Depraved, Distracted, Disabled, or Just “Pack Rats”? Workplace Hoarding Personas in Physical and Virtual Realms

Jo Ann Oravec

doi:10.21153/ps2015vol1no2art472

Authors

Jo Ann Oravec University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2015vol1no2art472

Keywords:

hoarding, persona, workplace disability, anxiety, popular culture, virtual goods, class, lifelogging

Abstract

This article provides some potential directions in exploring the construction of the persona of the “hoarder” and addresses how such a persona can move to the foreground of an individual’s set of workplace-related personas. Hoarding throws into relief some critical concerns about the social standings of individuals in workplaces and the extent to which they have autonomous expression. The article frames hoarding in terms of its capacity to externalize particular social issues (such as environmental problems) and generate public discourse, and examines both physical hoardings (books and papers in academic and office settings, for example) and hoardings of virtual goods (such as digital music, video files, and pornographic images). Virtual hoardings have been constructed as problematic as they create barriers to the free flow of information in the workplace and can challenge organizational interests related to intellectual property concerns. Hoarding as a whole is becoming more tightly circumscribed as a workplace and community condition, in part because the ability to manage physical and virtual items in confined settings is considered central to many forms of competent societal functioning.
An assortment of human resource management initiatives to mitigate hoarding concerns has developed, including the consideration of hoarding as a disability. However, hoarding behavior is increasing creating problems for those who are searching for simple definitions or straightforward diagnostic criteria. This article also provides some structures for analysis of the class-related and economic dimensions of workplace hoarding personas, and explores potential implications of lifelogging initiatives and hoarding acceptance approaches.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Jo Ann Oravec, University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, USA

Jo Ann Oravec is a professor of information technology in the College of Business and Economics at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. She received her MBA, MS, MA, and PhD at UW-Madison. She also taught at Baruch College of the City University of New York (public policy) as well as UW-Madison and Ball State University. She chaired the Privacy Council of the State of Wisconsin, the nation's first state-level council dealing with information technology and privacy. She has written books including "Virtual Individuals, Virtual Groups: Human Dimensions of Groupware and Computer Networking" (Cambridge University Press). She has written extensively on privacy, American studies, artificial intelligence, futurism, online reputational systems, and emerging technologies. She has held visiting fellow positions at both Cambridge and Oxford and has been a featured speaker at conferences in Hiroshima.

References

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 2013. Print.

Ayers, Catherine R., Princeton Ly, Ian Howard, Tina Mayes, Ben Porter, and Yasmeen Iqbal. “Hoarding Severity Predicts Functional Disability in Latelife Hoarding Disorder Patients.” International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry 29.7 (2014): 741-746. Print.

Baraniuk, Chris. “Things to Come.” New Scientist 221.2962 (2014): 46-47. Print.

Belk, Russell W., Melanie Wallendorf, John F. Sherry, and Morris B. Holbrook. “Collecting in a Consumer Culture.” Highways and Buyways: Naturalistic Research from the Consumer Behavior Odyssey. (1991): 178-215. Print.

Bergstrom, Theodore C. “On the Evolution of Hoarding, Risk-taking, and Wealth Distribution in Nonhuman and Human Populations.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.Supplement 3 (2014): 10860-10867. Print.

Brandes, Uta, and Michael Erlhoff, eds. My Desk is My Castle: Exploring Personalization Cultures. Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Print.

Bratiotis, Christiana. Task Force Community Response to Compulsive Hoarding Cases. Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston University, 3363599 (2009). Print.

Bratiotis, Christiana, Cristina Sorrentino Schmalisch, and Gail Steketee. The Hoarding Handbook: A Guide for Human Service Professionals. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.

Breininger, Dorothy. Stuff Your Face Or Face Your Stuff: The Organized Approach to Lose Weight by Decluttering Your Life. Deerfield Beach, Florida: Health Communications, Inc. (HCI). 2013. Print.

Broady, Timothy R. “The Carer Persona: Masking Individual Identities.” Persona Studies 1.1 (2015): 65-75. Print.

Bubrick, Jerome, Fugen Neziroglu, and Jose Yaryura-Tobias. Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding: Why You Save and How You Can Stop. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2004. Print.

Campbell, Jane, and Mike Oliver. Disability Politics: Understanding Our Past, Changing Our Future. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Canale, Anthony, and Bradley Klontz. “Hoarding Disorder: It’s More Than Just an Obsession-Implications for Financial Therapists and Planners.” Journal of Financial Therapy 4.2 (2013): 43-63. Print.

Coles, Meredith E., Randy O. Frost, Richard G. Heimberg, and Gail Steketee. “Hoarding Behaviors in a Large College Sample.” Behaviour Research and Therapy 41.2 (2003): 179-194. Print.

Conniff, Richard. “The Hoarding Instinct.” Smithsonian 42.9 (2012): 92. Print.

de la Cruz, Lorena Fernández, Ashley E. Nordsletten, Danielle Billotti, and David Mataix-Cols. “Photograph-aided Assessment of Clutter in Hoarding Disorder: Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words?” Depression and Anxiety 30.1 (2013): 61-66. Print.

Diekema, Anne R., and M. Whitney Olsen. “Teacher Personal Information Management (PIM) Practices: Finding, Keeping, and ReFinding Information.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 65.11 (2014): 2261-2277. Print.

Edwards, Richard C., and Richard Edwards. Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Print.

Ellis, Lindsay. “An Adjunct’s Death Becomes a Rallying Cry for Many in Academe.” Chronicle of Higher Education. Chronicle. 19 Sept. 2013. Web. 20 Sept. 2015.

Elsbach, Kimberly D. “Interpreting Workplace Identities: The Role of Office Décor.” Journal of Organizational Behavior 25.1 (2004): 99-128. Print.

Evans, Joel M., Michael G. Hendron, and James B. Oldroyd. “Withholding the Ace: The Individual-and Unit-Level Performance Effects of Self-Reported and Perceived Knowledge Hoarding.” Organization Science 26.2 (2014): 494-510. Print.

Fitzgerald, Paul B. “The ‘Bowerbird Symptom': A Case of Severe Hoarding of Possessions.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 31.4 (1997): 597-600. Print.

Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of Apocalypse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.

Fried, Daniel. “Compulsive Hoarding: Psychopathologies of Print, Phenomenologies of Text.” Culture, Theory, and Critique 55.3 (2014). Print.

Frost, Randy O., Gail Steketee, and Lauren Williams. “Compulsive Buying, Compulsive Hoarding, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.” Behavior Therapy 33.2 (2002): 201–214. Print.

Good, Katie Day. “From Scrapbook to Facebook: A History of Personal Media Assemblage and Archives.” New Media & Society 15.4 (2013): 557-573. Print.

Gormley, Cynthia J., and Samantha J. Gormley. “Data Hoarding and Information Clutter: The Impact on Cost, Life Span of Data, Effectiveness, Sharing, Productivity, and Knowledge Management Culture.” Issues in Information Systems 13.2 (2012): 90-95. Print.

Grisham, Jessica, Gail Steketee, and Randy O. Frost. “Interpersonal Problems and Emotional Intelligence in Compulsive Hoarding.” Depression and Anxiety 25.9 (2008): E63-E81. Print.

Haiken, Melanie. “The Surprising New Truth About Hoarding Disorder” Forbes. Forbes, 19 Nov. 2013. Web. 20 Sept. 2015.

Haugen, David, and Susan Musser. Should the U.S. Reduce Its Consumption? Farmington Hills: Greenhaven Press, 2011. Print.

Herring, Scott. “Collyer Curiosa: A Brief History of Hoarding.” Criticism, 53.2 (2011): 159-188. Print.

---. The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture. U of Chicago P, 2014. Print.

Hudson, Wayne C. “Persona and Defence Mechanisms.” Journal of Analytical Psychology 23.1 (1978): 54-62. Print.

“Is It Workplace Hoarding ... Or Record-Keeping?” Administrative Professional Today 40.3 (2014): 3. Print.

Jones, Colin, and Satwant Singh. “The Experience of Emotional Distancing in the Management of Compulsive Hoarding: A Visual Methods Approach Using The ‘Hoard’ Acronym Tool.” Journal of Cognitive-Behavioral Psychotherapy and Research 2.1 (2013): 41-46. Print.

Kibby, Marjorie. “Collect Yourself: Negotiating Personal Music Archives.” Information, Communication & Society 12.3 (2009): 428-443. Print.

Kim, Seok Eun. “Physical Workplace as a Strategic Asset for Improving Performance in Public Organizations.” Administration & Society 46.5 (2014): 496-518. Print.

Kirk, David S., and Abigail Sellen. “On Human Remains: Values and Practice in the Home Archiving of Cherished Objects.” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 17.3 (2010): 10. Print.

Lawrence, Lee Matthew, Joseph Ciorciari, and Michael Kyrios. “Relationships that Compulsive Buying Has with Addiction, Obsessive-compulsiveness, Hoarding, and Depression.” Comprehensive Psychiatry 55.5 (2014): 1137-1145. Print.

Leonard, Annie. The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-and a Vision for Change. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Print.

Lepselter, Susan. “The Disorder of Things: Hoarding Narratives in Popular Media.” Anthropological Quarterly 84.4 (2011): 919-947. Print.

Lupton, Deborah. “Self-tracking Cultures: Towards a Sociology of Personal Informatics.” Proceedings of the 26th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Designing Futures: the Future of Design. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (2014): 77-86. Print.

Magallares, Alejandro, Jose Morales, and Miguel Rubio. “The Effect of Work Discrimination on the Well-being of Obese People.” International Journal of Psychology & Psychological Therapy 11.2 (2011): 255-267. Print.

Mataix-Cols, David. “Hoarding Disorder.” New England Journal of Medicine 370.21 (2014): 2023-30. Print.

Mayer, Vicki. Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.

Mueller, Astrid, Ross D. Crosby, Heide Glaesmer, and Martina de Zwaan. “The Prevalence of Compulsive Hoarding and its Association with Compulsive Buying in a German Population-based Sample.” Behaviour Research and Therapy 47.8 (2009): 705-709. Print.

Murphy, Kathryn. “The High Cost of Hoarding Disorder.” Nursing Management 45.6 (2014): 20-26. Print.

Neal-Barnett, Angela, and Lorre Mendelson. “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in the Workplace: An Invisible Disability.” Women & Therapy 26.1/2 (2003): 169. Print.

Ng, Ricky Yuk-kwan, and Heather Höpfl. “Objects in Exile: The Intimate Structures of Resistance and Consolation.” Journal of Organizational Change Management 24.6 (2011): 751-766. Print.

O’Connor, John. “To Hold On or to Let Go? Loss and Substitution in the Process of Hoarding.” European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling 16.2 (2014): 101-113. Print.

Oravec, Jo Ann. Virtual Individuals, Virtual Groups: Human Dimensions of Groupware and Computer Networking. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

---. “The Ethics of Sexting: Issues Involving Consent and the Production of Intimate Content.” Digital Ethics. Eds. Don Heider and Adrienne L. Massanari. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. 129-145. Print.

Paterson, Jennifer, Jessica Hogan, and Heather Willis.“Vision, Passion, Action: Reflections on Learning to Do Disability Studies in the Classroom and Beyond.” Disability Studies Quarterly 28.4 (2008): 1-11. Web. 20 Sept. 2015.

Pearce, Susan. Collecting in Contemporary Practice. New York: Sage, 1997.

Pertusa, Alberto, Randy O. Frost, Miguel A. Fullana, Jack Samuels, Gail Steketee, David Tolin, Sanjaya Saxena, James F. Leckman, and David Mataix-Cols. “Refining the Diagnostic Boundaries of Compulsive Hoarding: A Critical Review.” Clinical Psychology Review 30.4 (2010): 371-386. Print.

Rasmussen, Jessica, Gail Steketee, Michelle Silverman, and Sabine Wilhelm. “The Relationship of Hoarding Symptoms to Schizotypal Personality and Cognitive Schemas in an OCD Sample.” Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy 27.4(2013): 384-396. Print.

Rasmussen, R. Kent. Dear Mark Twain: Letters from his readers. U of California P, 2014. Print.

Ronan, Keith P. “Navigating the Goat Paths: Compulsive Hoarding, or Collyer Brothers Syndrome, and the Legal Reality of Clutter.” Rutgers Law Review 64 (2011): 235-264. Print.

Russell, Bertrand. Principles of Social Reconstruction. New York: Routledge. 1917/1997. Print.

Santuzzi, Alecia M., Pamela R. Waltz, Lisa M. Finkelstein, and Deborah E. Rupp. “Invisible Disabilities: Unique Challenges for Employees and Organizations.” Industrial and Organizational Psychology 7.2 (2014): 204-219. Print.

Sholl, Jessie. Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean about her Mother’s Hoarding. Gallery Books, 2010. Print.

Shulman, Terrence. Cluttered Lives, Empty Souls: Compulsive Stealing, Spending, and Hoarding. San Carlos: Infinity, 2011. Print.

Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. New York: Penguin, 2010. Print.

Sprague, Robert. “Orwell was an Optimist: the Evolution of Privacy in the United States and its De-evolution for American Employees.” John Marshall Law Review 42 (2008): 83-134. Print.

Steketee, Gail, and Randy Frost. Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. Print.

Thomas, J. A., and K. Mora. “Community Resilience, Latent Resources and Resource Scarcity after an Earthquake: Is Society Really Three Meals Away from Anarchy?” Natural Hazards 74.2 (2014): 1-14. Print.

Thoreau, Henry D. Walden. New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 1845/1995. Print.

Tolin, David F., Randy O. Frost, and Gail Steketee. “A Brief Interview for Assessing Compulsive Hoarding: The Hoarding Rating Scale-Interview.” Psychiatry Research 178.1 (2010): 147-152. Print.

Tolin, David F., Randy O. Frost, Gail Steketee, Krista D. Gray, and Kristin E. Fitch. “The Economic and Social Burden of Compulsive Hoarding.” Psychiatry Research 160.2 (2008): 200-211. Print.

Vigne, Paula, Gabriela B. de Menezes, Murat Yucel, and Leonardo F. Fontenelle. “Can Hoarding be a Symptom of Social Anxiety Disorder? A Case Study.” The International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine 46.3 (2013): 315-23. Print.

Wang, John M., Rachael D. Seidler, Julie L. Hall, and Stephanie D. Preston. “The Neural Bases Of Acquisitiveness: Decisions To Acquire And Discard Everyday Goods Differ Across Frames, Items, And Individuals.” Neuropsychologia 50.5 (2012): 939-948. Print.

Weinman, Jaime J. “Can't Get Enough Of Compulsive Hoarders.” Maclean's 124.1 (2011): 77. Print.

Weiss, Kenneth J. “Hoarding, Hermitage, and the Law: Why We Love the Collyer Brothers.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 38.2 (2010): 251-257. Print.

Winter, Izabelle. Diary of a Hoarder's Daughter. Amazon Digital Services, 2014. Print.

Wolf, Katrin, Albrecht Schmidt, Agon Bexheti, and Marc Langheinrich. “Lifelogging: You're Wearing a Camera?” IEEE Pervasive Computing 13.3 (2014): 8-12. Print.

Woody, Sheila R., Kirstie Kellman-McFarlane, and Alison Welsted. “Review of Cognitive Performance in Hoarding Disorder.” Clinical Psychology Review 34.4 (2014): 324-336. Print.

Zamwel, Einat, Orna Sasson-Levy, and Guy Ben-Porat. “Voluntary Simplifiers as Political Consumers: Individuals Practicing Politics through Reduced Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Culture 14.2 (2014): 199-217. Print.