Work’s Intimacy, by Melissa Gregg. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Amazon Kindle Edition, 4474 locations. Reviewed by Ross Weathersbee.
Important notice from the reviewer: Due to the digital format of this book, page numbers cannot be cited. Instead, any parenthetical citations will include the “location number” assigned by the Amazon Kindle edition of the book. Readers of this review should not expect these location numbers to translate to the page numbers present in any print editions.
If there was one book to pick up after an exhausting week at work, it might be in your best emotional interest to stray away from Work’s Intimacy. Upon seeing the book’s cover, I immediately cringed at the unfortunate realization that this book probably applies to me.
Whether it’s checking my e-mail before bed or answering an early morning phone call, work invades my home regularly. I almost hoped that Gregg would ease my fears of technological overload, but instead she only confirmed them. Finishing the book was met with anxiety, uneasiness, and—most noticeably—a great, big sigh. What was I to do with all of these technological revelations?
Published shortly after the Great Recession, this book serves two important purposes: to [1] illuminate technology’s growing entrenchment in our work and personal lives, and [2] chronicle a variety of Australian professionals who navigated this troubled time. At the time of publication, Melissa Gregg was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney. Following the success of this book, Gregg began working for Intel Corporation in 2013, where she is now a Senior Principal Engineer.
Gregg also released a follow-up to Work’s Intimacy in 2018, entitled Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy. Gregg’s newest book may seem to be more relevant to the current state of technology, but the age of Work’s Intimacy should not discount its value. As Gregg puts it, Work’s Intimacy was “one of the first books to document the impact of mobile devices and social media platforms on work/life boundaries” (LinkedIn n.d.).
Gregg’s thesis for Work’s Intimacy is best summarized through her own words in the preface: “new media technology encourages and exacerbates a much older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of all other sources of intimacy and fulfillment” (174). Just like professionals from a century ago, technology has made work paramount in all of our life endeavors.
Our work influences where we live, how we live, as well as what we love, and how we love. We may exclaim “honey, I’m home” when we burst through the door after a long day at work, but are we really home? What is stopping us from opening up our phones and laptops to discover that another work-related issue requires our attention? Gregg kicks off the book with this in mind, thus setting the stage nicely for the work-life exposés to come.
During one study Gregg performed for this book, she questioned workers on whether or not they worked from home for their job. Initially, workers often said no until email was brought up. Gregg claims, “The very fact that people disregarded email—literally did not count email as work—was an index of the problem I sought to investigate” (1151). This study illuminates a recurring theme with every professional Gregg profiles; workers today suffer from “presence bleed” (211), in which our work responsibilities are free from the confines of location and time.
To Gregg, email appeared to be the best example of presence bleed because of its ubiquity in the professional sphere. It has become a given that professionals manage their email accounts with little regard for their personal life. The expectation for quick replies, however, turns out to be something predicated more and more by employees themselves and not the organizational leaders.
Instead, Gregg suggests that this micromanagement on behalf of employees is due to the “anxiety that comes from anticipating the highs and lows” (1193). Upper management might be happy to see that employees are reading and replying to emails in a timely manner, but, according to Gregg, it is the employees who largely perpetuate this behavior in search for the relief of an empty inbox. Who would blame them for that? Email and many other communication technologies thrive on the notifications they send to users. Without these constant check-ins, users would be much less encouraged to check them and respond.
I want to free myself from after-hours emails as Gregg seems to promote, but how could I? If a salaried employee’s overall goal is to “prove responsibility” (442), I could be risking my job by putting off my emails. Gregg writes extensively about these email dangers, but fails to eventually come up with any potential solution. Problem solving might not have been a part of Gregg’s goal for Work’s Intimacy, but this omission left me feeling a bit hopeless upon finishing the conclusion. I guess I will just feel dreadful about checking my email after hours now.
Gregg does touch on other important work-life issues throughout the book. She brings up Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and the growing concern that social media is urging professionals to partake in “deep acting” (2183), thus losing their genuine self in the process. In our attempts to cast ourselves in the best light, we can lose sight of who we really are. Gregg discusses how working from home differs greatly by gender: women preferred to work in common areas like the dining room (2701) while men often had a “dedicated office away from the rest of the house” (2710).
I now feel regrettably validated as I type this review from my home office, which is intentionally separated from the living area. In another section, Gregg implores educators to question “how they encourage students not only in the take-up of coercive social media applications but also in joining an employment market that requires substantial amounts of discounted and affective labor” (3599). What’s with all the learning, preparation, and examination if we just expect students to take unpaid internships in pursuit of something that might not ever pay as much as we hope it does?
These tangents illustrate important aspects of our work society today, but I just could not shake Gregg’s point about loving our work: “If employees regularly claim to “love” their work, what does love mean in this formulation, and how seriously should we take it as a rationale for the amount of time they choose to spend in its company?” (2990).
To me, these words stuck out above all else. As someone who works at a school I also attended, I frequently feel like I ‘love’ what I do. I get to give back to a place that means so much to me, and I get to work with the people who shaped me into the man I am today. After reading Work’s Intimacy, however, I have begun to question how much I really love my job.
Have I been deep acting this entire time? Are my feelings about my work genuine or something I have just accepted? Should I really be looking for love in whatever job I have? These are the thought-provoking questions Gregg prods you to contemplate.
Even still, the most disconcerting aspect of reading this book would be my new hyper-awareness of how work invades my personal life. This is exactly why I would caution reading it after a stressful week at work as I did—you will become irritated not only with your employer, but also yourself.
For me personally, I now notice just how many emails I send and receive after hours. I reach for my phone and then hear Gregg whispering in my ear to stop. I see my partner lounging on the couch after work, while I am still busy sending emails before work the next day. I acknowledge the anxiety of going to work and finding a full inbox if I decide not to take care of things after hours.
This is the true legacy of Work’s Intimacy: a newfound consciousness of the ways in which technology influences and even stifles our work.
References:
- Gregg, Melissa. Work’s Intimacy. Kindle. Cambridge: Polity, 2011.
- LinkedIn. “Melissa Gregg.” Accessed November 3, 2019. https://www.linkedin.com/in/melgregg/.
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