Abstract
Few things are more important to capitalism than worker productivity. Economists track it obsessively as a sign of the health of the workforce, and governments use it to project future economic decisions. But productivity is also something that, especially in some professional circles, many people aspire to. How did productivity become such a central part of the professionalized self? And in a time when even salaried knowledge workers are being buffeted by the winds of economic insecurity—when so many careers are not a 9-to-5 climb up the corporate ladder—what does it mean to search for productivity now? Productive toward what end?
In Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy, Melissa Gregg traces continuities and transformations in American time management discourse from its industrial roots to today’s productivity apps. This book is a kind of prequel to Gregg’s first book, Work’s Intimacy (2011), which documented how Australian professionals create moral order out of the technological pressures to be “always on.” Following these insights backward in time, Counterproductive explores the history of productivity’s “moral appeal” (p. 9).
Counterproductive begins in familiar territory—the story of Scientific Management. Alongside the usual tour of the ideas of Frederick Taylor, Frank Gilbreth, and Elton Mayo, the book focuses on the often-silenced ideas of women intellectuals who pioneered domestic management science in the early twentieth century and the women workers who were the experimental subjects of early industrial management. Mining archival material that rarely gets attention, Lillian Gilbreth, for example, is shown not to be a sideshow to the main event of her husband Frank’s motion studies, but a major force in developing ideas around domestic service worker management—ideas that are arguably more important than the history of industrial thought for understanding professional labor today. When we use a smartphone app to delegate routine tasks to a digital assistant, Gregg shows, we are recreating, through technical means, notions of productivity from early domestic science, which streamlined elite housewives’ work time by shunting mundane tasks to those lower in the class and racial hierarchy. Seemingly novel technologies like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which allows elite tech workers to train algorithms by offloading boring work to underpaid contractors in developing countries, look a lot less innovative when seen through this lens.
Gregg is a social scientist working at Intel, so part of the appeal of Counterproductive is to see historical reflexivity about technology from someone inside Silicon Valley. Drawing from market research and user design conducted for Intel, Gregg explores the tight links between old-fashioned self-help books from productivity gurus, such as the Getting Things Done series, and the sea of email applications, note-taking assistants, and task managers that flood the app store. A key insight is that both old and new time-management tools are not just about ascetic self-discipline—a common observation in Weberian accounts—but also about constructing an aesthetic in everyday life that Gregg describes, following Peter Sloterdijk, as “athletic.” Time management is “a form of training through which workers become capable of the ever more daring acts of solitude and ruthlessness necessary to produce career competence” (p. 54). Using athletic metaphors, productivity tools can produce a beautiful feeling of narcissistic perfectionism through feats of asociality—shutting other people out in order to overcome one’s exhausting to-do list. When this is done successfully, it delivers a peculiarly capitalist experience of freedom: the freedom to do more work.
The social costs of being seduced by productivity culture are, of course, huge. Productivity tools depoliticize the workplace by making stress and time pressure the worker’s fault, rather than pointing to structural causes. In individualizing productivity, then, time-management discourse also individualizes resistance to productivity. In a surprising turn, Counterproductive investigates one of the least understood trends in “anti-productivity” culture: mindfulness meditation. Particularly in Silicon Valley, meditation is the latest way to “hack” your brain so that you can be productive but also maintain your professional cool by learning how to slow down and be more present. Gregg examines the expanding genre of mindfulness apps, such as patches that track your brainwaves to tell you if you are not being calm enough. She observes that meditation, taken out of the context of the dharma, has an elective affinity with the athleticism of neoliberal workplaces, which require emotional stability in the face of repeated job transitions and bouts of overwork. This cooptation of meditation undercuts what may be potentially revolutionary about Buddhist practice: “to curate a state of non-striving, a deflation of the heroic ego that Western competitive capitalism typically celebrates” (p. 122). Productivity culture seems to transform a method for deconstructing ego into its opposite—yet another achievement tool.
Given productivity culture’s isolating, depoliticizing, and ego-inflating structure, Gregg wonders if there may be signs of a shift away from these values. She considers the rise of co-working spaces, which provide offices and amenities to otherwise unaffiliated contractors, freelancers, and entrepreneurs. Again drawing on data gathered for Intel, Gregg finds that the new wave of gig workers seems to be rediscovering the value of place and community in these spaces. Unlike traditional offices, coworking spaces are about rejecting the straightjacket of a 9-to-5, career-based temporal structure and embracing a kind of productivity that comes from the serendipity of connecting with others in an aesthetically pleasing space. There is something good about being physically present and connected face to face. This may signal a shifting preference, Gregg argues, from narcissistic careers to “atmospheres for social connection outside the temporal dictates of the organization” (p. 132). Access to these spaces, which are often expensive because they are so decadently appointed, is deeply unequal, however, and Gregg worries about their potential to transform anything fundamental about neoliberalism. At the same time, they signal something interesting about how the gig economy may be reshaping productivity discourse.
Counterproductive is an important example of how some of the most creative research in the sociology of work is being conducted inside tech companies. At the same time, the book sometimes skirts topics of intense interest to sociologists. Though it focuses on the spiritual dimension of productivity, for example, it makes only passing connection to Weber. How does the turn to quasi-Buddhist practices connect to the history of the Protestant ethic and conversations around the “new” spirit of capitalism? More curious is the book’s conclusion, which outlines eight “principles for post-work productivity” that can “move our aspirations . . . from the corporate to the collective interest” and prioritize “practices of selflessness and care” (p. 138). This is a laudable vision shared by many sociologists, but the book does not engage with the many existing concrete proposals for achieving it. How ought we to think about universal basic income, collective organizing among gig workers, platform cooperativism, or policy ideas that constrain the tech companies pioneering exploitative productivity? How might companies such as Intel reimagine disruption, automation, fast failure, and risk in ways that are more responsible in an age of massive economic inequality? Given that Gregg has compellingly addressed these questions in her popular writing, the lack of engagement in this more academic text was noticeable.
If you have ever felt simultaneously thrilled and disgusted with yourself at mastering your to-do list, Counterproductive can help explain why. It is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to explore the cultural meanings of today’s technological tools for managing our time and, ultimately, ourselves.