Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Just as the Protestant work ethic can be construed as an ideology propagated by the bourgeoisie and inculcated into the working classes, the current discourse of love and happiness at work undoubtedly finds its greatest resonance within the professional and managerial classes. But just as the work ethic in the U.S. today circulates widely in the culture — as well as among employers, public officials, and policymakers — as an unquestioned value, the mandate to love our work and be happy with it is arguably becoming increasingly hegemonic as a cultural script and normative ideal. How do we make ourselves happy and in love with our job? Here is a typical response: add new responsibilities, get more involved, learn additional skills, add qualifications, and upgrade your game (Hannon 2015, 22, 152-153). Happiness at work, “a mindset that allows you to maximize performance and achieve your potential,” is, as is often repeated, “strongly related to productivity” (Pryce-Jones 2010, 4, 10). ...

There were real differences between neoliberals and conservatives on the family. Although they converged around the idea of family responsibility, there were different motivations and different inflections to this convergence. Social conservatives saw the family and its moral order as foundational to any social and economic order. Even when they became converts to the free market, as was the case with Irving Kristol, they saw the family as the necessary foundation on which market freedom needed to rest. They were also more often than not invested in a particular vision of the family – patriarchal, heteronormative, monogamous. Ideas about responsible fatherhood and the need to reinstate the place of men within the family come from this conservative tradition. Neoliberals had a more minimalist understanding of family responsibility. For them, family responsibility meant that the family or the couple should be the primary source of economic security and in this way function as a subst...

The proliferation of auditing culture in post Fordism indicates that the demise of the big Other has been exaggerated. Auditing can perhaps best be conceived of as fusion of PR and bureaucracy, because the bureaucratic data is usually intended to fulfill a promotional role: in the case of education, for example, exam results or research ratings augment (or diminish) the prestige of particular institutions. The frustration for the teacher is that it seems as if their work is increasingly aimed at impressing the big Other which is collating and consuming this ‘data’. ‘Data’ has been put in inverted commas here, because much of the so-called information has little meaning or application outside the parameters of the audit: as Eeva Berglund puts it, ‘the information that audit creates does have consequences even though it is so shorn of local detail, so abstract, as to be misleading or meaningless – except, that is, by the aesthetic criteria of audit itself ’.  New bureaucracy takes...

Because of depression Mark Fisher took his life last year. A friend of mine sought counselling. She told me they had never asked her about work and her working conditions. I have recently heard that a colleague of mine is away because of stress. Personally, I narrowly escaped depression 18 months ago. Here is the context: "The ‘rigidity’ of the Fordist production line gave way to a new ‘flexibility’, a word that will send chills of recognition down the spine of every worker today. This flexibility was defined by a deregulation of Capital and labor, with the workforce being casualized (with an increasing number of workers employed on a temporary basis), and outsourced. Like Sennett, Marazzi recognizes that the new conditions both required and emerged from an increased cybernetization of the working environment. The Fordist factory was crudely divided into blue and white collar work, with the different types of labor physically delimited by the structure of the building it...