Abstract
Keywords
Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
Introduction
Today it is difficult to pinpoint where any organization ‘is’ in time and space. Knowledge work in particular regularly takes place beyond the four walls of a conventional office building and ‘nonstandard’ workers take advantage of arrangements that offer temporal and spatial flexibility, such as working part time or from home or on the road (Ashford, George, & Blatt, 2007). Such a blurring of traditional organizational parameters has been taken as grounds to claim that organizations are now ‘boundary
In such a networked work environment, it has been argued that there is no longer much sense to the notion of being ‘in the office’ (Fried & Heinemeier Hansson, 2013). These transformations, which reconfigure notions of spatial boundaries and relatedly presence and visibility in the workplace (de Vaujany, Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, Munro, Nama, & Holt, 2018), have informed growing critique of a mainstay concept of critical studies of technologically supported disciplinary dynamics in organizations: the panopticon.
The panopticon metaphor has long been considered ‘archetypal of IT-based social control’ (Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, Isaac, & Kalika, 2014, p. 545; Willcocks, 2004). Developed conceptually by Foucault and based on Bentham’s design for an efficient prison, the panopticon has been a powerful source of inspiration for critique of managerial practices emboldened by information technologies that permit fine-grained observation and monitoring of employees, even at a distance. Yet the panopticon’s potency as a metaphor falters in the recognition that today’s organizations are often distributed and digitally networked (Munro, 2000), with unclear boundaries (Bauman & Lyon, 2013), flatter team structures and increased mobility and autonomy (Brivot & Gendron, 2011; Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2013). Brivot and Gendron (2011, p. 140) further point out that in such working environments, ‘individuals can also actively participate (wittingly or not) in their own visibility, thereby creating new potentialities of surveillance by others’.
Stretched beyond its original emphasis on observation through individualization and isolation, the panopticon is tasked with supporting analyses of phenomena that are increasingly tangential to its original explanatory strength (Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2013; Leclercq-Vandelannoitte et al., 2014; Munro, 2000). While there have been calls to ‘go beyond’ (Brivot & Gendron, 2011; Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2013; Leclercq-Vandelannoitte et al., 2014; Martinez, 2011) or to ‘tear down’ (Haggerty, 2006) the panopticon, a productive alternative root metaphor (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011) is not yet available.
In response, I introduce the alternative metaphor of ‘exile’. I argue that a threat of exile compels distributed employees to make themselves visible at the perceived centre of organizational life. Exile has a spatial logic of expulsion rather than containment, and control stems from the need for ‘exposure’ and ‘recognition’ rather than through the expectation of surveillance. Exile is a useful alternative because voluntary ‘visibilizing’ practices do not make sense from within the popular panopticon metaphor, yet are a logical response to a fear of exile.
I begin by arguing that we need another way of thinking about how visibility plays a role in control in a particular kind of contemporary organization: distributed new culture organizations. This organizational archetype has two main features: knowledge worker employees make use of digital technologies to work both in and beyond the organizational head office, and management actively supports what has been termed a ‘new culture’ (Casey, 1999) work structure where employees collaborate in teams and are more or less implicitly encouraged to think of one another as ‘family’.
This dual condition is analytically significant because employees are both ‘freed’ from the physical enclosure of the head office but also work and collaborate within teams that are treated as central to a sense of identity and belonging in the organization. The consequence is that employees are still bound existentially and practically to one another even though they may not be co-located. In such organizations there is a need to be integrated within the organizational ‘family’ in order to ‘belong’ (Casey, 1999), yet this cannot be achieved through physical proximity and instead needs to be worked at (to a greater or lesser extent) via digital communication and collaboration technologies.
I further argue that the threat of exile – a fear of being overlooked, forgotten, left out – is intensified by the late neoliberal conditions of precarity and recession (Alberti, Bessa, Hardy, Trappmann, & Umney, 2018; Fleming, 2017). Subjective and objective experiences of precarization (a sense that one’s employment is insecure) are prevalent in modern capitalist economies across social strata, as the future feels less certain and ‘more areas of life are subordinated to the needs of the economy’ (Alberti et al., 2018, p. 449; Shukaitis, 2013). A sense of uncertainty is reinforced by individualization, competition and radical responsibilization that jointly deliver the message that ‘if you’re a loser in the new world of work it must somehow be your fault’ (Fleming, 2017, p. 703).
Within such a competitive entrepreneurial logic (Bröckling, 2015), employees are presented with a Darwinian narrative of survival: ‘if you fail to adapt, no one – not your employer, not the government – is going to catch you when you fall’ (Hoffman & Casnocha, 2012, p. 8). Yet as vulnerable beings, humans fundamentally suffer from and try to immunize themselves against such precariousness by seeking out social and familial bonds (Alberti et al., 2018; Butler, 2016). New culture organizations are therefore existentially attractive in the context of increased precarization, but they also reinforce the idea that belonging needs to be worked at, for fear of being ‘left out in the cold’.
In the following I use problematization (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011) to generate a conceptual argument for exile as a way of understanding these emerging organizational dynamics. The aim of problematization is ‘to illuminate and challenge those assumptions underlying existing theories (including one’s own favourite theories) about a specific subject matter’ (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011, p. 53). The aim of research guided by problematization is to generate ‘interesting theory’ that is relevant to the field to which it contributes and that can drive forward new lines of enquiry.
I examine the ‘ideological assumptions’ (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011) behind the belief that workers use technology to escape from the ‘managerial gaze’ (Harrington & Ruppel, 1999) and examine the ‘root metaphor assumptions’ (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011; see also Cornelissen, 2005) behind understandings of visibility and control in organizations. I draw on existential philosophy, postcolonial theory and governmentality to challenge the organizational and critical management literature’s ‘in-house assumption’ (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011) that technological
The following process of problematization is informed by interviews with remote workers; however, the paper is conceptual in nature. Selected empirical material is used for inspiration and illustration (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2007) and not as a ‘proof’ of the conceptual contribution. Instead I use empirical material to highlight key issues and to illustrate links to otherwise quite abstract concepts from existential philosophy. In particular I place interview extracts into dialogue with the work of Merleau-Ponty (1962), Arendt (2009, 2017), Vallega (2003) and Saïd (2012) in order to show how existential notions of spatiality in the ‘exilic experience’ offer fertile conceptual ground from which to build an alternative understanding of visibility and control in contemporary workplaces.
Visibility and Control in Studies of Distributed Work
Literature on virtual work, telework and remote work has long been concerned with the loss of organizational and managerial control that occurs when distributed employees are ‘out of sight’ (Sewell & Taskin, 2015). This literature has tended to take the view that an employee is essentially ‘a person who is genuinely a member of the organization but who is subversive and is trying to destroy it’ (Checkland & Howell, 1998, p. 80). This view echoes McGregor’s assessment of Theory X managers who assume that their employees dislike work and will avoid it where possible (McGregor, 1960). Against such an understanding, a lack of visibility over workers is a problem for management because it is assumed, aligned with Taylorism, that workers will take advantage of a lack of supervision by doing less work (O’Neill, Hambley, & Chatellier, 2014).
These assumptions have consequences for how distributed and remote workers have been treated both conceptually and in practice. The ‘Theory X’ attitude is for example apparent in the research findings of O’Neill et al. (2014, p. 152), who recommend ‘closer managerial monitoring’ of remote workers with certain personality types. The assumption that is revealed here is that if a manager’s ‘presence’ is taken to be the key force that coerces a worker to perform, then remote and distributed workers are conceptualized as having escaped the ‘managerial gaze’ and therefore the manager’s ‘control’ (Harrington & Ruppel, 1999). As a consequence, technologies ‘that enable virtual work environments’ (Harrington & Ruppel, 1999) have largely been perceived as representing a freedom for employees that correspondingly jeopardizes managerial control.
As forms of teleworking became more popular however, technologies were adapted and better understood in terms of how they could enable supervisors to engage in electronic surveillance of remote workers (Fairweather, 1999). Technological methods of remote surveillance were even considered superior to traditional methods of managerial supervision because they offered more detail, were more efficient and had further reach (Fairweather, 1999; Zuboff, 1988). In response to these technological surveillance efforts, teleworkers started to retreat from technological means of communication, becoming more reluctant to engage with the technologies that were being used by management to keep track of them (Fairweather, 1999). This then compounded the issue of isolation that was beginning to emerge as a significant issue for remote working employees (Fairweather, 1999; Whittle & Mueller, 2009).
This tension, where technology is seen to both free workers from the managerial gaze and yet also to subject them to greater scrutiny and surveillance, is still prevalent today. Remote working for example has been positioned as a way for employees to increase their ‘flexibility’ (Fried & Heinemeier Hansson, 2013), whereas managers remain unsure about whether workers can be trusted in their absence (Leeds, 2007; Mazmanian, Orlikowski, & Yates, 2013). Technology is sometimes then introduced both as a means of connecting remote workers, and as a means of controlling them. Here a kind of cat-and-mouse dynamic arises, where managers enlist technologies for supervision and remote workers retreat, thereby exacerbating both managerial efforts to gain control and the problem of worker isolation (Fairweather, 1999).
In response to this situation, Harrington and Ruppel (1999, p. 223) have recommended a change in management style to accommodate ‘new methods of employee communication and interaction’. These ‘new methods’ of relating to employees include an emphasis on
The Context of Distributed New Culture Organizations
Commitment, trust and familial relations are also considered hallmarks of the ‘new culture’ (Casey, 1999; Roberts, 2009). In the ‘new culture’, the organization is a primary site for identity and identification: organizational teams become the ‘family’ to which one belongs (Casey, 1999). While the very notion of organizational culture has been critiqued as a technique for managerial control (Knights & Willmott, 1987; Willmott & Alvesson, 2002), the new culture goes a step further by promoting familial thinking and flat structures in the worker’s relationship to colleagues and management, so that the team becomes a key source of ‘horizontal’ forms of control, for example through peer surveillance (Sewell, 1998), and also as a site of social pressure to belong.
The new culture organization archetype is prevalent today in knowledge industries, particularly in start-ups and scale-ups that appeal to a younger, educated and ambitious workforce. The new culture is for example modelled by large Silicon Valley companies where workers are encouraged to travel together to the organizational ‘campus’ (Saval, 2016), share cafeteria meals and work in close-knit teams in offices replete with fridges, snacks, games tables and in some cases even nap rooms (Cassidy, 2017). While such conditions evoke a sense of friendliness and fun, the popular transition to work environments based on team-as-family structures can be linked to a historical trajectory of strategic managerialist efforts aimed at lessening the influence of collectivized workers who resisted efficiency initiatives in the 1980s (Peters & Waterman, 1982).
Walton (1985) for example famously urged managers to move from a managerial model of ‘control’ to one of ‘commitment’, but this shift was not motivated by a moral or virtue imperative; rather it is positioned as a rational response to the disruptive effects of antagonistic industrial relations that were negatively impacting profits in the late 1980s (Casey, 1999). An ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dynamic was common in workplaces at the time, and the adversarial relationships that transpired were bad for business. Walton (1985) advocated for corporate cultures that emphasized familial relationships and teams because they were more efficient.
This historical trajectory is relevant to new forms of organizing that rely on distributed work. As was previously mentioned, new culture style organizations have been positioned as better suited to remote working arrangements (Harrington & Ruppel, 1999; Hunton & Norman, 2010). This is because it is assumed that employees in a commitment-based environment can be better trusted to act in the organization’s best interests (Hunton & Norman, 2010), even when ‘out of sight’ (Sewell & Taskin, 2015).
Although the notion of an organizational ‘family’ may seem a positive alternative to the increasingly individualized work environment (Fleming, 2017), productivity gains are sought by requiring organizational members to feel that they should
In the following I introduce in more detail how visibility and control have predominantly been explored in technologically enabled work: by means of the panopticon metaphor. The section makes possible an articulation of assumptions that prevent further insight into how voluntary visibility contributes to control in distributed new culture organizations.
The Panopticon and its Limits
In the panopticon, visibility is guaranteed, with the effect of inducing ‘in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault, 1977/2012, p. 201). However, in the organizational context I take as the basis for this analysis, visibility is reserved for those who compete for it via digital self-disclosure (Leclercq-Vandelannoitte et al., 2014) that can take the form of exhibitionism (Brivot & Gendron, 2011; see also Cristea & Leonardi, 2019). Thus while surveillance may be the
Foucault (1977/2012) famously adapted Jeremy Bentham’s
1
prison model of the panopticon as a metaphor for the disciplinary effects of pervasive surveillance when combined with division. The following quote explains how the panopticon was designed to work as a prison by ensuring that prisoners were visible at all times:
Bentham’s (1787/1995) panopticon prison design, which directly inspired Foucault (1977), featured a central tower in a circular building, divided into individual cells. The panopticon is based on the organization of bounded enclosures, or divisible, observable, calculable spaces. Prisoners have no idea whether they are being watched; they are painfully aware though that they are being observed, so the persistent visibility of the guard tower, combined with uncertainty about when they might be watched, encourage internalisation of a disciplinary gaze. (Leclercq-Vandelannoitte et al., 2014, p. 545)
Though his analysis of panopticism (Caluya, 2010) was only one component of Foucault’s extensive work on how ‘human beings are made subjects’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 777), the panopticon metaphor has been widely embraced in studies of organizations and control. It was for example adapted to include ICTs, in the ‘electronic panopticon’ (Lyon, 1993), which is a key concept in Zuboff’s (1988) study of how automation leads to increased visibility of work processes with implications for worker autonomy (see also Burton-Jones, 2014).
Today, the panopticon metaphor is so commonly applied that ‘the very mention of the term in conferences immediately leads scholars to roll their eyes in boredom’ (Caluya, 2010, p. 621). In response to its overuse, Haggerty (2006) argues for ‘tearing down the walls’ of the panopticon, assumedly along with transmorphisms such as the ‘superpanopticon’, ‘electronic panopticon’, ‘post-panopticon’, ‘ban-opticon’, ‘pedagopticon’, ‘fractal panopticon’, ‘synopticon’ and ‘neo-panopticon’ (Caluya, 2010; Haggerty, 2006), and more recently the ‘portable panopticon’ (De Saulles & Horner, 2011) which is enabled by mobile technologies.
Apart from being burdened with overuse, the panopticon metaphor is now challenged by technologies such as mobile information systems that are ubiquitous and so bring into question the notion that management’s capacity to observe workers is ‘confined to company premises’ (Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2013, p. 543). New forms of organizing, supported by now emerged technologies such as laptops, smartphones and tablets that enable spatially and temporally distributed work, contribute to a need for critical ‘logics of control’ that have a greater scope to account for the nuances of spatial distribution and willingness to participate than the panopticon can cope with (Brivot & Gendron, 2011; Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2013; Leclercq-Vandelannoitte et al., 2014; Martinez, 2011).
The panopticon metaphor thus rests on certain assumptions about how power and status are exercised in architectures of control (Dale, 2005) that are tied to a way of organizing that is no longer as dominant as it once was. Nevertheless, attempts continue to be made to adapt the panopticon to encompass developments, for example the popularity of social media technologies where people willingly share information about themselves with one another:
In disciplinary society, the occupants of the panopticon were isolated from each other for more thorough surveillance, and they were not permitted to speak. The inhabitants of the digital panopticon, on the other hand, engage in lively communication and bare themselves of their own free will. (Han, 2015b, p. viii)
In this appraisal of the ‘digital panopticon’, key elements of the original design are subverted. The panopticon prison’s architecture was expressly designed to isolate inhabitants from one another, rendering them calculable, their only opportunity for recognition (Roberts, 2009) coming from a centralized pillar of authoritative observation. The concept is thus now severely stretched: what meaning does this penal metaphor of enclosure hold when ‘inhabitants’ are engaged in ‘lively communication’ and actively produce and share personal information and ‘bare’ themselves to one another ‘of their own free will’?
Leclercq-Vandelannoitte et al. (2014, pp. 546–7) have characterized four further developments that present a challenge to the metaphor of the panopticon: (1) from a subdued prisoner to a voluntary participant; (2) from hierarchical surveillance to distributed control; (3) from an enclosed physical prison to potential unbounded control; and (4) from unilateral constraints to dialectics of control and autonomy. In response to these challenges to the panopticon, the authors draw on Deleuze’s (1992) notion of a ‘control society’, which is ‘based on the elimination of physical enclosures’ where ‘free-floating control [is instead] facilitated by the development of modern IT’ (Leclercq-Vandelannoitte et al., 2014, p. 547).
The observation that subjects are now not straightforwardly in the role of ‘subdued prisoners’ submitting to acts of surveillance is pertinent in the context of distributed and digitally enabled work (Brivot & Gendron, 2011). As Leclercq-Vandelannoitte et al. (2014, p. 546) point out,
unlike IT-based panoptic arrangements, which have long been initiated in companies by a superior hierarchical authority without the consent of those being controlled, mobile IS are frequently introduced, adopted, and demanded by the employees, who are not necessarily aware of [the technologies’] potential for control.
This shift is a major challenge to the logic of panopticism. Seeking opportunities to be seen may still result in surveillance, but it is not always the experience of employees that their visibility is ‘guaranteed’ or even sufficient.
I query, however, the notion that control is now ‘free’ (Deleuze, 1992) in the sense of being diffuse or amorphous. Although it has been said that ‘control is now flowing throughout the open social landscape’ and that the exercise of disciplinary control is no longer confined within ‘institutional boundaries’ (Martinez, 2011, p. 201), a
When there is a centre, real or imagined (Roberts, 2005), there inevitably corresponds a boundary that denotes who is ‘in’ or ‘out’ (see also Lewis, 1966, for a literary perspective). Under such a dynamic of perceived insiders and outsiders, control does not flow freely or haphazardly, but rather draws employees forward towards a perceived centre of visibility, in what amounts to an inversion of the panopticon’s spatial logic. 2 Foucault’s later work on governmentality is valuable here (Foucault, 1991; Foucault, Davidson, & Burchell, 2010), because it supports an investigation of how and why individuals take on the responsibility of ‘visibilizing’ themselves in order to compete in the neoliberal workplace as ‘enterprising subjects’ (Fleming, 2017; McNay, 2009; Rose, 1992).
But what can we say about the
Exile and Existential Space
In this section I put forward the notion of ‘exile’ as an alternative root metaphor for theorizing dynamics of visibility and control in distributed new culture organizations. I argue that in such organizational contexts, a fear of being exiled from the idealized or imagined organizational centre can compel distributed workers in particular to enlist technologies that allow them to digitally display themselves in a manner they perceive will garner attention, influence and approval from peers, management and decision makers. Selected material from interviews with remote workers is used to illustrate key conceptual points.
Introducing ‘exile’
Being excommunicated, banished, exiled, or even simply
The boundary between inclusion and exclusion that exile hinges on can sometimes be mapped in Cartesian terms (for example, with reference to the perimeter of a community’s habitat), but it is more significantly experienced
Essential to the threat of exile is the perceived home or centre that one fears exclusion
Away from the ‘centre of real life’
Exile always highlights a relational dynamic between (imagined) centre and periphery, based in an experiential sense of ‘where the action is’ and where one is ‘not’. An existential comprehension of spatiality is needed to further explore this point. To illustrate: in . . .then I feel exiled in this village, excluded from real life, and imprisoned far away from everything. Our body and our perception always solicit us to take the landscape they offer as the centre of the world. But this landscape is not necessarily the landscape of our life. I can ‘be elsewhere’ while remaining here, and if I am kept far from what I love, I feel far from the centre of real life. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 299)
Here Merleau-Ponty (1962) emphasizes that spatiality is not determined by Cartesian coordinates, but rather is experienced in relation to what we find significant for our lives and practices at a particular time.
Conventional understandings of proximity and distance are shifted in this conceptualization, because feeling ‘far away’ appears here not as a matter of kilometres but as an experiential distinction that is made against what is important, what
Though this comparison may seem extreme in the context of a discussion of distributed organizations, the issue of defining oneself against where one is not emerged in interviews with remote workers, who worked for new culture organizations, as a source of anxiety and existential concern. For example, one remote worker referred to his company’s head office as the ‘centre of the universe’ which, after moving city, he was now ‘out of’. The place where decisions are made and important events unfold is seen as the centre, and if one feels far from this place, then one can feel exiled ‘from the centre of real life’. The feeling of exile can manifest when those who already worry that they are on the ‘outer’ cannot access or enter conversations and decisions that they feel are important to them. As one remote worker put it, they feel left on the ‘edge’ of organizational life.
The impossibility of returning ‘home’
A solution to remote workers’ fear of exile might be to bring them ‘back’ to the centre, for example through more frequent visits to the head office. However, the notion that an exile ‘is no one, and belongs nowhere’ (Vallega, 2003, p. xi) reflects the remote workers’ experience of visiting their head office: they ended up feeling a greater sense of exclusion and isolation than when working from home. A manager of remote workers explained that remote employees visiting the office expected fun and ‘cupcakes’, but were disappointed when no one had time to talk with them as everyone was ‘bums up heads down’ working.
The impression that head office was ‘fun and games’ had however been reinforced by a company practice of posting to enterprise social media photographs of birthday and milestone celebrations held in the office: the image of the office as family ‘home’ had been carefully cultivated. When remote workers arrived at the office however, they instead witnessed the humdrum of daily working life, often with nowhere available to sit and few people to speak with. They left feeling even more excluded from organizational life than when they worked ‘remote’.
Here exile is again a useful conceptual framework, because an important part of the exilic experience is that an exile cannot access the place that they define themselves against. As Vallega (2003) points out, the home from which one is exiled becomes idealized and cannot live up to the exile’s expectations or memories of it. It is not possible to stabilize distant homes in time or place; the memory of them becomes nostalgic, romanticized and enlarged.
The notion of ‘returning home’ is in the exilic experience therefore treated as a compelling yet futile proposition. The home that is pined for can never be accessed in ‘real life’ and attempts to do so are wrought with a sense of disappointment and even despair (Vallega, 2003). Correspondingly, the exile and their experiences can never quite be comprehensible to those who are left behind. Understanding the melancholy of exiles ‘returning home’ can help make sense of how remote workers were not satisfied and even were ‘let down’ by their return to what they perceived to be the centre of organizational life.
Exile and Visibility
Those who feel on the ‘outer’ of organizational life are thus not in any simple sense ‘free’. While the panopticon guarantees containment, exile threatens expulsion. In significant ways, this inverts how visibility and control operate – while both dynamics are radial, the panopticon pushes visibility outwards ‘onto’ the surveilled, who is a subject by nature of being fixed in this gaze, while a fear of exile compels the peripheral subject to come forward ‘toward visibility’, seeking grounds for intelligibility.
Visibility is not presented as straightforwardly ‘good’ in the exile metaphor, but it is worth recognizing that visibility is not always experienced as a negative force or in terms of surveillance by workers. Rather, fearing ending up ‘outside the walls’ of the organization, when commitment, trust and engagement are emphasized as conditions of belonging and advancement generates an incentive for employees to
Working at being seen
Having a sense of self requires the feeling that one is known by the identity-giving community. Being ‘known’ can revolve around remembered details that build into a social reputation. Hannah Arendt explains that losing a sense of being known, along with one’s reputation, is a source of pain for those exiled from their communities: ‘Once we were somebodies about whom people cared, we were loved by friends, and even known by landlords as paying our rent regularly. . .[but] nobody here knows who I am!’ (Arendt, 2017, pp. 269–70). A detail like being known to pay the rent may seem trivial in light of the extreme hardships faced by exiles such as Arendt, but her comment highlights that these details are what constitute being a ‘somebody’ in the course of everyday life. As a result, the loneliness of exile can manifest in the realization or fear that one is not truly remembered or
Such a worry was for example raised by a remote worker who had been an original member of an educational start-up organization, yet felt her identity slipping away as new employees joined. She worried that no-one in the head office was advocating for her, and that her work ethic (a source of personal pride) was not recognizable to new hires: ‘I can’t see them, no one knows me!’ To try to regain a sense of herself in the organization, she requested the creation of an intranet site that allowed workers to each create a profile, upload a photograph and describe themselves. This offered her an infrastructure for regaining the grounds of subjectivity in an organization from which she was gradually, in her view, being excluded and forgotten. Today, teams in her organization use group messaging platforms to chat and share photographs of their teaching sites throughout the day. This requires looking for ‘interesting’ things to capture and share. Because these chats are interactive and occur in real time, one team member described them as a way of ‘hanging out together whilst being in a big empty room by ourselves’.
In a further example of how a desire to be known may lead to the instalment of voluntary visibility infrastructure, a team of remote programmers who work for a large technology firm wanted to become more connected to one another and to their colleagues in the office. To do this, they described an arrangement they had set up of their own accord, where each of the team members working from home would dial into a video conference in the morning and remain connected via this video link for the entire day. A screen displaying this conference call was also set up in the head office. One member of the team described feeling somewhat ‘chained to his desk’, but over time he became more comfortable stepping away or ‘muting’ the video link when he needed a break. He pointed out that he had requested the arrangement because he had been isolated, and that overall it made him feel like a ‘part of the team again’.
Catching management’s eye
The role of management here is to an extent passive: waiting until someone ‘catches their eye’. To illustrate this point: a manager of remote workers shared that she was impressed with one of her remote employees who had ‘made himself visible’ by quickly learning how to post updates (inspirational quotes, informal reports of activities and photographs) on the company’s enterprise social media platform, Yammer. She further pointed out that it is up to remote workers to make themselves visible in this way, and that if they do
It may seem irrational or naïve to request an arrangement where one is continuously filmed while working, or to voluntarily submit updates on one’s movements during the working day (see also Cristea & Leonardi, 2019). Yet seeking to be seen is one way that workers assert their identities and attempt to gain access and status in what they perceive to be the centre of organizational life. This self-disclosure may
Exile’s Epistemological Potential
So far this analysis has focused on how a
A certain creative scepticism and worldly perspective is attributed to the figure of the exile, who has learned firsthand that architectures of belonging are ambivalent and not to be relied upon:
The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience. (Saïd, 2001, p. 147)
A flexibility of thinking is engendered from the exilic position, which incorporates a beneficially fluid yet ‘interested’ (Spanos, 2012) stance. In contrast to an unquestioning effort to ‘assimilate’ to the dominant culture in efforts to belong, this attitude bears similarities to Arendt’s description of the ‘conscious pariah’ (Arendt, 2009), a figure who is an ‘outsider insider’, aware of their uneasy position yet concernfully ‘in-the-midst’ of public life (Spanos, 2012, p. 152).
The notion of being constructively ambiguous in one’s relationship to the organizational centre was reflected in the comments of an older remote worker, a programmer who had been involved in the open source community for many years. He now worked for a large technology firm which emphasized teamwork. He stated that he existed
The illustration above reflects a key point in Saïd’s autobiographical novel I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are ‘off’ and may be out of place. . . sometimes against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place. (Saïd, 2012, p. 295)
The exile living ‘contrapuntally’ (a concept from music where two melodies play at once) is a compelling proposition, because it embraces a lack of fixity. This resonates with how the remote worker described his job description: it had always been ‘fuzzy’, and he used this ambiguity to balance working on what he thought he was ‘supposed’ to be doing with ‘speculative long-term stuff’, and ‘crazy, out there, might be useful in a few years kind of stuff’. He used his position on the periphery of organizational life to work creatively and autonomously, and hadn’t been fired ‘yet’ – his definition of success.
The extent to which embracing the exile position truly enables ‘creative dissonance’ at work requires further empirical investigation. It is also likely that inhabiting exile as a constructive rather than oppressive position depends on being to a certain extent indispensable to the organization – in the example above, the remote worker is a skilled programmer whose services are not easily replaced. Literature that explores the potential of being ‘out of place’ would however suggest that certain remote workers may be able to embrace a position of exile; to resist strict new culture ideals of familial belonging and gain a unique vantage point, by not being, nor aiming to be, entirely knowable. Not fitting in to one place, moving between inside/outside positions without the expectation that either will stabilize as ‘home’, could thus enable a way of knowing and thinking ‘beyond the centre’.
Discussion
The disciplinary power associated with the panopticon shapes and normalizes subjects through calculation and comparison, so that what is abnormal is ‘corrected’ through therapeutic techniques (Lilja & Vinthagen, 2014). The fear of exile instead normalizes by requiring that subjects make themselves intelligible, by drawing on technologies of visibility to display themselves in a recognizable form to peers and management. What ‘catches attention’ is not explicitly defined, and so employees need to anticipate and trial different versions of themselves to see what ‘sells’. ‘Shaping and managing visibility’ in this way involves a great deal of work that must be done ‘tirelessly’ (Brighenti, 2007, p. 237).
In the context of fear of exile, visibility needs to be considered in two ways:
Visibility as competitive exposure
The idea that visibility is a ‘good’ that needs to be worked at for purposes of self-promotion is based in a market logic of neoliberal governmentality (Barratt, 2008; Dean, 2010; Foucault, 1991; Munro, 2012; Rose, 1999). Under advanced liberalism, the state is downsized and citizenship is enacted by exercising choice, for example through consumption or employment, forming a ‘government through freedom’ (Rose, 1990, p. xxiii). Within this political rationality of ‘freedom’ arises the ‘enterprising self’ (Rose, 1992) or the ‘entrepreneurial self’ (Bröckling, 2015), where ‘social existence is to be ensured not by centralised planning and bureaucracy, but through the “enterprising” activities and choices of autonomous entities’ (Rose, 1992, p. 10).
Under such an individualistic market logic, it is common for visibility to be positioned as a positive
Achieving such a personal brand requires relentless production of content for, and tending to, whichever digital platforms are popular at that moment: LinkedIn, Slack, Twitter, Instagram, even Pinterest. The pervasive marketing paradigm informing work practices today has thus been attributed more broadly to the ‘Social Media era’ (Turco, 2016). The implications for the exile dynamic are that maintaining visibility in these ‘markets’ requires constant (and often unpaid) work, where each individual is ultimately responsible for protecting their own position relative to others (Fleming, 2017).
Visibility as existential recognition
While neoliberal discourses of entrepreneurialism and branding link visibility to battles for ‘exposure’ within a competitive market, employees also need visibility to achieve social recognition. A subject is constituted as intelligible through ‘fair visibility’, which relies on significant others who ‘test’ and ‘testify’ ‘our existence by looking at us’ (Brighenti, 2007, p. 327). Especially where teams are treated as if they are family (Casey, 1999), and where work is a ‘key site for the formation of persons’ (Miller & Rose, 1995, p. 428), there is enormous pressure to fit in and belong. Discourses of freedom, choice and independence (Rose, 1999) are here confronted by an existential dependence on others for the kind of social recognition that is required to maintain a secure subjectivity within the organization (see also Knights & Willmott, 1989).
A sense of belonging in the organization is thus centrally important in terms of the ‘subjectivity it confers or denies’ (Rose, 1992, p. 11), yet distributed workers do not have immediate access to the established grounds of intelligibility that are readily available to co-located colleagues (e.g. a catch-up at the coffee machine, small talk before meetings). A need for recognition, a desire to belong and a fear of missing out (FOMO) (Przybylski, Murayama, DeHaan, & Gladwell, 2013) can therefore drive the installation of social media technologies accompanied by guessing games of what kinds of images, posts and signs of commitment (e.g. sending emails after hours, ‘liking’ company messages online, posting updates on enterprise social media) will render them intelligible as a legitimate ‘team-family member’ to distant others.
The double bind of the quest for visibility
Given a fear of exile, visibility is something that we ‘cannot not want’ (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, p. 75; Spivak, 1988). Yet it is ‘inherently melancholic’ because the ‘struggle for recognition’ implies contending with the norms that determine what counts as a ‘viable human subjectivity’ (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, p. 78). Workers who try to counter the fear of exile through individual self-promotion are confronted with the reality that the conditions that sustain life ‘are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons’ (Butler, 2016, p. 54).
When the field of visibility (what there is possible to see) is enlarged, for example through the proliferation of social media technologies in contemporary organizations (Turco, 2016), the ‘market of recognition’ intensifies and becomes more competitive (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, p. 66; Roberts, 2005). In light of the fear that ‘being invisible means being deprived of recognition’ (Brighenti, 2007, p. 329), employees respond by further regulating, curating and promoting their self-image to accomplish ‘existential aspirations’ (Ekman, 2014, p. 1161) of belonging.
Attempting to immunize against exile by embracing the quest for visibility in distributed new culture organizations is thus a double bind that ultimately regulates how and what subjectivity ‘counts’ as intelligible and therefore viable. Resistance against the regulatory effects of the exilic dynamic cannot comprise merely opting out of visibility; rather it involves ‘taking issue with precisely those regulatory ideals that determine who can and cannot be an intelligible subject’ (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, p. 67).
Agency and resistance
Rather than opting out, perhaps the fear of exile can be resisted by fully embracing the marketing logic of exposure, for one’s own benefits? For example, by harnessing digital technologies to enhance visibility in a flattering manner (Brighenti, 2007) such that dependence on any one organizational centre is lessened, enabling success in a ‘boundaryless career’ (Arthur & Rousseau, 2001)? After all, in the face of neoliberal dynamics of flexibilization and casualization ‘employees surf the employment networks strategically’ and ‘opportunism and self-exploitation may very well be combined’ (Ekman, 2014, p. 154). Yet, I maintain that embracing a competitive approach to visibility (at different scales: industry, instead of organization, for example), ultimately
As the example of the remote worker who chooses to live in ‘no-man’s land’ began to illustrate however, there is an alternative way of thinking about exile: as a potential site of resistance that offers a specific kind of freedom offered through living ‘contrapuntally’ (Saïd, 2012) with ‘creative dissonance’ (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, p. 194). Existing neither ‘here nor there’ presents a challenge to the single, unitary, competitive, individual entrepreneurial self that is privileged in neoliberal rationalities (Bröckling, 2015; Fleming, 2017; Rose, 1992).
When understood in terms of ambiguity, the exile figure is unlike a brand, because in being neither here nor there the exile avoids being recognized immediately and coherently as a unitary subject fixed in place and time (Driver, 2009) and thereby refuses to re-enact dogmatic rituals of belonging (cf. Fleming & Spicer, 2003). Rather than treating precarity as a condition to be evaded, it is to an extent appropriated as the basis for a pluralistic subject position. Foucault himself perhaps embraced this constructively ambiguous and uncertain position, given his proclamation: ‘Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 17; cited in Munro, 2012, p. 350).
It is important to note that inhabiting exile in this way does not represent a complete rejection of organizational or social life. Rather, this exile figure draws on their contrapuntal perspective to remain concernfully ‘in-the-midst’ (Spanos, 2012, p. 152) of organizational life. 3 While acknowledging that this may depend on a degree of privilege, for example in the form of recognized skills or personal resources that allow them to take on greater risks, it is worth exploring further how living ‘out of place’ and ‘out of time’ may enable the exile figure to redefine regulatory ideals of intelligibility, by first resisting the fear of exile and correspondent anxiety to belong that I have argued motivates visibilizing practices in distributed new culture organizations.
Implications and Conclusion
The ‘quest for visibility’ among distributed workers that I have outlined in terms of an attempted immunization against the fear of exile could be considered in terms of ‘empowerment’ (Brighenti, 2007). However, as Foucault has warned, ‘visibility is a trap’ (Foucault, 1977/2012, p. 200, in Brighenti, 2007, p. 336). Making oneself visible can still
The exile metaphor, where visibility is understood both as
Rather than assume that people unwillingly or at least unwittingly submit to surveillance regimes (e.g. see Zuboff’s (2019) characterization of consumer involvement in
Future research is needed to empirically investigate what I have introduced as the ‘epistemological potential’ of exile. Empirical studies could for example look into whether, and how, remote workers resist the incentive to present themselves as coherent personal brands, and how they experience and navigate the consequences of such resistance, both in relation to their peers as well as management. It is also important to consider the resources that enable employees to embrace exile’s potential – for example via difficult-to-replace skills, knowledge, or access to personal resources that reduce the risk or consequences of genuine expulsion from the organization. ‘Rebellious’ exiles could be contrasted both with those who have been exiled in a more conventional sense (for example, by being relocated to a failing branch of the organization) versus those who seek to avoid exile by engaging fully in visibilizing practices. How does each circumstance and strategy inform and shape daily routines, personal identity, relationships with organizational others, and career paths? What specific technologies are enrolled, and what role does the materiality of these technologies play (Treem, Leonardi, & van den Hooff, forthcoming) in the navigation of core–periphery relations in the exile dynamic?
From a managerial perspective, exile’s regulatory effects as outlined in this paper may seem an endorsement of Walton’s (1985) advice to manage through commitment rather than explicit control: promising
While I have focused on image- and text-related forms of voluntary visibility in this paper, future research could also explore the manipulation of performance data and metrics, which may already be a part of employee efforts to ‘catch management’s eye’. As employees become more adept at manipulating metrics through self-reflexive ‘calculative practices’ (Hayes, Introna, & Kelly, 2018), a sophisticated numerical mode of self-disclosure could become more prevalent.
The bodies of literature that have informed this paper are extremely rich and deserve further exploration in developing our understanding of exile, belonging, visibility and control in new forms of work and organizing. For example, postcolonial and decolonial theory is attuned to issues of exclusion, belonging, nostalgia and dispossession (e.g. Butler & Athanasiou, 2013; Frenkel & Shenhav, 2006; Saïd, 2012). Combining insights from these literatures with existential understandings of space can offer a fertile basis for exploring the spatial logic of control in distributed work, where boundaries are constituted through practices of inclusion and exclusion. Finally, through analogous reasoning, literature on nationalism (e.g. Anderson, 2006; Billig, 1995) could productively inform further critical investigations of new culture organizations where the visible demonstration of commitment to notions of ‘home’ and ‘family’ are key to both individual and collective identity.
It is important to further study and understand not only surveillance but also voluntary visibilizing practices, both for their
Footnotes
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