According to CMCI’s Prof Rosalind Gill we should look in an unlikely place to get a barometer of what the contemporary workplace is really like: the greetings card industry. ‘Happiness is an empty inbox’ declares one card Gill has noticed. ‘Nothing beats the satisfaction of crossing things off lists’, remarks another, and (Ros’s particular favourite, combining insights into workplace stress with a nod to postfeminism): ‘I’m too busy to have the nervous breakdown I deserve’.

“These cards tell us a great deal about the nature of work today”, argues Prof Gill. “They speak to the speeded up, intensified conditions in which many of us work, and to the ways in which information and communication technologies extend work well beyond the workplace into the intimate times and spaces of our lives”. Gill makes this argument in a review of Andrew Ross’s new book Nice Work If You Can Get It, published in The Higher this week, which you can read here.

Students on MA CCI doing “Creatives” will be able to hear Prof Gill talking about the intensification and extensification of work in her lecture on March 10, entitled ‘willing slaves?’