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Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary

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The production of precariousness and

implications for collective action: a
reply to Emiliana Armano and Annalisa
Murgia
a

Nancy Ettlinger
a

Department of Geography, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH,

USA
Published online: 17 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Nancy Ettlinger (2013) The production of precariousness and implications
for collective action: a reply to Emiliana Armano and Annalisa Murgia, Global Discourse: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought, 3:3-4, 502-506, DOI:
10.1080/23269995.2014.880254
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.880254

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Global Discourse, 2013

Vol. 3, Nos. 34, 502506, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.880254

REPLY
The production of precariousness and implications for collective
action: a reply to Emiliana Armano and Annalisa Murgia
Nancy Ettlinger*
Department of Geography, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 18:14 04 November 2014

This is a reply to:

Armano, Emiliana, and Annalisa Murgia. 2013. The precariousnesses of young
knowledge workers: a subject-oriented approach. Global Discourse. 3 (34):
486501. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2013.865313.

Emiliana Armano and Annalisa Murgia provide a welcome extension to Guy Standings
The Precariat by developing a subject-oriented approach based on interviews with young
knowledge workers in Italy. They also suggest that precariousness is preferable to
precarity because it offers a distinct term that captures the unstable and deleterious
circumstances that people experience beyond a job and conditions of employment,
notably an erosion of identity in light of work insecurity and misalignment between skills
and goals with the deskilled, low-paid, ephemeral and careerless work to which increasing
numbers of young knowledge workers are tied. Further, the authors explain that the
experience of precariousness is dynamic; hence, precariousnesses is most appropriate.
The interviews clarify how people find themselves drawn into work that entails material
and emotional blackmail as passions give way to self-exploitation, beyond exploitation by
employers. People work for low or even no wages, often below their skill capacity, well
beyond the time for which they are paid, and in the process blur former distinctions
between work and private space and time. The interviews also clarify the desperation
produced by gaps between short-term work contracts, prompting highly educated, skilled
workers to take jobs requiring few skills. One interview in particular helps clarify how the
crisis of overqualification experienced by young knowledge workers produces crises of
identity in light of internalized societal norms, which anchor identity in an apparently
unattainable stable job that permits the exercise and development of ones capabilities.
In one provocative sentence, the authors indicate that precariousness derives not just
from changes in the labour market but also from the transformation of production
processes, although this point remains undeveloped in their article as well as in the
literature on precarity/precariousness. All the authors interviewees were in some way
associated with educational and/or research institutions, reflecting a narrow slice of
precariousness from the vantage point of production processes. More generally, novel
corporate strategies facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICTs)
have emerged and are growing worldwide that engender new regimes of work practices.
Crowdsourcing open electronic calls for contributed work is one such strategy that can
entail remuneration ranging from nothing or next to nothing to a considerable but one*Email: ettlinger.1@osu.edu
2014 Taylor & Francis

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503

time payment. What mode of production, then, has produced corporate strategies such as
crowdsourcing? Answering this question is crucial for explaining new, objectified circumstances and subjectivities and, moreover, holds clues regarding prospects for, and problems of, collective action. Flexible production, the second industrial divide, helps to
explain precariousness,1 but it does not explain stunning developments such as working
for nothing something quite new.
I suggest that work without remuneration, by which people live on hope often
accepting nothing for their work with the hope of ultimately earning the privilege of a
salariat2 or profician job is one of a number of effects of a new mode of production
that emerged around the turn of the twenty-first century.3 Broadly, a central feature of the
new system is openness regarding two main dimensions: networks and innovation.
Whereas networks under flexible production are either closed or partially open as actors
from different networks strategically connect to ensure flows of new information (Burt
1992, 2005), networks as a means to access expertise are now fundamentally open, indeed
global, as illustrated by crowdsourcing. An especially novel feature of crowdsourcing is
both the effort and ability of firms to access expertise not only from people in other firms,
but also from people on the street who may be disassociated with firms and conceivably
may not even be employed.
Open networks are, in part, a new vehicle by which firms develop innovations. In
2003, former corporate manager and Berkeley scholar Henry Chesbrough coined the term
open innovation in reference to the new system in which firms open their borders to
externalize not just production (as in flexible production), but innovation either via
linkage with other firms or through issuing open electronic calls globally that reach
firms as well as individuals who have expertise or inventions to sell (Chesbrough
2006a, 2006b; Chesbrough et al. 2006). For example, in 2002 Proctor and Gamble issued
an electronic brief calling for an invention to permit the printing of edible pictures on each
potato chip in a Pringles container; the call was answered by the owner of a small bakery
in Bologna, Italy who had developed a means to print edible pictures on cakes and
cookies (Huston and Sakaab 2006). Crowdsourcing also takes the form of online competitions. For example, in 2007 Cisco Systems orchestrated an online competition with a
prize of $250,000 for an invention related to Ciscos core competency in internet
technology. The result: entries from 2500 innovators from 104 countries. The one-time
cash prize was considerable, although the rules stipulated that the commercial rights of the
winning invention would go to Cisco, which would then use the invention to launch a
billion-dollar business (Jouret 2009). Other types of online competitions offer virtually no
remuneration. For example, Threadless, a company founded in 2000 that produces t-shirts,
orchestrates online competition for t-shirt designs, offering a small cash prize to the
winner. The competitions permit Threadless to remove the labour costs of the innovative,
high-end, design part of production, while also crowdsourcing the evaluation of designs,
offering a $25 gift code for a Threadless t-shirt to a single evaluator picked at random.
This system extends well beyond the idea of prosumers4 consumers who participate in
production by, for example, checking themselves in at airports and out at stores equipped
with self-service cash/credit registers. The innovation of innovation is to use peoples
talents without or with relatively little remuneration, all the while that such individuals
very likely under-consume or consume in the self-torture of infinite debt in the absence of
a living wage (Lazzarato 2011).
The strategies developed by Proctor and Gamble, Cisco and Threadless exemplify
new avenues by which firms reduce the costs of innovation and increase profitability for
themselves as well as their shareholders, while offering little to nothing in remuneration to

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N. Ettlinger

workers in tasks or competitions or considerable to nothing in one-time events that lack

any semblance of security. These corporate strategies represent the initial stages of an
emergent mode of production. The first survey of open innovation, published in 2013,
showed that over of firms in the United States and Europe with sales over $250 million
reported practicing open innovation; further, most reported that support for open innovation by top management is increasing and, moreover, no firms already practicing open
innovation have abandoned it (Chesbrough and Brunswicker 2013). Although the survey
covered only large firms, small- to medium-sized firms (SMEs) also are important players
because large firms often rely on them in the externalized system of innovation.5
Beyond crowdsourcing high-level expertise or inventions for little to no remuneration
or for one-time prizes, another type of crowdsourcing accesses skilled labour for tasks that
are low-level but non-routine and therefore unamenable to computer-driven processes.
One exemplar is Amazon.coms Mechanical Turk6 subsidiary, which lists human intelligence tasks, HITs, for companies that pay Amazon.com 10% of the fee for completed
tasks. On 28 December 2013, rewards for HITs ranged from 0 for a task that would require
30 minutes to $25.72 for a task that would require 7 days (that is, about $3.67 a day). A
survey conducted in 2010 showed that 46.8% of Turkers come from the United States,
34% come from India and the rest are dispersed around the world (Ipeirotis 2010).
Although most Turkers generally use their income from Mechanical Turk to supplement
other income, over 10% of US Turkers and almost 30% of Indian Turkers rely on their
Mechanical Turk earnings. Significantly, Mechanical Turk exemplifies a new expression
of industrial piece work (work by the job, not by a unit of time), which traditionally has
characterized sweat shop labour. Mechanical Turk and other operations like it represent a
new frontier of virtual sweatshops of the digital economy that have not replaced, but rather
complement, on-the-ground sweatshops organized for production and distribution.7
Open networks as a means to tap skilled labour for repetitive, mundane tasks as well
as for innovative activity explain the crises of misalignment and overqualification as well
as the problem of short-term contracts and gaps between jobs that Armano and Murgia
discuss, including but extending beyond educational and research organizations. More
generally, such networks call attention to an emergent, worldwide mode of production that
complements a global reserve army of unskilled with skilled labour. Constant transitions
between what Armano and Murgia cite as a no longer and a not yet normalize liminality
as a mode of existence even while specific experiences change.
Framing the new desperations by a system of production and innovation that are in
their initial stage suggests that problems for people trying to earn a living are likely to
deepen. The focus specifically on young adults in Italy and Europe more generally
(Lodovici and Semenza 2012) implies a somewhat more stable existence for older adults,
but may reflect vestiges of more stable systems that cover older adults; as young adults
age, it is unlikely that their circumstances will change. Circumstances in the United States,
where the dismantling of the (mild) welfare state via Keynesianism occurred much longer
ago, are instructive: job instability and declining opportunities for earning a living wage
increasingly characterize work across the demographic spectrum. The youth issue in
Europe at this point is but the tip of the iceberg.
Armano and Mugia as well as Standing, while embracing the prospect for collective
action, nonetheless provide robust arguments regarding obstructions to the formation of a
political class. New regimes of work that individualize and render people vulnerable to the
immediate present by means of the ephemeral nature of specific jobs implicitly dissolve
connections and organizational capacity. As Standing has pointed out, the explosion of
each individuals problems alongside increasing debt results in alienation, erodes even

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community and family support, and further, fosters tensions among those who are
subjugated by the same system.
If there is to be a political response to the new regime, what, then, are to be the
mechanisms or tactics of resistance? If the new vulnerabilities are produced by an
emergent mode of production, then effective counter-conduct (Foucault 2007, 201)
must be directed to oppressive techniques of governance, such as crowdsourcing and
short-term employment without a living wage and benefits. In light of the increasingly
global scope of production and innovation strategies, it seems unlikely that localized
protest can be effective. Networked refusal to participate in crowdsourced and short-run
work is a possibility, although a tough sell to the large numbers of people who individually experience immediate material and subjective pressures. Another possibility is that
states can develop incentives for long-run hiring practices and the provision of living
wages (and penalties such as higher corporate taxes for short-run employment without
benefits), although the governance of governments via corporate financing and political
pressure suggests that this avenue also may be an improbable possibility. Perhaps the
design of a system that subverts existing strategies to work for people in addition to firms
may be fruitful; that is, replace revolutionary strategies that are unlikely to be sustainable
with a strategy to work with the system but reconfigure the goals. Consider, for example,
the possibility of using open network dynamics through non-profit organizations with the
financial support of governments at local and national scales to crowdsource problems in
a system that continually employs a heterogeneous domain of people with expertise to
sell, providing a living wage and benefits. The construction of such a system recognizes
the short-term project nature of work and accordingly develops a federation of ephemeral
networks that accesses requisite expertise and then continually reconfigures networks
relative to context-specific demands of projects. Governments might respond positively
to such a strategy because their administrations are territorial even if their reach extends
beyond national and local boundaries; they can ill afford dramatically increasing localized
socio-economic polarization accompanied by economic, social, cultural and, indeed,
political disenfranchisement of their constituencies. Effective organization, however, is
unlikely to be topdown. It is through grass-roots developments and oversight of nonprofit organizations that such a system, with financial support of government, may be
possible.

Notes
1.

2.
3.

Flexible production, which constructs precarious regimes of work, emerged in the United States
in the 1980s concurrently with dismantling of Keynesian welfare and roll-back neoliberalism
(Peck and Tickell 2002) associated with ReaganThatcherism. As Armano and Murgia indicate,
precariousness in Italy did not occur until the end of the 1990s. A central point of this essay is
that at least some of the problems that Armano and Murgia and others observe may pertain to a
new mode of production (i.e. not necessarily flexible production).
The salariat and proficians are relatively privileged jobs in Guy Standings (2011) hierarchical classification of jobs.
Considering the much longer duration of the welfare state in many countries in continental
Europe compared with the United States, precariousness occurred later in Italy and elsewhere
(endnote 1), and thus the rate of change across industrial divides in countries such as Italy is
accelerated. More generally, the point here is that change occurs at different rates in different
contexts and is contingent, contrary to conventional unilinear periodization conceptualizations.
Also departing from the usual periodization schema, modes of production may emerge at
different times across space, but they do not necessarily replace modes of production that

506

4.
5.

6.

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7.

N. Ettlinger
emerged earlier; this perspective recognizes diverse organizational strategies in any one time/
space context relative to contingent pressures, demands and the like (Grabher and Stark 1997).
The term prosumer was coined in 1980 by Alvin Toffler (1980) to capture the participation of
consumers in the production of the goods and services they consume.
Large firms often use the innovations developed by suppliers (formerly considered peripheral
in the previous system of production). In addition, while the availability of venture capital has
declined from the traditional source venture capital firms venture capital for start-ups is
increasingly available through large firms, which have developed internal venture capital
programmes (corporate venture capital, CVC) to invest in new firms that develop innovations
of interest to the large firms (Battistini, Hacklin, and Baschera 2013).
The name mechanical turk derives from an eighteenth century wooden manequin, represented
as an expert chess player and dressed as a Turk in a robe and turban. Presented as an invention
of artificial intelligence, it was, however, a hoax. The Turk was kept in a wooden cabinet with
gears and springs inside, and its owner worked the chess game from behind the mannequin.
Digital workers for Amazon.coms Mechanical Turk subsidiary are called Turkers because
they perform tasks for which robotics currently are unsuited.
Although on-the-ground sweatshops tend to be associated with the production of goods, the
increase in online shopping has generated sweatshop labour in distribution centres, where
workers pack, lift and prepare items for shipping under horrible work conditions. Amazon.
coms distribution centres are a case in point (Streitfeld 2011).

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