Post-socialist acceleration: Fantasy time in a multinational bank

State-socialism, flexible accumulation and the rise of the overworked Central and East European

Transformations similar to the post-socialist acceleration described in this article have been analyzed in other ethnographic contexts within the theoretical framework of the flexible accumulation regime (Gorz, 1999; Harvey, 1990; Schor, 1992). Since the 1970s and 1980s, large-scale companies have set out to increase profit and decrease turnover time by speeding up, among other things, the processes of labor. This has led to significant changes in the organization of economy, culture, space and time, both in the core and periphery of the world system. The entire world of work has been redefined in order to facilitate this process. For the current economy and culture, the “accelerated destruction and reconstruction of workers’ skills” (Harvey, 1990: 230) have been central. Flexibility has become a true economic and cultural religion. As Harvey describes it, “workers, instead of acquiring a skill for life, can now look forward to at least one if not multiple bouts of de-skilling and re-skilling in a lifetime” (Harvey, 1990: 229–230; see also Martin in Kirschner, 1999: 266 on this point).

The maximization of bodily and mental potential, the exercise autonomy and choice, multitasking, personal and organizational flexibility and entrepreneurial subjectivity have become important cultural values in post-Fordist economies (Martin in Kirschner, 1999: 267–269; Rose, 1998: 161). They led to a variety of new practices in the corporate world, which include: “personal development” techniques; increases in the use of stimulant drugs; “coaching”; “magical” procedures promising to deliver instant happiness; efficiency and skills; short, but intense training courses; teambuilding activities; time management techniques (Larsson and Sanne, 2005) or even family “audits” (Hochschild, 2008).

Key among these transformations has been the experience of time. As Todd (2009: 50) reminds us, “time has always been a salient dimension of work culture,” but the regime of flexible accumulation created new temporal structures (Rubin, 2007: 8; Schor, 1992). These include: project time (Shih, 2004); intermittent or zero physical presence in the company on the part of “nomads,” independents, teamworkers, and homeworkers; extended and erratic periods of working; flex-time (Worthington, 2006: 21–51); the reversal of work time in the global service sector (Poster, 2007); the “time famine” for knowledge workers (Perlow, 1999; Vuckovic, 1999); or buying time with self-medication when productivity imperatives dictate that there is “no time to be sick” (Vuckovic, 1999). All these studies indicate that contemporary workplaces in many parts of the world function according to new and accelerated rhythms, paces, routines, and schedules (Rosa, 2003: 11–12; Rubin, 2007: 2).

The high priority given to heavy industries in socialist economies, as well as the commitment to full employment of the labor force, generally delayed flexible accumulation production and consumption in Central and Eastern Europe by two decades. Until the early 1990s, although socialist industrial organization attempted early on to emulate Fordist plant organization (Burawoy and Lukács, 1992; Dunn, 2004), the work culture and temporal experience were rather different. Because of structural shortage of production inputs and hoarding practices, work during socialism was a hybrid of idleness, task-oriented time and clock time (Dunn, 2004: 16; Müller, 1997: 544; Verdery, 1996: 42–45), rather than the continuous, flat time of the assembly line. As the central allocation of resources was often unpredictable, socialist-era work culture was an alternation of idleness and task-oriented frenzy. Firms often lacked the predictability and stability of inputs. As Verdery (1996: 43) put it, “hoarding made for unpredictable delivery of inputs, which caused irregular production rhythms, with periods of slackness giving way to periods of frantic activity (‘storming’) when a delivery of materials finally enabled effort towards meeting the production goals.” Labor alternated between periods of shortage-enforced idleness, with rapid mobilization of workers in order to make up for what was lost.

Idleness in the socialist contexts had a different meaning that in the capitalist economies. Schwartz (1974), for instance, in his article on waiting and time, offers figures on the number of hours wasted queuing in USSR. Such equivalences, however, lack context sensitivity, reflecting the capitalist view of ‘time wasted’ as profit lost, rather the logic of the socialist economy. Idleness and ‘time wasted’ had other meanings under socialism (Verdery, 1996: 47): room for informal (secondary) economy activities, additional “tribute” to the state for personal gains obtained during shortage-enforced idleness (“time tax” as Verdery puts it), ritual waiting, the seizure of time for the display of power during rallies for leaders and the Communist Party. Although idleness, shortage and unpredictability of commodity circulation meant often immobilization and stasis for many people, for the socialist system “time wasted” also meant resources “saved” from household consumption, in order to be preserved and allocated to state investments.

Although the socialist experiences of time had different expressions, Verdery (1996: 57) concludes that the economic and political organization of such societies “generated an arhythmia of unpunctuated and irregular now-frenetic, now-idle work, a spastically unpredictable time.” Some of these features were carried over during the early post-socialist period. Studying the early post-socialist cultures of management and work in two small companies in early 1990s Russia, Hass identified elements common to the socialist period. He notes that “logics and practices were of sketchy organization of labor and the lack of rhythm or structured time and practice. Things got done when they needed to be done, not following measured pace or planning. When projects would come due or contingencies would arise, employees would go into ‘storming’ mode, and energy and spontaneous structure would arise.” (2011: 49). Structured organizational schema, formal divisions of labor and constant work rhythm lacked.

Hass (2011: 47; 62) also notes the advent of capitalist work-discipline in one service sector firm that he studied. The work routine changed quickly due to measures enforced by an American manager. Through new procedures, forms of discipline, and imposition of formality she altered the socialist/early post-socialist organization life towards, what Hass calls, “capitalist normalcy.” The result was that very quickly, the labor force became disciplined and began to work constantly, without office social intercourse induced idleness: “[occasionally] employees worked late into the night for many days beforehand – quitting time was based on when tasks were finished and no one complained” (Hass, 2011: 63). Hass also reports less after-hours socializing, short[er] birthday celebrations (limited to 30 minutes and placed at the end of the working day), banning of phone calls to family or partners (except in emergencies), quicker and target oriented physical movement in the office, shorter tea drinking and smoking trips. Not only discipline changed, but subjectivities changed too. Larson (2008), for instance, observing a CV writing workshop in Slovakia described how résumé construction maps and translates a person into neoliberal categories, that are transparent, accountable and suitable for verification by would-be employers.

Such studies, but also the data that I will present below, indicate that the socialist and early post-socialist work day porousness and the intermingling of social intercourse and work (Thompson, 1967: 60) disappeared with advent of the circulation capital-related forms of discipline and new architectures of work place power. After QB’s privatization, the management attempted to eliminate idleness and monotasking and generally succeeded in instilling new, constant and intensified work rhythms. In her concluding remarks on her essay on socialist organization of time, Verdery (1996: 57) stated that “‘capitalist’ time must be rendered progressive and linear so that it can be forever speeded up.” Acceleration is, in a nutshell, the story of the QB’s workforce and of the post-socialist skilled labor force in ex-socialist countries.

From state-owned to multinational: Privatization, flexibilization, and new persons

Before I present the post-privatization time-sense, let me briefly sketch the ways in which this bank was transformed after QB purchased it. Due to various economic and political problems during the early 1990s, the bank went bankrupt. The liabilities accumulated by the Romanian state prior to privatization were close to 1 billion dollars. While preparing for privatization, the losses were transferred to the public debt in the late 1990s. QB, a European bank, purchased and reorganized the operations of the virtually bankrupt bank. A predictable trend was the search for profitability i.e., the transition from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market (Kornai, 1992). This meant many things. One was the rescaling of number and location of the banks’ branches. During the post-1989 period, the bank extended its branch network throughout the country quite substantially, in many cases irrespective of the profits these branch offices were generating. While loss-making branches were shut down, new ones opened, especially in Bucharest, where some 20–30 branches served the large market of this capital city. This recalibration of the network has remained an ongoing process, in the sense that each branch has to produce, yearly, a certain profit, depending on the number of its employees.

The geographical rescaling of branches was accompanied by the downsizing of the internal workforce. The number of employees decreased from about 9–10,000 to about 4,900. The number of people who got fired or were forced to retire was larger than 5,000; they hired about 2,000 people after privatization. Described as “those who cannot be flexible,” usually meant employees in their second half of the carrier. Mihaela, one human resource department employee, acknowledged in retrospect that it was a mistake. As an illustration, she mentioned a near retirement person who became one of the most reliable employees. The ability to acquire computer literacy was mentioned as the key factor in deciding who left and who stayed. Outsourcing, too, reduced the number of employees. During the 2000s, this was a general trend among companies in Romania, but it was also, according to the interviewees, a good strategy to avoid requests for bribes from various state institutions and informal pressures for preferential hiring of relatives.

The restructuring of labor routines also facilitated the firing of employees. The post-privatization managerial discourse offers a textbook depiction of a “rigid” Fordist labor force for its employees. The human resources department personnel with whom I talked described the labor routine and organization prior to privatization was based on simple, “rigidly” defined skills. By the standards of “parent” bank’s labor culture, the job assignments were too fragmented and too mono-task. Some people simply stamped receipts, others just wrote their registration numbers into a notebook, while still others simply handled just one type of operation in the dealings with the bank clients. The post-privatization human relations department employees whom I interviewed described these jobs as “artificial” and the persons occupying them as “untrained” or “lacking any skills.”

As a result, the new management engaged into what Harvey (1990: 230) called the “accelerated destruction” of prior skills, followed by the concentration of tasks through the re-skilling of the workforce. Each new employee was supposed to master and perform most operations previously assigned to different employees. The concentration and reskilling overlapped temporarily with the imposition of computer literacy, a process that made prior labor routines and jobs obsolete. The agglutination of previously divided skills was accompanied by the compression and intensification of labor for each job. To give just one example, for front-desk clerks, labor intensification meant an increase in the number of processed invoices from 80 to 100 a day. Their work also became multitask: they faced multiple tasks ranging from register keeping and stamping receipts to the emotional work required by the face to face interaction with clients in the front-office.

Another form of reskilling in the search for profit was the inculcation of human resources department employees have described to me as a “sales mentality” or a “capitalist stance.” ⁴ The new management used three main methods of sales-oriented reskilling. First and the most important was training. Sales and customer service courses (i.e. teaching the speech and posture patterns required for interactions with clients) were, and still are, mandatory for all employees in every country where QB operates. They last for 1 month. Immediately after privatization, these courses were delivered by international trainers sent over from the bank’s headquarters. Besides these mandatory courses, training programs are a permanent concern of the management. Each yearly operational budget contains a substantial amount for such activities.

The existing bureaucratic authority was supplemented by elements of charismatic authority, a frequent form of legitimacy in the world of finance (Preda, 2009). Charismatic authority of “Westerners” facilitated the unmaking of the older organization and the creation of (or at least the attempt) a corporate culture shared across countries, including Romania. The arrival of a foreign CEO was the main form of routinization of charisma after privatization. The arrival of 50 to 60 “Western” expats from QB offices outside Romania, both from the ‘parent’ country and other national branches, also quickened the routinization of corporate work rhythm and practices. Labeled officially by the management as “seeds of change,” these expats were placed at various hierarchical levels, in order to “radiate” proper labor skills to the local workers. When asked why these people had to be expats, one interviewee said that it was costly, time-wise, to identify role-model employees from inside the Romanian branches and that foreigners had more credibility.

Another change was that the human resources department embraced a more assertive approach. It engaged in a very large-scale operation to screen and monitor all employees, firing some and recruiting new ones. Upon obtaining a job, the new recruits entered a process of institutional socialization. One form was the circulation of the booklet called Mission/Vision/Values, a programmatic statement of the bank’s aims. Although each interviewee had a copy of the booklet, they tended to dismiss it. One said “it sits somewhere in my drawer” and several gestured with their hand, a situation indicative of the decoupling of company’s myths from daily routine (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). Then, the human resources department also engaged in “express” socialization of the newly arrived employees, through “induction training,” which lasts for two days. During this period, the human resources department trainers introduce, on the fast lane, the newcomers to the program, the code of conduct, the labor contract and various internal procedures. Mihai, a middle manager with three year presence at QB contrasted this compressed time of institutional learning to the long period of ambiguity and lack of direction at his first (state) job, where he was left idle and unproductive. He emphasized the lack of temporal structure, saying that “they left me as a wild plant for a month; except for my office mates, nobody talked to me.”

Wages changed too, with privatization, in the sense that for those who continued to work they increased significantly, albeit unequally. Transformation of wages was not just about monetary value, but it also indexed how power changed inside the bank. Wage was an instrument of individualization. It transformed the bank employees into a “population” (Foucault, 1995: 190), as opposed to previous organizational principles of seniority, hierarchy, and age cohorts. The human resources department made periodical and constant evaluation of the employees a continuous process, maintaining them “under the gaze of a permanent corpus of knowledge” (Foucault, 1995: 190; Cotoi, 2011). The human resources department attempted to weaken the strong sense of universal entitlement to bonuses and undermine the importance of seniority which existed before privatization, by fostering what they saw as “entrepreneurial” attitudes among the workforce. Because QB inherited quite a strong labor union from the pre-privatization era, there was a strong pressure for the payment of equal bonuses to all employees. The post-privatization management, however, only granted bonuses for achievement and performance, rewarding those who over-performed and ignoring those who had average results. The union asked the management to eliminate the achievement bonus system and award everyone a flat amount at Easter and Christmas. Deploying the language of objectivity and science, the management, according to one HR employee, explained that not everybody can work the same. Referencing Gauss’s curve, the new management explained that very few people get distributed to the extremes; the vast majority fall into the middle, which means achieving the “according to job description” grade. After about 3 or 4 years of disputes the union and the workforce accepted the new “entrepreneurial,” differential system.

Corporate work-discipline and fantasy time

The new post-privatization time culture came as surprise to many of the former employees. One older interviewee, who had worked in the bank since 1981, said that “people were not used to working in such a way. As regards volume, time and dedication … those who worked at the state bank had no chance of adapting. Practically speaking, [before privatization] they were doing four hours worth of work in an eight-hour workday. The rest was a cup of coffee now and then … you know, other stuff.” ⁵ Similarly, issues of porousness and low intensity of work time in state institutions were expressed by Dan, who remembered his experience at his first job, just before the fall of communism. He described his first working days in the following way: “I was getting there in the morning, reading the sports daily for about two hours, I smoked, I drank a couple of coffees, around lunch I went out to eat. Then we came back, then the day was over.”

Dan recalls becoming bored and instead of reading the newspaper he began to read an English language manual and a computers book. That got him into trouble because the next day he ended up having to sort out a large pile of files. He left them on the desk and the next day resumed his previous activity of reading the newspaper. His sense of time wasted contrasted with the first two weeks at QB, occupied by intensive “induction training.” He was introduced to the company, met many colleagues and attended training programs. His first day was a rather long interaction with the human resources department, who presented the company and the organizational chart to him. Dan perceived all these as an intensification of time, as things moving faster, as a “huge change of speed,” whereas in the socialist-era company things moved in a “perpetual first gear,” as he phrased it.

Another transformation of temporal structures was the increased value of time and the emergence of time hyper-consciousness. Bogdan, working in the investment division, explained: “I don’t know if this is something to be proud of, but I began to value leisure time much more. Before that I could afford [to waste time], not going at the pace that I do now. I indulged in time-wasting, watched a soccer game or just wasted time in general.” Along with the emergence of the value of time came the intensification of time planning. Marcel described how he plans his free time in much more detail. He moved from indefinite “relaxation time”, time which “appears to have no destination” (Heintz, 2002: 150) to clearly defined, task-oriented free time. Before he worked in QB, his relaxation time was casual and elastic: “Things were not so condensed … I was hanging out, listening to music, chatting with friends, maybe playing bridge … stuff like that.” Lately, Marcel said, his free time has been no longer casual and spontaneous, but rather planned: “Having much less free time, I try to condense it into very clearly defined time. If I manage to put together two hours, I have a very clear goal, like going to the theater. I plan them the same way that I planned meeting you: I write down in my agenda what time I am going to the theater and I have a very clear plan of action.”

A sharper focus on time-keeping leads to time hyper-consciousness. When I asked Dan, a middle manager, for the description of a typical workday, he said it lasts from 8 am to at least 7 pm, but might go on for longer. Two Saturdays a month he has to go to the office—and occasionally on Sundays too. His description of his schedule abounded in small time units: he used hours and minutes to describe his daily routine, rather than longer and more diffuse units such as “morning,” “afternoon,” or “evening.” This is similar to historical studies on the emergence of capitalism and the redefinition of time, which described that the dynamism of capital-related activities produced a higher standardization of time keeping (Dohrn-van Rossum and Dunlap, 1996).

Aside from the intensification and sharper time-keeping, the elimination of porousness of work time occurred. The post-privatization office layout separates “work” and “life,” eliminating the conditions conducive to idleness and non-work-related interactions. Thompson (1967) has described the slow process of disciplining the workforce and instilling a sense of routine and daily schedule in early industrial settings. “Work” and “life” were not separated to the extent they became later at QB. The back office, unlike its pre-privatization location, is now organized as an open space without walls and cubicles (except for a few people in higher positions), a meeting room and the kitchen. During the time I spent there, the office floor was very quiet. Nobody seemed to talk to one another. The individual desks are located far enough apart so that one needs to speak in a loud voice to communicate with a neighbor or to stand up and walk to another person’s desk. Such interactional activities were transferred to common-area spaces, where one could not spend too much time because access to them is card-based and regularly verified by the management. ⁶

The new layout of the back-office became the objectification and the container of a normalizing gaze (Foucault, 1995: 184–194), a key instrument of change deployed by the disciplinary power of the new, private management. The subjects, Foucault reminds us (1995: 188), are “presented as ‘objects’ to the observations of a power that was manifested only by its gaze. They [do not] receive directly the image of the sovereign power; they only [feel] its effects – in replica, as it were – on their bodies, which had become legible and docile.” Not only the office layout, but several other disciplinary techniques helped the imposition of “compulsory visibility” of employees and the invisibility of managerial (disciplinary) power (Foucault, 1995: 187). Front-office employees offer a good illustration, and I will focus next a little bit on their case.

QB contracted a specialized mystery shopping firm which paid regular visits to bank tellers, in order to evaluate their service and then to report to the human resources department of the bank the results of the evaluation. The layout of the front-office also reflected the advent of disciplinary power and normalizing gaze. The design of the Communist-era offices was primarily an architecture of invisibility, withholding employees from both clients gaze and the managerial gaze. The pre-privatization offices had small and rather twisted rooms. The front offices had very high counters. Clients could barely see the bank teller. Because the number of non-corporate, individual clients substantially grew after QB took over, and because of the general orientation from the seller’s market towards the buyers’ market (Kornai, 1992), the counter disappeared from the front-office.

The newly acquired visibility of the bank employees previously hidden behind the counter became a symbolic rupture with the socialist past and a disciplinary device. One human resources department employee described the counter in moral terms as: “that elevated thing at the bank, beneath which one could not see what the employee is doing – eating, playing games on the computer or actually doing something for you. You were diminished; because of the sizeable width of the counter’s top, even if you were actually tall, you could not see what she is doing beneath.” Within a year after privatization, the old architecture of the offices changed. Low rise tables where customers sit replaced the counter, thus making employees constantly visible, seen and subject to the hold of disciplinary power. The human resources department employee explained that “now we have the employee sitting at a table with the client, a computer and both of them gazing at the computer.” Being constantly seen helped the management speed up labor, eliminate socialist era idleness and produce a sense of flat, but more intense, rather than arrhythmic time.

Job-related activities such as training courses or teambuilding create addition time pressure for employees. These two activities represent sites where organizational time and personal time meet and compete over employees lives. One interviewee described the initial excitement of new recruits when they enroll in training programs. At first, people attend such training programs on Saturday and Sunday, because they are anxious to learn new things, in order to be sure that they continue to work at the bank. However, in about a year, the employees begin to avoid weekends and pressure the managers to move the training programs to working days. The only activities left for weekends are teambuilding activities.

Teambuilding and mandatory socialization taking place outside the physical boundaries of the organization, but within its social ambit, also create time pressure. Teambuilding activities seem to be an intermediate area between work and life, situated closer to the former. During teambuilding activities, QB’s human resources personnel get a better sense of their employees’ personalities, attempt to channel workplace conflict into cooperation and seek to make individuals mix outside their daily office human landscape. The aims are highly resonant with the organization’s physics and metaphysics of flexibility and with the idea of self-regulating, flexible individuals. The first time when he attended a teambuilding, Bogdan was surprised that everybody was assigned to work with people with whom one have had minimal interaction (limited to greetings). Employees are supposed to network with each other and weaken the everyday workplace social micro-formations. People are thus kept flexible in their workplace relations, ready to be re-assembled, should the situation require (Rose, 1998).

This mixture of overwork, sharp separation of work from life, and time hyper consciousness creates a time regime which might be called, drawing on Guyer (2007), as “fantasy time.” Fantasy time involves two dimensions. On the one hand, there is the sense of short-term and dense present, caused by the colonization of personal time by organizational time. Its present-oriented nature suspends time, leaving employees stuck with nothing but work. For employees, their post-privatization high-paced work leaves very little mental and physical room for non-work related activities. The bank becomes a “greedy institution” (Burchielli et al., 2008; Coser, 1978: 101–105), which demands loyalty and attempts to weaken links to other institutions and groups, mainly family and friends. Dan who said that he regularly stays at the office for 11 hours (mentioned above) also described that

I don’t really get to socialize … there are office colleagues whom I speak to about many work-related issues. When I came to Bucharest [to work for QB], I told myself that I would get to see a lot of friends and that it would be great – we would have time to do plenty of things together. We see each other once every three months, for an hour at the most, because we are busy and tired.

Similarly, high levels of commitment expected by the bank may lead to the postponement of family creation. Although not at this bank, there are recurrent rumors which have it that human resource agencies in Romania actually inquire female candidates about personal life, the existence of partners and pregnancy plans. Because of high earnings and little time, such skilled workers become trapped into the cycle of work-and-spend (Schor, 1992), which leads to “inconspicuous consumption”—the imagined future use of already made purchases by people who have enough money, but insufficient leisure time (Sullivan and Ghershuny, 2004: 79). Several interviewees, recounting their employment and wage histories, noted that each time their wage increased, they imagined that they would save money, only to discover that they managed to spend them quickly. A public corporate figure (a CEO unrelated to QB) illustrates nicely the emergence of work-and-spend cycle nicely in Romania. In the forward to a time management manual published by a Romanian “leadership” trainer, the author explained that “many [Romanian] managers are subjugated by work […] An entire social strata entertains an alienated life, isolated from its joys or discovering them seldom, collectively, in the few moments when we are all, simultaneously, forming a voluntary convoy, flowing like a river to sky vacation in Austria or to the Greek beaches.” (Ghyka in Pantiş, 2012: 9).

On the other hand, fantasy time is not just about doing things in a perpetual present, but also about imagination. Bauman (2000: 147) rightly points out that the “crucial ingredient of [work culture] change is the new ‘short-term’ mentality which came to replace the ‘long-term’ one.” He seems to underplay, as the above quote suggests, that the economic and work acceleration created a new, day-dreaming “long term,” where meaningful plans are constructed and entertained. Anthropologist Jane Guyer, for instance, has recently described the recent economic evolutions and the time dimensions that they entailed in terms of “fantasy future and enforced presentism” (Guyer, 2007: 410). She notes that the current “shift in temporal framing has involved a double move, toward both very short and very long sightedness, with a symmetrical evacuation of the near past and near future” (Guyer, 2007: 410). People who live in fantasy time, are trapped in the everyday work present, but also embrace thoroughly the future. Fantasy time is populated with self-promises and meaningful plans.

The phenomenology of fantasy time is the opposite of what Ylijoki (2010) has called “instant living,” i.e. focusing on the present and ignoring the future. Personal desires and futures plans are stored into a vividly imagined and asymptote future. One local human resources guru (specialized in coaching, photoreading [sic] and productivity/time management) explained in a redemptive article in the main Romanian human resources magazine that “most of us live with the illusion that one day, someday, we will do those things that would fill our lives with joy: we will paint, garden, sew the clothes that we designed ourselves etc … and that moment, that ‘someday’, is like the carrot hung on a stick in-front of a mule. The faster the mule runs, the longer the carrot remains in-front of it, intact.” ⁷ Similarly, the author of the forward to the time management manual mentioned above also perceived that “a peculiar social phatology emerged, into which the ‘corporate employees’ sink before they realize it. The time left for family is thin, seeing friends is carefully weighted and frequent depressions, divorces and break-ups occur […]. I heard all too often colleagues saying that they did not marry out ‘of lack of time’ or that the birth of children is ‘scheduled in 3-4 years,’ because now the career is important” (Ghyka in Pantiş, 2012: 10).