Consuming work: computers, subjectivity and appropriation in the university workplace

The introduction of technologies has long been a central issue in the sociology of work. This has, however, largely been analysed in terms of worker displacement, deskilling and management control, while little empirical work has focused on questions conceming subjectivity. Current interest in Foucauldian approaches to questions of work and identity has remained primarily theoretical in nature and similarly lacks a sustained discussion of agency. Recent work on the relation between consumption and work has begun to provide a more nuanced framework for discussing the context-specific forms of appropriation in the workplace and their relation to workplace subjectivities. This article, based on a study of individuals’ relationships with the personal computer in the university workplace, adopts a consumption-based approach to explore the complex interplay between subjectivity, technology and work. It examines how the introduction of the personal computer articulates with the interweaving of a ‘professional self’ and a sense of self drawn from the non-work realm. These different subjectivities relate to different tactics of appropriation: appropriation by mastery and by domestication of the work environment. Technologies themselves, however, also participate in the reconfiguration of work spaces and routines, involving questions of competence, knowledge and power, time and space, and the boundaries between home and work, in the new environments of computerised academia.