Tag Archives: precarity

Blog, Bullshit Jobs, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Massimiliano Mollona: Why the End of Work Will Not Be the End of Capitalism

One of the lowest moments of my undergraduate studies in Economics back in the 1990s happened whilst reading Tom Peters’ Liberation Management (1992), where the management guru/McKinsey-associate proposes to abolish the tedious, repetitive, and pointless jobs associated with bureaucratic and hierarchical capitalism, and create instead leaner horizontal, collectivist, and autonomous structures, based on meaningful, self-directed, and relationally expanded workers’ actions. I thought to myself: “These bloody managers are appropriating even creativity!” Indeed, that was the beginning of what Boltanski and Chiappello (2005) later called ‘the new spirit of capitalism’. The same charismatic spirit of capitalist reformation echoes in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2019) despite it being an attempt to actually eliminate it.

Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs is based on the article ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, published in 2013 on the blog of Strike! magazine, an umbrella of militant left-wing organizations, which is now closed. The original Strike! page received more than one million hits, and within a week, was translated into a least a dozen languages. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week.  And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, David argues, “technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more” and more importantly, on effectively pointless jobs. Crowds of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. This situation creates deep moral and spiritual damage, “it is a scar across our collective soul” David argues. Yet no one talks about it. Keynes’ promised utopia resurged briefly in the 1960s – remember Andre Gorz’s Farewell to the working-class (1980)? Yet, it never materialised.

Image 1: Fredi’s office, © Masimilliano Mollona

The standard line today is that Keynes didn’t predict the massive increase in consumerism, which rebooted the productive economy, in tandem with the financialization of poverty. Instead, David links the proliferation of bullshit jobs to the explosion of the financial economy. The turning point was the economic deregulation of the 1980s, associated with the new spirit of capitalism, when “the children of the 1960s, used their ideology of cultural liberation, to break the unions and implement the regime of flexible production”. And yet, as I have highlighted in my opening paragraph, flexible production was precisely the result of the managerialist orchestration of expanded and more meaningful tasks for the workforce, and of the sense of expanded agency associated with such “job expansion” – the delusional experience of the new financialised subjects – which Bullshit Jobs advocates as a means against financial capitalism.  Moreover, finance, and the new forms of extractivism associated with it, generates not just bullshit jobs, but also a feudal social system, based on a weirdly sadomasochist protestant work ethics in which the performance of boring and useless jobs and of actions totally separated form real life leads to salvation and economic remuneration whereas the jobs with higher social value are systematically devalued and underpaid. The aim of Bullshit Jobs is to show that neoliberalism is a political project, of the dystopian kind, and not an economic one. In fact, unlike classical capitalism, which was about profit and sound economics, financial capitalism is inherently inefficient and bureaucratic, as is shown by its declining rate of growth worldwide.

By showing that capitalism is a cultural and ideological social construction, which we unconsciously reproduce every day, Bullshit Jobs opens a potential space of collective refusal. By understanding the performative dimensions of economics, we can appreciate that, if we decide so, we can produce a different society, first, by eliminating bullshit jobs. The policy of Universal Basic Income is a possible means to such end.

On the difference between bullshit jobs and shit jobs

Bullshit jobs involve being paid by someone else either on waged or salaried basis for jobs “that are so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”. They are jobs of smokes and mirrors. They are white collar jobs, full of perks and status, honour, and prestige. But those who perform them knows they are meaningless. In fact, the job holder must pretend their job is important. So, bullshit jobs always contain a degree of falsity and pretence. “The lives of bullshit workers are based on lies”. Shit jobs are the opposite of bullshit. They are jobs that are needed but are not well paid. Jobs that are of benefit to society. They are blue collar and paid by the hour. Undignified, but meaningful. Typically, they consist in the ‘reproductive jobs’ of looking after people, which involve care, empathy and emotional labour (Graeber 2019, 14).  Bullshit and shit jobs cut the private public divide, in the same way they equally flourish under capitalism and under socialism.

There are five types of bullshit jobs:

Flunky jobs exist only or primarily to make someone else feel or look important. They are the jobs of the servants, clients, sycophants, the entourage of those at the top of the feudal retainers. David writes: “imagine that a crowd of indigent, runaways, orphans, criminals, women in desperate situations and other disparate people gather around your mansion…. The obvious thing to do is to slap a uniform on them and assign them to minor task to justify their existence…. Such roles tend to multiply in economies based on rent extraction” (Graeber 2019, 29). Flunkies are modern versions of servants and maids, which David notes, have disappeared in the north Atlantic world.

Goonies are people whose jobs have an aggressive element: telemarketers, corporate lawyers, lobbyist. Working in advertising, marketing and publicity, goonies are always dissatisfied, even if their jobs tend to earn them six-figure salaries.  

Duct tapers are workers who make up for inefficiencies in the system. For instance: IT workers inputting information into excel spread sheets; programmers making different hardware compatible or female administrative assistants, who end up doing a lot of work for their (male) bosses, and with their affective labour, soothing their egos.  

Box tickers prepare reports and reproduce the bureaucratic apparatus of monitoring, surveillance, and performance assessment of work bureaucracies.

Taskmasters are the managers who formulate the strategic mission, assess business performances, compose grids of career progression, and keep the bullshit system alive.

Humorously parodying the kind of pointless categorizations that populate the bullshit workplace, David’s classification is loose and unground. On a closer inspection, it turns out that most bullshit jobs he mentions are in fact, shit jobs. Take for instance the IT workers who fix and repair programs or make different platforms compatible – the duct tapers. They may be bullshit jobs, but they are central in the reproduction of value under platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016). The workers for the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourced platform for so-called “post-human intelligence tasks”, which outsources small and alienating digital work are paid an average of 15 dollars per day, for anything between two and ten hours work, 100 hits per day. Platform capitalism is the productive side of finance, the new site of capitalist value creation and extraction, fully entangled with global industrial production, their digital infrastructures and automation systems. Amazon, Facebook and Google and their shareholders don’t think these jobs are bullshit and won’t let these jobs go without a fight. Or think of the Flunkies such as porters, security guards, maids, freelance care workers.  These ‘shit shit jobs’ are neither blue collar nor white collar but pertain to an unregulated and highly exploitative service economy, which also proliferates with the proliferation of finance.

The confusion seems to stem from the fact that David’s classification focuses on work, rather than on labour, which depoliticises the issue at stake because it discounts the social relation of production, that is, the field of articulations, negotiations and struggles around which some human actions are deemed to acquire more value than others, and underpin the social constructions of skills, tasks, and actions as building-blocks of the whole ritual edifice of bourgeois micro-economics.

Marxism in anthropology has never been too popular, but the attack to productivism and labour value theory in anthropology, from James Ferguson’s book on redistribution, Li Puma and Lee’s on financial circulation, to various analysis on the productivity of the informal economies of slums, has had the bizarre effect of generating a vast market for popular books about work  – whose more recent examples are Jan Lucassen’s (2021) monumental book The Story of Work a New History of Humankind and anthropologist James Suzman’s (2021) blockbuster book Work: A Deep History from Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Like David, Suzman has become a celebrity anthropologist, outspoken about the pointlessness of contemporary work mental and material structures and advocating the 15 hours a week from the perspective of the ‘stone age economics’ of the Ju/Hoansi bushmen of Namibia’s Kalahari desert, which he studied during his PhD in anthropology at Edinburgh university, started after he resigned as senior manager in the diamond mining giant De Beers. Now Suzman runs Antropos ltd, a think-tank that offers ‘anthropological approaches to present-day problem-solving’ at a corporate rate of up to £1,400 per day – half for NGOs (Hunt, 2020).

These culturalist and evolutionary studies of work undervalue the historical materialist aspects of labour, which Marx considers as a real abstraction that is both material and ideological – economic and political. Marxist labour theory of value says that capitalism is a political and economic construction that systematically undervalues and exploits those actions that are attached to a wage relation, which itself is a form of human devalorization. It is not the content of the action that matters. It is the relationships of production that matter, both at the local and global levels, in the entanglement between finance and industry, centres and peripheries, which generate complex entanglements of bullshit, shit, and shit shit jobs.

Besides, David’s argument that the economy of late capitalism is uneconomical, assumes that capitalism, at least at some point, was about economics rather than power and that the economy (or capitalism?) can be fixed, morally and productively, with an efficient work reorganization and that this reorganization consists in sorting out which jobs are more important than others. First, reproductive jobs are more important than productive ones, productive from the point of view capital. But when you look at his classification, nearly all jobs are reproductive, in fact the very problem of productivism, David argues, is that it forgets that the vast majority of the working-class fixes, maintains, looks after – machines, people and objects – rather than heroically fighting on the production line. David’s intuition about the value of maintenance and reproductive labour is a very important one. But, if nearly all human actions are reproductive in large sense, reproductive of the existent world and of existent institutions, how can we distinguish between those which reproduce capitalism such as unpaid housework, and those which reproduce life outside it?  

Image 2: Office work, photo by Andrea Piacquadio.

Instead of looking at how the value of work is socially constructed through the wage relation, David considers the degree of satisfaction afforded by different work, tasks or actions, satisfaction which is directly related to their different affordance of agency and freedom. The emphasis here is on the morality or ethics of freedom rather than the politics of labour, which resonates with Tom Peters’ ideology of freedom management, that is, the idea that work can be abolished or freed, without abolishing capitalist social relations (on this issue see also Ana Cecilia Dinerstein and Harry Pitts, 2021).

In fact, according to David, there is a clear moral divide between bullshit jobs and shit jobs. Shit jobs are morally satisfying and meaningful, whereas bullshit work is immoral, alienating and ultimately dissatisfying because it leaves the bullshitter without agency and creativity and such lack of agency clashes with humans’ natural tendency to find pleasure in seeing one’s action reaching its imagined end. But why is care work so satisfying despite it involving so little agency? Or can a sense of agency emerge from empowering other people’s actions or in the realization that all actions are ultimately equally powerless because deeply relational? An analysis of the social relations surrounding the evaluation of actions, and of the ethical performativity of value, as in Michael Lambek’s (2013) article ‘The Value of Performative Acts’, would have helped here.

Work as protestant ideology or ethics

But it turns out that freedom at work is heavily constrained by the morality of the time.

David is interested in the morality of labour of Northern Europe and North America and in its specific Christian protestant trajectory, and he explicitly leaves out the aristocratic and patriarchal vision of labour held in the Mediterranean and in ancient Greece, whereby physical labour is only for serfs and women. This historically and geographically essentialising classification, which characterises so much Mediterranean anthropology of the 1980s, doesn’t make much sense from the point of view of labour history.

In the feudal economy of Northern Europe, dominated by the Puritan and Protestant ethical framework, paid and waged labour were a form of education and disciplining of the working-class, of training to show good manners, limited to the initial part of one’s life. Its Judeo-Christian vision of humanity, which Sahlins (1996) highlights so well in his ‘The Sadness of Sweetness’, meant that work had to be self-mortifying, sacrificial and redemptive. In such male dominated society, human production is seen as an emulation of the heavenly process of world creation and reproductive labour is considered a mirror, although derivative, of the productive labour of men and God.

Capitalism transformed service into a permanent relation of wage labour but salvaged the ideology of feudalism. In fact, both managerialism and feudalism are forms of abstraction from real production, in which appropriation and distribution of goods, rather than actual production, creates elaborated ranked hierarchy. “Financial capitalism isn’t really capitalism but a form of rent extraction, where the internal logic are different from capitalism… since economic and political imperatives have come to merge… now it resembles managerial feudalism” (Graeber 2019, 181). But were previous forms of capitalism just economical? Is not always profit a form of rent extraction? David criticises the classical assumption shared by both Marxist and bourgeois economists that under feudalism the political and the economical blur because extraction is based on legal principle, whereas in capitalism the economical is abstracted from the political. In fact, he argues, capitalist economics, including work organization, is an entirely political construction. This depiction of Marxism is disingenuous. Marx clearly describes capitalism as a political construction, in which the fictions and abstractions of capital, embodied as much in bourgeois economics as in the material organization of the factory, become real.

More importantly, according to David, under financial capitalism, human life becomes progressively abstracted and surreal, which turns the ethics of Protestantism into a weird sadomasochistic ideology, in which the relation between social benefits and level of compensation is turned upside down; “people should be compensated for horrible jobs because meaningful jobs are already compensating” (Graeber 2019, 213). Productive labour becomes a form of punishment á la Foucault.

David’s Marxism

David’s Weberian and Foucauldian understanding of contemporary capitalism as a weird form of moral punishment and productive madness is a radical change of direction from his previous Marxist analysis of capitalist labour as an inverted form of slavery (Graeber 2006). There, David’s argument of the historical entanglement of capitalism and slavery was part of a broader reflection on structural Marxism, system theory and the political economy approach in anthropology (Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf and Eric Williams) and engagement with the radical black Marxism of Cedric Robinson. Particularly, David shows that capitalism and slavery share the following traits: both rely on a separation of the place of social (re)production of the labour force, and the place where that labour-power is realized in production – in the case of slavery, this is achieved by transporting laborers bought or stolen from one society into another one; in capitalism, by separating the domestic sphere (the sphere of social production) from the workplace.

The transfer happens by exchanging human powers for money. One effect of that transfer is ‘social death’, in the sense of the devaluation if not annihilation of the community ties and kinship relations and their separation from the workplace. The financial transaction in both cases produces abstract labour, which is pure creative potential and the sheer power of creation. The ideology of freedom which conflicts with how most societies take it for granted that no human is completely free or completely dependent, rather, all have different degrees of rights and obligations. The modern ideal of political liberty, in fact, has historically tended to emerge from societies with extreme forms of chattel slavery.

Such Marxist analysis of the entanglement of capitalism and slavery, tells us much more about contemporary forms of feudal management, the systematic devaluation of reproductive labour and the social construction of unfreedom, than the Weberian approach of Bullshit Jobs.

Reproductive labour

The central theoretical reference in David’s theory of reproductive labour is the feminist scholar Nancy Folbre (2020). For Nancy Folbre, patriarchy is the systematic devaluation of the power of reproducing life by women or alien men such as slaves, which is achieved through three main mechanisms: (1) the creation of property rights and laws that limits the circulation of people and put it under male control; (2) restrictions of rights of women children and sexually non-conforming individuals and (3) under-remuneration of care work.

For Folbre slavery and capitalism are not just moral or cultural systems (associated with patriarchy, aristocracy, caste, or race) or simply work structures (in which factories and plantations mirror each other), but are interrelated political and economic systems in which the wage relation is entangled with and reinforced by conflicting ideological construction of personhood and forms of evaluation of human action. The link between slavery, devaluation of reproductive labour and capitalism is made by Meillassoux (1986) in his anthropology of slavery, which shows how the systematic devaluation of the labour of slaves and the denial of their reproductive powers become a generalised and sustainable economic system only when slavery becomes entangled in merchant capitalism; in the same way in which the systematic devaluation of working-class labour can only be sustainable through the systematic denial of the reproductive labour of women.

Finance

Another Marxist trope in Bullshit Jobs is the link between finance, abstraction, and alienation, whereby the FIRE sectors (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) systematically create abstractions and abstracted organizations which hire ‘complicators’ to increase financial abstractions and the speculation connected to them. Finance creates meaningless ritual and new age gurus, “who paint abstraction as reality, forgetting that there are some things more real than others”. Marx describes capitalism as a form of labour abstraction – CMC to MCM – and finance as a multiplication of such abstract logic. The Marxist philosopher Moishe Postone (1993) considered the abstracted and impersonal kind of work David associates with bullshit labour as the materialization of the commodity form – a real abstraction of capital. But David discusses the proliferation of finance, abstraction and rent extraction as unreasonable and unrealistic deviations from classical capitalism and precisely because unrealistic, to be easily overcome. Even if unrealistic, contemporary forms of rentier capitalism, of the kind described by Christopher Brett (2021) or by Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings (2020) cannot be challenged simply through work re-organizations or wage redistribution, because it is deeply attached to assets inequality and on feudal power relations which capitalism constantly re-produces, via its impersonal machine.   

Solidarity

But the best part of the book are the descriptions of the creative strategies of resistance of this new precarised and dispossessed class of bullshitters consisting of Wikipedia ghost-writers, occupational poets, toilet graffiti artists, deluded rock stars, professional dropouts, and gossipers. It is precisely in the creative agency of these workers, and in David’s empathy towards them, that the book’s call to action emerges. After all, the book is based on interviews with individuals who had read David’s original article and identified with his political project of demystifying the corporate world. That is, the book is based on a sense of solidarity between David and the bullshitters. In this sense, Bullshit Jobs’ greatest potential is as a work of fiction or an ethnography of direct action, which in defiance of the tragic post-workerist sociological narrative, gives voice to the creative withdrawal, artistic desires, and post-capitalist fantasies of platform workers – whose anti-heroic politics resonates with that of the lost people of Madagascar.  

David’s optimism reflected the hopes about the end of capitalism that opened after the economic crisis of 2008 and embodied in the UK by Corbynism with which David had a strong affiliation. At the time, even the gigantic productivist trade union UNITE supported the elimination of bullshit jobs via the Universal Basic Income as a way into what Aaron Bastani (2020) imagined as a ‘fully automated luxury communism’.

This sense of hope was wiped out by the recent global pandemic, which, if anything, widened the gap between overpriced bullshit jobs and undervalued shit jobs. On the one hand, the lawyers, corporate accountants, the platform managers, the internet influencers and gurus. On the other, the Amazon Turkers, the IT engineers who build new Zoomified working environments, or install powerful optical Internet cables in middle class neighbourhood, the gig workers who deliver groceries, parcels, or health services; the nurses, teachers, and carers who continue to be responsible for the reproduction of life. Deadly on humans, the global pandemic didn’t singlehandedly eliminate any useless job or revaluate productive labour. If anything, it introduced the new category of spectral labour, the labour of nurses who are both underpaid and operate daily under deadly working conditions. If a pandemic cannot change capitalism, interstitial changes, operating ‘through the cracks of capitalism’, as John Holloway (2010)  would say, or cultural prefigurations of ‘what could be’, to use a term of Murray Bookchin (1971), won’t do that either.

I have been working on Universal Basic Income project in Brazil for some time, and I must say that the problematic associated with Bullshit Jobs alerted me of the perils of thinking that work can be eliminated with targeted policy measures without the elimination of capitalist social relations. From where we stand now, and looking back at 2013, when the article was written, seems to glance into a different era, one of intellectual hope and political mobilization, so fully embodied in David’s charismatic figure of scholar and activist. His call to action, as hard to follow as it may seem, continues to strongly resonate with me.

Massimiliano Mollona is Associate Professor at the Department of the Arts at Bologna University and Visiting Research Fellow at the Anthropology Department, in Goldsmiths College, London. He specializes on the anthropology of class, labour and political economy, and the anthropology of art. Mollona is currently working on an ethnography of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Marica’ Brazil, in collaboration with economists from the Federal Fluminense University of Rio de Janeiro.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on “Bullshit Jobs”.

References

Adkins Lisa, Cooper Melissa and Martijn Konings. 2020. The Asset Economy. London: Wiley.

Bastani, Aaron, 2020. Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. London: Verso.

Bookchin, Murray. 1971. Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Berkeley, California: The Rampants Press.

Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.

Brett, Christopher, 2021. Rentier Capitalism. London: Verso.

Ferguson, James. 2015. To Give a Men a Fish. Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Duke University Press.

Dinerstein Ana Cecilia and Harry Pitts. 2021. A World Beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.

Folbre, Nancy. 2020. The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems. An Intersectional Political Economy. London: Verso.

Graeber, David. 2006. Turning Modes of Production inside Out: Or Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery. Critique of Anthropology, 26(1): 61-85.

Graeber, David. 2019. Bullshit Jobs. A Theory. London: Penguin Books.

Gorz, Andre. 1980. Farewell to the working-class. London: Pluto Press.

Holloway, John. 2010. Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.

Hunt, Ellen. 2020. Blue sky thinking: is it time to stop work taking over our lives? The Guardian. Sunday 4, October 2020.

Lambek, Michael, 2013. The Value of Performative Acts. HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Vol 2 (2).

Lee, Benjamin and Edward Li Puma. Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity. Public Culture. 14(1): 191-213.

Lucassen, Jan. 2021. The Story of Work a New History of Humankind. Yale University Press.

Meillassoux, Claude. 1986. The Anthropology of Slavery. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Peters, Tom. 1992. Liberation Management. London: Alfred and Knopf.

Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labor and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1996. The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology. Current Anthropology. 37(3): 385-428.

Srnicek, Nick. 2016. Platform Capitalism. Oxford: Polity Press.

Suzman, James, Work: A Deep History from Stone Age to the Age of Robots. London: Penguin Press.

Cite as: Mollona, Massimiliano. 2022. “Why the End of Work Will Not Be the End of Capitalism.” FocaalBlog, 22 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/02/22/massimiliano-mollona-why-the-end-of-work-will-not-be-the-end-of-capitalism/

Blog, Bullshit Jobs, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Bullshit Jobs

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Massimiliano Mollona & Andrew Sanchez

When David Graeber published his article ‘On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs’ in Strike! in 2013, he knew he struck a chord in the public imagination. As soon as the article went up, the Strike! website went down for too much traffic. The article quickly became viral and was translated into at least a dozen languages. Before long, quotes from the piece appeared in the form of guerrilla posters on the London Underground with messages such as: “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working”. The essay’s main thesis was that work had become an end in itself to sustain the logic of neoliberal capitalism, thereby contradicting the myth of capitalist productivity. In 2018, David decided to turn this brief essay into a fully-fledged book with the intention to flesh out the argument more systematically. In this final instalment of the series, Massimilano Mollona and Andrew Sanchez move beyond the buzz sparked by the essay to sift through the conceptual and empirical claims presented in the book. Weaving personal working experience with anthropological theories of work and value (Sanchez), and considering it from the lens of Weberian and Marxist understandings of capitalism (Mollona), they show where the book succeeds and where, in their view, it is found wanting.  

These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.

Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

Massimiliano Mollona is Associate Professor at the Department of the Arts at Bologna University and Visiting Research Fellow at the Anthropology Department, in Goldsmiths College, London. He specializes on the anthropology of class, labour and political economy, and the anthropology of art. Mollona is currently working on an ethnography of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Marica’ Brazil, in collaboration with economists from the Federal Fluminense University of Rio de Janeiro.

Andrew Sanchez is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has published on economy, labour, and corruption, including Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India, Labour Politics in an Age of Precarity co-edited with Sian Lazar, and Indeterminacy: Waste, Value and the Imagination co-edited with Catherine Alexander. 

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Adam Brisley: RESPONSE: Ethics and the Anthropological Worker

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

Contemporary anthropological praxis sits at the intersection of two ethical traditions. Many anthropologists are equipped with both a sophisticated understanding of the ethics and politics of representation and a practical knowledge of the bureaucratic norms and standards of institutional research ethics (informed consent, confidentiality, anonymisation etc.). And yet, if the PrecAnthro/EASA report (Fotta et al 2020) and the recent scandal at the HAU journal tell us anything (Kalb 2018, Murphy 2018, Neveling 2018, Singal 2020), it is that our disciplinary ethics does little to ensure the ethical conduct of our discipline. As other contributors to this debate have noted, the situation described in the report demands a political and an anthropological response. It requires us to unionise and work ethnographically to understand “the structures of feeling and the conditions of possibility for collective mobilization” (Narotzky 2021). In my opinion, the report should also provoke us to re-evaluate the ethics of anthropological knowledge production.

I welcome the PrecAnthro report for helping to illustrate the scale of anthropological casualisation in Europe, but it is true that my feelings likely reflect how closely the report describes my own experiences of academic precarity: I was educated in the UK and since completing my PhD in 2015, have worked on fixed-term research contracts. As Susana Narotzky (2021) and Natalia Buier (2021) note, the report privileges the perspectives of researchers like me, whilst excluding the experiences of some of the most marginalised precarious workers in anthropology such as low-paid teaching staff for whom EASA membership is neither professionally advantageous nor affordable. I write here from my located perspective as a post-doc who has worked in the field of research ethics for a number of years.

I found little to disagree with in the FocaalBlog commentaries on the PrecAnthro report and would only contend that I do not believe that anthropologists feel uncomfortable talking about precarity within our discipline. On the contrary, in fact, I think that anthropologists are more than happy to discuss academic precarity because they see it as a largely externally driven phenomenon – part of the same great process of neoliberal bureaucratisation that has devolved power from academics to university managers and driven a culture of performance review and job insecurity across the piece (so called publish-or-perish). Rather, I would think, what makes anthropologists feel uncomfortable is talking about how the precarity of junior colleagues leaves them vulnerable to exploitation by senior colleagues and reluctant to report abuse and bullying due to a fear of reputational damage (Kalb 2021, Drążkiewicz 2021, Rajaram 2021). The kind of exploitation that allegedly took place at HAU may be extreme, but as Neveling (2018) argues, it sits within “a spectrum of social, economic, and political processes that have always driven academia and continue to do so” and that reflect the general conditions of capitalism. Yet, whilst we should of course foreground the political economy of academic casualisation in order to understand the grounds for collective resistance, we must also question what it means to produce anthropology is a way that is sensitive to the risks of exploitation inherent to the contemporary academic process. Such a project would necessarily be as much about the ethics of anthropological knowledge production as the political economy of precarity.    

One of the difficulties that anthropology faces here is a lack of familiarity. Our existing professional ethics and standards are attuned to the practices of conducing fieldwork and writing ethnography. We are not used to thinking about how we interact with each other as a problem of anthropological ethics. Neither do we tend to think of “the anthropologist” as someone who is particularly vulnerable. Indeed, it was not so long ago that the anthropologist was seen as quite the opposite of a precariously employed, exploited worker. Typified by the image of Stephen Tyler on the cover of Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986), the figure of the anthropologist-as-writer marked a dawning disciplinary confrontation with the idea that ethnography was not neutral scientific description, as had apparently previously been assumed, but a genre of “persuasive fiction” largely produced by elite, white men, working under conditions of colonial and post-colonial privilege. Anthropologists, who understandably tend to privilege the ethics of their own discipline to those imposed from the outside (i.e., institutional research ethics), have become keen observers of the politics and ethics of representation. Anthropologists are skilled at unpacking assumptions and revealing the structures of inequality that determine whose experience counts and who gets to speak for whom – as demonstrated in this debate by the various incisive critiques of the limits of the PrecAnthro survey. And yet it is unclear how effective our existing disciplinary ethics alone can be when the subject of exploitation is neither a subject of investigation, nor ultimately representation, but rather a fellow anthropologist.

The PrecAnthro report evokes a strikingly different image of “the anthropologist” to that of the elite, white man of crisis of representation. The typical respondent in the report is described instead as “a woman aged around 40… educated in either the UK or Germany… possibly in a relationship but has no children… and probably dissatisfied with her current employment and her work–life balance due to the fact that she works on a fixed-term contract” (Fotta et al 2020: 1). The report further illustrates what many already knew: contemporary anthropological knowledge production relies on a precariat of low-paid anthropological workers (postgrads, postdocs, teaching assistants etc.), many of whom will never obtain a permanent contract in the discipline nor academia more generally. What does the growing visibility of this version of “the anthropologist” mean for anthropological praxis? Are we to continue to imagine that the rights and wrongs of anthropological knowledge production can be discussed independently of the labour relations that structure our discipline? If not, then we may need consider whether our existing professional ethics are equipped to deal with the moral and political realities of anthropological research in the 21st century. Indeed, if it is our ambition to build the kind of class consciousness required for collective mobilisation, then we may need to start by acting in solidarity with precariously employed anthropologists and try to envisage ways that our working practices can be used to help mitigate, rather than exploit, the forms of vulnerability that academia creates.

Adam Brisley is a post-doctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He has a PhD from the University of Manchester and has previously held post-doctoral positions in the universities of Manchester and Bristol. His research interests focus on the relationship between care and political economy in the context of health systems crisis.

References

Buier, N. 2021. “What sample, whose voice, which Europe?” Focaal Blog, 27 January 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/27/natalia-buier:-what-sample,-whose-voice,-which-europe?/

Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Drążkiewicz, Ela. 2021. “Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia” Focaal Blog, 5 February 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/05/ela-drazkiewicz-blinded-by-the-light-international-precariat-in-academia/

Fotta, M., Ivancheva, M. and Pernes, R. 2020. The Anthropological Career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists: https://doi.org/10.22582/easaprecanthro

Kalb, Don. 2021. “Anthropological Lives Matter, Except They Don’t” Focaal Blog, 27 January 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/27/don-kalb:-anthropological-lives-matter,-except-they-don’t/

Kalb, Don. 2018. “HAU not: For David Graeber and the anthropological precariate.” www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/26/don-kalb-hau-not-for-david-graeber-and-the-anthropological-precariate.

Murphy, Fiona. 2018. “When gadflies become horses: On the unlikelihood of ethical critique from the academy.” www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/28/fiona-murphy-when-gadflies-become-horses.

Narotzky, S. 2021. “A History of Precariousness in Spain” Focaal Blog, 29 January 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/susana-narotzky:-a-history-of-precariousness-in-spain/

Neveling, Patrick. 2018. “HAU and the latest stage of capitalism.” FocaalBlog, 22 June. www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/22/patrick-neveling-hau-and-the-latest-stage-of- capitalism

Rajaram, Prem Kumar. 2021. “The Moral Economy of Precarity” Focaal Blog, 9 February 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/09/prem-kumar-rajaram-the-moral-economy-of-precarity/

Singal, J. 2020. How One Prominent Journal Went Very Wrong: Threats, rumors, and infighting traumatized staff members and alienated contributors. They blame its editor. The Chronical of Higher Education, October 5th 2020: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-one-prominent-journal-went-very-wrong?bclid=IwAR1F_go7fNeeRXDtTLZmAhBsNlKjv8ta3fb8e3o2uRn5WD-74cVqWKwsiVI

Cite as: Brisley, Adam. 2021. “Ethics and the Anthropological Worker.” FocaalBlog, 9 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/24/adam-brisley-ethics-and-the-anthropological-worker/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Prem Kumar Rajaram: The Moral Economy of Precarity

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The authors of The Anthropological Career in Europe (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) have made visible the inequality and hierarchy that has become increasingly normalized in higher education in Europe. The impact of the report lies far beyond anthropology, and my reflections here build on the report’s key findings and consider the impact of precaritization on the university and academia as a whole.

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Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Ela Drążkiewicz: Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

I was reluctant to contribute to this blog series. The recently published EASA report (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) draws attention to precarious labour in anthropology. However, in the last decade we seem to have been talking about precarity in academia non-stop. There is even a nickname for the genre: “quit lit”. So, what, I wondered, would my story change?

Indeed, I have been telling my story to many colleagues, including to those in positions of power. A few colleagues proved to be wonderful allies, offering kindness, compassion, and practical support. However, quite a few showed little empathy or solidarity, and displayed a strong appetite for power. While academic credentials are key to building a career in academia, personal reputation also matters tremendously. You depend upon your colleagues for recommendation letters. This is even more true when you become an ‘internal candidate’ (the sort of candidate that you, as an international migrant, hated until you finally became one yourself). So you learn to please everybody, to be a “good girl”: not to question your Line Manager in meetings, and surely never, ever, in front of others; do not criticise your institution in public; never make demands; say yes to everything; never complain; do not admit you struggle; and most importantly, show endless gratitude.

When, after almost seven years of working at my last institution (where I arrived from Cambridge with my own Marie Curie grant) my third temporary contract was coming to an end, a group of undergraduates (without my knowledge) decided to collect signatures in support of me. However, at the last minute, they hesitated to go public. They revealed their plans to me and asked, “What if it causes more harm than good?” Even though they were new to academia, they already sensed that critique and bottom-up citizen action might be a great topic for an academic paper, but is not necessarily appreciated at the university offices. For me, the students’ support was moving, not least because it was evidence that I am good at my job – despite the stream of job rejections suggesting otherwise. My students appreciated my research insights and my pedagogical skills, and were willing to take a risk. Yet I feared that it would indeed be seen as an affront and a betrayal. I felt deeply insecure and was afraid of being accused of actually initiating the protest myself. I could be branded as a troublemaker. And who would ever want to hire a troublemaker? 

I was also reluctant to contribute to this important discussion on precarity because I do not wish to be viewed through the lens of the precariat. I want to be known for my craft, not my struggle. After all, we are professional academics, not humans. But, most importantly, I am still struck by the feeling that there is a stigma attached to being a precarious worker.The myth of meritocracy promotes a certain narrative: academic success is based on talent, skill, and accomplishment. Moreover, this is not a mere job, but a vocation, requiring sacrifice. Failure therefore suggests that you are just not good enough, or lazy, an old maid in the academic family. If you struggle, perhaps it’s because you just don’t have what it takes? Maybe you have chosen the wrong job?

Academic labour relations are the perfect field for gaslighting and undermining the abilities and achievements of scholars who are not in a position of power. They also lead to segregation and isolation. In the highly competitive academic market, people are easily reduced to the amounts of identifiable social capital they can offer. If you represent the elite, why would you associate with the academic proletariat?

Furthermore, I did not want to write this blog post because it is embarrassing. How could I be so naïve as to find myself part of a Ponzi scheme? Universities and full professors profit from the accelerated recruitment of people in lower ranks. The more junior scholars you recruit, the less teaching you have to do; they will do it for you. You have more time for research, publishing, networking, gaining ever more valuable ‘academic currency’ in an exponential fashion. The more PhDs you recruit, the more prestige comes to you and your institution. You can build your clan, your estate, your power. The more post-docs you recruit, the better your publication record (the most important academic currency). The goal is therefore the constant expansion of the pool of dependent early-career scholars. The problem is, how to lure them in? In academia, this is done by the promise of permanent, stable, respectable jobs, and the myth of meritocracy: if you work hard, with talent, if you do everything by the book, you will obtain success. But, as the EASA report clearly points out, this is often a false promise.

And here is the final reason for my initial hesitation to write: I am exhausted. I finally obtained the holy grail of academia: a permanent job! I now have the chance to rid myself of the stigma, move on, forget. So why would I go back now and get myself involved in this discussion, associate myself with rebellion, with a fight that is no longer mine? Why would I throw myself back into this mud? I worked so hard to get out of it!

Yet, I decided to write. Because I don’t want to be part of an academia run as a rat race. Because I know intimately about the suffering of the precariat. For those of you, who have never been in that position, think of your pandemic experience: remember March 2020, overwhelmed with teaching because of the unexpected new rules of the game, having to adjust your teaching overnight. This is how many precarious workers feel every September. Scholars who move between institutions have to learn the new rules of the game all the time, prepare new courses, adjust to new environments. Remember, the frustration when senior (often male) colleagues were excited that they would finally have time to publish, while you were drowning in teaching and caring duties? Did you start to stress about your job security, funding cuts, redundancy? These are the daily stresses and frustrations of those in the early career stages. Was it fun to have Christmas or Easter over Zoom, to not see your parents, grandparents? This is how many international precarious workers have been spending Christmas for years. You might also now be familiar with the pressure of caring for your children non-stop. This is the recurrent reality of many of those in the international precariat who have children, but no family networks at hand to help, and who cannot afford a sitter or day care. Did you feel lonely in the pandemic? Are you fed up talking to friends on WhatsApp and would like to see them in person? This is the constant reality of so many international scholars lured by the myths of the Ponzi scheme that academia is, trapped in a precarious limbo.

Many young precarious workers are international migrants, and as such they make good workers. Uprooted from their personal networks, with no relatives to visit on Sunday, they are available to work extra hours. They also have a lot to lose: they have already made so many heavy financial and personal sacrifices for their academic careers that it is very hard for them to change course, which means they are ready to do anything and everything, especially if they are given the hope of another contract. They are also easily replaceable and disposable as often they are excluded from academic patronage networks. Often, they have little or no connection with an Alma Mater of their own. For their new institutions, they are just foreigners who have arrived for their own gain. There is an unspoken assumption that they will leave. Consequently, few feel a moral responsibility for them. They are also highly vulnerable to discrimination based on nationality or race, both within and beyond the workplace. It is shameful that this exploitation happens in academia, particularly in anthropology, where so many careers were built on researching exploitation, migration, and indeed, precarious lives. 

Ela Drążkiewicz is a researcher at the Institute for Sociology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Institutional Dreams: The Art of Managing Foreign Aid. She specialises in political, economic and organisational anthropology.  

Bibliography

Fotta, Martin, Mariya Ivancheva and Raluca Pernes. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Cite as: Drążkiewicz, Ela. 2021. “Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia.” FocaalBlog, 5 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/05/ela-drazkiewicz-blinded-by-the-light-international-precariat-in-academia/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Susana Narotzky: A History of Precariousness in Spain

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The EASA report on The Anthropological Career in Europe (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) is an important initiative that offers quantitative evidence about a situation which all of those who work in academia are aware of, many experience daily, and which has repeatedly been denounced since the onslaught of the neoliberal policies starting in the 1980s. I will comment on this document from my situated viewpoint as a Spanish anthropologist, a full time tenured anthropologist, and a PI of large collaborative projects.

As a report produced by anthropologists for anthropologists, my first surprise was to find it not very anthropological. Although the report acknowledges that situations are very different among countries, we do not get a picture of what those differences are. The ‘methodology’ cannot deliver that picture. First, the assumption that EASA membership represents anthropologists working in Europe, and in particular the most precarious anthropologists, is probably inaccurate. In Spain, many of the part-time non-tenured teaching positions have extremely low salaries and their holders juggle a plurality of jobs that make research difficult. As a result, membership in EASA –which is fundamentally tied to participation in the biennial conference—is rarely sought. Therefore, a large contingent of (probably) the most precarious voices, many of which are not proficient in English, is not represented in the survey. This may also explain why a large majority of respondents work in Northern institutions which have more resources than those in other countries.

Second, what does the fact of choosing to produce a ‘survey’ rather than an ‘ethnography’ of “The anthropological career in Europe” say about the discipline of social anthropology, about its trust in the ‘evidence’ produced by our main methodological tool? Why does EASA as an association of social anthropologists thinks that it needs quantitative evidence in order to make its point about precarious anthropologists’ situation in the academy? We have countless ethnographies about labor precarity in Europe, but we have scant detailed ethnographies about precarious anthropologists teaching and doing research in concrete university environments. This has not been an obstacle to insightful and important articles being written from two perspectives: on the one hand, contributions based on personal experience; on the other hand, contributions based on statistical secondary sources enabling theorizations about the neoliberal transformations of the university in general or in a particular country (often in the Global North). As Pérez and Montoya (2018: A5) propose, personal experience should “reveal research paths for future ethnographies of academic precarity”, but it cannot substitute for them. I suggest that producing ethnographies is an urgent task if we want (1) to understand concrete ongoing processes of exploitation, domination and dispossession, and (2) to organize in a collective manner to overturn them.

Third, context and history. The survey does not provide any tools for historical and political context. Rather, it generalizes the neoliberal process as if it developed in the same way everywhere. We know from anthropological investigations into other domains of life, however, that the rolling back and rolling out of the neoliberal state is modulated by concrete historical circumstances.

In the mid-1970s, as a result of an increase in the number of university students, Spanish universities resorted to hiring a large number of non-permanent faculty. The figures vary slightly according to each university but, on average, 80 per cent of the faculty in Spanish universities were non-permanent in the mid-1970s (Profesor No Numerario) (Moreno 2019, Castillo 1982). According to statistical records of the Ministry of Universities, the figure of non-permanent faculty has stabilized at around 45 per cent in the past four years. Precarity, then, was part of an undemocratic university system where hierarchies of patronage dominated the scarce avenues towards stable tenure. Precarity, now, is part of an austerity regime that has reduced public education resources, forcing universities to seek funding from other sources (e.g., research grant overheads) or public-private partnerships. This has important implications for our understanding of the neoliberalisation of Spanish academia; as much as it sheds light on the long history of academic precarity and the struggle against this.

In the 1970s, as part of the general struggles for democratization of the university, a nationwide movement of the No Numerario’s developed. Based on assembly meetings in faculties and universities, it was not attached to parties or unions and was coordinated at the national scale by a committee of representatives. They demanded the same treatment as the permanent faculty, together with access to decision making committees in the university and other democratic requests. They organized long strikes and threatened the continuity of teaching and exams. Yet, their demand of stability and equal treatment sought to obtain a well-paid labor contract and to abolish the life-long tenure of the Profesor Numerario, subjecting all professors to periodic evaluation of their teaching and research and, implicitly, to the possibility of ending their contract. In the end, this radical position –the generalization of “non-tenured” academic labor contracts– was disabled by a law of university reform issued by the first socialist government in 1983, which promoted a process of rapid stabilization of most PhD-holding No Numerario’s through access to lifelong tenure  (Carreras 2004).

Today, the privatization of the public university system is based on the elimination of that life-tenure system and its substitution by tenured labor contracts in a context where the existing labor regulations have deregulated most rights and protections. Precarious faculty today in Spain are represented only partially and by various unions demanding stability, but there is no equivalent movement, organization and coordination to that of the No Numerario’s in the seventies. Why is that?

Local patronage networks are still very much in place, and one of the major assets to access a permanent job is to remain close to one’s Alma Mater, rather than to publish or get an international post-doc position abroad. In public universities 87% of teaching faculty (tenured and non-tenured) have a PhD from the same Autonomous Community, and 73% from the same university where they defended their PhD. Simultaneously, an increasing contingent of young academics who have been competitively selected to post-doc positions in research projects, have generally been able to publish in ‘impact’ journals and have expanded their international networks.

As a result, two very different kinds of precarious academic exist nowadays. They are often pitted against each other in competitions for tenured positions. When committees have to decide the value of teaching or research experience, the value of the local or foreign (i.e. from outside the university) candidate, they often tend to favor the local candidate with teaching experience. Rather than moralizing this as being ‘bad’ or ‘good’ for the university, my point here is to underline the diverse positionalities of precarious academics in Spain and the difficulties that this fragmentation entails in terms of collective organization and mobilization. In a context with more precarity and minimal research opportunities, within an ongoing struggle for democracy, the No Numerario’s movement collectively organized and achieved stability. Why not now? What needs to be done?

As anthropologists we need ethnographies of academic precarities, we need to historically situate the various forms of precarity and to compare them. To act effectively, we need to understand the structures of feeling and the conditions of possibility for collective mobilization. We know the numbers, now we need to know the souls.

Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, Spain.

Bibliography

Carreras, J. 2004. Evaluación de la calidad docente y promoción del profesorado (IV). Legislación universitaria española (b): de la Ley de Reforma Universitaria (1983) a la Ley Orgánica de universidades (2002). (1ª parte.) Educación Médica 7(1): 9-23

Castillo, J.J. 1982. Universidad: O todos o ninguno, El País, 12 de abril 1982

Fotta, Martin, Mariya Ivancheva and Raluca Pernes. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Moreno, I. 2019. Interview with Prof. Isidoro Moreno, Anthropologist, Universidad de Sevilla. 20 March, 2019. http://tv.us.es/el-movimiento-de-los-pnn-y-la-democratizacion-de-la-universidad-y-el-pais/

Pérez, M. & Montoya, A. 2018. The Unsustainability of the Neoliberal Public University: Towards an Ethnography of Precarity in Academia. Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, LXXIII(1): A1-A16

Cite as: Narotzky, Susana. 2021. “A History of Precariousness in Spain.” FocaalBlog, 29 January. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/susana-narotzky:-a-history-of-precariousness-in-spain/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Giacomo Loperfido: On Excellence, Precarity, and The Uses of Public Money

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

Covid19 is producing a crisis – both sanitary and economic – of global structural proportions, threatening the very existence of society as we know it. All precarious segments of society have become more precarious. But even before now, a growing precariat, eating into larger and larger segments of the middle classes, was emerging. Isolation, alienation, precaritization are not a novelty. Looking at the PrecAnthro/Easa survey (Fotta, Ivancheva, Pernes, 2020), one can see that the transformations of the academic system are an integral part of the process of middle class precaritization that started long before the current crisis.

I am an unemployed anthropologist (and have been so for more than two years). I am also a member of the PrecAnthro collective/union. At the EASA conference of 2018 I had the pleasure to be part of Alice Tilche’s initiative to bring together junior and senior anthropologists (precarious and otherwise) to reflect critically on the implications of the current trend of funding academic research through “big projects” (see Tilche and Loperfido, 2019). Before then, I had been a “privileged” (Matos, 2019) precarious researcher, employed as a postdoc in one of those big projects. For four years, I enjoyed the chance to participate in a solidly funded team under the expert coordination of a senior researcher who was also able to embed our collective research among her high level contacts in global anthropology. Despite fundamentally benefitting from having been part of a “big project”, I would like to use my space here to express a critical stance on what seems to have become one of the hegemonic mechanisms of research funding in the European and global arena.

The “big project” trend relates directly to the occupational transformations within social anthropology highlighted by the survey: precaritization, constant competition over funding, growing separation between research and teaching, vertical polarisation of academic hierarchies, de-professionalization of academic labor through multiple contracts, the imperatives of – often restless – international mobility, to cite but a few.

In the 1990s, the extension of New Public Management policies to the university system enforced the managerialization of administrations, introduced performance requirements, and set up unbridled competition. What emerged was a new trans-nationalized educational arena, in which “excellence” and “competition” became not only fundamental key words and real-world access keys to tenured careers. As an effect, an increasing number of tenured positions were proletarianized as a collective body, “and the number of short term or part time contracts at major institutions increased (with the concomitant participation of a handful of highly paid stars)”, as a worried Bill Readings had already stated 25 years ago (Readings 1996: 1). He noted how the university was beginning to be spoken of in the idiom of “excellence” rather than of “culture”. His explanation was that “the university no longer has to safeguard and propagate national culture, because the nation-state is no longer the major site at which capital reproduces itself” (Readings 1996:13).

About ten years later, the establishment of the European Research Council was saluted as “a European Champions League” (Winnacker 2008: 126), and the new way of funding research through big grants was established as part of the EU’s 7th framework program. Here again, “individual excellence” and “competition as the prerequisite for the formation of excellence” were becoming key principles in overcoming the “startling parochialism fostered in Europe by the reality of Nation States” (Winnacker: 124-25).

In much less enthusiastic terms, PrecAnthro’s action has focused on those very processes of increased internationalisation, escalating competition, and the new global imperative of “excellence”. With the above-mentioned event at the EASA conference 2018, we wanted to problematize the ways in which the international academic arena has been transformed into a market, where “scholars who are able to secure large grants have become football stars openly traded in the academic league” (Tilche, Loperfido, 2019:111).  A “Champions League”, indeed. Yet, on the dark side of that seemingly glamorous moon, a less visible academic precariat silently took shap; and became exposed to all the profound challenges and hardships in academic careers and personal life that the EASA/PrecAnthro report brings to light for the EASA membership community.

From all the above, I can only infer a general decline in the perception of the value of public institutions as something being endowed with more than just ‘competition’, such as social equality and cultural reproduction. Certainly, we all love excellent scholarship. Yet, there is a difference between a public action that promotes academic excellence so that it helps everybody to improve their scholarship, and an excellence that comes as a single-minded competition mechanism where only those that already have the label of excellence will benefit. 

Personally, I did benefit from the opportunities offered by participation in a big international grant. But we should refuse to assess collective problems on the grounds of our personal interests only. If we are to do something about “the current tragedy of anthropology as a discipline” (Kapferer, 2018) – and these are, once again, words from a time before the current pandemic – it is important ask, from a political and economic angle, where the public money that I benefitted from did not go. How many more non-tenured positions, how many more fixed-term research contracts and how many part-time teaching contracts does each €2,5 million grant produce? Who shoulders the costs of those grants? The PrecAnthro survey offers important answers to these questions. Now, what happens if we put together the scary picture portrayed by that survey prior to the current pandemic with the projections we have on the impact of Covid19 on the global economy and precarity in the academy in particular? There is enough evidence now for an honest and serious discussion on social justice; and to question where the current organisation of “big grant” transnational research funding fits into the escalating inequality in academia.

Giacomo Loperfido is an independent researcher, member of PrecAnthro. He is currently working on his first monograph, A Birth of Neo-fascism: Cultural Identities, the State, and the Politics of Marginality in Italy, thanks to the generous help of the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, CH.

Bibliography

Fotta, Martin, Ivancheva, Mariya, Pernes, Raluca. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Kapferer, Bruce. 2018. “The Hau complicity: An event in the crisis of anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 9 July. www.focaalblog.com/2018/07/09/bruce-kapferer-the-hau-complicity-an-event-in-the-crisis-of-anthropology.

Matos, Patricia, 2019. “Precarious Privilege. Confronting Material and Moral Dispossession”, in Forum: Politics and Precarity in Academia, Social Anthropology 27: 97-117.

Readings, Bill, 1996, The University in Ruins. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press.

Tilche, Alice, Loperfido, Giacomo, 2019. “The Return of Armchair Anthropology? Debating the Ethics and Politics of Big Projects”, in Forum: Politics and Precarity in Academia, Social Anthropology 27: 97-117

Winnacker, Ernst-Ludwig, 2008. “On Excellence Through Competition”, European Educational Research Journal, 7:2, 124-30.

Cite as: Loperfido, Giacomo. 2021. “On Excellence, Precarity, and The Uses of Public Money.” FocaalBlog, 29 January. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/giacomo-loperfido-on-excellence-precarity-and-the-uses-of-public-money/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Natalia Buier: What sample, whose voice, which Europe?

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The EASA membership survey and the associated ‘precarity’ report (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) are an important and timely contribution. Surely these are findings we must build on and the critical scrutiny of which is indispensable for formulating minimally shared lines of action. The report is likely to stir discussion both through its inclusions as well as through some of its inevitable silences. It is some of the latter that I want to briefly touch upon here.

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Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Don Kalb: Anthropological Lives Matter, Except They Don’t

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The PrecAnthro Collective within EASA has shown staying power and bite. That is what the EASA precarity survey demonstrates (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020). Mariya Ivancheva has turned her elected stint in the Board of the European Association of Social Anthropologists to good use. She, her co-authors, and her multiple collaborators and supporters in and outside of EASA should be applauded. This is Europe-wide anthropological collective action at work, and it goes far beyond business as usual.

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Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Stefan Voicu: Introduction: EASA’s ‘Precarity Report’: Reflections, Critiques, Extensions

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

Every day across Europe hundreds of social anthropologists wake up knowing that their precarious employment conditions may one day force them to leave the discipline. Still, they keep the discipline going across the continent by teaching, providing vital research data for high-profile research projects and a substantial share of the annual publication output. They also apply for grants and jobs while balancing the tightrope of overtime work and personal life. All for the glimmer of hope of a permanent position.

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