April 2, 2022
The rise of remote work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore many challenges concerning the boundary of work and non-work. Burnout and work-life balance have been heavily cited in major business news outlets as reasons for turnover. This has brought increased institutional awareness to this boundary. However, this is not an entirely new problem, in fact the World Health Organization in 2019 produced the latest International Classification of Diseases definition for burnout[1] and some guidelines to management for preventing it. One such guideline being to “organize work to reduce job strain by optimizing workload and working time, ensuring safe staffing levels, encouraging regular breaks and having flexible schedules.” As I am privy to from various friends and acquaintances, these warnings went unheeded. Handfuls of organizations failed to manage this work “optimization” which ultimately resulted in some of the highest turnover rates the United States had ever seen. This particular problem gives us a good point of entry for examining the boundaries of institutions not only in terms of physical space but also time. In probing this, I will pull from both Savannah Shange’s “Progressive Dystopia” and Joseph Masco’s “Theater of Operations” who provide good methodological conceptions of institutional boundaries and practice and clear thematic differences. I find it in my best interest to initially summarize these works in contrast as I believe it will be easier to tease out the more obvious differing methodologies and themes. Then I will discuss a couple of prominent similarities before finally landing on the utility of these themes and methodologies in my own work on mandatory overtime.
In positioning the work of Shange across that of Masco, it is evident that both tackle very distinctly located (or “unlocated”) institutions. Shange’s ethnography takes place in a San Francisco high school while Masco’s ethnography of state security seemingly takes place nowhere yet everywhere. This alone produces an immense difference in methodological approach, but both also have a different thematic approach. Shange takes such a clear and strong political stance in her work that it feels as though Masco almost does not have one.
Unlike Masco, Shange, working at the school site, can take us “inside” the walls of the institution: show us what happens at meetings, in the halls, and even the lives and homes of those who inhabit the school. She gives us a clear geography of the limits of the institution in both a physical sense and in terms of policy. This then becomes an avenue for understanding who is vying for what when it comes to policy across the socioeconomic interests of participants in meetings. Shange not only provides us a locus of analysis with the concept of “homo-nationalism” (38) but because of this clearly embodied institution she can further outline where these participants reside in proximity to the school both physically and socioeconomically (both obviously non-exclusive). Non-withholding, Shange positions her own work’s goals of abolitionist anthropology in dialogue with those abolitionist goals of the school she is studying. It is because the school is so easily locatable, that she can produce a legible dialogue of the students, faculty, or institutional goals with her anti-racist efforts. This allows us to see deeper into the institution not just physically and socioeconomically as I’ve mentioned but also historically. This analysis of institutional history is one of the few thematic overlaps that Shange has with Masco which also results in a similarity of methodology.
As mentioned, Masco does not situate himself within a building. Because of this he cannot give us any insight into the inner workings of state security to the extent that Shange can give us about an abolitionist school. He has no interviews with government workers and because of the privacy produced by the government, he cannot exactly show us the discrete goals and interests of the institution or how the workers might organize themselves around them. So instead of an analysis of the inner arrangements of work or internally circulated texts and media he focuses on that which is externalized. Both he and Shange give us a historical account of the goals of the institution through externality. Whereas Shange analyses the historical and ever-changing socioeconomic geography of San Francisco and Masco studies the United States’ changing concept of security. It is precisely in this changing concept of state security that shows why we cannot locate the state. In his book, he discusses how the fear of nuclear war produces and preoccupies itself with an almost non-space and non-time. That is to say that people envision nuclear war as globally catastrophic because a bomb could very literally strike anywhere. He mentions how the government built multiple “test cities” to bomb in order to study the effects of bombing on cities and through which they also produced what I consider propaganda. Alongside this, part of the production of this non-space is through the study and analyses of the environmental impact of nuclear warfare across the globe. In this, the security breach is imagined as existing past the initial event and past the initial site of bombing therefore anywhere and anytime. The nuclear fear permeates space and time and produces practices that reflect this, such as bunkers which are stocked with non-perishable food items to last long enough for the surface of the earth to be hospitable to human life. Through propaganda, the coordinated practice produced by the security state is, unlike the school, not situated in any one site or solely in proximity of the state but envelops the national and defines global conceptions of safety. This is particularly evident in the artistic response of the public. Masco considers us to re-evaluate the propaganda produced by the state and to look deeply at media, specifically film, that is part of the wider social narrative. He directs our attention to the ways in which the public reimagines and reconstructs global destruction through numerous doomsday films. This serves a very useful focus similar to Shange’s attention on Black science fiction, in that it provides us a site for examining a cultural history of practice and ideology. This similarity has proven useful to me as I conceptualize methodologies for studying burnout specifically through overtime (OT).
Whereas Shange and Masco discuss popular science fiction media such as literature and film, I look toward social media. Specifically, the ways in which work or OT is discussed online and what this can tell us about the ubiquity of work “coordination” outside of work. Of special note, are the pockets of social media such as the reddit community r/antiwork where people coalesce to discuss their grievances about their jobs or TikTok users who solely produce content about the mundanity and sometimes stress of corporate work. Reading these authors has led me to consider data mining Twitter for dialogue containing the key phrase “mandatory overtime.” This seems to be a particularly useful phrase for understanding the textually coordinated practice of certain institutions within their brick-and-mortar establishments but also their reach beyond such spaces. From various tweets that I have read, I have noticed how people’s weekends and non-work time are reimagined. They become sites, fraught with expectations that are then destroyed to the point that some people don’t even make weekend plans because as one user said, he stopped expecting to have any free time after working overtime every weekend for over two years. Before these normalized and extended periods of overtime, however, work time is then not only the contractually obligated time spent at work, but it is a non-time for which no activity in expected non-work time can be planned less you risk disappointment and possibly anger. While this notion of non-time manifesting from mandatory OT is useful for thinking around the concept of a certain site-less institutional practice, there is still practice produced within the institution. As I have witnessed, in some organizations there is room ripe for analysis much like Shange’s. Mandatory overtime is typically decided by a team of managers and schedulers who have to coordinate activities in concert. These discussions are prime sites for observing how organizational values are defined and reified through the coordination of work. Even if the conversations may not always be necessarily rich in dialogue of these values, the texts which are referenced and produced are bountiful and not necessarily always locked away behind closed doors. In bringing up the closed doors, I will close by saying that one of the very useful “tactics” Shange mentions of doing her fieldwork in a site that she had already worked in prior, was striking to me. This indicates to me how useful this kind of site can be, but also the precariousness of such practices.
To conclude, although I don’t expressly give an account precisely for how to approach the practice of mandatory overtime, but I believe these two books give me particularly useful vantage points from which a concrete analysis can be performed. Shange’s observation from the inside and Masco’s analysis on non-space and non-time give an abundance of referential material for observing the coordinated activity produced by institutions which have complex boundaries.
Works Cited
Masco, Joseph. The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Duke University Press, 2014.
Shange, Savannah. Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, + Schooling San Francisco. Duke University Press, 2019.
World Health Organization. “Burn-out an ‘Occupational Phenomenon’: International Classification of Diseases.” 28 May 2019.
“Occupational Stress, Burnout and Fatigue.” World Health Organization, World Health Organization, http://www.who.int/tools/occupational-hazards-in-health-sector/occup-stress-burnout-fatigue.
[1] The WHO stylizes it as “burn-out” but it is more commonly used without a hyphen.
The Working Anthroengineer 
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