How do we understand the psychic life of cultural workers under neoliberalism? ‘Hope labour’ is a defining quality of a cultural worker’s experience, practice and identity. Hope labour is unpaid or under-compensated labour undertaken in the present, usually for exposure or experience, with the hope that future work may follow. Hope labour is naturalised by neoliberal discourses but not fully determined by them. Drawing upon empirical research investigating the ‘creative industries’ in the North East of England, we ask how hope labour is made meaningful and worthwhile for cultural workers positioned as entrepreneurial subjects, despite its legitimisation of power asymmetries. We develop Foucauldian studies of governmentality by addressing how cultural work is lived through neoliberal categories, demonstrating the conflicting discourses and relations to self involved in the constitution of entrepreneurial subjectivity. We make a novel contribution to an understanding of hope and precarity by illustrating how cultural workers begin to occupy the site of the entrepreneurial subject amidst conflicting configurations of hope, desire, anxiety and uncertainty.

Critical studies of ‘lean’ work regimes have tended to focus on the factory shop floor or public and healthcare sectors, despite its recent revival and wider deployment in neoliberal service economies. This paper investigates the politics of the workplace in a United Kingdom automotive dealership group subject to an intervention inspired by lean methods. We develop Foucauldian studies of governmentality by addressing lean as a technology of power deployed to act on the conduct of workers, examining how they debunk, distance themselves from and enact its imperatives. Our findings support critiques of lean work regimes that raise concerns about work intensification and poor worker health. Discourses of professional autonomy allow workers to distance themselves from lean prescriptions, yet they are reaffirmed in their actions. More significantly, we illustrate the exercise of a more encompassing form of power, showing how lean harnesses the inherently exploitable desire for recognition among hitherto marginalised workers, and its role as a form of ‘human capital’. The paper contributes to critical studies of lean by illustrating its subtle, deleterious and persistent effects within the analytical frame of neoliberal governmentality. We also demonstrate how studies of governmentality can be advanced through the analysis of contested social relations on the ground, highlighting the ethico-political potential of Foucauldian work.

We demonstrate proof-of-principle carbon dioxide (CO2) sensing at 2.05µm wavelength using a commercial infrared superconducting nanowire single photon detector (SNSPD). We verify the absorption peaks within the tuning range of the illumination source and perform a differential measurement within one of these peaks to detect a changing concentration of carbon dioxide within a gas cell. We demonstrate that SNSPDs are a promising enabling technology for short wave and mid wave infrared gas remote sensing.

Eddie MacKenzie looks back at the LDC Conference.

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