The Play Ethic

The Three-Day Week: more rest, less work, more play...and better?

Signs that our economic crisis are compelling politicians to think the unthinkable. There are several reports today that UK ministers are considering imposing a three-day working week on large areas of British industry and services. With the general tightening of finance and credit, the suggestion from both business and government is that it would be better to have people working three days out of five at 70-80% of wages, with the gap covered by a government subsidy, than have the businesses collapse and risk the far greater social expense of millions more on unemployment benefit.

For those of us who have been advocating regulations towards a shorter working week, for a whole range of different reasons - to benefit from the productive gains of technology, to address our deep disatisfactions with our parenting or community lives, to expand opportunities for self-development and mental health - this suggestion seems more like an opportunity, than the "dark threat" the Independent renders it as. 

As Jonathan Gershuny and Madeleine Bunting reminded us several years ago, the original 'three-day week' in the UK of the early seventies - instituted as a response to energy shortages caused by industrial dispute - had a very small negative effect on general productivity levels, way smaller than the 40% drop you might have expected. (I found a discussion on Channel Four's community website which backs this up anecdotally). 

There's a classic unreconstructed quote in one of the Independent pieces, covering JCB's decision to adopt this policy: "All the wives have given their men lists of things to do since the hours disappeared," says a foreman varnishing his door. But again, those of us who are interested in the power of play have to ask: is this a true picture? Do people, when given more free time from work, simply turn to leisure-and-recreation? ("Gardening leave", they call it in the newspaper industry, when a writer or editor who had been poached by another paper was being paid not to work - ie, add value and quality - for his new organisation). 

One would hope that things have changed since the seventies, and that there might be a significant amount of workers - in these 'quality-of-life' conscious times - who would welcome and embrace this de-centering of work (and to a degree consumption) in their lives. There are so many social indications - from the rise in demand for literary festivals, allotments and personal training, to the attractions of social media (now becoming real utilities like The School of Everything, Gumtree and Freecycle), to the incessant anxieties over parenting - that we want more time and space away from the workplace. 

Why might we want this? Well, to explore these highly-connected, highly-informed, highly-sensitised selves and communities that we have become, in the network society. And maybe, as a result, this free-time will give us a new perspective on the kind of products and services that we have been making and delivering. If it's a "New Green Deal"  that both the US and the UK are promoting as the ultimate kick-starter for prosperity again, then that can't be just construction jobs - it will also require some degree of innovation and entrepreneurship, about how we can live sustainable lifestyles that feel as replete and complex as the ones we've left behind. I think some more guaranteed free-time in our lives to explore different lifestyle options - and maybe open up new green markets, products and services as a result of these explorations - might be not a temporary measure, but an essential shift.

Again, I point you to Benjamin Barber's fabulous essay in The Nation, where he suggests that the financial crisis gives us a real opportunity to re-assess what we regard as 'valuable activity' in our lives - and one of those re-assessments might be that if we aim to reduce our consumption, we'll be able to work less, and invest in life more:

What if Obama committed the United States to reducing consumer spending from 70 percent of GDP to 50 percent over the next ten years, bringing it to roughly where Germany's GDP is today? The Germans have a commensurate standard of living and considerably greater equality. Imagine all the things we could do without having to shop: play and pray, create and relate, read and walk, listen and procreate--make art, make friends, make homes, make love.

Sound too soft? Too idealistic? If we are to survive the collapse of the unsustainable consumer capitalism that has possessed our body politic over the past three decades, idealism must become the new realism. For if the contest is between the material body defined by solipsistic acquisitiveness and the human spirit defined by imagination and compassion, then a purely technical economic response is what will be too soft, promising little more than a restoration of that shopaholic hell of hyper-consumerism that occasioned the current disaster.

Amen. Let's see opportunity in this crisis - the play of possibilities in what might seem the darkest of situations.

Always living 'elsewhere': the new intraviduals

The splendidly urbane On Point podcast (from Boston's WBUR) informed me this morning about a new social-issues 'talker' from America, called "Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety" by a New York sociologist called Dalton Conley. 

For a book that's all about how much the old social opposition of work and leisure is being broken down by, amongst other things, 24-7 connectivity, I'm faintly ashamed to relate the context in which I was listening and taking notes. That is, cradling my iPhone, in an empty coffee bar at 10.00am in the business end of Glasgow, with some decaff and bacon roll by my dilatory side. Undoubtedly performing an act of 'weisure', in one of Conley's unlovelier coinages.

Though there's the suspicion that Conley is angling for Malcolm-Gladwell-guru-status in some of his pronouncements, there's also much food for thought in his spiel. Some choice quotes:

Changes in three areas — the economy, the family and technology — have combined to alter the social world and give birth to this new type of American professional. This new breed — the intravidual — has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously...

Leisure? The 'good life'? What are those? Work is the central aspect of our lives. We are lucky that it is fulfilling work — work that we will probably continue to do until we are no longer capable — but it is, unlike that of my parents, all-consuming work. There is always an email to answer, a paper or memo to read, and a lecture to give or receive. Success in today's professional world doesn't mean retiring at fifty to play golf in Florida, it means working more and more hours as you move up a towering ladder of economic opportunity (and inequality). Socializing usually revolves around professional colleagues.

Sound familiar to you? The 'intradividual', flexibly responding to a demanding social world, certainly sounds like the 'self-in-and-at-play' that I've been talking about for years. (Deleuze talks about 'dividuals'in his final essays). Yet the second passage ties that player to a universe of endless leads, tasks, items of interest, possibilities of advancement - where the difference between 'friendship' and 'networking', or say 'family time' and 'surfing time', is completely elided. 

The image on the cover of his book - with a family arranged around a table, three with laptops and the other one plugged into her iPod - certainly horrified the admirable On Point host Tom Ashcroft, who pushed Dalton to take a negative line on this networked family (he refused, calling himself a 'social describer' than critic).

Yet I'd have to be honest and confess that I saw that scene regularly over the holiday period - an 11 year-old, a 14 year-old and an 19 year-old each with respective wireless laptops (one regularly purloined from parents), sitting around an old Dutch family table. 

The delightful aspect was that the periods of silent surfing were regularly punctuated by long, giggling interludes of You Tube inspired show-and-tell ('Downfall' mash-ups, lauguhing babies, and Fonejacker were the favourites). Sometimes there would be spontaneous dancing or harmonising to a particular track; and sometimes one would shout up from their browser, having found a particularly cute exhibition or film they wanted us all to go and see. Was this any different, in essence, from a classic family pastimes scene, with the copy, paste and link of their operating systems substituting for the magazines, glue and scissors of old?

To develop Dalton's coinage, we were all intra-viduals easily flipping into being inter-viduals - the fun, laughter and mutual benefit involved in sharing the resources contained in each others' networks. And if the parents are net-friendly (as we are), then this doesn't feel like some alienated gathering of functional schizophrenics, but actually a lovely, rich, memorable time together. 

But this happened in the holiday season - those rare moments when parents and children can hover around each other, untethered from their institutions (whether school, work or portfolio). Doesn't free-time, even in the digital age, still help cement emotional bonds? In the show, Dalton addresses this directly, by noting that in America, at least, the historical fact of mothers working more has not been complemented by the phenomenon of men working less (by comparison, Scandinavian legislation compels the sexes to take equal parental leave). 

He also talks about the psychological self-subversion of current American (These-Islands, too) anxieties over work, which he reckons is impervious to recession or boom. When it's bad times, you'll over-work because you want to hang on to what you've got; when it's good times, you'll over-work because you're comparing yourself with the rapidly advancing Joneses. Either way, you're anxious about not filling every minute with some moment of career-building interactivity. This is a kind of cul-de-sac perspective on human potential (bolstered by behavioural economics - see recent post) which I don't accept. There's more to the human condition that fear of failure, or resentment of success. 

And I still think we need to listen to some real radicals (here and here) on this matter. If the economic health of society now partly depends on our collective willingness to interact, to be creative and expressive with our social tools, don't we need to nourish that "mass innovation" (as Charles Leadbeater calls it) through new types of welfare and regulation? To be an "intervidual", to be a player, is exciting but exhausting: we need a complementary politics of time and care to help us repair and restore ourselves for this active, creative life. Which means sleep, holidays, sabbaticals, shorter-working weeks... you know my litany. 

But always scanning the horizons for other suggestions...

Why not start your weekend on Wednesday?

A useful column from the counter-intuitive economist Tim Harford, on why it is that we can't stop thinking of increasing consumption as the best indicator of a healthy economy. So many of the government measures deployed in the financial crisis are aimed at "restoring consumer confidence", and for good short term reasons:

Economists worry about a sharp fall in consumer spending, because when demand for goods falls, so does demand for labor. Our desire to spend less is quickly revealed as a desire to spend less hiring each other (and our friends in China) to make things. Result: economic collapse, unemployment, misery.

But in the long run, 

the picture is completely different. We earn—this is a very rough average—twice what our parents did when they were our age. When today's teenagers are in their 40s, there is no reason why they shouldn't decide to enjoy their increased prosperity by working less instead of earning more. Rather than being twice as rich as their parents, they could be no richer but start their weekends on Wednesday afternoon.

So why isn't that shift happening? Harford (a bit disappointingly) refers to some familiar studies in behavioural economics, which try to show that we want to earn more money because it's a sign of status - and that we're irredeemably status-obsessed. (It's the usual stuff: if you're given the choice between earning £100,000 in a society where people are earning more than you, or £50,000 in a society where people are earning less than you, you - irrationally - choose the latter option. As sociologist Alan Wolfe and I have both noted, in reviews of some of this stuff, it's mostly based on student samples in abstract psych-lab conditions. A very impoverished human data-set). 

His other answer is that historically, we already do have more free-time - more than four hours for women (and more for men) since 1965, and a huge gulf away from working (and dying) conditions at the turn of the century. Harford is a bit sneery about the "work less, spend less" movement, and its critiques of advertising as the bonds which tie our psychologies to consumerism. 

But he's somewhat trapped by his use of the tainted term "leisure" to define non-working time (tainted because it implies passivity and triviality). What we've been noticing over the years is that people are seeking the feeling of being fully autonomous and self-determined throughout all areas of their lives, whether productive, creative or familial - and we've called that the "play ethic". 

People's increasing interaction with social software and digital culture is one example of how the general urge to play (as I define play) is beginning to affect many different kinds of institutions. And create different kinds of institutions, too. See for example enterprises like The School of Everything or The School of Life, which are trying to fill up these extra hours Harford identifies with informal, innovative learning of all kinds, both on and offline. Indeed, they're realising the original Greek definition of school, shkole, as Pekka Himanen once wrote:

Shkole did not mean just “having time”, but also a certain relation to time: a person living an academic life could organize one’s time oneself – the person could combine work and leisure the way that he wanted.

For me, there is still a need for some kind of regulatory or welfare support - ie, a political strategy - to help people expand the zone of play into these increasingly less work-dominated lives. As Harford says: 

If this were a gradual process, mass unemployment would not result. People would simply earn less, spend less, wear a few more secondhand clothes, and spend more time reading or going for walks.

Add the collectivist energies of Web 2.0, volunteering and social action, and that's a picture of a post-recession (and maybe even post-consumerist) lifestyle that might well attract many. See the work of the Compass ginger group in the Labour Party for a sense of what the politics towards that might be.

Idling through the recession (and beyond)

Mark Kingwell, Canada's top pop philosopher, has written a compendium on idling (on a very long publishing delay, years after the UK's leisurely prince of idleness, Tom Hodgkinson, established his own dilatory empire). There's lots of bright wit in this puff piece in the Globe and Mail (thanks George Cairns for link), for example: 

Mark 1: ...What distinguishes idling from slacking?

Mark 2: The problem with the slacker is that he is, in the very act of resisting them, wedded to the norms of work. In avoiding work, or pretending to work, or hiding from the supervisor in the mailroom, the slacker is implicitly granting the world of work a dominant position. He gives work power as that which he should be doing even as he does not do it.

Mark 1: And idling?

Mark 2: Idling establishes an independent scale of value. It's like the difference between dozing - falling asleep from overwork - and napping, which we all know is an art form. The true idler enters the moment of not-working and takes it into a new realm of not even thinking about work, of strolling away from that collective addiction of the past 2,000 years.

All very familiar. (Will Hutton's review of my, Tom's and Carl Honore's book 'In Praise of Slow' put us all in the context of Western 'soft power' - displaying a kinder, gentler, less relentlessly acquisitive image to the rest of the world). But it was this exchange between the Mark's that really piqued my interest:

Mark 1: Suppose everyone was idle, though. How would society function?

Mark 2: Think of it this way. Any market economy is a failed attempt to distribute goods and services exactly where they are needed or desired, as and when they are needed and desired. That's all markets are, despite the pathological excrescences that nowadays attach to them: derivatives funds, advertising, shopping as leisure. If we had a perfect market, idling would be the norm, not the exception, because distribution would be frictionless. Most work is the result of inefficiency, not genuine need. In other words, idling is consistent with capitalism's own internal logic, which of course implies, even if it never realizes, the end of capitalism.

Now, I guess this is some reference to a pure theory of the market of which I'm unaware. But it certainly sounds like elements of the internet - where distribution is fictionless (hey! another iPhone/Android app!), where the long-tail delivers exactly what you want (maybe not when you want, but in a few days anyway). And who can deny that, when we have a consistent experience of getting what we want from a network-enabled screen, our behaviour tends towards the intrinsic self-satisfaction of the idler? 

The other reference this sparks off is that of distributed manufacturing and local fabrication (which we're beginning to get a hint of with things like print-on-demand books in bookshops). This is the great wet-dream of the post-scarcity prophets - a state of material plenitude that would destroy economics as the management of scarcity, and indeed allow universal, beauteous idling (hello, Iain Banks' Culture). 

I was delighted to see the Star Trek end of this - "make me a milkshake in the Universal Fabricator, Deanna!" - get a run-out in Ed Regis's contribution to the World Question Centre this year. Problem is, 'molecular manufacturing' might not be possible, says Regis, due to "insurmountable technical difficulties at the chemical bonding level". Well, they said the same about Trek's communicator and the teleport machine... 

Knowing too much, doing too little

Into the swing of 2007 with a new Comment is Free post at the Guardian today. It's pegged to quite a few Play-Ethic-oriented items - the UK Trades Union Congress's report that UK workers give their employers 7 hours unpaid overtime a week; the recent noises from the Conservative Party about exploring the possibility of a 35 hour week; and my usual concern with the great contradiction of the developed world - so many options for informed and connected action, so little time and resources by which to realise them. Lots of hyperlinks in the piece, be keen to hear your reaction.

Update: a reasonable response from CiF commenters - my own comment, and this response to it, enriches the argument considerably. And Jackie Ashley seems to have perused this material ever so slightly in today's Guardian...

Well beings or ethical beings?

Been fascinated by the recent convergence on wellbeing and happiness between the main political parties in the UK. This op-ed article for the Guardian comment page (here's a lovely PDF of it) explores the hidden affinities between conservative philosophy and the more normative aspects of the happiness agenda (which I've explored elsewhere in this blog, here and here and here). If you've come from reading the article, I'd love to hear your comments below.

Guardian, June 1st, 2006

If you’re happy and you’re Tory, clap your hands. So skilfully is the young pretender, David Cameron, pressing buttons on wellbeing, quality of life,and happiness that charges of superficiality and empty trendiness are coming thick and fast. But a deeper examination of his  recent speeches shows an underlying rigour that his political opponents would be foolish to underestimate

Iron cage in the head

It’s always an event when Richard Sennett publishes, even though I have problems with the gloominess of his take on the effects of information capitalism on peoples’ lives. I’m halfway through his new book, The Culture of the New Capitalism, so I won’t comment definitively – but a friend has read it, Madeleine Bunting, who basically agrees with Sennett. Here’s a representative quote:

What Sennett seems to be suggesting is that, in much of the workplace, there are no longer any rules. It's the chancer, the trickster, the chameleon, the illusionist on the hunt for the big break who flourishes. The rest of us, insecure and anxious, just hope to scrape together a sense of connectedness sufficient to keep loneliness, disorientation and meaninglessness from the door.

Passages like this – which seems to indict play values (chance, trickiness, chameleonic, illusory) as the unraveller of stable work cultures – make me realise just how far ahead of the consensus my arguments for a play ethic are. Can we still only conceive of purposeful, meaningful activity as that which occurs within public or private organisations, for which we exchange labour for wages? The mobile internet hints at a more ‘commonist’ society, which can support innovation and self-directed activity in many different locations – at home, in the street, as we travel.

But the idea that social regulation could support this fluid style of producing and making – say with a social wage or income supplements, or free communication channels – is far off. If even the best writers and thinkers (Bunting and Sennett) cannot themselves abandon those semi-military metaphors of bureaucracy and organisation, cannot escape Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of convention, then a players’ society will have to emerge from the margins. The metaphysics of the work ethic still grips the minds of Anglo-American public intellectuals too tightly.

Follow the Fun, says Rushkoff

Been looking forward to Douglas's business book Get Back In The Box, particularly since he told me it was going to foreground the presentation on play in business that he's been making for the last few years, under the title 'Follow the Fun'. He's posted some of this material on his blog:

In a renaissance society driven by the need to forge connections, play is the ultimate system for social currency. It's a way to try on new roles without committing to them for life. It's a way to test strategies of engagement without being defined by them forever. It’s a way to rise above the seemingly high stakes of almost any situation and see it as the game it probably is. It’s a way to make one’s enterprise a form of social currency from the beginning, and to guarantee a collaborative, playful, and altogether more productive path toward continual innovation. 

And this play begins at work.

Establishing a playful career or company isn't as easy as it looks. It doesn't require expensive consultants, trips to the woods, or the reinvention of a company's culture based on some abstract ideal. But it does mean going against much of what we’ve been taught about competition and survival - not just in business school, but for the past five centuries! Still, just as people have stopped relating as individuals to their brands and opted instead to become members of brand cultures, producers in a renaissance era must come to think of their companies as collaborative minisocieties, whose underlying work ethic will ultimately be expressed in the culture they create for the world at large.

Couldn't agree more - the first paragraph is a lovely summary of the kind of social mentality I was proposing in the Play Ethic book. I particularly like the idea of producers seeing their companies as "collaborative minisocieties".

But I also think this needs a real metaphor-shift (meaning head-and-heart shift) at the strategic and executive level, particularly with traditional companies, for that vision to have purchase. (Speaking from some direct consulting experience here). I'm sure Douglas would agree that some of that impetus comes from new business models forged by entrepreneurs, social and private, who (if they're successful enough) can generate profoundly playful productive cultures.

Why Do You Work So Hard?

Can't take myself away from the UK's slide into a terror-and-security state to blog about play... but  this is exactly the time to be pushing a philosophy of openness, love of difference and imaginative understanding. So I'm back, with an article from the SF Gate suggested by a US reader, which gets the spiritual underpinnings of a play ethic exactly right:

We are designed, weaned, trained from Day 1 to be productive members of society. And we are heavily guilted into believing that must involve some sort of droning repetitive pod-like dress-coded work for a larger corporate cause, a consumerist mechanism, a nice happy conglomerate.

But the truth is, God, the divine true spirit loves nothing more than to see you unhinge and take risk and invite regular, messy, dangerous upheaval. This is exactly the energy that thwarts the demons of stagnation and conservative rot and violent sanctimonious bloody Mel Gibson-y religion, one that would have all our work be aimed at continuously patching up our incessant potholes of ugly congenital guilt, as opposed to contributing to the ongoing orgiastic evolution of spirit.

It is not for everyone. It implies incredibly difficult choices and arranging your life in certain ways and giving up certain luxuries and many, many people seemed locked down and immovable and all done with exploring new options in life, far too deeply entrenched in debts and family obligations and work to ever see such unique light again. Maybe you know such people. Maybe you are such people.

But then again, maybe not. This is the other huge truism we so easily forget: There is always room. There are always choices we can begin to make, changes we can begin to invite, rules we can work to upset, angles of penetration we can try to explore. And if that's not worth trying, well, what is?

Mark Morford is a fascinating voice - will be keeping my eye out for him. (& I just figured out what the image is...)

The Book of Jobs

Interesting to see Virginia Postrel - poster-girl of the libertarian right in the US - backtrack a little on her previous play-positive zeal. In this most recent of her columns for the New  York Times, 'The Book of Jobs' (again, you'll have to buy the original - so there's a fair use extended post below), Postrel profiles a well-known US phenomenon, 'What Color Is  Your Parachute?', a yearly 'Bible' for job- and career-changing. The spiritual overtones aren't inadvertent. Says the founder, Richard Bolles:

Job-hunting gives us a chance to ponder and reflect, to extend our mental horizons, to go deeper into the subsoil of our soul. It gives us a chance to wrestle with the question, 'Why am I here on Earth?'

Postrel, in her newly respectable garb, seems to enjoy this new version of the Protestant Work Ethic - or perhaps we should now call it the Existential Work Ethic:

The book's peculiar power comes from its unusual combination of market realism, psychological insight and spiritual idealism. ''Parachute'' is suffused with the Protestant idea of the calling, but it is not Max Weber's grim, ascetic version. Instead, Bolles offers the grace-filled version of labor I recognize from my Presbyterian childhood, which was when I first heard of the book. Bolles believes God has given each of us special skills and talents and the responsibility to discover and use them. When we find our mission in life, he preaches, we will enjoy our work.

Doesn't she see the paradox - that the very labour-market restlessness the book encourages is as much a critique of our existing work cultures, and their ultimate penumbra of control and meaninglessness, as it is a 'graceful' re-validation of them? She used to get it:

The knowledge economy also discomfits those who equate the "work ethic" with a narrow range of industrial-era virtues: diligence, stoicism, patience, conformity. Particularly for conservatives, the idea that a job should be satisfying in itself is an uncomfortable one. They fear the consequences of allowing play to infect work.

A job as a 'graceful mission' steers a little too close to Bush-era piety than I'd have expected of Postrel.