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
I’ve moved on to the ‘Work’ chapter of Arendt’s Human Condition. It wasn’t as full on as I’d expected; because Labour/Work is a dichotomy, much of the meaning of Work was contained in the Labour chapter. This week I really just want to focus in on just a couple of key insights I’ve gleaned from … Continue reading Digesting Arendt’s ideas on Work
Three days ago I changed my job title on LinkedIn. The title change was part of a broader restructure at work, and was accompanied by a new role description which was really just a superficial tweak to the old one attached to a larger portfolio of accounts. There was no real increase in responsibility, and … Continue reading Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is a fecund text. What it lacks in internal consistency and clarity of citation it makes up for by providing an easily problematised taxonomy of human activity and the realms in which it takes place. It’s impossible to read it without thinking; even the things it ‘gets wrong’ provides the … Continue reading Hannah Arendt, Labour, and the Maintenance of the Self
