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Whistle While You Work 1
Whistle While You Work:
Work, Play and the New Economy
Siri Shadduck
Master of Applied Cultural Analysis SupervisorsDepartment of Arts and Cultural Sciences Jonas Frykman TKAM01 Jessica Enevold
Whistle While You Work 2
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the teachers of MACA who made this unique opportunity possible. A hat tip to my advisors, for all of their much appreciated help and support. And a thank you goes to my dear friends for their creative input and spirited encouragement.
Whistle While You Work 3
Abstract
Talk about work traditionally has meant an interruption of the finer, more bacchanalian sensibilities. To wit, labor is laborious. But what happens when work becomes play? When play becomes work? This paper is an exploration of the seemingly incongruent marriage of work and play. Often seen as frivolous and disorderly, play is not simply the terrain of toddlers; it is pervasive, for adults play too. The emergence of the New Economy in the late 90’s saw the alignment of culture and commerce. Here buzz words like experience, passion, creativity, and fun went hand in hand with economics. Management and HR departments, awakened to this trendy remix, were keen to adopt levity and play as core values. Employees, as it were, should have fun at work, and moreover, they should like what they do. And how could they not, when working hard is equated with playing hard? Based on an ethnographic account of play at work in a Scandinavian tech company, this thesis addresses how play becomes a convincing and valid means of management; how does it produce insight and innovation? Does play undermine productivity or underwrite it? At what point does play become work?
Keywords: Play, work, organizational culture, new economy, management
Whistle While You Work 4
Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii
Abstract iii
Table of Contents iv
Chapter I
Introduction......................................................................................................................................6
preface
Contextualisation: Aim/Questions...................................................................................................7
Overview of the structure of the paper............................................................................................9
Empirical Material..........................................................................................................................9
The Field Site................................................................................................................................10
Method/Methodology....................................................................................................................13
Chapter IIBackground/Theoretical Framework.............................................................................................13
Play.........................................................................................................................................13
The New Economy................................................................................................................16
Chapter IIIAnalysis Part I................................................................................................................................19
Style.......................................................................................................................................22
Materiality.............................................................................................................................25
Space.....................................................................................................................................29
Awareness.............................................................................................................................32
Interfaces...............................................................................................................................34
Website..................................................................................................................................37
Analysis Part II: Performance......................................................................................................5
On Ritual....................................................................................................................................38
Clocks...................................................................................................................................38
Beer.....................................................................................................................................42
Whistle While You Work 5
Affective Nets............................................................................................................................45
Fulfillment..................................................................................................................................48
Chapter Summary.................................................................................................................51
Chapter IV
Concluding Remarks and Further Discussion............................................................................52
Summary of Findings.................................................................................................................52
Reflections.................................................................................................................................53
Take Away Points.....................................................................................................................54
References.............................................................................................................................................56
Whistle While You Work 6
IntroductionPreface
‘Just whistle while you workPut on that grin and start right in to whistle loud and longJust hum a merry tuneJust do your best and take a rest and sing yourself a song
When there's too much to doDon't let it bother you, forget your troubles,Try to be just like a cheerful chick-a-dee
And whistle while you workCome on get smart, tune up and startTo whistle while you work’
‘If work were really such a good thing, then the rich would surely have found a way to keep it to themselves’ ~Haitian Proverb
It’s lunch time. The atrium is lit from above; natural light comes flooding in on sunny days. Most of the time though, it’s overcast and the incoming light is a dull grey. Someone has put on a reverberating pop song, a rush of warbling lalala’s punctuate the mealtime chatter. Meanwhile, a ping pong ball has flown astray and lands a little too close to a tray of sushi. ‘This place is a playground,’ my lunch mate intones. The ball goes off course again; this time it bounces off the wall and lands in the kitchen sink. Game over.
***
On her first day to work at a hip and young advertising firm, Julia is told to come up to the basket—a giant nest-like structure on top of the building. She climbs up several staircases that lead her into an office that seems more like an adult playground. Along the way she runs into a creative brainstorming session which entails being hit by balls, a curious blogger, a birthday party, and finally she arrives at the basket.
‘Hey, Julia! We’re mood showering. We hit you with a ball and you tell us the first thing that comes to your mind about sportswear.’
‘Come, play air guitar with us, it’s all good’
Whistle While You Work 7 ‘I’m doing a video for my blog, what’s your favorite burger in North America..?
‘Is it OK if I take your picture. It’s Tucker’s birthday, party’s about to start’.
‘Hey, want a break?’ You made it, took you a while, having too much fun?~From Portlandia
***
A summer ago I was in Thailand, on vacation. On this particular day however, I was not on a beach, basking in sunshine; I was sitting in a heavily air-conditioned Bangkok office trying to do a Skype interview. There were noticeable connection troubles. The phrase ‘Can you hear me?’ became an almost comedic leitmotif. It was especially ironic as the company with which I was speaking to, or trying to speak to, specialized in cutting edge mobile technology. I had stumbled across ATTI, a technology company in southern Sweden a few months earlier, and decided to write an internship inquiry letter. The website gave me a somewhat dour, prosaic impression and I hadn’t expected to hear back from them. And yet there I was, despite the technical problems, all went well.
Fast forward a few months. I was back in Sweden, standing outside ATTI’s office waiting to be buzzed inside. It would be my first visit. The exterior of the building was a dull stone grey; it stood facing a grave yard. As I was ushered in, I noticed in spite of my dreary impressions, the place was bubbling. Instead of cubicles there were couches, purple ones, red ones, and plush, bean bag chairs to boot. It was very much in line with Scandinavian design; a patina of straight edge exoticism gave the place a cool, hip, but slightly contained air. The employees wore denim, sneakers, and t-shirts. Youth was prevalent. This was hardly the stale, faceless work-mill I had imagined. It looked like people actually had fun. Fun at work, what a fascinating rhythm. The idea that work can and should be fun and playful has become somewhat de rigeur of late, especially within the new media/technology industries. It gives one pause to perpend as to the very essence of work itself. What value does play have in the workplace? How is it experienced? My thesis is an outcome of my investigation into this phenomenon.
Contextualization: Aim/Questions
My objective in this thesis is to realize a qualitative understanding of knowledge work in the
New Economy, wherein aspects of play are introduced to the workplace. I attend to the ways in
which employees experience play at work and at the multifaceted ways in which play is used in
the office. In order to analyze this phenomenon I have focused on a high tech company whose
‘on the cutting edge’ market placement goes hand in hand with a ‘work hard play hard
‘organizational philosophy. My analysis is informed by Schechner’s performance theories along
Whistle While You Work 8with insights from Du Gay, Foucault, Ross, Hochschild, and Sutton-Smith among others. The
paradoxes, inconsistencies and ironies that play presents within working culture are drawn out
and put to work.
The thrust is then to explore the ways in which work intersects with this notion of having fun
and, how more specifically, this constellation of work and play is in the end mobilized to add to
the company narrative and image (ergo inclining back towards production and the market). More
specifically, I wish to look at the ways in which play can be a means of ordering work, and how
it can be situated as a legitimate means of control.
Similarly, I intend to examine how casualness and levity are materially enacted in the workplace
and what that means for the employees and their own subjectivities of work and play. I seek to
locate, or rather bring specificity to actual lived experience of working within a creative industry
and moreover, attend to the affective nets cast and performed in a digital high tech working
environment. Using this framework, this thesis draws upon previous research/fieldwork at ATTI
(a pseudonym). I want to look at the ways in which this encroachment of economy onto life
affects perceptions of work itself.
Thus the main questions to be addressed in this thesis are as follows:
● How is play introduced and incorporated into the workplace--specifically within a
high tech/new media-based company?
● In what ways is it manifested in the materiality of the workspace?
● How is a ludic sensibility performed and subsequently accepted by employees?
● Does built-in play enhance or debilitate work processes? Does it effectively create
sharper intensities of fidelity towards companies and organizations?
Whistle While You Work 9
Overview of the structure of the paper
The makeup of this paper is as follows:
I start with an introduction to the field site and the field work conducted. Subsequently, I define
the terms I am working with, most notably Play and the New Economy, and delineate the
theoretical underpinnings along with the previous research into the aforementioned concepts.
Throughout the thesis, I intersperse my empirical material with theoretical underpinnings. I take
a bricolage approach, mixing empirical descriptions, quotes, etc, with theoretical strands and
when deemed necessary, chapters will begin with a quick introduction of terms and relevant
theories. Chapter I sets up the backbone of the thesis; chapter II introduces important terms; in
chapter III, I delve into a detailed analysis of the material structure of the workplace, and in turn
discuss aspects of performance and ritual which I argue are vital to the maintenance of a playful
office. In chapter IV I discuss my findings and wrap up the paper with a bullet point summary of
my main arguments.
Empirical material
‘ATTI has a certain spirit, don’t know what it is; I have to go back to my office in Stockholm
and get away to appreciate it’. ~ ATTI founder
The empirical material for this thesis stems from my previous internship fieldwork. It
encompasses 3 ½ months research at the technology company ATTI. During that period, I
conducted semi-structured interviews, net ethnography, and participant observation.
Interviewees ran the gamut from founders of the company, engineers, designers, and PR
managers, to those who had worked for the company as consultants as well as students who
wanted to work for them. I also took extensive field notes, recording details of informal
conversations with staff members, daily work processes, indexes of the work culture, e.g.
clothes, shoes, furniture arrangement, break routines, music and office decor, among other
things. Additionally, I analysed the company’s websites: these included the internal web server,
the company blog, their YouTube channel, Twitter feed, and their Facebook page. I looked at
Whistle While You Work 10their internal and external written materials, i.e. brochures and pamphlets, security guidelines,
software instructions, client protocol handbooks, and recruiting materials. I attended several
social occasions and a job fair where the company had erected a booth to entice new talent. The
mainstay of my data comes from my own situatedness-- being there, and observing the
company’s working practices--as Charlotte Davies puts it, ‘The purpose of research is to mediate
between different constructions of reality, and doing research means an increasing understanding
of these varying constructions, among which is included the anthropologist’s own constructions
(2002, p. 6).
The field site
ATTI is a Scandinavian B2B (business to business, manufacturing products not directly to
consumers, but to other companies) technology company, which specializes in building ultra
fresh, state of the art user interfaces, for mobile phones, HUDs (heads up displays, often found in
cars), and television screens for various OEMs and MNOs (Original Equipment Manufacturer
and Mobile Network Operator). Founded in 2002, the company has expanded significantly in a
brief period of time. Back then however, ATTI was the pet project of six young engineers; the
first employees, friends, class mates and relatives of the original six founders, were hired only
after year two. In the following seven years, the company opened up satellite offices in Asia and
North America, employing around 150 people. They proliferated quite successfully. Their
products could be found in millions of phones worldwide. ATTI’s trademark was the
combination of Design and Technology. The two concepts were part and parcel, one did not
function without the other; thus their products not only looked exquisite, they were also bleeding
edge new. The company’s cross functional teams comprised designers, programmers and
engineers. Playfulness, youth, creativity, friendship and fun represented the company’s core
tenets. These values could be witnessed in everything from the brightly colored walls, the IKEA
sofas, and the ping pong table, to the converse shoes, candy bowls and the musical instruments.
The company’s relatively small size is significant for the employees and the brand identity.
Much of the rhetoric in the company’s internal and external literature is focused on community
and togetherness.
Whistle While You Work 11Structurally, ATTI opted for a horizontal organizational culture. It was not top down, but
flattened out in order to foster innovation and promote personal initiative. In fact, they shied
away from a hierarchical schemata, eschewing the typical organizational flow charts delineating
chains of command. As Löfgren notes (2005) ‘..new digital technology, with speedier and more
efficient possibilities of storing, using developing and circulating information... a much more
flexible organization of work and capital, with both a slimming and a flattening of corporate
structures’(p. 1).
It’s the postmodern, post-Fordian schema for maintaining a culture of innovation. There is no
top down flow. Foucault’s ‘conduct of conduct’ formulation is pertinent here--’ to govern is to
presuppose the freedom of the governed. To govern human beings is not to crush their capacity
to act but to acknowledge it and to utilize it for one’s own objectives’ (Foucault, 1994). Letting
the creative juices flow freely is implied in this hands-off managerial style. Similarly, as Thrift
notes, spaces become important in producing new means of body techniques and identifications.
Space, particularly new spaces enabled by technology, creates novel means of performative
embodiment. The characteristic speed and ubiquity that marks such technology is extended to the
user who is hailed and thus directed to act in different ways. I shall look more at spaces,
particularly in regard to knowledge production, later on.
Employees worked independently in cross-functional Scrum teams, a configuration typical
within high tech companies. The project leader, or Scrum Master, guides the work-flow and
oversees the processes behind each project. Daily Scrum sessions or update meetings keep the
project in check. These take place at the same time and place each day, and all participants stand
while reporting their statuses; Scrum sessions are meant to last no longer than 10 minutes. Each
member of the team states what he/she has done and what still needs to be done and relates any
problems which need resolving. A backlog or list of priorities and features is usually written up
and updated daily on a whiteboard.
The CEO approves major decisions but seems to be removed from the day to day activities of the
company. The company’s founders kept offices on the sixth floor. While they were not often
Whistle While You Work 12there they still had considerable sway within the company, often dispensing advice and acting as
the company’s spokesmen at conferences and exhibitions.
Notably, the demographic make-up of the company was profoundly one dimensional. The
overwhelming majority of employees are white Swedish males, between the ages of 20-34,
although for ATTI 34 is on the steep side. Most either do not have children or have recently
become parents.
The company has since been acquired by a multinational corporation.
I would go to the office usually five days a week, from midmorning to evening, as working hours
were flexible. I was given my own computer and desk, where I could observe the team charged
with revamping the website. Their mission: to make it new. The former website was starchy,
stiff, mundane and did not reflect the hip, fun vibe of how the company identified itself. While I
spent most of my time here, I did have occasion to view and observe in depth other areas-
notably, the sixth floor, where the Innovation department along with the founders’ offices was
situated, and the downstairs atrium/dining area. This is where much of the socializing took place.
Office spaces were seated according to affinity; thus you would find engineers working on
automotives in one room, the products team in another, and innovation in yet another.
The work conducted at ATTI entailed sitting (or standing, for those more chiropractically
minded) in front of a computer. Being in front of a screen for long periods each day defines
balance in a certain way. The body technique, of say walking across a room to fetch a stapler is
different when your muscles have been asked to sit in one way, all day. Thus behaviour and
practices, come about, partly, in balance, the act of balancing in a high backed, ergonomically
designed chair, versus the tension of walking down a narrow cabin walkway in an airplane
(Barba, 1986, p.p. 115,117). What I’m getting at is very corporeal, embodied, it’s not simply a
matter of standing behind a programmer and watching him review line after line of code.
Observing, ascertaining daily praxis then is a matter of being in the midst, taking into account
not simply what is typed onscreen or communicated via email, but situating oneself there. Thus,
and then are we able to ask ourselves, for example, what is the relation between workers and
Whistle While You Work 13their job, their superiors and their sense of duty when they are occupied by networks, files, and
numbers--the digital ether. This is being in the field and experiencing it in a manner akin to
those who work and live it each and every day.
Method/methodology
The theoretical underpinning of this thesis takes its shape from a wide swath of critical thought.
Thus, methodologically speaking, I will take up a multifaceted, pastiche approach, relying upon
not one strand of thought, but on many, giving my thesis a more open and broader theoretical
base from which to draw out conclusions and analysis. I intend to focus my analysis with
insights from Schechner, Hochshild, and Thrift among others, along with a number of authors
working with organizational culture. It is true that I rely on Schechner’s performance theories to
give shape to this thesis, however given the eclectic parceling of my paper, one approach cannot
be singled out.
Background/Theoretical Framework
Play
‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’
‘Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is… The truth is that
the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand
gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose
outcome resolves all – all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience…
Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is no audience. No one to applaud, to
admire… actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No
one is interested.’
~ David Foster Wallace, The Pale king
Whistle While You Work 14 A child thrusts a piece of paper at you; it is, notwithstanding two black dots, completely blank.
‘Guess what it is,’ he implores. You aren’t up to snuff with kids’ drawings, and also not quick
enough for the tot’s taste, so he answers for you, ‘an elephant ghost!’. ‘Cute,’ you think to
yourself. The specter is amusing, to be sure, but ultimately it remains a trivial drawing without
significant use-value. And so it goes, in the logic of adulthood, of prosy ledgers, mortgages,
client meetings and fluctuating oil prices, an imagined ghost in elephant’s clothes has no cachet.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t even exist. Period.
Dolls, tin soldiers, jacks, empty diaper boxes, sticks, balls of wax, paper hats, forts, crayons--
these are the things of child’s play. Tradition dictates that play is situated within the domain of
tender youth. Children play. But adults? Adults engage in jest, rivalry, pranks, jokes,
competition, idling and games--ludic activities presupposed to be intrinsically separate from
child’s play. Or is the prevailing consensus a packaged myth? What is play, after all?
Attendance to play beyond the scope of children has been, traditionally, given short shrift, as it is
seen to be antithetical to work. As a diversion from the task at hand, it is beyond the singular ken
of the Protestant ethic. Yet, as Brian Sutton-Smith, a noted play researcher, reflects, ‘The
opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression. To play is to act out and be willful, exultant and
committed, as if one is assured of one’s prospects.’ Play is not merely a descriptor of childhood
(neoteny describes the predisposition to play even in adulthood) . It is pervasive and unbeholden
to age.
The study of play has ballooned to mammoth-like dimensions. Many have given the subject a
hard ponder and have declared it virtually impossible to define. It is everything, nothing and that
which is in between. Victor Turner reflected (1988), ‘ As I see it, play does not fit in anywhere
in particular; it is transient and is recalcitrant to localization, to placement, to fixation, a joker in
the neuroanthropological act (p. 233). Play is a stubborn beast. It is thus out of the purview of
this paper to examine play in its many theoretical incarnations. Rather, I choose to focus on a
few delineated strands, which take into account that ‘A play theory of any comprehensiveness
must grasp this strange companionship of the very young and the very old, the first waiting to
begin and the second to finish; . . . and such a theory must account also for the invigorated play
of soldiers waiting for battle, or the intensive play of Boccaccio’s youthful fourteenth century
Whistle While You Work 15folk attempting to outlast the Black Plague. In all these cases play seems to have more to do with
waiting than with preparing, more to do with boredom than with rehearsal, more to do with
keeping up one’s spirits than with depression’ (Brian Sutton-Smith, 1997, p. 45). Definitions of
play are indeed myriad and conflicting at times, each transporting with them a sense of
playfulness part and parcel. Again, pinning play down is not an easy matter, but perhaps, that is
the point.
The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his seminal work, Homo Ludens, discusses play as ‘not
serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity
connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own
proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It
promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and
to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.(Huizinga, cited in
Caillois, 1961, p. 4) His description notably excludes play from financial gain; it is an activity
performed for its own sake. Play in both these cases is a mode of beneficial and nuanced
distraction. Yet, meaning is still fleeting. The playing field, so to speak, is unwieldy and
sprawling. Is there a specific locus of play?
Sutton-Smith (1997) tackles the subject from various angles, concluding that ‘play as a
facsimilization of the struggle for survival... the primary motive of the players is the stylized
performance of existential themes that mimic or mock the uncertainties and risks of survival’ (p.
231). Geographer Christopher Harker (2005) prefers to use Richard Schechner’s theory of play
as ‘a continuous bending, twisting, and looping of . . . that for which I can find no appropriate
name, so “action” will have to do’. Schechner differentiates play from playing, which he sees as
more apt; playing is continuous and fluid, a process, whereas play is a concrete act. This view of
play(ing) opens rather than closes and positions playing as akin to becoming rather than being; it
is not fixed but flux. Thus Schechner’s conceptualization is vague enough to be descriptively
spot on.
As it were, play is too embodied and pervasive to curry favor under regimes of explicit
statements and systems of thought. A loose definition of playing as action or performance,
Whistle While You Work 16works to destabilize stark attempts to relay play into easy categorical shelves. To wit, we can
identify instances of play, in the tossing of a ball or in a game of hide and seek; however, at other
times play is elusive.
To get back to Schechner, ‘We need to stop looking so hard at play, or play genres, and
investigate playing, the ongoing, underlying process of off-balancing, loosening, bending,
twisting, reconfiguring, and transforming—the permeating, eruptive/disruptive energy and mood
below, behind and to the side of focused attention. (Why not ‘above’? I really don’t know, it’s
probably just cultural prejudice) (p. 43). Schechner’s definition of play extends beyond the child-
adult divide; it is precisely grainy and fat enough, an expansion of plumpes denken or crude
thinking to be productive. It boils down to the embodied performance; or, in other words it is
“not a limited set of activities but a behavioral orientation to performing any type of activity” (as
cited in Mainemelis & Ronson, 2006). Play is performative-- it is creative, freewheeling,
slippery, dangerous, and contradictory.
In sum, what have we learned? Play is porous. It is notoriously hard to define. To look at a
teleology of play is vexatious. We can locate play in particular spaces and times, but it cannot be
codified. Instead, we should see it as becoming and thus get at it obliquely, from an askew yet
parallel manner to the action itself. In this thesis l therefore approach it in the doing, the
performances of play. ‘Indeed, art and ritual, especially performance, are the home ground of
playing. This is because the process of making performances does not so much imitate playing as
epitomize it (Schechner, 1993, p. 41).
The new economy
‘Make it New!’
In current debates within the social sciences, there has been a turn toward epochalist
explanations of working life and the economical world, spurred by globalization and the spread
of information technologies. It has become new, or so goes the claim. Taking into account these
Whistle While You Work 17epochalist assumptions, I will examine what constitutes the New Economy. What is new about
the new economy? What was old about the old economy?
Picture, for a moment, a factory assembly line. Do you envisage greasy, semi-catatonic workers
lined up picking through nuts and bolts on seemingly endless conveyor belts? As well as being
an image of mind dulling proportions, it is pretty much spot on the epochalist idea of the old or
Fordian economy. Here we have an economy based on use value-- scale, efficiency, productivity.
The New Economy, conversely, conjures images of technology, the whirr and whiz of computers
rather than industrial machines, media, apps, and creative cities. It could be said that the New
Economy is less tangible than the old. It operates on wires and software and icons. Lash and
Urry speak of ‘economies of signs,’ Bauman of ‘liquid modernity,’ Castells of a ‘network
society,’ Florida of ‘knowledge workers and the creative class;’ these concepts form the parlance
of a new economic and organizational metanarrative. The upshot: the New Economy is a
culturalized economy, in which culture, as nebulous as the term is, aligns itself with economic
value; products and services are imbued with meaning beyond their materiality--‘what is
increasingly produced is not material objects but signs’ (Lash & Urry, 1994, p. 4). Thus, a box
of cereal becomes a means toward a happier, healthier lifestyle, and a hotel room embodies hip,
bohemian, counter-culture, its inhabitants donning a concomitant, handy cachet of cool.
In the New Economy, no longer is it enough to view the world through the coolly rationalized
lens of a laboratory microscope. Calculating logic, bureaucracy, stiff labor stratification, and
cubicles have become indicative of stagnation: ‘the move to the centre of the economic stage of
all things cultural and creative has brought forth an understanding that knowledge and know-how
need not only be entertained through the language of science, judgment and technological
innovation. There is room for an appreciation of the ‘softer’ symbolic, aesthetic, more affective
forms of knowledge alongside, or even entangled within, the resolutely cognitive.’ (Allen, 2002,
p. 39) Necessarily, the rhetoric surrounding the ‘cultural turn’ of the New Economy, slipped into
an ecstatic beat; buzz words like glocal, Web 2.0 and cyberspace were reified and their meanings
swelled to take on the zeitgeist, characterized by, like much epochalist idealism, a recurring and
heady optimism. Train an affective spectrometer on any young business venture and it would
easily register the rosy tinted confidence of the day. It was, however, boom and bust, reaching its
heyday in the late 90’s-early 2000’s depending on different narrative takes.
Whistle While You Work 18
Yet the afterglow, the residual affect ‘a new kind of economic sense organ, a temporary
assemblage everyone agrees to agree exist’ or ‘style,’ (a means of making different things
significant and worthy of notice: ‘a style governs how anything can show up as anything’ as it
were, still has a persistent hold (Thrift, 2000; Spinosa et al., 1997, p. 2)). The appeal is simple, it
resides in the business of making business seem more than just business as usual. Thus, a
palpable aura of magic is worked into an elusive (perhaps illusory, as well, taking into account
the Latin root that forms those words--ludos- play)but savory momentum; HR departments and
management consultancy firms across the Atlantic are quick to latch on (Löfgren & Willim,
2005). It is an uptake of faith in the power of creation and human sensibilities beyond the oft-
vaunted brutalism of bureaucracy. As Thrift puts it, ‘In the end, this is what I would call the
New Economy, a successful project to produce a new affective palette for business, a fevered
palette which would give products, markets and particular people a different kind of force, an
assemblage that would produce another kind of sense of the world, a sense of unlimited
possibility made up of different parts of hope joy, curiosity and other euphoric affects’ (Löfgren
&Willim, 2005, p. 133).
In this vein, everything old becomes new again, but with a glossier sheen, a metallic overcoat.
This isn’t about eternal recurrence. But perhaps it is in modern terms, where fleet is fashion and
speed is equally as fast as it is slow. Contradiction is distinction. The New Economy positions
nebulous concepts such as creativity and design as forerunners to the modern Philosopher’s
Stone. Somewhere within these terms, lies the secret to success and if not life everlasting, an
economical viability that refuses to be denied. Technology, with its quick acronyms IT, ICT, is
all pervasive, its software becoming ingrained in our day to day routines. In order to get ahead, to
remain in the game, to innovate and innovate some more, speed is thrust into the throne and the
high tech industry worships at its feet.
We could take the New Economy as a flash-in-the-pan, as each preceding economy could
somewhat rightly be called--new economies, philosophies, corporate agendas, brand strategies
and timely adages pop up only to ebb out time after time. The succession of things new is serial,
like dead-set clockwork. Or we could see the flash as an apt reflection, an inspired reading of
Whistle While You Work 19current organizational strategy and business practices. As technology speeds things up and the
world becomes faster, more precarious, knowledge as the means to innovate, becomes a key
commodity. Youth, speed, creativity, and future fetishization are hailed and propped up as an
adored, necessary cult. Currently, the economy of things turns on being first, so fast, faster,
fastest becomes the rallying call. Tech firms particularly, have to adopt to living in this
‘permanent state of emergency bordering on chaos’ (Thrift, 2000, p. 202). To get on the bleeding
edge, the trigger finger has to be quick, businesses have to be flexible enough to adapt to
changing and tenuous situations. There has to be a certain style to the gait of the these
businesses’ walk.
That being said, bureaucracy, hierarchy, etc have come under specious and unfair scrutiny, as
lacking creativity. Perhaps this sits ill with much of the affective gusto that the new economy
stirs up, but we must not ignore the easy romanticism of this stance. It is convenient to separate
the before and after, thereby valorizing culture as the ‘it’ thing of the here and now. However, we
also must be attuned to the difficulty, if not sheer impossibility of separating culture and
economy in material practice. Culture and economy cannot be construed as ahistorical; culture is
everywhere.
‘It is that if we are to talk about culture at all, then it certainly doesn’t exist in the abstract. It
doesn’t even simply exist as a set of discourses programmed into bodies – although bodies are, to
be sure, crucial in the performances of culture. Instead, or in addition, it is located and performed
in human and non-human material practices. And these are material practices which extend
beyond human beings, subjects and their meanings, and implicate also technical, architectural,
geographical and corporeal arrangements’ (Law, 2002, p. 24).
AnalysisSo it becomes fruitful to look at the intertwining of culture and economy within instances of
historical practice. Looking at an IT firm is an ideal means to delve into the interarticulations of
culture and economy in material working practices. It also goes to illustrate how such rhetorics
do actually shape the field as it is.
Whistle While You Work 20 However much a rarified air surrounds culture qua culture, we must pull back from abstractions
and touch upon the material basis through which culture is practice and performed; for culture is
located in the non-human surroundings and objects that make up the world. Thus, attendance to
architectural enclaves, filled and empty space, technical artefacts, corporeal arrangements and
the scattering of dinnerware on the living room coffee table, for instance, is requisite. Here I
want to look at office space. In this case, a rose is a rose is a rose, isn’t fully precise. Although,
office spaces tend to be similar, constructed in patterns that are more or less universally kindred,
each office is above all and actually, a constructed space, wherein a set of practices and
relationships are set up and performed. There are offices and there are offices; one can’t fish
around in the heavens and find some Platonic form for that which is an office. We must give
way to the baroque and look at the detail, or as Law (2003) puts it ‘This, then, is the crucial
move of the baroque imagination at work. It is an imagination that discovers complexity in detail
or (better) specificity, rather than in the emergence of higher level order [on Leibniz and the
baroque see Deleuze (1993) and again Kwa (2002)]. It is an imagination that looks down rather
than up.’ The baroque imagination uncovers material heterogeneity and seeks to find ‘ponds
within ponds, without limit’ as. ... each simple substance has relations which express all the
others, and consequently it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.' So we look down to get
at the implicit, the fleeting, the indirect--the complexities which make up the concrete. I am
arguing here for specificity to shed light on both the particular and the expanded picture.
Looking down, to look up.
In this vein, I will look at the stuff of life—or in more hefty terms, the heterogeneous materiality
which produces social life. More pointedly, I seek to discover what sort of material culture is
requisite for producing affective affinities. How does material culture co-produce and transform
everyday practices? To do this I go back to the physicalities of the office: what role do things
like paper, screens, and coffee pots play in creating an office space? I will take a synoptic look at
certain ubiquitous items and qualities and then attend to the ways in which they shape behaviors
and create, as well as limit, social relationships and practices. Attention is paid to the importance
of space as a series of conditioning environments to ‘cook’ and prime affect. How new devices
like mobile phones and the internet act as new kinds of neural pathways, transmitting faces and
stances (as well as discourse) as put forward by Thrift; therefore, the ways in which space and
Whistle While You Work 21materials in space provide myriad opportunities to forge new reflexes. Later on, I uncover the
ways that the body is not fixed, but rather transmits and receives in response to material and
social culture.
The office spaces are configured for groups, not individuals. The office I have in mind is the
home of a cross-pollinated bunch--web designer, programmer, engineer and interaction designer,
plus myself. It was set up in the same fashion as the other offices, but was customized by the
erstwhile inhabitants. From my own notes: ‘On the back wall: a single white shelf, jutting out
with steadfast grace, not a trace of metal, neither nails nor hinges to disturb its singular
suspension; lining the shelf, a row of tiny toy figures, the sort you’d pull out from a Kinder egg
when your existence was more tender in age. Beyond that, to the center left, a poster, the bulk of
it white, with red, yellow, blue, and green lines radiating through it, words packing the remaining
spaces to form a gentle, yet crisp credo on What Makes Good Design. Two windows, with the
automatic shades drawn to the midpoint, flank the illustrated manifesto’s right side. Books,
whose spines pronounce ideas like 3D, Graphic Design, and Engineering but also Travel and
Language, sit idly on the waxy white window sills, next to that, a pot of leafy plants, (the real
deal, not those convenient plastic imitations which quietly besot Chinese restaurants and motel
lobbies), and at the end of the row, a softly lit colored lamp, round and squat in shape, recently
acquired from IKEA. Computers, mostly boxy, black PCs, although a pair of white Mac laptops
can be found too, litter the desks, commanding much of the workspace real estate—screens next
to screens next to screens. Colored felt tip pens, empty coffee mugs, water glasses, cough syrup
bottles, business cards, fluorescent pink and yellow post it notes, touch phones, bowls of glossy
candies, notepads, robot figurines, and more toys, expand across and colonize what little empty
territory they can.’
This is an office which is messy, jerry-rigged, and plausibly incoherent. It does not speak of
privilege, command nor does it speak of luxury. There are no large wood desks and no leather
swiveling chairs, objects of distinction popularly shown in movies and to which we accord merit,
accomplishment, and financial success.
Whistle While You Work 22I want to look at the props, the material actants in the play, thus the way objects actually result in
ways of behaviour. Take chairs for instance. Swivel chairs, put us at ease, we are relaxed,
movement is made fluid by wheels and a rotating chair back. Orthopedic cushions relax the
muscles, while conditioning the body to sit properly.
Style
So then to start, first a style, (again recalling Thrift (2002), ‘Style is one of the keywords in the
social sciences and humanities at present, suggesting the need to understand a change in the style
of engagement governing a repertoire of practices’) which gives the place a certain modulation, a
pitch which you can only get at in being there, inhabiting this particular space . The presence of
color is telling; it relays a message, an anticipation. This isn’t a monochromatic, drably attired
office. Color is explicit--it’s in the posters, the notes the plush cushions that adorn the common
areas, the lamps, and even the pens are vibrant greens and pinks rather than the standard blue or
black. Color for ATTI is a means of commerce and also quality of life. Aesthetic value is relayed
from the office to the design of the products. It reflects an economy of play, and it creates a
chromatic politic too. Consider Rimbaud’s (1973) synaethesian panegyric, Voyelles, wherein
each vowel is associated with a color: ‘A , black velvet jacket of brilliant flies which buzz around
cruel smells/gulfs of shadow... I purples, spat blood, smiles of beautiful lips/in anger or in the
raptures of penitence...U, cycles, divine vibrations of viridian seas/Peace of pastures seeded with
animals, peace of wrinkles/That alchemy prints on great studious brows.’ Colors, then, make up
an aesthetic choice, they assume a gravity; this choice represents a politic, testifying to how one
does something, in an adverbial sense. The bold, optimistic color palette which overlays the
office space asks of those who are in the midst to be bright, clean, cool and happy. The design
and color scheme were deliberate; money was spent on these details and color could easily be
seen as a barometer for the company’s values, attitudes and level of communitas. Color speaks to
a narrative, investments, opinions and beliefs. A perky color palette is resonant with future faith
—faith in their own knack for modern plasticity, to shape the things to come-- which is
consonant with the demands of ‘fast companies’ and to the capitalistic imperative ‘enjoy’. The
future is created in the shape, texture and tone of the office space.
Whistle While You Work 23We can also consider sound, especially in terms of giving or relaying a style. What does work
sound like? Or to get at it from a different angle, what does working playfully sound like? Can it
be conceived of in terms apart from the proverbial bells and whistles of the assembly line? What
does a certain sound ambiance do to attention? To look at the case in hand, at this office, the
ambient sound is not merely filled with the clicking of a computer mouse or furious typing. Most
often, the offices are enlarged, sonically speaking, with music. Rove around the floors and you’ll
hear an eclectic compilation of notes sounding from various offices; if it isn’t blaring from
personal speakers, individuals can be seen wearing large sound-blocking headphones (a trope of
the programmer, energy drinks and/or coffee, headphones and an intense absorption by the
screen). So, music fills the working environment. Contemplating a design quandary is different
when listening to Bach or the National, and also very different from listening to idle voices and
whirring computers, for instance. The character of a task can be seen in a more flattering light
when the tune is one that agrees with the worker; thus ‘whistle while you work /Put on that grin
and start right in to whistle loud and long’ sings of truth. Employees can crank up their favorite
tunes and consider ledgers, technical bugs, distribution, and color schemes in a more attenuated,
comfortable manner. Music, along with the digital stream, the ping of new SMS messages,
Facebook status updates, Twitter tweets and so on become understood as a part of the ambient
architecture, which is experienced through habit. As much as it could be seen as a distraction, it
becomes rather a state of distraction, in Benjamin’s sense, and thus, comes to make up a
component part of one’s embodied being, of one’s habitus. It’s a condition, being musically
inspired, or accustomed at the least, which one comes to expect. It primes affect in a particular
way. Listening to music puts employees at a state of ease; it also gives silence a more punctuated
weight. Thus, when the music becomes a distraction, pressing mute is either a decision signaling
seriousness or relief.
Muzak, developed in the 1920’s to make office work more agreeable, interestingly toted the
slogan ‘Muzack fills the deadly silences’. It was meant to silence, so to speak, the awkward hum
of too much silence and also the distractions of machines, air conditioning, and employee
chatter. Muzak, was dictated by the management and led to a controlled ambient environment;
workers were meant to hear the music, but not listen to it. It was not an individual choice.
Whistle While You Work 24I contend that what music does is to contribute to this aforementioned ludic style, as it points to
inconspicuous cracks, holes in the net, pockets of fresh water, of air. It points to the sheer lack
of totality, of an overwhelming and total system of control. Working is porous. It is not fixed.
We can refer back to Schechner’s net image of play. There are leakages, the unforeseen, the
subversive, the sacred and obscene buried in that which makes up the everyday, the working day.
We can take it up as the Lefebvrian moment, which disrupts and contains possibilities, openings
rather than breathless totalities and closures. It is the instance of being there and nowhere else.
Thus we find fissures/cracks of liberation, of overturning moments which replay as a possibility
each and every day.
Significantly too, the proliferation of music in the work place, and the deliberate allowance of
music, plays into this aestheticization of everyday life, the interlacing of economy and culture. It
shows how such devices articulate and shape organizational thought. Sociological theories are
performative in that they do create and develop fast companies in as much as they describe them.
The rhetorical output of social scientists does not simply lie outside life as it were, it is not
merely decorative; it can and does shape reality, as managers and organizational leaders take up
these epochalist leanings and incorporate them into actual office practices.
Whistle While You Work 25
Figure 1.1 Post-It Notes (ATTI website)
Materiality
Consider too the Post-it note as a potentially ludic technology. Pink, acid green, yellow, tangy
orange, these bits of adhesive paper are the quintessential creative brainstorming work tool. They
are small and ephemeral. What can you fit on a post-it note? Not much at all. Whatever is written
on a post-it note is meant to be discarded, sooner rather than later. A post-it note holds out the
promise of lucidity, conviction and thrift. Short and directed scribblings and words mark their
surfaces. Yet despite their size, entire projects are outlined, rehearsed and directed using them.
They embody the fast, ‘state of permanent emergency’ ethos of the New Economy. To wit, firms
must be hierarchically flat enough, flexible enough and agile enough to cut it in the global
marketplace; they must, using their resources and time in the most efficient way, be able to
Whistle While You Work 26adapt to the unexpected and thereby produce cutting edge products with intrepid speed. A Post-
It holds out possibilities. At the same time, it is also decidedly lo-fi and one could easily argue
that there’s something playful and nostalgic about these pieces of paper. They are fast and slow
at the same time. Again, possibilities are opened, totalities are broken up.
Figure 1.2 Office (ATTI website)
In contrast, computers are high-tech, they are able to store incredible amounts of information,
and connect users from one corner of the globe to another; they contain a multitude of
possibilities. In the same beat, distance and time are leveled. At this office, as in many others
computers are all networked. There’s an internal server, a private intraweb for communication
about anything ranging from the latest projects, to proposed outings, game days, and even
anonymous complaints. Computers are what make this company tick. Work cannot go on
without them. So what does it mean to sit in front of computers all day? It means being trained
to the visual. It means being absorbed in one space. Notably, the computer gives way to more
than just the job at hand. Whilst going through lines of code for example, one worker will
Whistle While You Work 27inevitably also have open a music player such as Spotify, messaging programs, such as Skype,
the internal web site, both personal and work email accounts, online newspapers and other
various entertainment sites. As a matter of fact, as a computer allows for an almost labyrinthine
network of information and social relations, distraction is easy. Apropos, for light diversion,
small breaks, most don’t get up and walk away from the computer; instead they’ll look at a
YouTube clip or read a blog. In other words, they do not actively seek something completely
different. One reason for this is that the screen flattens communication, making it easier to
interact. Why venture across the hall, when you can share a video clip via Skype? It’s more of
an effort to walk around. In this sense, interaction is contained, it’s disturbed; it tends toward the
superficial. The computer then, creates both absences and extensions of space. Any one person
can throw ideas back and forth about a certain scripting problem with someone 2,000 miles
away; at the same time, the same person doesn’t engage in face to face conversation with
someone in the same room, because he or she is 8 feet away. The relationship becomes one of
human and machine. Interaction is mediated by interfaces. Interfaces edit the ways in which
people communicate, so that what is said or done is locked up in a frame that doesn’t allow for
slippages or nuances because it is so programmed. It becomes habit, then, that people address
each other in terms of what the framework permits, without thinking twice. Conviction is carried
in material objects and indeed in the soft, nonmaterial objects that pervade our screens (Shove,
Watson, Hand, 2007).
If we look at the software, too, we notice similar contradictions. The widgets and programs that
run on this computer are geared to make their users more efficient. Thus it becomes easier to
write an email rather than call someone—email is concise, you leave out the umms and ohs
which are characteristic of so many phone calls. Similarly, chatting online rather than going
down a floor to discuss a project, because the topic of discussion is located in a digital file,
becomes the way things are done. Filling out a time form, for example, demands that employees
choose a description of what they’ve done; therefore, things not allocated for are not done,
officially. It begs the question what counts as work. The form limits function as much it tries to
alleviate specific problems. Within each instance of software is an innumerable set of
perspectives and philosophical commitments, without which the software wouldn’t exist.
Whistle While You Work 28Technology implies a expressly locked-in system, in other words. It presupposes certain
behaviors and precludes other uses.
Computers and computer software make up the actual working tools of the office. Computers are
accomplices in self absorption as well. They deplete and also deny public space. Notice that
people using computers tend to ignore those in their own physical proximity. Computers make
play not only possible because they are as transfixing as they are-- so that any interruption or
distraction holds out ludic possibilities-- it also makes play necessary.
Figure 1.3 Office Space 2 (ATTI website)
In these descriptions, the goal is to lay out the materialities which underpin and shape the social
and cultural demeanor of everyday life at the office. They are indexical of what is allowed, what
is normalized, encouraged, intended and therefore practiced. The mix of sound, computer
Whistle While You Work 29screens, online messaging services, scraps of paper, red ink pens, etc, affect and create
relationships that concretely form systems of interaction and practices which, in this office, are
specifically geared, crafted and in the end lend themselves to play. In other words, casualness
and also levity were taken into account and manifested in the details of the material arrangement
of the office. Taken separately, objects implicitly demand specific actions; looking at them as a
network, as a set of socio-technologies, they enact the social by conditioning behaviors and
extending a set of rules, guidelines for being in a particular place. Thus: ‘Place your coffee cups
in the dishwasher after use,’ Do not walk around with prototypes when clients are in the
building,’ ‘Do not stray from the traditional company name font,’ and so forth. Some rules are
implied while others are written into company memos.
Space
Part of the system of interactions is necessarily the building, the space of its rooms, the hallways
and beams that make it up. Thus as we see that objects fill the office space in significant ways,
we must also consider how the space itself necessitates closer assessment. The spatial layout, i.e.
the location of public and private office spaces, floors, and meeting rooms, etc., influences the
occurrence and structure of interactions. Thus today, it is fashionable to construct offices which
promote creativity through circulation (Duffy, 1997). The ‘new office’ operates on easing the
flow of communication, allowing for knowledge sharing and learning. Avoided are the type of
hyper-fragmented, isolated cubicle set-ups. Spaces must be flexible, for work is flexible.
ATTI’s offices span six floors. Each floor is structured as a kind of arcade, with offices running
along the sides of the middle corridor, which is interrupted by long white columns. The building
itself is old; there is one elevator and a winding staircase which often proves to be faster. Each
floor is self contained. The offices range in size but each has glass walls which are usually
covered in stickers, post-notes and other usually, cheeky, tongue in cheek pictures, geared at
poking fun at the work at hand, and creating a system of in the know jokes and allusions. Despite
technological advancements, i.e. despite the fact that video conferencing and other mobile
digital technology makes it easy to communicate, anywhere, anytime, face-to-face time is
deemed vital, such that real space encounters are built into the layout of the office spaces. For
example, coffee stations are located in the common areas on each floor; however there is one
espresso machine located in the atrium/kitchen. Encounters thus occur within a floor around the
Whistle While You Work 30regular drip-coffee; however for something different, employees must venture downstairs
beyond their normal working space. In this way, the trafficked space, through which it is
required to move in order to go from one office to another is designed as a meeting grounds.
Besides coffee, of which copious amounts are drunk daily, each common space has couches,
tables, fridges and often white boards on the walls. This is where everyday conversations,
spurious griping, and even the odd but felicitous confrontation occur. It is through these
encounters that one seeks to eliminate the creation of ghettos in personal bodily experience— to
deny passivity and introversion as it were. It is the office version of the public realm. According
to Sennett (2008), ‘The most important fact about the public realm is what happens in it.
Gathering together strangers enables certain kinds of activities which cannot happen, or do not
happen as intensely, in the intimate private realm. In public, people can access unfamiliar
information, expanding the horizons of their knowledge. Markets depend on these expanding
horizons of information. In public, people can discuss and debate with people who may not share
the same assumptions or the same interests.’ Different voices offer different ideas. The public
realm is a hot-spot of social interaction and where awareness, of people, their activities and
contexts is geared to be high.
In sum, we come to see that things, material things, particularly in space, as a part of space,
working with and inside space make meaning; as much as people use them to create meaning,
objects also expressly mean, as actors in and of themselves. They condition social awareness,
affect, knowledge, and the handing over of experience. To take up another example: a dirty cup
persuades one to place it in the dishwasher at the end of the day, where perchance you will meet
so and so and discuss a problem of, say, optics. This may or may not initiate an email exchange
or a Skype conversation. The problem may be solved or not. But it is elaborated upon and ideas
are exchanged.
Awareness
Another interpolation of theory may also be pertinent here. When thinking about things, and how
they impact behaviour, it becomes germane to speak of awareness then, a much vaunted concept
in HCI human computer interaction as well as Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW)
Whistle While You Work 31research studies. Both CSCW and HCI studies look at practices centered around the computer
and how engagement affects work and productivity, among other things. In this context
awareness can be defined thusly: “Awareness involves knowing who is ’around’, what activities
are occurring, who is talking with whom; it provides a view of one another in the daily work
environments. Awareness may lead to informal interactions, spontaneous connections, and the
development of shared cultures – all important aspects of maintaining working relationships
which are denied to groups distributed across multiple sites” (Dourish & Bly 1992, p. 41).
Awareness, then, plays a part in the dispersion of knowledge, which is often lateral or oblique,
rather than direct. Problem solving comes about through peripheral insights, fostered by casual
encounters, as much as it does through direct involvement. Or, to heed a more literary stance, to
"All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when
you are unable to concentrate" (Cortazar, 1986).
Similarly, it could be useful to think of work as performing certain tasks to produce certain
products-- not about craftsmanship, of writing a sentence, or a line of code, for instance, but
about coordinating human activity to open conversations, to what is said. Most actions are
engaged through speaking, through conversations. Speech acts--language conveys
commitments-- thus weigh heavily in interactions. People act by comparing assessments and
promises. Conversational space is necessary, for talking becomes a matter of doing.
The work of Wilhelm Dilthey can also be interpolated here, in fruitful fashion. For Dilthey,
interaction or ‘lived experience’ is a matter of the intermingling of affect, thought and will which
is dependent on what we as humans observe and react to and also the cumulative wisdom, the
communitas which comes about through participation in cultural and social performances (as
cited in Turner, 1987, p. 19). Experience is socially bound.
In the same vein, knowledge should not be seen as a commodity, or object that can be placed in
the common space to be shared, but as deeply process-oriented and interpersonal (Nonaka &
Takeuchi, 1995). Knowledge sharing and creating consists of a process; if we are thus to focus
on the practice of knowledge dispersion, we must acknowledge that it consists of continual and
Whistle While You Work 32ongoing achievements that are produced and reproduced. And it can be prodded, engineered in
certain styles, say ludically, abetted by an environment, expectations and culture that are up to
par.
Social awareness and therefore knowledge sharing as such can be fostered and created through
deliberate configurations as well as ludic practices. This arrangement, awareness as playfully
mediated, can be witnessed in the material design and set-up of ATTI. The offices were
specifically construed to encourage casual interactions and playful intervals. Interestingly,
because play is endorsed through material objects and space, it becomes a routine in and of itself.
Thus, on the one hand, play is meant to go against the grain of routine; however, it ends up
actually gunning for it, as well, in one fell stroke. Later on, I will argue that this dialectic is
worked out through rituals and performance.
In sum, however, I’ve argued that material objects have increasingly greater purchase on our
lives; they are more often than not, more than just scenery. Their values and the ways in which
people describe such objects, especially in the rhetoric of the times, reflect, shape and even
change how lives are conducted. So how is this played out in terms of actual doings and goings
on? In terms of practice, in terms of relations between people and objects and the spaces in
which actions take place? To investigate this, I’ll go back to ATTI.
Interfaces
A new set of mobile phone wallpapers (essentially interactive backdrops for your mobile screen)
are being developed. They are the first to be delivered directly to customers, rather than to
mobile businesses who distribute the wallpapers as part of their own phones. This time the stakes
are different. These wallpapers will show off what the company can do. The concept with
descriptions and pictures is placed on the internal web server, ATTIweb. This is a forum where
you can see what everyone is up to. Employees each have their own logins can post updates,
briefs, photos, etc about what they are currently working on. The latest updates show up n the
main page newsfeed. Members can set up their own categories, for new projects or for activities.
Each department, e.g. sales, innovation, web team, etc. has its own section. There are also
sections for games, coffee break suggestions, complaints, interns, code names, guidelines,
Whistle While You Work 33security, and so on. This is basically the internal repository for ATTI knowledge sharing, the go-
to place for finding information and engaging in information sharing. It is here that comments
about the quality of the wallpaper effects, how well they work or not, the text, the release promo
video and the look/graphic design can be made. After comments and suggestions are made on
the site, developers fix any glitches and finalize the graphics. The text, which consists of
descriptions that will be placed in the press release and blog entry, is sent out to several people
from marketing, innovation, and communications, two days before the release date. Drafts are
edited and resent. Some suggestions are taken up, others are discussed but discarded. As the
deadline approaches, the involved parties communicate via Skype about the wording and
grammar of the text: ‘We need to make the text shorter, without losing the message,’ ‘Wouldn’t
‘soothing’ be a better word or is there another synonym?’ ‘Does this humor work for an
international audience?’ A trip upstairs to the developers’ office, and you’ll find that while
working out the final version, they are playing a variant of ‘guess the artist,’ one member of the
three person team plays a song and the others must come up with cover versions by different
artists. As the working day is ending, employees head home and continue working on the end
draft via Skype. The wording is important and they want to make sure they get it just right. How
is a consensus reached? Although the CEO and marketing VP may have a look at the text, in the
end it is a few employees from Products and the developers who decide that the text is right. It’s
not about a direct word from above. Rather, after hours, the team comes up with a document that
is short, descriptive and engaging. They won’t work far into the night, but until something just
right is drafted and deemed appropriate. When the wallpapers are released on the blog, success
is gauged by comments and by web exposure. The number of links on other blogs and hits on the
home blog are counted and tabulated. Although users do note that the wallpapers do not work at
first--problems with the links as well as compatibility issues-- the reception seems to be
welcoming. One of the founders sends out a company-wide email with links about the release
and a word of congratulations to everyone who worked on and contributed to the project. With
mentions on several big tech blogs, it is deemed a success. Meanwhile during coffee breaks and
lunch, employees have loaded the wallpapers on their own phones and test them out.
Notice the circulation. The primary mediators in this wallpaper case, if we are once more
attendant to objects, are based on software and computers. Skype, emails and a web forum create
Whistle While You Work 34the forms through which the job is initiated, inspected and agreed upon. Small autonomous teams
minimize bureaucratic entanglements. The entire consensus building process has become a
matter of specific and enclosed frameworks. Communication is achieved by being boxed in and
opened up, much like a package or gift--the small windows of the chat box, the rectangular
receptacle for penning emails, these are reductive, but in the same instance, able to contain
multitudes . The message is teased into being, prodded out and combed into a neat agreement,
playful, concise and vivid. Conversations are legitimized via the software. Functional
delimitations garner more conclusive endings; for, if these discussions were to take place strictly
in actual tête-à-tête meetings, there would be a gap of meaning (conversations cannot be easily
remembered at all times, for one, and it is always easier to talk about something when the
referent is there, which is what technology quite nicely allows) and economy. Using Skype
allows people to work where it is convenient for one, and it also is fit for shorter messages.
When speed is at the behest of the company rule, such strictures become opening. They allow for
rapid decisions in a casual way. Rather than boiler room pressure, there is an elasticity at work,
which is only allowed by the berth or leeway of the objects at hand. It is thus a means to work
quickly, but also in a manner that works without imposing bureaucracy. The after-thought
courtesies, e.g. the thank yous and acknowledgements lend to the ludic possibilities in a ritual
sense. I will speak more about this in the next section.
Website
But for now, another empirical exercise. The website, before I came to ATTI, as mentioned
previously, was functional, but nondescript. It did not speak of individuality or distinction. It did
not speak of much at all, a European technology company, yes, but not much more than that. The
revamp, makeover, 180 switch up of the site, was thus a vaunted, yet understated deal. The
company was growing and wanted to put out a face that was of a piece with its values, being
youthful, open, fun--qualities which were decidedly invisible if non extant on the old site. What
defines a company? How does one give it a face, a voice, a head, a heart? What does a European,
a Scandinavian company do to go worldwide, to adopt values of sheer capitalism, of globalism,
of being in the know, without losing its consummate local edge, its communitas, its essence? The
task then, became one of rewriting the text--what does the company do anyway? Who are they?
What services do they offer?--and it was also necessary to create a more vivid graphic profile.
Whistle While You Work 35Spruced up visuals and sharp, concise descriptions--these were the goals. A small team was
charged with the job; they had their own office and sat side by side; it was a tight knit endeavour.
Scrum meetings were held in the mornings. Background graphics were conceived, laid out then
redone. Materials from the Products department were reviewed and pieces of text were trussed
together from existing descriptions. Some items would be viewed by the VP of marketing, but
much of it was put up unfiltered. In the end it would take them more than six months to complete
the task. As a new website was not the highest priority on the company’s to do list, there was not
much interference from the higher-ups, thus decisions that should have been made earlier on
were simply not. Other more urgent tasks, upcoming conferences and product launches, for
instance, came up, which meant the site got short shrifted from time to time. But it wasn’t simply
a matter of priority or order. Freedom to do as one wished, to experiment, to stretch boundaries,
was in fact too much. The playful, experimental ethos espoused by the company, needed
structure in order to work. As one frustrated team members put it, ‘This isn’t like Kindergarten
anymore with recess and toys, someone needs to take responsibility’. In the end, when the final
draft was ready to be reviewed and launched (after numerous pushed back launch dates),
chocolate candy eggs were offered to those who would venture down and give their critiques of
the site. A gesture to the new, youthful spirit of the site, which reflected the company’s own
playful, friendly values, it was. However, it was largely an empty gesture, as the forever delayed
website launch had become somewhat notorious. Its failure to launch highlighted what some
perceived as favoritism by the CEO, lack of guidelines, and a sense of pervasive chaos.
Certainly, employees agreed, it was fun to work there, but at the same time this leeway, the fact
that many didn’t seem to know who worked in their department, the fact that finding a person’s
office or seat was a running joke as it was problematic, and the lack of perceived oversight and
accountability, counterbalanced the ludic mood.
The same circulation could be observed as with the wallpaper case. Communication was handled
via face to face conversations, given the team members’ immediate proximity. Skype and email
were also used frequently to share files and also to joke and gossip in a semi-secretive manner.
Music was played; there was even a short-lived theme song. Post-its with new layout ideas,
along with 8x12 print outs of text and visuals were duly posted on the glass walls. Copious
Whistle While You Work 36amounts of coffee were drunk. There was camaraderie, jest, teamwork and fun. It seemed that
things were going swimmingly, until the timeline betrayed the mood.
What made the difference? Where did things go awry? To start, we must look at what can be
observed: the affective nets are cast and drawn. Fun as an affect is there certainly. However, for
one, simplification allowed by the constellation of programs like Skype and email, made things
more complicated. It could have allowed for centering, a strategy for making a statement, for
making a streamlined communication flow. But it did not, not for lack of trying nor conviction,
but because, I would argue, certain codes, performance cues were missed.
Furthermore, I would say that we are getting at the business of serious play, of what I’d term
bureaucratic play, play which is performative. Bureaucratic play is conditional and functional. It
requires, of course, employee buy-in, but also, a willingness and flexibility on the part of the
organization, of the bureaucracy. It allows for a sense of heightened interaction, but not in
excessively authoritative or orthodox ways-- it can’t be explicitly worked out in drills. It’s a
toolbox, a means to endorse and enhance company values. Bureaucratic play is not a totality, it’s
more of a framework which nudges and gives way to discovery, camaraderie, jest and creativity.
It advocates tight alliances between fun and corporate culture, as it plays off this idea that
business is where it’s at, not just pop culture. It is also a type of ritual performance, with
requisite roles to be fulfilled.
In a nutshell, (a rather large one, at that) it could be said that the former scenario worked as an
example of an ‘in order to’ situation --the actors performed in order to get things done within a
semi-scripted performance. The latter, a more naive and exploratory act, can be described as an
‘in such a way as to’ scenario. The actors were bucking the trend, going beyond the given
parameters and getting in over their heads. In spirit it was apt, however, in actual deed and word,
it was not in line with the script. To do something ‘in such a way as to’ means concision and
economy are foregrounded by a sense of unbounded liberty. The principle actors took liberties
that went beyond what was sanctioned in the organizational schema. Their actions were not
sufficiently clued up on the sanctified performance cues. For, to be free or to be seen as free, one
has to be able to know and to make choices. In this sense choice is a means to actualize freedom.
Whistle While You Work 37However, wrapped up in having the ability to choose, one must also be aware of what it means to
choose, what and why the pervasive expectations are what they are. And such expectations are in
not only the rulebooks and contracts, but also comprised in the everyday office culture. Thus, it
is useful to look at how this is performed.
Analysis Part IIPerformance
What I want to argue is that performance, and more specifically the performance of rituals, and
play rituals, forms and bounds relationships. Play hard, work hard becomes a matter of playing
the right roles and in turn lending to an affect of playful camaraderie and thus to the
communitarian ethos of the workplace. As one person put it, ‘you can’t just come in and read the
materials, the guidelines; to know how things work at ATTI, you have to be there. ATTI is
special, not like other companies’ (J. D., personal communication, October 24, 2010).
In tandem with performance, I will look at ritual qua ritual and the ways that rituals are enacted
and performed, for the two are part and parcel. Ritual is homologous with theatre--the
extenuation of behaviour, the rhythmic articulations of the body, the condensed gestures, and
arrangement of objects, these are the markers of performance and ritual as performed.
Performance theory has enjoyed circulation within organizational studies of late. Management,
clients, employees, customers, are outfitted with roles and scripts. In a sense, all the world is a
stage; but there are many simultaneous stages, scenes and actors and each is interwoven to form
a web of theatres, so to speak. An overview of the performance school would necessarily
include Erving Goffman’s (1959) sociology which sees organizing as like theater, in a
metaphorical sense. For Goffman, the social, i.e. all interactions between and amongst
individuals are groups are staged. People, as actors, prepare themselves, with make-up, props
and all, backstage; the performance, consisting of social routines and interactions, is played out
on the main stage. He argues that interactions are conceived in terms of the framework of that
which individuals ‘give’ and ‘give off,’ meaning what is expressed verbally and what is not, ergo
body language. The audience must always interpret the congruence between these two
expressions (their exact or inexact veracity) and respond in kind. Everyone is thus a player on the
world’s stage. Pine and Gilmore, in their espousal of the Experience Economy, similarly argue
Whistle While You Work 38that ‘work is theater and every business is a stage.’ Czarniawska (1997) takes a look at how
organizations enact, theatrically, their identities through forms of role-playing.
Going back to performance theorist Richard Schechner (1988), we find that his view of the
quiddity of performance is multifaceted, polymorphous, and he takes more than one stab in
defining it: performance is ‘ritualized behaviour conditioned/permeated by play,’ ‘twice behaved
behaviour,’ delving into ethology and animal behaviour, he links play and performance ‘I believe
play is what organizes performance, makes it comprehensible...One of the qualities of play in
higher primates in the wild is the balance between its improvisational quality and its orderliness:
in fact, play is the improvisational imposition of order, a way of making order out of disorder’;
furthermore, he develops a binary continuum of efficacy/ritual-entertainment/theater and labels it
performance. ‘Performance originates in impulses to make things happen and to entertain; to get
results and to fool around; to collect meanings and to pass the time...’ (p.p. 99, 157).
On ritual
Schechner (1988) places ritual in direct line with performance-- ‘Ritual process is performance’
(p. 342). He further elaborates, ‘The interactions that rituals surround, contain, and mediate
almost always concern hierarchy, territory and sexuality/mating. ...ambivalent symbolic actions
pointing at the real transactions even as they help people avoid too direct a confrontation with
these events’ (p. 231). Rituals, it must be noted, are result oriented. They allow results to be had
in a deferred manner. A ritual performance thus is a means to negotiate conflict without engaging
in a direct head to head showdown.
Clocks
In ritual performances, therefore, it is the absence of the all too real that renders its presence. For
example, let us look at the notion of time, which has been conceived as the ultimate taskmaster
in the working world, particularly in the case of technology companies where speed is key.
Modernity has, in line with the Enlightenment’s espousal of rational science and technological
progression, been driven by metered clock time. The logical ticking of the clock has ordered the
way we live, work and play so much so that we’ve become inured to its workings. The
Whistle While You Work 39mechanistic, mathematical abstraction that time became was represented wholly by the clock in
order to impose order on an otherwise disparate and intuited concept; timescapes are culturally
bounded, thus the cyclical times of various Eastern viewpoints, linear Western time, and static,
timeless Zen time are iterations determined not by science, but by lived culture. Time is as time
does, it is generative, performative, and the ways in which it is nested, contrived, condensed, and
exaggerated, influence daily practices. Thus, the feting of future time, as is homologous with the
New Economy, acts as both a counterbalance to the industrial clock and as an exaggeration
thereof. It is in this future fetish, when time becomes intertwined with a particular culture or
attitude, in this case, that which is unattainable and always at arm’s length, that certain lapses
and instances of disengagement come to the fore.
The future forecloses the now; future time thus becomes too close as technologies compress time
creating instantaneity, creating a demand for rapid feedback and response. The concept of now,
especially within fast companies, is constantly narrowed, made abstract because it is always
now-- the future is now. As Löfgren (2005) opines, in the New Economy it is imperative to
‘communicate the fact that you are a fast innovative and creative actor on the market, one who
already has a claim into the future’. So it’s about coming out ahead, being ahead of the times, at
all times. Being fast means not being in love with the moment but being in love with the future
moment, the instant future and also, finding an ideal in something that is almost inaccessible.
This is a stance that borders on the Utopian, as looking around the corner for something not yet
found or known is also an acknowledgment of being out of sync with the unruly and
unprogressive now. Time is out of joint, decoupling in temporal rhetoric, the individual from the
lived environment. Paul Virilio (1997) is even more explicit when he writes that "the
teletechnologies of real time…are killing 'present' time by isolating it from its here and now, in
favor of a commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our "concrete presence"
in the world…"(p. 10).When the future now is lauded to such a degree, in the narrative structure
and the ambient discourse, ritual becomes a grounding element. It makes time static, or arrested,
giving employees respite, pause. In simpler terms, time today is experienced as being out of,
pressed for, and simply not enough. The enactment of ritual works to attenuate time making it
more comprehensible, more meaningful. It brings things closer to the natural moorings and
makings of the world.
Whistle While You Work 40
At ATTI, work time is ordered by computers; time flows according to the machinic order. Clock
time via the machine is eminent. However, work is interspersed with sanctioned and expected
social interactions, so that the maxim ‘time flies when having fun’ becomes true. The company,
in that sense, allows its employees to carve out their own timescapes via rituals of coffee, eating,
Friday drinks, morning breakfasts, massages, and also flexible working hours. Teams often hold
their own weekly coffee breaks, with cakes and pastries bought or home baked by one member
on a rotating basis (these are worked out on the internal web server). They convene in the
common areas, fire up the coffee pots, bring up fresh milk from the main kitchen and engage in
conversations both work (complaints and compliments are dealt with in equal measure) and non-
work related. Coffee and cake, simple things, nevertheless, they act as both a type of social glue
and as centering devices. The contrast--fast work, reflected in the endless amounts of coffee (in
the office I observed, there were white board tallies of how many cups of coffee each person had
drunk in a given day, and there was a designated ‘pot watcher’ keeping watch for newly brewed
pots: ‘I drink between 5-10 cups of coffee a day, but I never have any on the weekend,’ ‘Watch
out for the coffee vultures, they gather around the pot before it’s even done-- they just put their
cups under to catch the drip,’ ‘I’m down to just two cups a day, my doctor said I shouldn’t
drink so much.’ Coffee is a precious commodity here; the original office design designated one
spot for coffee collection in order to encourage face to face encounters; however employees
ended up bringing their own thermoses from home) circulate through the building, with the slow,
meticulous chewing of sweets and the relaxed postures, as bodies are positioned on couches,
facing other people rather than screens. In turn this is of a piece with the office uniform--
sneakers, often Converse, or simply house slippers, t-shirts, and jeans. Coffee breaks such as
these highlight a heightened sense of interaction--they make the body visible in a different way,
such that attitudes, postures, mannerisms and timings are more drawn out, eased. The same goes
for spontaneous acts of play: giving out candies, throwing balls, shooting toy guns, engaging in
ping pong sessions, and the like--these form the ritualistic ethos of fun at work. This is ritual: "a
stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a
sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the
actors' goals and interests" (as cited in Turner 1977a:183). Rituals are storehouses of meaningful
Whistle While You Work 41symbols by which information is revealed and regarded as authoritative, as dealing with the
crucial values of the community.
Rituals as routines put into abeyance the matter of the all too real, and places the contentious, the
restive, the disagreed upon into spaces of liminality, in order to be grappled with in a symbolic
manner. It gives space. It imparts distance. And distance is comforting. Indeed Turner places
ritual in the liminal-liminoid (where liminoid are similar to liminal rites, but are not obligatory in
the same way, they are thus, liminoid activities are analogous to leisure and art1) line-up--he sees
it as interstitial, a threshold, betwixt and between, much in the same vein as he views play. It is a
subjunctive stance--working with possibilities, ifs, openings, leeway. The betwixt and in
between becomes pronounced when labor and leisurely acts are blended or when one is
superimposed on the other. Apropos, whenever a culture constructs itself through play activities
by imagining an alternate image of itself, this alternate image draws direct attention to the
liminal-liminoid aspects of the culture being constructed. Interestingly, this refocusing of
attention can produce ‘revolutionary strivings for renewed communitas’ (Roos, Statler, & Viktor,
2009, p. 93) Thus feelings of we-ness are enacted for the preservation of the company through
play. The resulting spontaneous communitas dissolves boundaries that have kept people shut off
and out from one another.
So, we can say that rituals stabilize identities by enacting their inversions. It is tantamount to
embracing the cause in order to flaunt or more bluntly, to screw the cause. In these instances of
liminality, there is a break in the prevailing structures and patterns of behaviour, rules aren’t
abided by and people act in opposition to the expected norms. Going against the grain, reinforces
the proverbial grain and solidifies social relationships in one fell swoop. Or to bring in Schechner
1 In tribal societies, liminality is often functional, in the sense of being a special duty or performance, required in the course of work or activity; its very reversals and inversions tend to compensate for rigidities or unfairnesses of normative structure. But in industrial societies, the rite du passage form, built into the calendar and/or modeled on organic processes of maturation and decay, no longer suffices for total societies. Leisure provides the opportunity for a multiplicity of optional liminoid genres of drama and sport.. which are to be seen as Sutton-Smith envisages play as experimentation with various repertoires.’ In the so called ‘high culture’ of complex societies, liminoid is not only removed from a rite du passage context, it is also individualized’ (Turner 1982, p. 160).
Whistle While You Work 42(1988) again, ‘the bottom line is solidarity, not conflict. Conflict is supportable (in theater, and
perhaps in society, too) only inside a nest built from the agreement to gather at a specific time
and place, to perform--to do something agreed on-- and to disperse once the performance is over
(p.189). Communitas is retrieved in ludic interludes. Instances of play aren’t simply social
occasions, for all work tends towards the social; rather, it is in the enacting of this alternate
image that creates a framework of togetherness. What appears to a detached observer to be a
straightforward employee get-together can actually contain a multitude of meanings and contexts
that can transform the seemingly mundane and trivial into something altogether different. It isn’t
the purely subjective emotional and cognitive flows that such interactions elicit and rework that
is the defining mark here. In actuality, all these exchanges are witnessable forms coming out of
social settings and everyday interaction; they are couched in and made meaningful through
socially shared practices.
Beer
Another empirical example: Friday beverages, aka beer night. At this company, beer and cider
are kept in stock in the kitchen/dining hall; for each bottle taken, employees are expected to
contribute a small set amount and place it in a jar for that purpose. The honor system works well
here. Although employees can have a beer after work anytime, Friday is the culturally sanctioned
sipping day. Before work is over even, many bring a bottle up to their desks and wind down their
day, talking about weekend plans, noting things still yet to be done, clearing away empty coffee
cups and entering more casual Skype conversations, filled with jokes, odd links to humorous
videos, cartoons, etc. After they officially log and clock out, they file downstairs to the kitchen,
where there’s food, music, and of course, more beer. People are looser, more relaxed. They
socialize, mingle, play ping pong. Talk, of course, is not all golden, gripes about the company are
aired, conversations turn acerbic, sometimes with hints of bitterness, irony and a sense of
restiveness, but these unsavory notes create cohesion in dissension. Even if one disagrees, and
there will be disagreement, an affective flow is created. It leads to difference, but therein lies the
crux. There are many ways of feeling and these gatherings create an affective well that is shared,
even if the sentiments are varied and even contradicting. For example: one employee, a computer
tech, on his work: ‘It’s Friday night, I’ve already got 20 emails in my inbox and I’ll have at least
double that amount by tomorrow. A lot of the time, it’s from the bosses, the CEO, they have
Whistle While You Work 43computer or system problems and I’m one of the only ones who can do the job. But right now,
I’m drinking, enjoying; I may answer the mails when I get home, or I may wait’ (T.T., personal
communication, Novermber 23, 2010). Another employee, an engineer, who had recently come
back from a stateside conference: ‘So they paid for us to sit around and explain the product and
attend the parties. We got to drink free Bacardi at Universal Studios. The best part was that the
Norwegian cheerleader squad was staying at our hotel, so every morning I could see them
practicing by the pool. It was great...I wish they would send other employees over too, so that
they could see what’s actually going on outside of the office’ (K.K. personal communication,
November 23, 2010). And from yet another employee: ‘I’m a designer. Look at my clothes, I’m
the only one who dresses well here.’ His friend: ‘Oh ok, but we engineers get paid more.
Designer: Yeah, but I have more fun’ (personal communication, October 25, 2010). This banter,
in this setting, as casual and off hand as it is, exemplifies how ATTI’s employees simultaneously
engage in fun and reconcile differences.
Performance, particularly in this workplace context, creates an aesthetic structure, a poetics,
which keeps the praxis, the day to day doings, from falling apart. It is meant to divert and
assuage conflict, to ‘frame and control... to transform the raw into cooked, to deal with the most
problematic...human interactions (Schechner, 1988 p.191). Nevertheless, conflict does occur.
Schechner, citing Victor Turner, identifies four actions that form the key components of social
drama:
‘1. breach of regular, norm governed social relations. 2. Crisis during which there is a
tendency for the breach to widen. 3. Redressive action ranging from personal advice and
informal mediation or arbitration to formal judicial and legal machinery.. to the modes of public
ritual...4. the final phase.. reintegration(as cited in Turner, 1974, p.p. 37-41). Office social
dramas are preempted by incorporated rituals of play and incursions of leisure which enhance
employees’ company allegiance and their own sense of well being. However, conflicts do erupt,
such as the website ordeal, discussed earlier. The breach occurred when the launch date was
pushed back for nearly 5 months, it was exacerbated as more time passed. In the end, when a
new layout was suggested by one of the founders, the previous 7 or 8 designs were thrown out
the window and a last minute change took place. The redress came in meetings with the CEO.
Whistle While You Work 44These were preceded by email exchanges with the team leader. However, it was a little bit too
late. The result: one person was fired, and the website design would soon change yet again. The
situation would have been resolved in a more amiable matter, had the actors not upset the
performative balance of play and work-- had they not fallen out of line with the given cultural
parameters. Apropos, looking at Stanislavski, the renowned actor and director, and his method--
actors are not meant to ‘play an emotion’ but rather ‘the given circumstances’ (1988, p. 342).
The given circumstances--what is there and presently available, what is workable and also what
is expected.
In acting, actors play-act, they do emotions but are not actually in the grips of such emotions. If
we take this to the office, we may say that employees are meant to act in certain ways, ludically,
in the case of ATTI, even if one is not playfully inclined per se. It’s a framework that
nevertheless affects those involved. Take, for instance, an actor that is meant to be acting angry--
he may be portraying an unreal emotion, a lie as it were, but still the performance is enough to
affect, to move the audience. Or to take another tack, regarding a painting by Bronzino is a
different beast from contemplating Brigitte Bardot--different aesthetic expectations, different
affective stances conditioned by disparate social norms. Hochschild, extending on Stanislavski’s
notion of ‘emotion memory’ defines ‘deep acting’ as the process whereby we conjure feelings
that we ought to feel to play correctly, our given roles (1983). She explains how ‘emotion
managers’ mainly in the service industry use deep acting techniques to shape how their
employees should feel in order to be effective in their work. Stewardesses, for example are
conditioned to be friendly and helpful, whereas doctors should be calm and unfazed. Hochschild
further differentiates deep acting, wherein feelings themselves are modulated, from surface
acting, which entails mere changes in facial/body display-- inner feelings in the latter instance
are neither changed nor affected. This can lead to emotional dissonance, a discrepancy between
what one feels and how one acts. Faking it may be a means to get through the day, but it is not
ideal for the workplace, as dissatisfaction can lead to poor job performance, resentment and high
turnover. Emotion management goes hand in hand with employee buy-in. It is a device for
organizational control.
Affective Nets
Whistle While You Work 45What I’m getting at here is that emotions are not simply inward or subjective states; they are
bounded by the social. Emotional responses are culturally scripted and directed (performed).
They can also be effectively bought and commoditized, to a significant degree. Emotions can be
shored up, pressed out in latent, but powerful ways. We find here an espousal which
encompasses the basic premise of the Experience Economy; after all, it thrives on emotion-- for
what is an experience or Erlebnis, if not an emotionally bound occurrence. Emotion, thus, can be
harnessed and transformed into the equivalent of a value added logo. The economical
implications of this are worth looking at, especially in terms of workers’ subjectivities. If their
own emotionalities are traded on in the global market, how can they retrieve a sense of agency?
I would argue that affinal with this ludic organizational style and the tenets of modern capitalism,
there is a playful collusion. Agency of this type falls more in line with a steady cantering than a
full out charge; it is the agency of interceding on behalf of another, of acting for another. This act
is not one of sovereign ruler but of being instrumental to spur action (Thrift, 2010). In this
configuration, complicity for the well being of each entity is entailed. It’s a sort of affective-
ontological waltz, of a piece with the ‘mother knows best’ plus ‘what’s good for the employee is
good for the company’ affirmatives, but in a more attenuated, nuanced sense.
The crux of the matter is that at ATTI, workers are encouraged to be friendly, creative, and
jovial--this is fostered by having an all pervasive play atmosphere. Play becomes part of the
employees’ habitus. Or in the words of Goffman, ‘when they issue uniforms, they issue skins.’
Anchored in a few pounds of flesh and soul, it should be added, if we are to take into account
deep acting.
What I’ve been heretofore explaining is that ATTI play has performative value. We can take it
as means of working things out, ritualistically, to confront organizational and social ills in a
symbolic manner, to work through conflict. However, at the very same time, it is a means of
maintaining social order. Echoing Mother Courage’s tagline – ‘Hey, I’ve got to get back into
business. Hey, take me with you’ (Brecht, 1963). We must get back to the business at hand--the
matter of being in business. The commercial rein is never far off; and the pendulous
intermingling of affect and cash cuts a sharp figure: ‘I’ve been working on testing for days, it’s
Whistle While You Work 46so boring but I try to look happy or at least busy while the boss is around. The client is really
getting antsy about getting this done. They’re breathing down our necks. We’ll get it done, but I
wish they’d give us some space’ (D.D., personal communication, November 2, 2010)
Work has traditionally been considered a necessary exertion; it is not, typically the locus of
enjoyment but rather the means thereto; fulfillment is had in making one’s livelihood, living
from the fruits of one’s labor. However, with the interpolation of fun and games at work, there’s
a burgeoning imposition of an infrangible code of behaviour. Work, have fun, have fun at work,
while you work. The dividing line between work and play is wizened and thus the teleology of
fun gets muddled. What does it mean when these two purportedly unequal values are given the
same worth, i.e. when work is equated with fun? In other words, if you hold two values as the
same, which one is better or worse? How does one valorize and hold dear one or the other? The
lack of difference makes a difference in that it may dilute both values. Work can become less
work-like and play less enjoyable. Employees complain about the lack of order, the constant
chaos-- ‘Experience the chaos of ATTI on all floors,’ ‘Do it yourself or it won’t get done,’ ‘I
have no idea who works in my department.’ However, they also decry the encroachment of too
much rigidity and structure (‘customer projects tend to get repetitive and perhaps automatic; it’s
limiting and not that much fun’), of not being able to take breaks or have access to massages
because they simply have too much to do and not enough time to do it.
We could conceive that work at the end of the day is work, even when it is mixed in with
intervals of play, or a bit of leisure. However, rituals, particular ludically-infused rituals, may be
seen as a means to enhance employees’ sense of interaction, but not in unduly prescriptive ways;
paradoxically they inure participants to institutionalization, while at the same time creating a
tandem, but sanctioned routine. Play, when positioned as bureaucratic play, as a means to an
end, can easily get at routine. For, if play becomes part of the everyday work practice, how can
it retain its fresh, fun appeal? If play becomes institutionalized, employees are likely to see it as
akin to office furniture, always there, perhaps comfortable too, but nothing to write home about,
making no difference, in other words. Fun turns into a bottomless pit; initial enthusiasm is
quickly succumb to worry and burn out. It’s a spiral staircase: daunting but pleasurably so, at
first take; persistent and never ending at second.
Whistle While You Work 47
However, it’s necessary to take into account the fact that, there is a tenuous balance. The fun
workplace is first and foremost a workplace and employees are quick to point out that fact. Even
when the normative gaps between what is considered work and play are ritualistically smoothed
over, work still maintains its preeminent standing. Work comes out on top. As iterated before,
play as ritual performance has a multitude of functions, not least of which is to strengthen
company values. Through play, employees are bound together as a community, rather than
existing as a disparate group of workers without strong affiliations. Furthermore, the fun
workplace bears out both myths of independence and romanticism (of the ideal office that
actually helps employees self actualize). Where more and more work has become a means of
distinction, a venue for self identification, getting a sense of pleasure out of what one does is as
important as the pay check. Employees are enticed by the prospect of ‘not business as usual’. At
companies such as ATTI, work is conflated with self fulfillment and also well being. Happier
workers, so the story goes, work better. They are thus given extras, massages, breakfasts, and
toys, in order to enhance their sense of satisfaction and concomitantly their sense of
accomplishment; having a job that is not simply a job, ergo a means to money, confers
employees with feelings of merit and enjoyment. ATTI is a company that believes in fun as a
vehicle to step-up creativity and thus innovation. The aforementioned sweeteners are meant to
boost creative output and thus give the company an edge on the competition in a notoriously
tough global market. The tenets of an affective economy are evidenced here. As described
earlier, employees’ sense of well being is achieved through affective conditioning. Fun is meant
to transgress traditional workplace norms, while at the same time effecting a measure of control.
At one end of the spectrum, management panders to its employees, giving them means beyond
mere cash, so that they may invoke a sense of company loyalty, and therefore, work better as a
company whole. Workers are governed by their passion for the company. These hand me down
benefits are meant to trickle back up especially in the financial sectors. It’s a system that’s
geared towards pleasing both sides of the equation-- the bookkeepers and everyone else.
Fulfillment
The play-performance turn gives itself to elaboration as a legitimate form of control because it
fits in with employees’ expectations which are molded in part by the overarching company
Whistle While You Work 48narrative. It’s a narrative which importunes the importance of fun, friendliness, creativity and all
around good times in conjunction with professionalism and cutting edge skills. In the end it’s not
a simple matter of doling out questions of practicalities, e.g.: Does a ping pong table help
employees work better? Does morning bread? Do free massages? Does Wii? These individual
things have no relation to the nature or quality of work in and of themselves. Rather, it is in the
way that they are incorporated into the company discourse, and how they are enacted in day to
day practice that bears weight. Employees themselves appreciate the benefits of bread and beer;
the very appeal of a more casual, relaxed workplace, one that prides itself on being different, on
not towing the corporate line is a considerable factor in employees’ decisions to work at
ATTI--’I could have gone to work with X company and I would have had to get up at 6 AM
everyday and wear a suit to work, and I probably would have made more money, I would have,
actually; but I’m still young, I’d rather be able to come to work at 10, eat breakfast for free, and
take a quick nap in the game room during my break if I want to. Take away my breakfast, and
I’m out’ (K.K., personal communication, October 20, 2010). There’s a sense of having your
cake, icing and all, and eating it too.
ATTI has taken the capitalistic imperative ‘Enjoy!’ and brought it into work, encroaching on the
affective registers of well-being, of free flowing ideas and camaraderie. They tell their
employees to ‘take it easy’ (but not too easy) and they do. Employees are affectively inculcated
to the casualized new media office. Get paid to enjoy your work -- this motif has become
something of an ecumenical act as companies solidify commitments through emotional
management. Put a twist on the cajoling adjuration, ‘Don’t sweat it’ and it becomes an
enticement; do not (let them see you) sweat, or in other words do not show your laboring, instead
turn it into play. Work is turned into something comestible, possibly something beautiful. Is this
a new take on ‘false consciousness’? Is it, in other words, a structuring structure that enables
employee buy-in, and consequently a good ideology, a faith that can be believed in? One
consequence of the play-work set-up is that employees’ personal, emotional lives become
inscripted, roped into the company brand; their non-work lives are situated as value adding
components because ATTI’s values are about community, of being part of a closely knit whole,
rather than being a faceless corporate entity. Their website depicts people lounging around,
sipping on cider, looking happy--this is their brand, in a nutshell. Thus, we find a conflation of
Whistle While You Work 49production and consumption; ATTI workers are invited to buy-in and consume the ATTI ethos in
order to create higher production values. Play could be seen as a gimmick to maintain social
order. On the one hand, it could be argued, the massages, the beer, the ping pong, etc. make
employees worry less about organizational structure, client deadlines, glitches in the products,
and lack of resources or direction, etc. However, if employees had really not accepted and
subscribed to the ATTI work-play culture, the effort would not hold up. Employees co-create the
atmosphere of the company, the mirthful brand and conviviality and also their own buy-in at the
same time. For, in the end, it was these values that first attracted them in the first place, and it is
these very same values that they wish to perpetuate.
I want to suggest that there exists a balance of both structure (management) and the everyday
lifeworld of the employees. The working body is governed through play, as an economy of play
and concomitantly happiness make up the company’s operative tenets. However, it is not the
mere top-down imposition of deep-seated economic motivations iterated in a friendlier manner
that we find here. Looking at the situation demands an askew glance. The ludic organizational
set up functions because there is collusion. Employees continuously co- and re-create the brand,
the company’s precepts, its ethos, its value, through (re)making its meanings. Meaning is
realized and produced through their own consumption of the brand. This is also reflective of the
incursion of pleasure and play in the public sphere especially with technologies that demand a
sort of ludic attention span, i.e. precisely the types of products ATTI produces--interactive
wallpapers, apps, and games--- again we witness the blurring of consumption and production.
Employees thus single-handedly ape and shape the growing cultural mode of production. It is not
then, the Habermasian system that controls and colonizes with an unwavering, adamantine grasp.
Rather we could see it as the foray of the lifeworld into the system . If we take the post modern
idea of mediated self narratives, of hobbies and distinction (the notion that your free time
interests, which in the realm of knowledge-based labor often collides, confer distinction, that
they show others who we are and what we believe in), of conceptions of well being and free will,
then employees make choices about their workplace as it ascribes to their own conception of
how they see themselves, of how they choose their identities and how they choose to lead their
personal lives. Indeed, their lives, both on and off the clock, are partially mediated by cultural
inscriptions in the workplace, such that Hochschild’s ‘managed heart’ is quite resonant.
Whistle While You Work 50However, complicity is found there too. Interchanges between structure and lifeworld create an
auspicious commingling.
It’s at times a wary pact, but in the end it cuts both ways, and there is an easy agreement.
Employees are implicated and yet that is not necessarily a bad thing. Management can and does
garner this affective net and propel it in meaningful and productive ways. It becomes a matter of
employee buy-in, mixed in with some compromise, a bit of awe and yes, sometimes even
contempt. Eventually routine falls into place and the duty to play actually becomes palpable. Yet
even a somewhat unpalatable routine can be put to thoughtful, intelligent ends, especially in an
atmosphere where openings, via play, are encouraged. What matters is that there is continual
redress, a process-oriented mindset which is open to and sensitive to anomaly, to purposefully
attenuate and change the way things are seen and understood. There must be in place a
mechanism for purposeful disorientation, of making strange or priem ostranenie, a means of
looking at matters in an askew fashion, in other words, an openness in structure, rather than
rigidity. Employees can be discouraged, self-mocking, contemptuous but also full of heart and
indulgent, because they are allowed to; they are given leeway. At the end of the day, after
developing lines of codes, designing power point slides, or say writing a interminable research
paper, there’s nothing quite as satisfactory as a cold beer, a game of pool or perhaps, a cool glass
of fresh milk on your tongue. At the end of the day it’s about feeling part of something--
cooperation, rather than exploitation-- it’s about feeling free to explore ideas, about a native
sense of play in the work environment. This goes beyond hallways and chairs, although those are
significant too; it has to do with affect, with regimes of doing that are performance bound, where
cues are welcome and necessary to work processes. In the words of one programmer, the fuse,
the force of ATTI’s esprit de corps, its mandate, is what could reasonably be called its flexibility,
its youthful plasticity:
‘What’s great about working here is they give you so much slack, I mean they give you so much
slack you could hang yourself with it. It’s good, it really makes you feel happier. You can’t work
with someone staring over your shoulder, it’s bothersome and doesn’t help. If you don’t have
someone keeping tabs on you all the time it makes you more creative, you get to put more into it.
Really, no one likes Big Brother. I don’t need clients breathing down my neck; I know how to do
Whistle While You Work 51my job and I’ll get it done, it’d be better if they weren’t so strict. But here it’s different. I like the
fact that here it’s about team work, here, you have common goals, there’s a real family feeling.
You get that with start-ups a lot. It’s a shame when they grow too big and too fast and become
impersonal. I mean when it gets down to it, you can bring work home, but you can’t bring home
to work’ (P.P., personal communication, January 9, 2011).
Summary of Chapter
A tentative summary of this chapter could be filed down to Charles Schulz’s popular phrase,
wherein we examine whether ‘Happiness is a warm puppy’. Or perhaps rather we should put a
musical bent on the matter and go with the Beatle’s version ‘Happiness is a warm gun.’
In this chapter, I argued that ATTI positions play as fun, and thereby rigs up an ostensibly
effectual affective net which pushes towards communitas and also company loyalty. This is
achieved in several intertwining ways. Bureaucratic play (non-autotelic play, or play which is
meant to encourage an end) cultivates communal and even familial-like ties amongst employees;
it does so by fostering an atmosphere of intense interaction--participation and creative thinking
are encouraged, leading indirectly to emotional satisfaction and fulfillment. Play allows staff
members to relate differently to their work, their co-workers, and to the way in which they see
and measure the value of the company. Furthermore, it is performative; employees and
management have erected frameworks of expectations, how each should act. Affective
conditioning (often through ritual performances)--or emotional management--inscribes ways of
feeling and acting. This aids in cultivating the ethos of the company in such a way that we find
there’s a receptive feedback loop in place. Employees are conditioned to the ‘Be happy, have fun
at work’ dictum, however, they themselves must buy into it first and foremost in order to make it
work. Employees are extensions of the brand, of the company culture; as much as ATTI
inscribes play and fun into their manifesto, and by turns, their staff, employees themselves
expect it and come to embrace it--thus ‘be the change you want to see’ comes true. A duty to act
emerges. The twin imperatives of produce and consume are the evident ideals: work hard and
play hard--consume what you produce and vice versa. Play is not seen as a waste of time, but
rather as a necessary means to a better, more productive work day, and in turn, a greater sense of
Whistle While You Work 52personal achievement through identification with the company ideals. In the same vein, corporate
culture becomes something that is, something that is acted, and not something you simply have--
it cannot be imposed. To wit, the company, its employees, the office space, the materials in the
space, the company narrative, codes of behaviour, and ideas, all form a network, one which
must be constantly performed in order to hold up.
Concluding Remarks and Further DiscussionHere I intend to discuss the value of play in work and how it can be used as a means to further
organizational coherence and also strengthen employees’ sense of self satisfaction and
fulfillment.
A further discussion of the applicable value of the conclusions will also be added later on.
Summary of findings
In this thesis I have attempted to examine the concept of play in the workplace--how is it
enacted and embodied, what it mean for employees, its impact on work regimes, and the ways it
is effective as an organizational tool. In looking at the materiality of the office space, I’ve noted
that play can be incorporated and encouraged by certain artefacts, white boards, for instance,
and certain spatial arrangements-- e.g. centrally located lounge areas. Furthermore, I would argue
that while there is no one locus of play, it cannot be situated in a ping pong table nor can we
attribute it to a plastic ball gun-- the socio-material network that these things create is important.
Where high technology is pervasive, low-tech artefacts become necessary complements. Coffee,
post it notes, tete a tete rooms, these give way to more interaction. The materials of the office
successfully encourage play and lend to a convivial atmosphere when they lead to increased
communication and interchange amongst employees.
Reflections
In a sense, ATTI’s form is dictated by its function--developing screen technology. What is the
purpose of a screen, if not to display? Performance is implicit in the nature of the beast. The
deployment of play not only helps to ward off the rather unsexy work of testing and
programming, it also harnesses a communitarian aura-- whereby sexiness is brought back by
Whistle While You Work 53latching whole-heartedly onto a riot of colors, in the form of toys, games, and music. Play is an
effective social glue--it inculcates employees into the company culture, and gives them a sense
of identification. It also serves to ground. Tech companies are evermore pressed to release new
products with increasing frequency; they must act in kind with their competitors, with their
customer’s desires and above all market pressure. Business is sped up. This forward looking-ness
precludes the ugly duck syndrome; products are not given the time to mature into something
magnificent, they have to be ready to go without much production time. The New Economy
relies on speed, flux, and ‘making it new’, but also on routine, scheduling and constancy in the
form of brand identity. Play, I’ve argued accords a sense of ballast, keeping employees rooted in
the face of velocity. It creates familiarity and camaraderie through invoking and creating rituals;
and this is why play becomes a profitable organizational tool.
And that’s the real ghost in the machine-- this fruitful uncanniness- an organizational
bureaucracy that’s trussed up enough to make you feel cozy, comfortable, at home; at times this
set-up seems to resonant with the American songstress Sheryl Crow’s song ‘If It Makes You
Happy (It Can’t Be That Bad’). I think what can be said is that these conditions are meant to
make one comfortable, but there is the extant and niggling consideration that this is a hair-
trigger step away from being genuinely stirred and thrust into happy worker mode via
meaningful arm-twisting. However, as I’ve noted previously, it does take two to tango--
employees create their own buy-in, shaping the company and its values in their own ways. As
such it isn’t mindless acceptance or false consciousness, it creates a becoming balance actually, a
favorable workplace.
Whistle While You Work 54
Take Away PointsAs my conclusions are, at times, theoretically dense, I would like to put forward some take away points that can be distilled from the previous material and end my thesis on a more result-oriented note.
● Play cannot be directly dictated or institutionalized, lest it lose its appeal and become something other than play. It can be used to create closer bonds and an esprit de corps in line with the company’s desired brand identity. In this way, play can be part of a bureaucratic mandate, however, it must be noted that employees play for their own sake, to enhance their own situation.
● Companies can condition a playful, fun working environment through inscribing it into the company ethos and mission statement, by creating playful spaces and encouraging their employees to have fun. In this way they create rituals and ways of acting that continuously recreate the play nexus. Focus on practice means that play/work are continual ongoing accomplishments.
● Play rituals creates new relations--how people cooperate and imagine themselves in roles with other people. Thus, new dynamics and a higher sense of interaction is established; there are also more possibilities for the cross pollination of ideas which in turn leads to greater innovation.
● Organizational Identity: The question of what the company is or more significantly who
is the company encompasses the organization’s overall cultural identity--meaning the employees and how they relate to each other, to the company as a whole and how they create meanings for themselves. Creating a cohesive collective identity becomes vital to fostering innovative and creative work.
● Of equal importance, is a company narrative to believe in, one that reflects and roots the identity of the company. The narrative should define, among other things, a common cultural knowledge, company myths, rituals, traditions, roles, codes, and ideals. This strategic of intent, or mission should create meaning for the employees and establish company direction.
Whistle While You Work 55
● In a play-influenced environment, employees feel more engaged and feel that they are learning. Learning, necessarily, is important for innovation. Learning influences emotional, social and cognitive dimensions of individuals; this could be construed as a type of company wisdom-- there’s a sense of learning the ropes, and thus the company culture--how things are done, how they can be done, and also, importantly how things can be changed, adapted, when necessary. It helps to ‘encourage individuals to adopt an attitude of openness, poise and curiosity that refuses to be satisfied that the goal of learning has been achieved, even as they imagine solutions to problems that may not yet exist in reality. (M. Statler et al., 2009, p. 104).
● Learning can be staged through explicit design of memorable events such as learning performances.
● Organizations should encourage this state of mind, so that new perspectives, ideas, and goals may be explored. Moreover, they should make sure employees have access to necessary resources to learn what they need to know to make decisions and to contribute to the learning environment. It is important that the patterns of circulation are noted so that the way in which people learn can be facilitated. Face to face time is especially valued in this endeavor and should be encouraged.
The upshot of this is that play can be a very powerful and useful tool in organizational management provided it is tempered with structure and leadership. It is possible to create a playful work place that encourages the not just business as usual mindset, one that reinforces ties amongst employees and loyalties to the company. Further research should look into the effects of a playful workplace on employees personal lives, and further if these practices lead to infantilisation processes.
Whistle While You Work 56
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