For me, other critical sources in considering this problem include George Ritzer (1993) The McDonaldization of Society, Robert Reich (1992) The Work of Nations, and Daniel Pink (2005) A Whole New Mind. To me, all three point to the need to examine flexibility in light of class differences and employer and employee perspectives. To be an unskilled worker in a large pool of unemployed confronting employers who are trying to minimize their obligations is not, I suggest, the same situation as that of a smart knowledge worker facing a situation in which opportunities along the dream career path are shrinking, but others are opening up along other (sometimes morally dubious) paths. The situations of someone young and single, starting a new family, or with kids in college, mortgages to pay and elderly parents to care for also differ in ways that strongly inflect the implications of flexibility, on both the employee and employer sides.

What resonated with me in Martin and Bourdieu’s discussions of flexibility was the ways in which this pervasive and positively-valued idea of flexibility can be a cover for really deep and broad exploitative processes that reach far beyond the realm of knowledge work. And what I found relevant to this series is the ways in which these new modes and locales of ethnographic practice can involve accommodative strategies (see Ben, Gottleib and Beth’s comments on Nate’s Week 2 post) that may be personally, ethically, or intellectually compromising.
The question for me is, to continue the dance metaphor: “In pursuing new professional opportunities for the practice of ethnography, how far can I bend before I break?” For me, these questions pertain both in how I imagine and shape professional and intellectual pursuits (projects, jobs) and also how I carry them out once there.

From an advertising perspective, what Galbraith is talking about is brand-building, described in one formulation as moving prospects from awareness to interest to serious consideration to to preference and, finally, the Holy Grail, can’t live without it. From an employment perspective, this is why smart people no longer look for jobs; they think about ways to grow a reputation and build a career.

The problem with jobs is that a job is fundamentally a task that can be performed by any number of people with similar skills, making the people in question easily replaceable. Thus, cynically speaking, getting and holding a single job is inherently deskilling. When all your time is taken up by doing the routines that you are paid to do, you aren’t thinking, learning, looking ahead, searching for the next step to something you’d rather be doing.

What is damned hard is finding yourself in a position where there are so many people wanting the same job you do that from an employer’s perspective you become easily replaceable. In this respect, I imagine, the world of academia and the world of dance are now very similar. When hundreds audition for places in the chorus and the stories of those who make it from the chorus to star are mythic because they are rare, the competition is fierce and hierarchy (A-list, B-list, no-list) is given. Those who make it to the top may not be the smartest or most talented (though they are usually both smart and talented). What they are is totally dedicated and ruthless when necessary to achieve what they want and, yes, they usually start with a leg up, an unfair advantage of some sort, connections or other resources that others lack.

So what can you do, if you are not one of these totally dedicated, ruthless, equipped with special advantages competitors who make it to the top of the heap? I only know of two possibilities. The history of unions shows what can be done when people band together and fight collectively for a fairer share of the pie. That’s one way. The other is the one my life represents, finding a niche in which you can make yourself indispensable to enough regular customers that you are pretty well off, which, if my experience is any indication, involves a lot of knocking around, trying this and that,finding what you are good at, and acquiring unique expertise that’s unique because very few others will have followed the same critical path and learned the same things that you have. The dancer who dreamed of Broadway earns a living as a personal trainer, a physical therapist, the proprietor of a ballet school or something totally different.

That’s my take.

Also, I have often been struck by the rising prominence of projects in general. In many fields—especially but certainly not limited to anthropologists working outside of academia—knowing how to manage, envision and implement projects can often seem to take precedence over expertise or depth of knowledge. But Laurel, maybe you could clarify this: Do you think that people are thinking about, approaching, planning and working in the category of “projects” in a new way today, or is this just about funding? Or perhaps there is another dimension to this that I’m missing?

Most of what you write here is so apt and well-described. There is, however, one point at which my personal experience diverges from the model you present. I cannot agree with the statement taken from Emily Martin that But if the flexible worker is adaptable, pliant, and quick, s/he is also necessarily more acquiesent, interchangable and disposable (Martin, pp. 143-158). An important part of the business of anyone dependent on project-based income is finding ways to become less acquiescent and, as far as possible, indispensable. What I’m about to say may not work for dancers whom, I suspect, are like professional athletes and have a short period in which to succeed or fail before their bodies betray them. But in the line of work in which my wife and I have found ourselves, translation and copywriting, abject acquiescence is a terrible, dead-end strategy. The key to success is neither to accept or reject client complaints but, instead, to discuss the source of the complaint (which is often no more than a query) and be ready to offer an option that improves on whatever the client suggests. This “third-way” approach demonstrates professionalism and builds a reputation for adding value as well as being easy to work with. Proceeding in this way and adding a store of expertise on which regular clients come to depend is the way to achieve a stable and comfortable livelihood.