Win-win imageries in a soap bubble world: Personhood and norms in extreme work

Abstract

This article explores the imagery and notions of personhood underlying the willingness to undertake extreme work among creative knowledge workers. The core argument is that extreme work is informed by pervasive win-win fantasies which can be recognized in a number of current organizational trends, ranging from New Public Management, over corporate culture, to project work. Each of these trends claims to transcend paradoxes by making contradictory extremes enhance each other rather than hamper each other. This is partly made possible by an increasing immateriality of both money and labor, I argue. Drawing on empirical data from creative knowledge industries, this article illustrates how 'win-win' workers subscribe to a set of norms promising that extreme work is a ticket to Never-Never Land. These norms are progression, passion, indispensability, and individual agency. The empirical analysis shows that win-win fantasies imprison us in 'irreflexive modernity', unable to escape the dream. In the end, the article discusses avenues for finding our way back into reflexive modernity through moderation, prioritization, and paying critical attention to the deferral between gain and cost practiced in win-win games.

Engagement y/o intensificación del trabajo ¿opción y/o obligación?: «Si no haces lo que te gusta, te tiene que gustar lo que haces»

“…Siguiendo estas «pasiones» algunos entrevistados parecen sobrepasar los límites de los lugares y tiempos de trabajo, y uno de los entrevistados (mando intermedio), muy explícito sobre este punto, señala que él lo percibe como una opción voluntaria y que supone disfrute. Como en el caso que describe Ekman (2015), parece que este mando está feliz de enriquecer el trabajo por la vía de su vida social y personal. Aquí emerge la cuestión central que nos interesa, si la dedicación debe/puede entenderse principalmente como una opción personal con disfrute/engagement tal y como apuntaría este último verbatim y/o el grado en que podemos reinterpretarlo más como una obligación, que nosotros vinculamos con la intensificación del trabajo.…”

‘Becoming mainstream’: the professionalisation and corporatisation of digital nomadism

“…This is precisely the revolutionary potential of the nomad, as envisioned by Deleuze and Guattari (). On the other hand, digital nomadism is also heavily reliant on the logic of capitalism and corporate culture for its own expansion—it is intrinsically connected to possibilities of free movement, the development and availability of ICTs, and the entrepreneurial ‘win‐win imageries’ that drive members of the creative/knowledge classes to ever more inventive forms of self‐exploitation (Ekman, ). Paradoxically then, nomadism, and we argue digital nomadism as well, is not only a ‘radically anti‐capitalist strategy’, but also ‘one brutal characteristic mode of capitalism itself’ (Young, : 172–173).…”

Motivation and identity: A psychoanalytic perspective on the turn to identity in motivation research

“…It has been argued that we are experiencing an irreflexive modernity (Ekmann, 2015: 591) in which individuals are incapable of reflecting on consequences while being bamboozled by win-win fantasies of work that "veil the pain of exploitation" (Ekman, 2015). As motivation research provides spaces in which to listen to how individuals story themselves as they are pushed to make something out of their lives by working (Arnaud and Guinchard: 2008: 242), space is created for greater reflexivity.…”