Thomas J. Catlaw & Gary S. Marshall (2018): Enjoy Your Work! The Fantasy
of the Neoliberal Workplace and Its Consequences for the Entrepreneurial Subject, Administrative Theory & Praxis
https://doi.org/10.1080/10841806.2018.1454241
Knights and Clarke find three emergent types of fragile or insecure identities in the academic workplace: impostors, aspirants, and existentialists.
Impostors are plagued by the feeling that they are getting away with something. Their position is a result of luck or hard work rather than ability, and they are perpetually on the verge of being “found out.” They fall short of the ideal academic almost to the point of wanting to distance themselves from academic work itself. Impostors feel a strong sense of guilt for not measuring up in light of the many and varied audiences that constantly evaluate and judge them.
Aspirants strive to be the idealized, proper, fully realized academic. Journal ranking and other markers of academic prestige are held to be legitimate and valid signals of success. So, while fear and disappointment haunt aspirants, obtaining access to those journals or other academic capital provides real validation. This validation, however, is fleeting since they must continue to meet the target in order to feel affirmed on an ongoing basis.
Existentials experience the contemporary workplace as being threatening to “the worth and significance of being an academic and what is valued and meaningful” (p. 345). Existentials experience tension between fulfilling career goals and doing meaningful work. The virtues of the academic life are eroded by the escalating demands for performance and entrepreneurial practices of the corporatized university.
Social media sites serve as a kind of desymbolized “virtual immanentization” of the big Other that offers some element of external Imaginary confirmation of one’s existence and forms of recognition and affirmation. However, given its location in the Imaginary, this recognition is capricious and temporary, and requires continual, ongoing maintenance, “liking” and affirmation by one’s social network “friends”— akin to the feeling of the aspirant academics described above of needing to constantly and actively maintain their standing.
There is no lasting Symbolic recognition. As we discuss below, being “liked” (that is, affirmed and recognized) in the workplace by your supervisor takes the form of both “objective” performance assessments as well as subjective assessments of being an entrepreneurial worker.
A final destabilizing aspect of the power of the Imaginary relation today is this: The binary in-out, Us-Them, logic of the Imaginary may have stabilizing in-group effects.
We may gain a sense of “Us” because we know we are different and better than Them. However, neoliberal managerialism—described next in terms of entrepreneurialism—deploys and amplifies the competitive ego/alter-ego dynamic within social groups themselves. Thus, many contemporary organizations pull in opposite directions, trying to both create a kind of esprit de corps or “brand identification” among employees while at the same time injecting their organizations with practices that incentivize individual competition and cultivate antisocial behavior (Bowles, 2016).
In this connection, as Dardot and Laval (2013) note, entrepreneurialism “takes precedence over the calculating, maximizing capacity of standard economic theory” (p. 111). The neoliberal presumption is that every human being “has something entrepreneurial about them” and market (self-)discipline can unleash this limitless personal capacity.
Thus, neoliberal government is distinct from the workings of the traditional market in that human beings are not seen as naturally driven to advance their self-interest or to truck and barter (Smith, 1776/ 1976).
Rather, the entrepreneurial spirit must be cultivated and developed through mutually reinforcing and enabling governing practices. The self must be worked on and disciplined; and enabling social conditions must be designed (Triantafillou, 2017).
However, at the same time, there is the implicit promise that hard work on the self will not only help to realize economic gains in the market, but also help to unleash a singular aspect of each individual. But, akin to the neoclassical economic assumption that individuals freely select their preferred basket of labor and leisure (Wolff & Resnick, 2012), the choice to engage in this activity is assumed to be freely ours, though both work and play are undergirded by the imperative and promise of self-realization through entrepreneurial activity.
That is, in neoliberalizing organizations, the notion that individual lives are projects to be self-designed is accepted, but work and market-activity is the hegemonic way for this to happen. The entrepreneur is the only Imaginary (in the Lacanian sense) identification that is sanctioned. From the management side, the task, then, is not merely to value employees and to make work meaningful.
Rather, management’s task becomes, in part, to make it possible for Work to become the vehicle through which an individual’s authentic self and personal growth trajectory are realized and to see that process of self-realization as an essential instrument for advancing organizational and managerial objectives.
In this way, the employee’s entire person — body, intellect, affects, and interests—becomes mobilized or instrumentalized to meet organizational ends, a state of affairs Fleming (2014) provocatively labels biocracy.
Since “career success is conflated with success in life” (Dardot & Laval, 2013, p. 268), organizational and work-related practices necessarily take on a new valence for the postneurotic, self-referential subject.
Performance, he suggests, creates a kind of “mirror” that reflects back to the subject a substantial and unified self, and gives the worker a way to measure the progress of a self that needs to be “continuously improving.” In this way, while audit and performance technologies are instruments of control, Roberts suggests that they also serve as content for workers’ demands for recognition and affirmation by management that they are more than cogs in the organizational machine (pp. 634–636). This endows management with the power to address the demand for confirmation of our existence and puts the worker in a position of constantly testing out the similarity or difference of others in the workplace.
A new, fragile social bond is being articulated today that is founded on the dynamics of desymbolization, auto-referentiality, and the centrality of unstable, Symbolically-unhinged Imaginary relations. This renders postneurotic subjects dependent on ongoing recognition and affirmation from (little) others while, at the same time, confronting the command to be
fully one’s self.
Neoliberal ideology frames this project in the image of the entrepreneur. For the postneurotic enterprising subject, Work takes on central importance and promise in light of the neoliberal emphasis on (paid) work as the primary location and means for achieving the self-discipline and focus to actualize that true self.
Quantitative performance measures serve as “objective” representations of recognition and assessments of one’s advancement toward that Imaginary image of self-realization. Where the big Other fails, we might quip, “big Data” fills in. In sum, this is the ever-displaced ground for the experience of inadequacy, fatigue, and depression (see Vanheule et al., 2003) in the contemporary workplace.
There is a particular doubling-down on employees in the public and nonprofit sectors insofar as the discourse of Work becomes entwined with discourses of service, vocation, and “doing more with less,” adding an additional layer of command to the injunction to “Enjoy your work!”