Overexposed workers: Visibility drive, paradoxical autonomy and competitive individualism in the high-end consulting industry

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore sociologically how managerial strategies that promote and normalize the constant public overexposure of workers operate. We will focus on the consulting sector, both for its influence in generating global organizational trends and for its capacity to reflect the transformations taking place in the world of work. To this end, we have developed a qualitative study consisting of an autoethnography in two companies in the sector and a series of interviews with consultants. The strategies of overexposure analyzed in this text are an expression of logics of power functioning that condition the experience of workers, contributing to consolidate forms of individualistic subjectivation prototypical of the contemporary neoliberal context. They are based on a paradoxical autonomy and logics of pressure and horizontal competition that operate from visibility and meritocratic rhetorics.