The Financial Times (FT) (January 30th, 2023) featured an excellent article this week on economic Shadow Work, written by Rana Foroohor. Shadow work was argued to be by the philosopher Illich as unpaid work carried out in economies such as domestic chores (Harney, 2007). Lambert (2011, 2015) updated the concept of Shadow Work to cover work which technology has generated which includes form filling we carry out on apps to engage with travel, banks, Call Centers etc. Previously, this type of work in more analogue times was carried out by frontline workers, now it is carried out as unpaid work by the general public. The need for service organizations to cut costs and increase margin has led to the outsourcing of previously paid work into the domain of Shadow Work.
Foroohar (2023) questions whether all this extra work has contributed to the lack of productivity troubling most Western economies. What is certain however, it has made an impact on our relationship to time, and time is what brings us to rituals and the role they play in our individual and collective lives.
Han (2020) argues that rituals provide us with transformative time. This is time spent in contemplation, as both an individual and a community, reflecting and imagining. A ritual takes us out of the normal flow of time, and when we return to our normal lives, we may do so with a slightly different perspective gained from this abstracted reflection. Let us use an example to illustrate.
Imagine a ritual which is carried out every January, post the Christian festival of Christmas. This ritual involves living a more frugal life for a calendar month and abstaining from specific food and drink. Not only can this ritual provide a form of recovery, but it also enhances appetite to reengage. There is more time spent imagining what is next as opposed to simply engaging. There may also be the decision to abstain permanently from certain types of food and drink, to emerge from the ritual with new habits of ways of doing things. We could say that January was spent in transformative time.
By contrast, if someone spent January as though it were any other month, then their experience of time would be linear, not transformative, they would be repeating what they normally do. Time in this case links to Whitehead’s (2010) observations that repetition without the ingestion of novelty leads to fatigue. The potential transformations afforded by ritual ingest novelty and reduce the fatigue of linear time. Without proactively performing rituals we are only left with natures impact upon us such as the seasons, and day and night.
To connect Rituals and Shadow Work, the conclusion is simple, transformative time is under increasing amounts of risk from Shadow Work. Without transformation and novelty, we can understand some of the current economic challenges of the West from a new perspective-lack of productivity, lack of innovation, high stress and anxiety, high absenteeism. All these are signs of a system which knows only repetition and experiences fatigue.
Reading
Lambert, C., 2011. Our unpaid, extra shadow work. The New York Times.
Harney, N.D., 2007. Shadow Work (Ivan Illich). The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology.
Lambert, C., 2015. Shadow work: The unpaid, unseen jobs that fill your day. Catapult.
Foroohar, R (2023) The Real Cost of Shadow Work. Financial Times, January 31st.
B. C. Han (2020) The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Polity
Whitehead, A.N., 2010. Process and reality. Simon and Schuster.
