CONCEPT
The Career Tournament
The structural organization of professional advancement as a relative competition in which a limited number of higher positions are allocated to workers who demonstrate the most visible commitment — making reduced hours a competitive disadvantage that accumulates across a career.
The career tournament is the third of the five institutional components that produce overwork in Schor's framework. Professional advancement in most knowledge-work organizations is structured as a relative competition: promotions, plum assignments, and increasing compensation are allocated to a limited number of candidates selected from a larger pool on the basis of visible commitment, output volume, and scope expansion. The structure produces overwork as an equilibrium outcome because any individual's decision to reduce hours is punished not only in absolute terms but relative to competitors who do not reduce theirs. The tournament cannot be opted out of individually; it can only be restructured institutionally. Its compounding effects across a career mean that early-career choices about hours have decades-long consequences, making the institutional pressure particularly resistant to individual-level remediation.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The tournament structure is more visible in some professions than others. Law firms explicitly track billable hours