Post-Fordist Passionate Work Ethics: Affective Economy of Flexibility and Precarity

Abstract

In this study, I examine the Passionate Work Ethics within the conceptual framework of “affective economy”, which I argue establishes the work ideology of today’s flexible and precarious post-Fordist work regime. More specifically, I focus on “immaterial labor” as a specific form of labor in today’s post-Fordist capitalism and flexible and precarious freelancing as its epitome. Based on interviews with independent professionals who are currently working as freelancer, this study seeks to understand how today’s prevalent flexible and precarious post-Fordist work regime makes itself desirable, through what kind of structures of affects and affective mechanisms. The main claim of the study is that the Passionate Work Ethics, with its affective investment in our desires, hopes and fears that covers up precarity creates a work ethics that makes desirable widespread precarity and flexibility through passive joyful affects. In this context, it has been revealed that the Passionate Work Ethics operates by arousing motivation, impulse and desire with the promises of “freedom-autonomy”, “spatio-temporal flexibility”, “self-realization and self-development” and “affective satisfaction”.