The Workplace Commons: Towards Understanding Commoning within Work Relations

Abstract

One of the most important focuses in social theory within the last decade has been upon the commons. We contribute to the emerging scholarship on the commons. We point out that this literature tends to neglect the workplace. We then argue that the workplace should be included as a potentially important arena of commoning. Going to studies of the workplace, we find that scholarship has implicitly found key emergent elements of commoning within the social relations of work. We develop a concept of the workplace commons, and consider arguments that the workplace commons is merely a fix for capitalism.

Absolute autonomy, respectful recognition and derived dignity: Towards a typology of meaningful work

“…Indeed, the MW framework emphasizes that the practices and relations workers engage in to create MW are enabled, and respectively constrained, by the organization of work and wider economic, political and social structures in which organizations are embedded. This highlights how relationships and actions at work stand in a dialectical relationship with the way work is organized and managed (Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999; Korczynski & Wittel, 2020). Therein, how the three dimensions of core autonomy, derived dignity and respectful recognition in low‐skilled work are created and sustained is subject to the concrete conditions and structures at work.…”

“…For example, Wrzesniewski et al.’s (2003) research on hospital cleaners shows how cleaners derived meaning from their work by informally including or excluding tasks, as well as modifying their sequence and number, while autonomously deciding how they relationally engage with patients. Labour unions and non‐governmental organizations can be important enablers for the development of core autonomy through the promotion of values such as solidarity, the securing of voice patterns and opportunities for getting together and participating in actions to improve workplace conditions (Gunawardana, 2014; Korczynski & Wittel, 2020).…”

Conflict and control in the contemporary workplace: Structured antagonism revisited

“…Korczynski and Wittel (2020) offer a broader view of continuity in addressing the contemporary meaning of collectivity using the lens of the ‘commons’ which, they show, has been widely discussed in sociology but not in relation to the workplace. Commons comprise shared resources administered by a community.…”

“…How strictly are rules on attendance enforced? Do workers handle their side of the bargain largely individually, or collectively, and what is the balance between the two? As per Korczynski and Wittel (2020), what kinds of collectivity are drawn on, for example, those based on gender or other identities?…”

The Wageless Life of Creative Workers: Alternative Economic Practices, Commoning and Consumption Work in Cultural Labour

“…By salvaging such residues from existing scholarship, I offer ‘alternative explanations’ (Tavory and Timmermans, 2014: 97) of the empirical dynamics of precarity in creative work, additionally drawing on (though not reporting) my own decade-long qualitative investigations of creative work across a range of creative industries, including publishing, music, theatre, visual arts and fashion. In doing so I build abductively on the literatures on diverse economies and alternative economic spaces (Gibson-Graham, 2008; Holmes, 2018; Williams, 2011), consumption work (Glucksmann, 2009; Holmes, 2018; Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2015) and commoning (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; Korczynski and Wittel, 2020; van Dyk, 2018). The disregard of wageless life in the literature to date, I argue, has blinded us to the politics of post-waged creative work, including insidious patterns of social inequalities and exploitation.…”