A critical exploration of the “agile career”: a means of exposing the politics and economy of precarity via the lens of dromology

ABSTRACT

In large aspects of contemporary career discourse, the importance of the “agile career” is asserted, although the speed of change has not been explicitly considered in relation to this concept. The political dimensions of the agile career via the lens of “speed” are explored in this theoretical paper. Particular attention is paid to Virilio’s paradigm of dromology, revealing how social positionality correlates with the distribution of “fear”, as well as resources to cope with the speed of change, thus promoting precarity. The embracement of speed and agility has resulted in a propaganda of progress, where those closer to the primary mode of production benefit over those at the margins, highlighting the tyranny of speed experienced by many within labour market.

KEYWORDS:

• Agile career
• career theory
• dromology
• labour market
• precarity
• Virilio

Introduction

Our societies have become arrhythmic. Or they only know one rhythm: constant acceleration. Until the crash and systemic failure. (Virilio, 2012, p. 27)

The use of an everyday dictionary provides insight into the general public’s usage of a word, or what phenomenologists would describe as the “natural attitude”. As I have previously recounted, the Oxford online dictionary definition of career provides useful insight into such natural attitude: “A course of professional life or employment, which affords opportunity for progress or advancement in the world” (in Gee, 2016, p. 6). This definition is concise and to the point, providing simplification and a narrowing of perception, whilst also highlighting bias. Work is central to such operationalisation, where work comes under the bracket of “paid work” that seeks progress via the climbing of a socially constructed hierarchy. Such central focus upon paid work moves the endeavours of art, education and mundane caring obligations, to the fringes of enactment and value. Career is therefore an exclusive concept serving capital (see Frayne, 2015; Gee, 2016, 2017, 2019). This has not always been the case in the career theory literature, as much of career theory’s genealogical roots can be found via the critical lens of the Chicago School of Sociology, though often forgotten (Barley, 1989). In the early twentieth century, the Chicago School’s broad sociological paradigm of career gained much traction within the field of sociology yet was challenged across the academy. Wilensky (1961), for example, responded to such sociological perspectives by asserting the importance of a work-centric and progressive focus upon career, career as profession, a means of asserting the natural attitude: “ … career is a succession of related jobs, arranged in a hierarchy of prestige, through which persons move in an ordered (more-or-less predictable) sequence” (p. 523). Wilensky’s assertion gained much momentum at the latter stages of the twentieth century and was embraced across the academy via Rosenbaum (1984), Spilerman (1977), and Thompson et al. (1968). Such momentum has endured where prominent theories within the arena of the Business School still adhere to such a perspective, where work is central, temporally framed via a Darwinian, teleological and progressive schema: “The evolving sequence of a person’s work experiences over time” (Arthur et al., 1989, p. 8).

Towards the latter stages of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, much of the business, policy and theoretical discourse of career accounts for major changes to labour market dynamics due to globalisation (Arthur, 2010; Roper et al., 2010; Watts, 2003). This is summarised well at the beginning of Bopp et al.’s (2010) “Agile Career Development” book, where the business world is to take heed of the coming dynamics of the twenty-first century:

Today’s global marketplace is dynamic and extremely competitive, which puts new and different pressures upon companies to remain relevant to their clients. Twenty-first century clients expect and demand rapid response to their needs, … organisations must aim to exceed client expectations. (p. i)

Such sentiments account for how companies, and thus their workers, are to keep up with rapid demand in a neoliberal “just in time” world, where agility and adaptability become paramount and required for progress. Such a context has therefore been described in the career studies field as providing a “careerquake” (Watts, 1996) which shakes the foundations of traditional structures. As a result, prominent writers at the turn of the century (Arnold, 1997; Arthur, 2010; Savickas, 2012; Watts, 1996) suggested that career theory and practice, on a global scale, must consider a restructuring so as to meet the demands of the new precarious labour market influenced, though not always acknowledged, by neoliberal policies. Much of this literature espouses how individuals are to shape their career via their own agency, be it via the individualising and atomising process of the Boundaryless or Protean Career or life design (Arthur, 2010; Hall, 1996; Savickas, 2012). The importance of individual adaptability and agility to meet the demands of this new fast-moving terrain has influenced many contemporary career scholars (Ginevra et al., 2021; Rudolph et al., 2017; Savickas & Porfeli, 2012) to focus upon private troubles at the cost of actively addressing public issues (Mills, 1959). Individuals within the twenty-first century are therefore positioned within a neoliberal world with a competitive, liquid and uncertain labour market, where career can become a reflexive organising concept due to its ability to comprise and simultaneously express competing meanings without “falling apart” while desiring “progress” (Collin, 2000; Gee, 2019; Lawy, 2006). Such uncritical focus upon individual adaptability and agility fails to consider how this may have coerced our notions of progress, that speed and agility means “better”.

Whilst the career literature reflects a recent social justice turn (see Hooley et al., 2018) – bringing into play critical theory such as Foucault’s notions of responsibilisation (Dany, 2003; Irvin, 2018; Vallas & Hill, 2018), Harvey’s neo-Marxism (Hooley, 2018) and Bauman’s notions of liquid modernity (Sultana, 2018) to critique neoliberal policies, it does little to make explicit the lens of speed and acceleration. There is a brief encounter with acceleration via the use of Srnicek and Williams’s “accelerationism” (Hooley, 2018). With a limited view upon accelerated life – with its continual forms of automation and artificial intelligence – there is a risk that the social justice turn may adhere to what Virilio would describe as a propaganda of progress, as the literature seeks to be informed by a promethean metanarrative which may well be overly seduced by techno-capitalism’s notions of accelerated progress (see section, “Emergency exit: should we be down with the robots?”). In this paper, therefore I assert that the field will benefit from insights made by Virilio’s dromology, the “science of movement and speed” (Virilio, 2012, p. 27). Doing so will provide sharper focus upon the complexity of late modern society, to acknowledge our inability to confidently predict the outcomes of supposed emancipation espoused by Srnicek and Williams’s accelerationism.

The acceleration of life and the fast-moving terrain of the neoliberal world has provided a precarious labour market for many (Anderson, 2010; Berardi, 2009; Greer, 2016; Mignot & Gee, 2020; Potter & Hamilton, 2014; Standing, 2011), however, much of these additions to the literature do not explicitly engage with the concept of career. In this paper, I assert a reconnection with career theory’s genealogical roots, by exploring precarity via dromology in conjunction with the “life-career”. The life-career is constituted by a range of social strands (Goffman, 1961), which trace memorialised enactment via articulation, especially during moments/episodes of transitions, where the paradoxical relationship between being and becoming is contemplated (see Gee, 2016, 2017, 2019; Gee & Barnard, 2020). The life-career in conjunction with dromology reveals latent political dimensions where social positionality correlates with the distribution of fear, as well as the resources to cope with speed of change. In this paper, I utilise an illustration, from a secondary source, to connect such theory with the empirical world, to illustrate its penetrative analysis. I conclude the paper by asserting that the embracement of speed and agility, espoused in many areas of career discourse, has resulted in a propaganda of progress. This propaganda results in those closer to the primary mode of production benefiting over those that find themselves at the margins of the labour market, a mode of analysis missing in the recent career studies social justice turn. Virilio’s thinking also provides a useful questioning of the tyranny of speed experienced by many within and outside of the labour market, to question much of the career theory and policy literature’s embracement of agility and uncritical views of progress, even some areas of the literature espousing social justice. I will now highlight how social theory has conceptualised speed during the latter stages of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century so that Virilio’s dromology can be introduced and contextualised.

Acceleration, the propaganda of progress and administration of fear

We must be able to dominate the domination of progress. There is a distinction between progress and propaganda. Speed, the cult of speed, is the propaganda of progress … To be clear, my fight is against the propaganda of progress and not against progress itself. (Virilio, 2012, p. 38)

Time, space and its relation have been concepts reflected upon and traced throughout the history of Western thought (Adams, 2004; Casey, 1997; Wajcman, 2014). In recent times, particularly since the advent of instantaneous communication technology, time and space are considered to have become disembedded, resulting in an acceleration of experience (Adams, 2004; Bauman, 2007; Giddens, 1991; Land, 2011; Srnicek & Williams, 2015). As Rosa (2013) accounted, if an alien was to view our world from a macro diachronic perspective they would account for the acceleration of activity from the advent of the hoe through to the smart phone. Life is getting quicker for the majority of us, though not evenly distributed. Such technological development, many of which have been influenced by military inventions, has accelerated experience (Virilio, 2012, 2014). Speed, which is not a phenomenon but a relation between phenomena, is for theorists such as Adams (2004), Rosa (2013), Sennett (1998), Land (2011), Srnicek and Williams (2015), Virilio (2012, 2014) and Wajcman (2014), fundamental to understand our current era, an era shaped by technological developments. With the advent of industrial capitalism came the intensification, mechanisation and efficiency of production, providing an alienation of experience for many workers’ lives. This led to separating the planning and enactment of production as well as the home and the workplace due to scientific management such as Taylorism (Edgell, 2006), where time became money, speed becomes power, “the essence of power” (Virilio, 2012, p. 43). The transmission revolution toward the latter stages of the twentieth century, along with the outsourcing of production, brought forth the post-industrial era, where the boundaries of work, home and leisure become blurred and increasingly commodified with further intensification and extensification of work (Fleming, 2009; Granter, 2009; Virilio, 2012, 1997; Watson, 2017). Speed, with its etymological roots within “success”, thus becomes uncritically viewed by many as human progress. The transmission revolution of late modernity brings the advent of new digital technology – such as the new iPad, or higher internet speed – promoted and embraced with breathless enthusiasm without a consideration of negative consequences (e.g. the inability of our cognitive functions to keep up with a continually accelerating and augmented reality).

Theorists such as Harvey (2007), Rosa (2013), Sennett (1998) and Virilio (2012) provide critical insights on such views of speed and technology, particularly within neo-liberal capitalist regimes, where capital growth, an ever constant within an ideology of accumulating profit, requires a reevaluation before environmental catastrophe (Cassegard & Thorn, 2018). Virilio thus provided a paradigm to understand speed, dromology, the “science of movement and speed” (Virilio, 2012, p. 27), that which connotes “running”, “race”, “racecourse”, resonating with a particular etymological strand of “career” (see Inkson, 2004, p. 128). Via such a lens, Virilio asserts the intense pollution of what he calls the dromosphere – our contemporary environment of speed (Brown, 2012), a grey ecology – since the advent of instantaneous communication technology. Such technology has resulted in the contraction of our perception of time and space, where the world has become smaller and smaller until it is larger than life itself. Such a contraction negatively impacts our well-being (Berardi, 2009; Rosa, 2013) and promotes a skewed promotion of progress, or what Virilio (1997, 2012) has described as the propaganda of progress and the cult of speed. Virilio has exposed how the embracement of such a propaganda and cult has resulted in a new form of tyranny, where our daily lives have become arrthymic, resulting in a constant desire and inability to catch up. Such views are in concert with Rosa who cries for a greater need for a “resonance of experience”, that which is knocked out of kilter due to the acceleration of experience and our psychological capacities, “the limits of human thought and time” (Virilio, 2012, p. 33), to cope in the speed of light era (Virilio, 1997). Such a pollution of the dromosphere, where many embrace the propaganda of progress, leads to an administration of fear, where our psychological ability to comprehend such accelerated flows of information is stretched and we are placed in an occupation, with fear as an environment with political consequences:

Fear was once a phenomenon related to a certain timeframe: wars, famines, epidemics. Today, the world itself is limited, saturated, reduced, restricting us to stressful claustrophobia: contagious stock crises, faceless terrorism, lightning pandemics, professional suicides … Fear is a world, panic as a whole. (Virilio, 2012, p. 15, original emphasis)

It is hard in the current context not to feel a resonance with Virilio’s assertions in a global world that has progressively seen the depletion of the safety nets of the state, such as the welfare state. The entwinement of techno-science domination and propaganda reproduces the attributes of an occupation both physically and mentally, hence Virilio’s use of the phrase the administration of fear (2012). The continual acceleration of experience becomes a means of distraction; where progress provides an ever slipping away telos of achievement, the yearning for a temporary place of safety and atonement, yet where this never arrival comes with constant evaluation and scrutiny and a continual bombardment of images and demands to keep up, providing no time for reflection (Virilio, 1986): “Promoting progress means that we are always behind: on high speed internet, on our Facebook profile, on our email inbox. There are always updates to be made; we are the objects of daily masochism and under constant tension” (Virilio, 2012, p. 47).

The propaganda of progress comes with a violence, thus Virilio wished to warn of such propaganda, highlighting the myth of Icarus, how with every invention comes an accident, a derailment; with the advent of the railway comes derailment, with the aircraft the air crash, with augmented reality accelerated reality. The derailment of accelerated reality pollutes the dromosphere making life increasingly inhabitable, yet this propaganda suppresses such a derailment, suppresses this siege mentality, the claustrophobia of accelerated reality. Such a reality provides a loss of the “sociopolitcal rhythmology” that has always governed human history; a move away from artisan, even industrial rhythms, where post-industrial rhythm is characterised by the logics of synchronisation and thus administers fear (Virilio, 2012).

Automation – the serving of a propaganda of progress

There is a temptation for individuals in an environment of fear, one that both occupies and preoccupies us, to transfer “agency”, ability to make decisions, to automatic and robotic functions, processes and formulae, which work at the speed of light, in an instant. This is a theme reflected upon by many contemporary theorists where automation provides an accelerated reality (Berardi, 2009; Land, 2011; Srnicek & Williams, 2015). Virilio (2012) and Taylor (2014) assert how economic crashes since the early 1980s are a result of such accelerated automation, where the global stock exchanges were first connected in real time with the highly evocative name of the “Big Bang” of the markets. In 1987 a crash occurred which demonstrated the impossibility to manage and govern such speeds, repeated in 2008, where “flash trading” occurred via technology used initially for national defence:

Insider trading could occur very quickly. In fact, the shared time of financial information no longer exists; it has been replaced by the speed of computerized tools in a time that cannot be shared by everyone and does not allow real competition between operators. We are witnessing the end of shared human time that would allow competition between operators having to reveal their perspective and anticipation

(Virilio, 2012, p. 34)

What is at play here is how the economy of wealth is interconnected with an economy of speed, where speed has political consequences. The desire for more speed not only resonates with flash trading it also resonates with our history of war, where “speed is the essence of war” (Sun Tzu in Virilio, 2012, p. 43). Such a history accounts for how the foot soldier’s life depended on his running speed in competition with the enemy’s time taken to reload; from horse to tank to aircraft, speed provides advantage, where the mastery of speed is the mastery of power and frames our sense of progress (Virilio, 1986). This can be connected to our working careers where Virilio has highlighted how the labour market administers fear via mass unemployment, where we have experienced redundancy of human muscular strength due to the machine of the nineteenth century, toward a permanent unemployment, challenging the need for human memory with the recent increase in computers and “transfer machines”, automating perception with computer-aided design and the horizon of the artificial intelligence market (Virilio, 1997). Such notions resonate with our everyday enactment, where our futures continually dissolve into the present (Collin, 2000), where our reality becomes accelerated, automated and where we are forever positioned to be catching up, providing a productive anxiety serving Capital (Mignot & Gee, 2020). The question becomes how might we resist the violence that comes with the speed of automation and what part might career guidance play?

Emergency exit: should we be down with the robots?

Recent contributions within career studies’ social justice highlight how automation invariably serves capital and not humans (see Hooley, 2018), where over-development leads to market crash. Technological development of automation, artificial intelligence and robotics have been given little attention in the career guidance literature and are now required so it can provide a contemporary practice; a practice geared toward social justice (Hooley et al., 2018). Therefore, Hooley asserts that career guidance is required to provide a form of social pedagogy, to inform its users of technological development and societal change. This is to encourage the asking of political questions, to ascertain who gains from such development, to inform and provoke individual and collective responses. Hooley therefore poses an important contemporary question; asking whether the “rise of the robots” and increased automation may boost neoliberalism, exacerbating inequalities and imbalances of power, or whether this is an opportunity to rethink social relations in ways which extend social justice and reduce alienation (Hooley, 2018). This question resonates with discussions in the field of accelerationism, a mode of thinking that considers the contemporary acceleration of life, from “left”, “neutral” and “right” wing perspectives, to inform “political” action.

Hooley briefly engages with this field, one of the only times the career studies literature directly does so, by utilising the thinking of Srnicek and Williams (2015) though not contextualising such thought. The engagement with Srnicek and Williams is, in part, to answer the important question he poses. Such thinking, Hooley asserts, can be a means of broadening people’s ideas of “work” beyond “finding a place within capitalism”, providing a catalyst for radical questions as we move toward “fully automated postcapitalism” (Srnicek & Williams, 2015) and “the diminishment of the work ethic” (Hooley, 2018, p. 100). Srnicek and Williams (2015) have advocated for an embracement of technology, to “challenge its ownership and use it in service of emancipatory goals” and therefore opening a place for self-determination, with career guidance enabling people to “self-actualise” via what Hooley describes as emancipatory career guidance: Consequently, emancipatory career guidance will need to yoke together individual career development, technological change and political transformation into a new model of practice (Hooley, 2018).

However, little detail is provided on the work of Srnicek & Williams (2015) automated postcapitalism and whilst there is support for ideals of such emancipation, I would suggest that Srnicek and Williams’s conceptions are presented in a prosaic and uncritical manner, especially as this is one of the rare instances that career studies explicitly links emancipation with automation, accelerationism and speed, which is the focus of this paper. An uncritical promotion of self-actualisation also occurs in Srnicek and Williams’s (2015) work, which fixes an essence “within” an individual. Such conceptions have been critiqued in a range of social theory literature (Derrida, 1982; Gee, 2017; Gellner, 1982; Hall & du Gay, 1996). By embracing Srnicek and Williams’s (2015) uncritical notions of self-actualisation, Hooley unwittingly goes against the duality of agency and structure which underpins arguments found in career studies’ social justice turn (Hooley et al., 2018). As also pointed out by Gardiner (2017, p. 33), Srnicek and Williams’s accelerationism is based upon a “Promethean metanarrative grounded in our understanding and mastery of natural and social forces through the systematic application of technico-speculative reason, to become at ease with a “modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology” (Williams & Srnicek, 2014, p. 354).

Providing this level of detail leads to scrutiny of Srnicek and Williams’s assertions and futurology, to consider what underpins such thinking and in-turn its predicted outcomes. There is a clear underpinning of rationalism in the work of Srnicek and Williams, which has been critiqued by many schools of thought (e.g. Frankfurt School and Post-structuralism), outlining how the exercise of reason is always already caught within a nexus of power and control (Gardiner, 2017). Srnicek and Williams thus provide a rational colonialisation of the future, one with a perceived telos, yet does not heed toward the warnings of Sultana (2018), where such an endeavour is to be noted with extreme caution, where we have experienced “dystopias” due to the “radical” “grand arch of social dreaming in the modern age to regulate all of society”. Therefore, Sultana (2018) expresses that rather than a perceived telos we may consider justice as “a ‘trajectory’, a series of temporary bargains negotiated by diverse groups with diverse interests, who remain open to renegotiating the terms of their cooperation, always alert to the inevitable saturation of power in such deals” (p. 71).

Srnicek & Williams’s thoughts also lead to problematic notions of activism, or what they describe as “folk politics”, where they suggest that rather than defend obsolete welfare-statism, the future can be viewed as a beneficial space for collective self-actualisation (Gardiner, 2017). This begs the question as to whether the complexities of the post-industrial techno-scientific automated world can be rationalised, how speed plays a part in such a (mis)understanding, where both Berardi (2009) and Virilio (1986, 1997, 2012, 2014) assert our inability to govern such a terrain by “human reasoning”. Therefore, to challenge Srnicek and Williams’s accelerationism is to acknowledge that it may well be overly seduced by techno-capitalism’s asserted claims of the ease in which its mechanisms can be modified for emancipatory goals. Such critique highlights the complexity of late modern society where there is an inability to predict the outcomes of supposed emancipatory endeavours with its inevitable unintended consequences, where the future becomes monstrous and not as malleable as the accelerationists would wish us to believe (see Shaviro, 2015).

Returning to Hooley’s question, “how are we to manoeuvre at this important juncture of human history?”, we need to consider if Srnicek and Williams’s accelerationism just adds to the speed and logic of accumulative capitalism, what Berardi describes as semiocapitalism:

We cannot fully contain or manage the chaotic velocity of a constantly accelerating semiocapitalism, but we can perhaps modulate its flows, slow it down incrementally, tarry with its oscillations and turbulences. If successful, we may avoid a crippling sense of anxiety, fear and anomie, but without sacrificing existential complexity

(Gardiner, 2017, p. 44)

It is here that dromology and Berardi’s distinctly anti-Promethean stance can be understood as “an existential process mixing art and therapy”, where both assert enactment that looks to “heal the exhausted human organism, and to cultivate a new, post-economic sensibility” (Gardiner, 2017, p .46). This provides a counter to accelerationism’s habitual liking for “ever-expanding growth, productive dynamism, and the technological sublime” (Gardiner, 2017, p. 46) what Virilio would likely describe as a continuation of the propaganda of progress and cult of speed.

Utilising dromology – case illustration

The previous sections in this paper have highlighted social theory’s consideration of speed of change, with a specific focus on Virilio’s dromology. It is clear that the utilisation of dromology provides a useful lens upon reading the labour market and people’s enactment of their life-career – a combination of social strands. Doing so provides readings that highlight the social element of career, how it is embedded within a context-with-others, and how an uncritical promotion of the propaganda of progress – based upon notions of being agile and encouraging economic growth – provides a limited lens upon reading career. This section provides a “real world” case study that is scrutinised via Virilio’s dromology, providing insights into the precarious nature of the contemporary labour market, one that advocates agility, disrupting strands across the life-career, distributing fear which in-turn has the potential to result in suicide; which the employer then views as an occupational hazard.

France Télécom – “Time to move” – a movement toward the occupational hazard of suicide

In thiss book, the “Administration of fear” Virilio (2012) briefly touched upon the example of France Télécom to illustrate how the pollution of the dromosphere can influence the world of work and promote an environment of fear with dire consequences. However, this illustration is brief, and in this paper, I wish to explore this in more depth to reveal to the career studies field the penetrative nature of dromology. France Télécom introduced a management programme entitled “Time to move”, a programme that was to ensure the permanent mobility of its executives, enforcing relocation within short time spans, which resulted in the company experiencing a wave of suicides, over 30 in total, during 2008–2010, where a consideration of precarity, job security as opposed to employment security, becomes of concern (Alemanno & Cabedochche, 2011; Standing, 2011). France Télécom’s “Time to move” programme can be utilised as a means of illustrating aspects of Virilio’s thought outlined above: how speed is promoted as progress, creating an ideology that supresses any critique, requiring employees to complete adaptation of the life-career at an accelerated pace, polluting the organisations dromosphere, administering fear to the point of suicide being seen as an occupational hazard. In this paper I explore an argument put forth by Alemanno & Cabedochche’s (2011) analysis of France Télécom’s “Time to Move” programme – from an intercultural communication studies perspective – one of only few to be found in the academic literature. The idea is to provide an insight into this programme, to see how previous research has analysed this, so that the paradigm of dromology can provide further and sharper insights.

France Télécom – initially a civil service company, operating in a national market, where two-thirds of the 66,000 employees had civil service tenure, with guaranteed employment security (Standing, 2011) – transformed within the early nineties to be an international player in the highly competitive telecommunications sector. With such a change – where profit margins suddenly became the salient indicator of success – France Télécom suddenly adapted to the context of globalisation, engendering a managerial culture where it was aware of the intricacies of economic indicators, yet had an inability to identify psychosocial and cultural tensions placed upon its staff (Alemanno & Cabedochche, 2011). On transforming into a private international company, the two heads of France Télécom, Didier Lombart (CEO) and Louis-Pierre Wenes, formulated an ambition: “to transform the company from grandpa’s telephone to internet livebox” (Alemanno & Cabedochche, 2011, p. 27). These two heads ran the business upon their own understanding of Human Resources consisting of job relocation every three years to promote the agility of its workers. Such an initiative was connected to company restructuring, planning of voluntary retirements and departures among employees, as well as promoting multi-specialisation rather than retraining. Such restructuring included 20,000 redundancies over three years with another 20,000 to follow during the “New Experience in Telecommunication” downsizing plan; all connected to the obligation for every manager to be a “cost killer”, as called by its employees (Alemanno & Cabedochche, 2011, p. 26). Such restructures were based upon a principle of human beings being seen as a primary resource, connected to their knowledge of application, to be viewed as a profit centre, a variable that could be shaped and moulded so as to reduce salaries, in the same way as other costs. Such a transformation was reliant on the stigmatisation of its history, moving from the “laziness” of its previous civil service culture toward the stimulus of excellence, where mobility was to be applauded within a permanently tense work atmosphere, for example:

One external agency, recruited as a communication and management advisor for France Télécom, considers such guilt-creating pressure to surpass and transcend oneself similar to that supposedly needed by a high level athlete: “when you yourself believe that your work is finished, you should realize that it is only 50 percent finished”.

(Alemanno & Cabedochche, 2011, p. 27, Author’s emphasis)

Alemanno & Cabedochche (2011), utilising many accounts of France Télécom’s employees, provided an explanation for the heightened level of internal crisis over this period via Ollivier’s (1999) chronologic crisis model which follows three stages:

1. Confusion about products and self-image of the company as well as among the personnel.

2. A permanent loss of the company’s credibility among employees (“discreditation”), when stigmatisation erodes support and understanding.

3. A disintegration of the individual’s social identity.

Alemanno and Cabedochche’s (2011) analysis asserts that suicides were a result of “desymbolisation” that occurred due to the above process. They assert that such desymbolisation occurs when any restructuring, on an international stage, does not consider the benefits of glocalisation as opposed to globalisation; in other words, failure in recognising that individuals and groups of individuals, such as companies, have their own local identity, with specific needs to be met (Hampton & Wellman, 2002). The argument is that France Télécom’s Time to move programme did not take into account such adaptations, assuming that individuals could adapt to any environment to which they had the (mis)fortune to find themselves delivered. As a result, the organisation, in this case France Télécom, can no longer provide enabling symbols. In such cases workers lose meaning in their work as it becomes reduced to instrumental action, which at its worst, due to the psychosocial stress induced, may result in suicide.

Whilst interesting and penetrative, Alemanno and Cabedochche’s (2011) analysis does not provide much exposure upon the notion of speed, where speed is only an implicit aspect of their analysis. Once providing speed more exposure within an analysis of the data accrued by Alemanno and Cabedochche (2011), an amplified notion of the pollution of the dromosphere emerges. For example, Alemanno and Cabedochche (2011) do not pursue the notion of speed in relation to adaptations described, yet data gained from the study provides insight into the pollution of the dromosphere where the CEO predicts a gloomy future, where staff are to anticipate an uncertain future, where “the company needs to adapt in a hurry” (Alemanno & Cabedochche, 2011, p. 26 – author’s emphasis).

A paradigm of speed can therefore be applied to the France Télécom case, where the setting is one within the transmission revolution, the need for adaptability to occur to fit with this new era of the speed of light, how desymbolisation occurs at a speed, disorientating its employees, providing an environment of fear, one where people feel an inability to speak out against the prominent ideology, where “colleagues, union activists or staff at the top of the company impose silence about such deaths” (Alemanno & Cabedochche, 2011, p. 35). Such an administration of fear, unevenly distributed, provides fear as an environment, where progress becomes the management mantra, only to be tempered so as not to crash and burn:

“You must constantly be the best in every part of your mission. But don’t burn out” (Alemanno & Cabedochche, 2011, pp. 28–29).

The constant assertion for mobility and adaptability forces relocation of the work career, which has a multiple knock-on effect throughout the other strands constituting the life-career, where an adaptation to new workplaces, housing, family relationships, commuting and leisure pursuits, is required. This provides a catalyst for a speed of identity adaptation, providing a bewildering effect upon the workers within the study:

When I was automatically moved from HR to a technical service, I felt incompetent, useless.

Now I feel afraid of hierarchies, colleagues, neighbours, friends, relatives. I don’t dare to express myself any more.

(Alemanno & Cabedochche, 2011, p. 30)

Via Virilio’s paradigm of dromology, the pollution of the dromosphere – with speed at the very essence of the France Télécom example, its main mode of production the internet live box, as well as the hurry for adaptability, the constant demand to catch up, the inability to express the derailment of such an ideology and environment – became uninhabitable for some of France Télécom’s workers. The France Télécom illustration provides insight into how speed of change can have damaging consequences; where the social positionality of its workers correlates with the distribution of “fear”, as well as resources to cope with “speed of change”, thus promoting precarity. In this case the precarity of job security as opposed to employment security.

Implications for career studies and guidance

The France Télécom example provides insight into job precarity. However, it is also worth noting that precariousness is an underpinning condition of life, where humans require multiple interdependencies as beings-in-the-world-with-others. Precarity is a “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Butler, 2009, p. ii). The argument presented here is that those further from the mode of production are in a more precarious position than those at the core of production, as they are required to adapt at a greater speed, where speed of change influences precarity. The question becomes how could career studies and guidance respond to such dynamics? Especially given its recent social justice turn, where career guidance is asserted to be an agent for emancipation via adaptive career guidance (Hooley, 2018), or where guidance can take note of Young’s (2005) faces of oppression to inform its interactions. Therefore, how might the analysis of speed of change, automation and accelerated reality inform such practice? How might the field critically consider such parameters, to challenge notions of progress that adhere toward propaganda, that may well have a perceived telos of a naïve sense of self-actualisation, one that diminishes the notion of solidarity to a blunt analysis of folk politics. Therefore, I recommend that the following prompts for discussion for the career studies field be included: Can we understand the technology at play? Do we need to slow down? How? Do we need a global form of folk politics and solidarity? How might this occur? Should we have a preconceived telos of such activity? What do we consider to be “progress”? What part does digital technology play? Can an uncritical use of technology feed the accumulative capitalistic monster that we are wishing to resist? What part does career guidance play in this, as art and / or therapy? The key here is that dromology provides a critique of progress, exposes the cult of speed, does not diminish folk politics, challenges discourses of oppression whilst acknowledging that there is no essence to the self, a self that can be open to interpretation, even reflexive interpretation (see Gee & Barnard, 2020).

Conclusion

This theoretical paper has accounted for the thought of Virilio and his paradigm of dromology. It has accounted for many of Virilio’s interconnecting concepts, such as grey ecology, the propaganda of progress, the cult of speed and the administration of fear. In doing so, I have asserted that such a paradigm can be a useful addition to the career theory literature, especially literature that explores the dynamics of the labour market and its knock-on effect upon interconnecting strands. By utilising an illustration, in this paper, there is an account of how Virilio’s thought reveals the importance of speed in the current labour market; one described as being precarious and where there are many assertions upon people being agile and flexible. As well as highlighting its uses in relation to employment I have also highlighted how this can be utilised via a sociological perspective of career, that is, career as any social strand in a person’s life where the speed of adaptation within the work strand interconnects with other strands in a person’s life (Goffman, 1961). Such an analysis can acknowledge that speed becomes an important factor in relation to change and adaptation, the ability to be agile, flexible and cope with speed of change. What can also be acknowledged via the paradigm of dromology is how the resources to cope with speed of change provide its own economy, one that interrelates with an economy of wealth. In this paper, there is also acknowledgement that those that are placed at the margins of the labour market – who are more likely to find themselves on casual or zero hour contracts of employment (very much embracing notions of the “new career”), or to experience job insecurity – are significantly disadvantaged. Such disadvantage becomes exacerbated when compared to those positioned more closely to the centre of production – a position that may well be conceived as mythical. Those closer to the centre of production are more likely to have contractual as well as job stability with access to greater forms of financial, cultural and social capital compared to those positioned at the margins (Anderson, 2010; Berrington et al., 2014; Greer, 2016; Potter & Hamilton, 2014). I must question whether the fast-moving world portrayed in much career discourse, which advocates and embraces the “boundaryless career” and “careerquake”, brings forth a form of travel sickness – the sensing of movement whilst stationary – to those forced to travel fast in an ever changing labour market; an ever increasing “megaloscopical” view – as increased speed of change narrows ones peripheral vision – for those at the periphery of “core production”, whilst allowing the privileged core to be positioned to watch movement from a stable high platform. The imperative of speed, and the so-called agility it provokes, appear to be important dynamics of the contemporary labour market imbedded within existing unfolding social structures. The propaganda of progress and the cult of speed described by Virilio appears to be a cultural imperative implicit within much of the contemporary career literature, which has yet to be critically reflected upon. It is hoped that this paper may provoke further theoretical and research endeavours to reveal the imperative of speed which appears to be at the essence of precarity, in order to inform career policy, practice and pedagogy and its recent social justice turn.

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Ricky Gee

Dr. Ricky Gee is a senior lecturer in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His research focuses on philosophical, sociological and political dimensions of career, influenced via the continental philosophical tradition. He has wide teaching experience at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and is a PhD supervisor.