THE LEISURE FACTORY: PRODUCTION IN THE DIGITAL AGE

To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. THE LEISURE FACTORY: PRODUCTION IN THE DIGITAL AGE Payal Arora Erasmus University Rotterdam Abstract This paper examines changes in contemporary organizational spaces and cultures. We confront private-sector appropriation of social media spaces, specifically in the architecting of workspace through play, both digitally and materially. Such a focus is essential to gain insight into the role of leisure in fostering productivity, innovation and creativity in the workplace today. This paper examines how business geographies extend to and influence social media spaces as they strive to realign the labor and leisure domain for innovation and employee satisfaction. The paper positions this trend historically by examining how leisure space has been legitimized to increase productivity. Such an examination highlights the implication of instrumentalizing play in the architecting of work environments. In other words, this paper addresses the 21st century of business spatial design, materially and virtually, and how it relates to the changing perspectives on labor, leisure and innovation in work cultures. Introduction Work defines us. Play liberates us from these definitions. This conventional wisdom is continuously readdressed as our meaning for both work and play transforms over time. Every society is driven by a vision of social life and, intrinsic to this template, lays the intertwined architectures of labor and leisure terrains. For instance, workspaces have undergone a tremendous change as employers have evolved in their understanding of what counts as productivity. In this innovation-obsessed economy, the common wisdom among many companies is that to attract the best talent, a new corporate culture is needed, sensitized to the workers’ larger well-being. Some companies are focusing on the very space within which such talent can be nurtured –the ‘office.’ The typical grey cubicle infrastructure is making way for a different work environment. Pool tables, volleyball courts, video game parlors, pianos, PingPong tables, and yoga stations are becoming a signature of these new labor landscapes (Kjerulf, 2009). Bicycles, scooters, and slides enable employee movement. Play is infused in the design and shaping of the reception area and boardrooms. The individual company gives way to an ecology of corporations situated in park spaces, resembling a university campus (Daskalaki, Starab & Imasa, 2008). From the cubicle to the hammock, there appears to be a shift in perception among some key companies on what counts as a productive space in today’s business market. It isn’t surprising that creative and technology industries like Pixar, Apple and Google have embraced the re-architecting of their corporate settings to resemble play spaces (Chang, 2006). Innovation is their business: The less regulating, confining and spatially predictable a work environment is, it is believed that it will be more likely to generate new ideas and enhance performance. These corporate parks share more with the ethos of public parks than the signature office, simulating a place that is relatively free from typical business routine and least marked by institutional pressures and the ordering of practice. 1 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. These new labor geographies are not confined to the West. Emerging markets have risen dramatically in the last decade and are becoming less viewed as back-offices and blue-collar workspaces and more as drivers of today’s global economy (Vaidyanathan, 2008). They are entering the world of business innovation, luring an increasingly global, cross-cultural and diasporic employee base. We see this manifested in ambitious new corporate designs of work spaces, be it the Infosys campus in Mysore, India, that serves as a green oasis for its employees to the impressive Shanghai Huawei Technologies Corporate Campus embedded in a lush wetland landscape, “typical of the strong corporate identity connecting the workplace and nature.” Most of these companies are part of a larger industrial, science, or technology park where the concentration of expertise and knowledge is being promoted for regional development (Goldstein & Luger, 1990). This appropriation of leisure space is not endemic to these niche industries. It is becoming more commonplace among diverse private-sector entities, including the healthcare record industries. Epic Systems is a good example: situated across 800 acres of former farmland near Madison in Wisconsin, it supplies electronic records for large healthcare providers like the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Clinic, and Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore. On entering this work environment, one is struck by the eccentric and playful atmosphere created through their choice architecture. The push to move the nation from paper to electronic health records is serious business. That’s why a first look at the campus of Epic Systems comes as something of a jolt. A treehouse for meetings? A two-story spiral slide just for fun? What’s that big statue of the Cat in the Hat doing here? Don’t let these elements of whimsy fool you. (Freudenheim, 2012, p.2) Their incentive to design their corporate office in the manner of a play space was to “draw programmers who might otherwise take jobs at Google, Microsoft or Facebook.” Hence, we come to an understanding of how productivity, creativity and innovation are tied to the spatial context within which they arise. Jason Fried, an emerging technology guru and co-author of ‘Rework’ (2010), pontificates about new ways to conceptualize working and creating. He attacks the sacred domain of the office, underlying its irrelevance in a society that hungers for creative-capital. In the initial decade of social media, corporations panicked (and still do to a large extent) about the infiltration of leisure into work. Corporate reaction manifested in litigious reactions to these micro-deviances. Fried believes that corporations are deeply misguided, “Facebook and Twitter aren’t the real problems in the office. The real problems are what I like to call the M&Ms, the Managers and the Meetings.” Businesses are missing the point, he feels. Their focus should be on the current design of corporate space that often undermines real work through the embedded structure of repetitive business practices. After extensive interviews with numerous professionals, research found that most people got their work done when not at the office. Companies spend billions on rent, offices, and office equipment so their employees will have a great place to work. However, when you ask people where they go when they really need to get something done, you'll rarely hear them say it's the office… I don't blame people for not wanting to be at the office. I blame the office. 2 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. A decade ago, corporations’ instinctive and sole response to social media within the work domain was to sue online business-bashing employees. We were inundated with headlines of companies taking employees to court for posting a negative comment on Facebook or Twitter. Today, the situation is more complicated: Corporations are realizing the implications of these disputes on public relations. They are also becoming aware of the fact that these digital leisure terrains can benefit them if used strategically. Large corporate giants like Microsoft, once the nemesis of social media, is today an enthusiastic host to more than 1,000 in-house web logs where workers can offer opinions on everything from astrology to C++ programming (Gely & Bierman, 2007). “We see blogging as a great opportunity” says Sanjay Parthasaratby, Microsoft's corporate vice president, “we get greater insight into what is going on with key technologies inside the company.” Blogging has become so popular at Microsoft that the company offers a web clearinghouse to highlight its various blogs and bloggers. Other companies like American Airlines are using blogs to give employees more channels to management. At IBM, employees from 30 countries use blogs to discuss software development projects and business strategies. Hot Topic, a 690 store retail chain, recently launched an internal social site for employees to share ideas and data. We see businesses virtually extending their presence on sites conventionally demarcated for online social and leisure purposes such as Blogger, Twitter and Facebook (Hermann, 2006). As seen in the examples above, there is also a tendency to create walled gardens for employees, so companies can closely monitor and architect features that are conducive to their unique settings. This is seen as enabling the restructuring of the top-down private-sector model to a more employee-driven and client-oriented culture. Further, web zones like LinkedIn are seen to facilitate networks and collaborations among employees and companies, the intent being that such connectivity of ideas and people will proliferate new ways of thinking and doing in the business sector (Guerrier & Adib 2003). Interestingly, LinkedIn’s digital space has transformed over the years and resembles more a social and leisure venue now than a utilitarian space that fosters work connections. The rise of digital labor adds a new dimension wherein people across nations work on a project and are paid for their creative input (Howe, 2006). This posits a challenge to the design of workspaces as they cater to a temporal, diverse and sporadic global labor market. Furthermore, ‘gamification’ has become a new buzzword for labor landscapes. By infusing game dynamics into the work culture, this trend is expected to enhance employee engagement and problem solving. In this paper we explore a number of parallel pursuits. We examine changes in organizational spaces and cultures. We confront private-sector appropriation of social media spaces, specifically the architecting of workspace and that of play, both digitally and materially. Such a focus is essential to gain insight into the role of the leisure commons in fostering productivity, innovation and creativity in the workplace. This paper examines how business geographies extend to and influence social media spaces as they strive to realign the labor and leisure domain for innovation and employee satisfaction. The paper positions this trend historically by examining how leisure space has been legitimized to increase productivity. Such an examination highlights the implication of mobility in the architecting of work environments. In other words, this paper addresses the 21st century architecting of business spaces, materially and virtually, and how it relates to the changing perspectives on labor, leisure and innovation in work cultures. 3 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. BLURRING THE LABOR AND LEISURE TERRAIN The historical struggle for leisure in the labor landscape Leisure has traveled quite a way to gain credibility. Puritans lost their grip on the worldview of ‘leisure as sin’ particularly during the industrial era in the second half of the eighteenth century. The utilitarian mantra, ‘an idle mind is a devil’s workshop’ gave way to the popular proverb, ‘all work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy.’ This was a revolutionary shift in human perspective, but did not arise without a struggle. The reputed historian Roy Rosenzweig best known for his book, ‘Eight Hours for What We Will’ (1983: 1), poignantly captured the uphill battle of the labor movement for an eight-hour workday and the subsequent rise of more urban leisure spaces such as public parks. On December 2, 1889, hundreds of trade unionists paraded through the streets of Worcester in a show of strength and determination. ‘Eight Hours for Work, Eight Hours for Rest, Eight Hours for What We Will’ declared a banner held high by local carpenters…the actual quest for ‘eight hours for what we will’ reverberated through the labor struggles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a compositor who told the US Senate Committee on Relations between Labor and Capital in 1883: ‘A workingman wants something besides food and clothes in this country…he wants recreation. Why should not a workingman have it as well as other people?’ And in industrial communities across America workers fought not only for the right to time and space for leisure but also for control over the time and space in which that leisure was to be enjoyed. Undoubtedly the labor movement contributed to this shift in perspective on the labor-leisure relationship and work culture. At the same time, there was also recognition from management that productivity at work was enhanced by leisure in social life (Roberts 2006). Leisure was found to have a legitimate role after all. That said, leisure was defined as that which was not work, or that which was in relation to or a product of work. In other words, leisure existed to serve labor or labor existed to produce leisure but the “twain were believed to not meet - leisure and labor are two sides of man's shield; both protect him. Labor enables him to live; leisure makes the good life possible’” (Woody 1957: 4). This perspective has its roots far back, as evinced through Aristotle’s observation on the relationship between these two domains, stating that, “we labor in order to have leisure” (in Rosenzweig 1985: 31). Clear dichotomies were laid out in the conceptualizing of these two realms: Work was a necessity that served utilitarian ends, while leisure was a luxury that was earned through labor. As prosperity grew in the industrial nations, leisure became a more central preoccupation. From the ‘labor for the many, leisure for a few’ thinking of feudal times, the new phenomenon of the modern era was the massification and democratization of leisure. In his book ‘Leisure in Contemporary Society’ (2006: 57), Kenneth Roberts extrapolated the pervasive perspective of the mid 1900s of spillover and compensation that linked labor and leisure. Two main kinds of work-leisure relationship were identified…the first was spillover, where work-based relationships, interests, social and technical skills spread into leisure. A common example given was white-collar workers who were able to use occupational skills 4 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. in running voluntary associations. A less attractive spillover was said to be the workers with routine, mundane, mind-numbing jobs whose mentalities were so stunted that they were content to spend most of their leisure being passively entertained. The second type of work-leisure relationship was compensation, where individuals used their free time to seek experiences they could not obtain at work. An example frequently offered was the desk bound executive who played sport in the evenings and at weekends. Another was individuals who were denied opportunities to display initiative at work who used their leisure to demonstrate their autonomy ostentatiously. While this framing appears outdated particularly in wealthy service economies, it arguably can be applied to the substantive youthful workforce in emerging markets like China and India. A recent article in The Economist (May 11, 2013) highlights the fact that India itself will soon account for a fifth of the world’s largest working-age population, stuck in the industry sector of routinized and mind-numbing jobs. Hence, while boundaries between leisure and labor continue to stay relatively firm, what transformed is how these entities occupy space in people’s lives. Leisure seems to be expanding into a range of activities and social spaces, while work continues to be demarcated in its sacrosanct box. In the United States, for instance, between 1890 and 1940, Fischer (1994) found that American leisure grew exponentially, even during the Great Depression era of the 1920s and1930s.This is particularly interesting as the popular conception of leisure is correlated to economic security, where higher classes have more access to leisure (Veblen 1899; Florida 2003). While no doubt there is evidence to support this perspective, it is still just one part of a larger matrix of leisurelabor relations. Looking across cultures and contexts, one finds that in spite of lower financial status, poor communities carve opportunities for leisure to sustain their cultural and social capital (Hutchison 1988; Marshall et al. 2007; Snir and Harpaz 2002). Despite this evidence, we see current policies in the global South reflect an archaic notion of labor-leisure relations among the poor. Numerous economic development plans to create digital access for the poor rests on the premise that this demographic will use new media spaces for utilitarian and work-related ends (Arora, 2012). Several schemes have risen for farmers to be able to check crop prices online, for women to access healthcare information and for the youth to find employment. However, a number of field studies (Rangaswamy & Toyoma, 2006; Ganesh, 2010; Arora, 2010) have revealed that contrary to these expectations, the poor in the global South appear more aligned with the typical user of the global North in their usage of new media. This body of research has found that the poor dominantly use these platforms for socializing, gaming, consuming popular media and pornography. I have argued in prior texts about this matter, pushing for the examining of leisure within the highly instrumental biased worldview of international development: The neoliberal view espouses that the poor will ‘leapfrog’ conventional and chronic barriers for higher socio-economic mobility. Yet, if equity between the ‘Third’ and ‘First’ World is to be achieved, we should expect that the poor, just as the rich, the rural, just as the urban, folk, will use computers for ‘frivolous’ and ‘trivial’ purposes. One can argue that this persisting tension stems from a morality of poverty where the pragmatic and ameliorative are the main benchmarks concerning Third World computing. After all, the 5 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. field of ICT4D emerged and arguably continues to be rooted in postcolonial discourse and practice with a focus on necessities for human and social development. Yet, through this narrowed lens, we can miss the actual engagements and ingenious strategies that the poor employ to cope and escape from their current plight. Entertainment is a key tool here with class taking a backseat. (Arora, 2012: 5) Yet, while the degree of leisure consumption pervades across diverse social categories, there are often distinct differences in the nature of practice. This diversity often stems from the unique social and historical contexts within which these groups reside. Take, for example, the ongoing discussion of why, when it comes to work and leisure, there are such distinct differences between the United States and Europe. A report by the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that a combination of tax systems, labor laws and other structural mechanisms shape the perspectives towards these two entities: Our punch line is that Europeans today work much less than Americans because of the policies of the unions in the seventies, eighties and part of the nineties and because of labor market regulations. Marginal tax rates may have also played a role, especially for women's labor force participation, but our view is that in a hypothetical competitive labor market without unions and with limited regulation, these tax increases would not have affected hours worked as much. Certainly micro evidence on the elasticity of labor supply is inconsistent with a mainly tax based explanation of this phenomenon, even though ‘social multiplier effects’ may ‘help’ in this respect. (Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote 2005: 30). Another perspective can be found through the feminist approach to this dichotomy. Here, ‘work’ in the industrial sense is seen as problematic, negating informal domestic labor and its lack of financial remuneration (Henderson 1996). It is argued that women’s leisure becomes an invisible act, as it is not tethered to the typical work domain, and that women experience leisure in their own diverse and expansive ways. Contrary to conventional thinking where the ‘modern’ replaces the ‘traditional’ lifestyle and mindset as per the Gesellschaft for Gemeinschaft model (Tonnies [1887] 2002), it was found that many new leisure behaviors augmented old ways of experiencing leisure rather than uncritically replacing them. Leisure has come into its own and more attention is being paid to its varied dimensions. Yet questions abound: Is leisure becoming more commoditized and commercialized? Is it more a private affair than a public activity? Is it more organized than informal in nature? In some sense, leisure has gained centrality and become an entity in its own right. Perhaps so much so that one can argue that the pendulum has swung to the other side, where leisure has generated much attention (and at times fear) with regard to its role in business spaces and practices (Tapscott 2009). At the heart of this momentum is the promise (or threat) of new media to exponentially scale and invade established work cultural norms, potentially destroying the boundaries between labor and leisure. Should we be threatened by this blurring of borders? Constant busyness: exploitation or liberation? In this mobile telecommunication culture, we witness entanglement as people find ways to 6 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. incorporate leisure in their work life and work in their leisure time (du Gay, 1996). Conventional work patterns are being challenged because of new media affordances. Digital platforms allow for the breaking away from the 9 to 5 workday and the possibility for part-time and remote workers not indigenous to the company’s location (Gershuny, 2005). While these new technology spaces have allowed for the de-anchoring of the employee from the work place, they have entrenched the worker in a cycle of constant, albeit intermittent laboring. This has fed into the already growing commuting and outsourcing work cultures and the creation of an ‘always on’ employee and work ethic. We find ourselves in an era of busyness where a clear demarcation of spaces for work and leisure has blurred with the rise of the ‘thumb generation,’ savvy ‘netizens’ who are at the constant beck and call of their clientele and supervisors (Buckingham & Willett, 2006). Capitalistic notions of efficiency and productivity are manifest in the Blackberry generation, paving way for a work culture that is immediate and constant. The addiction to continually check updates on our mobile devices became so commonplace that in 2006 ‘crackberry’ became the winner of the 2006 Word-of-the-Year contest by Webster Dictionary. While we can recognize that the pace of social life has changed due to new media technologies, some claim it is for the better and some for the worse. As the middle class expands, as choices increase, as mobility and access widen through new technologies, expectations of the type of labor people are willing to engage in have begun to shift. Emphasis is placed on being ‘authentic’ to oneself by creating coherence between our work and leisure lives. In this perceived individualistic age, “people are encouraged to ‘know themselves’, ‘be themselves’ and ‘be true to themselves’ especially through their leisure activities” (Guerrier & Adib 2003, p.1401). One can argue that the ideal ‘job’ is constructed around its proximity to leisure and social and intellectual enrichment, stimulating personal satisfaction. Certain corporations are now seeing the benefits of leisure to enhance innovation and creativity at the workplace and are shaping their corporate geographies to reflect this newly embraced work culture. The main difference between the industrial and the digital age is in the popular conception of leisure where, in the former leisure was to supplement labor while in the latter leisure is interwoven with labor. As this blurring gets complicated with the infusion of new media technologies, the element of choice to engage within specific contexts aids us in demarcating these practices as more leisure or labor-oriented. In her much read blog apophenia, the social media scholar Danah Boyd recently posted on the dilemma of defining work in a networked world. She reflects on the fact that she has lost “all sense of where the boundaries lie” in determining whether she is working or playing. She questions how to make sense of this blurring of boundaries that grows increasingly complex in the digital age. She recognizes that the extent of control the person has on their ‘space, place, and time’ is indeed a mark of privilege. Narration of her daily routine gives us a glimpse of how her privilege plays out: Today, I have my dream job. I'm a researcher who gets to follow my passions, investigate things that make me curious. I manage my own schedule and task list. Some days, I wake up and just read for hours. I write blog posts and books, travel, meet people, and give talks. I ask people about their lives and observe their practices. I think for a living. And I'm paid ridiculously well to be thoughtful, creative, and provocative. I am doing something related to my profession 80-100 hours per week, but I love 80% of those 7 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. hours. I can schedule doctor's appointments midday, but I also wake up in the middle of the night with ideas and end up writing while normal people sleep. Every aspect of my life blurs. I can never tell whether or not a dinner counts as "work" or "play" when the conversation moves between analyzing the gender performance of Game of Thrones and discussing the technical model of Hadoop. And since I spend most of my days in front of my computer or on my phone, it's often hard to distinguish between labor and procrastination. I can delude myself into believing that keeping up with the New York Times has professional consequences but even I cannot justify my determination to conquer Betaworks' new Dots game (shouldn't testing new apps count for something??). Of course, who can tell if my furrowed brow and intense focus on my device is workfocused or not. Heck, I can't tell half the time. It is worth keeping in mind that this association of busyness with the privileged domain was not always so. If we go back to the nineteenth century ‘man of leisure,’ the signal of the wealthy class was to be able to have much time at one’s disposal. The classic text by Thorstein Veblen ‘Theory of the Leisure Class’ (1915) was well ahead of its time, underlying the critical point that leisure was in fact a social construction and that due to the specificities of the context of the time, it served as an important signifier of upper social status. Ironically, today busyness seems to have transplanted leisure, serving a similar purpose. Interestingly, in present day contexts where work time has reduced, the feeling of busyness seems to be all pervasive as people report being ‘on’ all the time. Jonathan Gershuny from the Center of Time Use Research (2005) tackles this paradox of busyness by emphasizing the affective in this process. In other words, there has been a remarkable shift in the social value of constantly working, often resulting in the feeling of busyness. There is an implicit aspiration to be immersed in constant laboring, equating this to higher social status. Gershuny reminds us that this feeling can just as well apply to intense and constant leisure activity. As we shift gears to the context of emerging markets, my own fieldwork in the rural Central Himalayas has documented numerous events where busyness is thrust upon citizens, cutting across class sectors. Busyness, akin to a social virus, is found everywhere, even in the rural domain. There is a disjuncture in the conventional relationship between class and busyness. While there appears to be a drive to capitalize on time, it seems to be for a host of practices, including that of leisure. People in rural cybercafés are immersed in the ritual of busyness and within this sphere, practices of dating, socializing, and creative play surfaces. Rather than labor, one frequently encounters leisure activity. In resource poor contexts, much time accrues due to systemic breakdowns of socio-technical infrastructures. There is a dominant expectation that people will capitalize on their time more productively. Yet, what was witnessed was that people found ways to occupy themselves simultaneously with the mundane and the creative, for labor as well as for leisure. New technology was meant to liberate us from work. And it did. It also freed us up for more labor (Levine, 2005). There seems to be a circular pattern of effectively managing our complex lives with the aid of new technologies. With that comes an acceleration of lifestyle with little room to pause and ponder. The sociologist and feminist Judy Wajcman (2008) argues against the popular discourse of time-space compression and expresses deep skepticism about this 8 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. determined pace of social life in this supposed post-modern society. Much like the ‘industrial revolution’ that promised a ‘leisure revolution,’ she points out that new media technologies seem to threaten us with an age of acceleration and scarcity of time and leisure. Instead, we need to look at the quality of leisure and how that differs among diverse social groups and contexts. Such a focus creates a more nuanced and rich discussion. For instance, looking along the gender lines, the quality of leisure differs in two important respects…‘pure’ and ‘interrupted’ leisure, we show that men enjoy more leisure time that is uninterrupted (that is, unaccompanied by a second activity). Women’s leisure, by contrast, tends to be conducted more in the presence of children and subject to punctuation by activities of unpaid work. In addition, the average maximum duration of episodes (blocks of time) of pure leisure is longer for men (that is, that women’s leisure is more fragmented into periods of shorter duration than men’s). It seems reasonable to assume then that women’s leisure time may be less restorative than men’s. (p. 66) She leaves us with some strong advice on how to approach this subject, namely, she argues we should stay away from a deterministic perspective. We should rather focus on how people collectively appropriate digital platforms to take control and create a labor-leisure balance that is suited to their contexts and needs. While no doubt there is a new media focus to this book, the spatial, historical and socio-cultural angle continues to play central in this investigation. Here we should ask: to what extent is busyness associated with ordinary, routine action? Is busyness primarily an outcome and state of work? Does busyness primarily lend itself to fragmentation of sociality? The bottom line being, can technologically induced busyness serve as a platform for sociality, cultural and creative activity? As we shift contexts, we gain a wider and more complex understanding of the role new media platforms play in busyness. In these global times, we also should consider how busyness weaves into the staid dichotomy of leisure and labor. WORK CULTURES & ‘PLAYBOR’ GEOGRAPHIES Hobby Farming and Free labor Hard labor can be quite pleasurable. Certain leisure domains demand a concerted and continued effort for sustenance. The cultural geographer Hayden Lorimer (2005) brings to attention the historical practice of ‘hobby farming’ and how it was seen as distinctly different from agriculture. While the latter was clearly regarded as tedious labor, the former was immersed in the ideal of green space, romanticizing the act of cultivation as a deeply pleasurable, collectivistic and authentic act. In other words, labor here was associated with the “passionate, intimate and material relationships with the soil, and the grass, plants and trees” (p. 86). While the effort could be the same in both domains, the element of choice converted tedium into euphoria. Veblen’s conceptual framing of ‘exploit’ as a form of play is useful in capturing the essence of difference between these two types of laboring. While work in the context of hobby farming is not by any means pure play, it does indicate that embracing challenges and taking on labor wholeheartedly underlines the passage of exploit becoming enjoyable. Therefore, the motive that drove these efforts for the hobby farmer was “other than profit, such as pleasure or amenity, and he [sic] is not, therefore, dependent on agriculture for a living” (Davis, 1953: 83). Historically, hobby farming has been associated with the construction of a moral landscape, of 9 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. exercising one’s humanity through the materiality of hard earned labor. In today’s digital realm, the act of voluntarily contributing work to the creation and sustenance of social network spaces, including that of online gaming communities, is coined as ‘free labor’ (Scholz, 2013). Often done collectively and driven by the democratic ideal, these laborious acts together fuel what is termed the ‘gift economy.’ In the heady days of Web 2.0, this was celebrated as a communitarian vision where disparate individuals came together to donate their time and energy into the making of a vibrant online space of social value. The reward is dominantly affective and moralistic, being part of a larger whole and productively contributing to a digital and cultural commons, for the people and by the people. In their book, ‘Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything’ (2006), Tapscott and Williams express deep optimism for this new labor landscape that created the much loved platform of Wikipedia. This digital domain continues to serve as an example of mass free labor manifesting in a new world vision and altruistic humanity. It serves as proof that one can organize without an overarching organization dictating work terms and conditions. Another book that fed into this frenzy of the time was Charles Leadbeater’s ‘We-Think. Why Mass Creativity Is the Next Big Thing.’ Through this lens, consumers can also be producers, and leisure morphs into a form of work. Hence, from this perspective, hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers are at last legitimized in their efforts as new media topographies provide them ample opportunities to exercise their amateurexpertise and talent for the market (Howe 2006). Problems arise when such unremunerated and ideal efforts unwittingly become the resource and profit for companies. For instance, what happens when hobby farmers transform a piece of open space into a productive landscape and find companies and the state usurping their efforts? These virgin territories have been carefully nurtured to serve as an alternative vision to the corporate agricultural model of mass commercialism and disengagement with the land. Similarly, in the Internet context, we are noticing the monetization of free labor, a type of work that stemmed to serve not the corporate but the digital commons. The fruits of such collective cultural labor, “has been not simply appropriated, but voluntarily channeled and controversially structured within capitalist business practices” (Terranova, 2003, p. 37). Time and again, we see the masses waking up to the fact that their labor has in fact generated profit for someone else. Understandably, this creates a backlash. As early as 1999, American Online (AOL) thrived on the dedication of fifteen thousand ‘volunteers,’ who painstakingly contributed to the design and management of this digital space. Over time, a feeling of being in a ‘digital sweatshop’ permeated this group culture, resulting in a request to the Department of Labor to investigate whether AOL owed them back wages for years of free chat hosting. This is not the only example of a platform that gained value through unpaid inhabitants toiling to shape their cultural space. Recently, we see major tensions on several digital leisure platforms. From Couchsurfing to Second Life to Flickr, the collective that once enthusiastically nurtured these digital landscapes are emerging as a labor union of sorts, demanding that their efforts and membership be recognized. The long standing community of Couchsurfing, a global network of people who host each other when travelling and organize various social events, recently had tensions flare as some of their key members were censored for being too critical of the new design. This resulted in the Facebook page ‘Censorship on Couchsurfing.’ While indeed, most of its six million members are unaware and disengaged from this protest, it is well understood that it is this core membership that sustains its grassroots spirit. This is partly due to the fact that in 2011, this non10 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. profit organization became a venture capital-backed startup company. From the backpacker reciprocal culture, it now feels more commercially oriented, much like that of Facebook and others that push their corporate agenda to increase profit. This commodification of communalism is just one aspect of the story. Say for instance, hobby farmers do decide to allow pleasure and profit to live side by side. There is still the issue of what their rights and responsibilities are as part-time workers in this larger agricultural politics. This is in line with questions regarding the recent trend of crowdsourcing through platforms such as Mechanical Turk. Within this web-based work environment, people with hobbies and skills come to fulfill micro tasks that are offered by a plethora of companies. While they are compensated, they are underpaid, and are not protected by the usual institutional structures of mandatory health insurance and minimum wage (Scholz, 2013). To these currently pressing issues, Jose van Dijck and David Nieborg (2009) lend a nuanced perspective that is neither indiscriminate condemnation nor blind celebration. They critically analyze the way businesses have leveraged on these social impulses and the desire to contribute to a larger whole. In doing so, they push us to ask astute questions such as: What are cultural goods? Who owns mass produced /created cultural goods? At what levels does collaboration occur? Is innovation the sustenance of today’s business? To what degree are amateurs creating value for the company? They point out that we cannot assume that businesses and consumers are in alignment in their interests and benefits. Instead, it is a constant negotiation of the shared space and cultural practice, as both parties in some sense need each other. The more indispensable a terrain becomes for the user, the more likely they will continue to (often reluctantly) pay rent via their free labor. But, due to the politics of agency, these dynamics have a way of shifting. Activism and utopianism foster new digital and urban commons that are more aligned with contemporary and ideally improved visions of social life. Factory Gardens, social visionaries and emotional labor Work for work’s sake is hardly inspirational. We are constantly seeking and extracting meaning from our places of employment. When we toil, we also dream. We dream of belonging to a larger cause and embedding ourselves in terrains of self-expression. The business sector has often risen to the occasion to shape this progressive social vision. In the industrial era of the nineteenth century, leisure was already being viewed as a potential tool to motivate and mobilize. Chris Rojek, the prolific scholar on leisure studies, reminds us that the modern question of leisure in our work life was not just driven by workers demanding more freedom from their chores or statesmen with a new utopic dream to sell. It was also driven by industries that were beginning to believe that productivity was intrinsically tied to leisure practice. With institutional involvement came the codification of acceptable and unacceptable leisure and the regulation of free time and behavior. In an age of increasing urbanization, nineteenth century industrialists and the state were concerned about losing control over the socialization of the working class. Providing ‘normal’ leisure spaces became fundamental to channeling angst and enhancing emotional intelligence, a quality tied closely to competence. What we now call emotional intelligence and emotional labor gradually becomes so critical and insistent on the performance of competent behavior that it compromises the 11 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. notions of ‘time off, choice, and freedom.’ Even the practice of ‘chilling’ today is a performance activity that requires an acceptable setting, codes of representation and the social paraphernalia of coding and representation that signifies the suspension of pecuniary enterprise and industry (Rojek, 2010: 85) Back in the 1880s, a new type of designed green space appeared in the industrial landscapes of Europe and the USA – the factory pleasure garden and recreation park. (Chance, 2012: 1602). Across nations, the sweeping reforms of the public domain caught the imagination of dominant industrialists, particularly that of urban parks. They sought to hire the very architects who were instrumental in designing parks to extend such aesthetics to work arenas. The park designs of two companies - Cadbury Brothers at Bournville, UK and the National Cash Register Company, Dayton, Ohio, USA – became role models for the development of corporate recreation spaces that continued to be influential through the 1960s. Viewed as ‘recreational welfare capitalism,’ the efforts of carving park spaces around factories were seen by corporate visionaries to add “economic, social and cultural value to the company by contributing to a more healthy, stable and productive workforce and enhancing the company’s profile in the local and public realm” (p.1603). This modeled the labor landscape to resemble public leisure grounds, and accommodated the plural needs of the workers, including that of women and their children in the factory place. Thereby, playgrounds were built near the factory. Small promenades were created for workers to rest and take a stroll and carved green niches allowed picnicking and socializing. Much like how Web 2.0 has become the buzzword of today’s digital corporate architectures, urban parks served a similar purpose, signaling modernity in the workplace. These intervening moments of rest paid off: Factory parks gained evidence of economic gains due to increased worker productivity, and leisure within these spaces began to be viewed as more a duty and part of work provisions. Likewise, employees were beginning to see it as their fundamental right. Some went as far as to involve the factory workers in the planning and design of these park structures. This co-creation was meant to symbolize the progressive nature of the company and create a sense of worker ownership, loyalty and personalization that was believed to benefit the bottom line. Leisure space can enhance productivity in these domains. It can also instill personalization, immersion and company loyalty. We can witness this vision in the embracing of social network sites and blogs in today’s digital corporate territory. There is belief that social media spaces open up new ways to foster social capital, collaboration and bonding among employees in the work place (Gely & Bierman, 2007). This comes at a time where there is deep concern about rampant social isolation felt at work. Due to a marked decline of peer-support, social isolation is known to have increased substantively since the 1980s: “in 1985, about thirty-percent of people had at least one confidant among their co-workers. That proportion fell to eighteen-percent in 2004” (p.297). In fact, as more time is being spent at the workplace, virtual networks have come to be seen as extended corporate spaces to foster employees’ social connectedness and sense of community. The goal here is to nurture emotional wellbeing, which is seen as fundamental to the larger functioning of the employee. Take for instance the trend of social isolation in the United States as a context: 12 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. As Americans are marrying later, divorcing more often, and living alone more, work may be becoming the new center of American community, and we may be transferring our community ties from the front porch to the water cooler…There is hope that internet technologies – and blogs in particular – can decrease social isolation in today’s workplace by strengthening weak ties between co-workers. (p. 299) Expectations for these digital platforms are growing: employees are expected to reach out and connect with one another, facilitate a collaborative corporate culture, make business processes more efficient through outsourcing and recruiting, and improve employee training and general communication across the workplace (Kaupins & Park, 2011; Leader-Chivee & Cowan, 2008). These platforms are seen to offer opportunities for employees to demonstrate their intellectual capital and become visible to the management. In turn, corporate leaders can gauge employee motivation and satisfaction faster and respond quicker to labor unrest. Twitter, for instance, has gained a soft spot with many corporate executives as it serves as a friendlier platform to monitor and track projects and share critical and timely knowledge and expertise among employees (Rapoza, 2009). Furthermore, there is hope that sustained engagements within these platforms can strengthen organization culture and deepen loyalty to the company brand. Apple is an excellent case in point: its blog and Facebook Group called Apple Students have demonstrated tremendous success in maintaining a fan base, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the branding of a company. However, we should not forget that initially, companies did not enthusiastically embrace digital leisure platforms, particularly at their onset. Even in the industrial era, there were strong social movements and grassroots activism by workers fighting for their freedom to leisure within the labor domain. The hired hands gave great weight to small measures like taking breaks during work to rest, relax and socially connect with others. Work life was a substantive part of social life and was thereby seen as necessary to expand the humane boundaries by blurring labor and leisure needs. This created substantial pressure for social reform. Some companies were ahead of the curve, recognizing that this was not necessarily a threat to production. Rather, if it were strategically constructed, it could be harnessed for their economic ends. The win-win solution was their new mantra. Coming into alignment with the workers perspective and catering to their emotional need for leisure was seen as a smart move. Today, 65 percent of employees in Europe report that their everyday work life includes social networking. In general, two-thirds of employees in Europe feel that their companies are more transparent and more open because of the adoption of social networks. By country, Germany has the highest adoption rate and Great Britain the lowest (McGrath, 2010). In the United States, more large companies than small and medium enterprises (SMEs) use social media tools. While the business sector at large recognizes the opportunities to use new media platforms, there continues to be deep concerns. These leisure grounds, be it within the factory gardens or digital networks, can also invite unwanted behavior like the formation of labor unions and company sabotage by sharing of trade secrets, intentionally and unintentionally. Thereby, there is ongoing surveillance of employee activity and behavior within these supposed free social spaces. For instance, most companies in the Fortune 500 are taking advantage of the opportunities of Facebook. However, if we delve deeper, this is taking place at a peripheral level as corporations are posting mainly news releases and mission statements, being very careful of the nature of 13 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. information being shared within these spaces (McCorkindale, 2010). More than three-quarters of these Facebook pages did not have any recent news or updates in the mini-feed. A recent study found that only 37 of the Fortune 500 companies maintained corporate blogs, most embracing a conventional one-way communication strategy (Cho & Huh, 2010). Employees here seem to police themselves, either by barely participating or by superficially engaging within these domains. In 2008 and 2009, phishing attacks on social networking sites soared to 164 percent. In a survey with senior marketing executives, almost 20 percent of them reported being victims of online scams and phishing attacks aimed at hijacking their company’s brand names. Hence, while leisure networks are seen as important in the shaping of contemporary business cultures as decentralized and emancipative spaces for labor, there are undoubtedly challenges (Castells, Hardt, & Negri, 2001). The construction of these corporate leisure domains is hardly an exact science. The manipulation of workspace has utilitarian and symbolic repercussions: hierarchies and linear thinking can be embedded in the design and shaping of business spaces, and can lead to a culture of control and privileging efficiency over creativity (Daskalaki, Starab & Imasa, 2008). Earlier research on organization culture has focused on how spatial arrangements and physical architectures can reveal aspects such as power relations, company values and management styles (Henley, 1977). Research highlights the emotive aspects evoked by corporate structures as essential to their design (Urry, 1995). The aesthetics of corporate terrain can serve as powerful emblems of the private sector and the state (Guillen, 1997). For example, in the 1970s, modernist architecture signaled a new era of scientific advancement and elicited faith in the new corporate and state agenda. In later studies however, there has been more emphasis on the co-creative approach to these spaces, giving more weight to employee and customer agency: These behavioral or functionalist approaches have been challenged by more constructivist views that utilize the notion of ‘appropriation’ to demonstrate how users of space participate in giving meaning to a space. That is, according to constructivist approaches, the individuals do not only use (or populate) space but also co-construct it and in effect have opportunities to subvert or divert it from its pre-conceived basis. (Daskalaki, Starab & Imasa, 2008, p.50) Of course, these relations shift and evolve as social engagements, policies, and economies transform, compelling us to view these spatial enactments as dynamic. Hence, the focus should be less about spatial outcomes on corporate culture and more about recognizing the nature of boundaries formed between the leisure and labor realm, employee and employer interaction, and the spectrum of policy interventions; all of these come together to create an existing organizational culture. While spatial structures of companies can be prescriptive, homogenous, dominating and regimented, users of such space have the potential and ability to defy, play, circumvent and modify such terrains to create a new space different from the intended corporate design (Legge, 2005). To conclude, new media technologies offer new ways of spatializing living, working and playing. Historically and until today, leisure is associated with “constructs such as freedom, release, fun and choice; work with constructs such as compulsion, routine and restriction” (Guerrier & Adib, 2003, p. 1399). As mentioned above, these strong demarcations between work 14 To cite: Arora, P. (2015). The Leisure Factory: Production in the Digital Age. LOGOS, (3), 88119. and play have been attributed as a product of the industrial age. It is not new to relate work productivity to the physical environment. From blue-collar environments such as factories to the white-collar desk job, it is now commonly understood that the way workspace is organized has social impact on employee performance, attitude, and teamwork. Granted, these new media topologies can improve communication and cooperation between workers, but they also introduce new ways to control and divide labor; “the capitalist mode of production is characterized in a fundamental way by the contradiction between competition and cooperation” (Hermann, 2006: 65). Nowadays, more organization’s networks are becoming highly moderated and monitored within what constitutes as corporate ‘walled gardens,’ protective enclaves for corporate activity. Generally seen, large companies focus on internal social networks while SMEs use more external social networking tools. 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