No abstract

The literature on work-life balance primarily focuses on how individuals cope with high work demands. This study, however, investigates how young professionals experience the work-life balance support offered by organisations. Twenty-four millennial consultants were interviewed to explore their perceptions of work-life balance and organisational support policies in an extreme work context. Twelve consultants worked for strategy houses with an average working week of around 60 hours, while the other 12 worked for general management consultancies with average working weeks of roughly 50 hours. Our comparative findings suggest that overall work-life balance perceptions stay positive in both settings. In strategy houses, where work pressures are highest, reported policies and practices go beyond health programmes, training and coaching, which are the most common work-life balance measures. Strategy houses monitor their consultants’ work-life balance experience weekly, provide options to outsource components of the work, and offer multiple forms of compensation. These further policies are much appreciated. Despite these positive assessments, we also observe an increase of negative work-life balance experiences due to the higher work pressures at strategy houses. There is, therefore, some ambiguity in the work-life balance perceptions of consultants, who recalibrate what are ‘normal’ work demands and reframe and refocus on the bright side of work life. Such occupational ideologies indicate a ‘dirty work’ experience.

In the context of management and organisational literature, boredom has largely been seen in individual, psychological and negative terms, both for those experiencing it and for organisational outcomes. Through selective references to a wider sociological, historical and philosophical set of perspectives, we make a case here for refiguring boredom at work as a more relational and political notion. Rather than being seen as negative or trivial, we suggest that it is central to the concerns of organisation studies (and more widely) as a ambivalent everyday condition and experience. In particular, boredom is intimately linked to the project and promises of modernity and its associated effects on time, from factory industrialisation to contemporary work platforms. Both in terms of philosophical argument and applied fields such as art, literature, architecture and design, we suggest that boredom is both emancipatory/productive and alienating. Such an understanding establishes opportunities for research which would be central to the experience of contemporary paid employment and wider experience.

In this paper, we contribute to the study of the experience of consultants at work in two ways. First, we develop a framework of role analysis by identifying two core dimensions of consultants' professional role expectations in the literature: knowledge, whether technical or relational, and commitment, both in terms of behaviour and endurance. Second, we go on to apply this framework to 26 interviews of consultants and former consultants, from junior consultant to partner, working or having worked for 15 different firms, in order to better understand how they enact their role along all its dimensions and how it evolves over time. It allows us to spot two different patterns of role enactment: complying and negotiating and to understand their evolutions. Our findings shed light on the heterogeneity of consultants' behaviour, beyond compliance, and allow us to discuss the possibility of resistance in such elite environments.

While digital labour platforms are booming, their ability to constitute a sustainable alternative to the managerial firm and to salaried work is questionable. To date, this debate has been approached mainly from legal or political angles, and the organizational sustainability of such platforms remains underexplored. We respond to calls to study more specifically the cognitive capabilities of platforms by mobilizing knowledge-based theories of the firm. We contribute to the literature in three ways: (1) we introduce the concept of ‘cognitive sustainability’, which we define as the capacity to ensure the integration, conservation and creation of knowledge; (2) we develop a set of propositions aimed at identifying the activities that platforms are most likely to carry out in a cognitively sustainable way; (3) we argue for the possibility of an increased hybridization of digital labour platforms to perform complex activities. Mobilizing knowledge-based theories of the firm to explore new objects such as platforms and taking such hybridization processes into account adds to this body of literature by extending its application domain and taking a more dynamic perspective.