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Abstract:
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Routine work‐process, lack of self‐management, and long work‐hours have
traditionally been the main topics of discussion within the occupational stress
literature, constituting the primary factors that make people breakdown and burn
out. But within the last couple of years, this discussion has expanded its focus
from issues concerning the disciplinary work‐space. Increasing attention is now
being placed on the problems related to the burgeoning interest in employee
empowerment and self‐management in contemporary work‐life. In short, how
stress relates to self‐management. These working conditions, which put a great
deal of emphasis on the subjectivity of the employee and the ability of the
employee to self‐manage in a pursuit of an organization’s goals, are thus no longer
regarded as something that decreases stress, but rather as something that evokes
it. However, as this thesis argues, one can regard stress as more than a crisis we
are faced with in our work‐life. It is also an element that co‐produces what it is to
be a efficient employee‐subject within this work‐life.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of flows and machines, this sketches
out how stress among self‐managing employees, and in particular the manner in
which stress is reduced to a matter of individual coping, can be viewed as an
organising process that separates, joins and codes the ontological fabric of our
lives. In this regard, certain modes of existence centred on stress issues and the
coping strategies of individuals are themselves produced as an individual
responsibility for maximizing one’s own productivity as a self‐managing and
committed employee. As I will argue, the production of this mode of existence of
the employee‐subject revolves around the assumption of an employee subject
that is able to tune its feelings, desires and thoughts in to a life of productivity
without breaking‐down their body and soul. In fact, the potential break‐down of
stress should act as an internal limit for personal productivity, as a way of
rebooting to an ever more efficient self‐management. All in all, we can therefore
talk of a production‐process revolving around the presumption of an always fitter,
happier, more productive employee.
The questions raised in the investigation of this particular form of production of
subjectivity are: what notions of subjectivity as a productive resource are we
presented with when not only self‐management but also the management of the
stress this self‐management might entail becomes an underlying foundation for a
flexible and efficient organization? What can an employee think, do and hope for
under such circumstances? What are the dynamics that drive such a notion of
subjectivity? And with what necessity does this notion set itself forth?
All in all, the claim made in the thesis is that for this fitter, happier, and more
productive employee, dealing with oneself and stress are primarily matters of
individual responsibility and personal development. But by turning stress into matters of individual responsibility, happiness and productivity, one thereby
misses some of the underlying ontological processes working within selfmanagement
theories and practices. These processes are pre‐personal or preindividual
in the sense that they outline ways we can be produced as individual
subjects. These not only produce stress as a possibility for any particular individual
to assume, they also convert stress‐issues amongst employees into matters of
being unable to adequately contribute towards the organization, leading in turn
towards an understanding of these issues as something best handled if employees
can improve their own coping abilities. If they can better their own self. We can
hence talk of a commitment machine that produces a zone of indiscernability
between the subjectivity of the employee and the efficiency of the organization
connecting up with a coping machine that frames problems within this zone as a
matter of personal problems regarding one’s subjectivity.
The coping machine serves to reinforce the production of the self‐managing
employee by making the employees themselves each responsible for learning to
take control of their own passion for working in the organization. The employee
has to be passionate and committed, of course; but they now also have to
distance themselves from this passion and commitment in order to perform well
at their tasks. These passions are simultaneously considered both essential and
problematic: the employee is both part of an ideal state and a pathological
condition. The coping machine makes this pathological condition into a problem of
personal commitment rather than making it a task for questioning how the
production of the pre‐individual zone of indiscernability between the work and the
employees’ subjectivity is itself set up by the commitment machine. In other
words, the coping machine produces a mode of existence wherein stress results
from an overemphasis, on the part of the employees, upon the commitment
towards their work and from a failure to deploy the most appropriate selfmanagement
technologies.
The thesis can thus be said to be guided by three ambitions in its unfolding of this
tune in, break‐down and reboot motion. First of all, to give an account of the
inherent modes of existence produced within the contemporary organizational
ideal of the committed self‐managing employee. This is done through a reading of
various discussions about the management of employee subjectivity ranging from
the self‐leadership literature focusing on self‐management as intrinsically
motivating and enjoyable through to discussions of incitements to self‐manage
and commit as a subtle ways to encroach and exploit the employee’s personal
subjectivity to contemporary discussions of the new nature of capitalism and its
focus on the active living forms of knowledge as the key to value‐production.
The second ambition is to address a prevalent paradigm within the occupational
stress and stress‐management literature, namely that of coping, as a
reinforcement of this demand for a committed and self managing employee. This is done through a reading of some of the most influential scholars within stress
and coping and best‐sellers on stress‐management.
The third and final ambition is to describe this movement of reinforcement, or
tune in, break‐down and reboot movement, through the Deleuzian notion of
machines that in various dynamic ways produce and regulate ways of being or
modes of existence. Consequently, it will be suggested that the nuts and bolts
making up the relation between self‐management and stress is part of a mode of
existence that sets up certain expectations about the problem of stress and the
enterprise of dealing with stress as an individual productivity and enjoyment issue:
being fitter, happier, and more productive rather than being regarded as part of
the pre‐individual collective endeavor that constitutes us as these very subjects.
Today in self‐management these machines of commitment and coping might
produce us as a fitter, happier, and more productive subject. But this very
machinic production that unleashes and confines our subjectivity as employees
depends on an extremely unstable pre‐individual force. Tapping into this force
always means that the foundation of these machines are themselves vulnerable
and fragile, or as Deleuze might put it: we do not know yet what we are capable of
as this fitter, happier, more productive employee, we do not know were the preindividual
forces that animates the machines of commitment and coping might
bring us, so we must tune in, breakdown, and reboot to find out.
Besides a short introduction and a first chapter that highlight some of the most
important notions in the thesis, such as self‐management, stress, subjectivity,
modes of existence, pre‐individual forces and social machines, the thesis consists
of three parts. The first part running from chapter two through five, is called
Machines and Maps. Here I discuss the concept of machines as it is developed by
Deleuze and Guattari. Of particular interest is their notion of a social machine. Also
crucial is what a machinic approach in general implies when analyzing an object of
research and how this approach is utilized to understand the production of
subjectivity in contemporary work‐life. The second part Self‐management and the
Commitment‐machine runs from chapter six to eleven. Here I outline two machinic
indices of a self‐management, namely the ‘subjectivity’ and ‘commitment’ and the
machinery that drives them; the commitment machine. In the third and last part
Stress and the Coping‐machine, which runs from chapter twelve to fifteen, I shift
my focus towards the two machinic indices of stress: ‘the somatic subject’ and ‘the
coping processes’. I end up with a description of the coping machinery that drives
these indices and how this machinery connects up with the commitment machine
resulting in the production of the stress‐fit self‐managing employee. |
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