Locke

In general terms, work can be understood as an ongoing site of identity work (Watson 2008, 122). Watson argues that the personas that individuals are required to adopt ‘are likely to differ from the ones they adopt in other parts of their lives and, indeed, may come into tension with them’ (2008, 121). Work nowadays tends to ascribed social value so that ‘whilst few people today consider their work to be a calling or service to God, hard work is still viewed as a sign of good character’ (Beder 2000,127). Stephen Ackroyd (1999) suggests that the work setting can be seen as a discrete social ‘enclave’

which imposes particular norms of behaviour on to individual participants (1999, 55). In this context, he argues that individuals are not autonomous and that engagement is subject to circumscription by management (2008, 58). In this sense, argues Ackroyd, claims developed in collective opposition to the espoused horizons of the organisational context are also influential within the work setting (1999, 55). Work can, therefore, become a struggle to form and maintain identity at the same time as it is felt to be a liberating enterprise (Aldrich 1999, 8). From this perspective, participants in the work

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enterprise are not cast as free but as constrained within and by organisational processes.

Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (2001) aver that the terms of economic morality at the turn of the twenty-first century can be understood as significantly altered from former conceptualisations (2001, 8). Ideas of what counts as risk are weighted away from individual interests and economic production is now privileged above post-war utopian horizons of ‘egalitarian futures, work for all or the paternal government envisioned by various freedom movements’ (2001, 8). Bonds between employer and worker tend now to be short term and instrumental and people, in practice constructed as a source of wastefulness, are ‘ever more disposable’ (2001, 10).

Guy Standing (2011) suggests that, as occupational identity and security is eroded, claims on family and community support can become complex (2011, 23). In the new paradigm of personal responsibility and individual self-reliance, workers are vulnerable to blame for their circumstances especially as sources of collective and individual identity are undermined in the work context. This economic and social vulnerability Standing frames as precarious and those affected are termed ‘the precariat’ (2011, vi).

Standing states that old certainties associated with the work process and the place of participants within its structures are evolving and there is increasing scope for workers to be included in the precariat class, directly or indirectly. The precariat increasingly includes workers that have been understood traditionally in professional and secure terms (Standing 2011, 51). Standing suggests the professional classes are less easily

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defined in terms of their conditions of work so that permanent contracts are terminated and participants re-employed on less secure terms (Standing 2011, 47). Whilst not all workers in particular industries will be employed on the same insecure terms, tensions associated with neo-liberal economic relations appear to have penetrated these work environs. Thus, the modern work setting can be characterised not as a place of harmony or unity of purpose but of ‘anger, anomie, anxiety and alienation’ (Standing 2011, 30).

Precariousness in terms of employment is increasingly pervasive amongst the white collar occupations and service sector within which Quakers typically work (Chapter 5, Table 1). The backdrop to contemporary work in these sectors is one not only of increasing insecurity and but also organisational emphasis on individualised

achievement which ‘compel people – for the sake of their own material survival – to make themselves the centre of their own planning and conduct in life’ (Beck 1992, 88).

Thus, the individual has to accept socially ascribed risks, according to Beck and re-imagine engagement with work ‘as if it were a work of art’ (2000, 54) whilst ‘corporate power’ defines and disaggregates the extent of its responsibilities in favour of workers in the organisational setting (2000, 54). Beck writes that:

Having lost faith in God, they believe instead in the godlike powers of work to provide everything sacred to them: prosperity, social position, personality, meaning in life, democracy, political cohesion (2000, 63).

In this sense, Beck argues, meritocracy and efficiency in work-lives have transformed into a pervasive form of personal responsibility where individuals are deemed to be ‘the authors of their own lives’ (2000, 53). The effect of this shift in economic authority has

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been to re-position the individual as an isolated component in an environment of

tenuous risk (Beck 1992, 92). The apparent effect of this occupational insecurity is that managerial priorities are internalised and the potential consequences of the risk are borne by the individual (Beck 1992, 89). Structurally, the effect, argues Beck, is that boundaries between work and non-work are becoming more fluid and internally

competitive and individual flexibility vis-à-vis market opportunities are adopted as a key survival strategy (1992, 142).

This view of risk in the shifting world of work should not be understood simply in terms of individual vulnerability within the economic process. Contrary to Beck’s analysis of the increase of risk at work, Edwards et al(2008) state that evidence of insecurity at work that is measurable in empirical labour market and economic terms might not have altered significantly in the early twentieth first century (2008, 1163). There is little evidence of single trend towards less secure terms and conditions, they argue (2008, 1163). Rather, Edwards et al argue that risk should rather be understood in terms of individual expectation which is shaped purposefully by organisations (2008, 1165). In this sense, risk and insecurity is most often an experience that is shaped by particular contexts and is primarily felt at an individual level. So, whilst permanent contracts still predominate overall in employment, ‘subjectively, people feel more exposed to

uncertainty’ (Edwards et al 2008, 1165).

It is evident from my research, however, that the research participants do not share a dystopian view of the contemporary work setting. Affiliates do not experience the work

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environment as exploitational (Standing 2011, 129). Rather, affiliates tend to share a view of work as benevolent as well as harmoniously and fundamentally supportive of horizons which they identify as Quaker. In the next sections, I explore the terms upon which affiliates engage with work and suggest that Quakers individualised participation in the work setting can be categorised in utopian terms.