Overcoming Alienation: Irreducible Autonomy and Phronetic Techne in a Practical Rationality of Caring

Ruth Yeoman
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Ruth Yeoman: University of Oxford

Chapter 3 in Meaningful Work and Workplace Democracy, 2014, pp 68-95 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Never has work appeared to be so divided, intense, separated from our personal control and divorced from our sense of who we are. From Biauners (1964) industrial blue collar workers labouring under changes to the division of labour as a consequence of automation to the ‘managed hearts’ of Hochschild’s (1983) airline attendants, the complaint is that the experience of work has been systematically deskilled and subjectified by a capitalist project which aims to increase profit by appropriating and controlling workers’ agency in the exercise of their skills and the formation of their identities. The critique that contemporary conditions of work are thoroughly alienating opposes deskiiled and subjectified work to the mastery and secure identity of craft work, but, I shall argue, this dualism presents a narrative of work as irretrievably degraded which is not consistent with work as it is experienced by workers. I shall show the limits to the opposition between alienated work and craft work by describing a floor-level of irreducible autonomy in every act of work, which reveals that there is no completely alienated work from which the possibility of autonomous action has been eliminated. I shall propose that the identification of a level of irreducible autonomy enables us to conceptualise personal autonomy in work as fundamentally relational, and the pre-condition for the exercise of political autonomy.

Keywords: Personal Autonomy; Practical Rationality; Emotional Labour; Meaningful Work; Political Mode (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-37058-7_4

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137370587_4

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