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<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Knights and Clarke find three emergent types of fragile or insecure identities in the academic workplace: impostors, aspirants, and existentialists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cfound out.\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Existentials experience the contemporary workplace as being threatening to \u201cthe worth and significance of being an academic and what is valued and meaningful\u201d (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Social media sites serve as a kind of desymbolized \u201cvirtual immanentization\u201d of the big Other that offers some element of external Imaginary confirmation of one\u2019s 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, \u201cliking\u201d and affirmation by one\u2019s social network \u201cfriends\u201d\u2014 akin to the feeling of the aspirant academics described above of needing to constantly and actively maintain their standing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is no lasting Symbolic recognition. As we discuss below, being \u201cliked\u201d (that is, affirmed and recognized) in the workplace by your supervisor takes the form of both \u201cobjective\u201d performance assessments as well as subjective assessments of being an entrepreneurial worker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We may gain a sense of \u201cUs\u201d because we know we are different and better than Them. However, neoliberal managerialism\u2014described next in terms of entrepreneurialism\u2014deploys 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<\/em> or \u201cbrand identification\u201d among employees while at the same time injecting their organizations with practices that incentivize individual competition and cultivate antisocial behavior <\/strong>(Bowles, 2016).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this connection, as Dardot and Laval (2013) note, entrepreneurialism \u201ctakes precedence over the calculating, maximizing capacity of standard economic theory\u201d (p. 111). The neoliberal presumption is that every human being \u201chas something entrepreneurial about them\u201d and market (self-)discipline can unleash this limitless personal capacity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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). <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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). <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather, management\u2019s task becomes, in part, to make it possible for Work to become the vehicle through which an individual\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In this way, the employee\u2019s entire person \u2014 body, intellect, affects, and interests\u2014becomes mobilized or instrumentalized to meet organizational ends, a state of affairs Fleming (2014) provocatively labels biocracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Since \u201ccareer success is conflated with success in life\u201d (Dardot & Laval, 2013, p. 268), organizational and work-related practices necessarily take on a new valence for the postneurotic, self-referential subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Performance, he suggests, creates a kind of \u201cmirror\u201d 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 \u201ccontinuously improving.\u201d In this way, while audit and performance technologies are instruments of control, Roberts suggests that they also serve as content for workers\u2019 demands for recognition and affirmation by management that they are more than cogs in the organizational machine<\/strong> (pp. 634\u2013636). 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Quantitative performance measures serve as \u201cobjective\u201d representations of recognition and assessments of one\u2019s advancement toward that Imaginary image of self-realization. Where the big Other fails, we might quip, \u201cbig Data\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a particular doubling-down on employees in the public and nonprofit sectors<\/strong> insofar as the discourse of Work becomes entwined with discourses of service, vocation, and \u201cdoing more with less,\u201d adding an additional layer of command to the injunction to \u201cEnjoy your work!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thomas J. Catlaw & Gary S. Marshall (2018): Enjoy Your Work! The Fantasyof the Neoliberal Workplace and Its Consequences for the Entrepreneurial Subject, Administrative Theory & Praxishttps:\/\/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 … Continue reading “Enjoy Your Work”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125,12,21,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-fantasy","category-jouissance","category-lacan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14090"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14096,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14090\/revisions\/14096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
fully one\u2019s self. <\/p>\n\n\n\n