No Way To Make A Living is a sociological space about work, generating discussion and exchange on what work, paid or unpaid, is like in today’s world

Nik Rose’s con­cep­tu­al­isa­tion of the late mod­ern self as being com­pelled to engage in the act­ive gov­ernance of the soul has been pro­voc­at­ive for those who study inter­me­di­ary work. Inter­n­al­ising norms of self-exploitation, to work harder, longer, faster, to let work dom­in­ate ‘the social’ is seen by Angela McRob­bie (2002) as char­ac­ter­istic of work in the speeded up cul­ture indus­tries. Incent­ives and self-discipline, not rules, pro­ced­ures and a boss’s overt author­ity, reg­u­late the work force when the soul is gov­erned (du Gay 1996, Rose 1990). 

Cary Grant as Wal­ter Burns in ‘His Girl Friday’

This sort of inter­pret­a­tion could eas­ily be made of a friend of mine who works as an eco­nom­ics journ­al­ist. He puts the hours in, and he seems to like it. An omni­vor­ous cul­tural cap­ital enables him to ref­er­ence Keynes, Don­ald MacK­en­zie, Don de Lillo, Enron and The Septem­ber Issue in the space of the 8 minute dis­sec­tion he gives me of the cur­rent state of the fin­an­cial crisis. This impresses me, because he has an explan­a­tion, and even a pos­i­tion on each of these things, and it amounts to a story worth hear­ing. It seems that the acquis­i­tion of the new is the dimen­sion of gov­ernance which he has inter­n­al­ised, and its relent­less­ness is some­thing quite demand­ing. Imme­di­acy is one of the dimen­sions of the pro­fes­sional ideo­logy of the journ­al­ist lis­ted by Mark Deuze (2005: 447). To stop, or to slow down even, is to lose track, and pos­sibly to lose status. 

But we soci­olo­gists do tend to the neg­at­ive. There might also be pleas­ure – and vir­tue — in this imme­di­acy, this quest for know­ledge and for nov­elty, and a sat­is­fac­tion in using know­ledge to pro­duce know­ledge. In After Vir­tue, Alas­dair MacIntyre describes char­ac­ter as com­bin­a­tion of role and per­son­al­ity. Some roles at par­tic­u­lar his­tor­ical moments embody the char­ac­ter of the age: the Prus­sian officer and the Eng­lish pub­lic school teacher in the late 19th Cen­tury. For MacIntyre, such a char­ac­ter legit­im­ates and embod­ies the moral order of the age. And I won­der, what if the journ­al­ist is the Char­ac­ter of our time? The per­son of vir­tue in the liquid mod­ern world without grand nar­rat­ives, filled with uncer­tainty and, would be the per­son who steps into the pub­lic spaces of incom­pre­hen­sion, mas­ters enough of a story to tell, with quick words and ref­er­ences to now, and always has an eye out for the next tale. 

Ref­er­ences

1. Deuze, M. (2005) ‘What is journ­al­ism? Pro­fes­sional iden­tity and ideo­logy of journ­al­ists recon­sidered. Journ­al­ism. 6: 442–464.
2. Du Gay, P. (1996) Con­sump­tion and Iden­tity at Work. Lon­don: Sage. 
3. MacIntyre, A. (1984) After Vir­tue: A study in moral the­ory. Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame Press.
4. McRob­bie, A. (2002) ‘Club cul­tures: notes on the decline of polit­ical cul­ture in speeded up cre­at­ive worlds’. Cul­tural Stud­ies. 16 (4): 516–531. 
5. Rose, N. (1990) Gov­ern­ing the soul: the shap­ing of the private self. Lon­don: Routledge.