportunities for meeting people or associating with things,
proximity to which is liable to generate a project’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005:
110). The content of the project is less important than the general fact of activity.
The priority is for employees ‘never to be short of a project, bereft of an idea,
always to have something in mind, in the pipeline, with other people one meets
out of a desire to do something’ (ibid). Such productivity is institutionally
rewarded in universities, where staff are encouraged to prepare, workshop and
submit applications for research grants while also engaging in a combination of
qualitative and quantitative output measures. This regime of preparing and
asking for potential work, while also reiterating the significance of past work,
adds to the labour already expected on the job. The ostensible ‘security’ of
tenure is no longer the achievement by which one proves career success; rather
it is confirmed through regular accounts of one’s ongoing productivity.
The responsibility on employers to provide adequate support for workers in the
information workplace is avoided by making a virtue out of individuals’ capacities
to juggle multiple projects and commitments at once. The sense of instability and
being overloaded these changes may foster are dealt with by professional
development courses and ‘dealing with change’ programs, which urge
employees to feel comfortable with the unease of constant churn. The affective
labour involved here is the formation of somatic and psychic strategies
appropriate for positions and workloads that have no definitive beginning or end.
Paolo Virno has noted the consequences of this ‘dramatic lack of foundation’
including the rise of opportunism: ‘This sensitivity to abstract opportunities
constitutes the professional requirement of post-Taylorist activity, where the
labour process is regulated by no single goal, but by a class of equivalent
possibilities redefinable in every particular instance’ (1996: 17).
Virno summarises the anxieties of many white-collar employees in saying that:
Fears of particular dangers, if only virtual ones, haunt the workday like a
mood that cannot be escaped. This fear, however, is transformed into an
operational requirement, a special tool of the trade. Insecurity about one’s
place during periodic innovation, fear of losing recently gained privileges,
and anxiety about being ‘left behind’ translate into flexibility, adaptability,
and a readiness to reconfigure oneself (1996: 17).
This description puts a contemporary spin on the observations offered by C.
Wright Mills, whose classic account defined the white-collar worker as having ‘no
firm roots, no sure loyalties to sustain his life and give it a centre’. Mills’ famous
phrasing suggested that
Forthcoming in Disturbing Differences: Working with Affect in Feminist Readings, Marianne Liljeström &
Susanna Paasonen (eds) London: Routledge. Please do not cite without permission.
[p]erhaps because he does not know where he is going, he is in a frantic
hurry; perhaps because he does not know what frightens him, he is
paralysed with fear (Mills 1973: xvi).
The persistent themes in each of these descriptions are the affects of fear and
anxiety, the ontological bearing more recent researchers describe as the state of
‘precarity’ (e.g. Gill & Pratt 2008; Berlant 2008).
Given that researchers in universities are themselves also subject to these
feelings of ‘suspense’ and ‘impasse’ (Berlant 2008; see also Gill, forthcoming),
this poses particular methodological problems. In my own study, which follows
Hochschild’s method of studying workers in the workplace and the home, the
already frantic pace of the office environment adds a sense of pressure to the
interviews conducted, just as the window of opportunity to pursue research in the
tightly scheduled academic calendar creates a sense of urgency to complete
projects on time and on budget. Asking workers about their feelings towards work
can run the risk of having the interview situation resemble a confessional
opportunity to vent about shared problems. As the relationship with participants
develops over time, there is also the risk of forming empathy, and the ethical
questions of reporting information without judgment or censorship when
researcher and researched maintain similar habits and behaviour.
In previous work I have described the benefits of eliciting empathy as a
methodological imperative for cultural studies and its project of bringing
transformative political change to the university (Gregg 2006). In this context
however the possibility that scholar and participant share a belief in the intrinsic
value of work and career fulfilment can threaten the researcher’s capacity to
contextualise the practices displayed by participants in relation to other work
cultures. Compared to the forms of anxiety suffered by workers in the resourcesupply and assembly-line manufacture of digital devices—including the literally
punishing regimes enforced by traditional employment hierarchies in the factories
where office technology is built—the anticipatory affects and self-discipline of the
mobile office worker are far from the highest priority for global labour politics (see
McLaughlin 2008).
The insularism that can arise in studying white-collar work is in this sense a
pressing ethical issue. Feminist research into work cultures stays within a
neoliberal Western horizon when it celebrates the independence and
empowerment to be gained from the choice to engage in paid work (Gregg
2008). Such research can be justifiably accused of solipsism and narcissism if it
seeks merely to defend the work- and life-style preferences of the professional
middle class. Here the recent focus on achieving successful ‘work/life balance’ is
a strangely atomised understanding of labour history and a poor response to the
ongoing challenge of demanding work limits. This is why additional
methodologies, such as participant observation in institutional settings, discourse
Forthcoming in Disturbing Differences: Working with Affect in Feminist Readings, Marianne Liljeström &
Susanna Paasonen (eds) London: Routledge. Please do not cite without permission.
and semiotic analysis of media representations and forms of auto-ethnography
can be useful comparative techniques. Such methods add weight and context to
the empirical data gleaned from interviews with workers in information jobs,
providing a wider picture than the spoken word. They are the further critical skills
that scholars have at their disposal to create awareness of the ways professional
knowledge work fits in relation to the wider socio-economic conditions affecting
the fortunes of all workers.
Emotionally invested: Studying production cultures
As Andrew Ross (2004) argues, it is the extraordinary ability of academics to
excavate working hours from a range of times in the day that has provided a
model for the flexible work arrangements now formalised in information jobs
across many sectors. ‘Sacrificial labour’ is clearly ingrained in an industry where
the notion of ‘service’ neatly obscures the amount of unpaid work inherent to
major activities like journal publishing. This symbolic and voluntary labour whitecollar workers engage in signifies vocational commitment, consolidates the
transferability of reputation and sustains notions of professionalism. But by
routinely discounting the amount of time and attention their job takes from other
pursuits, academics have often been guilty of normalising the self-exploiting
tendencies now mirrored in further segments of the white-collar demographic.
This makes it difficult for researchers to understand such behaviour in terms of
labour politics; still more so to use findings to formulate convincing grounds for
critique.
The language of affective labour is an important resource for employees to draw
on to describe the new kinds of commitment demanded by the information
workplace. For academics in particular, affective labour explains how the
university manipulates the psychological lives of its staff to simultaneously exploit
and disguise the ‘immaterial’ dimensions of working life. In the drive to succeed
in rankings, outputs and quantitative economic measures, management’s
demands that academics be productive erase mention of the human elements
that complicate the tasks of thinking, writing and delivering the timely outcomes
rewarded with career success. In the language of campus mission statements
and marketing campaigns, inspiration strikes regularly, research teams are
assembled easily and teachers are always pursuing excellence. Such branding
initiatives celebrate creativity and innovation to promote the university at the
same time as they empty out the very language employees might otherwise
choose to express loyalty to the institution. The focus on captivating students,
delivering performance indicators and maintaining a competitive edge over
aspiring colleagues instead makes the idea of commitment to a profession feel
somewhat naïve and old fashioned.
Recognising their own investments in the work cultures they study – including the
feelings of insecurity and vulnerability produced by the corporate university – is a
Forthcoming in Disturbing Differences: Working with Affect in Feminist Readings, Marianne Liljeström &
Susanna Paasonen (eds) London: Routledge. Please do not cite without permission.
necessary part of academics’ efforts to document the culture of the information
workplace. Theorising affective labour in ways that can distinguish between the
mobilising power of vocational calling and the cynical language of business
opportunism may even help to re-awaken passion for scholarship motivated by
curiosity rather than careerism. Academic studies of labour would certainly
benefit from the kind of ‘affective reflexivity’ Hills describes when he encourages
scholarship that admits ‘its own neoreligiosities, its own fandoms, and its own
“reflexive pre-reflexivities” or self-absences’ (2002: 184). But to achieve this first
involves finding a common voice that can demand an end to the individual
psychological insecurity upon which the white-collar workplace remains
dependent. In future, acknowledging the need for work limits is one way
academics might contextualise the importance of our work to ourselves; ceasing
to see our own work lives as exceptional might have the further benefit of
improving our credibility in attempting to speak of the labour of others.
Note
i
In other work Hochschild shows how wealthy Western families solve this
problem by outsourcing domestic labour to migrant women, in Ehrenreich &
Hochschild (2002).
Forthcoming in Disturbing Differences: Working with Affect in Feminist Readings, Marianne Liljeström &
Susanna Paasonen (eds) London: Routledge. Please do not cite without permission.
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