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Accepted Paper:
The cunning of communication: human resources management, the flexible self and the invention of 'work rage'
Kim Turcot DiFruscia (Université de Montréal)
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the recent appearance of the concept of "work rage" in human resources management and work therapy discourses, and maps how the emergence of this concept corresponds to a transformation in the neoliberal understanding of the place of emotions in conceptions of selfhood.
Paper long abstract:
In the present communication, I wish to discuss the recent appearance of the concept of "work rage" in human resources management and work therapy discourses, and map how the emergence of this concept corresponds to a transformation in the neoliberal understanding of the place of emotions in conceptions of selfhood. As it reveals the limits of communicational ethics and its dual demand for an authentic and flexible self, "work rage" is paradoxically presented and used by human resources managers and work therapists both as a radical exception to the communicational ethics and as its necessary residue. Drawing from E. Povinelli's critique of the legitimization of deliberative rationality's exceptionalism as externalisation of internal limits, I will argue that the invention of "work rage" simultaneously puts into question the legitimacy of the demand for authenticity of self in the work place and that of a communicational management of emotions in crisis. The fieldwork from which this communication emanates is conducted in private international HMR firms and firm branches in Canada with human resources managers and work therapists.
Ambiguous states of mind and crises in their management: imaginative approaches to the self and emotions in four postindustrial societies
Session 1