Soldiering in an Age of Empty Labor (original) (raw)

2009

Abstract

Based on 43 interviews conducted with employees who, with a few exceptions, spend at least half of their working-hours on non-work-related activities such as "cyberloafing", a typology of "empty labor" (also known as "time waste") is suggested according to employee commitment and work intensity in order to set the phenomenon of soldiering and its oppositional importance into a new theoretical context. Marked off from other forms of empty labor, soldiering, emanating from the individual lack of commitment, can be said to entail grains of resistance. All types of empty labor are, however, associated with advanced methods of simulating productivity. Therefore, they ironically serve to maintain capitalism's self image of efficiency.

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