Abstract
This article explores shifts in workplace festivities in Bulgaria as part of the transition from socialism to post-socialism and analyses how work celebrations are used to express and uphold the moral economies informing them. During the socialist period, labour was glorified and work celebrations were a key instrument in the ideological and cultural engineering efforts of the state. Since the 1990s, private business owners have been reinterpreting and (re-)inventing festive traditions to stage their identities and moral orientations in discursive and performative ways. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation in industrial production and high-tech companies from 2017 to 2019, I argue that highly mediated company celebrations are, in the wake of promotional cultures, an opportunity for employers to brand themselves as “good.” Such events also model the expectations of a “good employee,” for example, to be competitive not only regarding one’s work but also in having fun, as part of work, which is a reflection of the general insistence on happiness in the neoliberal workplace.
Introduction: The Meaning of Festive Transformations
Socialism in Bulgaria was marked by ritual excess—the state-run cultural calendar included a continuously increasing number of festivities, many of which were dedicated to “socialist labour.” After 1989, this centralised, top-down, state-driven approach to celebrations gave way to new sources of influence—international corporate managerial strategies and globalising cultural genres, changing values of work, and new definitions of success informed by neoliberal capitalism. People continued to celebrate their work, but in the context of fundamental socio-economic transformation, these cultural practices have taken on new shapes and meanings.
In this article, I explore post-socialist business celebrations as a festive genre and as a work-related practice. As a form of festivity, workplace celebrations function as occasions to uphold shared values, demonstrate normative emotions, and reaffirm collective identities. 1 As part of the workplace social world, celebrations represent and constitute the principles and behaviours that are considered right, good, and deserving of praise. The purpose of the article is to address two main questions: (1) What happened to workplace festivities after the end of the socialist period? (2) What does this development demonstrate about the moral underpinnings of employment relations, past and present? In tackling these questions, I presume the social embeddedness of the economy in relation to both morality and ritual practices, which I discuss in the next section.
The discrete nature of celebrations predisposes a multi-sited research design in which the object of study is followed through different temporal, geographical, and industrial contexts. Work festivities 2 are treated as assemblages that are increasingly global 3 and locally contextualised. The research field incorporates not only the events happening in a specific place and time but also the sites of their generation (e.g., through legacy practices, managerial/human resource [HR] discourses, popular culture influences) and of their representation (e.g., in mass and social media). First, I describe the key characteristics of the socialist approach to work celebrations by using secondary sources. The early post-socialist period is discussed based on mass media representations of business celebrations. The present-day empirical examples come from fieldwork undertaken at industrial production sites in central and south Bulgaria and in high-tech firms in the capital Sofia. In 2017, I interviewed the HR manager of mineral extraction Company A and attended the annual celebration of Company B, producing firearms. Over the course of 2018 and 2019, I carried out in-depth interviews with tech industry managers and employees, and with event management service providers. For the purposes of this article, the relevant insights come from a travel management website (Company C) and an online sports-betting operator (Company D) where I attended the 2019 Christmas party. The primary focus of the fieldwork was on how these cultural practices are designed, shaped, and imbued with meaning by their creators.
I argue that with the end of socialist state control over work celebrations, a complex process of re-semantisation of these cultural practices began. The socialist era’s insistence on continuous and expressive celebration of the progress of socialism was replaced by an equally assertive top-down festive engineering in the corporate workplace of the new economy. The legacy of socialist formats intertwined with the influx of global managerial trends and popular culture as sources for much more heterogeneous local festive practices. New formats with a different scenography and style quickly appeared—in some cases, as a demonstration of the rejection of the old regime, and in others, as a commitment to profit and consumerism of the freed market. The empowerment and achievements of the working class as a collective ceased to be a reason to celebrate. Contemporary empirical examples demonstrate that the range of socially accepted modes of celebrating work corresponds to the social and economic stratification and growing inequality 4 of the post-socialist transition. Industrial factory owners use celebrations to extol their own status and generosity by framing the provision of basic working conditions as a corporate gift while at the same time denying workers’ entitlement. High-tech industry managers organise cinematic parties channelling cosmopolitan imaginaries to reaffirm their own prestige and the elite aspirations of their staff, who need the stage of yet more exclusive experiences to keep their social media newsfeed of neoliberal happiness constantly updated.
Work celebrations are one of the empirical manifestations and expressions of the moral views informing economic practices and relations in post-socialist capitalism. The “collective good” of state socialism is replaced by mostly materially defined notions of “good” that are context-specific and class-differentiated, reflecting varying degrees of power imbalances in employment. The “goodness” of employers is presented as a merit of their corporate commercial success. “Good” industrial workers are expected to accept “as is” the conditions set by company owners and be grateful for this “benevolence.” In the high-tech professional context, it becomes the managers’ responsibility to set a competitive example of festive expenditure and consumption for employees to follow and excel at, also competitively. The festive version of the “good life” is exclusive, defined by excess and by fun as another performance indicator for the enterprising individual of corporate neoliberalism.
The Moral Economy of Work-Related Celebrations
Based on a growing number of post-socialist ethnographies, Chris Hann has argued that the economic ruptures and transformations during the socialist and post-socialist periods in Hungary and other Eastern Bloc countries are reflected in processes of dis-embedding and re-embedding the economy in its social context. 5 The changing intensity and vibrancy of ritual activities related to the domain of production are interpreted as a sign of people’s relative dis/enchantment or of how engaging and meaningful economic activity is perceived to be. Hann argues that in the case of Hungary, compared with the previous era, sociality has thinned out in the time of neoliberal capitalism, and while ritual and economic energies were fused before, now many people are disaffected by their work and instead find ritual and emotional attachment in relation to national identity. 6
By focusing on work celebrations, this article brings together discussion of both the ritual and moral embeddedness of employment relations in the context of their post-socialist transformation in Bulgaria. Celebrations are special occasions, outside of everyday routines, with two main functions—recommitment (the reaffirmation of foundational beliefs and values) and tension-management (the temporary suspension of norms to allow for indulgences and inversions). 7 Work celebrations, for example company anniversaries and inaugurations, perform these functions in social groups, which are primarily defined by contract-based employment relations. Andrew Sayer suggests that ideas about rewards, working conditions and welfare support, recognition, hierarchies, and respective responsibilities all pertain to the moral economy of employment. 8 Work festivities stage representations of these ideas, and they function as declarations of the moral economies of employment, conveyed through decisions about what, how, and by whom they are celebrated.
Festivities in general are an important setting for power relations, in their consensual orientation, aimed towards legitimising the status quo. Work celebrations bring together hierarchical levels, and those in power can use them to embed economic activity—to convince participants of its meaningfulness—in line with the respective moral paradigms. However, even when festivities and the values they are meant to embody are attempted to be imposed from above, the result is a complex process of ongoing negotiations or appropriations of meanings and practices. To analyse the empirical cases of work celebrations from different historic periods, the approach proposed by Hann 9 —to link the production and use of moral sentiments with changes in the material economy—is adapted. In particular, Hann analysed work as a value and tracks the change in dominant understandings over time by focusing on empirical labour and social relations. 10 Following this example, the focus of this article is on the shifting of moral orientations in congruence with economic changes and marketisation. This is also in line with Palomera and Vetta’s proposal for a wide application of the moral economy approach 11 as a class-informed analysis of the entanglements of different regimes of value in particular contexts. Although Hann discarded the term “moral economy” as unhelpful and overstretched, here it is used to explore, as he proposes, the concrete reconfigurations and enactments of dominant values through social relations. 12 In his contribution to the ongoing discussion on the “confused state” of the concept, Carrier 13 also suggests an understanding of moral economy as a focus on relations and obligations arising with economic transactions. Such a substantive and relational approach is particularly relevant to the context of employment, in which mutual obligations are part of understandings of being a “good” employee and employer, and of doing “good.”
Post-socialist developments in work celebrations happened in the context of other major social changes—the transformation of the experience and meaning of work, and most fundamentally, the formation of new subjectivities. The privatisation of the economy introduced “a new work universe” with different work disciplines, performance expectations, time frames, and workplace socialities. 14 The official discourse of the socialist period emphasised production and worker collectives, while after 1989 individuals and their standards of consumption came to the fore in conceptual schemes explaining the new social order. 15 In the emergent capitalist society, dominated by private firms as the key form of economic organisation, the citizen-consumer is expected to be an active, flexible, enterprising self, who also contributes to corporate success. A critical analysis of these developments suggests that both the imputed autonomy and the consumerist orientation are frames for “a new set of disciplinary techniques modelled on the competitive marketplace.” 16 It is in this context that the article asks how work celebrations are used to express and uphold the moral economies informing them.
Festivities before and after 1989: From Pathos to Potlatch
Work-related celebrations of the socialist period were highly formalised and used as a key tool for the ideological modelling of everyday life. Their format—a ceremonial part followed by a banquet—was defined and prescribed by government committees. Military and political rituals (e.g., raising the national flag, taking an oath, giving reports) were adopted for the creation of very formal ceremonies performed with solemn pathos, invoking pride, commitment, and collaboration for the historic mission of building a socialist society. The detailed scripts indicated the expected emotional expressions reflecting the empowerment and enthusiasm of workers—“walk proudly,” “smile with gratitude,” “applaud loudly,” and so on. 17 All aspects of the celebrations had to be under centralised control, and local and subjective interpretations were discouraged, bringing forward conformity as a value instead.
This uniformity of work festive formats reflects the overall socialist government approach to public celebrations—as the outcome was not of bottom-up creative processes but of top-down instrumental cultural engineering. The ethnographer Nadia Velcheva published an analysis of workplace celebrations in early 1989, with the following explanation of their role:
Their [work celebrations’] ideological-patriotic, work-professional, and moral-emotional orientation makes them one of the means for full-fledged personal development within the immediate working collective, for the spiritual bonding of all its members, for turning ordinary everyday life into a celebration.
18
Celebrations were a serious endeavour—they were part of the ideological, moral, and professional upbringing carried out by the state. Throughout Velcheva’s analysis, the “worldview function” of festivities is underlined as their key function, that is, they needed to represent and affirm the moral economies on which the desired social order was framed and constructed in the official discourse, namely “the Marxist-Leninist idea is the foundation of the entire festive system,” which was part of the “uncompromising fight against remnants of the bourgeois worldview” and “the decisive fight for the creation of a new socialist way of life.” 19 Celebrations were designed to serve as both promotion of and evidence for “high morality and a qualitatively new attitude to work,” 20 with respect to the exploitation of the preceding capitalist “oppression” (gnet). To that end, being good and doing “good” were conceptualised through virtues such as collectivism, comradeship, mutual support, love for work, and individual responsibility towards society, while idleness, waste, mediocrity, lack of discipline, selfishness, and self-aggrandisement were stigmatised. 21
Velcheva’s monograph is titled Celebrating Every Day (Praznik v delnika), and together with the continuous expansion of the cultural calendar, this reflects another moral imperative—progress on the historic mission of building communism was unquestionable and so was the continuous act of celebrating it. However, in theoretical terms, such a proposition is oxymoronic—a celebration is the suspension of business as usual, and the mundane and the festive can continuously inhabit the same temporality only when the latter is more form than substance. Indeed, Alexei Yurchak argues that in the late socialist period, the precise and controlled replication of ideological forms in state discourse took precedence over the adherence to represented meanings. 22 As outlined, work-related festivities were meant to function as such “ideological forms,” in which to celebrate was to continuously reproduce the official scripts.
After 1989, the role of the state in defining, imposing, and funding festive formats, especially in workplace contexts, receded. The early post-socialist period in Bulgaria was marked by lower-than-expected levels of foreign direct investment (FDI) and a very difficult social and economic situation. 23 Deema Kaneff has demonstrated that in these conditions, individuals started to re-evaluate the meaning of work and the moral implications of economic activity. 24 Gerald Creed has argued that, in rural areas, the collapse of socialist economic organisation and the introduction of privatisation and market principles undermined social cohesion, leading to ritual retrenchment—that is, an overall decline in ritual activity as fewer occasions were celebrated and with less elaboration than before. 25 In contrast, private firms, the new socio-economic agents, engaged in reinterpreting and inventing cultural traditions, as the following examples will demonstrate.
Cojocaru and Cash propose that festive culture in the ex-socialist countries represents a mixture of the legacy of socialist celebrations, religious revivals, and national identity re-invigorations. 26 An addition to that are the new festivities organised by private commercial entities. In the early 1990s, private businesses provided space for the religious turn. An article in a leading daily Bulgarian newspaper, “No self-respecting SHOP 27 would lift the shutters without a solemn water blessing,” criticised the new trend and argued that it was motivated not by a strong orientation towards Christian values but by a desire to demonstrate a clear rejection of the socialist past, when such religious practices could not be part of the public protocol. 28 Religious rituals continue to be incorporated in the business protocol by business owners, and not necessarily only in instrumental ways, 29 but regardless of the motivation, the turn towards religious rituals was an enactment of the freedom to invent new traditions. 30
A telling example of the emerging festive hybridity was the opening of a new casino in 1994, covered in the news section in the privately owned daily press:
The ex-police boss and ex-partner in casino Sevastopol Hristo Velichkov is the new head of the Grandcasino in Grand Hotel Sofia. He and the boss of the hotel split a traditional bread at the opening of the casino yesterday in the capital city.
31
The accompanying picture shows the two men holding disproportionate pieces of the bread and overflowing with laughter, and a smiling priest with a large ceremonial candle next to them. This succinct but symbolically rich report is an example of the fast transformation of festive practices and moral orientations. The solemn socialist scenography, praising the virtues of labour, was replaced by an eclectic mix of rituals and the image of a new business elite blessed by a priest in a casino. Splitting a round bread between two people is a wedding ritual, uncommon for other contexts; it is meant to determine who will be the head of the family and the bread-earner. During the socialist period, the ritual was used to emphasise the importance of equality within the new family. 32 The context of the casino transforms the meaning of the ritual from home-making to winning more than one’s share—the picture shows the casino manager and the hotel manager comparing their visibly unequal parts of the bread. Material ambition, together with the gambling aspiration for fast and easy money, is part of the cultural imaginary of neoliberalism implied in the news piece. Casino Sevastopol was mentioned earlier in the same year as the site of an infamous shooting between criminal groups. The nexus of ties among businesses, mafia, police, and church was sustained by the “newspaper heroes” of the new time, that is, thugs who used their physical force not for the constructive labour of the past but for racketeering and embezzlement, and whose opulent lifestyle was covered in detail by the daily press. 33
Against the backdrop of news about economic hardship and shortage of basic goods in 1991, a report appeared in the gossip section of the leading privately owned daily newspaper on a spring ball for which the price of the ticket was half the average monthly salary at the time
34
:
Mrs. Maslarova [an MP], danced lambada at the charity spring ball at Sofia Sheraton Hotel Balkan. It was organized by the firm Interjournal, Bulgaria magazine and Ecoforum association and was dedicated to the Day of the Earth and the Year of the Child. The starting sum donated by the sponsors was more than a 100 000 BGN. Each ticket cost 240 BGN. The celebration was attended by diplomats, ministers, intellectuals, and businessmen. Crab cocktails, patés, cured meats, asparagus, tender lamb, cod with corn, and vegetable delicacies were covering the tables. There was almost no one around the improvised stage in the foyer. The salmon with mayonnaise won the competition with Yanka Rupkina, Kosta Tzonev, Stefan Mavrodiev, and the MP Todor Kolev [prominent singers and actors].
35
The post-1989 festive transformation has also been linguistic—the media cover the new “balls/balove” and “cocktails/kokteili,” not the old “banquets/banketi.” These new formats are markers of the new elites, as in the article above, but in other publications it is shop owners or a teacher who won the lottery who “gives a cocktail” to celebrate easy money and luck. Western cultural models and conspicuous consumption, which were considered “wrong” in the previous regime, are brought to the fore as new reference points for success. In the spring ball case above, the charity aspect of the event is covered to the extent that it allows readers to assess the spending power of the new elite, but the actual “good deed” of supporting a cause is less newsworthy, and no details are provided about what funds have been raised or what cause and beneficiaries will receive them. Instead, the detailed account of the menu underlines the potlatch aspect of gifting, which is building prestige for the new elites, not reinforcing solidarity in difficult times. Notably, in this and other such articles, there is a sarcastic note, indicating that the elites are as hungry as the rest of the people and that material consumption trumps the interest in and capacity for cultural activities. Such detailed reports on what the new high classes eat and drink continued to fill the newspaper pages in the 1990s. These and the following examples show that the new private mass media also played a role in the process of replacing the cultural codes of the socialist period by a neoliberal cultural programme 36 in which inequality, self-interest, and acquisitiveness are normalised. The unitary formality of the past, with its clear slogans defining the common “good,” has been replaced by fragmentation (i.e., wide disparities in whether and how people celebrate) and images of mostly material success unattainable for most.
Celebrations at Industrial Sites: Post-Socialist Disenchantments
After the first decade of difficult transition, with the introduction of a currency board and growing FDI, the economy started growing, and it recovered after the 2008 crisis, but the improvement in living standards has not been universal. As in other post-socialist countries, Bulgarian industrial workers, the previously celebrated labour heroes, have been among those most affected by the transition to a market economy. 37 Some socialist-introduced professional holidays—for example, the Day of the Metallurgy Worker or Day of the Transportation Worker—continue to be celebrated. 38 In other cases, the internationalisation of business has replaced local festive occasions with imported ones. For example, a mineral extraction and processing company in southern Bulgaria (Company A) dating back to 1951 was privatised in the 1990s, then acquired by a regional European company, and finally bought by the global leader in the sector. The respondent for this study, who is an HR manager in the company, noted with regret that the anniversaries of the company, which is one of the oldest industrial enterprises in Bulgaria, were no longer celebrated. Instead, a few years earlier, they had the eightieth company birthday of the previous owners, and after the latest acquisition, they “wait to see how old we are going to be with the new one” (HR manager, August 2017). There is a clear sense of lost legacy and local identity—from a leading employer in the region to a unit significantly reduced in size in a global organisation with out-of-reach decision-making processes. The HR manager comes from the local town, as do most of her colleagues. She commented reproachfully that the employees, some of whom have spent their entire working life in the company and whose team commitment is beyond question, over the last years had started to insist on receiving money instead of workplace festivities. The HR manager interprets this as lack of trust towards the owners-outsiders perceived as fleeting and unfixed, in contrast to the workers who remained, having nowhere else to go. Thus, the workers’ intention of defining employment relations on purely contractual terms is an indication of disillusionment and the failure to re-embed post-socialist economic activity in its social context, as discussed by Hann. 39 In another privately owned industrial company, Arsenal (Company B), producing military equipment, celebrations still happen, but a similar divide between workers and managers is evident. In 2017, when I visited on its 139th anniversary, Arsenal was one of the largest employers in the country with eleven thousand staff, after significant growth in the previous years. The local news covered the celebration with an emphasis on consumption and excess: “12 tons of kebabcheta, 40 a festive program, and high-ranking guests filled with joy and celebration the stadium, museum, park, and alleys of the military factory.” 41 As in the previous media examples, the emphasis was on consumption and excess, and tellingly, not the employees but the facilities of the company were filled with joy.
The general manager addressed the public “from his heart and soul, not reading from some paper,” framing his speech as emotional and genuine. After congratulating everyone, he started listing the benefits provided for staff—salaries above the average for the sector, a cake for every birthday (“just today we are giving away 40”), and subsidised seaside holidays. He continued,
we are not obliged but we continue making parking lots because until recently you were not driving cars, but now you do and we have to put these wretched cars somewhere. . . .Well, may you be strong and healthy and drive even more cars . . . . Little by little we improve things here, the cold winter days are in the past because of the ongoing project to install heating in production areas. We do not have a magic wand to improve everything at once, but this is the end goal, so that you come to work proud and smiling . . . . It is not easy at all to sell abroad. There we are exposed to the storms and winds of international competition. We are caught in this vortex, and we are managing for now, I hope for the future too . . . . I wish you all strong strong health, invest your labour in the company, and we will be here for you. (Nikolai Ibushev, September 2017)
This explanation of the obligations of the management and workers demonstrates the shift in the moral economy of employment relations in comparison with the socialist period. The provision of standard employment benefits is discussed as a gift, a demonstration of good will by the owners. 42 The improvement of work conditions is not linked to higher productivity, which would imply an exchange relationship, nor is it done out of duty, which is explicitly denied. The repetitive use of “we give” and “we give away” (davame, razdavame) highlights the actions of the management and their power. The relative improvement in the material conditions of staff (more cars) is mentioned not as a common achievement but as a source of problems for the management. The commercial performance of the company is not discussed at the same level of detail as the giving actions of the management, and although the company was experiencing growth at the time, it is the external threats rather than opportunities that are emphasised. The employees are encouraged to invest their labour in the privately owned company, but the overall context does not make this an invitation for a partnership. Throughout the speech, “we” does not stand for all, but for management only. The language is figurative, invoking magic and natural calamities, and the tone is patronising and elusive, conveying a paternalistic attitude towards employees. This attitude is a reminder of the socialist past, but what is missing is the recognition of the workers’ status and contribution.
Greetings by various official guests followed, and after that, the guests and the management team went to a different location and were no longer part of the celebration at the stadium. The company anniversary is used instrumentally to manage relationships with external stakeholders; it is not an opportunity for owners/managers and employees to celebrate together, reflecting its different functions and meanings. A similar observation is made by Elizabeth Dunn in the case of a privatised food factory in Poland, where a banquet introducing the new owners functioned as a metaphor of employment relations, but the meaning was not shared. 14 For the local staff, the banquet replicated a wedding celebration, bringing two parties in a social, not only contractual, union. This symbolism was lost on the American owners who interpreted the event as part of the process of taking ownership. The actions of the different actors in the festive setting are interpreted symbolically, and in the Bulgarian cases discussed so far, the absence of either the workers (Company A) or the managers (Company B) at a celebration is a sign of disengagement and lack of unity in a new class setting.
Back at the stadium of the military factory (Company B), an almost hour-long programme of performance by amateur groups followed, from kindergarteners to dance clubs and a pensioners’ choir. The incorporation of a range of local cultural institutions into the festive tradition is another example of the continuity of socialist-period practices. However, the audience was not very enthusiastic until the highlight for the day—the leading pop-folk singer Ivana—arrived, and this created more excitement. The choice of one of the most prominent and highly paid pop-folk stars, the length of her performance (three hours), and the opportunity to get up close and take selfies and pictures with her (which went on for hours) were a spectacle to match the cheap food feast (not given away, but sold at wholesale prices). When the entertainment ended, people waited around to check out—this was not a day off, people had an obligation to be there until the end of the shift. Celebrating is not voluntary, it is part of the work of employees—they are arguably expected to uphold the public image of the company as a place of joy and festivity, as reported in the local media. Once the gates were opened, many conversations on the way out were about the pop-folk star and how she looked from up close. For some of the employees at the factory, posting selfies with Ivana was a very small return on the investment of their labour that their manager had encouraged in his speech. Discussing another post-socialist privatisation, Liviu Chelcea demonstrates the growing “greediness” 43 with which the new management employs people’s time and efforts. It is evidenced in this case as well, along with a certain “stinginess” with which employees are treated—in overall working conditions and also at the anniversary, where basic logistics such as enough places to sit were not provided, forcing people to sit on the ground on pieces of cardboard surrounded by growing piles of trash—as garbage collection was also not organised during the day. The prominence of the pop-folk singer stood out in this setting, but it reflected the increased importance of celebrity culture and its promotional potential 44 —in this case, arguably legitimising the status and authority of the management, who can “give it away.”
“Factories for Events”: Hyperfestivity for Knowledge Workers
At the industrial sites, the balance of power is clearly not in favour of the workers. The opposite is claimed for the technology sector, also marked by high growth in the last years. 45 The lack of enough qualified professionals leads to competition for “talent” that is described as “fierce,” “brutal,” and even “unsustainable” by this study’s interlocutors who are HR, communication, and employer branding (EB) managers in the industry. The leading employers in Sofia have matched not only their high salary offers but also a range of benefits and perks unimaginable for the people in the military factory waiting for heating in their workplace. In overall sensory contrast to the industrial sites, the tech offices I visited are all in new buildings, with state-of-the art office and gym equipment, in-house coffee shops with free healthy snacks, and different recreational areas and playrooms. “Work hard, play hard” 46 is the official motto of only one of the companies, but it applies for the industry. “We have turned into a factory for events,” comments a manager (EB manager, Company D, July 2019), and this demonstrates another lexical turn. Respondents talk about “events,” “experiences,” and “activations” 47 —that is, they apply the professional marketing jargon and tactics used for activities designed to engage customers, along the principles of the experience economy. 48 The key criterion for the events’ success is, “has there been a wow effect for the employees?” (same manager), and all respondents share their strategies for delivering something that has not been done before—a new theme, an exclusive location, or a trendy guest celebrity. In reality, the formats are more or less standardised, the same party themes circulate and are reproduced, and the claim for uniqueness and “something new” is the selling pitch of the subcontractors (e.g., event agencies) who deliver celebrations as a marketable and, to a large extent, commoditised service.
Using this promotional and experience economy logic, workplace events are used to make implicit and explicit identity claims. According to the HR manager of an online travel platform, her colleagues “expect the best because they consider themselves the best at what they do” (HR manager Company C, January 2018). In recent years, in the Bulgarian public imaginary, the middle class are “the creatives” employed in the tech industry, validating their status aspirations through “hipsterish” consumption and lifestyle practices. 49 As an example of that, the employees at Company C were disappointed when they received Christmas presents that were not “special enough,” and the next year the HR manager designed a tailor-made, unique experience. On a Friday in December—that is, also during working hours—the fifty employees spent the day in the office playing a complex game in designated cross-functional teams. Employees in the office had to take part in the activities—that is, participation was effectively compulsory. The game, created by the HR manager, was a combination between a scavenger hunt and a series of puzzles based on industry and company facts and insider jokes. The HR manager's task, mandated by the CEO, was to incorporate the organisational values—teamwork, problem-solving, competitiveness, and fun. In the evening, everyone gathered in a restaurant, after having “cracked” its GPS coordinates as a final puzzle, and the CEO welcomed them “with tears in his eyes when he said we are one big family” (same manager). During the evening, the CEO kept nudging the HR manager to mix up people who reverted to their work teams and did not mingle.
This celebration was arguably expected to demonstrate that the relations in the company were not “just business”; as a form of ritualistic activity, the Christmas party defined belonging to this (elite) community. At the same time, no part of the party was “just fun”—employees were expected to perform their team spirit and pretend they were a frictionless family in which everyone gets along well. The playfulness integrated in the event was influenced by the global trends of exploring the overlaps between work and play. 50 As Fay et al. argue, management is appropriating the concepts of play and well-being in instrumental ways, and at the same time, fun, which has become “good” in managerial discourse, is colonising organisations, adapting to wider cultural trends by placing “the pleasure-seeking, ‘happy’ smiling, entertained, satisfied, spending customer-person” at the centre of modern culture. 51 This does not necessarily mean that the political economy of neoliberalism changes—after company-wide restructuring in 2018, the HR manager’s position was closed, forcing her to leave, although her performance was graded as excellent. The ties holding the company family together are of much shorter term than the kin metaphor would imply.
Festivities are also used to demonstrate status. At Company D (developing sport-betting platforms), the thinking about company parties is always “large-scale” (EB manager, Company D, December 2019). One of the “grand gestures” of the owners was to take all staff (700+ people) to a seaside weekend in Greece. As in the case of the military factory, the implied generosity is also a claim for the financial capacity and prestige of the giver. But this version of the corporate gift is also meant to provide the workers with the picture-worthy backdrops and discursive resources to perform their own success as individual enterprising selves.
The EB manager jokingly offered a senior manager a bribe not to release to staff their pictures “partying hard” on a yacht during that weekend. The senior manager’s reaction was that this was not compromising material or an ethical breach, but on the contrary, pictures that everyone should see because this was what they should aspire to. As in the military factory, the management here also celebrates apart, but conspicuously and in full visibility, and this is meant to motivate the rest to climb upwards to realise the perceived social mobility potential of capitalism.
The parties are “grand gestures,” but they are used to maximum advantage. One of the recent Christmas parties was themed “The Great Gatsby,” and as part of the programme, there was a Moulin Rouge–style semi-erotic ballet—both inspired by the respective Hollywood movies. A senior manager asked the EB manager “to leverage the party”—a financial term, the relevance of which she did not initially understand. What he meant was to ask the ballet dancers, all female, to come from the stage and dance with the staff on the dance floor. It was negotiated on the spot and done. The following year, the theme was “A Night at the Circus,” and the highlight performance was by a drag queen. Drag culture is peripheral in Bulgaria, and this corporate party gave space for queer culture in front of a relatively very large audience. Thus, in the same company, festive events have been the stage for quite divergent social representations but still under the same categories of excess and changing the rules. According to the respondent,
for us, it is important to do things that nobody has done before, luckily both the business and the culture allow us, and actually require us, to always be one step ahead. . . we have a culture that allows us to be extravagant and to do things outside the box. (Same manager)
In the tech entrepreneurial culture, innovation and disruptive change have become “ideological constructs” 52 —an ideal to strive for—and this logic is applied to festivities and reaffirmed through them. The circus-themed event is also used promotionally, and it was covered in a leading culture and entertainment media outlet calling the employees “party gurus” with a “tradition of organising phenomenal parties” that should be “really envied.” Thus, the media reinforce the identity construction use of the party and reaffirm the neoliberal cultural model values of self-actualisation and enjoyment. 53 In this model, wanting more for oneself and outperforming others, to achieve exclusivity, are considered “good.”
Closing Remarks
This article has demonstrated some of the ways in which the post-1989 socio-economic transformations in Bulgaria are reflected in ongoing and dynamic changes in festive practices. The focus has been on the modes of invention of work celebrations—as an outcome of a centralised process of cultural engineering in the socialist state, as a hybrid of the legacy of the past and reactions towards it, and as a commercialised and commoditised service offered under the label of “unique experiences” in the post-socialist capitalist market.
According to Andreas Reckwitz, the need for experiences that are singular and promotable is a main characteristic of current Western cultures. 54 The workplace celebrations examined here illustrate this argument. The generic scripts of socialist celebrations required only the change of names and locations, generating knowledge of personhood defined by unity and belonging. 55 The current customised, tailor-made, ideally never-seen-before exclusive events function within the discourse of unique individualism. The socialist logic of general conformity is replaced by a logic in which competition operating on multiple levels is “the good.” In addition to the employers and event service providers they hire to “wow” their employees, individuals also compete to get closer to the celebrity performer and to share boastful personal posts online in the spirit of “my party is much better than your party.” 56 This new form of conspicuous consumption online allows employees to use the festive offerings of their employers for their own purposes in constructing and promoting their desired online personas. This applies equally to factory workers posting selfies with Ivana and software developers sharing a range of audio-visual formats from their events.
Apart from this similarity, however, the parallel between the industrial and high-tech celebrations demonstrates the extent to which class differentiation and the relative distribution of power within the respective sector produce significant differences in the moral economy of employment relations and its reflection in the festivities. The workers in the industrial settings have very limited employment alternatives, especially in the case of Company A, where they refuse to engage in gift-exchange with the changing owners. As has been discussed in relation to corporate gifts, festivities are shown to create relations of attachment but also separation, of similarity and difference. 57 In Company B, private owners speak with the paternalistic attitude of the socialist state but with an emphasis only on their giving, framed as gifting.
While in the socialist period labourers were at the centre of national celebration strategies, nowadays the festive activities in industrial settings are insignificant compared with the “play hard” extent and frequency of celebrating in high-tech companies. There, the material basis is oversupplied, and the hyperfestivity of the sector is addressing a different need—the search for meaning and self-reassurance. In the field of leisure studies, the increase in the number and importance of events is interpreted as an answer to the need for “meaningful” real-life experiences arising from the increase in socialising online.
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This search for meaningfulness is discussed by one of the respondents:
A friend of mine who owns a small IT company tells me—these big parties you have, that’s just trying to overcome an inferiority complex. But for me, it is important that the people in the company realize that we don’t do these parties just to prove to ourselves how great we are and what parties we can throw, but because they deserve them. The purpose of the Christmas party is for people to leave with the feeling that all the work, efforts, and strain during the year was worth it. (EB manager, Company D, January 2020)
This demonstrates the year-end tension-management role of big celebrations, but there is also a strong recommitment and identity aspect. The scale and specialness of the events should make work meaningful; they should give material expression to the worthiness of employees and be a well-deserved reward for their sacrifices, motivationally framed as continuous self-improvement. The high-tech parties validate the enterprising self—active, mingling, winning—as the essence of the “good” employee, and by that, they legitimise relations of exploitation and function as a disciplining measure for ongoing and across-the-board competitiveness. The inferiority complex, related to tech nerd stereotypes, is countered with a “party guru” claim, demonstrating the importance of overperforming in socialising skills and status. As Eva Illouz argues, there has been “an emotionalization of the workplace, a transformation of criteria of evaluation of work in terms of emotional satisfaction, emotional management, and emotional expressiveness.” 59 Moreover, there is an insistence on happiness in the neoliberal workplace, not as a result of doing work but as a prerequisite for finding and keeping it. 60 Once again, every day has to be a happy day, the socialist-time insistence on celebrating in the mundane has made a return, but in the capitalist context, the proposed path to achieve that is through the consumption of “authentic” experiences.
As with the socialist everyday festivities, there is an inherent contradiction. According to Aeron Davies, “when personal forms of emotional and immaterial labour are freely exploited, . . ., promotional culture promotes ‘false’ ways of thinking about work, labour, leisure, and consumption.” 61 The promotional war between tech employers, fought through the emotions and affect of employees, creates a sense of entitlement and elitism, built, however, on fragile work relations. The processes of ideological modelling of everyday life did not stop with the end of the socialist period; only the sources of influence, content, and techniques have changed. The unitary form and messages of the socialist celebrations have been replaced by a range of formats reflecting the existing worldview segmentations and inequalities, and legitimising corporate power.
