Abstract
In his canonized and subsequently disparaged The Principles of Scientific Management, Frederick Taylor wrote that “underworking,” which means “deliberately working slowly so as to avoid doing a full day’s work . . . constitutes the greatest evil with which the working-people of both England and America are now afflicted” (Taylor, 1919, pp. 13–14). Whereas such “underworking” can be seen as forthright workplace sabotage, in his example-rich monograph Roland Paulsen (2014) turns our attention to the many forms of empty labor. Defining empty labor as “everything you do at work that is not your work” (p. 5), Paulsen highlights the pervasiveness of this “unrecognized type of resistance against work” (p. 1): Finnish employees report spending 2.3 hours of their workday, on average, engaged in private activities on the Internet; 70% of all online purchases in the United States are made in the hours between 9 am and 5 pm; and, 52% of surveyed US employees cite Web-surfing as the “#1 distraction at work.” One particular media scandal, which provides an extreme example of idleness in the workplace, will spark the imagination of anyone reading Paulsen’s book. The much-publicized 2012 scandal involved a German civil servant who, upon retirement, composed a farewell e-mail message to his colleagues and wrote: “Since 1998, I was present but not really there. So I’m going to be well prepared for retirement—Adieu” (p. 120). The civil servant, who continued to detail that for his 14 years of nonwork-at-work he earned €745,000, expressed no regret for his salaried idleness once it was made public but rather challenged his critics by stating that it was not his problem if his employers did not make use of his services, thus exemplifying what Paulsen consequently defines as involuntary slacking. The ubiquity of rarely censured empty labor has spurred Paulsen to consider how thought and emotion “strike back” at the oppressive power of workplace structures or how life infiltrates work.
For Paulsen, empty labor is workplace resistance, and idleness while at work is organizational misbehavior, even if, given the prevalence of empty work, it seems strange to consider cyberloafing “deviant” behavior (2014, p. 116). Nevertheless, empty labor violates the social contract of paid labor, which is based on the exchange of work for a salary, with time as the estimation of productivity and the basis for calculating the rate of such exchange. Indeed, idleness is taboo because the workplace is ideationally all about productive engagement with work-related tasks. This normative taboo means that “successful time appropriation cannot be openly rebellious” (p. 148) and produces countless slang terms that convey the idea of empty labor without actually confessing idleness in the workplace. Like Taylor, who lists several expressions that mask nonwork, including “‘soldiering,’ as it is called in [the U.S.], ‘hanging it out,’ as it is called in England, [and] ‘ca canae,’ as it is called in Scotland” (Taylor, 1919, p. 13), Paulsen (2014) analyzes the Swedish idiom maskning (which denotes footdragging) and explains the significance of skiving and freeloading by probing the Swedish practice of fika (the workplace institution of taking a daily coffee break with colleagues). These analyses establish the basis for his claim that appropriating time within wage labor is “the creation of autonomy within heteronomy” (p. 99).
Paulsen’s study is firmly grounded in the sociology of work, and therefore his analysis of types of empty labor and of the causes of empty labor focuses on social relations and institutions. For example, Paulsen notes that “taking it easy” remains a silent or implicit agreement among employees, as any disclosure of nonwork methods helps expand rationalization and monitoring. Similarly, Paulsen describes not only the motives for empty labor (table 6.1, p. 102), but also the process of socialization into empty labor, which he calls “reverse kaizen for slackers” (p. 91). Such socialization instructs employees that empty labor is condoned as long as such behavior does not put a greater workload on colleagues (p. 94), does not endanger anyone (see the fearful tales of pilots sleeping during flights and of surgeons leaving an operating room [pp. 95–96]), and is not “ill mannered” (see the example of a juror playing solitaire during deliberations in a mass-murder trial [p. 96]). In these non-offensive ways, empty labor occurs within a normative universe that allows for the covering of AWOL (absence without official leave) under the disguise of “going for a smoke” (p. 85) and that drives the outwitting of the system (p. 86) even in the face of technology’s panopticism (p. 88).
Outwitting the system is yet another workplace action: “‘doing nothing’ while at work can be a very demanding activity requiring planning, collaboration, risk calculation, and ethical consideration” (p. 99). Therefore, the challenge of identifying empty labor comes not only from the labor involved in nonwork but also from the structural features of the workplace. Prime among them is the opacity of the job, where we judge occupations by “their organizational function but [find it] harder to tell what they actually do” (p. 74; italics in original); and if we cannot tell what actions or behavior describe the job, it is difficult to differentiate work from nonwork. Likewise, the splitting of labor between the sites of the workplace and the home, as in the blurred boundaries between the activities of work, family time, and leisure, further cloud the identification of empty labor and challenge its censuring.
Paulsen also outlines the causes of empty labor, among them bad management and juggling projects (p. 78). Particularly interesting among the causes of empty labor is the exploiting of workplace uncertainties, especially when the job disguises empty labor behind a sense of responsibility and excellence (p. 80). These causes, coupled with the opportunity for cyberloafing that comes from access to the Internet at every workplace desk, confirms the importance of perceived commitment to work (p. 78). In other words, the perception of others about one’s commitment to work, or one’s performance of one’s commitment, become as important as doing the actual work (p. 81). Moreover, such performance of one’s commitment to work affords the exploitation of cultural differences: Paulsen quotes an interviewee telling how, “because we were from Sweden, the Norwegians had this idea that we were hard-working and so on. So sometimes they said: ‘you better do this so that it gets done.’ ‘Thanks a lot,’ we said and then we took a three-hour lunch break” (p. 78). By addressing technology, management, production tasks, and cross-cultural encounters, and by considering their intersection, Paulsen situates empty labor within the many features of contemporary workplaces and has explained its prevalence.
Most importantly, Paulsen describes empty labor as workplace resistance: if, for Paulsen, work is “the very institution around which our most oppressive power structures are constructed” (p. 4), not working while at work involves a form of opposition. His neo-Marxist perspective drives him to engage with a broad range of social theorists of work. In particular, the first two chapters of the book, which are titled “Power at work” and “Subjectivity at work” and are largely theoretical, see Paulsen wrestling with ideas about organizational misbehavior and resistance while calling upon Paul Thompson and Stephen Ackroyd, the Frankfurt School, Alain Touraine, and the sociological canon of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim (even if, oddly, there is no mention of Marx’s alienation throughout the book’s discussions of labor and resistance. . .). By highlighting empty labor as action, Paulsen wrestles with the motive, rationality, and possibly passivity of resistance (pp. 101–102) and challenges poststructuralists to consider the modes of subjectivity involved in resistance, including the role of managers in colluding with empty labor on their shift. Therefore, as much as resistance is a defining characteristic of empty labor, Paulsen recognizes that “resistance against work is not resistance against all work. Which work to resist and which to perform is . . . a key issue for each interviewee involved in soldiering” (p. 99). Relying on Baldamus’ (1961) classification of work in terms of both expected output and sense of obligation, Paulsen identifies four forms of empty labor (table 4.1, p. 62; reproduced below): (a) slacking, defined by low output and weak obligation, which is characteristic of workplaces with a “culture of fun”; (b) enduring, defined by low output and strong obligation, which describes the predicament of employees working in dead-end jobs and is illustrated in the case of the German civil servant; (c) soldiering, defined by high output and low obligation, which describes the typical footdragging; and (d) coping, defined by high output and strong obligations, which is characteristic of highly stressful occupations and is related to work burnout (pp. 61–71). And although it may seem as though soldiering and coping, because they involve high potential output and/or strong work commitment, run contrary to workplace resistance, even these burnt-out or footdragging employees do nonwork while at work and thus still violate the social contract of paid labor in their distinct ways. Indeed, validating his categorization, Paulsen’s extensive fieldwork, his references to surveys, his cases taken from several countries, and his many interviews—with employees in a diverse set of industries, including nursing, retail, administration, and management—give an opportunity to further contemplate the distinction between work and non-work. The book’s appendices expand on and explain the methods and data, adding to the book’s overall impressive integration of empirical research and conceptual writing.
Types of Empty Labor.
Source: Paulsen, 2014, p. 62
This book, like Paulsen’s other publications, offers a fresh perspective on the study of work. Few researchers have studied idleness and work from a critical perspective (for example, see Gagnier and Dupré’s [1995] feminist critique focusing on domestic work), and therefore Paulsen’s comprehensive treatment of both conceptual and empirical issues freshly infuses discussions of compliance/resistance with ideas about subjectivity. As noted by Alvesson in the book’s Foreword, Paulsen’s treatment of work and nonwork and of labor and empty labor is unconventional, careful, reflective, and at times ironic. With likewise praise, Paulsen’s Empty Labor was recently awarded the EGOS Book Award 2017. Therefore, even the few overlooked issues—such as Paulsen’s neglecting to consider the role of empty labor in driving workplace innovation (when casual conversations by the water-cooler set a “ba” foundation for creativity; see Nonaka & Konno, 1998) or his neglecting to consider the impact of such shared acts of clandestine nonwork on building a communal sense—do not overshadow the book’s contribution to the sociology of work. Rather, the book would surely serve as a solid basis for further study of new forms of empty labor enabled by changes to the workplace (could we have imagined cyberloafing while at work before 1995’s introduction of the World Wide Web?), empty labor dilemmas (such as the impact of empty labor on underemployment and underpayment), and the iron cage of managerial strategies to monitor work in the hope of curbing empty labor. With work becoming a new badge of honor—which explains why so many of our colleagues declare their gripe that they have a million e-mails in their inbox or that they again have to work over the weekend—Paulsen’s book inspires further study not only of workplace conditions and characteristics but, importantly, of the meaning of work.