Reconstructions of Labour Identity in Unlivable Organizational Contexts

Abstract

Transformations in work experience are provoking a work-related identities crisis, as long as work conditions discourage investment in unsafe, unstable identity referents, which are also more demanding in qualitative and quantitative terms. These problems with a positive link to work identities are behind the concern big companies express about job involvement or work commitment, which is key to their efforts on workers’ control through new mechanism, especially those relying in mechanisms involving directly workers’ subjectivity, while they offer less and less ground to their workforce to commit to their job. Under these conditions workers express more frequently a certain subjective distance to their job and organization in different forms: from acceptance of organizational demands, sometimes sincerely, sometimes cynically, to subjective uninvolvement, more or less covert, including the exit of the organization. The aim of this work is the analysis in depth of workers’ responses, in terms of agency, to the conditions under which they perform their tasks, paying especial attention to the voluntary exit of the organization. These strategies represent nicely the malaise new forms of regulation of subjectivity are producing. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews from different research projects. Results show the diversity of responses workers implement before potentially unliveable situations. Notwithstanding the general dominance of conformity responses, diverse forms of evitative responses show up like critical or simulated accommodation, as well as subjective distancing. Equally exit response are also relevant (escapist identities) in search of better to option to find a desired acknowledgment in more liveable identities.