The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative

Hicks, Heather J. The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative. 2008. London, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009.

Immediately relevant: Ch. 1 "'No Good to Anybody': Player Piano, General Electric, and the Consumption of Work."

Ch. 3 "Automating Feminism: Self-Actualization versus the Post-Work Society in Joanna Russ's The Female Man."

Ch. 4 "A Cyborg's Work Is Never Done: Programming Cyborgs, Workaholics, and Feminists in Marge Piercy's He, She, and It.

In addition to another three chapters, the book offers an Introduction, Conclusion, extended Notes, a Bibliography, and Index.

Blurb on Google Books (lightly edited; note reference to Frederick Winslow Taylor, a key figure for this wiki[1]):

American workers over the past half-century have found themselves steeped in management discourses promoting teamwork, synergy, vision, and a host of other concepts meant to inspire an ever deeper commitment to work. The Culture of Soft Work offers an original examination of American writers' responses to these motivational techniques through readings of postmodern novels and a diverse range of other canonical and popular texts. Building on the work of scholars who have investigated the cultural impact of Frederick W. Taylor’s management theory, this study is the first to examine how post-Taylorist management has shaped Americans’ subjectivity and their art. Hicks ably demonstrates that while Taylor hardened work by stamping it with the masculine imprimatur of science, subsequent management theorists reconceived work as soft, emphasizing its emotional, spiritual, and irrational aspects—a transformation that has redefined work as postmodern and retooled the gendered subjectivity of American workers.

Hicks ends her introduction with a promise to conclude her essay "with a review of other contemporary 'cyborg texts' in which the transformation of the 'human' into the 'cyborg' can be reread as a symbolic sacrifice of the individuality and free will historically associated with humanism on behalf of an internalization of unprecedented contemporary work imperatives" (p. 91).

Notes that the main plot "of He, She and It concerns the efforts of Shira, a gifted computer scientist, to provide Yod" (a significant letter in the Hebrew alphabet),[2] a cyborg of revolutionary technical sophistication, with sufficient understanding of human motives and behaviors for him to 'pass' as a biologically conceived man. [***] The question around which Piercy makes all of this revolve is whether Yod can truly become human" (pp. 91-92). Cf. and contrast works featuring the original golem of Prague and his/its narrative descendants, works using what has been called "the Pinocchio motif," or, seen negatively, "Pinocchio Syndrome" of a mechanism becoming or wanting to become "a real boy" or equivalent,[3] — and, of course, the play R. U. R. with its humanoid androids and questions of humanity and labor.

RDE, finishing, 6Jun22, 30Jul23