Ad-hocracy

Uberification.

Yes, it’s a word, and you can probably guess what it means. There’s even a book called Uberification of the University. I haven’t read it yet but maybe I should.

I did however read Temp by Louis Hyman. Hyman is a professor of economic history tracing the rise of the gig economy. Uber is one of the most visible forms at present, especially in the U.S. where car ownership is widespread. Temp is appropriately subtitled “How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary.” But the gig economy is not new. Hyman traces the rise of Manpower and McKinsey, and shines a light on the many ‘hidden figures’ who have long faced job insecurity – women and people of color in the U.S.

The gig economy has been here for a long time. It’s simply more visible now. Those lamenting for the good old days of secure jobs have a narrow vision of those days – they were only good for a small segment of the population, particularly those who had some cultural and social power. When I was growing up in a faraway country, America was the land of opportunity. While things have worked out well for me so far, that’s not the case for many others and perhaps most others. Being a tenured professor means that I am among the sub-1% of people with the highest job security. I should count myself very, very, very lucky. A generation from now, I think such positions will be extremely rare.

I did start out as an adjunct professor (i.e., not on the tenure track) at my current institution. A physical chemist was going on sabbatical and someone was needed to cover P-Chem. I was a postdoc, and doing very well research-wise, but I was slightly bored and missed teaching very, very much. (I’ve known since young that teaching would be my career of choice.) So I left my postdoc early and took up the adjunct position, but I continued to move my research projects along and publish papers, and I mentored undergraduate research students as an adjunct professor. That’s an uncommon situation, but I was (and still am) in a particularly supportive department. A couple of years later, I joined the tenure track and the rest is history.

Until now.

Higher education is struggling. Private colleges not in the elite group are in trouble if they are mostly tuition-driven (i.e., a small endowment at best), not well-located, and low status in terms of name-recognition. My institution is doing fine overall. The endowment is decent, although not fantastic. There is some name recognition in some areas. But we’re also in a very desirable location – which means that students will keep coming, at least for a while, if we’re able to keep tuition and financial aid manageable. I’m pretty sure my job will be stable for at least ten years, and possibly twenty years – by which time I would have retired. Not planning to be a hanger-on.

But all this makes me wonder if I should be thinking much harder about the future of education. Is what we’re doing sustainable? I’m not so sure anymore. What might teaching look like in the gig economy? An example might be the blossoming web of tutoring or extra classes in Asia where intense national exams act as a sieve. The tutoring economy is huge, decentralized and highly competitive. It also has features of a superstar economy. The ‘top’ tutors who have built up a solid reputation and clientele are much sought after. Some have opened schools and centers with multiple branches across a city, and they charge premium prices. As you might surmise, this further widens the gap between the haves and have-nots.

We live in an ad-hocracy. This will be the experience of most of our current students when they graduate. A small number may land those coveted few positions that still provide good-old-days job security with benefits and protections. The majority will have to learn to live with the new normal of job insecurity. Corporations have restructured to emphasize shorter-term profits and quick growth over longer-term stability. McKinsey’s consultants, themselves part of the (albeit high-paying) gig economy, led America (and other parts of the world) into relying more on temp-supplying agencies such as Manpower. Flexibility is the new watchword. Gigging through TaskRabbit and Upwork have become more desirable options than the gig-shift-work of Starbucks and its lookalikes. In the penultimate chapter of his book, Hyman paints a potential differential outlook for winners and losers.

For those at the top… who were ambitious, smart and entrepreneurial, the digital economy was just shorthand for opportunity on a global scale. Energetic entrepreneurs could have an idea, assemble a team through Upwork, and bring a product to market with few barriers. For everybody else, the digital economy was a grind. Labor laws offered few protections, desgined as they were, for an industrial age. Employers, given a chance, evaded wages and benefits… Office work no longer felt like a path to the middle class… Uber drivers hated the low wages and lack of choice but lamented the coming of driverless cars, which promised to eliminate even that last refuge of commodity skill… Uberification portended a future of winners and losers, of insider and outsiders, of differentiated employees and commodity workers. Interchangeability was the core of the workforce problem… workers in the twenty-first century need to find monopoly skills. For the rocket scientists and visionaries, this requirement is not a problem, but for the rest of us, who are more or less human, commodity workforces can’t help but seem like a race to the bottom.

If that sounds bleak, Hyman paints a potential silver lining in the last chapter of his book. He has some interesting suggestions of how the crumbling corporation can evolve into a digital cooperative with the potential to provide economic benefits (and some semblance of security) while preserving flexibility. He briefly discusses some pros and cons to portable benefits, universal basic income, reorienting the movement of capital into small business rather than consumer debt. The answer is resolutely NOT to “turn everyone into software engineers” but to allow a myriad of talents and skills to find their niche in the long-tailed digital economy. The old idea of job security is indeed going the way of the dodo, but there might be ways to still provide life security in a thriving populace.

One of the most interesting vignettes in Temp is how Tesla’s self-driving modules leapfrogged past competitors by simply including sensors in their mass-human-driven cars to train the artificial intelligence in the modules. Hyman suggests that virtual reality training of robot A.I. may lead to similar leaps. Think there’s a task only humans can do? You’d be surprised at what robots can do through machine learning. I think I have a movie idea of a prequel to the Matrix movie series based on Hyman’s descriptions. That being said, the full strength of Hyman’s argument comes to the fore when reading the entire book. His expertise and blend of economics and history makes a solid argument for how and why the ad-hocracy has evolved to its current state. I highly recommend it, even as it makes me increasingly skeptical of the value of consultants.