Work's Intimacy
1. Edition August 2011
200 Pages, Hardcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and
its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It
moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew
"knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal,
family, and wider social tensions emerging in today's rapidly
changing work environment.
Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media
technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among
salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns,
often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment.
New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet
computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom
to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been
paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move
out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining
rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to
work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new
and unforseen ways.
This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established
professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of
technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised
to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in
its way
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Work's intimacy: Performing professionalism online and on the job
PART ONE
THE CONNECTIVITY IMPERATIVE: BUSINESS RESPONSES TO NEW MEDIA
1. Selling the flexible workplace: The creative economy and new media fetishism
2. Working from home: The mobile office and the seduction of convenience
3. Part-time precarity: Discount labour and contract careers
PART TWO
GETTING INTIMATE: ONLINE CULTURE AND THE RISE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING
4. To CC: or not to CC: Teamwork in office culture
5. Facebook friends: Security blankets and career mobility
6. Know your product: Online branding and the evacuation of friendship
PART THREE
LOOKING FOR LOVE IN THE NETWORKED HOUSEHOLD
7. Home offices and remote parents: Family dynamics in online households
8. Long hours, high bandwidth: Domesticity at a distance
9. On call
Conclusion
Labour politics in an online workplace: The lovers vs. the loveless
'coercive dimensions' of teamwork, longer hours, job insecurity and
the intrusion of labour into personal life? Then Gregg's brilliant
book, based on athropological research in Brisbane but of global
significance, will show you that you are not alone. Writing of
organisations that continue to demand unidirectional 'loyalty' from
their workers, and of a woman whose office contacted her on every
single day of her maternity leave, Gregg conveys a coolly
controlled anger while coining powerful descriptions such as
'function creep' and 'binge work'. Her interviewees, baffled but
trying, elicit our empathy, even those who have internalised the
brutalist jargon of the modern office. If I ever use 'progress' or
'action' as a transitive verb, please shoot me."href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/12/steven-poole-nonfiction-choice-reviews">
Steven Poole, The Guardian
"Author Melissa Gregg has put flesh on the bones of what many
suspected. Under the pretence of giving us the freedom to work at
our own pace and wherever we choose, mobile phones, laptops and
'tablet' computers have shackled us to our bosses' will in a way
that nothing has done since the treadmill."
href="http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2011/0815/1224302449852.html">Irish
Times
"An engaging read that will chime with the experiences of
academics and many other professional workers."
href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=417421§ioncode=26">Times
Higher Education
"A timely and important book, which raises essential questions
about work, lifestyle, emotions and intimacy in the era of online
technologies ... All interested in this book will not only find
important scholarly discussion, but will also be made to rethink
their own labour practices, priorities, and 'lives and loves'. This
mobilisation of achievement and accomplishment for rethinking our
own world, in which discourses of achievement and accomplishment
monopolised all spheres of life, and in which the imperative to
love one's wok implies a troubling freedom is the effect of this
book, which is at least equally important as the scholarly
discussions it will trigger."
Anthropological Notebooks
"An important book that will transform the way we think about
both work and intimacy. Rich, moving, and scholarly,
Work's Intimacy looks set to become a new classic in the
fields of cultural studies, gender studies and the sociology of
labour."
Rosalind Gill, King's College London
"Gregg's remarkable analysis of the dispersed workplace could
not be more relevant. It is a precious gift to scholars of modern
work, and it will also be invaluable to anyone struggling to meet
too many deadlines and balance too many obligations in pursuit of a
livelihood today."
Andrew Ross, author of Nice Work If You Can Get
It
"Based on a rich body of empirical research, Work's
Intimacy provides us with a troubling, insightful and timely
analysis of the partnership between online technologies and the
changing mythologies of work - and its impact on our everyday
lives. Melissa Gregg has written an important book, carefully
unpicking so much of what we have come to take for granted in our
experience of the ever-expanding boundaries of the working
life."
Graeme Turner, The University of Queensland
