In Melissa Gregg’s Introduction of “Work’s Intimacy,” the author’s main argument is that modern online technologies destroy the workers’ boundaries between professional and intimate, negatively affecting their quality of life. Melissa Gregg believes that now people can observe how professional duties penetrate into time and space not previously intended for them. The author discusses the importance of finding optimal solutions to this problem in the shortest possible time.
The author strengthens her argument by analyzing research results published in books on the topic. For example, referring to Carnegie’s work, she demonstrates how the writer managed to form the American view of the relationship between employees in the workplace. In the 1940s, How to Win Friends and Influence People created the code of courtesy between workers, breaking the boundaries between friendship and work. Gregg compares this to how now online technologies now allow work to invade the intimate spheres of a person’s life. The author argues that, at first glance, convenient technologies hide an additional volume of duties, which are often unpaid. The workload that seems acceptable to the worker in the beginning then becomes overwhelming. Therefore, the hours of such work become challenging to control, leading to confusion between private life and professional life. Extra hours of work and underpayment significantly worsen the quality of life of an employee.
I would like to ask the author whether the results of her research could be used in the university environment. With the transition to an online learning system, university students felt that their academic activities were beginning to affect their time and space perceptions. Thus, solving the problem of boundaries’ destruction between professional and intimate outlined in the book might be helpful in the context of students’ academic activities.