From Boardroom to Bedroom

FROM BOARDROOM TO BEDROOM Online culture, intimacy and the new world of work

Book proposal submitted by

Dr Melissa Gregg Department of Gender and Cultural Studies Quadrangle Building A14 University of Sydney NSW 2006

p 02 9351 3657 | m 0408 599 359 | e [email protected] http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/gcs/staff/profiles/mgregg.shtml FROM BOARDROOM TO BEDROOM Online culture, intimacy and the new world of work

Rationale

This book provides an overdue account of online technology's impact on Australian workers. Based on a three year study of employees in some of the country's largest organisations, it takes the reader into the offices and homes of today's salaried professional. The results provide an intimate insight into the psychological consequences, family dynamics and wider social anxieties that have accompanied the new, “flexible” workplace.

This is the first local research of its kind to focus on online technology as it affects the lives of ordinary office workers—those at the heart of Kevin Rudd’s much vaunted “knowledge economy”. Set against an economic backdrop that has moved sharply from prosperity to looming recession, the book combines extensive interview material with a detailed archive of work-related media coverage, producing a genuinely novel account of the significant changes to white collar work in recent years.

The book is marked not only by its topicality but by a compelling juxtaposition of representations of workplace culture with the reality on the ground. The exclusive interview material covers a range of contemporary issues, from information and communication overload to email addiction and the ethics of virtual relationships. From Boardroom to Bedroom sparks debate about professional work practices at a time when concerns over these conditions are only set to increase. It also offers a necessarily sobering account of the work world that the latest technologically dependent generation prepares to enter.

The book introduces the notion of work's intimacy to describe the way technology exacerbates the expectations of professional jobs as they come to invade spaces and times that were once less susceptible to work's presence. As part of wider changes affecting the salaried middle class in wealthy economies, online technologies have acted as orienting devices for the experience of career mobility negotiated by growing numbers of educated workers. These technologies have helped carve out spaces for connection, community and solidarity where these did not previously exist, leading to new personal and professional relationships that complicate what we mean by the notion of “friendship”.

At the same time however these technologies have also played on feelings of instability, threat and fear that arise as workers come to terms with an unstable employment landscape and the death of the linear career path. Material contained in the book shows white collar workers use technology to alleviate anxiety over meeting professional performance measures. The worst of this behaviour involves manic email monitoring, online presence performance and the tyranny of the mobile phone for senior executives and on-call workers alike. The health implications of these practices are worrying for even the youngest of workers interviewed.

The professional workers described in this book—those who have survived the redundancies already inflicted—look set to continue making excuses for working conditions that have been difficult for some time. Recognising the value of a job in and of itself in the present climate suspends efforts to resist workloads that have been so accelerated by new technology that they require the most steadfast efforts to manage. Written for a contemporary workforce that is defined by “presence bleed”, From Boardroom to Bedroom provides an important assessment of current directions in workplace culture in the wake of the information revolution. It does this at a time of crucial significance, given that the most powerful of economic forces appear poised to erase whatever language remained to speak of work limits.

Proposed length: 50 000 words, including references.

Chapter Summary

Introduction. Work's intimacy: Performing professionalism online and on the job

Communication technologies are now central to the functioning of today's workplaces and yet so far few studies have shown the effects of online culture on professional and personal life. The email equipped mobile phone and wireless laptop are just the latest in a range of always-on devices offering unprecedented opportunities for work to follow us to new locations. This poses new questions for the notion of professionalism as the work day adjusts to fit new surroundings and expectations. Should I answer that email tonight after my extra glass of wine? Do I have to be friends with my colleagues on Facebook? Will my son know if I’m listening from the other room as I finish this overdue presentation? This introductory chapter places the networked office in the wider history of salaried work, from the white collar “corporation man” of the 1950s to the Fordist era of “service with a smile”. The on-call, mobile work persona typical of office life today is different again. Salaried jobs have always relied on networking skills to develop contacts and maintain likeability, so online extensions of this practice are clearly to be expected. Yet to what extent are they exacerbated by the surveillance capabilities of communication technologies? Calendar scheduling devices, chat programs, status updates and above all email increase the pressure on employees to stay in touch and informed about work. This chapter raises a fundamental question for the book as a whole: How do workers retain a personal life or sense of privacy faced with a range of compulsory work- induced friendships? And how do they cope with the networked office which makes managing information and communication a personal responsibility?

PART ONE

THE CONNECTIVITY IMPERATIVE: BUSINESS RESPONSES TO NEW MEDIA

1. Selling the flexible workplace: The creative economy and new media fetishism

Management and business literature have been vital in selling the affordances of the flexible workplace facilitated by new media. As Fred Turner argues, Baby Boomers coming of age in the Cold War period matched with West Coast anti- institutional thinking in the US to lay the foundation for what would become a widespread expectation that work should escape the 9 to 5 office. This marriage of counterculture and cyberculture that also fuelled the “no collar” workplaces of the dotcom boom has proven a compelling justification for the flexible workplace, which gives employees the power to choose when and where (but never whether) they work. This chapter surveys the business imperatives and accompanying philosophical movements that drive the information economy, from Richard Florida's “creative class” to Merlin Mann's “Getting Things Done” life-hacking phenomenon. Drawing on a 4 year archive documenting the growth of work- related supplements in major Australian newspapers, it also provides a prehistory for the hype surrounding technology’s liberating workplace uses: a situation where the i-phone and the laptop signify freedom from work in spite of their role in extending the working day. To set the scene for the location of the book's study, the chapter develops an analysis of these two trends by noting their confluence in the “creative industries” moment that hit Queensland in the early part of the decade. The convergence of business, academic and state interests underwriting Brisbane’s branding as the “Smart State” was a fitting amalgam of a much longer hope—that is, the possibility of a lifestyle city that could attract the talented and creative knowledge worker.

2. Work from home: The mobile office and the seduction of convenience

In the height of the Liberal Government's term in office Treasurer Peter Costello urged Australian women to take advantage of new technology to work from home. With online connectivity helping mothers combine work in the paid market and in the home, new media could put an end to women's alienation from long hours culture and hence the rewards of career progress. This chapter draws on interviews with working women to see how this advice has been taken. It reveals how flexible working conditions assist parents seeking to fit paid work around children's activities, household chores and other kinds of “immaterial labour”. While a number of women agree that technology creates new opportunities, others explain that it also means they are contacted by work throughout maternity leave and other official time off. Women are shown to develop sophisticated monitoring habits to stay on top of their job around the demands of family, which translates to mean getting up earlier or staying up later than the rest of the household to engage in uninterrupted work. For working parents, online technology is a seductive convenience. The increased potential to engage in work from home creates a sensitivity to the number of productive hours available in any given day. Young mothers who claim it is a personal choice to work as hard as they do echo postfeminist tenets that women can “have it all”. But this chapter asks whether women’s use of technology to pursue paid and unpaid labour provides a sustainable model for participation in the labour market. Comparing the habits of a range of workers also allows an overdue assessment of how online technology encourages men to engage in work from home—or not.

3. The catch-up day: Part time work, discounted labour and the idea of personal choice

The previous chapter illustrates how workers' self-conceptions draw on mutually reinforcing logics circulating between business and government. These ideals promise to enhance workplace efficiency and economic growth just as they empower the worker. In this chapter the focus is part-time employees who use informal office hours and rostered days off to “catch up” on work. This additional work is again regarded as a personal choice but is nonetheless considered crucial to performing their role to a professional standard. A range of compensatory and anticipatory measures are adopted by those who occupy less central roles in large organisations. These workers not only check email during hours and days away from the office, they also engage in practices like the “catch up day” to schedule meetings that keep face with clients. Part-timers on contract also regularly accept extra work to express loyalty to the company in the hope of securing a long term relationship. In each case, employers are released from the obligation to provide infrastructure during the hours worked on top of binding contracts. This offloads both the emotional and practical costs of a substantial amount of unrecognised labour. Workers in this chapter feel lucky to have achieved the “special circumstances” of their part-time status, which speaks the truth of how inflexible management approaches remain in seeing full-time work as the norm. It also suggests a growing phenomenon of internalised management empathy that prevents workers from raising questions about appropriate compensation. As the next chapter describes in more detail, the culture of teamwork pervasive in office settings leads part-timers to discount the real hierarchies that continue to exist in large organizations—instead creating a range of individual justifications for an ongoing lack of security.

PART TWO

GETTING INTIMATE: ONLINE CULTURE AND THE RISE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

4. On Friday Night Drinks: Teamwork and office culture in the age of the hotdesk

This chapter begins an analysis of work's subtle encroachment on intimate life by highlighting the social dimensions that permeate professional jobs. The obligations of networking functions and entertaining clients join new management strategies of team-building and bonding exercises in the fashion for corporate retreats and get-to-know-you initiation programs. These strategies serve to develop personal connections between employees that will simultaneously erase hierarchies, affirm shared objectives and encourage loyalty to the firm. It is no coincidence that these extra-curricular activities rise in prominence at a time when managers can rarely guarantee permanent positions for staff or create long-term strategies for their organisations. The irony here is that the performative demonstration of workplace cohesion through compulsory morning teas, birthday celebrations and after work drinks tries to compensate for the regular and spontaneous social contact of an earlier era, where the tea room or the cigarette break offered regular opportunities for collegial intimacy. At today’s hotdesks, these spontaneous exchanges move online to email, G-Talk and Twitter, or blog sites that attract thousands of cubicle-bound readers. This chapter considers the platforms and websites that shine a light on the isolation that is the flipside to the coercive intimacy of the modern workplace. Online communities are shown to alleviate the need to develop solidarity with physically present co-workers when this means engaging in the most superficial gestures of friendship. Drawing on a growing literature on emotional labour and work, and Richard Sennett’s idea of the “corrosion of character”, this section of the book asks how organisations can respond to the problem of employee commitment as the secure conditions of white collar careers face ongoing threat. It also considers the consequences for individuals when virtual workplaces prevent the possibility of any local interaction with colleagues. How will a wider uptake of remote management strategies hinder the social benefits that have been significant dimensions to professional work? 5. Facebook Friends: Security blankets and career mobility

Over the course of this project Facebook has taken on successive roles as a source of public panic, fascination and finally mundanity as companies and households have each come to terms with its potential moral hazards and threats. Social networking sites in general have been the cause célèbre for “old” media keeping their gatekeeping function alive by exploiting parental concerns about unknown strangers in the house and employers’ desires to avoid time- wasting in the office. As opposed to the creative applications of MySpace for corporate ends, in particular with respect to the alternative economies of the music industry, Facebook is the iconic application for this book as a whole. Its popularity amongst a middle class, office-dwelling demographic illustrates the seamless combination of professional and personal identity that is at stake in the shift to intimate work (“contact” = “friend”). Amassing these relationships in a unique biographical configuration, the Facebook experience reveals the limited language white collar workers have developed to explain work’s centrality in daily life as well as the pleasures and relationships to which it gives rise. This chapter uses the idea of the security blanket to explain the function social networking sites play for a range of workers. Using these platforms, friends and family can be brought along for virtual company through a succession of non-continuing projects and positions. When work takes individuals away from home, social networking sites become a reassuring presence throughout the day to cushion the impact of unfamiliar surroundings. The class mobility that comes with broadening education opportunities and new forms of salaried work requires new configurations of family and community support. This chapter shows social networking sites provide a safe place for intimate exchanges between familiar faces when work takes away the solace of an originary community.

6. Know Your Product: Online branding and the evacuation of friendship

“Broadcast Yourself” was the mantra for Web 2.0 enthusiasts heralding the participatory revolution of online culture. Behind the slogan however a number of obstacles awaited those seeking to benefit from the democratic opportunities of new communications platforms. The “broadcast impulse” relied on the skills to use technologies in the first place but also the spare time in which to do so—not to mention the confidence and assurance to see oneself as worthy of broadcast. This chapter extends the previous chapter’s discussion of the winners in the knowledge economy by questioning the role of early adopters in exacerbating the “digital divide”. It looks in detail at the effects on workloads for those whose job it is to implement the participatory tenets of online engagement. PR fashions dictating the need for organisations to develop a “social networking strategy” fail to acknowledge the impact of online branding on ordinary workers. As companies extend their brand presence to users and clients, this chapter shows the effects of these trends on those actually providing the enhanced services on offer. As web work becomes an increasingly important focus for funding and development, new job opportunities have emerged for those–particularly young–workers comfortable with online platforms. But others have faced greater challenges as their roles have been forced to become outwardly directed to captivate the public. If employees have little choice but to use communications technology as part of the job, this chapter offers examples of how these same platforms are used to mark out space that is distinct from the commercial imperatives of business. Whether through limited visibility options, “fake following” or private profiles, information workers create individual solutions to maintain genuine online friendships when their jobs demand a public identity. It concludes this section of the book by highlighting the significant amount of work now required to ensure friendship survives, as those in portfolio careers try to resist the pressure to “instrumentalise” their networks.

PART THREE.

LOOKING FOR LOVE IN THE NETWORKED HOUSEHOLD

7. Home offices and remote parents: Family dynamics in online households

An IT support manager uses the internet to work from home in the evening but spends most of the night upstairs in the study where his children know not to disturb him. A university lecturer refuses to upgrade from a home dial-up connection so that his children can access the websites used by friends. A working mother spends “quality time” with her husband after their son goes to bed – each on their laptop catching up on work. In these accounts, online connectivity creates new dynamics, tensions, presences and absences among families. This chapter asks whether the Bigpond marketing campaign has it right when it says “We all get on when we can all get online” in happy broadband suburbia. It begins the final section of the book which focuses on individual stories to fully explore the notion of work’s intimacy. One of the major hopes for new media technology was that it would solve the problem of the “absent father” – the parent whose work prevented the experiences and pleasures of watching children grow up. Today professional demands affect both parents, and while technology may allow them to be present in the home, many attest to being engaged in work communication even when they appear to have left the office behind. This distracted presence is a symptom of the bleed between work and home: if parents check email at the dinner table or take conference calls during a child’s soccer match, how does this affect the time families spend together? Building on the pioneering work of Arlie Hoschchild, this chapter describes the “time bind” of working families who use technology to stay on top of multiple demands. It asks how concerns about online culture differ from previous anxieties about new media. Parents who express fears about the amount of time their children spend online also admit to their own internet addictions, including manic email monitoring, an inability to “switch off” from work and paranoia about missing vital information. In this situation, are children logging-on for love from outside the home as a response to parents who may appear to be present but are actually absent in important ways?

8. Long hours, high bandwith: Negotiating domesticity and distance

Moving further into the intimate, this chapter considers how love, romance and friendship are affected by the convergence of online technology and the long hours of the professional workplace. It draws on informants’ experiences maintaining relationships in spite of unforgiving schedules—including the way that technology allows expressions of affection and connection between couples who may spend more time together online than they do in person. Whether through shared social networking communities, webcams, Skype or mobile SMS, friends and couples use a range of technologies to share the vicissitudes of the working day. “Ambient” media platforms such as Twitter provide a platform to narrowcast mundane trivia to interested others but also the emotional dimensions to worklife that the office tends to leave silent. Investigating the habits of information workers in this regard reveals that a significant number now find their partners online in the first place. Further, the extent to which online culture is a priority in everyday life is part of a suite of features and interests used to determine potential partners’ suitability and taste in other areas (most obviously: a shared belief in the significance of work). This chapter illustrates how office and home space are each transformed and rendered visible in the phenomenon of the “full time intimate community”. Couples reckon with the possibility of having more knowledge than ever before about their partner’s daily routine away from home, while selected networks of friends also have the chance to witness the rhythms and realities of others’ domestic relationships. In each case, online intimacy compensates for the lack of physical time available to share with loved ones as workers negotiate the requirements of high-pressure jobs.

9. On call

On-call workers are the crucial backbone for “always-on” work cultures. The previous chapters focus on the experience of office workers in a general sense given that so few accounts of the new economy workplace have provided this knowledge. To finish the book however it is important to hear the stories of those whose job it is to provide the infrastructure for these typical uses and users. Think of the IT support manager whose day consists only of urgent demands—as equipment fails or users lose data—or the PR strategist who is called upon to solve problems with a telco company’s coverage failure. For both, immediacy is key. If other workers in this book show symptoms of anxiety and stress faced with communication overload, these employees face even greater pressure. In fact, for some of the most vulnerable workers in large organisations, the expectations of availability placed on them by management prevent the most ordinary of activities, from grocery shopping to gym membership—even the solitude of the daily commute. These workers’ jobs invade the “time of life” in the sense defined by precarity theorists. Their ability to manage time or plan ahead is restricted by the unpredictability of roster systems. Meanwhile their on-call status also restricts their movement in a physical sense as social life and family recreation must be kept within wireless range in case of work emergencies. Returning to where the book began, it is the notion of “teamwork” that sweetens the demands placed on these workers to meet ever changing obligations. And yet, as is the case with a number of the staff interviewed over the course of the project, teamwork does not extend to making decisions about the organisation overall—which can lead to the ultimate form of workplace atomisation: retrenchment. This chapter shows in the most vivid terms how agreeing to unrealistic workloads out of loyalty to the team is no guarantee against cost-cutting measures that are decided higher up. Illusions of indispensability are irrelevant in an era of strict efficiency targets and mass outsourcing of jobs. The bind of today’s white collar professional is to be invested in one’s work as and when required but without the reciprocal assurance from employers that such commitment will be rewarded.

Conclusion. Presence bleed and the prospect of work limits

Professional employees increasingly reckon with a condition of “presence bleed” where the location and time of one’s labour becomes a secondary consideration to the task of managing the expectation that one will be available and ready to work. Feelings of responsibility and anxiety – the “anticipatory affects” outlined in this book – stem from the knowledge that for middle class employees online technologies are generally accessible outside the workplace. This results in an omnipresent potential for engaging with work that must be individually regulated. From Boardroom to Bedroom documents a moment when a substantial number of employees seemed unable to differentiate between a paid work obligation and a more genuine reciprocity characteristic of friendship. This distinction was made difficult by a society that continued to reward long hours work cultures while seizing any opportunity to commercialise the intimate networks that make life tolerable. In times of prosperity, Australian organisations benefited from the flexible work regimes of the “new” economy without feeling the need to address the impact of these changes on workers’ personal lives. Is it any surprise that as a recession is forecast, companies are now beginning to acknowledge the need for work/life balance—encouraging long-term staff to take leave and work fewer hours to save the budget bottom line? To this point, work has been the dominant priority and major source of identity for the knowledge professionals described in this book. Asking them to simply let go of the intense forms of intimacy and connectivity that have been vital to assuring their commitment for so long only adds further insult when savings and plans for the future have swiftly evaporated. Contributing to our understanding of the present crisis, From Boardroom to Bedroom calls for a serious reappraisal of work’s significance in relation to other sources of fulfillment and intimate life. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, for many it is already too late.

Details of illustrations: A selection of field-work photos of offices and homes of employees featured in the book; representative media coverage of work culture from a four year archive of newspaper Career and IT lift-outs; prominent mainstream advertising for communications technology where relevant (each subject to negotiation/ permissions).

Audience: The book's primary audience will be students, educators and professionals in media, journalism, information and communication fields – those whose experiences are reflected in the book. It also offers a major contribution to emerging international research in production-side cultural studies and cultural economy. To date, this area has yet to provide a study that draws together a discussion of new media's impact at the level of the everyday while also developing questions of labour, gender and cultural theory. The conceptual work achieved by this book, particularly around the notion of affective labour, is a further dimension adding to its empirical archive. However, the nature of the topic makes this book highly marketable as a crossover publication that can appeal to a business audience as well as a wider readership interested in contemporary issues. The question of work-life balance has been prominent as a topic of debate in the public sphere for at least as long as John Howard declared it “the ultimate barbecue stopper.” This book's novelty is to offer an account of changes to professional work practices as they have happened. It provides a basis to explain key dimensions of the present economic context which has caught many of the more familiar public commentators unaware.

Competing titles: The most obvious precedents for this book's approach are Andrew Ross's No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs (Temple UP, 2004) and Jill Andresky Fraser's White Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and its Rewards in Corporate America (WW Norton, 2002). Each of these books have an approachable writing style and a focus on individual stories and companies – although they feature corporate experiences rather than the comparative public/private perspectives offered in the present book. While Ross's account remains a touchstone study of the dotcom boom and subsequent bust, both works also predate the so-called “Web 2.0” technologies that are a major dimension of the present title. Academic publications that cover these technologies so far, such as Axel Bruns' Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From production to produsage (Peter Lang, 2008) are pragmatic overviews for a university market. A more prominent title that has attempted a crossover audience is Mark Deuze's Media Work (Polity, 2007) although this text has major silences on issues of family life as well as the gender inequalities that feature in media workplaces. Australian writers who have worked in this area include Barbara Pocock in The Work/Life Collision (Federation, 2003). In contrast to the present book, which offers an ethnographic account of changes to workplace culture for a wide range of readers, Pocock's sociological approach is more specifically targeted to a policy audience. What distinguishes this book is a recognition factor. By focusing on the less glamorous and largely desk-bound office workers that are the bulk of the professional class it describes a more mundane workplace reality than the extremes others depict. In this way the book also differs from local releases in Australia, such as Helen Trinca and Catherine Fox's Better Than Sex: How a Whole Generation Got Hooked on Work (Random House, 2004). While the territory is similar, From Boardroom to Bedroom shows how the long hours culture pursued by those at the top of the workplace hierarchy has side-effects on those further down—those whose jobs do not provide the same financial and lifestyle rewards as the demographic described by Trinca and Fox.

About the author: Dr Melissa Gregg is an internationally recognised scholar in the field of cultural studies, new media and affect theory. Her previous books are Cultural Studies' Affective Voices (Palgrave, 2006), and the co-edited collection, The Affect Theory Reader (forthcoming with Duke UP). With over 20 peer- reviewed publications, Melissa has been at the forefront of research into technology's impact on professional and personal life as co-editor of special issues on these topics for Continuum: Journal for Media and Cultural Studies (2006) and Media International Australia (2007). Following her PhD, for 5 years Melissa worked as a Research Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, culminating in the ARC Discovery Fellowship, “Working From Home: New media technology, workplace culture and the changing nature of domesticity”. In 2007 Melissa was awarded a UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award for her work investigating online culture. Taking up a teaching position at the University of Sydney in July, in late 2009 Melissa will organise a major national conference on academic labour, "The State of the Industry", with the support of the ARC Cultural Research Network. She lives on Sydney's south coast.