How the ‘Do What You Love’ Mantra May Further Exploitation on Campuses
By Will Jarvis
June 10, 2019
According to research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, the commandment to “do what you love” could expose employees to exploitation, unpaid work, and heightened professional demands.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site, and then refresh this page.
You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one,
or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com
According to research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, the commandment to “do what you love” could expose employees to exploitation, unpaid work, and heightened professional demands.
The researchers used eight separate studies, including more than 2,400 participants, and concluded that while passion for work could be beneficial, it could also lead to exploitative managerial conduct — asking employees to work on weekends without extra pay or to complete tasks unrelated to their jobs, for example. The researchers termed this the “legitimization of passion exploitation.”
When participants in one study read about a Ph.D. student who was verbally abused and exploited in academic work, researchers found the “legitimization” worked both ways: Exploited individuals were seen as more passionate.
ADVERTISEMENT
The Chronicle spoke with Troy Campbell, one of the researchers and an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Oregon, about the study’s relation to academe. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q. How did this research get started?
A. There had been some writings about this topic. There’s an article called “In the Name of Love,” by Miya Tokumitsu, which was published in Jacobin, and [passion exploitation] was a topic we were all thinking about. It ties in with system justification: We have a motive to justify our system, and we have a motive to see the world as fair. So we kind of want to believe the world is this place where there are trade-offs to certain things. We are establishing this psychological regularity that, in our mind, passion seems to be associated with exploitation in certain ways.
Q. How so?
A. There is this justification in society that we often jump to, which is: People are getting their own reward from [pursuing] their passion, so it’s more OK to make them do that work.
ADVERTISEMENT
Q. How does this relate to higher ed?
A. If your goal is to have a high status in academia by certain things like publication counts, then it is better for professors to exploit certain people in their situation, as long as that exploitation doesn’t lead people to overwhelmingly see the negative. Now, I think lots of professors don’t want to do that, but as we know from things like motivated reasoning, when we want to do something, we’ll often find the justifications in our head to make it right.
Q. Are there examples of this?
A. One of the interesting things about doing this project — and the press release being on the front page of Reddit for a day — is having all these conversations of how it works in [students’] lives. There were so many anecdotes that we got about the way students are mistreated by faculty, and that mistreatment doesn’t come in the classic psychological abuse where you’re telling the person they’re horrible. I know professors are busy, but it’s things like setting up meetings and not showing up. It’s saying you’ll get back to a student and not getting back to them for two weeks.
ADVERTISEMENT
Q. There’s the idea in academe of “pursuing a passion.” How does that play into this idea, especially with the adjunctification of professorial roles?
A. There is a theory called system inescapability. It’s the idea that if you feel you cannot leave the system, you’ll find a way to end up [feeling] justified in the system. Lots of people [in academe] are in very niche fields. There’s very few jobs in certain types of literature scholarship or pop-culture studies. Arguably, what people believe is that that person is currently at one of only three jobs in the world that is perfect for them. If you’re an adjunct professor and you look at the career path for yourself, and you say, It’s going to take me five to 10 years until I get the right amount of money, until I’m treated really well. And then I say, Well, lots of tenured professors aren’t treated well. They’re justifying it because of this internalization of passion and exploitation. They’re justifying it because they’re, like, Well, I wouldn’t let myself get exploited.
Q. What’s the next step in this area of research?
A. One thought I’ve had is creating a website called Passion Problems, where we kind of source different stories. Now we have thousands of [stories] because of the comments sections on these articles [about the study], and I have a couple of art students here who came up with ideas to do short films about it.
Q. How should academics address these ideas?
ADVERTISEMENT
A. If you want to regulate passion exploitation, you actually end up removing a lot of opportunity. Again, it’s one of these miserable things where the solution is you just need to be a more thoughtful person.