A long time ago, as a hopeful undergrad, I bought a copy of each of Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of" books. As a young, white, middle-class man, something about the taxonomic certainty of the titles appealed, embodying as they did a sort of imperial drive to categorise. Dividing up European history into four ages - of … Continue reading Thoughts on Thompson
Both ‘work’ and ‘job’ are key words today. Neither had its prominence three hundred years ago. Both are still untranslatable from European languages into many others. Most languages never have one single word to designate all activities that are considered useful. Some languages happen to have a word for activities demanding pay. This word usually … Continue reading The Book I’m Currently Writing, Take 3
I’ve been sitting on a new version of my ‘The Book I’m Writing’ post for a few weeks because I’m not super happy with how it’s turned out. The guts of the post is that, having read Foucault, I’d like to have each chapter talk about the ‘birth’ (read: contingent construction) of an idea that … Continue reading A review of Melissa Gregg’s “Counterproductive”
Having finished the two Foucault lecture series I wanted to read, I’ve moved on to critique of Foucault. Gentle critique, it must be said, in that the book I’m now reading is Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller’s Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Rose and Miller have been working in the governmentality … Continue reading On the Neoliberal employment bargain
So, after my last post, I’ve been given the green light to keep publishing on the blog. It was all a bit of a formality in the end, but given how much synergy there is between the day to day of my job and the stuff I’ve been reading on Governmentality, it was a worthwhile … Continue reading Foucault on Work
I know it's been a while between updates. I've been struggling at work, and haven't had a whole lot of energy for writing. I'm also starting to firm up a plan for my first chapter, so I'm not sure how often I'll update here. After all, I want to write the chapters, not just the … Continue reading Gender and Power at Work
A few months ago I posted a working definition of work. I've been becoming more and more unhappy with it as time's worn on. It's far too materialist, for starters. It won't deal with the psychic or emotional effects of work on our lives. As Steven Salaita puts it in his recent post on post-academic … Continue reading Work is an Ordering Principle
My boss recently told me that in order to do my job I’d need to take work home with me. This is not the first time this has happened, but this time was different. I work in sales, and what my boss was trying to tell me was that to generate leads I needed to … Continue reading Discipline and Governance in the Neoliberal Workplace
In this post, I want to turn from the idea of home as a refuge from the public to consider the centrality of the ‘household’ to work, perhaps as the first tentative step towards a ‘history of the present’ of work. Remember the aim of a history of the present is not to look for … Continue reading The Fall of the ‘Household’
In my readings on the history of work thus far, I’ve come across a fairly stable trend in how thinkers about work think about work. At the beginning of the 21st century we have two broad and entangled ways of understanding what work is. Firstly, to put none too fine a point on it, work … Continue reading A Working Definition of Work
Performance Anxiety 