Employability demands workers mirror the net-like delocalization of neural networks

Evidence

But aren’t these qualities also those expected today of the individual in the working world? Shouldn’t we become polyvalent, accepting the law of delocalization by making ourselves available, showing ourselves to be without attachment, ready to break old ties, to create new ones? In a company, write Boltanski and Chiapello, ”valued staff members are those who succeed in working with very different people, prove themselves open and flexible when it comes to switching projects, and always manage to adapt to new circumstances.” Today the emphasis is clearly put on polyvalence more than on craft, on the multiplication of encounters and potentially reactivizable temporary connections, on belonging to diverse groups. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 151

Categorization

• XREF: The asserted, not argued, brain-workplace analogy the reader wants to catch — management culture borrows neuroscience’s multipolarity wholesale.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the neural worker’ — how neuroscience vocabulary legitimizes precarity by recasting displacement as synaptic flexibility.