The Objects of Work and Life - Metaphysical Labour Flexibility, Performance and Commitment in W

relationship is always thought of by how it affects the human subjects. It can be a matter of, for example, feelings (e.g. Clark, 2000), involvement (e.g. Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985), and work and life satisfaction (e.g. Guest, 2002), stress/illness (e.g. Wise and Bond, 2002), depressive mood (e.g. Duxbury and Higgins, 2001), performance (e.g.

Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985), attention (e.g. Greenhaus et al., 2003), rewards (e.g.

Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985), or meaning (Taylor, 2000). These are examples of the consequences or impact that the constitution of the relationship of work and home has on the human subject’s well-being (or the well-being of others that the human subject knows, e.g. children and spouse). They are important because they are what in fact are said to be studied by theories of work-life balance. They are the dependent variables that are observed. However, the problem is that these variables say more about the human subject’s perception of work and home than they do about the relation. They do not even say something about how the relationship between work and home affects the well-being of the human subject, because the independent variable of the relationship is seen as, for example, work-family spillover conflict (Matsui et al., 1995) or work-life balance (Saltzstein et al., 2001). This means that they develop a scale to measure the level and impact of, for example, conflict and balance, but what they are studying is nevertheless not the relation of work and life: it is a perception of home and work.

Instead of studying the dependent variables (work-family interface) and independent variables (consequences) as a relationship between a cause and effect, I will suggest that we should study both of these as effects in themselves. It is not work and home that influence each other, it is the relationship between life and work that produces effects that can be said to belong to the human subject in the sense that they can be founded as constituting principles within these. This means that I will study the outcome of the relation between work and life as a real expression and not as a possible experience.

In this following part of this chapter I will discuss in detail how we should think and understand these displacements of the four-fold problem of this constitution of the relationship between work and life. The first part regards the object of the relationship between work and life as problematic forms in which the object is expressed. The subject of the relationship between work and life is discussed in the second part. Here it is shown that the relationship between work and life is not expressed by human subjects

but by certain types. In the third part the conditions of the relationship between work and life is taken into consideration as modes of individuation that can be located as constitutions within types’ expression of work and life. Finally, it is argued that the effects of the relationship between work and life have to be located within the expression of the relation itself and not by how it affects the nature of a given human subject.

itself. Consequently they have not thought about the relation between work and life but about the perception of this. To make it possible to think about the relation in itself, I will suggest a different understanding of the constitution of the relation of work and life where the object of the relation of work and life is not simply given to the human subject’s perception, but is constituted inside the human subject’s expressions of the relation of work and life. The object is therefore the expressed relation of work and life that is to be found within the human subjects’ expressions of work and life.

Instead of arguing that problems are given to our perception, I will say that problems are constituted inside the expressions of human subjects, which implies that the problematic constitutions of the relation of work and life transcend human subjects’

expressions. They transcend because they are expressed in the expressions of work and life. However, they are not forms that transcend the expressions but principles of constituents that can be located within the expressions. This is the case since they are not already constituted forms in which we can experience the relationship of work and life, but have to be invented, constituted or constructed within the given expressions of the human subjects. This means that we cannot put forward already constituted forms like balance or spillover, but instead have to create new problems in which the relation of work and life can be expressed. Accordingly, the problems are seen as passive, because they make the relation determinable and not an active determination of what the relation is. Instead, they establish a relation that can be expressed in various ways by human subjects and hence become determined. Later in empirical analysis I will show how flexibility, performance and commitment are problems in which the relation between work and life is expressed.

These problems are the constitutive elements of work and life. Conventionally, theories of work-life balance would say that the constitutive elements are the individual or organizational factors, but as these constitute the human subjects’ experience of work and home they are of no use here. Instead, we have to focus on the constitution of the relation of work and life. The constitution is expressed in the expressions of the human subject, which means that we have to show how these problems work as constitutive elements within the expressions, i.e. what is the determinable principle of constitution in

the expressed? As these problems are not given before their empirical deployment, it is not possible to define what they are, but is possible to describe how they work and function. Their empirical deployment will be shown in the analysis that follows this chapter.

How should we understand that these problems transcend the human subject’s expressions of work and life? It might be easier to understand this if we think of these problems as performative utterances in Austin’s sense, which connote that “the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action” (Austin, 1975: 5). The employees are seen as flexible, committed and performing by the uttering of flexibility, commitment and performance. The latter, the forms of problems, are something that only have existance within the expressions, i.e. in their transcendental problematic form, and the former, what herewith are expressed are modes of individuation. We will discuss modes of individuation in more detail in the section on the conditions of work and life.

Hence, we have to make sense of these problems in new ways since they are deployed in different ways than we so far have done. This means, for example, that flexibility is neither mediating between different human states, e.g. the state of being at home and the state of being at work, nor within the human states of being a mother and being an employee (see e.g. Sennett, 1999). Flexibility is in this sense not something between or within human states that expresses something about a human subject or the human conditions. Thereby it is not about which side of the employees’ life will benefit from flexibility (work or home?). Flexibility does neither express a human subject as being flexible nor that the human subject experiences the border between work and non-work as being flexible. Consequently, flexibility is not possessed by the human subject as a specific characteristic of this individual. It is not a property of the individual that expresses a particular essence of the individual human being. Thus, flexibility is not personal since it does neither belong to nor express anything about the human subject’s personality.

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Alternatively I will advocate that flexibility is a problematic form in which the human subject’s expressions of work and life can be constituted. It characterizes a relationship between work and life, but these characteristic traits should not be located in the personhood of the individual human subjects or in the border between work and home.

Instead, the characteristics of flexibility should be found in the way it as an operative function constitutes human subjects as flexible. Flexibility is not something the human subjects have, but rather something that can be located in what they do. This operative function is a mode of individuation that constitutes the relation between work and life in the human subjects’ expressions of work and life. What is said about work and life should not be referred to the human subject but to the mode of individuation. From this follows another transformation as the mode of individuation is not given in an actual form outside of its constitution inside the expressions of work and life. Hence, the mode of individuation is the condition of the conditioned expression of work and life. We could therefore say that flexibility expresses the possible relations between what is expressed (condition) and who is expressing (conditioned) it. It is important that the characteristics of flexibility always have to be founded in what human subjects do, because it only exists virtually outside of these singular constitutions of work and life, which actualize it.

Flexibility can therefore be said to belong to the human subjects in a different sense than as a personal property or characteristic. It belongs to them when it characterizes the essences that are constituted inside the expressions of the human subjects when they talk about their work and life. To provide an example, when interviewees talked about cutting down on sleep to be more productive, how some of them refused to hand in time registration and at the same kept their own account on these hours of work in Excel, or how they thought and argued for their personal competency development to be part of working productivity or not, it appeared to me that they talked about work and life in intensive terms, i.e. how the relation of work and life is expressed as a matter of performance. These discussions and argumentations about flexibility suddenly appeared to me as a problem of managing performance when there are no extensive definitions of what work is in terms of place and time. When talking about flexibility the employees expressed the relationship between work and life as how life became productive in

relation to work. However, this was not the case when the interviewees talked about work and life in the problematic form of commitment. Here the interviewees spoke about the social relation that they have to colleagues and how they demanded that they should be as committed as themselves to work. This means that they spoke about commitment as a social obligation, but it was not at all clear what was considered to be

‘work’. Work was not only the job functions carried out at the work place and in the work time; it was rather a particular form of life that the employees gave expression to that would or would not be regarded as an expression of commitment by management and colleagues. These examples are discussed in more detail in the analysis, but are mentioned here as example of how the relation is expressed in various ways and how the determination of these expressions depends on the problematic form in which they can be spoken about and how they are given expression to in the singular individual (e.g.

the individual who is regarded as committed in opposing the individual who is not).

This means that the objects of work and life are not given extensively between work and home but rather intensively in-between work and life since they are transcending human subjects’ argumentations for, discussions of and talk about work and life. This way of thinking breaks with the traditional perspective on the relation of work and home that is studied extensively, i.e. the relation is given in spatial and temporal terms. To see the relation as intensive means first of all that it is not a relation between work and home that is studied but the relation between work and life. Furthermore, it infers that the difference between work and life is not given physically by separating work from other areas of the human subjects’ lives. It is rather metaphysically because it is a matter of how the relation of work and life in itself transcends actual expressions of work and life, i.e. how the relation of work and life becomes performable, flexible and committable.

The metaphysical difference between work and life is therefore not the same as the physical boundary between work and home. It is not perceptible, but is imperceptible in itself. We should think about how the imperceptible is constituted inside the given, which does not mean that it can be located by how it becomes perceptible, that is the metaphysical manifests itself in the physical. Instead, the imperceptible transcends human beings by becoming the sensible of the being. Consequently, the metaphysical is not becoming perceptible but is rather hiding by being imperceptible inside what is

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constituted. The metaphysical does not concern what is constituted, but how it is constituted. We should not think of the metaphysical as something between work and home. The metaphysical is rather in-between work and life, but in another way than we are used to thinking, because the relation is not already constituted as forms of harmony, equilibrium or balance between work and home, but is constituted by how the metaphysical relation in itself is transcending the expressions of work and life.

Consequently, the problematic forms in which work and life are expressed are not ready-made; they have to be invented. Of course there are other problems than the aforementioned, but the focus in the thesis will be on these three problematic forms as it was those that could be located in the expressions of the interviewed employees and managers. This does not exclude the possibility that there might be other problematic forms in which the relation of work and life are expressed, but these were simply not found in the empirical material.

This way of thinking about the relation of work and life in itself is rather complex, because it is not experienced by the human subject, as we normally would think. Instead, we have to think about the continuous modulations and expressions of the relation between work and life and understand how it is given expression to itself. The relation is both expressible (the objects of work and life as problems), expressing (the subject of work and life as types), expressed (the conditions of work and life as modes of individuations), and the relation between expressing and expressed (the consequences of work and life as effects).

In document Metaphysical Labour Flexibility, Performance and Commitment in Work-Life Management (Sider 103-108)