Border work. Resisting commodification in the workplace (and elsewhere)^†,‡

Abstract

In the effort to identify and criticize the problems of the current neoliberal developments in their infiltration of modern life-worlds, often the actual point of the critics has moved into the background: humane behaviour and the capacity to insist on it is hardly studied. This capacity to insist is at the centre of this contribution, both as individual action as well as in its structural dimension. Building on an example of border work by a training officer in a medium-sized German company to address the alienation of an apprentice, this paper will theorize about: (a) the ontological quality and the social practice of such acts of protecting another person against alienation and (b) the social ambiance and structures that allow (if not encourage) this protective action. The individual, the situational and the social structures for unconditional giving, commonly understood as altruism, are sketched. Border work against alienating marketization becomes apparent as a worthwhile subject for socio-critical research.

Keywords:

• altruism
• work
• giving
• help
• emotional capitalism

Notes

^†Translated from German by Stefanie Everke Buchanan, Universität Konstanz, Germany.

^‡This contribution could not have been written without the comments of Arlie Russell Hochschild who saw where bridges could be built from practice to theory.

Subjectivization is understood as the process of becoming a subject in the sense of Foucault (1982, 212):There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control or dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.

However, there are voices who, in the face of the unstoppable pull of the encroachment of the market, call attention to the limits of commodification (Williams 2005). I agree with Williams' emphasis that there are limits of the market, since I want to make a similar point here. However, I do not join in Williams' diagnosis of where the limits of marketization are and that there is a growing non-commodified realm.From my point of view, he overlooks the marketized nature of today's subsistence work and house work. Coming from Arlie Hochschild's idea of intermingled realms and the variety of forms of commodification I cannot join Williams' argument that a sizeable portion of time spent working in advanced economies is used for the purpose of undertaking subsistence work and that the share of total working time spent on this non-exchanged work has been growing over the last forty years. (Williams 2005, 48)

In fact, it is more difficult to see how ‘they’ don't mix or how market logics are overridden. One difficulty is that family-like behaviour is a rare phenomenon. In workplaces it disappeared largely with the Fordist regime dividing work and life (Thrift 2005). Where family-like behaviour still appears in companies it has mostly turned into services for families and thus has become part of the business model (see for example Glass and Estes 1997). When it appears, for example, in communities of coping (Korczynski 2003) it often serves the employer as much as it helps the workers. The coping strategies are stabilizing labour power and thus are not exactly border work against commodification. Due to this problematic observability of family-like, pro-social, in-situ behaviour, researchers moved into the laboratory, but cannot say, what their findings can tell us about the behaviour in the ‘real world’ (Gurven and Winking 2008). A long-term perspective like the cultural history approach by Löfgren (2013) is a sophisticated example of how de-commodifying (and re-commodifying) tendencies can be made visible. However, this form of research demands some persistence and makes the argument more on the macro level. Due to these methodological constraints, border work for pro-social behaviour and against commodification is a difficult subject. It mostly has to build on random occasions found in ethnographic research as we will see in the course of this paper.

Although the borders of emotion work and emotional labour are at stake here and thus the question of when emotion work is commoditized and turns into emotional labour, as Hochschild suggested to signify the commodified form (1983), I do not want to join the debate mostly led by Bolton (2005) and Brook (2009) within labour process theory. This debate centres on the question of whether all emotion works in waged labour processes should be seen as commodified (Brook) or whether individual employees' philanthropy may exist as well when emotion work is not mandated by the employer (Bolton). The issue of what the right ideological stance is diverts us from the main purpose of this paper: to start from and to theorize about pro-social behaviour in the workplace, its possibilities and its structures, rather coming from extant positions in labour process theory. Rather than studying how the grip of capitalism becomes always tighter, I focus on how alienation is avoided and how pro-social behaviour breaks with this grip.

Mr Schmidt's deviation illustrates here that it is precisely, and ironically, the current established standards which sometimes significantly limit educational success. These standards are set to guarantee the quality of education and make it controllable. They emerge from an act of ‘entification’, to say it in Tord Larsen's words, of what good education should look like. These standards demand from the teachers a professional distance and an understanding of the students as clients. They are not supposed to take family matters of their students into their hands as Mr Schmidt does for Rodrigo and his father.

Translated from the German edition.