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

I write for a not-for-profit music web­site. The site is run by one extraordin­ary man, ‘John’, and it’s quite a man­age­ment task. The staff writers get together once, maybe twice a year. The recent meet up in a cot­tage in the rainy Peak Dis­trict was fiery. Office parties often are. There would be no reason any of us staff writers would ever meet if it wasn’t for the site: we live miles apart, with lives that scarcely con­nect. The dif­fer­ence between us, and the irreg­u­lar­ity of our con­tact, pro­duces con­flicts that – I sus­pect – would dif­fer if we met daily in the same workplace.

Let me explain why I described the meet-up as fiery and then per­haps you’ll see the point. In the red corner, ‘Mur­iel’, the pink-haired vegan act­iv­ist and Lynne, the lec­turer in the soci­ology of gender. In the blue corner ‘Des’, attention-seeker with wan­der­ing hands, every other word a swear word. Face-off: I shout at him not to fondle me. Later, there’s been more drink­ing. Des throws my King Creo­sote[i] cd on the fire. Acrid smoke and no-one knows quite what to do, cer­tainly not Des, who laughs. I don’t under­stand such point­less destruc­tion. Now the fall out: I get Des to replace the cd; John must man­age his future involve­ment in the site.

Whilst organ­isa­tions appear to oper­ate in the sphere of ration­al­ity, any­one who has ever worked in one knows this is an illu­sion: emo­tion is never absent; and nor is sex (Brewis and Lin­stead, 2000). The office party appears – in pub­lic dis­course — as a lim­inal space where bound­ar­ies, par­tic­u­larly around sex at work, are trans­gressed. Hol­l­i­day and Thompson, how­ever sug­gest that

far from being a space where one is bey­ond organ­isa­tional con­trol, the real func­tion of the office party is to fur­ther refine the organ­isa­tional subject.

(2001: 127)

That is, Des forced the group to notice him as the oppos­ite of a desexu­al­ised, dis­em­bod­ied, rational worker: at the office party he was re-embodied (as was I, through his actions). And he then must be scru­tin­ised and his future beha­viour reg­u­lated. I had no qualms in com­plain­ing about Des’ beha­viour, as I didn’t have to face him on Monday morning.

That we did not have an estab­lished daily rela­tion­ship might also have con­trib­uted to his actions; would he have dared to behave badly if he had more to lose from being known as a wrong ‘un?  On the other hand, I won­der if Des wouldn’t have been shamed more effect­ively if sur­roun­ded by people who see him day-in, day-out; if the col­lect­ive strategies for man­aging him had been refined over time, if there was a well-established idea about what was accept­able. Work­ing in prox­im­ity to col­leagues pro­duces a sort of cohe­sion in the way home-working never can, even as it also makes for daily frustrations.

It might seem like this is an unusual case and there­fore has little to say about the ordin­ary exper­i­ence of sex at work. Cer­tainly, few organ­isa­tions are as decent­ral­ised as this one, even as home­work­ing, flex­ib­il­ity and out­sourcing have been grow­ing for years, pro­du­cing organ­isa­tions that are not made up of com­pany men, but indi­vidu­al­ised work­ers. Cohe­sion and col­lectiv­ity are hard under such atom­ised cir­cum­stances. But too often har­ass­ment is seen as rare and indi­vidu­al­ised, not sys­temic and there­fore impossible to gen­er­al­ise from. Sex, viol­ence and work are entwined in ways that are sim­ul­tan­eously ordin­ary and extraordin­ary, wound into the fab­ric of work­ing lives.

Ref­er­ences

1. Brewis, J. and Lin­stead, S. (2000) Sex, Work and Sex Work: Erot­i­ciz­ing Organ­iz­a­tion. Lon­don:

   Rout­ledge.

2. Hol­l­i­day, R. and Thompson, G. (2001) ‘A Body of Work’ in Hol­l­i­day, R. and Has­sard, J. (eds.) Con­tested Bod­ies. Lon­don, Rout­ledge: 117–133