Boredom and Organization Studies

Introduction – Or: The Triumph of the Cuckoo Clock

There are water clocks, fire clocks, incense clocks, hourglasses, sundials, even flower clocks, the latter telling time by following the rhythm with which some plants raise their leaves during the day and let them droop down during the night. Yet, I am fairly sure, no catalogue of timepieces includes anything like the cuckoo clock that Donald F. Roy imagines in his classic study ‘Banana time: job satisfaction and informal interaction’ (1959). Roy’s clock fights boredom. Unlike other clocks, it does not measure time, but rather reacts to it. With the sound of alarm and protest, its announcements challenge the temporality of the industrial process that makes time appear given, mechanical, invariant and independent. To Roy, who is studying a group of machine operators in a garment factory in New York, the announcements of the imaginary cuckoo clock work to break up the wearisome, extra-long working hours, and set in motion an array of informal interactions that effectively, as Roy puts it, gentle the ‘beast of boredom…to the harmlessness of a kitten’ (Roy, 1959, p. 164). I do not think there could be a better image of the subtle relationship between boredom, organization and human temporality, which I would like to explore in this essay.

In boredom, time appears to stand still, unable to pass. The German word for boredom, Langeweile, captures the experience nicely, literally meaning ‘a long while’. As Jack Barbalet (1999) has explained, it is the subjective experience of absence of meaning to an activity that promotes this consciousness of time as an empty interval. So in cases like Roy’s, boredom arises ‘from the non-coincidence of two durations, that of the work, which is slow and irksome, and that of the mind which longs to be elsewhere’ (Barbalet, 1999, p. 637). The experience in boredom of time as given, invariant and reified, in other words, is the result of a perceived loss of meaning and of the concurrent experience of activities or circumstances as meaningless.

The perception in boredom of a particular situation as meaningless registers as a kind of restless dissatisfaction, an agitated protest that reacts against this loss. Boredom may be viewed in terms of passivity; but it may also be explained in terms of the fidgeting, doodling, shuffling activity of both mind and body that it causes and which the announcements of Roy’s cuckoo clock come to signify. In his study, the boredom caused by the monotonous and repetitive labour leads the industrial workers to come up with the series of different ‘times’ throughout the workday – informal forms of social interaction – that they use to break up the working hours. The ‘banana time’ of the title refers to a point each morning when a banana stolen from a lunchbox becomes the object of interplay. Herein lays the triumph of Roy’s cuckoo clock. Not only does it signify a protest against the loss of meaning taking place in the industrial process, it also signifies the triumph of the subjective and social processes that create meaning, where none is found and lead to new, alternative forms of organizing.

In this essay I am interested in boredom as a loss of meaning, but also as a creative, if often destructive, protest against this loss, and I want to understand how this bipolarity – and the relationship between the two features in it – can teach us something about organization. I mean to suggest something that may at first sound provocative: that there exists a subtle, but nonetheless fundamental, affinity between boredom and the processes of organization. With this I am not trying to dispute that valuable things can be learned from studying the negative corollaries of boredom in organization as most organizational research in boredom has done (for a review of this literature, see Loukido, Loan-Clarke, & Daniels, 2009). But I am suggesting that pushing forward towards an understanding of organization through an interpretation of boredom and its history may tell us something essential about what organizing is as an activity. This is not an easy task; boredom has a tendency to hide in its causes and to escape with its a/effects, it is an evasive and elusive matter. Walter Benjamin famously describes it as ‘the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience’ and adds that a ‘rustling in the leaves drives him away’ (Benjamin, 1969, p. 91). And yet, boredom shares with any process of organization a fundamental question, which every child knows how to ask: What shall we do now? Any adult will remember the spells of boredom that sometimes punctuated childhood life and the severity with which such spells prompted us to do something. Like the act of organizing, boredom begins in a state of suspended anticipation in which some things are started, but nothing really begins. It is in moments like these, when we, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has put it, are ‘both waiting for something and looking for something’ (Phillips, 1994, p. 68) that boredom can talk to us about organization, and organization about boredom.

To orient the discussion I make three arguments. First, I will argue, even if people may always have been bored, ‘boredom’ is not a universal feature of human existence. Rather it is a culturally and historically contingent construct that arises in Western culture along with the management and organization of time. Boredom emerges as a new way of feeling, associated with modern temporal regimes. Secondly, if boredom is not a universal feature of human life, then the ability to experience it is an acquired capacity. While everyone may be bored from time to time, those capable of boredom are those who have learned to tell and endure time in an organized way. This extends from reading a clock to applying oneself in an organized and productive manner. Finally, I want to take up the protest in boredom against the loss of meaning that this application infers. Boredom, as I have already indicated, is associated with a loss of meaning and as such it may be similar to contemporary organizational pathologies like alienation or depression. But the loss of meaning that registers in boredom is perceived and lived as a lack of something that potentially leads to new forms of organizing. I say potentially because boredom often merely disappears into the kind of distractions that may lead to new forms of organized productivity (becoming more avid consumers or more zealous advocates of illusion), or that may just be malicious and destructive. But as I would like to show, the imperative in boredom towards meaning also indicates a potential for change and transformation that grows out of life as it is lived. Boredom, as the fallow ground of existence, is in other words also the source of new possibilities.

The Roots of Boredom in the Artificial Administration of Time

In most places, including organizational research, boredom is defined in fairly universal terms: for example, as an unpleasant transient affective state, marked by a lack of interest and a failure to concentrate (Fisher, 1993), a state of low arousal and dissatisfaction (Mikulas & Vodanovich, 1993) or as a response to a challenge for which the individual is over-skilled (Csikszentmihályi, 1974). Also literary sources seem to suggest that boredom is a universal feature of human existence. Consider for example the following passage from the work of Aristophanes (ca. 450–385 BCE):

I groan, I yawn … I stretch, I fart,

I don’t know what to do. I write, I pull my hair, I figure things out

As I look into the country, longing for peace… (quoted in Toohey, 2004, p. 107)

It is hard not to associate all the yawning, stretching and farting, which goes on in Aristophanes’ description of someone waiting for the Athenian assembly to begin, with boredom. The symptoms are common enough: the feeling that time is long and will not pass; the impression that everything is always the same, as if the experience itself captures a snapshot of eternity; a bodily restlessness that becomes a sudden urge to yawn, an itch that will not be satisfied, overwhelming sleepiness; the daydreaming that forces attention away from what it was supposed to be directed at; and perhaps the urge to do something else without knowing exactly what that might be.

And yet, while its symptoms may indeed be as old as humankind itself, the cultural construct of boredom is not universal. Even if what Aristophanes’ protagonist tells us undeniably sounds like boredom, he never speaks of boredom. This is because ‘boredom’ as we know it is a fairly recent phenomenon. Like organization studies, it emerges out of the industrial processes that equate time with money and the command of time with progress. As a phenomenon of any magnitude, in other words, boredom belongs to modernity.

The rise of boredom is the rise of a conflict associated with the artificial administration of time. While this conflict arises as a distinct malady around the 19th century, it has its roots in the gradual historical emergence of a conscience of human beings as subjects of organization. One early example of this is found in ancient texts about military strategy. Much of the life of a soldier – in ancient Greece as anywhere else – is spent waiting, and boredom remains an uneasy companion of the military forces everywhere, even today (e.g. Maeland & Brunstad, 2009). Unoccupied soldiers are a hazard, prone to frustration and weakened by inactivity. In texts on military strategy, the term alus (literally meaning ‘alienation’ or ‘otherness’) appears as a reference to the frustrated feeling that flourished among soldiers forced to wait between battles. Alus is perhaps the first historical example of something similar to the private, abstract emotion and inner state that we know as boredom.

Another, later example from the Middle Ages is found in the conflict between human temporality and the artificial regulation of time taking place in the administrative injunctions of the Christian church. Most commentators see in the capital sin of acedia (Greek: ‘carelessness’) a direct connection with the phenomenon we know as boredom today (e.g. Goodstein, 2005; Svendsen, 2005). In The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (1960), the historian Sigfried Wenzel has carefully documented the different meanings and aspects of this sin and its relation with the power of the Orders – the Benedictine Regula – to secure the coherence of monastic life. As an early example of temporal regulation, the book of precepts known as St. Benedict’s Rule organized the monastic day into regular and scheduled periods of communal and private prayer, sleep, spiritual reading and manual labour – ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus – ‘that in all [things] God may be glorified’ (Herberman, 1913). The mortal sin of acedia – or the noonday demon as it was also known – ensued from the failure to follow the rules made to secure due order, with distraction, laziness and idleness – in short with the failure to apply oneself virtuously to the monastic regulations of the church:

The demon of acedia … is the most burdensome of all the demons. It besets the monk at about the fourth hour of the morning (10 am), encircling his soul until about the eighth hour (2 pm). First it makes the sun seem to slow down or stop moving, so that the day appears to be fifty hours long. Then it makes the monk keep looking out of his window and forces him to go bounding out of his cell to examine the sun to see how much longer it is to three o’clock, and to look round in all directions in case any of the brethren is there. Then it makes him hate the place and his way of life and his manual work. It makes him … think that there is no charity left among the brethren; that no one is going to come and visit him. (Evagrius, 2003, p. 93)

I think this forceful account, given by a fourth-century monk, who travelled around the Cenobite communities in the desert of Alexandria, illustrates very well how closely the sin of acedia was associated with the horarium and with the artificial regulation of time. Not for nothing was acedia thought of as demonic possession (Agamben, 1993; Rosenberg, 2008). To the afflicted monk, the time of the daily chores appeared endlessly long, making him hate the place he found himself in. He began to feel disdain for the brethren, and impatiently started complaining that his work brought him no spiritual joy or rapture. Today we would no doubt say that the monk was suffering from boredom. But to the monk the demon of acedia made the manual labour and the communal tasks appear meaningless – a waste of time and at the very best a diversion from the inner possibilities of his calling. To the church his behaviour simply meant a failure to observe the sanctity of labour. If he hated his daily chores, it was not a signal that he longed to serve a higher spiritual purpose. It was a sign that he was unable to fulfil his vocation within the administrative order of the community.

When boredom emerged during industrialization as a malady of nearly epidemic proportions, it had shed itself of religious connotations and was no longer confined to the moral injunctions of the church. The English word ‘boredom’ is a neologism, which came into use sometime during the 18th century. Whilst words for boredom in other languages – the Danish kedsomhed, the French ennui, the German Langeweile, the Italian la noia – are older than that, it was not until the 19th century that they came to refer to approximately the same thing (Goodstein, 2005; Svendsen, 2005; Wangh, 1975). What they referred to was a specific kind of social suffering that associated the passing of time with the subjective experience of meaninglessness. The history of boredom, in other words, is the history of the gradual emergence and ‘interiorization’ of feelings that have come to be such common features of human existence that we find it hard to see beyond them. It is the history of a new way of feeling closely associated with the coming into being of the processes of organization that artificially administrate human temporality. Boredom, in this respect, is not a universal phenomenon. It arises historically together with the modern organization as a lived experience of the keying of human existence into the precision of what Georg Simmel called the ‘super-subjective temporal schema’ of clock time (Goodstein, 2005, p. 6). Insofar as the great, classical theories of organization are also theories about the human being, the phenomenon of boredom and the study of organization are closely connected.

Learning to be Bored: Boredom and the Subject of Organization

Boredom, as already suggested, is not a universal feature of human existence. It is the experience of the one who fails to find purpose and to make sense of the artificial administration of time in the processes of organization. Boredom, in other words, is the result of a failure to tell and to endure time in an organized manner. To tell time here means more than merely the ability to read a clock; it pertains to the little piece of organizational wisdom that things take their time and that this is a circumstance, which has to be endured with great care and vigilance by those who wish to make something of themselves. Rather than a universal feeling, boredom emerged historically together with the disciplining of the so-called ‘civilized’, who impatiently and eagerly expected their fellow human beings to finally redeem their human potential in a timely manner.

Few have described the importance of this capacity for time-telling as forcefully as Immanuel Kant, of whom it was said that he maintained throughout his life a regimen so severe that people could set their clocks according to his daily walk. In the section on boredom from his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (2006), Kant introduces two characters, who both in their own way fail at time-telling. Kant begins by mocking an English nobleman, whom he explains, reacts to the ‘tick-tock’ pain of being driven forward in life, and to the ‘frightening arduousness of boredom to anyone who is attentive to his life and to time’ (Kant et al., 2006, p. 128) by throwing himself into every new form of enjoyment and form of consumption that he can think of. In the end nothing is new to him any longer. As someone in Paris said, Kant dryly remarks, the English will even ‘hang themselves in order to pass time’ (p. 129). It is hard to imagine a more severe failure at time-telling than this.

Even if the failure of the second character has more to do with oblivion than with attention, ‘the Carib’, who Kant mentions in a curious footnote, is no better off than the English aristocrat. Because of his inborn lifelessness, Kant suggests, he is incapable of boredom. Unlike the ‘cultivated human beings’, he can sit around for hours with his fishing rod without catching anything. This ‘thoughtlessness’, Kant further explains – in his culturally typical colonial thoughtlessness – is because of the lack of incentive to activity to which he is subject (p. 129; note 5). For both the aristocrat and the Carib, in other words, there is an incapacity to tell time properly. Because one fights against the boredom of routine and the other is indifferent to it, both fail to cultivate the forces that drive life forward and makes it worth living. This failure at time-telling is thus associated with the failure to manage, organize and apply oneself in life in the most productive way.

In the so-called ‘cultivated human beings’ to whom Kant refers, the skill it takes to tell time and cultivate life is thus an acquired one. As Kant says, turning to the young of his generation with an exhortation:

…being satiated produces that disgusting state that makes life itself a burden for the spoiled human being … – Young man! (I repeat) get fond of work; deny yourself enjoyments, not to renounce them, but rather to keep them always in perspective as far as possible! (p. 132)

The impulse and appetite that drives life forward is painful. But it can be cultivated through the process of learning to love and endure work, and to appreciate the organization of needs that this presupposes in order to put life in perspective. Boredom, as Kant would have it, is an inversion of this capacity for cultivation as it collapses on itself; it is the failure to organize existence by enduring the time which it takes to become a ‘cultivated’ human being. The time that one takes, but does not cultivate, in Kant’s eyes is simply wasted and boredom is a warning against this.

There lies in Kant’s association of boredom with time-telling and cultivation an important insight for further development. For the subject that he speaks of here to which time is of the essence, obviously, is also the subject of the modern work organization. It is the ‘human resource’, which – like time itself – during the 19th century became a commodity of the production process. On several occasions, John Hassard (1991, 2002) has described the making of this subject, and the temporal commodification that arises with it from the conflict in industrialized societies between the temporality of the worker and the industrial pace in time-based organizational technologies. As Hassard (2002) points out, the focal point here is the temporal structuring that becomes the central feature of planning and training as labour is separated from the varied rhythms of craft or agricultural work. The worker of this organization is gradually coaxed and nudged into a world where time is money and money is accrued through extracting more time from his labour than is invested in the production of goods. This ‘linear-quantitative’ tradition of temporal structuring, as Hassard names it (2002, p. 886), reflects the time-based technologies that came into use in the wake of industrialization and mechanization.

The severity of the training that it takes for anyone to aspire to such time-telling skills and its effects is brilliantly described in Heart of Darkness (1899), Joseph Conrad’s novel about the exploitation by European trade companies of the African continent. Here Conrad’s alter ego, the seaman Charles Marlow, introduces a fireman, who has been trained and given the task of maintaining the boiler on board the steamboat that carries Marlow into the heart of darkness. If Kant’s Carib was incapable of boredom, simply because he was found to be ‘outside’ the kind of time that drives ‘civilized’ people forward in life, Conrad’s ‘savage’ is well on his way in (literally to the heart of darkness) and is learning as he goes along. As Marlow explains, he:

was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hindlegs … He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful because he had been instructed; (Conrad, 2002, p. 74)

Conrad’s native-cum-fireman may still belong on the bank of those who have not yet learned to be bored. But, by now an ‘improved specimen’, he is making progress. He has already learned to apply himself fully to the rhythm of the machine that supposedly he controls. His usefulness lies in the way he has been instructed – a ridiculous hybrid, who is now in thrall to the strange witchcraft of the machine that he works at. Conrad’s genius lies not only in his description of the vile and racist methods of the colonizing powers; it also lies, I think, in his subtle insinuation that it is the ‘strange witchcraft’ of the machine, which these powers brought with them, that harbours the real heart of darkness. Marlow himself, Conrad informs us at the end of the novel, is telling his story to his listeners back in industrialized England just to pass time before the swelling of the Thames seems to lead the travel companions into ‘the heart of an immense darkness’ (Conrad, 2002, p. 162). This is the darkness of the emphasis on maximum specialization in industrialized labour that Taylor struggled with (Locke, 1982) and that later became the focus for Mayo, Roethlisberger and others in the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory (e.g. O’Connor, 1999). Both the colonized and the colonizers suffered from the changes to the temporal structure of experience that resulted from the organizing rhythms of mechanization, and which rendered the individual’s sense of time empty and meaningless.

When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations (1792) he probably knew nothing of boredom (as already mentioned, the term first became fashionable in the mid-19th century), but his principles of the division of labour are full of fascination with the strange witchcraft of machines and its organizational impact. He was adamant in his critique of the persistence of older preindustrial behaviours in industrial work. A country weaver for example loses time, Smith argues, (or ‘saunters a little’ as he more elegantly puts it) in the passage between his loom, his field and his loom again. It is this kind of ‘busy idleness’ that makes him incapable of vigorous application; but when his different trades can be carried out in the same workhouse, time is saved (Smith, 2007 pp. 5f.; see also Bakken, Holt, & Zundel, 2013). Moreover, Smith argues, anyone who has been lucky enough to visit a workshop where the division of labour has been implemented will frequently have been shown the ‘very pretty machines’ that have been invented by workers who, ‘being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing [their work]’. Smith gives the example of a boy, who, like Conrad’s fireman, is working a steam engine. He has tied a piece of string to the machine, allowing him to handle the valve automatically. This innovation, as Smith puts it, leaves the boy, who loved to play, ‘the liberty to divert himself with his play-fellows’ (2007, p. 6).

There is something oddly naïve, I think, in Smith’s assumption that the time which the little boy saves on his work task will go into playing. For like Conrad’s fireman, the boy is an ‘improved specimen’ – in thrall to the new technologies of temporal administration that keep the machines going, always at the highest level of their output. At best, the ingenuity of the boy’s invention is absorbed into the self-same form of organization that it was designed to escape – and the machine is literally growing. At worst it is just another waste of time to be done away with from a managerial perspective. Strangely enough – given the quote above – Smith does appear to recognize the devastating effect that his time management principles can have on the life of the common worker:

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. (Smith, 2007, p. 506)

It is hard not to see in these words an inversion of the Kantian idea of labour as a force of cultivation. The boredom that arises as an epidemic mass phenomenon in the European cities of the 19th century is deeply associated with the tragedy of alienated labour and with the futility and pointlessness of any kind of mental involvement that this kind of labour comes to signify. The stupidity and ignorance of the workers that Smith acknowledges as a risk in organized labour is the result of the experienced dissociation of the individual from the series of instrumental ends that make out the organizing process. Boredom, in this respect, is not a passing fancy; it is a name for the loss of meaning in the everyday activities that make out the fabric of a meaningful life. As such it arises in Western culture as the self-paced rhythms of cultivation are gradually replaced by the empty, linear-quantitative ticking of clock time and its infinitely exploitable future.

It has been suggested that the term ‘boredom’ etymologically is a figurative extension of the verb ‘to bore’ meaning ‘to drill’. If that is so, then the devastating dynamic of telling and enduring time that arises with organized labour reveals at least two kinds of ‘boring machines’. There are of course industrial machines like the ones that Roy’s workers operate, which produce actual, physical holes. But there are also the inner boring machines that grow in proportion with the way the first are perfected. The holes drilled by these machines represent the devastating existential effects of the introduction of clock time in organizational life. The decisive characteristic of this negative or ‘naked’ time, as Michael Theunissen (1991) has called it, is its abstract objectivity and its alienation from the subject. It is a purely formal arrangement of linear time as it is divided into discrete and numerable units that exist only as empty fragments with no natural or historical content – holes that in their separation from each other are organized so that they are impossible to tell apart. The linear progress of these undistinguishable units produces the dismaying experience of the eternal recurrence of the same, so that all time appears to be doing is endlessly reproducing itself. Boredom in this respect is what ensues when lived time is stripped bare of qualitative experiences, and what remains is experience without qualities – the frightening vertigo of time in its pure facticity.

Boredom, Work and the Imperative Towards Meaning

Ennui. Do you know it? Not that common, banal ennui that comes from laziness or illness, but that modern ennui that gnaws at a man’s entrails and makes an intelligent being into a walking shadow, a thinking phantom. (Flaubert, 1884)

In the Middle Ages, Evagrius and his fellow monks found it necessary to distinguish between simple kinds of carelessness, for which Latin had several terms (Rosenberg, 2008, p. 3), and the more severe condition specific to the monastic context that became known by the Greek term acedia. Again, in the 19th century, a similar kind of borrowing took place as the British adopted the French term for boredom, ennui, in order to designate the special and powerful malady that spread like a scourge through the salons and gradually also the workshops and offices of industrialized society. Today, in social critique, boredom appears as an index of profound malaise associated with the usual suspects of modernization (e.g. Anderson, 2004; Goodstein, 2005; Healy, 1984; Highmore, 2002; Klapp, 1986; Spacks, 1995). These examples all suggest that boredom is not some primitive or innate emotion in humans, but is the result of historically contingent organizations of society. They also suggest that if boredom is still spreading today, it is as the by-product of a rationality derived from the dictates of technology, work and productivity, rather than a fleeting experience of having nothing to do. We may say that when we are bored, we have ‘nothing to do’. But in reality, boredom rather designates the experience that even if all kinds of things could be done, there is nothing in particular that is worth doing. Everything may be possible – but nothing in particular makes sense.

In organizational research, the awareness of an association between boredom and the experience of meaninglessness in life and work is longstanding (e.g. Fisher, 1987, 1993; Game, 2007; Gemmill and Oakley, 1992; Loukido et al., 2009). It is suggested here that boredom may be more widespread than ever. One survey identifies that as many as a third of Britons claim to be bored at work every day, with the proportion growing in the financial services sector to 50% (DDI, 2004). In most such studies, boredom is the central experiential component of the loss of meaning that ensues as the educational levels of the workforce, and the use of technology to routinize working practices, increase at the same time. When the skills of workers exceed the requirements of their jobs, the absence of intrinsically rewarding activity generates boredom. Such a way of understanding boredom is sound from a work organizational point of view. Still, the technocratic logic of it is truly paradoxical. In reality, the combination of technology and skills ought to free up time for the individual and encourage qualitatively different experiences. And yet, perhaps as a reflection of what Theodor Adorno has called ‘the atrophy of the imagination’ (1991, p. 192), the logic today remains accurate in an organizational culture, where work is a compulsion, and people appear to be losing the ability to develop their own interests beyond the sphere of work – to make time for themselves. Google’s Innovation Time Off program may allow employees to develop their own projects during working hours to enhance creativity and innovation, but like with the notion of ‘organizational slack’ (Lawson, 2001), the ultimate goal of such strategies is still to enhance productivity within the organizational framework, rather than imagining alternatives beyond it.

Nearly two centuries ago, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard made a philosophical connection between the artificial administration of human temporality and the loss of meaning in boredom that reflects this logic. According to Kierkegaard, the most boring people are ‘the busiest workers of all, those whirring insects with their bustling buzzing’ (Kierkegaard, 2000, p. 54). To Kierkegaard, rather than a passive form of resignation, boredom is equally a failure of imagination and a source of frantic activity. It leads people to believe that they can understand themselves with human resources and as human resources alone (McDonald, 2009, p. 62). In the busyness of work, Kierkegaard thus saw an organizational logic with roots in the beginnings of human history, accentuating what people do. Boredom, as he puts it in a curious, alternative version of the Genesis:

…can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore, they created human beings. Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of the population. (2000, p. 51)

As the driving force in a world where sameness alternates only with more of the same and nothing grows of its own accord, the activity of boredom – rather than idleness, as the saying normally goes – was to Kierkegaard the ‘root of all evil’ (Kierkegaard, 2000, p. 54).

Perhaps the boredom that spreads today is also more closely associated with activity than with resignation. Contemporary work activities are no longer exclusively tied to the workplace, but are gradually annexing leisure time and even temporal intervals like waiting time, travel time and time in-between happenings that used to be worthless in any economic sense of the word only a few decades ago. Social technologies work with ‘big data’ to align subjects with specific consumption practices, focused on capturing the pre-rational affect of attention, rather than that of rational choice. As people, from early school age to retirement age, gradually become more entangled in their individually engineered profiles on social networks, corporations like Apple, Facebook or Twitter are designing ‘workplaces’ within workplaces, where people generate value for these organizations without giving it a thought, while at the same time being at work for others. A platform like Facebook is no doubt good for many things; and yet, it is difficult to pinpoint what exactly it is for. Precisely this diffuseness serves to functionalize and reintegrate the primitive, pre-cognitive impulse of interest into a logic of organization centred on economic advantage. What should constitute the use of free time in such contexts is thus tending toward its opposite and is becoming a parody of itself (Adorno, 1991, p. 188). In reality, the early internet metaphor of the free and elegant ‘surfer’ cutting across and riding the digital waves of the world wide web could easily be replaced by the image of the notoriously bored passenger of a cruise ship, who works her way across the online sea like a tourist with the blind, clamorous enthusiasm of the like-button, never leaving the micro-cosmic comfort zone of the individually designed profile, and reaching out to others only to satiate a hunger for the new and the interesting.

In A Philosophy of Boredom (2005), Lars Svendsen has noted how modernity valorizes ‘the interesting’, implying that every element of life and experience must have personal value. In life, as well as in work, being interesting and looking for the interesting constitutes an existential burden and an often insurmountable task. This challenge is reflected in the counterparts of boredom in the motivation theories that seek to render the flow of everyday life harmoniously self-forgetting to the state of unconsciousness (e.g. Csikszentmihályi, 1974). In such a light, boredom is exclusively associated with a separation of drive and satisfaction, with resistance and obstruction of authority. The German sociologist Wolf Lepenies once suggested that the trigger of the series of civil wars in France between 1648 and 1653, known as the Fronde, was boredom at court, caused by the collapse of the king’s system of etiquette (Lepenies, 1992, p. 127). According to a German newspaper, even the happenings in Paris in May 1968 were explained on a flyleaf with the words: France was bored (FAZ, 1968). In organizational research, the negative corollaries of boredom in organizational life illustrate how the bored vehemently and often at great costs turn against the organizational prescription. Boredom arguably leads to alcohol abuse (Ames & Cunradi, 2004), work strain (Matthews et al, 2000), counterproductive behaviour (Bruursema, Kessler, & Spector, 2011; Spector et al., 2006); accidents and injuries (Frone, 1998), lower job performance (O’Hanlon, 1981), stress (Broadbent & Gath, 1979) and depression (Wiesner, Windle, & Freeman, 2005) – just to name some of the documented effects. Such examples all associate boredom with irrationalism and destruction, rather than with meaning.

And yet, it is also precisely this active side of boredom that reveals its latent emancipatory possibilities. Even if the way that boredom superimposes itself on the apparent harmony and inalterability of the given may often be lost to the distractions of consumerism, and to the alienated arbitrariness of social pathology, it is also here that its moments of genuine insight potentially reside. Boredom contains a dynamic element, a protest, which is often muted by its destructive effects, thus obscuring the role that it has in reactive formations of meaning. In his work, Jack Barbalet has focused on what he calls the ‘imperative toward meaning’ in boredom (1999, p. 633). He suggests that rather than being the cause of ailments like depression, boredom can be said to act as an emotional bulwark and safeguard against such conditions. Barbalet’s argument is that boredom, along with the loss of meaning, produces in the person who experiences it a disposition towards finding or constructing meaning, either in the meaningless activities themselves or in other activities. Boredom, as he puts it, ‘is a restless and irritable feeling which sets in train a process leading to curiosity, invention and associated activities in which … meaningfulness in activity and circumstance are sought’ (Barbalet, 1999, p. 641). In itself such restlessness may of course do little more than provide shelter from some of the brutalities and anxieties that comprise modern life – for example by boring us, rather than making us depressed. Indeed, Martin Heidegger famously distinguished between different levels of boredom, an everyday kind belonging to the man on the street, and a deeper and more ‘authentic’ boredom only accessible to those (like himself) who dared to think beyond the everydayness of experience to the depths of Being (Heidegger, 1995). In reality, though, the role of boredom in the foundation of meaning in everyday life has little to do with such heroic individualism. As Henri Lefebvre has argued, the everyday is not inherently ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’, but instead represents the existential terrain on which human feelings, intentions and pleasures are gradually realized in a process of ‘authentication’ (Gardiner, 2012). Boredom points to the transformative possibilities implied in such a process. At its meaningful core, it may be taken to signify a profound, lived experience of the possibility that things could actually be different. As a flash into the historical possibilities embedded in the totality of being, the lived experience of boredom, once stripped of its distractions, in this light can be viewed as a manifestation of utopian possibilities (Gardiner, 2004). Such possibilities cannot be disentangled from the activities of everyday life, but must rather be seen to grow out of their particularity. The imperative towards meaning that resides in boredom works with whatever is available to it. Consider, for example, the recent news story of a great-grandmother, 76, in Crewe, Cheshire, who was repeatedly arrested for shoplifting. Over the last four years the elderly lady, according to her probation officer, had acquired the conviction record of ‘a heroin addict in his late teens’ (Telegraph, 2014). Using her bus pass, she had travelled around two counties to town centres, where store detectives had repeatedly picked her up. Her explanation was that even if she knew it was wrong, she kept doing it anyway, because she was bored of being old and lonely. In this example, boredom acts as a painful reminder of how lonely growing old can be. But it also represents a forceful insight into the potency of the disposition as it lays bare how things are and struggles to create meaning out of whatever means is available to it. What has, for some reason or other, lost its meaning is then replaced, not by something entirely novel, but by meaningful alternatives that come from within the first, drawing on resources that are already present in the situation. The recurrent, informal interactions of Donald Roy’s clicking workers offer a similar example of how people take matters into their own hands and create alternative and meaningful forms of organizing, when whatever they are doing appears meaningless.

A renewed interest in boredom in organization studies could take its beginning in the emotional imperative towards meaningfulness implied by such examples to explore the way that boredom contributes to the foundations of social transformation and genuine change in organization. Boredom may undoubtedly, as I have shown above, be a cause of subjective suffering associated with the artificiality of organizational temporality. In this manner it is not unlike other social pathologies that characterize contemporary organizational life, like alienation or depression. But unlike alienation, that as a totalizing concept tends to focus on the structural determinants of meaninglessness and malaise (Barbalet, 1999), and also unlike depression that signals a fundamental loss of meaning (Johnsen, 2009), boredom allows us to illuminate the slow and often irksome processes by which human needs in organizational life gradually become desires and rise to the surface of everyday life. Boredom, as Adam Phillips (1994) has pointed out, returns desire to its own possibilities. In this, it reveals a sudden richness and a genuine possibility to anyone who is willing to listen, which points beyond the apparent triviality of the organization of human experiences. Here it emerges as a reminder of the fertility and the extraordinary power concealed in the apparent banality of ordinariness. The power harboured by boredom – and herein lies its lesson for organization studies – is one that insists on such particularity and calls for its meaningful resurrection in the midst of the ambiguous and often abstract textures that make out the social organization of everyday life.