Caught in a Bad Romance? Affective Attachments in Contemporary Academia

Abstract

In contemporary management theory, as well as in popular discussions of work, love is often used as an affect that describes a fulfilling relationship with one’s job. In his famous talk at Stanford University in 2005, for instance, Steve Jobs encouraged students to keep looking for a job that they love, because, in his view, the only way to do great work ‘is to love what you do’. In cultural studies, however, there has been a growing interest in asking whether we become blind to key elements of contemporary capitalism when we designate certain jobs as ‘lovable’. This blindness occurs primarily because we tend to connect exploitation with work that is defined as ‘Fordist’ and alienating, not with work that promises the self-recognition that Marx wrote about (Ross, 2004a). In this chapter, however, I consider what kinds of theoretical tools one can use to grasp the problems that occur in ‘lovable’ work. I discuss the subject through a case study, a Finnish anthology entitled Tutkimusmatkoja äitiyteen [Research Journeys to Motherhood] (Keski-Rahkonen et al., 2010).