the diminishing returns of productivity culture

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the diminishing returns of productivity culture<br>Feb 05, 2021

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Xerox Ad, c. 1980<br>This is the midweek edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.<br>In 2006, Karen Ho was an anthropology student at Princeton. She wanted to study the culture of Wall Street, and she understood that the easiest way to gain real access was to work there herself. She had virtually no qualifying experience, but because she was a student at Princeton — one of the handful of schools that Wall Street firms deem acceptable in their search for the ‘best of the best’ — she was able to finagle a low level position. With time, she built enough connections and trust that dozens of bankers agreed to sit with her for an interview. The resultant book, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, came out in 2009.<br>There’s a passage from one of Ho’s interviews that, as the kids say, lives in my mind rent-free. She’s talking to a banker about his preference for the sort of work ethic you find on Wall Street:<br>If you go to the outside world and you start working with people, people just are not motivated in the same way. It is just a pain in the ass to get anything done in the real world. People leave work at five, six p.m. People take one-hour lunch breaks, and people do this and that and whatever. Believe me, it makes a big deal, because if you are working with people who all work real hard to do whatever it takes to get things done, it just makes things so much easier. And doing things is what makes people feel good about their life and makes them feel important. This is the whole self-worth thing — to complete and do things.

He talks a little about how he thinks workers in big corporations and the academy just aren’t as motivated — they lack ambition, or:<br>I think in the old days, back in the fifties or sixties, people kind of just had a set pattern of life. They went to work, climbed the ladder slowly, and did whatever they were told. I think now that people are so seduced by the capabilities that you can jump ahead and how much difference you can make, how important you can feel or whatever it is that gets you off…

He’s referring to the ‘Organization Man’ approach to work — made possible, at least for white men, by the middle-class security of the post-war period. Who needs manic ambition when you’re not terrified of falling from your class position? But then he finishes with:<br>It feels like now, you can get a lot done, be really productive, and it is seductive. And that is why people who have more than enough money…more than enough respect, still are involved in this at the expense of their families because they need to feel needed. And there is nothing better than to complete thing on a regular basis.

There’s something great about this dude with so much confidence in his approach to life that he doesn’t have to dress up what he gives him self-worth (“completing and doing things”) and his addiction to it. Productivity is what gets him off. Everyone else just doesn’t understand the thrill of completing things on a regular basis.<br>I thought about this passage this week, while working on the chapter in the new book on the history office tech that promised to make workers’ lives easier, but usually just created the compulsion to do more work. Much like the digital technologies of today, these technologies — from “24 hour computer lieutenants” in a GE dishwashing factory to word processors — were sold to workers as a means of making their work simpler, more predictable, safer. Gone were the days of desperate struggle to type out a memo without typos at 5 pm, or remembering that the fourth steam gauge always read just a little off. Automated tech was going to be a worker’s best new colleague.<br>Automation was also positioned as a sort of cure-all for America’s industrial slump: a way to close the gap between their global competitors, particularly Japan and Germany. It promised to decrease inefficiencies and increase productivity — and productivity, as Robert MacNeil put it in his intro to an episode of PBS Newshour in 1980, was the “in” word of the year: “Everyone who thinks he knows what’s wrong with this country wants to improve productivity.”<br>Leaders were confused, however, when employees began to push back: who wouldn’t want their work to be easier? The problem, as documented in books like Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of the Smart Machine, Harley Shaiken’s Work Transformed, and Joel Makower’s Office Hazards, was the tech was often just as annoying, often made them feel like shit, and it made people hate their jobs.<br>Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. That knowledge, accumulated over years on...