Review Article: When ‘life itself’ goes to work: Reviewing shifts in organizational life through the lens of biopower

From work to non-work in organizations and beyond

How do organizations tap the ‘whole person’ at work and link it to productive activity? As numerous studies of organizational learning have demonstrated, it is difficult to induce these qualities through traditional top-down hierarchies (see Perelman, 2011; Pink, 2011). The command to ‘be yourself’ using basic Taylorist styles of management abnegate the very life capacities that are desired − much like ‘ordering’ a child to play or have fun. Contemporary management appears to have solved this problem in two ways. First, by evoking conventionally non-work themes in the workplace such as lifestyle indicators, sexual orientation, political beliefs (usually via the company Corporate Social Responsibility policy [here, see Costas and Kärreman, 2013 on how CSR is used to tap personal solutions to business problems]) and even leisure interests like ‘partying’. Second, by generalizing the index of work or ‘the job’ beyond the office, so that ideas, skills and potential value-adding efforts that occur in a cafe, at home or even on holiday might be captured by the firm. Let us look at each dimension in turn.

One of the strangest aspects of contemporary management discourse is its conspicuous reliance on facets of life that the Fordist mentality would have previously deemed out of place in the office. Many workers are invited to express their difference and individuality by telling onsite employers ‘who they are’ outside of the workday. The management consultant Gurnek Bains (2007) casts this mainly in terms of personal authenticity. Based upon a substantial number of empirical cases, he notes the approach taken by putatively ‘enlightened’ CEOs in their attempt to increase task-engagement among the workforce:

[A] major reason why people don’t feel a sense of genuine belonging to their organizations is that they have learned to be inauthentic and so have those around them. Take the example of Simon, a senior executive in a media company. He told us: ‘for so long, I hadn’t been bringing myself to work. I wasn’t really prepared to let others see or know the true me . . . then I woke up one morning and realized, I’m living my life with these people, so what’s the point in pretending’. (Bains, 2007: 104)

The language is curious here in the way it frames the ‘true me’ as something inherently beyond the formal prescripts formulated in the office indicative of traditional management methods. The ‘true me’ and its attendant ‘buzz of life’ might be signified by those aspects of myself I typically concealed from the managerial gaze – informal knowhow, personality and hobbies − many of which could only be articulated outside the office. Gorz (2010) describes this change in management philosophy succinctly in his study of European employment practices. Whereas workers in Taylorized industries,

… became optimal only after they had been deprived of practical knowledge, skills and habits developed by the culture of everyday life . . . post-Fordist workers have to come to the production process with all the cultural baggage they have acquired through games, team sports, arguments . . . . (Gorz, 2010: 9−10)

Gorz might be overstating this trend, but I suggest this changing emphasis in management thought is related to two additional sub-developments that have been observed in practice. First is the attempt to encourage and capture the informal organizational sphere, which in the past has been viewed with a distrustful eye by the firm. Play, misbehaviour, games, humour and ‘fooling about’ are not only permitted by Liberation Management, but also engineered through a variety of exercises and provocations (Deal and Key, 1998). One only has to think of the formidable number of studies documenting the introduction of rather puerile role-playing drills in organizations, often orchestrated by ‘funsultants’ who force workers to sing children’s songs, wear pyjamas and pull pranks on fellow employees (see Cederstrom and Fleming [2012] for a full summary).

The second sub-development is perhaps more emblematic of the Liberation Management ethos. Rather than manufacturing non-work themes in the office, the firm simply sanctions expressions of who the person already is. Kuhn (2006) calls this the lifestyle approach to labour management, in which companies hope to prompt more engaged employee performances by encouraging their everyday self on the job. This may take banal forms, like informal dress codes and tattoos openly displayed in the office (Fleming, 2009; Fleming and Spicer, 2004); but it can also be more stridently enforced, such as a call-centre employee bringing cherished personal objects to the office like surfboards, consumer items related to individual tastes and home-cooking (Land and Taylor, 2010). According to Florida (2004: 222), for example, the aesthetic labour of the ‘creative class’ (which includes most modern work according to his overly-expansive definition) demands increased self-expression and the freedom to be ‘complete people’ in organizations. As a result, companies are increasingly relaxed about the presence of ‘signs of life’ in the paper-littered cubicle, retail shop floor, healthcare centre and so forth.

The second broader shift in this management approach flows in the opposite direction, that of work infiltrating life beyond the formal workday. Most employees, of course, still clock-in and out as per usual, but an interesting trend also appears to be increasingly evident. In their best-selling book Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (2011), Ressler and Thompson note the popularity of a ‘Results Only Work Environments’ (or ROWE) in US industry. Contrary to conventional management wisdom, many companies now focus mainly on out-put measures rather than inputs. As long as a project deadline is met, for example, firms do not care when, how and where the work is done – be it in your underwear in the middle of the night or in a local cafe on Monday morning (also see Gregg, 2011). The spread of temp-work is certainly linked to this idea (Barley and Kunda, 2004). However, we can also observe this inclination in how the management function is more generally approached. In his rather ridiculously titled book The Seven Day Weekend (2007), the construction industry entrepreneur, Ricardo Semler, explains the rationale:

Imagine a company where employees set their own hours; where there are no offices, no job titles, no business plans; where employees get to endorse or veto any new venture; where kids are encouraged to run the halls; and where the CEO lets other people make nearly all the decisions . . . [where] you have the freedom to get your job done on your own terms and to blend your work life and personal life with enthusiasm and creative energy. Smart bosses will eventually realize that you might be most productive if you work on Sunday afternoon, play golf on Monday morning, go to a movie on Tuesday afternoon, and watch your child play soccer on Thursday. (Semler, 2007: 13)

We must, of course, give very little substantive credence to these fanciful proclamations by a multimillionaire CEO. There are now, however, some empirical data suggesting that this idea is being adopted in concrete corporate practices, in which firms realize that productive labour might just as easily take place outside of office hours as during the typical workday. As Kamp (2013: 129) puts it,

… the ‘normal working day’ is gradually being effaced . . . in reality, working hours are no longer defined by actual work time spent but by the nature of the assignment, by solution strategies, and by the level of ambition involved, as well as individual factors and preferences.

This change in management ideology not only represents a quantitative change in how work is experienced, related to labour intensification or the proliferation of mobile technology, it is symptomatic of a qualitative shift too. Maravelias (2003) refers to this as a post-bureaucratic tendency in which the professional and non-professional become difficult to disentangle since our jobs ‘seek to exploit aspects of individual’s ‘personal’ spheres, which may be valuable in work’ (Maravelias, 2003: 548). In extreme cases, productive time may occur even during our most intimate moments. For example, Lucas’s (2010) fascinating autobiographical account of life as a computer programmer describes how he began to solve code problems in his sleep. He termed ‘sleep working’, as opposed to merely dreaming about one’s workplace, something that cannot only be explained by the promulgation of BlackBerrys or online technology.

In summary, we can note a different relationship between work and ‘life’ in these emergent employment trends (see Table 1). As opposed to the earlier preoccupation with suppressing or eschewing the broader non-employment and informal attributes of workers, they now appear to be central value-adding resources in organizations.

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Table 1.

From work to ‘life’ and back again: Changing trends in employee management.

Dominant feature	Taylorism/bureaucracy	Culture management	New organizational emphasis on ‘life’
Objective of management	Formalize and depersonalize work role and the employee (Taylor, 1967 [1911]; Weber, 1946).	‘Mould’ or ‘design’ the worker to hold strong normative alliances with the firm (Kunda, 1992).	Capture pre-existing social qualities and informal knowhow of the employee (Gorz, 2010; Maravelias, 2003).
Organizational justification	Rationalization and the superiority of management science over worker knowledge (Beynon, 1980; Crozier, 1964).	Committed employees who identify with the firm and feel part of a ‘family’ (Deal and Key, 1998).	Liberation and freedom of self-expression and difference (‘just be yourself’, fun, play, etc.) (Semler, 2007).
Regulation of work/life divide	Strict demarcation between work role and the worker’s personal/private and/or broader life qualities (Alvesson, 1987; Whyte, 1956).	Organization treated as a closed ‘cult-like’ system – fear that life might contaminate strong cultures (O’Reilly and Chapman, 1996).	Non-work associatives (lifestyle, sexuality, etc.) encouraged in organizations (Kuhn, 2006; Land and Tyler, 2010).
			Work occurring beyond office hours (Gregg, 2011; Lucas, 2010).
Proclaimed employee benefits	More efficient work and more pay under piece-rate system, impartially and equal treatment (Taylor, 1967 [1911]).	Sense of belonging at work – less alienating or anti-social enviroment (Peters and Waterman, 1982).	Authenticity and flexibility – personal idiosyncrasies, lifestyle and diversity at work (Bains, 2007; Ressler and Thompson, 2011).

Foucault’s turn to bios or life itself

As Munro (2012) and Hatchuel (1999) note in their excellent reviews, most adoptions of Foucault in organizational research have focused on his arguments about disciplinary power – regimes of containment and self-surveillance (e.g. see Burrell, 1988; McKinley and Starkey, 1998). The 1991 English publication of his essay ‘Governmentality’ partially shifted the emphasis towards Foucault’s later concerns about the calculation of everyday life in modern societies, especially pertaining to enterprise cultures and ‘entrepreneurial selves’ (see Du Gay, 1996), but received only lukewarm interest in management studies, as Munro rightly points out. ³ With the publication of his lectures at the College de France over the last 10 years – especially The Birth of Biopolitics (2008) – we see a more fully developed post-disciplinary agenda emerging, related to governmental management, security and biopolitical forms of domination. These ideas, I suggest, may provide insights into the changing patterns of employment surveyed above. ⁴

How might bios or ‘life itself’ become enmeshed within power relations, especially when we typically think of, say, coercive workplace controls as antithetical to ‘having a life’? Foucault first introduced the idea concerning the intersection between power and sexuality (Foucault, 1978). In his lectures, however, we see the concept being more systematically studied in relation to liberal forms of statecraft and especially neoliberal governmentality (Foucault, 2008). Here Foucault considers biopower distinct to the controls he had earlier termed ‘disciplinary’. Disciplinary power emerged from the prison and is based upon the strict and austere training of bodies within tightly regulated space/time domains. Timetables, the sequestering of individuals and internalization of the regulative gaze characteristic of prisons, he argued in Discipline and Punish (1977), had escaped into society to become a prominent template for workplaces, including hospitals, schools and so on.

Biopower is different and concerns not only the biological organism, but also broader ways of living, social activities that tended to be considered more of a secondary reproductive resource for major institutions. This kind of regulation does not seek to contain the subject of power. Instead it aims to utilize its inherent and unlimited qualities, becoming virtual in the sense that it transcends typical disciplinary boundaries (e.g. work and non-work), enrolling pre-existing styles of conduct into governmental, economic and judicial flows of regulation. Economic security and risk are key motifs here, since the marketization of society calibrates all behaviour to a cost–benefit analysis rather than pseudo-religious norms related to disciplinary confinement. This, he argued, is how populations – their hygiene, bodily functions, familial conduct and political alliances – are governed ‘from afar’ in late capitalist societies.

The Birth of Biopolitics lectures are astoundingly prescient in the way they concentrate on the then nascent neoliberal project as a sign of things to come. He singles out economists like Gary Becker (1976) and Robert Lucas (1972) as leading harbingers of a new type of power. Their ideas around ‘human capital’ in particular, he suggested, foretold the emergence of controls that index life more generally to the precepts of economic utility and governance. This entails,

. . . generalizing the “enterprise” from within the social body or social fabric . . . The individual’s life itself – with his [sic] relationships to his private property, with his family, household, insurance and retirement – must make him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise. (Foucault, 2008: 241)

Neoliberal biopower sees economic calculability permeate into our broader life projects, making human capital no different to any other resource. Moments of living we traditionally thought to be beyond direct domination become its primary vehicle. Social aptitudes, creative capacities, libidinal desires, emotional intelligence and our very ability to engage in useful social action are enlisted in this respect. Foucault tellingly notes that the underlying fantasy of biopower is a paradoxical ‘capitalism without capitalism’, life and the pre-existing structures of private property and free markets. This is why the prison metaphor and its disciplinary tropes of confinement, docile bodies and sequestered spaces are less important here. Life is accelerated and harnessed rather than coercively moulded into strict conformity with impersonal timetables and rules. As Foucault (2008) further explains in relation to US neoliberalism, biopower,

. . . involves extending the economic model of supply and demand and investment-cost-profit so as to make it a model of social relations and existence itself, a form of relationship of the individual to himself, time, those around him, the group and the family. (Foucault, 2008: 241−243)

Biopower, capitalism and work

A serious oversight in Foucault’s analysis is the limited role played by struggle and contestation in the rise of neoliberal governmentality. For example, how could we explain the ascendance of Thatcherism or Reaganism without mentioning the coal miners’ or air traffic controllers’ strikes? Also think of the material ‘pain’ underlying austerity policies presently promoted by contemporary neoliberal governments (see Stuckler and Basu, 2013). This dilution of the conflict behind biopower is also replicated in other related studies (e.g. Dean, 1999), including Munro’s (2012) otherwise useful review, when he claims that ‘rather than intervene directly on the individual person, the neoliberal apparatus of control seeks to modify the “milieu” . . . in which the individual makes choices’ (Munro, 2012: 351). In contrast, I propose a more concrete and conflict-sensitive view of biopower, understanding it as a ‘weapon’ that exerts direct force on the body and social relations, but in ways that we might miss if approached simply from a disciplinary perspective.

In order to gain the most from the concept of biopower, therefore, we must position it within the context of capitalism proper – that is to say, class relations, exploitation and divergent political interests. Perhaps this has been done most successfully by Hardt and Negri (2000, 2009) in the political sciences. Building on Foucault’s insights, they argue that the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s is crucial for understanding how biopower became a central component of the (self-) exploitation today, especially as it pertains to the affective and emotional skills of workers. Whereas life used to be considered a resource for reproducing labour outside of the point of production (as Althusserian Marxist theory revealed), these two distinct spheres are now considerably blurred. As they put it,

. . . life is no longer produced in the cycles of reproduction that are subordinated to the working day; on the contrary, life is what infuses and dominates all production. The excess of value is determined today in the affects, in the bodies crisscrossed with knowledge, in the intelligence of the mind, and in the sheer power to act. (Hardt and Negri, 1999: 367)

My take on this argument points to three important facets of corporate dominance that explain the rise of biopower in organizations today. First of all, the crisis of Fordism revealed that traditional models of accumulation could no longer organize themselves. The large command and control structures of the 1970s developed terminal inefficiencies, and were too remote from increasingly core value-creating activities among the workforce.

Second, a new appreciation of the working subject emerged that essentially aimed to enlist employees themselves to organize an otherwise moribund corporate infrastructure. Hence the conspicuous focus in the 1990s on self-managing teams, the self-styled learning abilities of the workforce (e.g. tacit knowledge), individual discretion and the flexible ‘portfolio career’ that placed many of the risks of capital investment onto workers themselves. Indeed, the problem with the neoliberal ‘solution’ to Fordism is that strict economic rationality required something beyond itself in order to function at all. It needed us to be more fully involved in everyday management matters (see Duménil and Lévy, 2011).

Third, with the de-industrialization of western economies, many jobs come to include an immaterial or highly socialized element, partially detached from concrete tasks (e.g. screwing on a bolt). Work becomes framed in terms of ‘human capital’ that emphasizes life skills, communicative abilities, self-organizing capabilities and emotional intelligence. This occurs in ostensibly low-skilled jobs as much as those at the high-end of the occupational hierarchy. As Callaghan and Thompson (2002) quote one firm in relation to menial call-centre employment, ‘we hire attitude’ as much as anything else.

In summary, it seems that biopower transforms work into an intangible social process no longer exclusively linked to concrete and delimited tasks indicative of Fordist employment. Having said this, it is nevertheless a highly embodied form of regulation, since our jobs are no longer defined as something we do among other things, but what we are. Hence, the logic of the factory comes to increasingly define more moments of what was once non-production. The time and space of work becomes generalized because the ‘means of production’ are technically us. Ominously, we are now permanently poised for work.

Social subjectivity put to work

Many of the classic studies of work – from Marx to Weber – complained about the dehumanizing effects of control and managerial power. The ‘bureaucratic personality’, for example, is uniform and dehumanized, relegating our colourful and spontaneous social attributes to the informal organizational sphere.

In contrast, biocratic forms of influence provoke and instrumentalize these aspects of the workforce, especially in relation to self-management, learning and innovation. Indeed, in his analysis of Human Resource Management (HRM), Hanlon (2007) even argues that it is now redundant, since so much of organizational productivity occurs despite (and around) the rules of top-down structures. We train ourselves, self-organize, use our cooperative discretion to get the job done, and draw upon authentic personal attributes to interface with customers, clients and superiors (also see Hancock and Tyler, 2000). As Dowling (2007) notes in relation to waitressing, affect and spontaneous acts of cooperation (among staff and between staff and customers) remain necessarily external and autonomous to the typical labour process. Such value-adding capacities are difficult to formally prescribe through hierarchical power relations (which do not disappear), since how do you, for example, command someone to communicate their authenticity on the phone, be sociable in the office or resourceful on the job?

Biocracy partially solves this problem in two ways. First, we might note the indirect capture of the informal organization that was always present but previously distrusted in management practice. As the classic studies of workplace behaviour including Roy (1952, 1958) and Burawoy (1979) have demonstrated, employees have always found ways to unofficially self-organize and relieve boredom despite the edicts of formal rationality (also see Juravich, 1985). But given neoliberalism’s difficulty in organizing or reproducing itself on its own terms, studies are increasingly noting how this unofficial world of work has become central to the production process, especially with its rich currents of knowhow, ingenuity and plain humanity (e.g. covering for someone or fulfilling a task in the weekend as a favour to a co-worker).

On a mundane level, this might be experienced by workers as simply ‘getting the job done’ since so many formal management systems are ironically considered an impediment or obstruction to task accomplishment (Gordon, 1996). Qualities beyond work regimentation are important here. Orr (1996) presents a great example in his study of photocopy repair workers who drew upon a communal pool of knowhow frequently sourced after office hours to achieve their targets despite the stringent directives insisted upon by the firm. They created their own secret labour process that was purely inter-subjective (based around narratives), enabling them to perform the job in a much more superior way compared with the formal protocols designed by upper management. This ‘invisible work’ (also see Fletcher, 2001) was rich in social and communicative attributes, something the firm did not acknowledge (since it contravened management) but nevertheless depended upon to maintain productivity.

A second evocation of biocracy seeks to directly capture these social subjective qualities of the workforce. This is somewhat different to ‘responsible autonomy’ (Friedman, 1977) noted in earlier studies of Fordist employment because it seeks to enclose what is already present rather than ‘trust’ employees to follow the rules in the supervisor’s absence. This might even include harnessing activities that would have once been labelled ‘shirking’ within the responsible autonomy paradigm (see Ross, 2004).

Indeed, some business analysts now admit that it is very difficult to directly command workers to learn, be authentic on the call-centre phone or use their broader life skills to achieve certain tasks. Instead, corporations must allow employees to flourish on their own accord (even if they appear to be against the organization) and find ways of redirecting these energies back into the productive circuit of accumulation. The Harvard Business Review, for example, now openly celebrates all manner of techniques that harness the ‘voluntary’ efforts of workers that intuitively appear extraneous to the formal enterprise. An article entitled ‘Harnessing Your Employees Informal Networks’ (McDermott and Archibald, 2010) is telling in this regard. It is stated that a hands-off, non-interventionist approach to management is crucial for valorizing productive moments that reside within subterranean cultures of the organization (also see Clair et al., 2005). As it pertains to tacit networks, the article argues, firms should encircle rather than manage, capture rather than formalize: ‘. . . if your smartest employees are getting together to solve problems and develop new ideas on their own, the best thing to do is to stay out of their way’ (McDermott and Archibald, 2010).

A CEO interviewed by Pink (2011: 32) epitomizes this changing emphasis in management thought: ‘if you need me to motivate you, I probably don’t want to hire you’. In other words, and following Foucault’s argument, employees are not only considered ‘human capital’, but also responsible for its affability, flexibility and content – since corporations cannot (or will not) take on these compositional responsibilities themselves (see Cremin, 2010). Hence the management mantra most likely to be heard in large companies today: ‘be what you are!’ (Sturdy et al., 2010).

Non-work put to work

The most obvious feature of biocracy is the conspicuous appearance of non-work in the sphere of production – something encouraged in much management practice today. We might be tempted to interpret the emphasis on lifestyle, sexuality and personal attributes on the job as a relaxation of traditional workplace controls. This is how the proponents of Liberation Management and ROWE would like us to view such developments. As management guru Ricardo Semler (1993) enthusiastically proclaims, ‘control is now passé!’ (p. xiii). However, there are two important instrumental motives underlying this trend that are symptomatic of biopower at work.

First, whereas traditional management systems considered non-work an interference to the atmosphere of productive rationality, many of today’s workplaces rely upon it for innovative energy, social finesse and enthusiasm that is more indicative of one’s broader lifestyle (e.g. university academics, fashion industry employees, software engineers, etc.). As Hanlon puts it in relation to the impotency of much top-down HRM, ‘labor increasingly entails the input of cultural content from activities that have not been historically considered “work”’ (Hanlon, 2007: 272). Gaming programmers, for example, develop a sense of cultural taste (e.g. the next big thing) away from the office, knowledge that companies nevertheless rely upon to be successful (also see Liu, 2004).

Second, the evocation of non-work is the most obvious way to provoke the subjective social attributes of the workforce, especially the skills we mentioned above. In Fleming and Sturdy’s (2011) analysis of call-centre employment, for example, framing the office as if it was a ‘late night party’ did not in itself create value, but made it easier for the organization to capture aspects of inter-personality that was of economic utility (e.g. non-scripted and flexible engagement with customers, etc.). The firm even claimed that what employees did was not really ‘work’, since where else can you drink on the job, be sexually promiscuous and use company space to promote broader projects, such as an anti-capitalism protest? Hence also why, for instance, airline attendants are required to ‘act as if the cabin is your living room’ to kindle moments of emotional labour that are difficult to directly administer or prescribe (Hochschild, 1984).

A growing number of studies have demonstrated how blurring the work/non-work boundary to access ‘life itself’ is central to enhancing productivity. Let us review three exemplary cases. Ross’s (2004) in-depth ethnographic investigation of the IT firm Razorfish is useful in this respect. The organization openly acknowledged that much of the productive work could not be differentiated from the lifestyle interests of its employees. In this sense, the highly embodied and ‘immaterial’ nature of the skills involved on the job meant that it made more sense for the firm to dismantle the work/life division that previous management wisdom had considered crucial for discipline. Indeed, Ross was deeply surprised by how many non-work signifiers were observable as the organization endeavoured to import ‘lifestyle components back into the workplace’ (Ross, 2004: 139). The warehouse-like space, for example, was purposely left only partially renovated – with overhead piping and wiring exposed − to recreate a climate of artisanal amateurism many felt definitive of their work. Even the anti-corporate ‘hacker ethic’ was embraced by the organization, fostering a strange tension in the workplace culture, especially given that the firm was a publicly listed for-profit enterprise.

Some companies go to even greater lengths to capture life on the job. Land and Taylor’s (2010) investigation of an ethical textiles manufacturer in the UK explains why. They report on how managers painstakingly replicated themes indicative of life beyond work on the company’s premises. To give the job and products a veneer of bohemian chic, the firm openly promoted the leisurely pastimes of its employees, both within the organization’s internal culture and external identity:

In order to establish the authenticity of the brand, this immaterial labor of brand management drew upon the recreational activities of employees. This inscription of employees’ lives into the brand created the economic value of the company’s products, situating their ‘lives’ as a form of productive labor or ‘work’. (Land and Taylor, 2010: 408)

According to Land and Taylor, this systematic blurring of life and labour was much more than a marketing tool. It directly tapped into labour productivity, especially when workers began to think of their jobs as something more than just work. The study revealed that managers needed more from employees than anything the company could formally prescribe.

Another relevant illustration can be found in Michel’s (2012) study of employees in a large US bank. Senior management did something very unusual in order to heighten effectiveness. They transformed the work setting into a home away from home, removing all cultural demarcations that might have once separated work from home, leisure and life more generally. This was presented to the workforce in the parlance of freedom and increased benefits, since employees could now access the workflow process whenever they liked, include personal events and interests in the office schedule and cultivate a workplace climate that was almost indistinguishable from living as such. Michel (2012: 336) notes: ‘. . . the bank erased distinctions between work and leisure by providing administrative support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, encouraging leisure at work, and providing free amenities, including childcare, valets, car service and meals.’

These so-called freedoms came at a cost. Michel closely documented the way in which existence in this ‘lifestyle firm’ was completely overtaken by work. There were no spatial or mental boundaries to separate personal concerns from those of the job, prompting one employee to sadly note, ‘my work is my life’ (Michel, 2012: 344).

Private time put to work

Michel’s study highlights a third facet of biocracy. If non-work associatives are transposed into the sphere of production, then a converse movement occurs too. Work time seeps into ever more aspects of life outside the formal job, into the private and social lives of employees more generally. This is an interesting development, since, as critical labour process theory has rightly shown us (see Thompson and Smith, 2010), most hitherto management thought focuses on the transformation of labour power at the point of production, often confined to tightly controlled space/time.

Biocracy runs against the grain in this respect, universalizing the pressure to work even when one has formally clocked out. Indeed, Ross’s (2004) study mentioned above demonstrated how management understood that ‘ideas and creativity were just as likely to surface at home or in other locations, and so employees were encouraged to work elsewhere . . . the goal was to extract every waking moment of an employee’s day’ (Ross, 2004: 52, also see Harney [2007] in relation to academic work). Even the overly optimistic advocates of ROWE also admit, ‘it’s not about giving people more time with the kids. ROWE is not about having more time off. You may not work fewer hours, you may even work more . . .’ (Ressler and Thompson, 2011: 61). Two empirical investigations vividly illustrate this facet of biocracy at work.

Melisa Gregg’s (2011) extensive case study of media and IT employees found them completely indexed to their jobs, to the point where one interviewee even continued to work when immobilized in a hospital’s Accident & Emergency ward following a serious accident. Mobile technology certainly contributed to this hyper-work mentality, but it also stemmed from the obstructive nature of extant formal controls, whereby employees developed job-based solutions on their own time in order to successfully complete their tasks. Gregg refers to ‘presence bleed’ (always being mentally ‘on the job’) and ‘function creep’ (increased time being given up to organizing the labour process) as key features of this employment environment. She describes ‘presence bleed’ as a situation where:

. . . firm boundaries between personal and professional identities no longer apply. Presence bleed explains the familiar experience whereby the location and time of work become secondary considerations faced with the ‘do to list’ that seems forever out of control. (Gregg, 2011: 2)

Here workers’ broader life qualities become a vital resource for the firm, especially in relation to the sheer amount of ‘poise work’ conducted around the job to complete formal work-time objectives. The social organization of tasks was particularly salient for activating this overworked subjectivity. For example, the use of teams functioned to horizontalize power relations. Gregg (2011: 85) notes,

. . . the team becomes hegemonic in the office culture due to its effectiveness in erasing power hierarchies and differential entitlements that clearly remain in large organizations . . . [teams] have the effect of making extra work seem courteous and common sense.

While more waking hours may be indexed to the job through biocracy, another striking study reveals that the pressure to perform might even be evidenced during our most intimate moments. In Lucas’s (2010) study mentioned above, his job became so integrated into his lifestyle, hobbies and general interests that he found himself being productive even in his sleep, developing task solutions in his dreams. He observed how this made resistance very difficult, which is telling of the kind of regulation that underscores biopower. He explains with reference to some classic methods of escaping managerial control:

. . . given the individually allocated and project centered character of the job, absenteeism only amounts to self-punishment, as work that is not done will have to be done later under increased stress. Given the collaborative nature of the work, heel dragging necessarily involves a sense of guilt towards other workers. On the production line, sabotage might be a rational tactic, but when your work resembles that of an artisan, sabotage would only make life harder . . . It is only when sickness comes and I am involuntarily incapable of work that I really gain extra time for myself. It is a strange thing to rejoice in the onset of a flu. (Lucas, 2010: 128)

Here we see traditional modes of contestation being outflanked by a new set of control functions that have inserted themselves into everyday life. Sadly for Lucas, only illness provides any respite from the pressures of work.

Unpaid labour put to work

This extension of labour into society beyond the firm also marks another definitive corporate strategy of biopower. Even actors not formally part of the organization might be enrolled into the productive circuits of the enterprise in a number of ways. The life proclivities of consumers (e.g. co-production) and online communities (e.g. crowd sourcing) are especially salient. The massive gaming industry provides an illustrative case in point, whereby its formidable customer base is permanently poised as a key provider of product development (Arvidsson, 2006).

For example, the amateurism and artisanal cultures of online groups are increasingly used as unpaid R&D labour in many ways by these enterprises. Terranova (2000) points out that media technology has conspicuously shifted substantial innovative costs onto user-groups, with LEGO being a standout example. Kücklich (2005) ironically calls this ‘play work’ since it utilizes the modifications (or ‘mods’) of gamers outside of the traditional business-circle to generate private profits. As a result, ‘“mods” not only increase the shelf-life of the games industry’s products, but also inject a shot of much-needed innovation into an industry seemingly unable to afford taking commercial risks’ (Kücklich, 2005).

In this description, we see how the financial risks of innovation are managed by many businesses. Potential losses are seldom born by firms under this model (also see Mazzucato, 2013). Any successes and resultant profits, of course, are literally owned by the enterprise (which Perelman [2002] labels the corporate confiscation of creativity, especially via Intellectual Property laws). Indeed, some of the most profitable business ideas have been sourced from non-capitalist activities as consumers, amateurs and enthusiasts invent solutions on their own (see also Howkins, 2007). ⁵ Perhaps this explains the increasing number of business analysts who suggest thinking of the private firm in terms of Wikipedia or a potentially lucrative ‘creative commons’ (Barnes, 2006) in which profits are derived from enclosing public inventiveness. As the authors of the best-selling Wikinomics claim, ‘by tapping open platforms you can leverage world-class infrastructures for a fraction of the cost of developing them yourself’ (Tapscott and Williams, 2008: 147, also see Monbiot [2011] in relation to how academic publishers ‘hyper-exploit’ public university funds).

Table 2 schematizes the trends identified in this review through the lens of biopower.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 2.

Biocracy at work.

Biocratic dimension	Key aspect of ‘life’ put to work	Central biocractic mechanism	Desired managerial outcome
Social subjectivity	Informal labour that workers draw upon to ‘get the job done’ despite the official rules (Orr, 1996).	Indirect capture of ‘invisible work’ as a significant resource (Fletcher, 2001).Direct capture of employee ‘ways of life’ (McDermott and Archibald, 2010).	Instrumentalizing social qualities that are otherwise unmanageable towards productive ends (Dowling, 2007; Hanlon, 2007).
Space	Non-work skills/aptitudes and social knowhow typically enacted beyond the firm (Land and Taylor, 2010; Liu, 2004).	Blurring the work/non-work boundary – the lifestyle firm (Fleming and Spicer, 2004; Michel, 2012).Mimicking non-work activities (i.e. ‘partying’) in the office (Fleming and Sturdy, 2011).	Useful workplace qualities forged outside of the strictures of workplace controls (Gorz, 2010; Ross, 2004).More authentic emotional labour and engaged employee performances, (Hochschild, 1984).
Time	Private time that falls outside formally paid work hours (Ressler and Thompson, 2011).	‘Presence bleed’ so that work becomes a permanent concern (Gregg, 2011).	Employees continuously performing or ‘poised’ for work beyond remuneration or associated organizational costs (Harney, 2007; Lucas, 2010).
Economic valorization	Unpaid labour by non-employees enrolled into the production process (Arvidsson, 2006; Tapscott and Williams, 2008).	Capitalizing on public innovations/efforts through co-production, crowd sourcing, etc (Kücklich, 2005).	Free labour harnessed from consumers, users and general public (especially through IP law, technological platforms and commodity design) (Perelman, 2002; Terranova, 2000).