Doing critical scholarship

According to the American Psychological Association (2019), the field of industrial and organizational psychology involves “the scientific study of human behavior in organizations and the workplace. The specialty focuses on deriving principles of individual, group, and organizational behavior and applying this knowledge to the solution of problems at work.” As a critical scholar, I would like to problematize and reframe what is meant by the “study of human behavior in organizations.” Following sociologist of work Charles Perrow (Reference Perrow1986), I would suggest that, “The problems advanced by social scientists have been primarily the problems of human relations in an authoritarian setting” (p. 53). In other words, issues of power, control, and resistance are endemic and defining features of “human behavior in organizations.”

From a critical perspective, then, power is not just one possible topic among many but rather provides an epistemic frame through which the dynamics of organizational life can be understood. For example, critical scholars would argue that Taylorism was not simply a system of work efficiency but also an effort to transform the dynamics of control and resistance in the workplace as managers sought to limit the autonomy of workers. Indeed, from a critical perspective, the field of management—broadly construed—can be viewed as deploying increasingly sophisticated efforts to more efficiently extract surplus value from alienated, expropriated labor. From scientific management, through the human relations and human resource management movements, to the corporate culture initiatives of the 1980s and 1990s, and finally to current notions of self-branding and the “enterprise self,” we see not so much a movement away from the exercise of power but rather a shift from coercive to consensus-based forms of power. In this sense, the workplace under capitalism has evolved to adapt to worker struggles against the demands of capital. What has remained consistent, however, is the managerial effort to take what is relatively indeterminate (labor power; that is, the abstract potential to labor) and, through various management practices, realize something rather more determinate (productive labor and hence surplus value).

I address these issues from a particular disciplinary viewpoint. I am not a sociologist, a management scholar, or an industrial psychologist, although my scholarly interests overlap with all of those fields. I am a communication scholar who writes about work and organizations; my intellectual home is the field of organizational communication within the discipline of Communication. I have much in common with the subdiscipline of Critical Management Studies (CMS), which functions under the aegis of the Academy of Management, although most of CMS’s members are based in Europe and Australasia. CMS scholars tend to adopt an “antimanagerial” perspective toward work; this does not mean that they are “against management” but rather that they problematize the default assumption of “managerialism” as involving the increasing rationalization of employees and their role as resources to be tapped for productivity and profit (Burrell & Morgan, Reference Burrell and Morgan1979). In this sense, CMS tends to assume the perspective of the low-level worker rather than the manager, frequently through the examination of worker resistance to managerial control processes (e.g., Brophy, Reference Brophy2017; Fleming, Reference Fleming2014a; Fleming & Spicer, Reference Fleming and Spicer2007; Mumby, Thomas, Martí, & Seidl, Reference Mumby, Thomas, Martí and Seidl2017).

What does it mean, then, to bring a critical communication sensibility to the study of work and organizations? First, I treat communication not just as a phenomenon or process to investigate but as a mode of explanation. In this sense, communication is not something that occurs “in” organizations; rather, organizations are constituted through communication processes—what my field refers to as the “CCO” (Communicative Constitution of Organization) model (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, Reference Ashcraft, Kuhn and Cooren2009; Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud, & Taylor, Reference Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud, Taylor, Putnam and Mumby2014; Putnam & Nicotera, Reference Putnam and Nicotera2009). Organizations are thus viewed as the product of repeated, iterative interactions among people and are produced and reproduced in an everyday, ongoing manner through communication processes. From this perspective, organizations as communication can be defined as “the process of creating and negotiating collective, coordinated systems of meaning through symbolic practices oriented toward the achievement of organizational goals” (Mumby & Kuhn, Reference Mumby and Kuhn2019, p. 11).

Second, I see organizations as political sites of contestation. The communicative construction of collective systems of meaning does not occur spontaneously or capriciously, but is both medium and outcome of struggle among organizational stakeholder groups. In its simplest terms, the key stakeholders are managers and employees, who may struggle over, for example, the meaning of “a fair day’s work,” the right to representation, what constitutes adequate compensation, and so forth. Looked at from a broader and more complex perspective, stakeholder struggle can involve consumers, community members, shareholders, and brand publics, among others. For example, shareholders may pressure publicly owned companies to eschew long-term planning in favor of short-term returns, leading to management practices that emphasize maximizing stock price. Workers may resist the resulting corporate efforts to intensify work and/or sell off less profitable parts of the company. As I mentioned above, management and organizational theory must be made sense of in the context of this struggle, in that they are developed as efforts to address the dynamics of workplace control and resistance (though they are generally framed as neutral efforts to rationalize and improve work).

Third, and related, a critical communication perspective recognizes that organizations are not just places where people work, but they also function as important sites for the creation and maintenance of personal identity (Beech, Reference Beech2011; Deetz, Reference Deetz1992; Kenny, Whittle, & Willmott, Reference Kenny, Whittle and Willmott2011; Kuhn, Reference Kuhn2006; Wieland, Reference Wieland2010). In this sense, the modern corporation has become the primary institution for the development of stable conceptions of self, surpassing the family, church, government, and education system in this role (Deetz, Reference Deetz1992). Thus, we are all subject to processes of corporate colonization—a concept that reflects the extent to which corporate ideologies and discourses pervade our lives. For example, a number of researchers have examined how the boundaries between work and life are increasingly blurred, and thus harder to manage. The emergence of “no-collar” work (usually creative “knowledge work” that occurs in decentralized organizations with flexible but highly demanding work schedules) in the past 20 years or so has put even more pressure on a coherent, stable sense of identity because it breaks down the boundaries between work and other spheres of life almost completely. Work is the “new neighborhood,” and the new neighborhood is work. As Ross (Reference Ross2003) has shown, although no-collar work often features more humane, participative organizational environments, the hidden costs to self-identity (in terms of losing any sense of self independent from work) can be high. Moreover, as the old model of the linear and stable career path has given way to increased insecurity and frequent job changes under neoliberalism (see below), many workers face the contradiction of a strong personal investment in work identity coupled with unstable and precarious job possibilities.

Finally, a critical communication perspective views organizations as important sites of decision making and democracy (Deetz, Reference Deetz1992). Indeed, the industrial workplace has been a site of struggle from its very beginning. In the mid-19th century, the working-class Chartist movement in the UK almost caused a political revolution with its fight for political reform and improved pay and working conditions in factories. Between 1881 and 1905, in the United States there were 37,000 strikes involving 7 million workers in a total workforce of 29 million (Bederman, Reference Bederman1995, pp. 13–14). Unions became a major political force, with membership rising from 487,000 in 1897 to 2,072,700 in 1904 (Perrow, Reference Perrow1986, p. 57). Strong union representation was a major feature of the “social contract” between management and workers at the height of Fordism in the 3 decades following World War II. Today, there is a burgeoning $15 per hour livable wage movement. My point is that, despite its frequently authoritarian, nondemocratic structure, the workplace has always been a site where workers collectively struggle for increased rights in terms of pay, working conditions, and voice. From a communication perspective, interest lies in how organizational stakeholders engage in various struggles over meaning as a way to shape how decisions get made.

Let me now turn to a discussion of the influence of (neo)Marxist theory on the study of work and organizations.

Marxism, neo-Marxism, and work

Critically oriented studies of work and organizations have been around for a long time. The intellectual heritage of this tradition can be traced back, first and foremost, to Karl Marx (Reference Marx, Moore and Aveling1967) and his critique of capital. Marx argued that histories were not rooted in systems of ideas (as did the philosophers Kant and Hegel, for example) but were the result of material conditions arising from specific modes of production. Historically, each mode of production (e.g., citizen–slave, aristocrat–serf, capitalist–worker) was rooted in a system of exploitation specific to that mode of production. Marx showed how exploitation under capitalism took a very particular and insidious form, in which workers were stripped of their organic relationship to their own labor and reduced to the status of a commodity in the cycle of economic value production. Because of this, “[the worker] does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself” (Marx, Reference Marx1961, p. 37).

The capitalist, then, is confronted by a worker who is alienated from his or her own labor. Importantly, however, the capitalist does not buy the worker per se (which would, of course, be slavery) but rather buys the worker’s time for a fixed period (Harvey, Reference Harvey2018). The trick for the capitalist is to utilize this purchased labor time (i.e., the potential to labor) in the most effective manner possible, maximizing the production of surplus value (the creation of surplus value occurs at the point in the working day when the worker has produced the value of his or her labor power and thus for the remainder of the working day labors for free). As Marx shows, the production of surplus value lies at the root of profit. From a Marxist perspective, then, the distinctive character of capitalism lies in its subordination of the human capacity to create useful products (what Marx calls “use value”) to the exploitive demands of the capitalist, whose concern is to create commodities that realize exchange value greater than the cost of production. In other words, capitalists do not care about what they produce as long as it realizes exchange value and hence profit.

The organizing logic of capitalism therefore requires that surplus value is appropriated from labor by paying it less than the value it adds to the labor process. As a result, capitalism is in a constant state of flux, characterized by a perpetual revolutionizing of the production process to ensure the continued creation of surplus value. Sometimes this involves technological revolutions, such as Henry Ford’s introduction of the moving assembly line or Toyota’s introduction of the Kaizen system in the 1950s. At other times it involves the introduction of new systems of managing workers (e.g., scientific management, human relations, corporate culture, etc.).

However, the ongoing production of surplus value—whether by technological or managerial innovation—is complicated by what labor process theorists have referred to as the “indeterminacy” of the labor process (Thompson & O’Dougherty, Reference Thompson, O’Dougherty, Alvesson, Bridgman and Willmott2009). From this perspective (and Marx’s), conflict is a defining feature of capitalism because of the problematic status of labor power; that is, the employer cannot access the commodity purchased without going through the person and body of the worker. What is purchased as abstract labor becomes embodied labor in the work process itself. Frequently, workers do not simply submit to intensification of the labor process but rather push back against such efforts. For example, even though Frederick Taylor’s task was to eradicate “systematic soldiering,” he recognized it as workers’ rational response to managerial efforts to increase production (because increased production frequently resulted in piece rate cuts and/or layoffs as a further way to increase profitability).

Workers, then, are not completely ineffectual in the face of capital accumulation processes; although as workers they are crippled (in the sense that they are reduced to appendages to the labor process), as wage laborers they have opportunities for resistance by exploiting capital’s dependency on wage labor as the primary source of surplus value. Marx argued that the combination of ongoing crises of capitalism and the emergence of a working-class consciousness would inevitably lead to a new socialist order in which workers “expropriated the expropriators” and came to own the means of production. Of course, the “inevitable” revolution did not occur, as capitalism in the 20th century weathered its various legitimation crises by both corporate adjustments to worker demands (e.g., company pension plans, union contracts, etc.) and government intervention to mitigate some of the worst excesses of capitalism (e.g., the Adamson Act that introduced the 8-hour work day, social security, the GI bill, etc.).

For the most part, in the 20th century Marxist theorists ceded the study of work to the business schools and the industrial psychologists as a site of struggle under capitalism. When the predicted downfall of capitalism did not come, second-generation Marxists turned to other phenomena to explain the ability of capitalism to weather its various legitimation crises. For example, scholars of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (established in 1923) turned their critical eye on the newly emergent “culture industries,” arguing that capitalism legitimated itself by creating mass-produced, easily consumable forms of popular culture to the masses. As they argued, capitalism could not survive without a population that learned how to be consumers, both of the products that capitalism produced and the system of ideas that sustained capitalism as an economic and political system (Horkheimer & Adorno, Reference Horkheimer, Adorno and Cumming1988; Marcuse, Reference Marcuse1964).

It was not until the 1970s that work once again became a focus of Marxist critique. Harry Braverman’s (Reference Braverman1974) classic text, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, was the first systematic critique of the capitalist labor process since Marx’s Capital was published over 100 years earlier. Braverman’s basic thesis is that under monopoly capitalism in the 20th century, work was continually subject to processes of deskilling, such that the conception of work and its execution—once united under craft-based work—was torn asunder. For Braverman, the main culprit of this separation was Taylorism and scientific management (Taylor, Reference Taylor1911/1934). As he argues, although Taylor is traditionally viewed as an efficiency expert, his true impact is measured by his reorganization of the labor process such that the traditional stock of knowledge about work was redistributed from workers to managers. According to Braverman, then, the real success of scientific management was not increased efficiency and productivity but the development of managerial control over the labor process via the deskilling of workers. After scientific management, hand and brain were not just divided, but hostile to each other; workers must switch off their brains to get through the monotony of the work day. For example, in 1913 Henry Ford’s Dearborn plant had to hire 52,000 workers to maintain a workforce of 13,600 employees, such was the level of alienation experienced by workers on Ford’s assembly line (Esch, Reference Esch2018, p. 37).

Braverman argues that although the conventional wisdom is that scientific management was replaced by more humanistic approaches to work (e.g., human relations theory), it actually became a taken-for-granted way of organizing work (both blue and white collar). Moreover, he suggests that human relations theory (one of the founding theories of industrial psychology) is more accurately viewed as an effort to psychologically adjust the worker to the anomic effects of work under scientific management and capitalism. Thus, the task of Elton Mayo and his colleagues was not to make the labor process itself more humanizing but to reposition the manager in a more therapeutic role, enabling workers to better negotiate the psychological and emotional stress of work under capitalism (Illouz, Reference Illouz2007). The goal, then, was not so much to revolutionize work but to short circuit any revolutionary tendencies that an organized workforce might develop—a position consistent with Mayo’s conservative, even antidemocratic, philosophy (O’Connor, Reference O’Connor1999a, Reference O’Connor1999b). Even today, one could argue that the study of work in the fields of management and industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology rarely questions managerial logic. For example, although research on workplace affect and emotion can be seen as a shift away from the preoccupation with cognition, focus is largely on the relationship between emotion and worker satisfaction and productivity (e.g., Brief & Weiss, Reference Brief and Weiss2002). Rarely are questions asked about the politics of emotion management and the degree to which the regulation of employee emotion has emerged in the last 30 years as another sphere of corporate capture and control—another way to make the indeterminacy of labor more determinate. As Hochschild (Reference Hochschild1983) showed more than 35 years ago, “emotional labor” is a serious source of stress for workers in corporate efforts to shape even their emotional expression.

Braverman’s analysis of the capitalist labor process catalyzed a resurgence in Marxist-inspired studies of work and gave birth to an interdisciplinary field of study called labor process theory (Ackroyd & Thompson, Reference Ackroyd and Thompson1999; Knights & Willmott, Reference Knights and Willmott1990; Thompson & O’Dougherty, Reference Thompson, O’Dougherty, Alvesson, Bridgman and Willmott2009). Space prohibits a detailed discussion of this field’s research over the last 40 years, but one of its central foci has been the subjective experience of work under the labor conditions that Braverman documented. Braverman himself acknowledged that his focus was on the objectively identifiable, structural changes in work under 20th century monopoly capitalism and that workers’ actual experience of the labor process was a topic he intended to leave to others. Thus, Labor Process theorists and scholars in related (indeed, overlapping) fields of study (e.g., CMS, critical organization studies, critical organizational communication studies) have in the last several decades have taken up this challenge and turned to exploring the everyday dynamics of control and resistance in the workplace. In other words, how do workers engage with the control processes that monopoly capitalism and its agents have put in place?

If work under capitalism is characterized by the “indeterminacy of labor,” then much of that indeterminacy plays out at the level of meaning. In other words, it is not simply a question of management coercion of workers into greater productivity but rather of communicatively shaping the organizational reality in which workers participate and, as such, influencing workers’ sense-making processes. Thus, much of critical organization research in the 1980s and 1990s took up what became known as the “linguistic” or “discursive” turn (Deetz, Reference Deetz2003; Oswick, Keenoy, & Grant, Reference Oswick, Keenoy and Grant2000), which, broadly speaking, viewed discourse as the very “stuff” of organizing; language and communication do not simply describe an already existing organization reality but bring that reality into being. For critical researchers, such construction processes do not occur spontaneously or arbitrarily but rather are seen as intimately tied to existing relations of power and control. Thus, critical studies examine how these relations of power and control get played out at the level of discourse and meaning construction. In this vein, critical researchers have explored a broad range of discursive practices, including, for example, narratives (Brown, Reference Brown1998; Mumby, Reference Mumby1987, Reference Mumby1988; Trethewey, Reference Trethewey2001; Witten, Reference Witten and Mumby1993), metaphors (Deetz & Mumby, Reference Deetz, Mumby and Ruben1985; Smith & Eisenberg, Reference Smith and Eisenberg1987; Tracy, Lutgen-Sandvik, & Alberts, Reference Tracy, Lutgen-Sandvik and Alberts2006), humor (Collinson, Reference Collinson1988; Mumby, Reference Mumby, Lutgen-Sandvik and Sypher2009; Rhodes & Westwood, Reference Rhodes and Westwood2007), rituals (Burawoy, Reference Burawoy1979; Rosen, Reference Rosen1985, Reference Rosen1988), and everyday talk (Holmes, Reference Holmes2006; Pringle, Reference Pringle1989; Trujillo, Reference Trujillo1992).

Critical research has therefore focused heavily on the dynamics of control and resistance that play out at the level of every communication processes. For example, critical scholars quickly challenged the “corporate culture” approach, showing how the idea of a single, homogenous culture that was carefully engineered by management was something of a chimera in practice (Alvesson, Reference Alvesson1993, Reference Alvesson2002; Kunda, Reference Kunda1992; Willmott, Reference Willmott1993; Young, Reference Young1989). As a number of critical researchers showed, the development of strong cultures was often less about employee empowerment and democratization of the workplace and more about expectations that workers would commit their entire selves—body and soul—to the organization. As Kunda’s (Reference Kunda1992) well-known ethnography of a high-tech organization showed, although employees worked in a highly decentralized, post-bureaucratic system where they ostensibly experienced considerable autonomy, the demands placed on them by the corporation’s strong culture frequently led to either employee burnout through overwork, or various forms of employee resistance to corporate efforts to fully capture their senses of self.

Much of this research tended to follow one of two tracks. First, many of the studies explored the discursive processes through which the existing “deep structure” (political and economic) relations of power and control were reproduced at the level of everyday organizing through members’ discourse. In other words, how do workers collectively reproduce their own oppression (e.g., Burawoy, Reference Burawoy1979; Collinson, Reference Collinson1992)? The second research track focused much more heavily on employee resistance to corporate efforts at control through meaning management. Here, the focus is on the individual and collective agency of workers as they seek to both to resist managerial control efforts and construct spaces (both physical and metaphorical) within which they can construct zones of autonomy, free from managerial intervention.

Interestingly, in the last decade or so this second research track has exploded (e.g., Courpasson & Vallas, Reference Courpasson and Vallas2016; Fairhurst & Zoller, Reference Fairhurst, Zoller and Banks2008; Fleming & Spicer, Reference Fleming and Spicer2008; Frayne, Reference Frayne2015; Mumby, Reference Mumby2005; Mumby et al., Reference Mumby, Thomas, Martí and Seidl2017; Paulsen, Reference Paulsen2014). This is perhaps not at all suprising, given a number of emergent factors over the last 30 years or more, including the decline of the management–labor social contract, increased worker productivity and simultaneous decline in real wages, increasing income disparities between rich and poor, and the ongoing shift toward “gig” work and zero hour contracts (resulting in greater work insecurity). All of these factors have contributed to a work environment that is more exploitative and stressful for workers, leading to less commitment and loyalty to employers, particularly given the constant invocation to think of themselevs as “entrepreneurial subjects” who must develop their own brands (Peters, Reference Peters1997). Thus, in the transtion from Fordism to post-Fordism (see below), a work environment has emerged in which employers have shown little commitment to employees, and employees have returned the favor.

The shift in the conditions of work from Fordism to post-Fordism has also had a significant impact on the conceptual tools that critical researchers have brought to bear in studying work and organizations. Much of the research conducted under the aegis of neo-Marxism takes the Fordist, industrial setting as the default work context. The low-trust environment that typically prevailed between management and workers under Fordism had relatively clearly demarcated lines of control and authority, thus providing a productive context for exploring how the “indeterminacy of labor” played out in workplace struggles. Post-Fordist work presents a different set of challenges for understanding the ways in which power and control play out. In the next section I turn to a discussion of work under post-Fordism via the lens of the philosophy of Michel Foucault.

Foucault, work, and post-Fordism

The French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) may seem like an odd figure to influence the study of work, given that he did not even write about the topic. Over the last 40 years, however, his writings have significantly shaped how critical researchers think about the connections among work, organizations, and power. Importantly, he has helped scholars think through the transformations in work and organizing that have occurred during this period. Let me briefly lay out what I (and others) see as the most important features of this transformation and then work through how Foucault helps us to understand this process and its effects on work and workers.

In very broad terms, the transformations in work and organization over the last 40 years can be characterized by a shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. The Fordist system was the dominant form of work and organization for much of the 20th century, bringing together in one production process the moving assembly line (adapted from Chicago abattoirs), Taylorist scientific management principles, and Weberian bureaucracy to create large organizations with massive economies of scale. Under Fordism, although the work was often monotonous, deskilled, and frequently characterized by industrial conflict, it also provided (perhaps for the first time in human history) relative security for workers, enabling the possibility of an aspirational life.

Fordism reached its zenith in the decades following World War II, as the cycle of mass production, mass consumption, and middle-class prosperity expanded apace. Undergirding Fordism was the economic system of Keynesianism, which helped to mitigate the worst excesses of capitalism and its boom and bust cycles. Under Keynesian economics, the state played a central role in maintaining full employment, stimulating economic growth, and providing for the welfare of its citizens (e.g., by providing universal health care—in most industrialized countries except the U.S.—state pensions, unemployment benefits, etc.).

In the shift to post-Fordism and its attendant political-economic philosophy of neoliberalism, however, we see the emergence of a very different conception of work and the power dynamics that characterize it. Neoliberalism is driven by the fear of excessive state intervention and thus is premised on minimizing the role of the state and allowing market principles to flourish across all spheres of life, including work, family, relationships, and education. At the center of this privileging of the market is the sovereign individual, defined as an entrepreneur of him/herself. In this sense, “Neoliberalism is … a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human wellbeing can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey, Reference Harvey2005, p. 2). Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (along with Ronald Reagan, one of its earliest architects) provided perhaps the best summary of neoliberalism when, in a BBC radio interview she stated, “[W]ho is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.… There is no such thing as society” (Thatcher, Reference Thatcher1987).

What does this shift to neoliberalism and post-Fordism mean for how we think about work and organizations, and how does Foucault’s writing inform this thinking? Neoliberalism not only introduces a very different power dynamic but also is informed by a very different conception of the individual. From a worker/employee perspective, this means that the ontological security once provided by the social contract between workers and employers and its accompanying lifetime employment has largely disappeared, and has been replaced by rules of the game that are constantly shifting. Career events such as promotions and dismissals are no longer grounded in clear and stable hierarchies, and corporate rules can occur in seemingly random and whimsical ways as the latest economic and/or cultural shift changes the way organizations do business.

At the center of this neoliberal logic of the market is the idea that each social actor is viewed as human capital (Becker, Reference Becker1976; Foucault, Reference Foucault and Burchell2008). That is, we each possess a set of skills, knowledge, and abilities that we are responsible for maintaining and improving so that we accumulate more capital (and hence accrue more market value). Under Fordism, it was the role of capitalists to take the risks associated with raising and investing capital to create profit and wealth; under neoliberalism, individual workers become the risk takers and are encouraged to see themselves as forms of human capital—permanent and ongoing commercial projects that compete with all other social actors for market share in order to increase their value. Under neoliberalism, each individual is a mini-enterprise in constant competition with other mini-enterprises for comparative advantage.

Under neoliberalism, then, risk has become both pervasive and naturalized—something that is everywhere, an accepted feature of daily life. In this sense, we are all—to a greater or lesser degree—“venture labor,” defined as “the investment of time, energy, human capital, and other personal resources that ordinary employees make in the companies where they work. Venture labor is the explicit expression of entrepreneurial values by non-entrepreneurs” (Neff, Reference Neff2012, p. 16). With this neoliberal discourse, society has shifted away from collective responsibility toward greater personal responsibility for economic well-being. We must all spend a lot of time and energy investing in ourselves as human capital, even though most of us work for others. Put simply, we have shifted from a WATT (“We’re All in This Together”) to a YOYO (“You’re On Your Own”) system of governance.

Foucault argues that this shift to neoliberalism is undergirded by a new manifestation of power, which has fundamentally reshaped individuals’ relationship to society. Against Marxist thought, Foucault rejects the conception of power as operating in a top-down manner, whether through direct coercion or more subtle, consensus-based forms of power (e.g., corporate culture), and hence as negative (forbidding, preventing, circumscribing behavior). Such a view, Foucault argues, is rooted in a problematic “sovereign” model of power, which had been the dominant model in political discourse for 200 years, as theorists sought to develop alternatives to the monarchic, repressive form of government (basically, the 200-year old project of modernist Enlightenment thought). Foucault argues that this “sovereign” model needs to be dethroned because it does not capture how power operates under neoliberalism. Thus, we need an alternative to this negative conception of power.

Foucault refers to his alternative conception of power as “governmentality” (Foucault, Reference Foucault1979, Reference Foucault and Burchell2008), or the “conduct of conduct.” Foucault’s argument is that under liberalism the art of power is about managing free will—about creating the conditions under which people can view themselves as free, autonomous, and differentiated agents. Organizationally speaking, although power through coercion or consent operated via a process of homogenization in which all employees were (at least ideally) either coerced or ideologically shaped into the same organizational reality, governmental power operates according to a logic of differentiation—that is, “through the organized proliferation of individual difference” (McNay, Reference McNay2009, p. 56). How does this make sense as an exercise of power? How does the proliferation of difference rather than sameness and conformity function as a form of power in contemporary organizing?

From a neoliberal perspective, society functions most effectively when individuals are free to engage in self-regulation and self-promotion, unencumbered by the state. In such a context, the only role of the state is to provide the conditions under which such a process of marketization can flourish. However, as a number of scholars have pointed out, these self-regulating abilities of individuals are carefully managed; they are “shaped and normalized in large part through the powers of expertise” (Miller & Rose, Reference Miller and Rose1990, p. 2). Thus, beginning in the 1980s, and consonant with the rise of neoliberal economic policies, a new political discourse developed in which employees were constructed as entrepreneurial individuals who sought to actualize themselves in all spheres of life, including work. Employees are increasingly viewed as in search of meaning, responsibility, and fulfillment in work itself rather than as seeking emancipation from work viewed as simply a means to an end.

This new “problematization” of the self–work relationship (Miller & Rose, Reference Miller and Rose1990) is consistent with the neoliberal view of the market as providing the “grid of intelligibility” for all spheres of life. Under a system of governmentality, individuals are encouraged to view themselves as engaged in a permanent process of enterprise as the means to increasing the value of their human capital. In this sense, the market is extended “to the entire social body and to generalize it inside the whole social system that, normally, does not pass through or is not authorized by the market” (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Burchell2008, p. 248).

Other scholars have extended Foucault’s argument to suggest that the neoliberal conception of humans as units of capital and the attendant downward movement of risk from capital to everyday workers is not a bug in the system but a feature. Keynesianism and Fordism built the mitigation of risk into the system, but under neoliberalism and post-Fordism, risk and insecurity are normalized as a necessary and constitutive feature of control—as actual instruments of governance through insecurity. As Lorey (Reference Lorey and Derieg2015, p. 11) argues, “In neoliberalism precarization becomes ‘democratized.’” If precarity is the norm, then there is no longer a separation between free subjects (in the classic liberal sense of social actors free to pursue their own economic self-interest) and the precarious; those who are free are also precarious. Thus, for Lorey, the function of what she terms “governmental precarization” is to create subjects who accept precarity as the norm—an inevitable and necessary feature of self-governance within neoliberalism. Under post-Fordism and neoliberalism, then, risk is spread increasingly downward, marking a shift from “venture capital” under Fordism to “venture labor” under post-Fordism (Neff, Reference Neff2012). In this sense, the implicit separation of labor and capital under Fordism is eliminated under neoliberalism. Everyone is a venture capitalist but of their own human capital.

Organization studies research has increasingly focused on how the ubiquity of the market as the grid of intelligibility has led to the “corporate capture” of all spheres of life within capital. Although under previous regimes of control the primary locus of struggle was between capital and labor “at the point of production” (as we saw in the discussion of the Marxist tradition), today the primary locus of struggle is between capital and “life itself” (Fleming, Reference Fleming2014b). In this sense, the capitalist mode of production has escaped the factory walls (what Marx called the “hidden abode of production”) to encompass all of society, such that we now effectively live in a “social factory” (Gill & Pratt, Reference Gill and Pratt2008; Lazzarato, Reference Lazzarato2004) within which all aspects of life create the potential for capitalist valorization. As Böhm and Land (Reference Böhm and Land2012) argue, capitalism is now characterized by a “new hidden abode” in which the social is framed economically, and the central question for critical analysts of work and organization becomes: How does the production of meaning and subjectivity intersect with capitalist value production processes?

As one might imagine, this shift places communication at the epicenter of the capitalist accumulation process, potentially converting virtually any human communication behavior into a monetizable form. Indeed, a number of years ago, Sergio Zyman, the former chief marketing officer of Coca-Cola, made the claim that “everything communicates.” By this he did not intend, I think, to simply say that communication is everywhere (which is an uninteresting truism) but rather to suggest that the key to contemporary capitalism is to figure out how the communicatively constructed sociality that we all need and thrive on as connected human beings can be mediated by the market. In such an understanding, communication becomes constitutive of economic value within neoliberal capitalism. Such a realization has led the Italian social theorist Maurizio Lazzarato to claim that, “Contemporary capitalism does not first arrive with factories; these follow, if they follow at all. It arrives with words, signs, and images” (Reference Lazzarato2004, p. 190). For example, as a company, Facebook is premised on the communicative cultivation of a culture of intimacy and connection as a means to capture, extract, and analyze personal data that can be turned into billions of dollars in advertising revenue. Similarly, AirBnB has turned couch surfing into a multibillion-dollar industry, and Uber has done the same with ride sharing. What all these industries (and many others) have in common is the creation of a digital platform that transforms everyday communication and social interaction into zones of the “social factory,” subject to corporate capture and capital accumulation.

Thus, the emergence of the social factory under neoliberalism is fundamentally reshaping humans’ relationship to work, and not necessarily for the better. In the new, so-called “gig” economy, work is a constant presence, because every social interaction theoretically presents a possibility for the self as entrepreneurial subject to improve his or human capital: Am I having a beer with some friends, or am I networking? All forms of communication become grist for the social factory mill. From the perspective of governmentality, we are all free subjects/agents, but it is precisely this (YOYO) free agency that requires us to become our own “micro-structures” (McRobbie, Reference McRobbie2016) of support, meaning, and community creation.

Increasingly, then, critical studies of work and organization are attempting to unpack how the communicative production of the enterprise subject within neoliberalism and the social factory has become increasingly central to organizing processes in 21st century capitalism. A number of scholars, including McRobbie (Reference McRobbie2016); Fleming (Reference Fleming2014b, Reference Fleming2017); Marwick (Reference Marwick2013); Kuhn, Ashcraft, and Cooren (Reference Kuhn, Ashcraft and Cooren2017); and Mumby (Reference Mumby2016, Reference Mumby and Brummans2018), have explored this question, examining the communication processes through which governmentality constructs social actors as both free agents and human capital, constantly preoccupied with burnishing their individual brands while simultaneously trying to maintain a coherent narrative of self in the face of precarity and insecurity.

Along with this increased preoccupation with the self in relation to work, it is important to recognize the fundamental transformation in the structure of work itself. As Weil (Reference Weil2014) has argued, we now live in the age of the “fissured workplace,” the basic philosophy of which is that companies view hiring full-time workers as a last resort. Instead, companies operate according to the following principle: “Find your distinctive niche and stick to it. Then shed everything else” (Weil, Reference Weil2014, p. 50). In the fissured workplace, profit maximization requires that companies figure out their core competencies (what provides greatest value to consumers and investors) and then externalize all other costs associated with doing business. For example, once Nike recognized in the early 1980s that it was not a running shoe manufacturer but a fitness and lifestyle company, its business model changed completely; its core competency became design and branding, and everything not connected to that core mission was outsourced, including the actual manufacturing of their products. The same is true across all spheres of business, including academia (where part-time labor is increasingly the norm; university administrations are loath to hire a tenure-track professor when an adjunct can do the job).

Weil (Reference Weil2014) argues that the fissured workplace creates a precarious and unstable work environment for lots of workers. For example, fissuring practices weaken labor standards and increase employee exploitation. It is not uncommon for employment agencies to farm out their contracts to still other, smaller agencies. Because each level of a fissured workplace needs to be able to make money, the further down the chain one goes, the slimmer the profit margins become. The result is that companies often cut corners to maintain profits, including engaging in wage theft and nonpayment of overtime to workers. For example, between 2012 and 2017, the U.S. Department of Labor recovered $1.2 billion in back pay for workers who had been subject to wage theft.

The fissured workplace, then, is a product of both neoliberal economic policies (with its attendant rise in shareholder power and short-term profits) and the increased power of the brand in corporate decision making. Companies sell brands, not products, and the organization of any firm is structured around its brand identity. As Kornberger (Reference Kornberger2010) has argued, “Brands are increasingly becoming the organizing principle of business” (p. 22). In other words, organizations do not manage brands; brands manage organizations. Moreover, organizations view their core employees only as those who can contribute to its brand value; everything and everyone else must be viewed as auxiliary to brand management. In the late 1990s, for example, Ford announced that, “The manufacture of cars will be a declining part of Ford’s business. They will concentrate in the future on design, branding, marketing, sales, and service operations” (Olins, Reference Olins, Schultz, Hatch and Larsen2000, p. 51). Today, the Mustang is the only car that Ford sells to the U.S. market. Ford has become post-Fordist.

The precarity of the enterprise self is thus exacerbated by the neoliberal reorganization of work itself, where only a minority of core workers have any degree of job stability (and even then, companies like Amazon adopt a management philosophy that routinizes constant reinvention and employee evaluation and maximizes stress). Indeed, instability and precarity are even celebrated and used as a branding tool. For example, in 2017 the freelance services digital platform Fiverr (brand slogan, “In Doers We Trust”) launched an ad campaign that included copy such as: “You eat a coffee for lunch. You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer”; and “Nothing like a safe, reliable paycheck to crush your soul.” Such celebration of the enterprise self as a business model perfectly exemplifies the normalization of precarity as an opportunity rather than a danger to human health and happiness. In this context, the brand becomes the institutional form that theoretically mitigates such precarity; if the enterprise self is able to create a sustainable brand that “adds value” to a company (branding oneself as a “doer,” for example), then success and relative stability are possible; if not, failure is a problem of unsuccessful brand management. YOYO, indeed.

Such disaggregation and individualization of work has actually created more market opportunities for some companies. WeWork’s business model, for example, is built on mitigating the sense of alienation that gig workers experience by virtue of their lack of connection with other workers. In this sense, WeWork is a branded response to the fissured workplace, providing externalized workers with a sense of belonging. It offers workplace culture and community where it is absent for many workers. Thus, we have reached a point where even corporate culture is outsourced.