Paper short abstract:

This paper explores critical shifts in post-COVID19 work by reimagining the workplace as an ecology. This paradigm switch facilitates closer attention to how nascent working practices cross the borders of working organisms, traversing their bodies and consciousness, and resulting in ill health.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on research into the effects of post-pandemic neoliberal working practices on women's chronic inflammatory disorders in England. Following on from Tim Ingold's phenomenological rendering of work as a 'taskscape' (1995), I reimagine workplaces as living ecosystems interacting with porous organisms, rather than as sites of physical alienation and social disembeddedness. Instead, I posit workers are always necessarily dwelling in the site of their labour, inhabiting and imbibing working milieus as with any other 'natural' environment. In addition, current labour processes which are materially unbounded from specific location (office / factory / university) require novel forms of both bodily and conscious engagement from workers. These unbounded spaces demand intracorporeal negotiation with new forms of surveillance, monitoring, and social life. Among such entanglements, workers notions of self-governance and productivity are often stretched, with potentially damaging repercussions for their physiology and health. Following Bachelard's 'poetics of space' (1958) in which he posits home as both a physical entity and state of mind, I suggest current workers carry around an 'inner workplace' or internalised ethic of productivity which guides their daily activity. This delocalised drive pushes them to meet often unrealistic demands, perform consistent reviews, and meet centrally managed targets. What are the repercussions for workers in an already demanding neoliberal economy? Are they felt differently across genders, and if so, why? By reframing the contemporary workplace-as-an-ecology, I argue, we can pay closer attention to the ways porous bodies and minds take in, react, and internalise, nascent labour practices.