Results-only work culture dissolves the boundary of the workplace

Evidence

The office had instituted something called the Results Only Work Environment, or ROWE, which meant to abolish the eight-hour workday by letting you work whenever from wherever, as long as you got your work done. It sounded noble enough, but there was something in the name that bothered me. After all, what is the E in ROWE? If you could be getting results at the office, in your car, at the store, at home after dinner—aren’t those all then “work environments”? — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 90

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ROWE dismantling of place anchors the reader’s question about whether Odell’s solutions themselves presume privilege — she had the resources to refuse email here, which many cannot.
• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s Milgrom/reputation materials: abolishing the fixed workplace replaces the ‘place’ of work with everywhere — same logic as abolishing the bourse’s physical trading floor. — connects to: Linguistic labor makes work and life inseparable under post-Fordism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1404