Enormous reductions in public sector spending produce unemployment. And unemployment makes for poverty, misery, hopelessness, illness and anomie. Some of the cuts to public sector spending will remove work from society: Forgemasters’ employees will join the queues outside Sheffield job centres, looking for jobs that don’t exist, living on the benefit breadline, sinking into depression, needing care.

Other public sector cuts will not remove work, but transfer it from public sphere to private sphere, from commodity form to non-commodity form. Children, the infirm elderly and the sick will carry on needing care (and social care isn’t part of the NHS ringfencing). Someone will have to step in when budget cuts mean fewer care assistants or fewer public nursery spaces. This might sound like Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ in action: neighbours helping because the fat state is ought to slim down. But care that is contingently gifted like that leaves the recipient at risk, even assuming that the needy are known and noticed (which might not be the case if layers of administration are removed). And it leaves the caregiver exhausted by the double burden of paid work and care.

It is often the case that unpaid care is done by women (see the Women’s Budget Group analysis), and, though the ideological conservatism that drives the desire for a small state is not quite the same conservatism that essentialises gender divisions and wants women to be placed in the home, married and looking after children, the coincidence might be felt to be fortuitous by some. At nowaytoamakealiving, we are always angered by the failures of imagination and empathy that generate policies intended to increase inequality and worsen lives.

The set of photos by Suzanne Lee/Panos London, of women taxi drivers in Delhi gives lie to the hypertheorising of supermodernity. Here, an older story of gender, family and work is on display. Diya Chaudhri’s text describes women’s discovery of freedom and subject status through their entry into taxi driving. For Meenu Vadera, director of the Azad Foundation which trains women to become taxi drivers, this is a way of giving women citizenship: the driving license is a document which proves existence.

Photo by Suzanne Lee for Panos London

One of the women interviewed, Ekta , says “I feel empowered, as if I have my own identity other than a wife and mother.” There is extensive research to show how paid work provides empowerment and connection and freedom, but taxi driving differs from other work. For Sheller and Urry (2006), mobility is a way of gaining subjectivity, of becoming a person; though they don’t give that much of a sense of whether it matters what the mobility is for, is it just to be prized for its own sake?

It seems here that it is work as much as mobility, that offers this subject status, and mobilities research should take work seriously. The female taxi driver challenges the norms of the city as a gendered space because she works and well as because she moves. Running a taxi, of course, is not merely a process of learning how to negotiate those city streets with that machine, but of negotiating the internal space of the car. Chaudhri notes the challenge the women taxi drivers provide to other drivers on Delhi’s streets, but the only customers she considers are other women, who will feel safer if driven by a woman. I wonder and worry about the dangerous customers. However empowering it is to learn to drive, being at the vanguard of gender equality and working as a driver is a risky place.

References

1. Augé, M. (2009) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso.
   Hodges, G. R G. (2007) Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
2. Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006) ‘The new mobilities paradigm’. Environment and Planning A 2006, volume 38, pp 207–226.

Martin Argles/Guardian: Downing St political staff

In the first photograph, there are three members of staff huddled round one phone. Argles tells us they are listening in as Brown speaks to Nick Clegg, leader of the Lib Dems. “Nick, Nick, I can’t hold on any longer. Nick, I’ve got to go to the palace”, Argles reports hearing (Guardian, 13th May 2010: 21). I’m fascinated by that huddle, it speaks of the hunger, urge and delight to be in on the moment that characterises the political aides and correspondents I’ve met. They are seduced by an everyday proximity to power to imagine that nothing else matters as much, and that hearing things second hand is almost worse than not hearing them at all. Look at the woman hovering behind, one ear turned inwards and her own mobile in hand: it matters so much to be there, to be listening in on an event that matters for just this moment.

I like the ordinariness of the rest of the scene: the big metal cupboard with its fire safety certificate, the Downing Street screensaver on the right of the shot, and at the back, the colleague involved in a very different sort of phone call.

Martin Argles/Guardian: The war room in Downing Street

In the second shot, we see a wider perspective, a layered modernity. Chandeliers, wood panelling and a fireplace point to a Victorian refurbishment of the original Downing Street building, although the lights are now electric and the fireplace is surrounded by desks. Confronting this past is the detritus of the modern office: screens, wires and swivel chairs; coffee cups, iphones, and men in ties. The carousel of MDF desks are paper-free, though an enormous briefcase in the centre of the shot has a wadge of documents shoved in it: this is the last day of work, and this room will soon come to be taken for granted by a different sort of political animal.

Celia Lury defines the brand as “the object or medium for the exchange of information between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’” (2004: 74). Retail workers are configured as extensions of their employer’s brand values, through the aesthetic labour they do and the sorts of customer service they are expected to offer (Pettinger, 2004). Brands produced by marketing specialists through analysis of the consumer market are presented back to the customer not merely through logos, the arrangement of the shop and such like, but also through the bodies of employees, whose consumption practices reflect the brand’s idealised consumer.

Branded workers embody the exchange of information Lury talks about; they are simultaneously producer and object; their working lives are always of the brand. The personal branding industry goes beyond this, objectifying the worker as brand and so collapsing the person to the object — as in the current election when we’re no longer voting for a party, or a local MP, but for Brown, Clegg or Cameron.

Some people might quite like being the brand. Mike Allen, author of Washington insider dealing, agenda setting  gossip sheet Playbook exemplifies a man who seems to delight in being reduced to a brand; cagey about his history and apparently living without a private life, Allen is always on and always making news. It’s an alarming vision for other journalists if this is what they are to aspire to: not sleeping, being in touch, at work all the time. Work becomes all-consuming.

What does this mean for the consumer? The consumer is not neutral recipient of the brand, but qualifies the market too through their attachment to objects (Ilmonen, 2004; Pettinger, 2008). Retail consumers don’t passively accept brand stories. Mike Allen’s consumers are people like him, politicos who need to be in the know, even ahead of the game for their own work. They’re always on too, they can’t be behind the times. But most of us consume journalism more casually (one of the nowaytomakealiving team prefers to read the week’s newspapers in reverse chronological order; the other couldn’t do this, but does do a month’s worth of New Statesmans at a time).  How do we experience branded journalism?

I’m a Guardian reader, of course. My parents get the Telegraph though, and when I’m visiting them I look at it with gritted teeth. Whilst I think I’d very happily go to the pub with some of the people who write for the Guardian, I suspect I’d never give the time of day to a Telegraph journalist. In my naive understanding of how recruitment happens, I reckon the Guardian must handpick its staff according to whether they’re good guys. But then it turns out that the author of how to cope with a Tory government is also writing for the Telegraph’s banker’s wives’ shopping guide Stella. So how do I make sense of this? For me the Guardian reader, the Williams’ personal brand is conditioned by her location in the Guardian and is subverted when it appears in the Telegraph. Brand advisors say that trust is the key reason to have a brand, but my readerly trust is easily attacked by the nature of the individualised freelance media industry that means my Guardian journalists publish elsewhere. The branded worker is vulnerable to consumer rejection as well as to a mode of organising work as though it was the only thing that mattered in life.

References

1. Boltanski, L. and Chi­apello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Cap­it­al­ism. Verso, Lon­don, trans Gregory Elliot.
2. Du Gay, P. (1996) Con­sump­tion and Iden­tity at Work. Lon­don: Sage.
3. Lury, C. (2004) Brands: the logos of the global economy. Abingdon: Routledge.
4. Ilmonen, K. (2004) ‘The use of and commitment to goods’, Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.27–50.
5. Pet­tinger, L. (2008) ‘Devel­op­ing aes­thetic labour: the import­ance of con­sump­tion’. Inter­na­tional Journal of Work, Organ­isa­tion and Emo­tions. 2 (4): 324–343.
6. Pet­tinger, L. (2004) ‘Branded stores, branded work­ers: ser­vice work and aes­thetic labour in fash­ion retail.’ Con­sump­tion, Mar­kets and Cul­ture 7(2): 165–84.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/844/feed 1 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/746 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/746#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:10:13 +0000 Dawn Lyon http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=746 The Working Lives of Londoners is a series of photographs by Harriet Armstrong on display at City Hall (22 March to 7 May 2010) which shows Londoners ‘going about their daily routine in the capital’ (The Guardian). A selection of images was published in The Guardian in March, but more can be seen on Harriet Armstrong’s website. There are some quirky and original images and together they make an interesting contribution to the recognition of work in today’s world, and some of the spaces that people inhabit in their everyday working lives.

A number of the images are portraits, including of people who are in the public realm, such as Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, and Boris Johnson, Mayor of London (who I happened to see going into City Hall just as I was leaving this afternoon!). In other portraits we can understand work by the context within the image, for instance the policeman standing outside Number 10 Downing Street, or workers posed amongst theatre props. In these types of photograph, the worker and the job are one (for now at least) and the portrait of the person in their working environment carries the idea of what it is they do in their working lives.

Other images show workers engaged in something and these are the ones I especially like. They show us people, places and activities we don’t usually see, such as the clockmakers inside Big Ben, and they show us people and work that we might not usually notice. The stonemasons of Trafalgar Square, a station supervisor on the Piccadilly Line, and the black cab mechanics all caught my attention; and the London Marathon course measurer was certainly work I had previously taken for granted!



Neon Light Engineer by Harriet Armstrong

 

The composition of some of the photographs is stimulating for thinking about work sociologically. In one image, a Neon Light engineer, suspended alongside a building, is pictured from below, the sky becoming the backdrop to his working world. He looks alone up there, only tenuously connected to the world as he holds onto the light he is working on, although in another image, someone else appears to be keeping an eye on him from the ground. We can’t see exactly what the light engineer is doing so we don’t get an insight into the activity of work per se but we do get some sense of what his working life is like from seeing him in the sky like that. The stunning picture of the rope access abseiler cleaning the No 1 London Bright Building is equally evocative.

Although the image of statue cleaners is taken peering into a vehicle, what looks like a harness on one of the workers suggests that his work also takes him off the ground. His co-worker, seen snoozing in the background, is taking a moment out, and this draws our attention to the ways in which working routines include pauses, and are shot through with other activities and meanings.

The materiality of work is very present in the photographs too. The cinema projectionist at the Barbican is seen surrounded by and connected to his equipment, as is the fire-fighter, whereas the organ tuner at the Royal Albert Hall must quite literally get inside the object of his labour.

Work is not presented in these photos in the restricted ways we sometimes see it celebrated, mostly of men doing dangerous things, however fascinating images of these worlds are. Bell-ringers – presumably an unpaid commitment – are shown in perfect coordination in a space lit by what looks like early morning sunshine. The hairdresser in a centre for homeless people might be there on a voluntary basis or as an employee. Overall, the collection transcends rigid categories of work, including artisans, gardeners and protestors alongside teachers and engineers. These photographs encourage us to ask questions about the basis on which work is undertaken, and to recognise the enormous range of work that goes on in London.

Overall, this series is a refreshing look at what we do from a young woman photographer. Thank you, Harriet Armstrong.

]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/746/feed 1 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/815 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/815#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 08:00:12 +0000 Scott Taylor http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=815 Researching women and work can be really puzzling. There is a series of things I genuinely don’t understand: how it feels to earn your living in a workplace where you are the only woman or in a small minority; what it’s like frequently finding yourself the only person of your sex in workplace contexts; the emotions generated by spending lots of time in ‘between men’ cultures, where conversations tend to focus on masculine activities or are conducted according to masculine norms. In doing academic work I’ve tried to gain a better understanding of women and work, by making sex, gender, sexuality, and gendered inequality part of students’ lives and understandings through my teaching, along with doing some research into why women leave prestigious professions like law to go into more satisfying work[1]. More recently, whenever possible, I’ve been making small changes and differences in my own workplace and working practice (but not through positive discrimination, dear me no, that would be illegal in the UK). But it doesn’t seem to make much difference, academic work… imagine that… or anything I do in my own working context, business schools… wonder why…

I think I started to understand women and work a little better when in 2004 I went to visit the Women’s Library in east London with my partner – it’s in a lovely building in Old Castle St, E1 (a converted wash-house, I’ve just found out) in a backstreet within sight and sound of the City, but definitely not on the main drag. A location that seems unpleasantly appropriate, given the cultural hostility to women in the UK financial industries – reading Linda McDowell’s Capital Culture is one of the most disturbing introductions to gendered discrimination or inequality in that milieu. All business school students should read it… anyway, I like that the library is within reach of everyone working in the Gherkin and the other various glass and steel phallic symbols around there.

Being in the library is a lovely sensory experience – quiet, calm, pleasant. (I’m thinking here ‘the way libraries used to be’ but that makes me sound old and grumpy.) In any event, a very nice place for thinking. The impression from reading pieces on this website is that academics interested in the experience of work never switch off their brains — Dawn Lyon in a B&B quizzing an innocent hotel inspector about his work, Lynne Pettinger getting lost and starting to think about work and sound,Tim Strangleman walking around galleries thinking about organizational death. The experience I had in the library that day was similar.

The exhibition was a corker — called Office Politics: Women in the Workplace 1860–2004, it was a brilliantly put together mixture of furniture (with desks designed specifically to ensure women’s modesty and protect men’s marriages – as an antidote, this is good fun: http://www.linux.otherspace.co.uk/officepolitics/), antique office machinery, clothes, self-help books, all sorts of stuff to position women in relation to work, organization, men. So much stuff I didn’t know about. And also, a little paper timeline with key events marked over the 150 year period. One event and date stood out for me – 1961, Barclays removes the marriage bar.

You’ve probably heard of the marriage bar, but I hadn’t. Turns out there used to be a formal rule in lots of organizations that women had to leave on getting married. No question, no debate, no exceptions — marry and you have to go. And the year when the board of Barclays decided this wasn’t really a good idea — 1961 – just 2 years before my mum got married, not long before I was born. Well within living memory. In some organizations you could come back as a temporary employee without any benefits or security (‘Thank you sir!’), but for most the bar was a barrier that couldn’t be jumped or worked around. The Foreign Office was especially reluctant to remove it, waiting until the Sex Discrimination Act in the early 1970s sort of outlawed its implementation. Hmm.

So, marry and go do some domestic and reproductive labour, or stay single and you can stay in your job. With a colleague from Exeter, Emma Jeanes, I started to do some digging in the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, an archive that’s been called a ‘structure of feeling’ rather than a systematic dataset. One diary lodged there, written between 1938 and 1944, tells a wonderful story of a woman working in the civil service. She fell in love with a married man, became pregnant, and told her boss – who promptly asked for her resignation under the marriage bar rules. This woman, who must have been very sparky, refused, on the reasonable basis that she wasn’t married but pregnant, and there was no rule about pregnant women having to leave. Rational argument for a bureaucratic setting! She kept her job, gave birth to twins, and continued to work for the Civil Service, by all accounts doing a very good job (in both spheres of life, work and family – her children are currently editing her diaries for publication, when they can find time — they’re both senior academics, at Imperial College and Oxford). Another diarist, who stayed single and therefore kept her job, was brave enough to call herself a ‘Feminist’ (with a capital F) in her workplace in 1940s Glasgow. (Weirdly, this diarist lived at the top of the hill my mother was born at the bottom of – strange feeling to read her diary, as she describes sitting on the bus going past my granny’s house.) I really like this woman, from reading her diary, because she prods her colleagues all the time about their views on women and work – making trouble, causing conflict, challenging, then writing it all up. She would have made a good academic or researcher. Her brother did, from what she says – he worked at Glasgow University, first in the engineering faculty, then as an industrial psychologist of all things. Whereas his sister seems to have spent her working life as a clerk, writing wonderful diaries and being a Feminist. 

We’re not entirely sure where this research is heading, but it does feel like it’s taking us into interesting areas empirically and theoretically. We’re finding that women writing about their experience of work responded to the marriage bar in very different ways. Some argued for it, telling workmates that it was unethical for a woman to ‘take a man’s job’ when she didn’t need to earn independently; others were strongly opposed, wanting to maintain financial and social independence from husbands. The women report very different responses from their male colleagues, from extremely conservative to relatively radical. Above all, reading the diaries has given us a healthy respect for the variety of human experience and response to regulation. In short, as ever, we’re finding that a societal and organizational desire to impose a norm, to create a divide according to biological sex, was continually contested, circumvented, and undermined.

We’re on the lookout now for people who actually had to leave work because they got married. So if you know of any friends or relatives with this experience who would be willing to tell their stories, please contact either me or Emma Jeanes.

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[1] Taylor, S. (2010) ‘Gendering in the holistic milieu: A critical realist analysis of homeopathic work’, Gender, Work & Organization, 17(4).
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/815/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/692 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/692#comments Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:29:36 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=692 Flight attendants are an extraordinarily popular subject of study (Hochschild, 1983; Taylor and Tyler, 2000; Williams, 2003). Research focuses on the emotional labour and body work involved, as Dawn highlighted recently. The customer here is a powerful, but shadowy figure, who extracts and deserves service, and whom the cabin crew must please. These academic concerns are some way from the story of the ongoing British Airways dispute between management and unionised workers over different cost-cutting measures, and the manner through which negotiations are taking place. Given long-standing tensions between BA and its workforce (at least since the Gate Gourmet confrontations), it’s hardly surprising to hear the discussions are strained.

What’s notable about the reporting of the dispute is who is imagined to be damaged by strike action: it is you, my reader and telly watcher, you the imagined, eternal and all-important consumer. You are no longer a shadowy presence; you have had your honeymoon plans destroyed. Whilst the workforce are specified by the fact of their employment for BA, you the consumer are everyman, and you the consumer ought not be disadvantaged by those pesky strikers. There is no hint that you are also a worker.



Casablanca Airport by John Spooner

The BA dispute — and the political interventions provoked by it — has broader implications for discussions of pay and working conditions than just this case. It influences the landscape in which further discussions and decisions about labour law and labour rights are made, and relates to political sensitivity to the consumer the worker, to the power of management and the privileged status afforded to protecting the brand. The consumer is not the only universal figure in our social life. We are workers, too.

References

1. Hochschild, A. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. London: University of California Press.
2. Taylor, S. And Tyler, M. (2000) ‘Emotional labour and sexual difference in the airline industry’. Work, Employment and Society. 14:77–95.
3. Williams C. (2003) ‘Sky service: the demands of emotional labour in the airline industry’. Gender, Work and Organization. 10 (5) 513–550.

John Spooner photographs used under creative commons license

]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/692/feed 2 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/663 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/663#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:25:28 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=663 My Dad has a story about how he came to get a job. It was the mid-60s, and he was going to leave school with a miscellany of o-levels. The teacher called him in and said,

“well Pettinger, what’s it to be”.

“dunno sir”

Mr Heckthorpe starts reading from the list of possible careers, starting at A.

“Accountant?”

“ Yeah, that’ll do.”

Mr Heckthorpe gets the yellow pages to start calling all the accountants in Bradford, alphabetically. This is long before professionalisation made accountancy a graduate-only occupation. At ‘C’ (for Claridge Turner), he finds an opening, and my Dad starts his training. (It’s not quite the youth employment officer who thinks Billy Casper’s only right for manual labour in Kes.)

Dad reckons he considered holding on till Mr Heckthorpe reached bricklaying… and the Pettinger world would have been quite different.

In the recent discussions of careers advice (renamed careers guidance… advice is a dangerous thing to proffer too readily), it’s very easy to find funny stories about its failures, as Philip Hensher does. But it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do well: matching people, with all their presumptions about work, their knowledge and abilities, to a spectacularly wide range of occupations. To know what jobs exist, yet alone have an inkling of what they demand, what pleasures they offer, what you need to do to get them, would be an enormous undertaking.

Now, as a sociologist of work, I’ve being asked to contribute to a career development module to improve the ‘employability’ of students – because the main benefit of education is, apparently, to provide an oven-ready workforce. No mind that my research expertise is in customer service work (please, no rubbish jokes about the likely destinations of sociology graduates: our students learn to think independently and question commonsense understandings of how the world works, which some employers value). There are two things I want to tell them:

1. the jobs they’ll end up in ten years are probably not ones they think are possible now: there’s more complexity to the labour market than they can imagine.
2. that asking people to talk about their careers produces stories about luck and happenstance as much as decision making and direction (see e.g. Arthur, Inkson and Pringle, 1999).

But luck and happenstance demand decision-making in turn, and even good possibilities throw up conundrums that need worrying out. When a friend asked for advice about what direction to take in a career he’s well established in, I stuttered a tepid, milksop answer, one that stressed feeling and intuition. I had no expertise to offer in the moment, no wise-sociologist suggestion to assess the possibilities of each role, to consider how each would be formative of future possibilities. This means I encouraged him to make decisions based on values which Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) associate with the ‘new spirit of capitalism’: emotional responses to a quest for autonomy, creativity and self-fulfilment, which those engaging in the flexible network of the ‘projective city’ ought to aspire to. Not certainty, a ladder, security and a plan for a future as a company man.

And I wonder whether it is right of me to reproduce these new spirit values as the ones that matter most. For my friend, already a winner in the global labour market, it works well. For my students, the selling of autonomy and flexibility as virtues maybe more problematic: they certainly understand that work should be fulfilling, suit their personalities and such like, but I don’t know that sort of work is so easy to find and hold. And if a lad like my Dad is about to leave school in Bradford with a few GCSEs, I’m pretty certain he’ll find it harder to get work that has meaning to him, and certainly impossible to leverage the sort of mobility Dad found when he stepped onto the bottom rung of a well-placed ladder.

References

1. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, London, trans Gregory Elliot.
2. Arthur M. B., Inkson K., and Pringle J.K. (1999) The New Careers: Individual Action and Economic Change. Sage: London.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/663/feed 6 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/545 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/545#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:29:34 +0000 Dawn Lyon http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=545

In tune

I recently went to the workshop of a double bass maker and repairer. My friend was taking his battered bass there to see what parts might be glued and otherwise made to hold together again. ‘Can’t you clean it up whilst you’re at it?’ I asked naively, attending to the finish rather than the sound. Apparently there is value in layers of varnish and Roger is cautious. It seems to me that he’s sort of ‘reading the wood’ as he looks at the instrument, and he knows not to touch where he can’t be sure of the impact of changing something. ‘No, you wouldn’t want to do that…’ he concludes.



Waiting

The workshop is an extraordinary place for an outsider. There are pieces of instruments all around the single room, sections and strings and bridges and necks, and a pan of glue on the boil on an old camping stove. I can’t take it all in, and I can’t see how Roger manoeuvres his way through the arrangement of objects. As well as making new instruments, what he does here is to work on things produced through the craftsmanship of others, undoing and remaking them. It takes a careful eye and a trained ear, an understanding of the whole process of creating a double bass, a lot of patience and dexterity, and a kind of respect it seems to me. He’s not an old man but he’s been doing this for a long time already. Several years ago, he decided to take a break. ‘I tried being a driving instructor,’ he said. ‘I lasted a year.’ When he was doing his apprenticeship, the man who taught him had already told him his future: ‘You’ll never do anything else.’ And here he is, in his own workshop, in tune with his instruments.

]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/545/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/494 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/494#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:06:04 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=494 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.
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