From work-life to work-age balance? Acceleration, alienation, and appropriation at the workplace

Abstract

The progressive speeding up of social life is a central and defining feature of modern societies. Many of the core elements of social acceleration are produced and experienced at the workplace, where the attraction as well as the pressures for speed are felt most vigorously. Thus, information and communication technologies are at the heart of the latest wave of acceleration in the twenty-first century. This chapter is divided in three sections: Sect. 4.1 reconstructs technological acceleration, the acceleration of social change, and the acceleration of the pace of life as the three defining processes of modernization. Section 4.2 then identifies the logic of competition, the modern cultural ideal of an eternal life before death, and the self-propelling nature of the acceleration cycle as the main driving wheels of social acceleration. The last section discusses the ambivalent consequences for working conditions and experiences. Here, the erosion of the capacity to appropriate the workplace, working tools, processes, and products, and to identify with them, appears to account for a tendency toward alienation from work and even for pathological symptoms like the burnout disease.