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title: "Collaboration is sometimes a euphemism"
category: thoughts
modified: 2015-11-11 09:10:34 -0500
tags: [coworking, collaboration, coworkers, neoliberal work]
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In the business and management world, a great deal of attention is devoted to producing, supporting, and sustaining collaboration. Articles with titles like ["Collaborate to Win is the Paradox of Market Competition"](http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/234559), ["Collaborate for Real: turning the lingo of collaboration into everyday practice"](https://hbr.org/2015/09/collaborate-for-real), and ["The Way to the Future Through Collaboration: Tinkering With the Bounds of What's Possible"](http://www.wired.com/insights/2014/05/way-future-collaboration-tinkering-bounds-whats-possible/) are representative of why so much attention is given to this term. In theory, collaboration requires individual workers to reach beyond their particular skills and knowledges by relying on other workers and competencies. This interdependance, when done right and well, magnifies the abilities of individuals and produces new collective competencies. As such, business and management use collaboration is a marker of a healthy work environment, a stimulating workplace, and a pathway for continued capital growth. Collaboration, as an idea and activity, stands as an illusive admixture for success.

In simple terms, collaboration is both a work style&mdash;how work occurs&mdash;and work ethos&mdash;how work *should* occur.  As a concept, collaboration seems to be a rather uncontestable notion. But what if collaboration isn't all it is cracked up to be?

For a company, valuing collaboration makes good sense in terms of both corporate strategy and human resources. Collaboration holds the potential for new business opportunities through additive and synergistic work. Collaborative settings offer workers the ability to learn from others and potentially exercise creative thinking skills as they find ways to create output that would be impossible in sequential work. To borrow a metaphor from computing, in a collaborative environment individual workers are no longer responsible for input-output but parallel processes. As such, a collaborative workplace purports to transform individuals in a collective by distributing responsibilities and tasks differently, as well as mitigating bottlenecks and redundancies. In theory, collaboration requires the supression of egos, which from the corporate standpoint means a workforce more aligned with collective (rather than individual) values. By moving beyond a single-minded approach to work (i.e. a cog in a machine), individual workers participate in a performed collective identity that is not parsable to individual parts.

Popular treatment of collaboration makes it almost impossible to argue against collaboration. Yet unsurprisingly, the popular attention to this term, as popular attention to any term, leaves much to be desired. Collaboration is taken at face value, conjuring the stock image of individual workers united in a trust fall exercise. Collaboration assumes the form of an aspiration or an aphorism that can only be blasphemously countered. Collaboration is a term that seemingly embodies the workplace of the future. The problem is that the workplace of the future looks a lot like the workplace of the past.

While 

One side of the invisibility of collaboration stems from the issue of showing work. The history of management reveals that management is often a practice of finding ways for workers to show what they are doing. A quintessential example is the time card. The time card requires workers to self-document their hours, ostensibly putting the responsibility of being paid on the workers to document properly. The time card is an absolute structure.

Collaboration presents an issue for management. While cogs in a machine are easily accounted for, compositional unit 


 In short, collaboration is yet another euphemism for business as usual.<commit_msg>collab draft<commit_after>---
layout: post
title: "Collaboration is sometimes a euphemism"
category: thoughts
modified: 2015-11-11 09:10:34 -0500
tags: [coworking, collaboration, coworkers, neoliberal work]
image:
  feature: 
  credit: 
  creditlink: 
comments: 
share: 
---
In the business and management world, a great deal of attention is devoted to producing, supporting, and sustaining collaboration. It seems popular publications orbiting these domains often claim collaboration is a secret ingredient to market success&mdash;["Collaborate to Win is the Paradox of Market Competition"](http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/234559)&mdash;or a pathway toward successful innovation&mdash;["The Way to the Future Through Collaboration: Tinkering With the Bounds of What's Possible"](http://www.wired.com/insights/2014/05/way-future-collaboration-tinkering-bounds-whats-possible/)&mdash;or simply a better way to work and retain employees&mdash;["Collaborate for Real: turning the lingo of collaboration into everyday practice"](https://hbr.org/2015/09/collaborate-for-real). In theory, this attention makes sense. Collaboration requires individual workers to reach beyond their particular skills and knowledges by relying on other workers and competencies. This interdependance, when done right and well, magnifies the abilities of individuals and produces new collective competencies. As such, business and management use collaboration is a marker of a healthy work environment, a stimulating workplace, and a pathway for continued capital growth because collaboration combines various pressing workplace issues from human retention in an age of wage austerity to redefining production in a rapidly changing and saturated global marketplace. Collaboration, as an activity as much as idea, stands as an illusive admixture for moving forward.

In simple terms, collaboration is both a work style&mdash;how work occurs&mdash;and work ethos&mdash;how work *should* occur. In both respects, the term seems to be a rather uncontestable notion, at least in the current moment of western neoliberalized capitalism. As a workplace ideal, collaboration parallels other socially minded ideas, such as the global citizen ("Think Global, Act Local") or the conscientious employer (). But what if collaboration isn't all it is cracked up to be?

For a company or corporation, valuing collaboration makes good sense in terms of both corporate strategy and human resources. Collaboration holds the potential for new business opportunities through additive and synergistic work. Collaborative settings offer workers the ability to learn from others and potentially exercise creative thinking skills as they find ways to create output that would be impossible in sequential, individuated work. To borrow a metaphor from computing, in a collaborative environment individual workers are no longer responsible for input-output but parallel processes. As such, a collaborative workplace purports to transform individuals in a collective by subparcelling and sharing responsibilities, as well as mitigating slow-downs by the same token. In theory, collaboration requires the supression of egos, which from the corporate standpoint means a workforce might be more aligned with collective values (and hopefully those of the company itself). By moving beyond a single-minded approach to work (i.e. a cog in a machine), individual workers participate in a performed collective identity that is not parsable to individual parts. But collaboration as a corporate strategy is clever in other ways.

Beyond the stated goals of collaborative workplaces, attention to collaboraton is a shadow of a variety of other systemic workforce issues within corporations. The very means of what makes collaboration useful and important to companies&mdash;distribution of responsibility and tasks in the hopes of synergy&mdash;is also the means through which collaboration is a type of control. With teams working in more integrated ways, individual workers no longer retain sole ownership over particular skills, outputs, or ideas. As much as distribution reduces bottlenecks and redundancies, it also acts as a type of de-/re-specialization. As teams build capacities, ideas, and methods, individual workers own less and less of what it is they make, while simultaneously building particular relational skills within a micro-supplychain. Of course, this notion is culturally paradoxical&mdash;collaboration coincides with language of increasing employee ownership over the things they work on (["If you want employees to work like they own the company, then give them a stake in the game."](http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/218028)).

In corporate settings, collaboration takes a particular toll on the individual worker. In my dissertation fieldwork, I heard over and again how the technology company I observed (called LTC) frequently flew the banner of collaboration, yet did little to support its day-to-day. This was most concisely summed up in the ways performance was assessed at the end of the year. Rather than focus on the various parts of projects one was involved in, LTC valued only those projects that an employee "owned," meaning was the lead on. As such, the performance review process soured the potential for collaboration, but also revealed its problem. For an employee working on a variety of projects in which she is not the owner, a manager is left with determining the worth of that employee in an ad-hoc manner based on the outcomes of the projects. The many developed skills related to teamwork, carework, and interpersonal communication are nothing more than a backdrop. Certainly under a different regime, performance reviews might be assessed with greater sensitivity to collaborative environments, however, changing the terms of assessment does not address the slippage between what collaboration seems to be and what it ends up being.

Outside of the corporate setting, collaboration is a similar, albeit different, euphemism. Collaboration represents the over-tasked worker. In my more recent research into coworking spaces, I frequently hear the language of collaboration as an important selling point for joining a space. For independent entrepreneurs, freelancers, and remote workers/teams, coworking grants workers the opportunity to bump into someone new, hopefully spurring on new thinking, new connections, and new opportunities for success. While I am sure this happens (I have yet to hear a truly compelling story), collaboration seems to have a new valance of standing in for jobs that are rife with shadow work. 

At one of the first sites I visited, I spoke with a mid-40s remote employee of a nonprofit that does work overseas. I asked him about his use of the space and whether he felt it was worth it.

“Part of the idea is collaborate or share ideas, which I’m not doing much of that because there’s nobody else here doing what I’m doing. But if I’ve got a question about my website, then there are several people in here that are way better at that than me. I can get their help on that. Or if I have question about how to best use social media, these guys—I mean I’m an old guy [he has some salt and pepper hair, about 6’2” mid-40s]—these guys know way more about how to use that stuff than I do. So, I’m able to get little bits and pieces like that I can benefit from.”


In short, collaboration is yet another euphemism for business as usual.
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