Biopolitics at Work

Conveners:  Peter Fleming, Queen Mary, University of London, p.fleming@qmul.ac.uk  and André Spicer, Warwick Business School, andre.spicer@wbs.ac.uk

The CMS Division of the AOM will conduct a research workshop immediately prior to the 2010 Academy of Management meetings in Montreal in August 2010. The workshop will begin mid-morning of Wednesday Aug 4 and run till the evening of Thursday Aug 5.  We are coordinating a stream called biopolitics at work in this workshop, and seek submissions from interested researchers.

One of the great traditions of critical analysis of the workplace focuses on the way the logic of production runs counter to life: work is described as a zone of dehumanization, dis-enchantment, alienation and anomie. When we are at work we must abnegate and repress those characteristics that make us human. Changes, however, appear to be afoot in the contemporary corporation. Managerialism now has a keen interest in promoting, investing and capturing life at work. ‘Fun-sultants’ endeavour to make work mimic the dynamics of play and jest. Spirituality and health are cultivated in the form of psychedelic chi-charts and statues of small Budha’s in the cubicle. Health, sexuality and lifestyle are welcome in new-age firms like Apple and Google. In customer service employment such as call-centres, workers are encouraged to ‘just be themselves’ (deviate from the script, display their unique characteristics and express authenticity on the phones) and bring more of their non-work personalities to the job. Zany, organic and fun workers are key aspects of many human resource programs, downplaying control, standardization and the cold logic of economic rationality. In the lobby of a major hotel firm we learn from a wall poster that Robert, a 24 old employee, absolutely loves ice-hockey and roller blading in his free time.  Liberation management ala Tom Peter’s even celebrates the tropes of 68-era radicalism, anti-authoritarian sentiments and a slacker underground chic.

Is this reintroduction of life or bios into the workplace represent the arrival of the much heralded ‘frictionless capitalism’ in which employees are now free? This workshop would analyze these developments in corporate ideology from a very political perspective. We argue that a major shift is occurring in the contemporary workplace in which capital is both investing in life (in order to harness its added benefits in economic terms) and parasitically capturing it, even forms of life that aims to resist the logic of corporate domination. It is argued that what we call (after Foucault, Hardt and Negri among others) bio-power is a defining feature of the workplace. The new struggle is not so much between capital and labour but capital and life, as we see the ‘social factory’ extending its logic of objectification by mimicking and absorbing family, lifestyle, the body, sexuality, leisure and even love. Social competencies, communicative skills and the wellspring of social richness that was found either after the worker left the factory or was relegated to the informal organization (think of ‘banana time’) are now key targets in the politically-correct firm. We will invite papers that explore the bio-politics of the new-age firm from a critical perspective. We are particularly interested in novel theorizations of such permutations in the workplace.  One avenue of analysis might evoke Foucault’s discussion of the birth of bio-power, with the tropes of liberalism and freedom entering the organization. Another era might focus on recuperation of dissent. Much of the commodification of life in the workplace trades in anti-work motifs, especially those that were used to critique the crisis of everyday life in the late 1960s (apropos boredom, alienation and commodification). An additional focus might be that developed by the Italian autonomous who argue that the very life of the employee (that persists despite the blockage of capital rather than because of it) is now primed for exploitation.

But the bio-politics of contemporary forms of work might also harbour points of resistance. What would they look like if even the language of resistance is being tapped by corporate domination and transformed into a pro-business instrument of power? We would like to discuss in this workshop the various forms of struggle the rise of bio-power initiates. What are the sites of freedom and how does one challenge the commercialization of life? Some of the themes that we foresee being discussed and presented in this workshop might be:

·        Monitoring life in the workplace

·        Employees increasingly demanded to not just do work, or even identity work, but also bio-political work.

·        Everyday life and non-work as a reservoir of commodification

·        Economies of goodness

·        What is life and its connection to new work forms?

·        ‘Non-work’ at work

·        Recuperation of resistance and its limits at work

·        Diversity, gender and bio-commercializatrion of the body.

·        Theorising bio-politics at work (Foucault, Agamben, Hardt and Negri)

·        Struggle and resistance in a biopolitical workplace

·        Corporate social responsibility as parasite

·        Health, the body and spirituality in the new-age firm

·        Play, simulation and its Other

·        Political movements organized around biological issues – eg. Health lobbying groups.

·        Increasing importance of life as central economic sector – health sector

·        Use of health as a claim of objective necessity

·        The social factory, innovation and the management of discretion

·        Sociality, emotional labour and exploitation

·        Stress and the self as a bio-political effect

·        Body work and its corporatization

·        Theories of freedom and emancipation in the bio-political employment era