Surviving Work in the UK

One of the problems with a workplace survival strategy of keeping your head down and your mouth shut is that you’re left to listen to just one voice. Yours. As someone who is prone to the paranoias that is a pretty dismal fiction about how to survive work on the theme of Dig-hole-then-hide-in-it-only-form-relationships-with-dogs-or-goats. Psychoanalysis offers us a bitter sweet way of facing up to the depth of feelings we have about work and the much denied psychic realities of playing with the other children at work. As many of us fall into the uncomfortable and disestablished zone of precarity, the quick-fix-tick-box-disneyworld versions of work enshrined in business school libraries don't even touch the sides. We’ve just completed two months of blogging about our experiences of Surviving Work in the UK in partnership with the LSE’s Business Review. All of the contributors I adore because they combine the deeply unpopular art of speaking-actual-truths with humour and humanity, brave in these neuro-linguistically programmed and compulsorily happy times. The tagline for this series is ‘how to make friends and influence people’. Oh but the oldies are the goodies. Our belief is that if there is anything like a silver bullet at work its being able to form relationships, both with ideas and with the people around us. Treat yourself to the series so far:How do you maintain your sanity in a toxic workplace?Elizabeth Cotton Self-employment is precarious work: the uses and abuses of self-employment in the UKElizabeth Cotton What gets measured gets distorted: the pitfalls of targets and measurementsClive Morton Managed care models are hurting the UK’s Mental Health ServicesIan Simpson The side effects of treating education as a commodity: Less free expressionElizabeth Cotton The focus on exam grades is failing the next generationXavier Eloquin In Business as in government direct democracy is not an optionPhilip Stokoe Poor working conditions affect mental health workers’ states of mindElizabeth Cotton Alienated, under pressure and target driven: Why we need to make friends at workJulian Lousada Psychoanalysis can help us make sense of BrexitDavid Morgan Counting the self-employed as entrepreneurs is a meme that refuses to dieStephen Toft Being an insider outsider: the experience of looking for workJulia Macintosh Manning up in the caring professions: the resilience debateChris Manning Surviving Work in the UK continues to run over the next six months. We will be publishing blogs throughout the rest of the year on such juicy topics as perversion and the politics of learning. In the new year we will produce an eBook of the series and run a Survival Surgery with the LSE’s Department of Management in the summer of 2017 to work out collectively how we survive work. To sign up to our weekly blog go here