Work and Self-Development

                                                     10-11 November 2011

                                               Woolworths Theatre 102, Building E12, Macquarie University

Abstracts

Jean-Philippe Deranty

 (Macquarie University, Philosophy)

The Subject at Work: Between Psychology and Social Theory

The formative character of work regarding the cognitive, emotional and moral capacities of the human individual is well established in empirical psychological and sociological research. Contemporary philosophical debates about work make significant use of this research. However, the claim that work has a significant impact on individual self-development relies on a conception of the individual in society in which the division of labour and the institutions of work continue to play a central role. And such a conception of society has become highly problematic. To many social theorists and political philosophers, it is an outdated view. In other words, whilst the psychological centrality of work is underwritten by wide-spread everyday intuitions and vast amounts of empirical research, its "social-theoretical" side has become highly controversial. This paper seeks to address this conundrum. I begin by outlining the case for the psychological centrality of work, citing three particularly important bodies of empirical and clinical research arguing in this sense. I then seek to show that the argument about the psychological centrality of work relies on the social-theoretical centrality of work as a premise, and I briefly describe what the latter entails. In a third step, I study four key objections that are raised to deny the centrality of work for contemporary individuals: a historicist objection; the objection of gender bias; the objection of institutional differentiation; and the objection of value pluralism. In each case, I seek to provide arguments against the objection, in favour of the social centrality of work.

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Paula McDonald

 (Queensland University of Technology)

Janis Bailey

(Griffith University)

Robin Price

(Queensland University of Technology)

"You've got a right to refuse": To what extent are young workers industrial citizens?

While the literature points to significant shifts in young peoples' labour market participation and the social, economic and political context in which this has occurred, it tells us little about how youth are socialised in the workplace, how literate they are in terms of their rights and responsibilities or how and via what mechanisms this literacy is acquired. This paper asks to what extent young people, who are in the formative stages of acquiring understandings of work in the formal economy, are industrial citizens in the sense of being 'recognised as full and equal members of the community... and ultimately their individual and collective place in society... notwithstanding social and economic change around them' (Carson, Roche & Fitzgerald 2000: 79).

Forty-eight focus groups were conducted with 216 adolescents attending 19 Australian high schools. The analysis was guided by the three a priori categories: a) Rights; the way formal capacities and obligations are conceived and which enable subsequent action; b) Domain; the exercise or practice of industrial citizenship; and c) Status; the differential social locations which affects young people's access to resources.

Young people consistently framed their employment 'Rights' structurally around financial and safety entitlements and were mostly silent on workplace rights related to positive working relationships, fair treatment and the appropriate exercise of power. Parents, employers and, to a lesser extent, unions were central to the acquisition of the rights dimension of citizenship. Evidence for the 'Domain' dimension of industrial citizenship, or citizenship as practice (Lister ,2007), was seen in the various ways young people responded to problems they encountered in the workplace, such as to underpayment, harassment by customers/managers, punitive responses to refusing shifts and perceptions of overwork or unreasonable responsibilities. Relevant to notions of 'Status' was the expressed identity of 'young worker' as well as class, gender and rurality.

While rights based discourses are useful in emphasising power and workplace democracy and in highlighting formal capacities associated with legal status (Joppke, 2007; Lister, 2007; Mundlak, 2007), this paper argues that industrial citizenship is a more useful concept for seeking holistic understandings of how young people experience employment and conceptualise and negotiate their place at work. The study highlighted the way in which dimensions of citizenship, while explored here as analytically separate, are actually mutually constitutive. The data also highlight that awareness of rights does not necessarily lead to action - to exercising citizenship - because awareness of rights 'in the abstract' was high, but capacity to enforce rights was low. Hence, the current emphasis on agency in the acquisition of citizenship, that is, where the individual needs 'to conceive of himself or herself as the centre of action with respect to his/her own biography' (Beck, 1992: 135) somewhat overstates the young workers' ability to negotiate employment on their own terms. Finally, the study suggests that the inclusion of social divisions, including gender and rural disadvantage, are important in (re)theorising industrial citizenship.

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Dr. A. Veltman

(James Madison University)

Meaningful Work and Human Flourishing

The questions "what contribution, if any, does work make to a good life?" and "which kinds of work contribute to human well-being, if any do so?" appear central to philosophies of human flourishing, yet the topic of work has received sparse attention in contemporary philosophical accounts of human flourishing.  This lack of attention to work in the philosophical literature may stem from a belief that only subjective and highly individualistic accounts of fulfilling work are possible, and perhaps from a commitment to conceive of the human good in terms of primary goods and basic virtues that, in principle, all people can possess. 

In this essay, I argue that meaningful work is a necessary component of human flourishing, for meaningful work promotes a host of personal and moral goods that are integral in human well-being, including self-respect, dignity, pride, self-expression, intellectual development and existential purposiveness.  Conversely, some forms of work undermine human flourishing by stifling the development of human capacities, such as when automated work degrades a human being into a robotic non-person, in part by outsourcing the thinking and skill that a person would otherwise put into working, thereby determining that workers will rarely act like thinking, skill exercising human beings while on the job.

In addition to examining several dimensions of meaningful work, I examine a troubling implication of the necessity of meaningful work for human flourishing: since not every person can participate in meaningful work, not all people can flourish.  I argue that this implication does not undermine the necessity of meaningful work for living well, for the fully flourishing life is not available to all people, regardless of the particular components that one includes as part of flourishing; furthermore, philosophical reflection on components of the human good should not be limited by our present distributions of goods.

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Penelope Faure

(Department of Psychology, Macquarie University)

Doris McIlwain

(Department of Psychology, Macquarie University)

Retrenchment: hitting the reload button rather than the panic button

An employee is said to be "retrenched" when his or her job becomes redundant and the employer either cannot offer the employee any alternative position or, any alternative position offered cannot be accepted by the employee. It presents a variegated challenge to the subjectivity of a working person. It sets in play a rite of passage (Van Gennep, 1908) that is more or less well-negotiated depending on a number of powerful influences. The degree of emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) required to manage the experience and to reconfigure life position depends on the person's pre-existing views of the person-work contract, the circumstances of their losing their job, whether those around them are able to be supportive and are seen as such by the person enduring the loss. We analysed six in-depth interviews of mostly very well-paid, highly educated individuals who had recently undergone retrenchment and who had a placement with an agency providing transitional support and guidance. Using grounded theory analysis, surprising themes arose suggesting that certain features contributed to a person's capacity to experience the transition as (in the words of one participant) an opportunity to 'hit the reload button rather than the panic button'. These attributes contributed to self-development and a fresh approach to personal aspirations, working with others and the worker-employer contract. Letting the data speak, at this stage, we link personal, contextual and cultural-level features to create a model of resilience. Here, we focus on personal features like reflective self-awareness, capacity to voice the reality of what transpired rather than defend against it, and ability consciously to depend on others for new input. We suggest this model addresses why some people were able to use unwelcome change as a basis for self-development rather than merely surviving such a threatening and potentially shame-inducing experience. We present here preliminary grounded theory work, which emphasises letting the data speak, but we will advert to theories as they are relevant.

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Dale Tweedie

(Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University)

Is Call Centre Work Self-Developing? Some Paradoxes of Workplace Autonomy

This paper analyses contemporary experiences of work in light of two philosophical approaches to self-development at work. The first approach stems from James Murphy's (re)reading of Aristotle; it argues that the development of technical, social and even moral capacities at work can be constitutive of human flourishing. The second approach is derived from Axel Honneth's and Christophe Dejours's theories of recognition, in which institutional and interpersonal recognition at work develops the practical self-relations that are necessary for autonomous action. In both theoretical perspectives the contribution of work to self-development is Janus-faced, since work can either create or destroy the pre-conditions of well-being or autonomy.    

Since call centre work is often characterised by fairly repetitive tasks, and by sometimes staggering levels of surveillance, both the "flourishing" and "autonomy" approaches may suggest that common experiences of call centre work are straightforwardly inimical to self-development. However, on closer analysis, these experiences of work also create apparent paradoxes within both philosophical frameworks. For instance, while intensive surveillance at call centres certainly restricts opportunities for self-development, having one's work assessed by competent others also seems a pre-condition of developing technical capacities in the broadly Aristotelian framework. Similarly, while surveillance seems intuitively opposed  to autonomy, the concept of recognition nonetheless implies that one's work is somehow made visible to others. This paper endeavours to show that resolving these apparent paradoxes advances our understanding of both philosophical accounts of self-development and contemporary experiences of work.

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Caryn Cridland

(University of Technology, Sydney)

Compassion and mindfulness at work

Most of us spend much of our lives at work. Sometimes we spend more time there than at home with our families. A lot of life experiences then naturally occur at work and, like our families, we often cannot choose our work colleagues. Involuntary relationships can lead to conflict and difficult circumstances in the workplace. It is during these difficult times that we often learn most about ourselves and others.

When interpersonal conflict leads to a crisis self-reflection is required, promoting development in those individuals forced to reflect about themselves and the situation. Self-development can be accelerated when individuals are supported to develop skills to assist them deal with challenging circumstances. Even brief interventions can lead to changes in the way individuals respond to conflict situations.

The current study investigated how mindfulness and compassion influence individual responses to workplace scenarios. Participants were randomly assigned to three groups: Control, Mindfulness and Compassion. The latter two listened to a brief induction before completing an online survey. One was designed to induce a state of mindfulness (a willingness to observe inner states), the other, a state of compassion (an awareness of the interdependence of human relationships and of a shared common humanity).

Participants were then asked to answer questions (with differing levels of compassion on four workplace vignettes, based on real-life interpersonal issues. The main hypotheses tested were whether the inductions would increase participants' capacity to select an option that was not punitive towards any one person but optimised the opportunity for change on the part of all involved.

Analysis revealed significant differences between groups and genders on some vignettes. Overall, participants in the Compassion group demonstrated the most compassion. This finding indicates that in some situations, people may be influenced to be more compassionate. One remarkably surprising finding was that men in the Mindfulness group showed the least compassion overall. There were significant differences between men and women in the Mindfulness group on one vignette. Mindfulness may not result in optimal outcomes for everyone in every situation. These results indicate that some forms of brief intervention may assist individuals respond to challenging situations in the workplace. The learning may then be applied to other areas of their lives and assist with individual self-development.

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Michael Fine

(Department of Sociology, Macquarie University)

Working for nothing: Carers, volunteers and ageing

The unpaid work of carers and volunteers raises important questions of the significance of the reward and motivation of work. Drawing on contemporary statistical evidence from Australia and theoretical accounts of care and social participation, this paper sketches a number of the key themes that emerge. Unpaid work, it will be argued, is assuming new importance in the context of the ageing demographic profile of post-industrial capitalism.

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William Newsome

(Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University)

Why those who study "cognition in the wild" should care about Christophe Dejours

Responding to worries of the contrivance of contexts and ecological invalidity within laboratory experimentation on mentality, many cognitive scientists have undertaken studying human cognition as it unfolds "in the wild". This phrase is meant to capture the differences between laboratory contexts and the contexts of everyday human involvement. The aim of this talk is to illuminate aspects of Christophe Dejours' clinical and theoretical research on individuals and collectives at work that, I argue, have been underemphasized or ignored in "outdoor" cognitive science research. With Dejours' points taken on board, the phenomena of interest to cognitive science in the wild becomes even more complex and distributed than previously recognized. I conclude with thoughts of why this is not a methodological impediment, contrary to critics of the 'extended' view in cognitive science.