Press/Media: Research
What ideas and ways of thinking about work have made it the central social, cultural, political phenomenon that characterises modernity and its self-understanding?
A truly novel (historically) understanding of work has taken shape in the last two centuries and becomes the framework in which the politics, economies, cultures and social orders that ensued since 1900 have been configured. Our relationship to work (our is in intentional reference to the magnitude of the phenomenon of work today) is probably the most decisive form that legitimates the way in which it is possible at all to become a person in modern times – rather than remaining un-formed human material, whose fate cannot even be decided within the force-field of modern history.
| Title | How a Soviet miner from the 1930s helped create today’s intense corporate workplace culture |
|---|---|
| Degree of recognition | International |
| Media name/outlet | The Conversation [republished by Fortune Magazine, 30 March 2023] |
| Primary Media type | |
| Duration/Length/Size | 3000 words |
| Country/Territory | United Kingdom |
| Date | 29/06/21 |
| Description | One summer night in August, 1935, a young Soviet miner named Alexei Stakhanov managed to extract 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift. This was nothing short of extraordinary (according to Soviet planning, the official average for a single shift was seven tonnes). Stakhanov shattered this norm by a staggering 1,400%. But the sheer quantity involved was not the whole story. It was Stakhanov’s achievement as an individual that became the most meaningful aspect of this episode. And the work ethic he embodied then – which spread all over the USSR – has been invoked by managers in the west ever since. Management language is replete with the same rhetoric used in the 1930s by the Communist Party. It could even be argued that the atmosphere of Stakhanovite enthusiasm is even more intense today than it was in Soviet Russia. It thrives in the jargon of Human Resource Management (HRM), as its constant calls to express our passion, individual creativity, innovation and talents echo down through management structures. |
| Producer/Author | Bogdan Costea and Peter Watt |
| Persons | Bogdan Costea, Peter Watt |