Susanne Ekman

Fantasies about work as limitless potential – how managers and employees seduce each other through dynamics of mutual recognition

This article draws on combinations of discourse theory and Lacanian theory to study the role of fantasies in creative knowledge work. It attempts to nuance a number of critical Lacanian studies that emphasize how management and HRM practices exploit the seductive, yet disciplining, effects of fantasies to increase worker commitment. In contrast, empirical data from fieldwork in two creative industries are used to show how employees also ensnare and discipline their managers based on the same fantasmatic dynamics. The article argues that both managers and employees avoid concrete definitions of responsibility in favor of intense mutual recognition. This allows them to pursue a shared fantasy about limitless potential (financial and existential) realized via work. This dynamic of recognition renders both parties more vulnerable towards each other and makes both parties resist attempts at moderation. The question of power and exploitation thus becomes highly muddled.

Is the high-involvement worker precarious or opportunistic? Hierarchical ambiguities in late capitalism

This article addresses the recent trend in critical organization theory and sociological literature to regard employees in creative and high-involvement work as precarious. It does so by tapping into the perennial debate about control and ambiguity in organization studies. Its main contribution is to expand the focus on workers as objects of control to exercisers of control. Drawing on ethnographic material from the creative knowledge work sector, the article argues that structural and discursive developments in late capitalism generate a specific form of ambiguity which is mobilized by both managers and employees in attempts to exploit and control the counterpart. Through careful analysis of hierarchical interactions, it shows how it is highly contextual whether managers or employees come out as ‘winners’ in the game of influence and domination. This means that the study of worker precariousness needs to be combined with the study of its flip side, namely worker opportunism.

A history of vocational ethics and professional identity: How organization scholars navigate academic value spheres:

In recent years, Michael Burawoy has sparked a discussion about the role of social sciences in society. He calls for an increased interaction between different value spheres in social science, because ‘the flourishing of each depends on the flourishing of all.’ To ensure this interaction, he proposes that we pay better attention to the micro-politics of academic lives, not least their historical, geographical and biographical specificity. The current article contributes to this agenda, contextualized in the field of Organization Studies. It analyzes the vocational micro-politics of organization scholars, especially with a focus on historical and biographical specificity. Based on in-depth interviews with 15 senior scholars, many considered founding figures of Organization Studies, I analyze how they navigate value tensions in different historical periods. To understand historical differences, the article draws on a combination of Burawoy and Boltanski and Chiapello. To understand individual navigation of value spheres, I apply terms such as selective incorporation, decoupling, antagonism and double attribution. In the end, I discuss how some scholars navigate spheres to ensure mutual correction while others navigate them to enable opportunism. The latter is a tempting strategy for young scholars trying to survive extreme performance pressures today.

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

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.

Working time regimes: A panel discussion on continuing problems

This article records a panel discussion at the Organizational Working Time Regimes conference on 31 March 2017 at the University of Graz, Austria. The discussion was moderated by Sara Louise Muhr and the panelists were Jana Costas, Susanne Ekman, Laura Empson and Dan Kärreman. The discussion both departed from yet centred on the concept of time itself: how we understand time as academics, employees and managers, and how the notion of time guides and controls all of us in various ways. Through the different perspectives that the panelists have on time and work regimes, it became evident that time – and discussions of time – is complex and context-dependent and needs to be researched as such. The discussion passionately weaved in and out of key questions on work intensification, inequality regimes and resistance to working time regimes that are deeply entwined with dynamic dialectics such as personal/professional, past/future, individual/organizational, worker/leader, good/bad. The panel in this way takes the reader through difficult discussions about what is ‘extreme’, for whom is it extreme and what interventions (if any) can be made by academics. Doing so, the panelists sensitively drew attention to our own line of work, academia, and the work regimes controlling academics.