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Springsteen songs are white-collar anthems too

        by Adam Jones,     December 30 2013, 07:55

 

BEING a middle-class Bruce Springsteen fan used to be a vicarious allegiance. His greatest songs explored the physical and psychological damage caused by joyless manual labour, or worse, the lack of it.

For those with jobs involving less sweat but more pay, The Boss offered a cathartic glimpse of people nobly struggling to hold onto their dreams amid unyielding economic conditions.

"End of the day, factory whistle cries, men walk through these gates with death in their eyes," went a typical lyric. The protagonists of this blue-collar opera had souped-up cars but rarely out-drove their fates.

The visceral urgency of early Springsteen put the effete setbacks you get in an office job into perspective.

Now, however, white-collar workers in richer economies are confronting an identity crisis of their own that makes them more like the subjects of a gritty Springsteen song than distanced observers.

Technology and globalisation are conspiring to destabilise professional careers. Sectors once judged to be rock-solid, such as accountancy or the law, are not immune from the job losses, outsourcing and general cost pressures either.

"Even if you are not losing your job, companies are changing really quickly," says Insead business school’s Herminia Ibarra, an expert on the identities that professionals construct for themselves through their work.

She says these identities are being undermined by career stagnation and increased workloads, particularly among those managers who are aged 40 and above.

In short, letting your sense of self get too bound up in your job is a risky move.

For Springsteen fans, the disorientation is not helped by his daughter’s emergence as a leading international show jumper. Instead of embracing her birthright by racing a ’69 Chevy through the deserted streets of rust-belt America, she is trotting around on horses with names such as Vornado van den Hoendrik.

But laying that irony to one side, all may not be lost. Ibarra suggests that it is vital for white-collar workers to find time somehow to develop side interests — both at work and at home — that could eventually lead to a new career path, or at least a sense of identity that is more securely anchored.

Striking out on your own as an entrepreneur or self-employed contractor is another potential solution, of course.

"If you are thinking about moving on to something else there are a lot of jobs that have disappeared. Often people have to create their own," she says.

That said, I reckon that inhaling the values of early Springsteen records is another way of feeling better without the hassle of finding a new job or setting up your own company.

For instance, if you are the sort of person who at the end of the year obsessively charts your progress against that of your contemporaries, try using freedom rather than material success as a benchmark over the coming days.

By that measure, the most enviable figure in my own peer group would not be the axe-wielding cabinet minister or the predictable millionaire bankers, but a bloke who co-founded something called the Dark Mountain Project. I am still not sure what it involves but it seems to feature a manifesto, poetry, scything classes, festivals and a mournful sense of the green movement’s failure. A bit like Born to Run covered by druids.

On the whole, it is prudent to assume that most employers will let us down at some point, whether they mean to or not.

When they do, there is little point in harbouring resentment; rather, as Ibarra suggests, it is vital to nurture a life outside work that will get us through the stresses of the day without an existential collapse.

A record such as Darkness on the Edge of Town is full of reminders that we should keep striving for something extraordinary outside of the workplace grind, rather than "dying little by little, piece by piece" in air-conditioned stupor.

For many white-collar workers, these are not borrowed songs any more: they should feel free to sing along at full volume.

But do not be too surprised if blue-collar fans choose not to join in. After all, the professional classes are relative newcomers to the "downbound train" Springsteen sang about on the album Born in the USA in 1984. Manual workers have been riding it for far longer.

Springsteen is touring South Africa in January/February 2014.

• Jones is the Financial Times’s Business Life Editor.

© 2013 The Financial Times Limited

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