A recent podcast interview by Ezra Klein was of an acknowledged expert, Cal Newport, on “knowledge work.” Newport proposed that knowledge work, whatever it is, could become much more efficient and even more enjoyable if it didn’t involve so many emails and Slack interactions. In other words, knowledge work should be done in relative isolation.
The entire analysis leaves unanswered the question of what “knowledge work” actually is. To put it another way, is such work part of the capitalist, or market-industrial economy, or is it rather, in actuality, more part of the emerging Attention Economy? Is it better understood as mostly “attention work?” If it’s that, the workers themselves would not be likely to favor being cut off from the strongest sources of attention.
To back up a little, the term “knowledge work” was originally coined or popularized by the business writer Peter F. Drucker, the same person who also put forward the idea that if large pension plans invested in corporate stocks, that would eventually bring about “pension plan socialism.” The idea was that the pension plans would control corporate decisions eventually and would care more about worker’s interests that than previously typical investors would. Actually, when pension plans started to invest in stocks, they felt their duty was to maximize the stock value, partly by urging that executive pay depend on that. The results: vastly increased CEO pay with many jobs automated or exported to keep down wages.
When it comes to “knowledge work,” the definition itself is problematic. Virtually every kind of work one can think of requires some specialized knowledge, even, say, properly cleaning offices. Knowledge is acquired in two different ways: either through some sort of formal education or by learning through practice. A good surgeon has gone through years of college, medical school and residency— and perhaps even more—to acquire proficiency. Is such a person clearly more knowledgeable than, say, a master carpenter without even a high school diploma? Also, if an economy is based on scarcity, knowledge is sometimes overabundant. Just ask people who cannot pay off their student debts because there are too many people with similar knowledge clamoring for positions.
One definition of knowledge workers is “those who think for a living.” That sounds fairly appealing to me, but even Stephen Hawking—the famous theoretical physicist who suffered from near-total ALS–had to move muscles somehow just to convey his thoughts. Both the surgeon and the carpenter do considerable manual or physical work, as do most artists, teachers, scientists, actors, dancers, professional athletes, chefs, and many more who are as valued and largely treated the same as those more clearly in the category. If sitting at a desk and keyboarding into a computer is perhaps most typical today, that would include many in what the recently deceased David Graeber referred to as “bullshit jobs.”
Evidently thinking isn’t enough. What’s crucial is finding a way to express what one thinks that gets sufficient attention.
In the Attention Economy, what is most crucially scarce, desirable, and competed for is attention from other human beings. I repeat: attention is something most people want, and in today’s environment, the limited supply of it from other people is highly competed for. You have to go after it or lose out. (Sometimes, some of this this is referred to as “networking”). It doesn’t matter, in the end, whether one acknowledges this—even to oneself. One just has to do it.
As long as getting attention is an issue, however hidden, then means of interaction such as emails, texts and Slack, etc., are key parts of what “work” actually is. If you are not getting and giving attention, or trying to, you’re not working, in that sense. Usually, you will fail to get sufficient attention if you are unable or unwilling to give it to colleagues, gatekeepers, and so on.
A traditional economic analysis, based on automatically assuming the purpose of work is to increase revenues for one’s employer, may miss what, in their hearts, is most so-called knowledge workers’ actual objective.
Take Ezra Klein himself as an example of a “knowledge worker.” He’s currently an employee of The New York Times. Once, years ago, newspaper writers did not have bylines, but that era is long gone. Could The Times just put Klein in a room without outside contacts and have him bang out pieces without a byline? Perhaps there’s someone in their management who would find that a good idea, but I doubt Klein or many of his readers would. Most readers have too many choices of what to pay attention to read a random opinion piece by someone anonymous.
Furthermore, to do his work, Klein absolutely needs to pay attention to and get attention from many others. So far, Klein’s career has gotten him lots of attention, even while his employers have changed. The Times is quite probably not the last rung in his career ladder, and that possible future requires that he —and not just The Times—get attention for his work.
And the same goes for his interviewee, Cal Newport, who has to research the business books he writes and evidently has a certain following for. It holds too for a tremendous percentage of the so-called knowledge workers, who can’t rely on their current employer or job title even existing ten years down the road, and quite probably have at least vague ambitions to become more well known—more attended to, in effect —than they are now.
Newport cites the example of a duo of “coders” who carry out their assignment cooperatively but isolated from almost everyone else, and who get to stop work around 3pm every day. I’m sure there are people who would love that setup, but should they? I suppose by a “coder,” though the term is ambiguous, Newport means what is otherwise known as a computer or software programmer. Aside from the fact that these workers can’t develop any following or repute by proceeding in such isolation, it may not be such a successful ploy to achieve a good program either.
The “hive mind “ metaphor that Newport counterposes his isolated work example to has always struck me as singularly inappropriate. After all, all the workers (bees, of course) in a beehive are sisters with the same genes and pretty much the same outlooks and knowledge. In reality, what makes large communities of thinkers—of the sort that used to be given more appropriate names such as “invisible colleges”— so creative is their substantial differences as to what they know, what they’ve done, and even how they approach the world. For many computer programming tasks, the absence of such connections would surely lead to failure, or, at the very least, taking inordinately long. And people working on hard problems who get off work at 3 in the afternoon likely will end up rethinking the difficulties or ambiguities well into the night. They won’t be off work at all, even if they’re not getting emails.
Would that make them more suckers than Druckers?
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