EVOLUTION PÅ ARBEJDET: Indblik i en refleksivt selvforandrende kultur
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/ta.v0i51.106704Abstract
Workplace organisation and employee identities are increasingly spiritualised, the author
argues. Management issues are no longer phrased in materialist terms, but regarded as
matters of personal intent and cultural meaning. Ethnographic fieldwork is a highly
suitable, albeit complex way of studying the production of meaning under modern
capitalist forms of work organisation. In the late 1990s, the author conducted four
years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork amongst European and North American
management consultants and Human Resources Managers. Drawing on this fieldwork,
she discusses the contemporary concern with evolution and growth at work. She argues
that a sub-culturally nourished, neo-spiritual cosmology of self-development, individual
responsibility and change has grown conspicuous in (post)-industrial societies. Under
neo-liberal, globalising forms of production and governance, ideals of timed, efficient
self-management, self-reflexivity and internalised economic rationalities have conquered
the discourse of organisational behaviour. Work is rearticulated as a spiritual quest and
a personally profound calling. The values-based trend is a significant factor in this,
demanding that work be personally meaningful. The practical enactment and production
of this meaningfulness make up very relevant fields for contemporary ethnographic
study. However, the author also notes, classic ethnographic notions are challenged in
this kind of study. Ideas of the informant as a constant subject-position and the field as
a stable place are challenged, when those under study are managers and employees
who strive to move ever faster and become ever more evolved, self-altering - and thus
always “new”.
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