Representing affective labour and gender performativity in knowledge work

Abstract

This paper argues that a multimodal approach to critical discourse analysis makes visible how contemporary office design and furnishings prescribe gender performativities crucial to the labour of communicative capitalism (Dean 2005). Examining WWW-based promotional material produced by multinational contract furniture producers, a critical analysis is offered of the ways in which the open-plan office is represented as a wellspring of affective labour. First, attention is turned to detailing the kinds of social actors and their actions depicted in the representations of office work. Second, the kinds of interactional meanings produced in the videos are documented. Having established how these idealized representations of knowledge work highlight particular embodiments and actions, the paper then argues that the promotional materials are in fact constituting those ‘bodies that matter’ (Butler 1993) to communicative capitalism. Ultimately, these videos depict how the female knowledge worker must ‘cite’ a normative feminized affective worker so as to be recognized as a viable employee.

Are workspaces gender neutral? A literature review and a research agenda

“…Also, although open-plan offices reduce spatially visible gender disparities (Kelan, 2018), such differences do persist in how women live and conceive the space (Roderick, 2016;Zhang & Spicer, 2014). On the one side, in open-plan spaces, women perceive themselves as extremely visible to a persistent "male gaze" (Hirst & Schwabenland, 2018, p. 170); therefore, they engage in a continuous regulation of their attitudes and their appearance (Wasserman, 2012;Wasserman & Frenkel, 2015;Morrison & Smollan, 2020;Bauer & Murray, 2018).…”

Multimodal critical discourse analysis of the cinematic representation of women as social actors

“…In line with the discursive view of identity, informing the present study, Butler (1990Butler ( , 2004 describes gender as performativity. This concept purveys the notion that gender is something that one does, something that is actualized in the everyday acts of performativity, entailing a reiterative practice (Roderick 2016), rather than a pre-given construct. A number of studies have addressed how performativity is construed by tackling social issues like weight loss (Mishra 2017) and masculinities (Kerry 2016; Pimenta and Natividade 2012), among others.…”

Perception of Labor Individual in the Terminology of the Modern Economic Science

“…I. Roderick (2016) исследует онтологию рабочего пространства, в частности, его дизайн и обстановку и их влияние на представленность мужчин и женщин на рынке труда. H. Greenhalgh-Spencer (2017) исследует сферу информационных технологий с точки зрения представленности в ней женщин как рабочей силы и т.д.…”

“…5. Разрыв между работником и работодателем (Juska, Woolfson, 2016), между академической «элитой» и периферией (Maesse, 2017), между мужчинами и женщинами (Roderick, 2016;Greenhalgh-Spencer, 2017;Mills, 2017), между молодыми и пожилыми (Juska, Woolfson, 2016) и т.д. В широком смысле слова онтология современной неоклассической экономической науки описывает экономику как преимущественную сферу деятельности и интереса и работника, и работодателя, игнорируя или недооценивая другие характеристики реальности.…”