Degrees of (Self‐)Exploitation: Learning to Labour in the Neoliberal University

Brienza, Casey

doi:10.1111/johs.12119

Cited by 18 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Further the recent global pandemic has further blurred the lines between work and home life, with universities calling on tenuously positioned faculty members to devote ever more time to developing ‘quality’ online content while simultaneously being at risk of mandatory furloughs and decreased material gain (Anwer 2020 ). Within this context, knowledge socialism’s reliance on a virtuous ethos to elicit the volunteerism of creative labor within a post-scarcity creative class, supports Brienza’s ( 2016 ) argument that HE represents a continued site of precarious/creative labor exploitation/self-exploitation.…”

Section: Is Knowledge Socialism Promoting a (Self)-exploitative Ethic Of Cbpp Creative Labor?supporting

confidence: 61%

Virtue Signaling: Problematizing Creative Labor Within Knowledge Socialism

Green

2021

Postdigit Sci Educ

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This article argues that current scholarship inappropriately utilizes ‘virtue signaling’ to elicit a subjectivist form of de-valorized creative labor within knowledge socialism as a philosophy of praxis. Moreover, it argues that within institutionalized higher education (HE) contexts, knowledge socialism should be reoriented toward the promotion of prosocial-entrepreneurial ‘transitional ecosystems’ of commons-based peer production (CBPP). This sociomaterialist repositioning will outline a path forward for knowledge socialism which better understands, elicits, and valorizes the inherently prosocial-entrepreneurial creative labor contributions of precariously positioned academics within contemporary HE. In order to accomplish this aim, this article first underlines several fundamental concepts (commons-based peer production, collective intelligence, creative labor) before moving on to a more pointed philosophical discussion and critique of these concepts as underlying assumptions within knowledge socialism. Lastly, this article provides an operaismo-based reflexive inquiry into the interplay between the theory of knowledge socialism as experienced in practice within the China HE context, contributing to the development of non-exploitative knowledge cultures within CBPP creative labor processes.

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Section: Is Knowledge Socialism Promoting a (Self)-exploitative Ethic Of Cbpp Creative Labor?supporting

confidence: 61%

Virtue Signaling: Problematizing Creative Labor Within Knowledge Socialism

Green

2021

Postdigit Sci Educ

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“…Thus, neoliberal market logic affects not just individuals but organizations embedded in this logic. Neoliberalism is apparent in universities due to universities' use of precarious labor and focus on publication as a quantitative measure of productivity (Brienza 2016;Luka et al 2015). This motivates researchers to publish peer-reviewed manuscripts as quickly as possible.…”

Section: Organizational Embeddedness In Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We mentioned hoping the project would bolster our curriculum vitae or provide new skills. These reflections demonstrate that even with internal motivation present, the potential pressure toward publication and academic skill building that exist for all academics employed in public universities (Brienza 2016;Luka et al 2015) affected how we designed and used the research.…”

Section: Embedded Constraints-academic Sidementioning

confidence: 99%

Reflections on Embeddedness in an Applied Sociology Project in Ontario

Maich

Boggs

Butovsky

2021

Journal of Applied Social Science

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The growth of precarious employment across Canada prompted sociologists and community researchers to understand the causes and consequences of insecure work. However, structural context often leads research organizations’ goals to conflict with those of its members. According to organizational theory, external pressures influence organizational goals and their approaches to problem solving. Thus, the purpose of this article is to illuminate some of the concrete ways that such pressures, known as embeddedness, help to shape research output. We draw on written reflective analyses of our experiences with embeddedness while working in the research organization Poverty and Employment Precarity in Niagara (PEPiN) to highlight the external factors which constrained our data analysis and our final report’s legislative and workplace policy recommendations for relieving the economic and family stresses associated with precarious work. We argue that embeddedness under neoliberal conditions limits the extent of structural critique that research organizations make of working conditions.

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“…To the academic reader, these injunctions—to brand the self, to build one’s social capital as an investment in the future, to remain “visible,” and to validate one’s impact through quantifiable metrics—may seem jarringly familiar, and, as we argue in the next section, they are . Yet, scholars have overlooked, until very recently, the striking similarities between cultural labor and academic work (Brienza, 2016; Gill, 2014; Luka, Harvey, Hogan, Shepherd, & Zeffiro, 2015). This recent attention to the parallels between academic and cultural work, perhaps unsurprisingly, has come from scholars of the creative industries.…”

Section: Self-branding In the Social Media Agementioning

confidence: 99%

“Facebook for Academics”: The Convergence of Self-Branding and Social Media Logic on Academia.edu

Duffy

Pooley

2017

Social Media + Society

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Given widespread labor market precarity, contemporary workers-especially those in the media and creative industriesare increasingly called upon to brand themselves. Academics, we contend, are experiencing a parallel pressure to engage in self-promotional practices, particularly as universities become progressively more market-driven. Academia.edu, a papersharing social network that has been informally dubbed "Facebook for academics," has grown rapidly by adopting many of the conventions of popular social media sites. This article argues that the astonishing uptake of Academia.edu both reflects and amplifies the self-branding imperatives that many academics experience. Drawing on Academia.edu's corporate history, design decisions, and marketing communications, we analyze two overlapping facets of Academia.edu: (1) the site's business model and (2) its social affordances. We contend that the company, like mainstream social networks, harnesses the content and immaterial labor of users under the guise of "sharing." In addition, the site's fixation on analytics reinforces a culture of incessant self-monitoring-one already encouraged by university policies to measure quantifiable impact. We conclude by identifying the stakes for academic life, when entrepreneurial and self-promotional demands brush up against the university's knowledge-making ideals.

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Degrees of (Self‐)Exploitation: Learning to Labour in the Neoliberal University

Abstract: Much has been written on the neoliberalization of the academy on the one hand and precarious creative labour/work in the culture industries on the other, but there has been comparatively little writing which makes explicit the intimate links between these two sociological phenomena and how

Cited by 18 publications

References 16 publications

Virtue Signaling: Problematizing Creative Labor Within Knowledge Socialism

Virtue Signaling: Problematizing Creative Labor Within Knowledge Socialism

Reflections on Embeddedness in an Applied Sociology Project in Ontario

“Facebook for Academics”: The Convergence of Self-Branding and Social Media Logic on Academia.edu

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