(Knowledge) Work Futures

But we are getting ahead of ourselves...

Although learning and knowledge work are taken as the two orienting horizons for the contents of this blog, it may be worth going one step up the common-sense taxonomic hierarchy and looking at work, particularly the futures of work, since we are adopting a proleptic stance. The Chartered Management Institute has recently (March 2008) produced two reports on this topic.

The first, Management futures: the world in 2018, raises the question of "How Future Competent is Your Organisation?". Six questions are posed which might help organisations to prepare for future eventualities. Despite acknowledging the indeterminacy of the future, the report suggests that it may be possible to ensure that an organisation is "future proofed", a phrase which seems to hold a guarantee that the rest of the text withholds. Nevertheless, the report is worth reading for its scenarios and its diagram of clusters of opportunities.

The second, an Executive Summary of Environmental scanning: trends affecting the world of work in 2018, argues that "the future is, in a sense, already all around us", which could be interpreted as a proleptic viewpoint. The report uses a PEST (Political, Economic, Social and Technological) analysis to identify the most important trends that could shape the future workplace. The analysis reveals, the report claims, that "the UK workplace is in the middle of a profound and irrevocable transformation".

While these reports are interesting in as far as they go, they do not engage with the tension between what might be termed the labour element of work, i.e. labouring on behalf of an employer for remuneration, and the more creative or reflexive element, the knowledge and skills one brings as a culturally competent and socialised professional. In a context which approaches more closely that of knowledge work, MacKenzie, McShane and Wilcox discuss this difference in terms of performativity and authenticity in academic work. For these authors, performativity and authenticity signify different levels of identity in the conscious experience of self. The reference here is to MacKenzie, H., McShane, K. and Wilcox, S. (2007), Challenging performative fabrication: seeking authenticity in academic development practice, International Journal for Academic Development, 12 (1), pp.45-54.

A similar tension to that discussed by MacKenzie et al. in the context of academic work is examined by Peter Case and Erik Piñeiro in the context of computer programming. Case and Piñeiro show that, in expressing and conforming to a hacker ethic, programmers' narratives evince technical, ethical and aesthetic motives at one and the same time. Software engineers are extremely aware of the means whereby organizational control is exercised and of the demands for performativity that they feel compromise their coding practice, which they conceive as an artistic endeavour. The reference here is to Case, P. and Piñeiro, E. (2006), Aesthetics, performativity and resistance in the narratives of a computer programming community, Human Relations, 59 (6), pp. 753-782.

These two examples assume a negative perspective on performativity, derived primarily from Lyotard's "The Postmodern condition", although Case and Piñeiro do also consider the performative "face-work" that programmers put in when presenting themselves in an online forum. There is, however, another more positive and general debate to be had around the notion of performativity and the social construction of the self, derived from J.L. Austin and modified by Judith Butler and others, I hesitate to mention Jacques Derrida, especially when brought into interaction with concepts derived from the ethnomethodological, symbolic interactionist and social phenomenology traditions and with systems theory, both that variant which seeks to develop an understanding of socio-technical systems and that which seeks to understand systems in terms of poiesis, autopoiesis, heteropoiesis, allopoiesis and purpose or teleonomy.