Precarious professional work entrepreneurialism, risk and economic compensation in the knowledge economy

ALEXANDER STYHRE PRECARIOUS PROFESSIONAL WORK Entrepreneurialism, Risk and Economic Compensation in the Knowledge Economy Precarious Professional Work Alexander Styhre Precarious Professional Work Entrepreneurialism, Risk and Economic Compensation in the Knowledge Economy Alexander Styhre School of Business, Economics, and Law University of Gothenburg Gothenburg, Sweden ISBN 978-3-319-59565-8    ISBN 978-3-319-59566-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59566-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944450 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface A few years back I submitted a book proposal to a publishing house The theme of the book was to discuss professionals and their capacity to make judgment in their day-to-day work, a skill that is acquired over time and through intense socialization into a profession that is the hallmark of professionalism The editor who handled the submission was skeptical about the very term “profession” and suggested that the term was more or less antiquated Instead he proposed that the more suitable and contemporary term to denote this group would be “knowledge workers”—a concept being quite fashionable around the turn of the millennium I am still thankful to this editor for confirming the thesis that I had entertained for some time, that “profession” as a scholarly and managerial term is now being abandoned, and that new terms, more or less directly coproduced with the investor capitalism version of competitive capitalism, are now taking its place The classical view of the professions is that they constitute groups of elite workers, being sufficiently well organized and controlling forms of expertise, highly valued by society and individual employers, and that such conditions grant professional groups the authority to speak on behalf of society and themselves about matters of joint concern In the era of investor capitalism, efficiency (operationalized as maximized shareholder returns) is the guiding star for all social and economic activities In this mode of economic production, professional groups can no longer engage in societal activities but must commit all their efforts to the v vi  Preface participation in market-based activities In order to overcome inherited privileges and rights, negotiated or earned over decades or even centuries of professional work, the very term profession is at stake The know-how and expertise that professional groups control and provide are of course still highly valued and attractive to engage, but the professions can no longer be granted the right to maintain the independent role in between the state and the market (i.e., industry) they have had historically Thus, new terms and concepts are being introduced and catered In addition, beyond the rhetorical strategies and new narratives of contemporary capitalism, structural and institutional changes have in many ways affected the nature of professional work Slower economic growth, increased economic inequality, the globalization of the economy, and exogenous technological change are all part of the wider change of scenery where professionalism is constituted and operates New employment relations, increasingly high levels of household debt, and soaring costs for tertiary education are some factors that affect, e.g., the middle class, the traditional recruitment ground for professional workers In order to bridge and align a variety of conditions, changes, and factors into a coherent and hopefully meaningful model of contemporary professionalism, this volume introduces the term precarious professional work The term precariousness is commonly associated with the most vulnerable and least advantaged groups in the labor market, the unemployed, workers salaried by the hour, people working part-time or on the basis of short-term contracts, etc., all operating at the lower levels of the income pyramid and in many cases not being granted benefits such as health care provisions or pension funds In this perspective, professional workers are still privileged and enjoy many advantages over less educated or skilled workers Yet, many of the rights and benefits historically accruing to professional workers are today under erasure For instance, fewer professional workers can take advantage of secure and long-term employment as they to a lesser extent work in small- and medium-sized firms with less ability to cushion the ups and downs in the economy Moreover, professionals are increasingly compensated on the basis of their ability to participate in competitive games and to demonstrate enterprising qualities, i.e., they are less valued as experts and specialists and are increasingly incentivized to act entrepreneurially Expressed differently, professionals are increasingly exposed to market pricing, and that implies, it is argued, the introduction  Preface     vii of an element of precariousness within professionalism That is, to use the term precarious professional work is by no means intended to trivialize or downplay the hardship encountering what the British sociologist Guy Standing calls “the Precariat,” but it is instead a term that points at the affinity between these least favored groups and the more historically successful professional groups inasmuch as they are both exposed to (albeit to a varying degree affected by) the same socio-­economic forces and changes in contemporary competitive capitalism As the volume will hopefully demonstrate to its readers, these socio-­economic forces and changes are not operating at the fringes of the economy but serve on a more deep-­­ seated level to transform the processes of economic value creation Social scientists and management scholars, but also the wider public, are accustomed to think of the major public (i.e., listed) corporation as the principal site for economic value creation This image is most likely to be of practical relevance for considerable time to come, but what happens inside this corporation is quite another matter, demonstrating the presence of very dynamic and changeable practices and operations New employment relations, new collaborative efforts between firms and organizations, new performance-reward systems, and new ways to organize day-­ to-­day work are only a few changes within the corporation that inform and shape professionalism In addition, the “externalization of managerial control” through the use of audits, credit ratings, stock market pricing of the firm’s shares and outstanding securities, and various forms of ratings, rankings, and accreditations adds to the complexity of in-house activities All these changes bring about a new situation where a professional career is no longer the safe, comfortable, and perhaps a somewhat dull middle-class career choice that predictably follows the track from university graduation to retirement Instead, the new precarious professional work presents new challenges for the coming generations of professional workers and for the middle class with whom professionals are commonly associated Pollock and Bono (2013: 629) argue that scholars presenting research work are given two tasks: “answering interesting questions” and “telling the story.” This indicates that scholarly work should both address the matter of joint concern and present it in ways that are literally and ­aesthetically appealing To merely access and present a reliable and intriguing data is not sufficient, but the data needs to be structured into an intriguing plot and story-line, clad in a literary language Such declarative statement viii  Preface makes sense to me, but the questions regarding “Interesting for who?” and “What story should be told” still linger on Ultimately, to determine ex ante what is interesting to explore is a privilege bestowed upon the scholar; to make the assessment ex post regarding the degree of relevance, etc., is up to the readers to determine At the same time, unless scholars claim and realize their privilege to identity what they believe are of interest, the community of readers cannot make their assessment Therefore, what gets written is dependent on scholars having the capacity to identify conditions, perceived problems, and puzzling phenomenon that attract their attention In addition, what story to be told on the basis of a specific set of data is another epistemological and ethical concern Scholarly writing is at times criticized for being parochial, overtly convoluted, preoccupied with minor theoretical controversies, and so forth While there is a fair share of truth in some of this critique, it is nevertheless based on the assumption that such declarative statement could be done from some neutral vantage point In fact, that is an untenable proposition The idea that, say, an anthropologist or physicist could be criticized for conducting research that matters only for a small group of anthropologists and physicists is to succumb to common sense thinking, assuming that any research activity that is not immediately accessible for any possible reader, and regardless of their willingness to invest any time or effort to learn to understand this line of research in more detail, should be disqualified That is, unless, e.g., anthropologists or physicists are capable of explaining what they and why upon request, they should lose their privilege to conduct this line of research While such emotional responses to what may appear as secluded, even mystical, unpopular modes of knowing the world may be understandable, it still succumbs to the fallacy that all individuals have the same capacity to understand ongoing research activities As that is apparently not the case, all forms of expertise are at risk to be dismissed as undemocratic and thus to serve specific interests But to assume that anthropologists or physicists participating in their own idiosyncratic research activities of necessity are engaging in self-­ aggrandizement is s­ imply untenable, at least not as a general proposition separated from context and local conditions What they is given by disciplinary standards, norms, and boundaries, and they obey scholarly  Preface     ix standards for knowledge production This in turn implies that the question “What stories should be told?” can be answered quite liberally as any story that the scholar who ex ante defines something as being worthy of interest and attention, regards as being worth telling As it is the reader and the wider scholarly community that determines the quality and relevance of research work once it is published, there is no reason to get stuck already before the work has even started Pollock and Bono’s (2013) claims regarding scholarly knowledge production can thus be handled by a combination of elite and market models The elite model asserts scholarly autonomy (the right to define research problems and to proceed accordingly), and the market model treats any scholarly publication as a contestant over limited attention and authority in scholarly fields and in the public sphere Therefore, the concept of precarious professional work, introduced and discussed in detail in this volume, should be understood as a way to address structural and institutional changes in competitive capitalism, in its corporate system, in its market system, and in its regulatory practices It is a story of joint concern worth telling, no matter whether anyone is willing to listen or not GothenburgAlexander Styhre March 23, 2017 Reference Pollock, T G., & Bono, J E (2013) Being Sheherazade: The importance of storytelling in academic writing Academy of Management Journal, 56(3), 629–634 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Liz Barlow, commissioning editor, Palgrave Macmillan, for providing me with a contract for this volume, and Lucy Kidwell, editorial assistant, Palgrave Macmillan, for the assistance during the publication process In addition, I am grateful for the collaborate work that I have conducted with my colleagues at the School of Business, Economics, and Law, University of Gothenburg, over the last period I am particularly indebted to Maria Norbäck and Björn Remneland-Wikhamn Finally, I would like to thank my family, my wife Sara and my two sons Simon and Max, for providing a refuge from academic work By o’clock, it is time to go, thank God! xi .. .Precarious Professional Work Alexander Styhre Precarious Professional Work Entrepreneurialism, Risk and Economic Compensation in the Knowledge Economy Alexander Styhre School of Business, Economics,... 1932, also examining the consequences of the separation between finance capital owners investing their capital in the firm and the operational management of the firm The work of Berle and Means (1991)... being thinly capitalized and thus having less ability to buffer the ups and downs in the economy Therefore, these professionals are increasingly exposed to the same risks as any category of other