A form of labor regularly distinguished from manual labor. Intellectual labor is characterized as more closely related to, or dependent on, the workings of the mind or brain. Increasingly, such thought-work has been categorized as the enterprise conducted by a certain class of individuals (i.e., intellectuals) and a certain class of occupations (e.g., university professors). As such, intellectual labor not only has become a term used to explain a form of labor, but also has been established as a type of professional behavior expected, demanded, and crudely measured. These classifications and professional developments reveal several lines of tension and present meaningful problems, to wit: whether it is plausible to draw lines between intellectual labor and manual labor (and/or between intellectual labor and non-intellectual labor); whether (regardless of how carefully such line-drawing might be done) it will always be the case that there are many kinds of manual labor that, performed in a specific way or approached by the right individual, could take on a profoundly cerebral quality; whether any effort to distinguish between those who use their brain for labor and those who don’t (or those who don’t “as much,” or “as well”) can ever be anything other than an arrogant and/or condescending exercise in class prejudice, etc. Perhaps the question is more scientific than it initially appears (though this is obviously the move to intellectualize par excellence), and all one need do is insert within each laborer a sophisticated monitor capable of establishing how (and where) the brain is functioning activity-to-activity, task-to-task. In addition to the stated difficulty of classifying the boundaries of intellectual labor, problems abound in occupations that have come to be defined by their commitment to this form of work.
Take, as a relevant example, ACADEMIA and professional academics. To the extent that intellectual labor is understood as a (the?) primary duty of modern academics, questions arise as to the preferred kinds of intellectual labor and the manner in which such labor can be evaluated. Different departments and universities have come to prioritize some species of intellectual labor over others, although it is not always clear that these prioritizations are publically justified (or even conscious). Relatedly, the value and effect of intellectual labor are not easy to assess. Several criteria may be invoked, including: the number of hours spent laboring (“I saw you clocked in a few minutes late yesterday, Steve!”); the quality of publications (“Damn, that was a persuasive article, Steve!”); the selectivity of the journal that accepts said publications (“Ooh, isn’t that venue a tad bush-league, Steve?”) (see EXCELLENCE). All of the above may be ways of tracking the intellectual impact of an academic’s work on the academic community or broader public (see AUDIENCE), or they may be secondary to a more holistic mode of evaluation (“Have you heard of Steve?”). One final point on the nature and space of intellectual work: those occupations that consider themselves predicated on intellectual labor may incur grave losses when an obsession concerning its supply and demand displaces and depreciates other essential virtues, practices, or activities. When the life and the effective exercise of the mind become detached from other human goods (when, say, incrementally surpassing previous learning in a highly specialized subdisciplinary subregion becomes the summum bonum of academic life) intellectual labor may neglect its greatest and most rewarding tasks. (Or are they even tasks?)