Over the last century, our society experienced radical changes in the perception of life and work. Throughout this time HRM emerged to a complex context, that has the difficult task to deal with objects that are independent of mechanically determined calculation and control. Now, in our contemporary time not only the perception of work has changed but also the way our society behave. Though, HRM had to create a subject that is able to cope with these changes and take a comparative advantage. As temporary advantages are not only topics in the working world but in every part of our life, this is a theme worth writing about. This essay aims to explain and describe how this subject has been created and how it is able to deal with the challenge of the contemporary time. The first part describes the development in the perception of work and highlights the characteristics of our society that ask for exactly this subject. In addition, it will analyse how the graduate labour market has experienced a change. The second part will focus on how this subject is forged by using the notion of Thrift, whereas the last part will discuss this subject and evaluate it. The whole essay is accompanied by examples of David Eggers’s “The Circle” to illustrate the concepts.
Starting from 1960, work was perceived as something negative and rather a sacrifice in life. Berger referred to this as the “problem of work” that was characterised by the loss of significance and meaning (Berger, 1964). For him, this was the result of the loss of value due to the development of two spheres the private and the public. As continuous work ethics failed to solve this problem, the so-called soft capitalism emerged as a solution. The vision is that soft characteristics are the key to economic success. Therefore, soft capitalism concentrates on aspects such as creativity and identity, culture and values as well as motivation. It gave the problem of work back its significance through injection of “culture”, “value” and motivation” (Heelas, 2002). This created a pathway for what was known as “the century of self” that redefined the way people behave. In the 1970s people started to think the government tried to brainwash the society with advertising, to turn them into ideal consumers. This resulted in revolts in different societies calling for things that gave them the possibility to express themselves, and their individualities (The Century of the Self, 2002). This created a place with the “self” as the centre of our society, which emphasise even more the link between soft capitalism and the problem of work. Work is now a possibility to express one’s self or to use the terminology of Maslow the opportunity of self-realisation (Maslow, 1965). The word job in German exactly emphasises this change: Beruf, which means to be called to be something, and thus “helps me find myself” (p.311). This is what Heelas means by the “turn to life”.
This created the so-called “new economy”, that was born in human’s pursuit of excess in every part of their life. “Don’t’ settle for anything less that you could be, make your life a masterpiece”. Consumers and companies constantly ask for the imperative of more: more products, more profits, more money, more growth, more learning, more skills, more innovation and more flexibility (Thrift, 2000). However, even though we ask for more, the new economy is not about materiality, but about positionality. To make it more clear we put enormous importance in how we look, how things make
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us stand out of the crowd, to make us better than others. Here lies the current value of things. The value of things is not in costs, not in revenues, but rather how it makes us look like in our society (Costea, 2016a). The Germans have a very applicable terminology for this: “Rangordnung”, which means that we want to order ourselves in the society and preferably very high.
This change in the vision of work and society, characterized by consumers with insatiable appetite requires a different type of management than what Ford and Taylor asked for. Thrift defined a “style” to describe this type that is able to cope with the different societal changes: the fast subject, that is seen as an ideal that can perform in the new economy and cope with the unremitting changes and the constant enforcement to be the fastest and the best (Thrift, 2000). But the question that might come up is how can HRM, which is the link between graduates and employability, find a justification to make students become this subject? The difficult thing to grasp here is that the contract between a company and a worker is based on a payment for a commitment to work. While the payment is fixed the commitment is not, which emphasise the danger of the costs of an unmotivated worker (Costea, 2016d). In “the Century of the Self” subjects always ask the questions: Who am I? Who can I be? HRM took advantage of this pursuit of self-perfection, with the use of the “principle of potentiality” and thus completely reformed the graduate labour market. HRM reconceptualised the “self” as a source of imminent force and energy. Every human subject is full of resources and endless potential. The essence of the language lies in the ability to do something without knowing how to do it. “You don’t know it, but you have the potential to know it”. HRM acts as a ‘promising engine’ by promising students that they can reach their potential and be self-actualized through work. Where else in the “century of the self” can this justification come from. This promise is the compensation for human subjects (not money) to put their full commitment to their work. This endless potential that is hidden in the individual can, however, only be brought out if he is able to activate it through performance and continuous development. Life is seen as a continuous actualization of the potential, because nobody is sufficient and can always be more and worth more. Admitting that you have no potential or willingness to become more, would make you worthless in the eye of HRM (Costea, et al., 2012). But how do students know how this fast subject looks like? HRM visualize this ideal through the “power of words”. For example, with job advertisements. Every company glorifies its success by describing with specific “words” the ideal “ethos”, of all employees who work in the company and thus how a graduate has to be willing to become if he/her wants access to these jobs (Costea, 2016c). HRM gives students something that normally seems unreachable: the possibility to reach perfection, which is exactly what Bailey said in the Circle: “I’m a believer in the perfectibility of human beings. I think we can be better. I think we can be perfect or near to it. And when we become our best selves, the possibilities are endless. We can solve any problem. We can cure any disease, end hunger, everything, because we won’t be dragged down by all our weaknesses, our hoarding of information and knowledge, we will finally realise our potential” (p.291)
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Now that we grasp why the need of the fast subject is essential and how the graduate market has changed with the language of potentiality, I will look more into detail how the fast subject is forged.
Therefore, it is worth to discuss the “performative turn” in the “new economy”. Our contemporary business requires more measurements of short-term performances, which can be seen in the increase of shareholder values. This emphasises a growing pressure on managers to constantly perform as business is constantly measured with an increasing importance on shorter time horizons. To cope with these permanent demand, companies need to be in a constant “emergency” (Thrift, 2000). Everything is no longer sufficient in itself, which can be seen in an example of the Circle: Mae’s supervisor explained to her that every customer enquiry needs to be answered perfectly. To rate her work questionnaire are send to the customers. The crucial point is that even if she had 98% the problem would be that there are 2% missing and therefore it is not sufficient. This emphasise that producing work is not enough anymore, everything has to be spectacular, it has to be a performance. “To per-form means to move towards a form and that means that one sees the ideal, and wants to be seen attempting to take this form and be confirmed in this attempt”. (Costea, 2016e). This highlight the “Ressentiment” in the new economy and, that self-actualization as it was promoted by Maslow is not the self-actualization of our time. Nowadays self-actualization relies on the opinion of others. How else can performance be measured in order to declare if something was “good” or “great” (Costea, 2016b). This can be seen in the Circle, where Mae is constantly measured for her work. Every time she is doing well she is getting a message from her supervisors, which tell her how good she is performing (p.54). Also very applicable is the “Partirank” that shows how much you are taking part in activities. This constant comparison and measurement with others, made Mae work night and day to increase her Partirank, not because she had to, but because she wanted it. Not being rated well “made her disgust herself” (p.189), as could be seen when she was “frown” by 368 people in the Circle (p.405).
This constant measurement, however, requires ‘visibility’. Thrift defines three spaces that are crucial to enable the fast subject to be forged. Thrift calls these spaces sight – new spaces of visualisation, cite – new spaces of embodiment and site – new spaces of circulation” (Thrift, 2000). What he means by sight is that to refigure business one should see things from a different perspective to get a new view and thus understand it in a new way (Thrift, 2000). One example can be the immense differences between Mae’s old working place and the Circle. At the Circle, Mae has six different screens on her desk (later nine) (p.325), which are not all for business. This emphasises that business in the Circle is made in a completely new way, even more than a way, it’s a movement. It is not just doing business but being in a community that lives and shares everything together. New technologies such as “See change” or simply the “bracelet” every Circle member is wearing visualise the speed, the change and the success of the Circle. It creates a community based around the idea of “participation”, where everybody plays its “part” (p.188). The second form of space is cite, which
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embodies the norms towards management through which the invisible should be made visible and the use of the citational force of the management body. This includes situation building that should enable the unlocking of the potential, creativity and imagination of the management body. This helps the fast subjects to be prepared to surprises and improvise in unexpected situations (Thrift, 2000). What the Circle does can be seen as the embodying of certain norms. Every technology (such as CircleSearch) it uses to make the company and everybody in it transparent, enhance with its citational force every human subject in the company to do the same (“All that happens must be known” (p.67)). Not doing so is seen as a refuse to participate in what makes the Circle successful and therefore prevent the potential of the body to be unlocked (“Privacy is theft” (p.303)). This can be seen in the example when Mae didn’t tell in her profile everything she was doing and thus enabled the loss of information that could have been useful to someone else (p.175). Eggers smartly uses the simplest and at the same time the most elegant way to make the invisible visible: transparency. Even more applicable as an example in this context is Mae as the embodying of the norms of the Circle, through which she makes the invisible visible. Starting from simple Zing posts, to sharing everything she does in her free time, she ends up being herself completely transparent wearing cameras (p.307). This making her “a role model” (p.329) and known all over the world, gives her citational force through everybody wants to become like her, become a ‘fast subject’. The last space mentioned by Thrift is site, which refers to locational practices. The key aspect is the generation of locations or situations where innovation and creativity can take place. Although the use of technology is augmenting, business travel continues to increase, because innovation is more likely to take place during face-to-face interaction. Also, offices are designed otherwise. The focus is on rooms, where individuals could interact and get inspired (Thrift, 2000). An example, therefore, is the Circle campus, as the governmentality, which shows in the name of which values we agree to be governed. Eggers express this geographical truth impressively. A place where work happens but much more. Incredible rooms, places where events take place every evening, such as circus shows or music concerts. A place where you make party and sleep when you are too drunk to go home. A place where nothing is too expensive to set all the details so that the performance of every human subject is optimal (medicine checks every 14 days (p.157)). A place where everything seems like “heaven” (p.1) and feels like “home” (p.377) and where, in contrast, the other places feel like “the chaos of an order less world” (p.370) and a “third world experience” (p.371).
To conclude this essay, I would like to evaluate this ideal subject in a critical way. As mentioned in the first part of this essay, HRM is taking advantage of the “self” to make students become fast subjects. However, there is a danger to this “promise” to self-actualization through work and the insatiable appetite of consumers. The fast subject is referred to an ideal type that can cope in the new economy. But how can the fast subject be an ideal type when everything is always insufficient? In the context of rating: if being the best means to be rated 4.5 out of 5, as soon as everybody is rated 4.5, then 4.5 becomes insufficient and suddenly 4.6 will be the best. The problem I try to
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highlight is that in the new economy there can’t be self-actualisation for everyone. This profound engagement to always be the fastest and the best can be very dangerous though it “expresses a sense of urgency to be headed by individuals without allowing the limits of this exhortation to appear” (Costea, et al., 2012). The demonstration of this profound engagement with work was the death of Moritz Erhardt, a 21-year-old intern at Bank of America, who worked for 72 hours in a row in order to get a place for the graduate programme (Costea, et al., 2015). So the question here is: Is there any outcome to all this “self-actualisation” and “more”, when there is no final decision that can articulate the sentence: you are now perfected, which completely prevent subjects to take control of their limits and real possibilities (Costea, et al., 2012). The new economy has changed the value of things and generated more forms of hierarchy although everybody appeals to be equal. To admit someone is better, would be to surrender to someone’s superiority and is thus not acceptable. This can be seen in Annie’s reaction when she perceived Mae as her peer (p.355). So the question here is: If I am not rated how do I know what I am worth? Therefore, the right question is: Do we actually want to escape this? The father of Moritz said that the death of his son was not the fault of the bank. It was Moritz that wanted to work longer in order to show how good he is. In this case it can only end in “performativity”. A society, where how we do things has no longer a meaning. It is way more important how it looks like. Lacy (Black Mirror, 2016) is eating a cookie and drinking a coffee that doesn’t taste her but though upload a picture in the internet writing “Yummy” under the picture. We smile at each other, but we don’t like each other. We just want to beat each other.
In my opinion, the only possible outcome will be a crisis since the self is not an ideal. Heelas described the protestant work ethic as the right work ethic because you work for something that can be an ideal “god” (Heelas, 2002). Although the Circle is referred to god, it can’t be god, because human beings can’t be an ideal, they have boundaries, they do die. The financial crisis was the best example of what the consistent need of “more” to “self-actualise” one can lead to. As Simmel said: “This vision (of more) is tragic because it raises the spectre of success (self-actualisation) and of failure (danger of the promise) at the same time” (Simmel, 1990).