Is the high-involvement worker precarious or opportunistic? Hierarchical ambiguities in late capitalism

Abstract

This article addresses the recent trend in critical organization theory and sociological literature to regard employees in creative and high-involvement work as precarious. It does so by tapping into the perennial debate about control and ambiguity in organization studies. Its main contribution is to expand the focus on workers as objects of control to exercisers of control. Drawing on ethnographic material from the creative knowledge work sector, the article argues that structural and discursive developments in late capitalism generate a specific form of ambiguity which is mobilized by both managers and employees in attempts to exploit and control the counterpart. Through careful analysis of hierarchical interactions, it shows how it is highly contextual whether managers or employees come out as ‘winners’ in the game of influence and domination. This means that the study of worker precariousness needs to be combined with the study of its flip side, namely worker opportunism.

The issue about control has been debated in organization theory for decades. The question underlying this debate is how managers handle their ambiguous and conflictual relation to employees (Reed, 1992: 99). Friedman famously described this conflict as consisting in the fact that employees must display both instrumental obedience and autonomous discretion in order for the work place to function (Friedman, 1986: 97). In other words, there is an inherent ambiguity in the hierarchical relation. This ambiguity and the managerial answers to the challenge have been treated in a variety of ways, ranging from Marxist Labour Process Theory to post-structuralist studies of (neo-)normative control and employee resistance. Despite their differences, the debates have in common that they rarely focus on how employees draw on these ambiguities to exercise control or discipline towards their managers. Although it is frequently recognized that managers and employees are in similar states of vulnerability vis-à-vis capitalist forms of exploitation, employees are not often studied as those deploying organizational, discursive or social technologies when trying to control their superiors.

I would like to add to this debate with empirically specific material from two large creative knowledge work organizations. My argument is that within this sector, the project based and high-commitment forms of work (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005) give rise to a specific version of ambiguities between contractual and self-actualization oriented discourses and practices. These ambiguities are not just exploited by managers, but also by employees. This allows both parties to control, subjectify and discipline the counterpart. My intention with this is to expand our view on the so-called ‘precarious’ (Gill and Pratt, 2008) project worker in the creative knowledge industry, so that it may include the element of opportunistic domination this worker can exercise over his superior under the right kind of circumstances. As such, it is meant as an invitation to generate contextual differentiation and empirical specificity to the question of control and ambiguity in organizations.

The article will proceed as follows: I start by sketching the debate about control and ambiguity in organization theory, including themes such as ‘manufacturing consent’, (neo-)normative control, resistance and self-alienation. After this, I introduce more sociological perspectives on the normative and cultural changes in late capitalism, including the celebration of individual freedom, self-actualization and project work. I argue that these changes engender deep ambiguities between contractual and self-realization based work modes in organizations, especially those in the creative and knowledge intensive sector. These ambiguities strongly influence the power relation between managers and employees. I illustrate this by briefly presenting the dominant discourses about work in my two case organizations, and then explore in depth some of the ambiguous interactions ensuing from them. In the analysis of the ambiguous interactions, I draw on vocabulary about ‘double communication’ developed in systems theory. The intention is to demonstrate that it is highly contextual whether it is the manager or the employee who gets away with disciplining and controlling the counterpart through strategic manoeuvreing in ambiguity. Finally, I discuss the implications of these findings for critical research.

Control and ambiguity

The question of control has been central in organization theory since its inception in the late 19th century and has gained its specific focus on ambiguity and tensions between control and autonomy since Braverman and followers initiated Labor Process Theory (LPT) in the 1970s (see Smith and Thompson, 1998). Roughly, one can sketch the concerns of this debate under the following key words: direct control versus ‘responsible autonomy’ (Friedman, 1986); discourse, power, identity and discipline (see Delbridge and Ezzamel, 2005: 606–607) and employee resistance (e.g. Collinson and Ackroyd, 2005; Fleming, 2005; Fleming and Spicer, 2007). Historically, there is a move from Marxist and critical realist approaches to more post-structural approaches since the 1980s. Common to all the debates is an attempt to theorize control in hierarchical relations as more than simply subjugation. Rather, control is analysed as a complex and ambiguous dynamic largely depending on an element of employee autonomy in order to succeed. Despite this recognition of autonomy, I would nevertheless claim that the literature tends to focus on the employee as an object of control attempts rather than as exercising control attempts within hierarchical interactions. Or in the words of Stanley Deetz, there is the risk of confining the critical agenda to ‘talk of victims and perpetrators and the reduction of complexity into simple terms’ (Deetz, 2008: 347).

While the early LPT studies focused on workers’ loss of control due to routinization of jobs and deskilling, later studies were more interested in the need to manufacture consent amongst workers. In other words, they recognized more influence and autonomy in employees and showed how managerial attempts at control might fail in the face of powerful or resistant workers. As such, the Marxist focus on exploitation and inequality was somewhat moderated, and the emphasis was placed on contextual differences and varieties of worker-manager conflicts (Friedman, 1986: 98). There was also an interest in distinguishing between managerial strategies for control, not least the differences between formal and informal approaches. Ouchi’s term ‘clan based control’ marked the beginning of an explosion in OT literature analysing informal control (Ouichi, 1980). The key to informal control is precisely that it depends on the promise of autonomy and personal choice in order to function. As a consequence of this turn, there was an increased interest in subjectivity and identity at work. Relying on post-structural themes about power, discourses and subjectification, a new line of OT research studied ‘governmental’ forms of control which rely on internalized self-disciplining rather than external regulation (Ezzamel and Reed, 2008: 607; Reed, 1992: 92–103). Again, the ambiguity between external control and internalized commitment was a central theme.

Roughly, the first wave of critical literature studied various forms of managerial control via corporate values, HRM tools, discourses on ‘excellence’ and ‘enterprise’ and disciplinarian effects of team-work (Barker, 2002; Bonner and du Gay, 1992; Casey, 1995; Grey, 1994; Hochschild, 1983; Knights and Willmott, 1989; Kunda, 1992; Ray, 1986; Willmott, 1993). The second wave argues that this normative control has been replaced by ‘neo-normative control’ (Fleming, 2009; Fleming and Spicer, 2008: 303; Fleming and Sturdy, 2007). Rather than encouraging ‘clan-like’ forms of commitment, the companies now urge employees to ‘be themselves’ and ‘be authentic’. This research is inspired by Hardt and Negri’s work on the ‘social factory’ and their claim that late capitalism turns everything, even the private, social and emotional sphere, into potential productivity (Hardt and Negri, 2000). The individual urge to ‘be authentic’ and pursue self-actualization is now used as a means to gain innovative and branding advantages by corporations. One could say that the attempts at control exercised through promises of autonomy become increasingly sophisticated, according to this literature. However, Hardt and Negri also point out that the ‘social factory’ opens up new space for spontaneous, collective resistance, as people find ways of organizing passionate solidarity and anti-work movements.

Similar points are made by sociologists who explore the interplay between self-actualization trends and late capitalism. These writers claim that we are witnessing a process of detraditionalization whose primary consequence is increased reflexivity and individualism (Bauman, 2000; Beck et al., 2003; Giddens, 1991; Sennett, 1998). In this individualism, the predominant themes are autonomy, self-realization and ‘do-it-yourself-biographies’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2009: 15). These themes imply that individuals are responsible for orchestrating their lives in the most optimal way, always relying on personal choice rather than convention. Everything should be carefully deliberated as an existential stance showing one’s commitment to the realization of personal values and potential. (As we shall see in my case material, this late modern discourse is immensely powerful in the two organizations and is mobilized by both managers and employees in their interaction with each other.) In line with Hardt and Negri, this research also points out a significant interrelation between these cultural trends and pervasive changes in capitalism during the same period (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Sennett, 2006). Through flexibilization and project work, capitalism has moved away from a language of bureaucracy, instead (apparently) offering employees permanent development and increased autonomy at work. This way, the ‘do-it-yourself-biography’ of late modern individualism fuses with the project-based late capitalism.

Returning to our theme about ambiguity, several researchers studying late capitalist organizations have claimed that the shift from bureaucratic to flexible organizations is not as radical as the literature suggests. Rather, they argue, most organizations seem to construct a combination of bureaucratic and flexible frameworks, thus generating highly ambiguous norms about work (Alvesson, 2001; Courpasson and Dany, 2003; Watson, 1994: 115–116). From a CMS perspective, this ambiguity has been analysed as double control, summed up by the metaphor ‘cages in tandem’ (Kärremann and Alvesson, 2004). The claim is that employees are faced with both bureaucratic and high-involvement-based forms of control at once, thus constraining, regulating and invading them more than ever (see also Clegg and Courpasson, 2004; Markham, 1996: 404).

As we can see, the question of control and ambiguity has been revisited countless times by the OT community, not least by the CMS branch. In this article, I align myself with the group of researchers who wish to temper the focus on villains and victims when it comes to studying hierarchical interactions. Drawing on data from the knowledge work sector, I argue that managers and employees both seek to ‘control’ and ‘discipline’ each other via opportunistic manoeuvreing in ambiguity. I show how a specific version of ambiguity arising from the marriage between self-actualization trends and late capitalism has increased employee access to such disciplining of their managers in certain lines of work. Below, I will illustrate this with my empirical case. First, I show the ambiguous discourses about work which flourish in the two case companies. As we shall see, these discourses draw on both bureaucratic and ‘self-realization’ themes. Then I show examples of hierarchical interactions ensuing from these discourses, and how managers and employees take turns attempting to control each other through strategic use of ambiguity.

Media, Booker and multi-sited fieldwork

During my fieldwork, I spent three months in a large media company and another three months in a large publishing house. I selected those two sites on the assumption that they would harbour a large number of workers committed to late capitalist values about flexibility, autonomy and self-actualization at work. Media ¹ is a large media company producing TV, radio and internet content. It employs more than 3000 people, and the producing staff is a mixture of academics and journalists. A little more than one-quarter of the employees are hired in temporary or freelance positions, and the turnover is 12%, which equals around 400 new employees a year. In other words, Media is a very ‘flexible’ and project based organization. After my three months in Media, I conducted a second field study in the large publishing house Booker. I decided to conduct two field studies in order to gauge which trends cut across organizations. Booker is in many ways similar to Media in terms of profile, types of assignments and types of employees. Both are prestigious workplaces offering positions that include creative and self-directed work, and both attract ambitious, well-educated and highly involved employees.

During my six months of fieldwork, I was included as a ‘regular’ employee in both organizations, in the sense that I was present every day, had my own desk, pc, mail and phone number, yet without having any actual working tasks. I spent the day attending meetings, lunches, working groups, seminars or just hanging out in the office. In addition to this, I conducted long in-depth interviews with both managers and employees. My data material consists of 25 individual in-depth interviews with managers and employees, lasting 1.5 hours on average, plus my field notes. Furthermore, I was given access to a number of organizational documents such as development plans, stress policies, organization profiles, strategy papers, employee satisfaction studies, human resource papers, job advertisements and applications responding to these.

In general, my ethnographic techniques were based on creating continuous challenge to the hypotheses I formulated along the way. It was a kind of ‘kill your darlings’ approach: at intervals, I questioned my own analytical preferences, such as favourite hypotheses and enticing distinctions. After specifying them, I spent the next period subjecting them to maximum empirical pressure. Usually, this process would generate significant twists in my analysis. Similarly, I used ‘discomfort’ as an empirical guideline. Whenever I experienced discomfort or reluctance, I considered this an indication to pursue it. As an empirical researcher, I often feel discomfort when my analytical ordering is threatened. It could be that certain employees insist on their commitment to traditional craft, just when I have painstakingly concluded that craft is no longer a value in the network organization. These employees generate analytical discomfort, and one is often tempted to label them as ‘exceptions’. If one elects, instead, to turn these disturbances into a central focus for a while, they usually add important complexity to the analysis.

In practice, I relied on tools from so-called multi-sited ethnography, which is inspired by the ANT principle of pursuing matters of concern (Marcus, 1995). In contrast to traditional fieldwork which focuses on bounded sites, the multi-sited method operates in chains of relevance. It follows people, stories, conflicts, and objects so as to understand the relations between them and their different appearance depending on position and perspective. My criterion for selecting what to follow was ‘intensity’, based on the assumption that this indicated when something was ‘at stake’. So if an employee expressed intense frustration with an administrative practice, I followed this practice in as many contexts as possible, making sure to generate material about the same phenomenon from a range of different positions. As a fieldworker, I could move between contexts which did not have access to one another: I was present both during informal employee lunches, during top management meetings, during rehearsals and other confidential settings. This multi-context approach allowed me an impression of how the central actors read each other and to what extent their readings were synchronized. In this way, I was able to see contradictory aspects of the same phenomenon—e.g. how employees were at once more vulnerable and more powerful due to specific discursive practices.

Below, I will proceed to a brief presentation of the discursive practices about work and hierarchical interactions which dominated in Media and Booker. After that I offer a more empirically dense analysis of ambiguous interactions based on these discourses. This analysis will draw on systems theory vocabulary such as ‘double bind’ and ‘hybrid’.

Discourses about work—contract or self-actualization

While exploring the discursive practices in Media and Booker, it soon became obvious that the late modern themes about individualism, self-realization and flexibility described above were very dominant. When asked what they considered the purpose of work, both managers and employees gave answers such as: self-actualization, having fun and developing personally. The mention of money was very rare, and always in combination with more personal parameters. In other words, the workers in Media and Booker considered their job as a platform for existential explorations, and they all underscored that they would leave immediately if their workplace lost this aspect.

Largely, the themes revolved around work as a stage for self-actualization rather than as a formal contract with a hierarchical counterpart. While a contract focuses on the task or purpose of the organization and attempts to establish a clear relationship of exchange between employee and workplace, self-actualization focuses on the Self, its relationships, and its existential development via work. This self-actualization focus was expressed through a number of subthemes, such as ‘progression’, ‘passion’, ‘indispensability’ and ‘sincerity’.

In the progression theme, work was cast as a medium for personal development, and it stigmatized tradition and stability for being too limiting. This could be seen in the Media employee Peter’s reflections on his need for security. He obviously considered this characteristic a liability and he spent a long time explaining what he had done to minimize it. For example, he had made sure to choose the more interesting, albeit less secure, job over the permanent yet routine-minded one. When contemplating this choice, he said: ‘Thank God! It’s one thing to be a security addict, it’s quite another to be pathologically security addicted’. In other words, valuing stability above challenge merited the diagnosis ‘pathological’. Generally, the self-actualization discourse underscored the desirability of permanent challenges. Managers and employees alike described how they needed a job which pushed them to the limit (or beyond) and allowed them to discover how much they were capable of when put to the test. The thought of a predictable and safe job generated strong reactions of dislike, or even disgust. As the employee Lisa put it: ‘The moment I’m no longer challenged, I have to leave. Then I have to move on!’.

Another form of work-based self-actualization was endorsed by the idealization of passionate dedication. Many employees claimed that working life was only fully realized when it became the vehicle for intense personal involvement. Routines, procedures, rules and ‘duties’ were framed as narrow-minded, backwards or limiting approaches which should be overcome by virtue of heartfelt enthusiasm and the willingness to explore possibilities beyond familiar territory. The metaphors in the passion theme were based on images of fire and fuel, such as a having a ‘burning involvement’ or finding that challenges served as ‘excellent fuel’. They were also based on images of plunging, such as ‘throwing oneself in at the deep end’ or ‘jumping’ into the unknown. The absence of these aspirations was a cause for scorn or disrespect. For instance, when Lisa imagined working with colleagues who were ‘stable’ and ‘routine-minded’, she exclaimed: ‘Ooh, yuck!’, and called it a ‘nightmare scenario’, because ‘sure they’d do their job. But it just wouldn’t be the same’. They would go home at five, and they would not be open to all the possibilities, she claimed. In other words, they would not subscribe to belief in limitless development which was quintessential in the self-realization discourse. This personal development was also endorsed through a focus on being indispensable, in the sense that the worker should break the mold of ‘exchangeable unit’ and become someone ‘unique’. By virtue of passionate progression, each worker’s contribution gained that unimitable ‘personal touch’ which made him indispensable and set him aside from a routine-minded craftsman.

In the self-actualization discourse, the focus on personal aspects was also evident in the way which managers and employees thought of their hierarchical interactions. Both parties emphasized the need to escape fettering and rigid contractual dynamics. Employees were particularly insistent about the merits of sincerity and presence in their superiors: managers should offer frequent personal validation, and they should entrust their subordinates with a great degree of autonomy. In turn, the managers commended explorative and self-directed employees who did not just cast their leaders as instrumental figures, but instead entered into sincere reciprocal relations with them.

Summing up, the self-actualization discourse focused on the merits of personal and existential aspects, both in one’s approach to the professional assignments and in one’s approach to the primary organizational counterpart. As such, it neatly reflected the late modern themes about individualism and self-realization described earlier.

However, and to my initial discomfort, another set of themes kept showing up, disturbing the analytical plot about my case organizations as ordered around a self-actualization discourse. I subsumed these themes into a ‘contractuality discourse’ which obviously co-existed with the self-actualization discourse. In other words, I ended up concluding that my case organizations featured an extremely ambivalent discursive and practical framework, as discussed in the literature review above. In contrast, and sometimes direct opposition, to the self-actualization discourse, the contractuality discourse focused on the task (as opposed to the Self performing the task), on separation of private and public spheres and on clear indications of power differences and mandates. As such, it was very close to traditional bureaucratic virtues. For example, many employees talked about craft and the virtues of painstaking practice and careful adherence to tradition. When doing so, they scorned the individual quest for uniqueness and they celebrated the selfless focus on ‘substance’. People described to me their joy over ‘the good product’ which completely transcended concerns about authorship or vanity. For example, the radio journalist Karen explained that what really mattered was to produce ‘good stories’. It was a pleasure to offer people a good listening experience: ‘They don’t have to listen to me. They should just listen to the story’, she said and explained that if the story was good, she was just as happy to broadcast a colleague’s production rather than her own. While self and identity were constant interests in the self-actualization discourse, the selfless dedication to something external dominated in contractuality discourse.

In line with this, the contractuality discourse also focused on collegiality and emphasized the virtues of setting aside personal aspirations in favour of something ‘outside’. In this case, the outside was a social collective of colleagues inspiring solidarity, mutual care and common efforts. The collegiality theme commended the temperance of individualized ambition. In fact, it discredited workers who were very intent on personal excellence, because they were seen as self-centred or disloyal to the group. Stories about collective achievements and social bonds were common in this theme, which cast good co-workers as the most important feature in a desirable workplace.

The contractuality discourse also underscored the importance of impersonal frameworks guiding the interplay between managers and employees. There should be formality, rules, explicit power asymmetries and clear boundaries. Employees emphasized that competent managers should establish explicit asymmetry with transparent definitions of rights and duties for both parties. In other words, hierarchy was cast as a prerequisite for healthy and fair manager-employee relationships. Consequently, management attempts to establish symmetrical interactions with employees were interpreted as opportunism or power abuse in this discourse. Instead, the responsible manager was expected to acknowledge his power privilege so that he could always be held accountable. He should behave like an authority, in other words. For instance, Sara reflected on her manager:

We have a manager who is a bit like: ‘What do you think?’ But a manager is a fucking manager! I expect him to be that, so I can act in that space. We shouldn’t try to pretend that we’re equals, because when it boils down to it we’re not!

The same focus on ‘the matter’ and on impersonality was expressed by managers when they talked about the manager-employee interaction in the contractuality discourse. A good employee should respect ‘the rules of the game’, instead of trying to turn work into a self-actualization agenda. The rules of the game involved an understanding of the fundamentally hierarchical nature of organizations, and an acceptance of the fact that sustainable business requires compromise and pragmatism. Managers speaking in the contractuality discourse often despaired over their ‘pampered’ employees who seemed to think that they only needed talent, not skills, and that they could go from newcomer to star within the first few months. Instead, managers requested more ‘realistic’ attitudes, including the willingness to set aside artistic aspirations in favour of concrete assignments. They also requested less ‘diva’ reluctance to receive critical feedback, and they wished that their employees would not demand constant validation and attention.

The two discourses existed side by side in the workplaces and represented different normative frameworks for establishing cooperation in hierarchical relations. In many cases, they mingled into one tension-ridden framework where managers and employees engaged in continuous negotiations about moderation and compromise. These negotiations attempted to carve out positions in a middle-range spectrum which grappled with the integration of personal/impersonal, Self/task and sincerity/rules. However, in many other cases, the discourses featured as polarized forms of sense-making entering an antagonistic dynamic with each other. This allowed both managers and employees to mobilize different discourses depending on context and agenda. In these situations, there was no meta-discourse able to point out the oscillation between antagonistic discourses and the inconsistencies which this gave rise to.

As we learned above, several critical researchers have referred to this co-existence of two different frameworks for hierarchical interactions as a kind of double control. By contrast, I argue that the ambivalence is used by both managers and employees to serve their own agenda. Especially the talented employees may draw on strategic shifts between, or combinations of, the discourses in order to get things their way with management. Furthermore, I argue that the ambiguous norms also make for ambiguous phenomena where it is hard to determine who benefits and who pays in the hierarchical interaction. Maybe there are even interactions which are at once exploitative and liberating. Below, I will describe two kinds of interactions in which the discourses appear as antagonistic and are oscillated between, or combined, strategically by both managers and employees. In order to analyse the ambiguity of these interactions, I draw on vocabulary from systems theory concerned precisely with ‘double communication’ in various forms.

Ambiguous interactions: double bind and hybrid

The two most analytically challenging interaction forms which I observed between managers and employees, I have given the names ‘double bind’ and ‘hybrid’. Both interaction forms illustrate that it is highly contextual when the discursive and structural conditions of late capitalism facilitate managerial control or employee control in a knowledge work setting wrought with ambiguity.

The term ‘double bind’ was originally formulated by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1956), based on a systems theoretical approach. He considered it a highly dysfunctional form of interaction and believed that it was a frequent cause of severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, when practiced in a family setting. Double bind occurs when there is a relationship of dependence in which one party communicates two mutually exclusive demands to the counterpart, combining this with some form of threat about sanctions. Popularly speaking, this places the counterpart in a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ position. An important additional element is that there is an absence of ‘meta-language’ capable of addressing the contradictory demands, plus that the possibility of simply leaving the situation is absent too. In Media and Booker, double binds were a recurring dynamic, featuring an equal number of managers and employees in the ‘binding’ role. The double binds consisted of one party subscribing to norms from both discourses at the same time, and in a mutually exclusive version, when interacting with the counterpart. It is a fundamentally opportunistic position which involves wanting the best of two worlds without committing to any of the concomitant duties.

A very common double bind practiced by employees was to demand of their managers that they should facilitate highly personal, existential development on the one hand, yet that they should establish impersonal rules and procedures on the other hand. One could also say that in the double binding communication, employees felt insulted when managers drew limits, yet felt abandoned and let down if they did not. So when contemplating the very same assignment, an employee might expect her manager to lead her by giving her unambiguous instructions, yet at the same time might feel outraged if she was not given complete ‘artistic’ freedom, so she could develop personally through her work. Below are two quotes from the same employee about her expectations to managers:

I want someone who says it like it is. I mean, really!! And he should mean it. I want the criticism: ‘This you do well, this you do badly’. And what I don’t do well, I had damn well better start improving. Just so we get a little straight talk. I like the attitude that: ‘You are paid for this, so don’t complain all the time. Coz’ you’re getting a monthly salary to do this!’.

At another time she evokes a fairly different framework for the interaction:

I take on all the fights. I take a million fights, screaming and yelling at my bosses, saying: ‘You have to do this and this and this’. Well, then they don’t. They’re still just the same people. And then I can sense that I am not getting what I need from them. Then I have to move on.

As we can see, the employee Lisa wants superiors who draw unambiguous limits and establish a quid pro quo contractual relation with her. Yet, at the same time she wants her superiors to follow her lead, so she can develop through her work, rather than simply perform business as usual. If they fail to do so, she will look for another job.

A similar kind of double bind was practiced by managers. Often they expected of the employees that they have a pragmatic and ‘realistic’ attitude towards assignments instead of being driven by intense desire for personal expression. However, at the same time the assignments were of a nature which demanded intense and limit-breaking efforts, including the ability to tolerate high degrees of uncertainty and work-pressure. Boiling this double bind down, it went like this: If you insist on limits, you are outdated; if you challenge limits, you are pampered and conceited. Below are two very contrasting manager quotes about expectations towards employees:

They’re hired by Media on a contract, so of course we have an assignment for them. Noone should say: ‘But what if blah blah blah?’ It’s an official order that they should deliver this. If they don’t, then they’ve sort of fired themselves.

So the relation is based on quid pro quo exchange with clear, contractual definition of rules and duties. However:

There are still some employees who focus more on rules about working hours and all sorts of professional subtleties. That bothers me and provokes me—mostly because I find it puzzling, since they’re the ones who will lose to others in the end. And when I try to motivate them to find other ways to move on with their expectations towards themselves and their surroundings, they stubbornly persist.

So, those who insist on rules are stubborn and will lose to the others in the end.

As we can see, both managers and employees deployed double binding communication in hierarchical interactions. Furthermore, both parties had various potential sanctions which the counterpart might feel threatened by. Usually, these threats were implicit in the double bind, but no less acutely present for that reason. Examples of potential employee sanctions which managers worried about were: gossiping and thus creating hostile and conflictual attitudes from staff members towards the manager; giving bad evaluations of the manager in the recurring HR measurements, thus decreasing his chances of promotion; losing motivation and thus the necessary creative drive to carry out the demanding assignments in a satisfactory way; not giving the manager the personal validation which he often needed in order to find his work meaningful; and finally, the most radical sanction, quitting the job, often by joining the competitor instead. As one can see, the employee sanctions were mostly based on the manager’s (and the company’s) need for a creative, motivated and cooperative staff. Creative knowledge work depends on employee enthusiasm and flexible collaboration in order to generate competitive products. Managers on all levels were acutely aware of this. Consequently, it was incorporated in the HR procedures, according a fairly high importance to employee evaluations. Furthermore, the managers were as embedded in the self-actualization discourse as their employees. This meant that they often ended up in personal crises if their relationship to the employees did not involve an element of mutual validation, appreciation and trust. This gave the employees powerful means for informal sanctions. On a more structural level, employee sanctions were based on the manager’s (and the organization’s) dependence on networks. Often the loss of an employee would mean the potential loss of clients, and the loss of unique expertise, experience and contacts (see Alvesson, 2000). As such, it could represent serious consequences for the company. Obviously, the gravity of this loss depended on timing and on that particular employee’s cultural and social capital in the company at a given moment. Some employees were only a minor loss and could be replaced quite easily.

Examples of potential management sanctions which employees worried about were: losing ‘opportunities’ such as promotion, exciting challenges or influence; not getting validation or attention; being stuck with routine assignments; moving to less prestigious tasks; or worst case, being fired or not having the temporary contract extended. Not getting a pay raise was generally second to the concerns above, but still featured.

As we can see, the ambiguous cultural norms combined with the project- and network-dependent forms of organizing permitted both managers and employees to practice opportunism. Obviously, not everybody was in the same position to exert double binds on their counterpart, but these differences in opportunities did not follow the manager-employee divide. There were situations featuring vulnerable and dependent managers—including top managers—as well as vulnerable and dependent employees. Generally managers agreed that they would be in trouble without extraordinary and talented employees; the ones with ‘x factor’. This made talented employees difficult, sometimes impossible, to replace—which in turn gave such employees opportunistic manoeuvreability. Furthermore, the dependence on timing and on specific clients also gave employees contextual power, as the loss of knowledge or contacts could be very damaging for the organization in a given situation (Alvesson, 2000: 1103).

Another interesting interaction form which I observed was the ‘hybrid’. Structurally, the hybrid is identical to the double bind: it involves directing two mutually exclusive set of expectations towards the counterpart at the same time. However, while the double bind becomes negative and concentrated on potential sanctions, the hybrid generates productivity in a seemingly impossible enhancement of two antagonistic discourses at once. Here we see fierce standardization and system-breaking innovation occurring at once. We see actions being hierarchical and symmetrical simultaneously. And we see work experiences being exploitative and liberating at the same time.

Originally, the notion of the hybrid was developed by the systems theorist Günther Teubner (1993, 1996). He was interested in the appearance of ‘organizational monsters’ which seemed to cooperate and compete at the same time. Teubner challenged existing analysis of these phenomena which sought to understand the organizational monsters as existing somewhere on a ‘continuum’ between cooperation and competition. His seminal suggestion was that they did not operate between those two conditions, but managed to transcend them. To explain this, he used the concept of ‘double attribution’: the very same practice could be attributed to competitive logic and cooperative logic, depending on the situation. Some contexts called for legitimation based on competitive terms, others for legitimation based on cooperative terms. On the one hand, this produced extreme flexibility and improvisation capacity; on the other hand it generated high risk of opportunism as responsibility could be avoided by the same principle. Without elaborating further on Teubner’s financial examples, I shall try to apply the concept of hybrid on my empirical setting and the two discourses of contractuality and commitment.

In Booker and Media, hybrid interaction occurred when antagonistic versions of the contractuality and commitment discourses were active at the same time between two parties, yet generated a highly productive, flexible, and (as we shall see) fantasmatic dynamic transcending the antagonism. The term ‘transcending’ refers to the fact that the coexistence of two discourses was not made possible by moderate compromise or by one discourse superseding the other. In contrast, it allowed both the mutually exclusive discourses to be enhanced at the same time. It did so precisely through the manoeuvre of ‘double attribution’. In addition to double attribution, the hybrid was also made possible by a focus on future resolution rather than present dissonance. An example of hybrid interaction from my fieldwork was the dynamic between the employee Camilla and her manager John.

While Camilla was studying, she worked as an assistant at Booker, performing relatively minor tasks for the editors. During this time, the head of department, John, noticed her and found her unusually talented. Barely graduated from university, she was hired as a full time editor and given very prestigious assignments. She told me how she had biked home that day, warm with happiness, thinking: ‘Now I’m finally somebody!’. When Camilla talked to me about work, she used very emotional language. She explained how she could never be in a job which did not generate absolute passion in her. Routine, administration and assignments which did not correspond with her personal interests were inadmissible and would cause her to leave her position, she said. ‘I would rather be on unemployment benefit and eat oatmeal every day than have a job like that!’, was her comment. For Camilla, work should be a context which delivered existential meaning and opportunities to explore her passions. If work could not provide this, she would rather be poor, but live in accordance with her inner desires, she said. In other words, Camilla was thoroughly entrenched in a radical version of the self-actualization discourse when describing her work situation: work only made sense to the extent that it was not contractual.

A similar subscription to the self-actualization discourse was made by her manager John when discussing his work with Camilla. He had employed her despite her lack of experience, because her talent was so exceptional. He commended her for her uniqueness, her original ideas, and her very ‘personal pen’ when writing. All these strengths compensated for the fact that she was not familiar with the craft of editing, nor with the everyday realities and routines of the publishing house. In fact, it was precisely her transgression of familiar routines, habits and norms which John appreciated in her. He explained how she would come to his office many times a week, presenting him with new, untraditional ideas for a project. Nine out of ten times he would have to tell her: ‘Camilla, that’s just too crazy!’. But that one time out of ten, John explained, her idea was so promising that it by far exceeded any of the ideas that the rest of the editors came up with collectively. So Camilla’s ‘innate talent’, her passion and her uniqueness overruled her lack of experience, craft and ‘realistic’ approach, in John’s view. As such, he too was staunchly rooted in the self-actualization discourse in his understanding of her as an employee: she had been employed, precisely because she was impossible to keep within the limits of contractual work.

Interestingly, both parties also subscribed to a strong version of the contractuality discourse. When I entered Camilla’s office to interview her, I was struck by the enormous piles of papers and books on her desk, on her floor and on her chairs. She sat behind those piles, looking like someone about to drown in a virtual onslaught of paper. Her expression was a bit wide-eyed, almost surprised, as if she was wondering how all those piles had arrived in her office. She answered my questions in a very wandering manner, again giving the impression that she was a bit dazed or lagging behind her own situation. After her initial emphasis on passion and enthusiasm, her narrative changed as I started asking more concrete questions. She explained that, to tell the truth, she was a bit at a loss about what she was supposed to do. She glanced around at the piles with a tired expression while saying this. I asked her if she had not posed this question to her manager, to which she replied that it did not feel appropriate when he had such great faith in her talent. But in all honesty, she confided, her biggest wish was to work as a trainee for several months, learning from somebody experienced about how things should be done. She looked very fragile and very nostalgic when expressing this wish. It was obvious that the thought of instructions, guidelines, procedures and clear managerial orders seemed immensely appealing to her at that moment. In other words, she longed for clear limits which could protect her from the menacing limitlessness of the piles growing on a daily basis in her office. This was precisely the kind of work approach she had earlier claimed was the farthest from her mind—and even incommensurable with her existential beliefs.

Similarly, John subscribed to the contractuality discourse in his interaction with Camilla: Primarily, he did this by giving her encompassing assignments which required a great deal of administrative work. Despite both parties’ emphasis on passion and limit-breaking, a large part of the piles in Camilla’s office consisted of highly mundane, yet fairly technical work of an administrative nature—work which required precisely the kind of training, disciplining and ‘realistic’ approach whose absence John found so fascinating in Camilla. In practice, John often had to cope with a number of inconvenient consequences of Camilla’s non-contractual approach. This could be delays in administrative assignments, technical mistakes or inexperienced approaches, which made it necessary for him to buy more time, cover for her or look for extra assistance.

The interesting thing is that John and Camilla’s interaction could not be labelled as a simple double bind dynamic, despite both parties’ simultaneous subscription to two mutually exclusive sets of expectations. Instead of gravitating towards sanctions and mutual control, the dynamic transformed into a ‘virtualized’ mode which was deeply meaningful to them by virtue of strong common fantasies about future possibilities. Both John and Camilla believed that they would accomplish something great together—that they had the potential to break new ground and generate truly original ideas. This ‘fantasmatic’ investment in the future made them willing to endure the ongoing dissonances of their present situation. Although the recurring friction between limit-breaking self-actualization and limit-enforcing contractuality made both parties not only frustrated, but also anxious, the intensity of their common vision was strong enough to conserve their dedication. In practice, this required constant juggling in order to avoid or postpone or recast situations which demanded discursive and practical coherence of them over a longer period of time. One could say that coherence over time would require consistent and ‘realistic’ choices which would then quell the fantasmatic investment so indispensable to both of them in their work. Without having any access to explicit meta-language about it, they both shuffled discursively to maintain maximum manoeuvreability: they filled in forms, documented project hours, reported publishing plans etc., all the while knowing more or less consciously that their work did not live up to the requirements of this contractual and rule-guided paradigm—and all the while scorning such ‘unimaginative’ and ‘rigid’ approaches. At the same time they fantasized, envisioned, innovated and made spectacular promises, all the while knowing that they were toying with the limits of what was practically possible—and all the while longing for a working life with clear, protective boundaries and purposes. Through their willingness to perform this constant double-attribution and to endure the ensuing dissonance, they maintained a position of maximum possibilities, albeit in a highly risky form. The greater the divide between the two discourses practiced at once, the higher the risk of breakdown—either practically or personally.

For Camilla, the breakdown was personal. After several episodes of dizziness and quickened heartbeat, she ended up passing out at work and being taken to the ER with heart fibrillations. The dissonance had become greater than she could bear. After this incident, she decided to have a serious talk with John about her working life. When she told me this, I expected that the outcome of their talk had been a plan for more realistic working procedures for Camilla. Maybe John had offered her the training she longed for, and maybe she had been given assignments which were more in line with her actual level of experience. As it turned out, this was not the case.

When John learned about Camilla’s episode, his comment was: ‘Don’t worry! I’ve had stress breakdowns too!’. The rest of the conversation took the form of an empathetic exchange of intimacies about the personal tolls that dedicated work takes on your soul. John’s overall message to Camilla was: ‘Breaking down is not a flaw in you. It is part of the game’. After this, Camilla returned to her piles and her visions and her frustrations. No concrete measures had been taken to alleviate her pressure, but nevertheless her stakes were lower. The dissonance was still there, but it had taken on a new form: she was beginning to believe that it was not due to her incompetence, nor was it something she would be able to remove if she wanted her visions and fantasies intact. Instead it started to appear more like a structural element in a game of virtuality, whose other aspects she enjoyed. It was the price to pay for fantasmatic and existentially heightened working life.

Discussion: critical research on high-commitment work and flexibility

Looking at Camilla and her colleagues, I find that the notion of ‘precariousness’ often used to describe the situation of the late capitalist project worker requires elaboration. There is ample reason to point out the vulnerabilities arising from excessive involvement, not least when it is combined with surveillance and bureaucratic control forms. I agree that this may represent instances of ‘double control’ exercised over the employees. However, my long presence in the case companies left me with another set of impressions which I find less represented in the literature. Most importantly, these impressions were of very powerful, strategic and demanding employees who played the game of ambiguity in a way that generated insecurity, vulnerability and bewilderment in their superiors. I believe that this aspect is important to include in our analysis of high-involvement work if we are intent on relieving some of its pains. In ‘The Social Factory’, productivity and existence become enmeshed to radical degrees. But it is not just a condition which serves the interest of the capitalist enterprise or of spontaneous anti-work collectivities. It also caters to the existential desires of Camilla and her like, whose approach to life is the ‘Carpe Diem’ mantra, and who expect of work that it should deliver the stage for this individualized endeavour. In my opinion, not only is Camilla deeply attached to her own exploitation, if you will, but she is also actively exploiting her work place and her manager. It may seem counterintuitive to call Camilla exploitative, considering her obvious vulnerability and the way in which John exploits her. Nevertheless, I find her exploitative and opportunistic in the sense that she does not entertain a notion of consistent responsibility. She is willing to endure periods of enormous over-involvement, but she would not be willing to enter a continuous commitment to laborious, yet not necessarily spectacular, effort (even though she lapses into momentary fantasies about it). As such, she is in Booker to serve her own self-realization agenda, even if this sometimes renders her highly susceptible to manipulation and exploitation. By the same token, John or Booker would not be able to count on her efforts, unless her self-development narrative was catered to. She would indeed leave for the competition or for a life on unemployment benefit the moment work became ‘simply work’. Put differently, Camilla and John share a very specific notion of mutual obligation which is expected to deliver the combination of mutually exclusive elements. As such, the work relation becomes a site where prioritizations are seemingly no longer necessary, and where the banality of tradition can be transcended on a daily basis. If it fails to deliver this fantasy, both parties, manager and employee, may choose to terminate the engagement. It is, in other words, a relationship of which both parties primarily ask ‘What is in it for me?’. The fact that this question may lead to excessive degrees of dedication and work just underscores the ‘messiness’ of the phenomenon. Again, we are faced with the fact that exploitation of the counterpart and exploitation of the Self seem to go hand in hand. Precariousness and opportunism are apparently different sides of the same coin in many cases.

Looking at the structural conditions behind these dynamics, the flexibilization, project-organization and neo-liberal mix of standardization and decentralization are obviously significant. Much has been written on the disturbing consequences of this, including casualization, erosion of professionalism and semi-totalitarian organizational cultures. I agree with the deep concerns over these phenomena. However, we also need to study the way in which certain employees have gained new mobility and thus new access to opportunism based on the very same structural conditions. Concepts like the ‘protean’ and ‘boundaryless’ models of career (Briscoe et al., 2006) attempt to capture some of these phenomena where employees surf the employment networks strategically, making use of the same short-term loyalty and double expectations as the organizations. Here, it is important to underscore that opportunism and self-exploitation may very well be combined.

Precisely because I share the concerns about these new forms of work, I also believe that we must do our best to understand how such processes can continue, despite the high degrees of pain and frustration they cause. One of the reasons for this, in my opinion, is that many employees in the knowledge intensive sector are at least as reluctant as their workplaces to engage in mutual obligations which require consistent and non-opportunistic responsibility over longer periods. The ‘win-win’, ‘limitless optimization’ fantasy which fuels shareholder capitalism also fuels late modern workers’ approach to their existence. The art of sobering disappointment seems to be increasingly forgotten (Craib, 1994). Despite the fact that optimization fantasies generate enormous exhaustion, pain and anxiety, the tedious practice of humility and moderation seems to generate even greater reluctance. Instead, there is a pursuit of autonomy and self-realization which promises to cancel out the need to choose. In this trend, project work-places and employees become complicit. Increasingly on the margins, unions are watching the spectacle, unable to engage their members with suggestions for increased protection, realism and procedural clarity. ² Employees decline attempts at moderation and clarification, even if they bemoan the costs of excessive commitment. Similarly, employees often meet managerial invitations to ‘down-sizing’ and reduction of work-load with scorn, because they are unwilling to lose any of the ‘opportunities’ afforded by their assignments. Just as organizations no longer stop their instrumental demands at the threshold of workers’ private lives, so workers no longer stop their existential demands at the threshold of the organizational stage.

If many managers and employees form a pact around high involvement and opportunism, thus both generating and experiencing the ensuing precariousness, then maybe we need to take a closer look at that pact, rather than focusing mainly on the control attempts exercised by managers. For critical research, this could be a call to conduct empirical studies of the situations in which both parties insist on opportunism rather than long-term reliability, and look at some of the seductions and fear of missed opportunities driving this practice. Why, when both parties recurrently harbour fantasies about moderation, do they hardly ever manage to synchronize them into coordinated efforts? Furthermore, it could be interesting to pursue some of the moderation or prioritization attempts actually being made by both individuals and companies out of frustration with the precariousness of opportunism. Are there any possible sources of inspiration one could look to when trying to formulate feasible alternatives? For example, what are the effects on managers and employees when Volkswagen decides to turn off employee access to their Blackberry mail accounts after working hours? (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16314901). And what might we learn from the many people who have changed career from high-involvement jobs to more tangible or manual occupations? Could it be possible to establish such shifts within the companies, so that the less spectacular assignments, which are often hard to ‘sell’ to employees, might become legitimate and even desirable out-of-the-limelight positions, preferably without decrease in salary?

Conversely, it is also interesting to explore whether a reduction in ambiguous communication might offer relief from stress and tension, even if this means being much more explicit about the mutual exploitation going on between company and employee. So, rather than trying to sell the double package of ‘work is existential freedom’ and ‘profit or out’, the instrumentalization of flexibility and temporariness could be a legitimate framework for both employees and corporation. Maybe such arrangements seem attractive to certain employees for a certain period, and when it is no longer the case, there might be access to the more stable, yet less spectacular positions, as mentioned earlier?

These are just speculations, but they are also invitations to more micro-sociological research on the mess and ambiguities of project work. Rather than producing grand narratives about the phenomenon, I believe that we should offer empirical studies showing the contextual variables informing flexible practices and their agents. This includes opportunistic employees and exploited managers. Furthermore, it includes the possibility that employees may wish to be exploited in certain periods, because the exploitation generates a set of opportunities they would not be without. Obviously, it also includes growth-fixated, shareholder-driven companies trying to maximize employee productivity at any cost. And by the same token, it includes casualized, burnt-out workers with enormous work pressures and zero security. The point is that if we wish to minimize the pains of flexible, high-commitment work, I believe that we must generate empirically dense knowledge about the phenomenon which includes significant variations within the worker group and the manager group, just like it includes messy phenomena like ‘desirable exploitation’ or ‘opportunistic precariousness’. This kind of knowledge will helps us avoid simplistic attributions of blame and instead direct us towards practice-near understandings of mutual seductions and manipulations in the complex, daily power dynamics.

Conclusion

The question of control and ambiguity in hierarchical relations is a perennial discussion in organization theory and has been revisited countless times over the decades. Many organization theorists over the years have pointed out how managerial control depends on a certain element of employee autonomy in order to succeed. This ambivalence represents the potential for doubly intensified managerial control, i.e. through regulation and ‘seduction’ at the same time. In trying to point out the worker vulnerability which this entails, researchers have coined the term ‘employee precariousness’. At the same time, however, the ambivalence also contains the potential for employee resistance and spontaneous, collective anti-work movements, so the literature argues. In this article, I try to highlight the paradoxical and hybrid nature of these phenomena in the hierarchical power dynamics. The hybridity consists in the fact that precariousness and opportunism seem to be two sides of the same coin, both based on the fact that consistent responsibility is eroding. This means that the very same employees who are exploited via their precariousness also exploit their workplace through opportunism. Paradoxically, opportunism may take the form of extreme over-involvement. This is because over-involvement is part of a polarized pattern with under-involvement and faithlessness as its other pole. Together these poles form an antithesis to consistent, stable responsibility towards a common object.

My analysis draws on empirical material from two creative knowledge work organizations characterized by high degrees of project based and flexible work. I argue that these organizations are characterized by fundamentally ambiguous discourses about work and hierarchical interaction. One dominant discourse draws on contractual codes, another on ‘self-realization’ codes. Often, the focuses on contract and self-realization mingle into one, tension-ridden framework, where hierarchical interactions evolve around the attempt to strike compromises and establish integration between contrasting approaches, However, in many other cases, the discourses feature in antagonistic forms, allowing both managers and employees to jump strategically from one to the other depending on context, in order to maximize benefits and minimize costs. This generates a highly opportunistic and highly precarious environment for both parties. Who comes out with most opportunities as a result of their navigation in ambiguity is a contextual matter, rather than just a question of position in the hierarchy. Structural and cultural ambiguities are mobilized by both parties in what seems to be a shared attempt to orchestrate work as the setting which allows mutually exclusive elements to be combined.

I end up concluding that the frequently lamented ‘precariousness’ of the project employee requires empirically dense and contextual study which allows for variation and mess. This will permit us to see how employees often desire exploitation due to the opportunities this exploitation offers, just like managers often try in vain to moderate their subordinates’ excessive work practices, being met only with intense double communication and threats of sanctions. These are important additions to the study of how managers exercise double control, and how employees are being casualized, deprofessionalized and colonized by flexible, high-commitment work.