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Agility of Affect in the Quantified Workplace

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The Agile Imperative

Part of the book series: Dynamics of Virtual Work ((DVW))

Abstract

The chapter examines the Quantified Workplace project, which was carried out by a company that fitted sensory algorithmic devices to workers’ computers and bodies that identify agility via data collection, and reveals management practices that track affective and emotional labour, categorized in the project as stress, subjective productivity and wellbeing, thereby identifying workers’ so-called agility. The agile work design method attempts to convert areas of work capacities to facilitate the conversion of labour power into a source of value but through quantification of unseen labour it can also result in alienation and abstraction. Participants’ resistance to participation identified in the Quantified Workplace reveals tensions in the labour process when affect is measured in processes of corporate change.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The philosophers Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari are responsible for reviving and continuing affect research, which began with Spinoza’s postulation on affect in Ethics Part III def 3. Clough illustrates the ‘turn’ to affect (2007, 2008), and Gregg and Seigworth (2010) note that interest was further piqued in 1995 with two pieces, Massumi’s ‘The Autonomy of Affect’ (1995) and Sedgwick and Frank’s ‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins’. Blackman (2010) edited the special issue Affect, placing research in the field of body studies, with possibility and without image, emphasizing collective intelligence and affective engagement where it emerges. Blackman led discussions in feminist and queer studies perspectives, touching on relations of entanglement and the prowess of intersubjectivity and relationality (2008a, 2008b, 2011, 2012). Colman identified the affective feminist self (2010) and later, Wetherell (2015) critically outlined affect research, calling for a better ontological programme in which questions of emotion, pre-physiological experience and affective transmission and potentials are less bewildered. A by no means exhaustive list of further research includes Clough (2008), Colman (2008, 2010), Gill and Pratt (2008), Coleman (2012), Thrift (2004), Berlant (2011), Haider and Mohandesi (2015) and the edited collection by Karatzogianni and Kuntsman (2012). Two recent issues in 2016 and 2017 on Affective Capitalism for ephemera and Thinking Critically About Affect in Organizational Studies in organization demonstrate studies on affect continue to be cross-disciplinary. This research, however, does not address the areas of affective labour and quantification systems addressed in this chapter.

  2. 2.

    In the first interviews, three comments indicate concern about what personal data management had access to, increasing to 21 in the final interviews. More than half of participants in a separate ADP survey expressed concern about the amount of personal data that employers can access via wearable technology (ADP, 2015). Attitudes towards privacy vary across countries, with 60% of German and a high number of British workers expressing reservations, while only 36% of Dutch employees have reservations about personal privacy at work (ADP, 2015). Based on that study, Quantified Workplace participants’ concern for privacy was above average for the Netherlands, and interestingly, participation intensified sensitivity. In some cases, workers tend to feel devices ‘spy’ on them (The Week, 2015).

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  1. University of Leicester School of Business, Leicester, England

    Phoebe V. Moore

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  1. Nuremberg Campus of Technology (NCT), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Nuremberg, Germany

    Sabine Pfeiffer

  2. Nuremberg Campus of Technology (NCT), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Nuremberg, Germany

    Manuel Nicklich

  3. Nuremberg Campus of Technology (NCT), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Nuremberg, Germany

    Stefan Sauer

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Moore, P.V. (2021). Agility of Affect in the Quantified Workplace. In: Pfeiffer, S., Nicklich, M., Sauer, S. (eds) The Agile Imperative . Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73994-2_11

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