Course syllabus

Lecturer

Associate Professor Campbell Jones

Room 908 Human Sciences Building

Office Hour: Tuesdays 1.00-2.00pm during term time

Email: campbell.jones@auckland.ac.nz

 

Tuakana

Alex Birchall

Room 502 Human Sciences Building

Office hours: Tuesdays 12.00midday-2.00pm

Email: abir196@aucklanduni.ac.nz

 

Lecture Times

Tuesdays 10.00am-12.00midday

Room: 8 Eden Crescent (building 801) room 209

 

Tutorial Times

Fridays 12.00midday-1.00pm

Room: 8 Eden Crescent (building 801) room 209

 

Short paper description

This paper examines the changing relations between work and life outside of paid employment. Particular attention is paid to new forms of expropriation that profit from claiming private ownership of collective effort, ideas and cultural forms. These developments are crucial to understanding and contesting social inequality, globalisation, organisational restructuring and new technologies. Course material is drawn from international literatures and is grounded in an understanding of contemporary New Zealand.

Objectives

This course will critically examine the concept of work. Everyone who works, and everyone who uses the word ‘work’ necessarily has an understanding of that activity and its significance. Overwhelmingly, however, the pdominant representation of work in contemporary society, culture and politics, reflects one or another version of what can be called ‘the vulgar concept of work’. The vulgar concept of work privileges the purposive, intentional, instrumental action of a largely isolated invididual. The problem with this vulgar concept of work is that it downplays the socially mediated character of action and places an unrealistic priority on individual intentionality and instrumentality.

This is a problem firstly because the vulgar concept of work and practices that follow from it – such as the individualised wage relation and ideas of individual private property – allocate resources in staggering disproportion to actual effort. In this way, the vulgar concept of work is pivotal in (1) the production and reproduction of inequality, (2) the unjustified attribution to particular individuals of vast power and wealth, (3) the denigration of unpaid work and in specifically the reproductive labour predominantly done by women, (4) the leveraging of advantage out of existing conditions of inequality, which are above all marked by ethnicity and nation, and (5) in being unable to value ‘non-intentional’ practices (such as nature) it is complicit with widespread environmental degradation. 

Second, the vulgar concept of work is a problem because this concept of work has by and large been taken up by social progressives, liberals and what remains of ‘left’ political parties. Having no effective alternative conception of work and things attached to it (reward, the person, etc.) is both a sign of the present weakness of the parliamentary and extraparliamentary left, and also reflects an incredible opportunity for the reinvention of left politics. We will seek therefore to articulate a concept of work that is at once more adequate to the nature of what work is, and beyond this to outline the explosive political consequences of moving beyond the vulgar concept of work.

Course Aims

At the end of this course you should:

• Have an understanding of some of the key meanings of work from the history of political economy
• Be able to identify the different assumptions about human beings and social situations that accompany different concepts of work
• Understand the shifting relations between work and ‘non-work’
• Understanding the meaning of the concept of ‘the work of others’ and the economic, social and political consequences of this concept 
• Develop the groundwork of a critical understanding of work that places work within the context of the capitalist political economy

To achieve the course aims you will need to:

• Attend the weekly lecture
• Read the course readings
• Actively seek to understand all of the readings, which involves reading with a dictionary, reading beyond the text and bringing questions of clarification to tutorials
• Attend the weekly tutorial, after having read the assigned readings
• Prepare for and submit both written assignments on time
• Collect your marked work and take on board feedback to further develop your writing and understanding of the material
• Prepare for and complete the final examination

 

Lecture schedule

INTRODUCTION

Lecture 1: Introduction (25 July)

Lecture 2: Capital (1 August)

Lecture 3: Rethinking work (8 August)

 

PART ONE: THE OTHER

Lecture 4: The vulgar concept of work (15 August)

Lecture 5: The work of others (22 August)

Lecture 6: Thinking the other (29 August)

 

Term test during tutorial Friday 1 September

Mid-term break (Monday 4 September - Friday 15 September)

 

PART TWO: THE SUBJECT

Lecture 7: After the subject (19 September)

Lecture 8: Substitution (26 September)

Lecture 9: Eating the other (3 October)

 

PART THREE: DIFFERENCE

Essay due Monday 9 October

Lecture 10: Difference (10 October)

Lecture 11: Conditions (17 October)

Lecture 12: The place and politics of the work of others (24 October)

 

Tutorials

The key goal of tutorials will be to understand the readings set for the week and to apply the ideas in the readings to current examples. Tutorials will involve discussion of the meaning of terms and the understanding and application of concepts. It is therefore imperative that you read all of the readings for the week in advance of the tutorial. If you are unable to do the reading then please do not attend.

 

Readings

Readings in support of the lectures for each week will be available via Canvas and will also be circulated in class. In addition to the variety of readings by other authors, we will also read the following papers, which also will be made available via Canvas:

Jones, Campbell (2017, in press) ‘The value of work and the future of the left’ Counterfutures: Left Thought and Practice Aotearoa, 4.

Jones, Campbell (2017) ‘The meanings of work in John Locke’ in Jakob Bek-Thomsen, Christian Olaf Christiansen, Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen and Mikkel Thorup (eds.) History of Economic Rationalities, pp. 51-62. Dordrect: Springer.

Jones, Campbell (2016) ‘Management and its others’ in Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott and Michelle Greenwood (eds.) Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies, pp. 466-473. Oxford: Routledge.

Jones, Campbell (2014) ‘The reality of the work of others’ Paper presented at the Hegel and Effectual Reality: The Logic and its Realisations conference, Hegel Studies Lab, Vercelli, Italy, 15-16 December.

Jones, Campbell and Anna-Maria Murtola (2012) ‘Entrepreneurship and expropriation’ Organization, 19(5): 635-655.

Jones, Campbell (2010) ‘The subject supposed to recycle’ Philosophy Today, 54(1): 30-39.

 

We will also read selections from the following book, which will be the required course reading. To complete this course you will need to own and read the assigned sections of this book:

Marx, Karl (1990) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Classics.

Note that there are many other editions of this book, including free online versions. It is vital that you have access this edition, the Fowkes translation published by Penguin. The specific breakdown of the sections to read each week will be on Canvas.

 

Assessment

Assessment for this course will be composed of a term test (20%), an essay (30%) and a final comprehensive exam (50%).

 

Term test

The tutorial session on week six will be a one hour in-class term test that will revise all material in the first half of the semester. This test will run for one hour and will commence at midday on Friday 1 September in the usual tutorial room. The test will be worth 20% of your final grade.

 

Essay

You are also invited to write an essay that focuses on one aspect of work, or a particular type of work, that is of interest to you. Following the lectures, tutorials and readings of the first ten weeks of the course, you can therefore prepare an essay of no more than 2,000 words (including references). This will count for 30% of your final grade and will be due at midday on Monday 9 October. Further details will be given in class and on Canvas.

 

Final Exam

The final comprehensive exam will be two hours and will count for 50% of your final grade. It will cover all material in lectures and tutorials and all readings. The date of the final exam is still to be confirmed, but is anticipated to be in the exam period 2- 20 November.

 

Electronic devices in class

Although many students enjoy having open access to electronic devices and wifi access, research in classroom experience has highlighted a series of problems that result from allowing electronic devices such as smartphones, iPads and laptops to be used during lectures and tutorials. When such devices are available it is very difficult to resist the temptation to refer to applications unrelated to the instructional material, and most importantly this use is distracting to other participants in the class.

This class will require undivided attention for 3 hours of class time a week and so all participants are asked to turn all phones off before class, and to not use iPads or laptops for notetaking. To make this withdrawal less traumatic than might be possible, two steps have been taken. First, paper copies of lecture slides will be provided at the start of class, and students are invited to annotate these and to make their own personal notes by hand with pen and paper. Second, electronic recordings of all lectures will be posted on Cecil shortly after the lecture. It is advised that if you take longhand notes with a computer then these should be made outside of class time with the lecture recordings and notes at hand.

If you have a medical or other condition that makes this situation difficult then you are asked to consult with the course lecturer before lectures begin.

 

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is to give the impression that the work of others is your own. Plagiarism is a form of cheating and will be treated with the utmost severity. If you are tempted, think again. It is better to receive zero for one piece of coursework than to be excluded from the University. 

If you are at all uncertain about what this means, then make sure you appraise yourself of the University of Auckland policies on Academic Honesty and Plagiarism, online at http://www.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/about/teaching-learning/honesty/