Postcards from the Workday's End: Singapore vs. Bangkok — Epoche C1
The hour after the desk This letter is about one small act repeated daily in two cities: what an office worker does in the first hour after leaving the desk, in Singapore and in Bangkok. The received contrast is easy to draw, and I drew it myself on a first visit. Singapore ends the day upwards — a rooftop bar above the towers of the Marina Bay Financial Centre, colleagues still in the clothes they worked in, the conversation still running on quarterly numbers. Bangkok ends it downwards — a plastic stool in a soi , one of the numbered side lanes branching off the main roads, near a station of the BTS Skytrain, the elevated railway that opened in 1999 and along whose line most central offices now sit. Elevation against ground level; a curated escape against a boisterous one. The contrast is accurate as a photograph and close to worthless as an explanation, and the way it fails is worth more than the way it succeeds. It sets a minority practice in one city beside a majority practice in the other and reads the difference off as national temperament. Singapore has its own version of the plastic stool, in far greater numbers than it has rooftop bars, and the reason it stands under a roof rather than on a kerb is a matter of documented policy rather than of disposition. What follows keeps both postcards but changes what they are evidence for. I borrow the vocabulary from the research on work-home boundaries, say what that research actually measured, and then ask the question the original comparison could not: not which city unwinds more elegantly, but which of these rituals does the psychological work that leaving the office is supposed to do. What a leaving ritual is for, in the terms of the people who study it The relevant field is small and unusually concrete, so it is worth saying who did what before borrowing their words. Christena Nippert-Eng (1996) spent several years among the employees of a large American research laboratory — scientists, technicians, clerical staff — and their households, and came away with a description of home and work not as two places but as two mental territories whose border each person draws differently. She called the drawing of it boundary work : the everyday, largely unnoticed labour of keeping the two territories apart, or of letting them run together. Her subjects arranged themselves along what she named the segmentation-integration continuum . At the segmenting end, work and home share almost nothing — separate calendars, separate clothes, separate telephone numbers, no family photographs on the desk. At the integrating end the two dissolve into a single undifferentiated life. Her most quoted index of a person's position on it is domestic to the point of comedy and entirely serious: the keyring. Someone who carries house keys and office keys on one ring has one life. Someone who carries two rings has two, and can put one of them away. Blake Ashforth, Glen Kreiner and Mel Fugate (2000) supplied a mechanism for that observation. Their subject is what they call the micro role transition — the frequent, short, reversible movement between roles that a person makes several times a day, as against the once-in-a-lifetime movements between roles that the anthropology of ritual usually treats. Their claim is that these small crossings are nonetheless managed by rites: bounded sequences of action that mark the exit from one role and the entry into the next, borrowing the three-part structure of a passage — separation from the old state, a suspended middle belonging to neither, incorporation into the new one. Two properties of a boundary carry the analysis. Its permeability is the degree to which one role's demands penetrate the other's territory; a telephone that rings at dinner is permeability. Its flexibility is the degree to which the boundary can be shifted in time or place without penalty. Their central and slightly counter-intuitive result is a trade-off: the more segmented the two roles, the more effortful each crossing, but the cleaner the state on the far side. Integration makes crossing cheap and makes arrival meaningless, because there is nowhere distinct to arrive at. The third piece is the one that lets the two postcards be scored rather than merely admired. Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz (2007) built and validated an instrument, the Recovery Experience Questionnaire, which asks not what people do after work but what the doing achieves. It separates four experiences, and the separation is the contribution: psychological detachment , the sense of being mentally away from the work situation rather than merely physically out of the building; relaxation , a state of low activation and low demand; mastery , an off-work challenge that builds competence; and control , deciding for oneself how the time is spent. These are not synonyms and they do not travel together. An evening can be relaxing and undetached, which is a drink with colleagues while the project is still under discussion; or detached and strenuous, which is what an evening language class is. Detachment is the dimension that carries most of the association with recovered well-being the following morning, which is precisely why it is the one to apply to a rooftop bar. The first postcard, corrected: the rooftop is not Singapore's evening Singapore does have the scene the postcard shows, and it is not an invention of tourism. It belongs to the city's deliberate positioning as a node for regional finance and for the professionals who circulate between such nodes — a positioning that Brenda Yeoh and T. C. Chang (2001) analysed as a state project rather than a spontaneous outcome, tracing how policy set out to attract transnational flows of capital and people and what that did to the built environment. The Marina Bay skyline is the visible residue of that project. What the postcard gets wrong is not the scene but the denominator. The rooftop bar is where a thin professional stratum ends some of it