Engagement and/or Work Intensification, Choice and/or Obligation?: "If you don't do what you love, you have to love what you do"

Abstract

A high employee engagement has become the new one-best-way across all type of organizations. Passion and discretional effort that would guarantee productivity for employers and wellbeing for employees. This is what renovated management discourses have been promoting for some years now and justifies our general objective: a better understanding of the potential contradictions associated with employee engagement. We conduct qualitative fieldwork at the Spanish subsidiary of a leading American multinational of the ICT industry where dedication and passion emerge as central in our interviewees' discourses (professionals and managers). Passion seems to play a key role to understand a level of dedication at work that employees tend to explain as a result of personal and voluntary choices, even when risks for work-life balance and health and generalized doublethink emerge as contradictions. A critical discourse analysis suggests that passion, more than being a voluntary choice and/or an end in itself, seems to an insidious strategy to enact a mandatory obligation, a means to sustain the work intensification process. We find a sophistication of the normative control mechanisms, something aligned with emergent neo-normative mechanisms in the international literature, that, like their predecessors, focus on subjectification processes and identity management. Our results would support the growing (con)fusion to evaluate the internal/external origin of demands and control in the so-called knowledge work, in line with social trends towards activation, self-management and entrepreneurship.