Abstract
From the very first organizational theories, boredom at work has been closely linked to the issue of time. However, studies on boredom have often considered the phenomenon as a mere behavioral outcome of organizational processes or practices and have built on an instrumental approach, neglecting its deeper manifestations. Following recent calls to tackle boredom as a fundamental issue in organization studies, we build on Heidegger’s framework to delve into superficial, retrospective, and profound boredom. This phenomenological approach enables us to go beyond the instrumental view of boredom, revealing the close links between boredom at work, time, and authenticity. To this end, we adopt a genuine empirical tool, immersed in the eight novels of the famous French writer, Michel Houellebecq, a unique observer of contemporary workers. Our findings help us to highlight two contributions. First, we argue that in trying to divert their employees from boredom by creating and developing “passing the time” activities, organizations only reinforce boredom at work, leading them to an unauthentic relationship with time and being. Second, we delve into the meanders of profound boredom at work and suggest that by listening to its call, individuals may unveil what truly matters to them and find a way to reach authenticity at work.
Introduction
Controlling employees’ time, and the inevitable feeling of boredom that ensues, has been a fundamental dimension of modern organizations (Johnsen, 2016) from the very first organizational theories (Taylor, 1911) to more recent developments of the knowledge society (Costas and Kärreman, 2016). Boredom has long been associated with low-skilled jobs or repetitive tasks (Roy, 1959) in organizational studies, and considered as a behavioral outcome of organizational processes or practices or, more generally, as an unfortunate but marginal tribute to competitiveness. However, in the last decade, boredom has received renewed attention as organizational theorists have taken up the issue of boredom at work (Carroll et al., 2010; Johnsen, 2016).
In today’s knowledge societies, organizations can no longer focus simply on their capacity to optimize employees’ attendance time, but also need to ensure that individuals are wholly engaged at work all the time in order to be more creative and, ultimately, to gain a competitive advantage (Srivastava et al., 2006; Zhang and Bartol, 2010). Employee engagement, meaning full physical, cognitive, and emotional involvement at work, has become a fundamental dimension of organizational performance (Kahn, 1990). Managing boredom and ensuring that employees are not wasting their time and their talent, but are instead as creative and efficient as possible, has become a major concern in contemporary organizations (Menger, 2014; Perry-Smith and Mannucci, 2017). Many organizations have thus adopted an instrumental approach to avoid boredom, either by pushing their employees to refocus their attention on the job (Fisherl, 1993; Hamilton et al., 1984), or by capitalizing on play (Butler et al., 2011; Loukidou et al., 2009). However, boredom is not limited to a lack of stimulation and motivation in low-skilled jobs (Chin et al., 2017), but is intensifying for workers and managers in contemporary organizations, even in seemingly prestigious jobs such as consulting (Costas and Kärreman, 2016). Boredom is not simply the clock-time that stretches and fails to pass. It also refers to the complete loss of meaning experienced by individuals (Barbalet, 1999) that attacks their very identity (Costas and Kärreman, 2016) and leads to disengagement and “bore-out” (Bourion, 2015; Rothlin and Werder, 2008). These deeper manifestations of boredom at work have received scant attention in organization studies to date (Johnsen, 2016). We thus submit the following research question: beyond the instrumental management of boredom in contemporary organizations, how do individuals experience the different manifestations of boredom at work?
Boredom is deeply related to the issue of time, as the perception of time failing to pass is a clear sign of boredom (Roy, 1959). However, it is also related to the individual’s identity, especially in contemporary organizations (Costas and Kärreman, 2016). The conceptualization of employee engagement as a key driver of organizational performance “not only suggests a linkage between engagement and job performance, but also represents an inclusive view of the employee’s agentic self” (Rich et al., 2010: 617). In contemporary organizations evolving in a knowledge society, the instrumentalization of boredom is not only a means to help employees save time, as in the industrial age, but also a way to unleash employees’ potential and creativity to ensure their full engagement. Organizational answers to boredom echo the rise of individualism and the new corporate culture of individual empowerment and redefine individuals’ relationship to time and being at work. We therefore suggest building on a philosophical approach to gain a more encompassing view of boredom, its different manifestations and how it relates to time and being at work (Johnsen, 2016; Svendsen, 2005). To this end, we build on the work of Heidegger (1938/1995). Among modern philosophers, Heidegger is considered as one who has investigated boredom in the most depth (Elpidorou and Freeman, 2015). He does not use boredom as a peripheral concept of his work but views it as a fundamental aspect of philosophy and metaphysics. Second, the Heideggerian phenomenological framework can help us to go beyond the dead-end of instrumental approaches to boredom in organizational studies. Phenomenological approaches (Sanders, 1982) question the assumption that our relationship with the world is chiefly rational. They investigate occurrences in their respective contexts as they are “governed by common human and social arrangements” (Holt and Sandberg, 2011: 221), and are especially useful in furthering a more comprehensive approach to boredom. Lastly, in all three of the different “forms” of boredom identified by Heidegger (1938/1995), that is, “becoming bored by something,” “being bored with something,” and profound boredom, as “it is boring for one,” boredom is ontologically related to the question of time and being.
To address this issue, we turned to novels, considering them as especially relevant empirical material. As Holt and Zundel (2014) argued, literature gives us a better grasp of how individuals “struggle” with concepts in their everyday life. Considered as a methodological resource, literature may contribute to a better understanding of boredom as a comprehensive phenomenon at work, rather than simply a specific dimension of an activity. In particular, we decided to analyze the eight novels by Michel Houellebecq. As “a novelist of work” (Lahanque, 2015), Houellebecq is a particularly interesting observer of contemporary workers (Cnossen et al., 2017) and thus of boredom in modern organizations. His work has been used in different fields such as economics (Maris, 2014) and politics (Bowd, 2019), and appears particularly relevant in organization studies.
Our methodological apparatus allowed us to deploy Heidegger’s theoretical framework at an organizational level and to highlight two main contributions. First, we note the ontological relationship between boredom and time, and argue that while most organizations try to avert boredom by creating and developing “passing the time” (Heidegger, 1938/1995) techniques for their employees, these tend to simply reinforce boredom at work, and may even result in more profound manifestations of boredom. In orchestrating the way employees “pass the time,” organizations prevent individuals from listening to the call of boredom, cutting them off from an authentic relationship to time and who they truly are at work. Second, our study delves into the meanders of profound boredom at work and suggests that by listening to the call of profound boredom, individuals may find a way to reach authenticity at work and unveil what truly matters to them.
In the first section, we review the literature on boredom at work and show how the Heideggerian approach can be applied to organization studies. The second section details the methodology and how we build on the eight novels of Michel Houellebecq to unravel the different manifestations of boredom in organizations. The third section presents our findings, revealing the three main “forms” of boredom at work according to the Heideggerian philosophical framework, and how profound boredom may open a way to authenticity at work. Finally, the last section discusses the implications of our study for theory and practice.
Applying Heidegger’s typology of boredom to being in organization
Boredom is what Heidegger (1938/1995) calls a “fundamental attunement” of “Dasein,” that is, an open door “to get at the basic conditions of being—the conditions that make it possible for us to make sense of things and ourselves” (Holt and Sandberg, 2011: 221). What exactly can this philosophical approach teach us about boredom at work? First, boredom has long been considered as a mere emotion in organizational literature, in other words, an affective reaction following an organizational process or practice (Carroll et al., 2010; Johnsen, 2016). Building on Heidegger (1938/1995), however, we can envision boredom as “Mood,” a fundamental mode “of existence that [is] both constitutive and disclosive of the way one exists or finds oneself (sich befinden) attuned to the world” (Elpidorou and Freeman, 2015: 664). Boredom is neither inscribed in the pure subjectivity of the individual and an intentional relationship with the world, nor is it the result of a given organizational context. Boredom is a “phenomenon,” “a condition of everydayness, an entire weave of things that typically goes unnoticed because it is lived in” (Holt and Sandberg, 2011: 221). Second, boredom is directly related to the experience of time (Adam, 1992; Hassard, 2002), and the Heideggerian approach embraces a non-instrumental vision of time (Bakken et al., 2013) that enables us to go beyond the objective-subjective opposition of time, and the contradiction of the practice and process view of time (Holt and Johnsen, 2019). Finally, by underscoring how boredom opens us up to Dasein (being-in-the-world), Heidegger shows us a path to authenticity (Freeman and Elpidorou, 2015; Segal, 2011). The Heideggerian path is not easy. It is a long crest path that confronts us with our being in time and our finitude, but which can also ultimately reveal what really matters to us.
The aim of the present literature review is therefore twofold: first, we introduce the three Heideggerian “forms” of boredom (Heidegger, 1938/1995) to investigate the link between boredom, time, being and authenticity, and second, we review the main research findings on boredom at work in light of these manifestations.
Superficial boredom: Becoming bored by something
According to Heidegger (1938/1995), the first, most common and most frequent “form” of boredom, is “becoming bored by something,” that is, by something or someone external to oneself. As Heidegger suggested, you are waiting for a train that is not coming. You want something and it refuses itself to you. From a phenomenological perspective, only individuals can experience boredom, but in relation to something or someone external to themselves. At work, it is the most widespread manifestation of boredom, extensively explored in the organizational behavior literature (Fisherl, 1993). Who has never experienced superficial boredom induced by an endless managerial speech or a meaningless conversation with colleagues at the coffee machine (Leary et al., 1986)? Who has never been bored by meaningless and repetitive tasks (Cox, 1980; Fisherl, 1993; Lopata et al., 1985; Vodanovich, 2003)? In many respects, superficial boredom is even consubstantial to modern management methods (Johnsen, 2016). Both division of labor (Smith, 1776/1937) and scientific management (Taylor, 1911) are based on job fragmentation and work being organized around simple and repetitive tasks. Far from being outmoded, this tendency seems to repeat itself across the ages, especially in low-skilled jobs, now called the gig economy (Gandini, 2019), but also in some seemingly far more prestigious knowledge-based jobs such as consulting (Costas and Kärreman, 2016).
As Heidegger (1938/1995), the sources of superficial boredom are external to each individual. People cannot act directly on the origin of their boredom, so their first reaction is to try to “pass the time,” in other words, to reduce the time between themselves and the end of boredom. At work, employees may refocus attention on their tasks (Fisherl, 1993; Hamilton et al., 1984), look for additional stimulation, such as singing, daydreaming, chatting with co-workers (Game, 2007), or play to pass the time and be potentially more productive (Loukidou et al., 2009). Humor is also often used in a subversive way to pass the time, as Roy (1959) observed in his seminal article, or as noted more recently by Taylor and Bain (2003) in an investigation of work in call centers.
In superficial boredom, people know what is bothering them. It is caused by the lack of something. People feel empty due to a refusal of things, and react against this feeling as they want to fill the emptiness inside them (Heidegger, 1938/1995). At work, this state of feeling empty is mainly caused by a lack of arousal or autonomy in activities (Fisherl, 1993), or a lack of social relationships (Loukidou et al., 2009), which in turn have been linked to many negative outcomes (Vodanovich, 2003; Vodanovich and Watt, 2016), such as procrastination (Wan et al., 2014), poor attentional control (Shaw et al., 2010), lack of self-confidence, insecurity (Zondag, 2013), and even anxiety and depression (Eakman, 2011). However, superficial boredom also leads to a more profound questioning of time. As time seems to pass too slowly, people react against the temporality of things that refuse them something. “What is at issue here in the possibility of boredom is an as yet obscure relation of the dragging along of time to the things that refuse themselves. But this means that what is at issue is the question of what time itself is” (Heidegger, 1938/1995: 105). As in the example of “banana time” (Roy, 1959), even when people literally try to kill time to escape boredom, it is a first step toward a deeper understanding of the power of time. People try to kill “the beast of boredom” (Roy, 1959: 164), which not only leads them to develop informal interactions with their colleagues, but also opens a first window to the singularity of time (Holt and Johnsen, 2019).
Retrospective boredom: Being bored with something
Boredom is not only this clear impression of something or someone external that refuses itself and gives us the impression of being dragged down. It is not just a mere emotion triggered by something external, or even interpreted by someone, it also tells us something deeper about ourselves. Boredom is a mood that lies within us and opens us up to a deeper experience of time and our being. “Moods are the pervasive medium or lens through which the world is disclosed to us, and in existing, we constantly find ourselves in them. Moods are already there, however, not insofar as they exist independently or outside of Dasein” (Elpidorou and Freeman, 2015: 664). This second “form” of boredom that we label as retrospective boredom is illustrated by Heidegger as follows. We are invited to a party and the atmosphere is good. The day after though, we cannot help but think we were bored. “With the best will in the world we can find nothing that could have bored us. And yet (. . .) it is clear that we were bored even though it was all so pleasant” (Heidegger, 1938/1995: 110–111). We only realize it afterward and the sources of our boredom are hard to identify. Boredom is unclear and vague and seems to lie within us. It is as if, retrospectively, the whole situation was boring.
At work, researchers have shown that extraverts are more likely to be bored when they engage in repetitive tasks (Fisherl, 1993; Gardner and Cummings, 1988). Farmer and Sundberg (1986) even introduced the concept of boredom proneness as a way to measure boredom at work (Vodanovich, 2003). However, when boredom goes deeper, when we are bored with something and not by something, it is unclear if boredom lies within us or in the situation itself (Heidegger, 1938/1995). The border between oneself and the situation blurs. Moreover, and as highlighted by the Organizational Studies literature in the last decade, these deeper manifestations of boredom are directly related to the identity of individuals, especially in the service industry. In a rich investigation of consultants, Costas and Kärreman (2016: 32) show how “the bored self arrests” the identity of individuals “by the ways in which it involves the sense of stagnating rather than developing.” Consulting firms, especially the most prestigious ones, applaud opportunities for creativity, autonomy, learning, and expertise, but the reality of a consultant’s job is often different, full of repetitive tasks and clerical work. Consultants may just have the impression they are frustrated by being overqualified, but something deeper is occurring (Costas and Kärreman, 2016). Being bored attacks the core of consultants’ professional identity (Carroll et al., 2010), and at the same time, it is impossible to determine what is boring since it is the situation as a whole which is boring.
In retrospective boredom, the way individuals pass the time is transformed. People are not fully aware of their boredom in the present moment and thus do not actively seek to pass the time. “Passing the time is ‘repressed’” (Heidegger, 1938/1995: 111). Many people repress this “passing the time” at work by saying they are busy or overwhelmed, whereas their activity is simply a way to escape from boredom (Carroll et al., 2010). Furthermore, this repressed passing the time is often spawned by organizations themselves. Team-building activities, the gamification of work (Cardador et al., 2017) and professional training sessions (Tews and Noe, 2019) frequently have no other real purpose than to entertain employees and prevent them from feeling bored. Play is now frequently presented as a strategy to enhance creativity and teamwork, but it is also more straightforwardly “motivated by a desire to cover up the boredom that is an inherent feature of waged labor” (Butler et al., 2011: 331). Organizations create passing the time that, while not overtly labeled as such, is in fact nothing more than a hidden form of boredom repression.
We are bored. We try to fill the empty space, but this emptiness cannot be filled. “This self-forming emptiness is this ‘I know not what’ that weighs upon us” (Heidegger, 1938/1995: 120). We show an “obstructive casualness,” “first in the sense of abandoning ourselves to whatever there is going on; and second in the sense of leaving ourselves behind” (Heidegger, 1938/1995: 119). There is an emptiness inside us but, unlike superficial boredom, we do not know exactly what is bothering us. This emptiness is not a lack of something or someone but the expression of an emptiness that lies within us. It is not just tasks that are meaningless but work as a whole. Workers become disengaged, indifferent (Dempsey and Sanders, 2010; Diddams et al., 2003; Michaelson, 2005; Michaelson et al., 2014) and boredom ultimately leads to burnout (Cole et al., 2012).
In retrospective boredom, time flies without us noticing. We are held in limbo in a fixed time. We experience a new dimension of Time, different from familiar time that flows, different from clock time. We stand in a present, cut off from the two directions of having-been and the future, and this present reveals to us the intimacy between Dasein and temporality. The present is not a succession of “nows” anymore, there is only one present which stands still. “This standing time—this is we ourselves; it is our self as that which has been left behind with respect to its provenance and future.” (Heidegger, 1938/1995: 125). However, this “standing now” is still unfamiliar, and unknown. It is the situation as a whole, indeterminate, which is boring. Retrospective boredom does not free us, but it is an awareness to present time and it summons us to be retrospectively.
Retrospective boredom “indicates the emotional underpinning of meaning in social systems. [It] is one emotional imperative to and foundation of meaning in social processes” (Barbalet, 1999: 633). As people grow aware of their boredom, it serves as a call for deeper questions on the meaning of their career, and even life in general (Fisherl, 1993; Johnsen, 2016; Loukidou et al., 2009). People may realize, but only retrospectively, that the dispossession of time is precisely what characterizes modern organizations (Johnsen, 2016). Clocks not only count the hours, they synchronize human activities to maximize efficiency and productivity in modern organizations, and involve their being (Mumford, 1934). As Marxist approaches highlight, the dispossession of workers’ time is not only an unfair trade of the person’s time for poor remuneration, but is the dispossession and commodification of the worker’s life itself (Osborne, 2008). “Capital exposes the laborer to time in its most naked form: the impersonal time of which he is a mere incarnation, the time that was never his to take or give in the first place, because it takes him” (Holt and Johnsen, 2019: 1567). Even in more mainstream approaches, employees’ time is not just controlled by someone else, it is orchestrated, thought out, projected by others (i.e. managers). Talent and career managers project the future through human resource management tools (Cappelli and Keller, 2014). Globalization and complexification in industry prevent employees from mastering the entire production process. Employees are simply a link in the value creation process, and their time and work, whether linear or flexible, is consubstantially fragmented (Crawford, 2009).
Profound boredom: “It is boring for one”
The third “form” of boredom described by Heidegger is “profound boredom” as “it is boring for one.” Heidegger does not give any typical examples as there is no predetermined illustration of profound boredom for anyone. However, “to cite one possible, but entirely non-binding occasion (. . .), it is boring for one to walk through the streets of a large city on a Sunday afternoon” (Heidegger, 1938/1995: 135). Profound boredom is quieter, less visible, but also deeper and broader, and is the most critical one as it opens us up to the “Dasein” (i.e. understanding ourselves as consciousness, subject and person). The source of profound boredom is found neither in things that refuse us, nor in individuals after conducting a long and in-depth introspective process to discover the meaning of life. It is the “Dasein,” the “it,” the uncertain, the unknown that calls us.
At work, profound boredom remains unexplored, apart, perhaps, from the work of Johnsen (2016) and Barbalet (1999) on the concept of ennui. “Boredom, but not ennui, is a feeling that expresses a dissatisfaction with the lack of interest in an activity or condition (. . .) Ennui, but not boredom, is a languid surrender to emptiness” (Barbalet, 1999: 634). Ennui or profound boredom goes beyond introspection about the meaning of work and life. It cannot “be ascertained as something present at hand that we can appeal to, or as something firm upon which we might stand, but must be awakened—awakened in the sense that we must let it become awake” (Heidegger, 1938/1995: 132). Profound boredom is so strong that it cannot be obstructed by any conscious or repressed passing the time. We feel empty, but not with an emptiness that is willing to be filled or that challenges the individual in question or a specific being. It is an emptiness that annihilates, and from which nothing can emerge except, potentially, the call of Dasein.
This emptiness is not nothing. It is “the expanse of beings’ telling refusal of themselves as a whole, and of the singular extremity of what makes Dasein possible” (Heidegger, 1938/1995: 135). Something positive can emerge from this urgency we feel in the face of the emptiness of ourselves as a whole. On a more operational level, boredom at work has been shown to have many potentially positive consequences. At macro level, boredom is a driving force that may lead to a striving for novelty and the adoption of new management practices (Abrahamson, 1996). At micro level, boredom can be essential to well-being. It sends a mismatch signal to individuals, promotes movement and self-regulation, and helps people to establish new goals both at work and in life as a whole (Elpidorou, 2018). Bored people are more likely to engage in novelty-seeking processes. Boredom can thus enhance creativity (Park et al., 2019).
Nevertheless, a key point in Heidegger’s rationale is that we cannot have a utilitarian vision of this deepest “form” of boredom. Profound boredom is a fundamental mood beyond intentionality. Individuals or organizations cannot use it, even indirectly, in order to be more productive or more creative. Profound boredom is not a reaction, whether negative or positive, to a meaningless task or activity, otherwise it would just be another way of passing the time. Instead, people feel timeless, virtually removed from the flow of time. Profound boredom is a confrontation with time dragged out, which can only be broken by a call of Dasein in the urgency of the moment. This urgency is an essential need and has no concrete response, especially not one provided by others. It is an urgency that questions individuals, a ridge path over the void of life (Heidegger, 1938/1995), and a confrontation with our “being-toward-death” (Heidegger, 2010), in other words our own finitude at each and every moment in our existence. However, by facing our temporal being, we may feel removed from the flow of time, and ultimately, “whoever sets a proper task for his or her life and gives it content does not need to fear boredom and is secure in the face of it” (Heidegger, 1938/1995: 158).
Boredom at work: Toward originary time and authenticity
Retrospective boredom reveals to us our inauthenticity. However, it is only a first step toward authenticity, as our inauthenticity is revealed to us a posteriori and says nothing about our authentic being. On the contrary, profound boredom reveals to us the ontological structure of time, “originary time” (Heidegger, 2010), which “must be clearly distinguished from our ordinary conception of time, namely, a continuous and irreversible sequence of ‘nows’ (. . .) [and also] from ‘world-time’: our pre-theoretical experience of time as a sequence of meaningful events” (Freeman and Elpidorou, 2015: 674). Originary time unfolds in three directions. The first direction is the future: the movement by which the being, by anticipating his or her own death, throws itself into the future and discovers itself as a set of unrealized possibilities. However, the being that throws itself ahead of time can only do so from somewhere, and the being’s second direction is a return toward what it has been (i.e. the past). Thrown ahead from the being it has been, the being moves toward the third direction (i.e. present). It discovers its own world, its situation and what truly matters to it (Heidegger, 2010). “Dasein can become authentic (eigentlich), therefore, if its choices are revealed to itself as stemming from its thrown existence” (Freeman and Elpidorou, 2015: 673). “Time-without-us” reveals itself to us (Holt and Johnsen, 2019). Time is not a succession of chronological events (Bakken et al., 2013). Time is not related to a practice or a process. Time is “beyond” us and exists without us (Holt and Johnsen, 2019). Profound boredom reveals this to us, while offering us the chance to be authentic, in other words, to be responsible for our own choices.
Evidence or examples of authenticity at work, in the Heideggerian sense, are scarce in the organizational literature, and mainly refer to “anxiety,” the first fundamental attunement developed by Heidegger (2010). Meacham et al. (2019) show how inclusive management that supports employees with intellectual disabilities to confront their anxiety about securing a job may lead to more authentic relationships at work. Segal (2011) argues that anxiety may in fact be essential in facing uncertainty. When people face deep uncertainty, they cannot continue with business as usual, but are destabilized, introspective, and finally full of anxiety. However, if they listen to and face anxiety in the Heideggerian sense, that is to say, in its relation to time, to being and to our finitude, they may rediscover the three directions of time and be authentic at work. However, if anxiety clearly appears to be the most important fundamental attunement for Heidegger (2010) in the first part of his work, he then moves on toward an investigation of boredom (Heidegger, 1938/1995). It seemed appropriate for us to follow the same route and to investigate how profound boredom at work may or may not allow us to achieve authenticity.
The extant literature has widely investigated superficial boredom at work, in other words, how people can be bored with repetitive tasks or a lack of arousal at work. However, over the past decade, organizational theorists have shown how deeper manifestations of boredom have expanded in modern organizations and how they attack the identity of individuals and the meaning of work. Most modern organizations endeavor to suppress boredom, sometimes by developing innovative strategies to pass the time. Some organizations try to use it as a catalyst for creativity. However, as Heidegger noted, profound boredom is not a mere emotion. It reveals to us the ontological structure of time that is beyond us. It is a fundamental mood that may lead to an authentic way of being in organizations, but which is beyond intentionality and a utilitarian approach to time. We thus reiterate the research question set out in the introduction: beyond the instrumental management of boredom in contemporary organizations, how do people experience boredom at work and its relations to Time and Being?
Methods
Heuristics
As we envisioned boredom as a phenomenon deeply rooted in organizational contexts, we needed to collect empirical evidence of “moments” of boredom at work on various occasions: when the individual in question realizes it is occurring, when the individual thinks about it, and when the individual accepts, rejects, or represses it. Literature seems useful in this respect as it helps us to go beyond the conscious perception of individuals alone to glean a more comprehensive view. It provides us with “what we need to know but cannot quite get access to with [usual] given rules of method and modes of apprehension” (Gordon, 1997: 25). Using literary material to analyze organizations (see Beyes et al., 2019, for a review) allows us to go beyond the representation of a mere empirical reality to “exaggerate and clash with contemporary reality” (Zhang et al., 2008: 891). This emphasis is very useful when trying to unravel specific organizational issues that are deeply inscribed, but often hidden, in mundane organizational life (De Cock, 2000). The frequently “reflecting and provoking” (Czarniawska, 1999: 3) aspects of literary work contain innovative, new, and exotic tropes (De Cock and Land, 2006) to explore underestimated organizational phenomena like boredom. In such a configuration, novels are of particular interest as they “can contain, invent and perform organizational thought” (Beyes et al., 2019: 3).
Second, literature offers opportunities to see concepts through new eyes by adopting more flexible epistemological and methodological postures (Latour, 2005). Literature offers a long “seam” of mutual fertilization to explore (De Cock and Land, 2006). As reality is full of fiction, there is a “pervasiveness and relevance of fictionality as a routine aspect of life” (Cetina, 1994: 5). Furthermore, literature “always entertains some active relationship with the Real” (Jameson, 1981: 67). Literary output, as a product of history (De Cock and Land, 2006) is always anchored in a specific field, contains power issues, and reflects and/or criticizes the social institutions and economic contexts its authors are embedded in (Bourdieu, 1993). Literature as scientific material enables us to better understand how contingencies, power and institutions are profoundly inscribed in organizational contexts. We believe that this heuristic contributes to a better understanding of boredom as a comprehensive phenomenon at work.
Why Houellebecq?
We thus decided to examine the novels of the famous contemporary French writer, Michel Houellebecq. The classics are frequently used to bring literature into the organizational field. Nevertheless, “contemporary novels, too, harbor trenchant observations and reflections that can not only enrich but further organizational theorizing” (Beyes et al., 2019: 1798). This is certainly true of Houellebecq’s novels, which could be considered as pieces of “lyrical sociology” (Brinkmann, 2009: 1376). Still, why refer to Houellebecq when attempting to grasp boredom as an organizational phenomenon? Houellebecq is not a consensual writer. Both his writing and his public stances are always subject to controversy, almost systematically leading to a Houellebecq scandal (“affaire Houellebecq,” Abecassis, 2000). Indeed, Houellebecq appears as transgressive. Yet, this “poetic” transgression (Novak-Lechevalier, 2020) is largely “pasteurized” in an era when not playing the game is fully part of the game (Julliot, 2020). Besides, Houellebecq remains elusive, being nowhere and everywhere at the same time (Moor, 2012) and “requires thinking in fluid and unconventional categories,” outside the traditional left and right political positions (Abecassis, 2000: 803). What matters is not the transgression, but what it reveals to the reader (Julliot, 2020).
So, what does it reveal? Without ignoring his controversial statements, we need to adopt an approach that focuses on the fact that his work reflects both a symptom and a reaction to the malaise generated by our contemporary era (Williams, 2020). This has three epistemological consequences when adopting Houellebecq’s work to study an organizational phenomenon. First, Houellebecq is in tune with the news and writes about concrete reality, a “shared experience” (Abecassis, 2000: 812) that is lived and experienced by all, beyond fiction (Baroni and Estier, 2016), making him a model contemporary observer of the knowledge worker (Cnossen et al., 2017). His books thus represent “a moment where what is already in the air finds its crystallization in a single narrative” (Abecassis, 2000: 816). His ability to seriously address the political and social stakes of modern society legitimizes his work and reinvents our vision of the world (Baroni and Estier, 2016). Second, this “familiarity” leans on “a concrete phenomenology of the world” of which “fictional elements constitute only the frame” (Abecassis, 2000: 803). Grounded in everyday experience of life, especially working life, Houellebecq offers us a “phenomenology of the daily,” combined with a profound reflection on the end of things, sometimes even beyond humanity, offering “a statement about the relationship between being and existence: the experience of being thrown into the world and despising it” (Abecassis, 2000: 823). Third, Houellebecq’s books present our society and its neo-liberal order as a dead end (Campbell and Dutton, 2020). In this dispiriting context, organizations constantly and precisely impose their “oppressive” norms (Julliot, 2020). Thus, as a relentless “clinical” scrivener of a social but dehumanized scenario in which humans are constantly torn between their quest for desire and meaning and the practical impossibility of attaining it (Cnossen et al., 2017), Houellebecq is particularly useful to further our understanding of how boredom is experienced in contemporary organizations.
As the eight novels written by Houellebecq depict an identical universe (Baroni and Estier, 2016), we decided to analyze them as a common corpus (see Table 1 below) that offers the following characteristics. First, Houellebecq’s narrators have been described as presenting a kind of self-portrait. The protagonists are similar and represent various facets of the same person; they are “always anti-heroes [who] experience a sense of loss” (Cnossen et al., 2017: 313). Second, picturing how “the existence of men was organized around work, which occupied most of life” (The Map and the Territory: 65) makes him a genuine “novelist of work” (Lahanque, 2015). Last, Houellebecq’s modern world, dominated by the capitalist economy and market logic (Morrey, 2013) reveals a horrific backdrop that acts either as a disincentive for people who try to escape from it to a “calm, quiet space devoid of any want” (Cnossen et al., 2017: 321), or as an all-encompassing social scene for passing the time, in which everything is admitted (i.e. leisure, sexual relations, work, and even spiritual life). Houellebecq’s novels thus appear to offer an apt setting for studying boredom at work through a Heideggerian lens.
Presentation of the novels.
Data analysis
Our dataset was analyzed based on an abductive logic (see Locke et al., 2008; Van Maanen et al., 2007). As boredom is a recurrent theme in Houellebecq’s work, we began by rereading his eight novels with a focus on passages on organizational issues. It rapidly became obvious that the typical Houellebecquian (anti)-hero was stuck and depressed within an organizational system that was slowly but systematically destroying him. Going back and forth between the novels and the main approaches to boredom in organization studies (Vaara and Monin, 2010), we defined four categories that methodologically operationalized Heidegger’s work: (1) sources of boredom, (2) passing the time (operationalized as individuals’ reactions to boredom), (3) relation to the horizon of time (operationalized as the perception of time for individuals), and (4) being (operationalized as an emotional and ontological mood due to boredom). Creating an inventory for each occurrence linked to one of these categories in the novels, we classified them into “superficial,” “retrospective,” and “profound” boredom and then built our conceptual descriptions of boredom in Houellebecq’s work (see Table of quotes in Appendix). The following section details our findings.
Findings
Our journey into Houellebecq’s novels reveals the three Heideggerian “forms” of boredom in the context of work. In particular, we expose the importance of profound boredom, a concept that has received scant attention in the organizational literature to date. First, we focus on superficial and retrospective boredom, demonstrating how, by orchestrating passing the time in order to avoid boredom, organizations only amplify it. Second, we focus on profound boredom as an un-thought phenomenon at work. These two first parts follow the sub-dimensions described in the methods section (sources of boredom, passing the time, relationship with the horizon of time, and Being). Third, we suggest that profound boredom provides a narrow but essential way to reach authenticity at work, questioning the instrumentalization of time by organizations. Table 2 below gives insights into how Houellebecq’s heroes experience boredom at work, examining the types of boredom, the relationship with time, the moments of authenticity they are confronted with (or not) and, finally, their destiny following their confrontation with boredom.
Heideggerian analysis of the novels.
Superficial and retrospective boredom
Sources of boredom
Mundane tasks represent a powerful source of superficial boredom in Houellebecq’s work. Dependent on bureaucratic rules, weighed down by a high degree of formalism, Houellebecq’s anti-heroes are generally overqualified for their routine jobs, and work on unstimulating and unchallenging tasks. This is the case of Florent-Claude, the hero of Serotonin, a contract worker at the Ministry of Agriculture, whose work mainly consists of writing notes and reports, and in which he struggles with regulatory issues: “Those questions of exasperating legal formalism occupied a growing part of my working time, you constantly had to be ‘on top of things’ – on top of what I never really knew – and there can’t be an area of human activity as utterly boring as the law” (pp.126–127).
Uninteresting and hypocritical colleagues also represent an inexhaustible source of superficial boredom. Work relationships are very often of poor quality and artificial: “They [two colleagues] went on trotting out the platitudes for a good 15 minutes” (Whatever, p. 4).
Managers often appear as the most genuine source of boredom. Highly imbued with themselves, sexist, arrogant, ceremonious, clingy, their sole presence generates boredom. The rare ones who do not generate boredom are those who leave time and autonomy to their subordinates, such as the director of a research center, where the hero of The Elementary Particles is about to go on a visiting scholar program: [Michel]: “My work would have to be completely independent of the centre’s bureaucracy. [Michel’s boss]: Of course. I’ll write to Walcott, the director there. He’s a good man, he’ll leave you in peace” (p. 224).
In retrospective boredom, sources become internal and imprecise. Houellebecq’s characters are bored for no specific reason. They are uninterested in their activities and avoid contact with colleagues. They are bored with their jobs in which they have no interest, like the hero of Whatever, who focuses ironically on his material situation and the tangible aspects of his career: “I’m in middle management. Analyst-programmer in a computer software company, my salary is two and a half the minimum wage; a tidy purchasing power, by any standards. I can expect significant advancement within my firm; unless I decide, as many do, to sign on with a client. All in all, I may consider myself satisfied with my social status” (p. 13).
Passing the time: Reactions to boredom
Houellebecq lays particular emphasis on “passing the time,” which hides a certain “brutality” under an apparent “sweetness” (Annihilate, p. 11). As he points out, immediate reactions to superficial boredom are initiated by the individuals or the organizations themselves. In Whatever, the hero is sent on a mission with a colleague to train civil servants in several departmental directorates of the Ministry of Agriculture. A first meeting in Rouen, Normandy, gives him an opportunity to appreciate his colleague’s talent for passing the time: “Tisserand is first to speak; he introduces himself, introduces me, introduces our company. After that, I assume he’ll introduce the computer, the integrated software, their advantages. He could also introduce the course, the work method we’re going to follow, lots of things. All this should take us around midday, no problem, especially if there’s a good old-fashioned coffee-break” (p. 55).
Comments by the departmental director in La Roche-sur-Yon, a small prefecture in the French provinces, then make him realize that the training course itself is just a way to pass the time, suggesting that organizations set up activities in order to prevent people from getting bored: “Computers, he tells us bluntly, he wants nothing to do with them (. . .). If he’s agreed to our coming, it’s only for not having hassles with the Ministry, but the moment we’ve gone, he’ll put the software in a cupboard and not touch it again. In these circumstances, the training sessions appeared to be an amiable pleasantry, a way of chatting to pass the time” (p. 97).
Reactions against boredom apparently fade only as “passing the time is repressed” in retrospective boredom. Individuals realize too late that they are stuck. They are not fooled by their job but pretend to be interested through conformism or lack of courage. The quote below suggests that Paul, the hero of Annihilate, sees his work in the office of the French Minister of the Economy as a refuge to mask the grayness of his existence, a relatively comfortable refuge to which he abandons himself: “His own capacity for work was more or less unchanged since the already distant days of his studies. He noted this without rejoicing, without grieving either, working a lot or a little was indifferent to him. He was obviously going through a kind of stasis at all levels of his life, in that working a lot was probably better, it effectively chased away all thought” (p. 298)
Relationship with the horizon of time
In superficial boredom, individuals try to kill time. They feel indefinitely dragged by slow moving time, as in the long, useless and repetitive meetings the hero of Whatever attends before being sent on a mission across France: “Of the meeting itself, I retain but few memories; in any case nothing concrete was decided, except in the last quarter of an hour, very quickly, just before going to lunch, when a training timetable for the provinces was drown up. I’m directly concerned, since it’s me who will have to do the travelling around (. . .) The whole thing will be explained to me again the next day.” (p. 35)
In retrospective boredom, individuals have left themselves time for the situation in which they find themselves and time passes without realizing. At least at the beginning of their career, most of Houellebecqian heroes dedicate time to their professional life, but they end up realizing that the situation, after all, fails to satisfy them. This is what the father of Jed, the hero of The Map and the Territory, says when he realizes a posteriori how his time was wasted at work: “I confess I was hoping for something more from my career as an architect than building stupid fucking seaside resorts for dumb tourists, under the control of fundamentally dishonest and almost infinitely vulgar property developers” (pp.139–140).
As people are standing in the present time, nothing can come since “the horizon of the future has been unbound.” Being cut off from the past and the future helps people to reach a full conscientiousness of the present time as Paul, the hero of Annihilate, when he takes a temporary leave from his work. He is bored with the situation. He has no plan for the future, except of doing nothing, and he is indifferent toward his past. He realizes that he has not been happy at work, “but it is not the fact of having been happy in a place that makes the prospect of leaving it painful, it is simply the fact of leaving it, of leaving behind a part of one’s life, however dreary or even unpleasant it may have been, of seeing it collapse into nothingness; in other words, it is the fact of growing old” (p. 563).
Being: An attunement state due to boredom
Becoming superficially bored generates an emotional state of oppression and being left empty, as illustrated by the following gallery of characters in The Map and the Territory: a customer in a restaurant looking “like a technical sales representative who was nearing the end of the line”; an “exhausted and despondent” waitress; and a “dead tired” police commissioner. The same novel offers an example of how Jed, the hero, is left empty as his artistic creation process freezes: “This time it was Jed who risked spoiling the atmosphere, because since his last painting, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market, he no longer felt much about art. He was going nowhere. There was a sort of force that had carried him for a year or two, but was now dissipating, crumbling” (p. 9).
In retrospective boredom, the feeling of indifference and being left empty becomes stronger and blurrier. People feel detached from their professional activity, with a vague feeling of indifference. Bruno, one of the heroes in The Elementary Particles, offers a good example when working for the Department of French curricula at the Ministry of Education: “His colleagues, the thought-provoking seminars, the social development of the adolescent, multiculturalism. . . none of it had the slightest importance for him anymore” (p. 198).
Doing a useless job plunge Houellebecqian heroes into an “obstructive casualness,” as in the case of Daniel1, in The Possibility of an Island, who ends up leaving his job in show-business: “All in all I was going to drop not just this film but almost everything, in conclusion I said I no longer felt the least ambition, or rage to win or anything of that kind, it seemed to me that at this point of my life I was truly tired.” (p. 125).
Profound boredom
As boredom grows, it gets deeper and more obscure, and its sources are no longer identifiable. It is profound and it hurts, as experienced by the hero of Whatever just before beginning his training mission across France: “At times, too, I’ve had the impression that I’d manage to feel quite at home in a life of vacuity. That the relatively painless boredom would enable me to go on making the usual gestures of life. Another big mistake. Prolonged boredom is not tenable as a position: sooner or later it is transformed into feelings that are acutely more painful, of true pain; this is precisely what’s happening to me” (p. 46–47).
Responding to the call of Dasein—the It, the unknown, the uncertain—appears to be the only option to truly exist. A combination of urgency, loneliness, and emptiness reflects a moment of truth. The individual is faced with time and his/her own finitude. It is the only way to understand the essence of human beings, despite the pain and hopelessness often associated with it. Shortly before committing suicide, Daniel1, the hero of The Possibility of an Island, notes that: “We all have to meet our own death, see it in front of us at least once, and each one of us, in our heart of heart, knows this, it is, when you think of it, preferable that death, rather than being clad normally in boredom and attrition, should wear the rare robes of pleasure” (p. 301). For Houellebecq, being conscious of the finitude of life and thus of the destructive dimension of time is so fundamental that it persists even through cloning, as conveyed in the same novel by the neo-human Daniel 24: “It is precisely this repugnance and boredom that we must cultivate” (The Possibility of an Island, p. 69).
In profound boredom, passing the time no longer diverts individuals from confronting their own loneliness with the emptiness of their existence. They are compelled to listen to the call of profound boredom, as in Platform when the protagonists make a professional visit to a cultural site to prepare it for a holiday stay: “Valérie was lost in thought, walking down the alleys, across the flagstones, through the grass. That’s culture for you, I thought: it’s a bit of a pain in the arse, but that’s good; everyone goes back to their own nothingness” (pp. 80-81).
Profound boredom is related to a time that gets away from us, something that neither individuals nor organizations can manage. Thus, profound boredom is rarely experienced by Houellebecq’s characters in organizational contexts. It occurs through a gradual withdrawal, as experienced by Bruno, one of the heroes in The Elementary Particles, during a nap at a new-age campsite: “He had stopped wishing, he had stopped wanting, he was nowhere. Slowly, by degrees, his spirit filled with a state of nothingness, the sheer joy that comes from not being part of the world” (p. 109).
Individuals feel timeless, and the perception of time vanishes. The neo-humans described in The Possibility of an Island offer interesting examples of this experience. Living in a far-off future, they are delivered from boredom and feel genetically removed from the flow of time: “It is without regret, without distress, that we leave one another at the end of our occasional intermediations, and return to our calm, contemplative lives, which would probably have appeared unbelievably boring to humans of the classical age” (pp. 302–303).
Emotions evaporate, and individuals settle into a fundamental mood in which they are confronted with all the bareness of themselves. Not merely liberated from their everyday personality, they go beyond the specific situation where all and everything appears indifferent, like Florent-Claude, the hero of Serotonin, retrospectively thinking about his career: “Today my indifference at the time toward the apricot producers of the Roussillon seems a warning sign of the indifference that I showed toward the milk producers of Calvados and Manche at the crucial moment, and also of the more fundamental indifference that I would go on to develop toward my own fate.” (pp. 23–24).
Authenticity
Settling into the fundamental mood of boredom creates an urgency, in specific cases leading to authenticity at work, but also, more frequently, to depression and a renunciation of life.
Perhaps the most significant example of urgency leading to authenticity at work is Jed, the painter in The Map and the Territory, who suddenly decides to destroy years of work: “Everything that, a few days previously, had constituted his world suddenly seemed completely empty to him. Road maps and photographic prints were spread out by the hundreds on the floor, and not a single one of them meant anything anymore. In resignation, he went out and bought two rolls of ‘garden waste’ (. . .), then went home and began to fill them (. . .) It was months, or rather years of work that he was in the process of destroying, and yet he didn’t hesitate for a moment” (p. 66).
According to Houellebecq, only by mastering the entire production process, as artists and scientists do, can individuals’ meet their deepest aspirations, leading them to authenticity. As Jed himself believed, “To be an artist, in his view, was above all to be someone submissive. Someone who submitted himself to mysterious, unpredictable messages (. . .) which nonetheless commanded you in an imperious and categorical manner, without leaving the slightest possibility of escape—except by losing any notion of integrity and self-respect. These messages could involve destroying a work, or even an entire body of work to set-off in a radically new direction, or even occasionally no direction at all, without having any project at all, or the slightest hope of continuing” (pp. 66–67).
Moreover, this allows one to free oneself from the time of organization. At the end of the novel, his fortune made, Jed withdraws from the world to begin the last phase of his artistic activity. He frees himself from commercial and temporal constraints to reach a level of creative authenticity that leads him to make videograms “that are like nothing else in his previous work, nor, in fact, like anything known” (p. 286). Pushing his vision further in The Possibility of an Island, Houellebecq even suggests that going beyond time is the only way for individuals to find meaning in their work. In a futuristic universe, Daniel1, the anti-hero, is linked to leaders of a sect that offers its members immortality through cloning. The sect launches a communication campaign which emphasizes that overcoming time generates authenticity in one’s work. In a commercial, a man is repairing a canoe on a riverbank: “He was working calmly, in no hurry, giving the impression of finding pleasure in it and having all the time in the world ahead of him; then he turned towards the camera and smiled broadly at the message: ‘Eternity, Tranquilly’ was surimposed on the screen” (p. 284).
However, most of Houellebecq’s heroes are unable to reach authenticity at work as the organizations want to retain control of time, and so do not allow it. The call of Dasein remains a dead issue; profound boredom has no way out and leads to their destruction, as in the final scene of Whatever, in which the hero cannot escape clock time: “Everything that might have been a source of pleasure, of participation, of innocent sensual harmony, has become a source of suffering and unhappiness. At the same time I feel, and with impressive violence, the possibility of joy. For years, I’ have been walking alongside a phantom who looks like me, and who lives in a theoretical paradise strictly related to the world. I’ve long believed that it was up to me to become one with this phantom. That’s done with (. . .), I am at the heart of the abyss. I feel my skin again as a frontier, and the external world as a crushing weight. The impression of separation is total; from now on I am imprisoned with myself. It will not take place, the sublime fusion; the goal of life is missed. It is two in the afternoon” (p. 154–155).
Discussion
As shown above, our study of Houellebecq’s novels empirically exposes the three “forms” of boredom described by Heidegger (1938/1995) in the context of work, allowing us to extend our understanding of the intimate relationship of boredom with time, a force beyond us we cannot instrumentalize. It also contributes to our understanding of profound boredom at work and how organizations can enable individuals to set out on a more authentic path of being at work.
Boredom and time in organizations: A phenomenological approach to a time beyond us
Our Houellebecquian journey shows how avoiding boredom by “passing the time” (Heidegger, 1938/1995) in contemporary organizations is linked to a factitious and instrumental relationship with time. Time at work is reduced to a “vulgar time” (Bakken et al., 2013; Heidegger, 2010), in other words, the organization’s clock time and the “eternal recurrence of the same” (Johnsen, 2016: 1410) associated with it, which individuals try to cope with by “passing the time,” a reaction against superficial boredom. As Houellebecq’s novels illustrate, his anti-heroes’ petty odysseys at work traverse a series of “passing the time” moments (e.g. pointless formal training, everlasting meetings, or retirement drinks). This should be enough to overcome boredom. As the classical analysis of Roy’s (1959) “banana time” or the more recent study of Johnsen et al. (2019) about Helsinki prisoners illustrate, people who try to escape the feeling of enduring endless days tend to split time into recurrent symbolic activities (Roy, 1959). Whether described as a commodification, a social construction, or a compression (i.e. doing more in a shortened period; Hassard, 2002), time is something people deal with and try to domesticate, mainly to avoid boredom (Holt and Johnsen, 2019).
However, as Houellebecq’s novels unveil, this instrumental approach to boredom leads to a dead-end. The work situations Houellebecq describes are not only organizational settings that induce people to administer time through recurrent activities but are also meaningless. Passing the time is often assigned to individuals and tied to performance monitored by managers or subjected to organizational norms that amplify boredom instead of diverting people. The administration of time not only fails to prevent superficial boredom since passing the time still appears tedious to individuals, but also bridges it with retrospective boredom. People resent boredom not only with respect to the activities concerned, but for the organizational situations in which they are embedded. In other words, if Houellebecq’s characters slowly but surely get caught up in the net of boredom, it is because passing the time fails to “overcome the vacillation of time” (Heidegger, 1938/1995: 98). Time has its own pace and cannot be instrumentalized (Holt and Johnsen, 2019).
So why does boredom persist? Throughout their organizational journey, Houellebecq’s characters are bored as they feel they are “held in limbo to time in its standing” (Heidegger, 1938/1995: 120). Time is frozen in the past (through a succession of unforgettable experiences) or projected into a rootless future (through a succession of goals to be achieved). While studies in organizational psychology have shown that boredom is strongly linked to reduced job performance (Fisherl, 1993; O’Hanlon, 1981; Van Hooff and Van Hooft, 2014), our analysis also argues that clock time transforms people into a counterpart of Sisyphus, carrying a repressed form of “passing the time.” When organizations, especially in the service sector (Costas and Kärreman, 2016; Johnsen, 2016), artificially manage boredom, the individual’s entire situation becomes boring, potentially dragging people down to “profound boredom” (Heidegger, 1938/1995). As Holt and Johnsen (2019) indicate, time is set against us and is even beyond us. This is what profound boredom is all about. We need to listen to the call of boredom and not try to treat it as an outcome of our incapacity to deal with time as a resource. Confrontation with profound boredom leads Houellebecq’s narrators to a systematic withdrawal from the organizational “vulgar time” (Bakken et al., 2013; Heidegger, 2010).
As Houellebecq’s anti-heroes gradually withdraw from the frenzy of mundane work, they may be attuned to a more ontological dimension of boredom, a “feeling of acceptance or of resignation toward a state of indifference” (Barbalet, 1999: 634) together with awareness of both the finitude of the world and of themselves (Heidegger, 1938/1995). When they listen to the call of boredom, individuals accept that organizations may not last forever and are consequently thrown into the world instead of acting upon it. Profound boredom becomes a self-defense mechanism against the downward slide of contemporary work. It is not a mere disengagement at work, or even a renunciation, it is an urgency, a timeless appeal to do things another way. It is a “need” to withdraw from the flow of time, paving the way for authenticity.
Profound boredom at work as a mood, a fundamental attunement toward authenticity in organizations
Examining Houellebecq’s anti-heroes’ uncompromising take on organizations and work helps us to understand profound boredom as an antidote to the “instrumentalization” of work. Individuals develop a vague but intense feeling that something is rotten in the state of contemporary work. Why is it so blurred? If we are humans, it is not only because we are beings capable of rationality, sociability, or practicality. It is also because our entire existence is fueled by moods and this affects our idiosyncratic relationship with the world (Elpidorou and Freeman, 2015; Heidegger, 2010), including our relationship with organizations. Profound boredom displays our “Being-in-the-world” as thrown ahead from a preexisting situation (Heidegger, 2010). This preexisting situation discloses not only who we wanted to be, but also throws us into who we want to be (Elpidorou and Freeman, 2015; Heidegger, 2010). As such, it is a mood that contains a revelation, but also determines how things appear to us. Such “facticity” resists explanation and interpretation (Heidegger, 2010) in a “mooded” way and reveals a world that matters to us (Elpidorou and Freeman, 2015). What Houellebecq’s characters show us, in addition to Heidegger’s theoretical framework, is that their withdrawal from organizations has nothing to do with cold indifference toward the organizations in which they are embedded but is instead an affected refusal regarding the absence of meaning. It is a compelling call for something else, which only Jed Martin, the main protagonist in The Map and the Territory, and, in a different way, Daniel25, the last of Daniel1′s clones in The Possibility of an Island, achieve by withdrawing from the meaningless routine of their daily tasks (producing standardized pieces of art for Jed and studying the life of Daniel1 for Daniel25). By listening to the call of profound boredom, individuals may thus withdraw from the organizational rat race and experience a more authentic way of being at work.
Profound boredom is not a manifestation of a lack of stimulation due to uninteresting work content, or even a strong emotion, it is a mood, in other words, a keen awareness that everything at work has become inauthentic. As a result, individuals become more open to authenticity (i.e. the fact that profound boredom reveals our own finitude). It is a “fundamental attunement” that leads us to truly understand and accept the contingency of our existence (Freeman and Elpidorou, 2015; Heidegger, 1938/1995) and that of organizations. Our existence is phenomenologically situated, and attaining it discloses that we cannot take things for granted (Segal, 2011). Until recently, boredom was only perceived and grasped by organizations in superficial and retrospective manifestations. Notwithstanding their contribution to a better understanding of boredom at work, psychological approaches (Game, 2007; Loukidou et al., 2009) remain focused on an instrumental link between boredom and meaning at work to allow people to set new goals and objectives (Elpidorou, 2018). However, as Johnsen (2016) argues, boredom constitutes an alarm mechanism, “a reminder of the fertility and the extraordinary power concealed in the apparent banality of ordinariness” (p. 1415). Our study shows that this fertility is not something we can find in organizational injunctions for more performance, more engagement, or even more play in the workplace. It reminds us that we will otherwise lose our capacity to do things, beyond work and its call for greater performance and productivity.
What are the immediate consequences of this on our organizational life? For over a decade, individuals have faced an organizational injunction to be themselves. As Fleming and Sturdy (2009) suggested, this has resulted in a new form of management, a neo-normative control through which individuals are encouraged to be authentic at work by having “fun” and behaving as if there were no boundaries between their private and professional life. However, authenticity cannot be monitored by either the organization or the individual. Instead, profound boredom reveals that authenticity comes from our “throwness” in the world and depends on the uncertainty of the situations we encounter and care about (Heidegger, 2010; Segal, 2011). It cannot be an injunction, something that will lead us to enhance organizational productivity, as in the example of Google’s Innovation Time Off program (Johnsen, 2016). Profound boredom awakens us to this false rhetoric on authenticity. When Houellebecq mocks the “Dance your job” seminar that a secondary character attended in The Elementary Particles, he denounces the vanity and lack of meaning of such organizational initiatives. On the contrary, as Costas and Kärreman (2016) suggested, it is the reason why boredom is growing at work, especially for knowledge workers.
Boredom constitutes a plea for individuals to abandon meaningless tasks, jobs, careers, and inauthentic relationships that do not matter to us in organizations. Our study reveals that we need to listen to the call of boredom and not be afraid of it. If we get bored in the workplace, it is because we care about work. Houellebecq’s praise of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in The Map and the Territory reminds us that contemporary organizations prevent individuals from caring about what they do in order to focus on performance and productivity, two things that drive people away from the elementary desire for and pride in the content of their daily work (Crawford, 2009; Sennett, 2008). On the contrary, our analysis suggests that we should bring this notion to the forefront. Indeed, it is precisely through a confrontation with mundane reality that we are drawn back to “facticity” (Elpidorou and Freeman, 2015; Heidegger, 2010). However, this supposes a necessary abandonment. Organizations should not try to control boredom but should care about it. Caring about boredom at work implies giving people the possibility to define their work output and to master the production process (Crawford, 2009). In so doing, they can care about the actual limits of their work (Crawford, 2009) and not have to systematically comply with a pre-established process and rules. When Michel’s boss in The Elementary Particles says to him that his new director will “leave [him] in peace”, it means that Michel will be able to do whatever he wants in order to do his job. Caring about boredom suggests that organizations not only need to give people autonomy (Fisherl, 1993), but should provide individuals with an “embodied agency” (Crawford, 2009), that is, the individual capacity to determine what is required to do a job well. It also means that people should be allowed to evaluate and take the time needed to do things. Caring about boredom at work could therefore represent a genuine encounter with the daily situation that is “beyond our head” and requires our “attention” (Crawford, 2015). It is a kind of situated mood that concerns everyone in our contemporary organizations, including workers in the service sector.
Concluding remarks
As recent studies have suggested (Costas and Kärreman, 2016; Johnsen, 2016), simply managing boredom by avoiding it or benefiting from its creative strength is insufficient to understand the organizational issues of boredom at work. In this paper, we examine how we can go beyond the instrumental approach to boredom, investigating profound boredom highlighted through Heidegger’s (1938/1995) framework. Our phenomenological journey into Houellebecq’s novels offers two main insights. First, it indicates that the organizational management of time simply orchestrates renewed passing the time in order to prevent individuals from being bored. This never-ending race against boredom leads to individuals’ withdrawal, as it may prevent profound boredom from occurring, and may plunge them into disengagement or even depression. Second, it unveils that profound boredom is ontologically linked with time, paving the way to more authenticity for individuals at work, in other words, an awareness of their finitude, but also what truly matters to them. Boredom is beyond us; it mediates the relationship between individuals and organizations and reveals the meaninglessness of the latter. Thus, boredom should be addressed as such in organizations. As a mood, it reveals how individuals are somehow lost in organizational translation, and implicitly implies that organizations need to change their process, social organization, and discourse to allow people to have a more authentic relationship with time.
Footnotes
Appendix
Table of quotes.
| Categories | Superficial boredom (Becoming bored by something) | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Conceptual description | Empirical codes | Examples of empirical evidences | |
| Sources of boredom | Being bored by people | Colleagues and other stakeholders at work | Her interest in teaching had also waned considerably. On the whole, young people no longer interested her much. Her students were at such a terrifyingly low intellectual level that, sometimes, you had to wonder what had pushed them into studying in the first place. (The Map and the Territory, p. 220) |
| I already know this young man; we’ve chatted many a time around the hot drinks machine. He generally told dirty stories; I have the feeling this tour of the provinces is going to be grim (Whatever, p. 52) | |||
| I’m sitting in a cool white office, opposite a guy slightly younger than me who’s just joined the firm. I think he’s called Bernard. His mediocrity is distressing. He can’t stop talking about money and investment: share packages, portfolios, high interest saving schemes. . .the full set. He’s banking on a level of wage increase slightly higher than inflation. He bores me somewhat. I don’t really manage to reply to him. His moustache twinges. It goes quiet again when he leaves the office” (Whatever, p. 16) | |||
| Boss | Schnäbele performs his role most impressively. Before signing the first document he goes through it at length, with tremendous gravity. He singles out a phrase which is “somewhat unfortunate at the syntactical level.” The secretary, confused: “I can do it again, Sir” and he, the great lord: “No, no, it’ll be fine.” The fastidiousceremony is repeated for a second document, then for a third” (Whatever, p. 57) | ||
| He is one of my superiors in the hierarchy; I think his name is Norbert Lejailly. I didn’t know he’d be here, and I can’t say I’m overjoyed by his presence. This man has the features and the behaviour of a pig. He seizes the least opportunity to laugh long and loud. When he isn’t laughing he slowly rubs his hands together. He is podgy, even obese, and his self-satisfaction, which nothing solid would seem to support, is absolutely unbearable to me (Whatever, p. 34) | |||
| Being bored by something | Tasks | Molecular biology was routine. It required no creativity, no imagination and only the most basic second-rate intellect (The Elementary Particles, p. 13) | |
| Bruno had a fleeting idea. It was a professional preoccupation: what role should Paul Valéry play in the French language instruction of the scientific disciplines? By the time he finished his choucroute and ordered some cheese, he was tempted to answer “None” (The Elementary Particles, p. 167) | |||
| Passing the time | Passing the time initiated by oneself | Oneself as procrastinator | There is never much to do in the office in August, and my colleagues have to go on holiday because they have children. I stay in Paris, I play solitaire on the computer and around the 15th I take a long week-end off (Platform, p. 13) |
| She explained to me that she had been employed to “rejuvenate and modernise” the programme of cultural events. They weren’t high-end events: the flyer that I picked up the first time I visited her at the office gave off a sense of deadly boredom: workshops in origami, ikebana and tenkoku; lectures on playing Go and tea ceremonies (the Urasenke school and the Omotosenke school). The few Japanese guests they had were living national treasures, but most of them were at least 90 years old - they could appropriately have been called dying national treasures. In short, to fulfil her contract she had to organise one or two manga exhibitions, or a couple of festivals on new trends in Japanese porn; it was quite an easy job (Serotonin, p. 38) | |||
| Passing the time initiated by others | Stakeholders at work | During the morning a seventh person will make periodic appearances, intended to jolly along this meeting of minds. He is the head of the Ministry of Agriculture “Computer studies” section, the one I missed the other day. This individual seems to have given himself the mission of embodying an exaggerated version of the young and dynamic boss. In this, he streets ahead of anything I’ve had occasion to observe up till now. His shirt is open, as if he hadn’t quite had the time to button it up, and his tie flies off to one side as if caught in a slipstream. He doesn’t walk in the corridors, he glides. If he could fly, he would. His face is shining, his hair disordered and damp as if he’d come straight from the swimming pool (Whatever, p. 34) | |
| “It’s true they’re cute, the little girls. . .” commented Josette, taking a slice of papaya and adding to the general unease. The coffee was slow in coming. What do you do at the end of a meal if you’re not allowed to smoke? I sat quietly as the boredom increased. We concluded the conversation, not without difficulty, with some remarks about the weather (Platform, p. 64) | |||
| Passing the time initiated by the environment | The organization | Although strictly speaking Marie-Jeanne does nothing, her work is, in fact, the most complicated job: she has to keep abreast of movements, networks, trends; having assumed a level of cultural responsibility, she constantly runs the risk of being thought reactionary, even obscurantist; it is an accusation she must defend herself and the institution. She is also in regumar contact with artists, gallery | |
| owners and the editors of obscure reviews, obscure, at least, to me (Platform, p. 15) | |||
| It was true that a long-term unemployed person inevitably turned into a little mute and huddled being, and that theatre [organised by a Job Centre], and especially the vaudeville repertoire for some obscure reasons, gave these unhappy creatures the minimum social ease required for a job interview (Serotonin, p. 105) | |||
| Relation to the horizon of time | Reacting against the specific time of things | Killing the time at work | I spent the afternoon in my office doing various things; more or less nothing in fact (Whatever, p. 128) |
| At midday, partly out of desperation, I went to eat with a business manager and a managerial secretary. I was of a mind to converse with them, but wasn’t given the opportunity; they seemed to pursuing an already ancient conversation: ‘I finally got twenty-watt speakers for my car stereo, bragged the business manager. The ten watts appeared a bit weak and thirty watts was really much more expensive. I reckon it’s not worth it just for a car. - Personally, the secretary retorted, I’ve had four speakers put in, two in the front and two in the back. The business manager contrived a ribald smile. So there was it, everything was proceeding as normal (Whatever, p. 127) | |||
| Being dragged on and on by a slow passing time | Feel like time is dragging at work | The immediate superior offers me a coffee; he hasn’t, it seems, given up on trying to win me over. Stupidly I accept, which means that before a few minutes are up I find myself being given a somewhat delicate task: the detection of errors in a software package that has just been sold to the Ministry of Industry. There are, it appears, some errors. I spend 2 hours on it, and as far as I can tell there aren’t any; it’s true that my mind is elsewhere (Whatever, p. 128) | |
| Being | Being left empty by the refusal of things and reacting against this emptiness | Being disengaged at work, weary, exhausted | At the office, I continued to do the bare minimum; all the same, I had two or three exhibitions to organise; I got through them without any difficulty. Office work isn’t very difficult - you simply have to be reasonably meticulous and be decisive. I had rapidly realised that you did not necessarily have to make the right decision, it was sufficient, in most cases, to make any old decision, as long as you made it quickly - if you work in the public sector, at least (Platform, p. 183) |
| “You know, it may seem weird to call you stressed when essentially you do nothing all day, but the figures are there!” He gave the sheet with my results a vigorous tap; “You’re stressed; you’re stressed to a terrifying degree and it’s as if you were having a static burn-out” (Serotonin, p. 283) | |||
| Being affected in a paralysed way | Being inactive/unproductive at work | Weakness of the senses was reinforced by a growing professional disinvestment; the task force was slowly falling apart; there will be a few sparks, a few principled declarations notably during work drinks (there was at least one of these a week at DRAF) but we had to agree that Normans didn’t know how to sell their products (Serotonin, p. 117–118) | |
| Categories | Retrospective boredom (Being bored with something and the kind of passing the time pertaining to it) | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Conceptual description | Empirical codes | Examples of empirical evidences | |
| Sources of boredom | Boredom lies in us | Oneself as worker | The following Monday I went back to my job, a bit on off chance. I knew my head of department had taken between Christmas and New Year’s Day off; probably to go skiing in the Alps. I thought there’d be nobody there, that nobody would feel in the least bit like me, and that my day would be spent tapping idly away on some keyboard (Whatever, p. 127) |
| Somewhat bizarrely, he goes on to question me about my work. I don’t get it; I’m unable to grant his question real importance. That’s clearly not the issue there. He defines his thinking precisely, in speaking to me of the “possibilities for social rapport” offered by the job. I burst out laughing, much to his surprise. He gives me another appointment for Monday (Whatever, p. 132) | |||
| Boredom lies in situations | Hierarchical system | Human beings do, in fact, look very much alike. Of course, we can distinguish between males and females; we can also, if we choose, distinguish between different age categories; but any more advanced distinction comes close to pedantry, probably a result of boredom. According to Hutchinson and Rawlins, the development of systems of hierarchical dominance within animal societies does not correspond to any practical necessity, nor to any selective advantage; it simply constitutes a means of combating the crushing boredom of life in the heart of nature (Platform, p. 355) | |
| Occupation | The atmosphere in his research facility was like an office, no better, no worse. Far from the popular image of molecular biologists as Rimbauds with microscopes, research scientists were not great thinkers but simple technicians who read Le Nouvel Observateur and dreamed of going on vacation to Greenland (The Elementary Particles, p. 13) | ||
| I’m not ambitious, Michel. . . ‘ she would tell me sometimes. ‘I feel happy with you, I think you’re the love of my life, and I don’t ask for any more than that. But that’s not possible: I have to ask for more. I’m trapped in a system from which I get so little, which I know is futile; but I don’t know how to get out. Just once, we should take time to think; but I don’t know when we’ll be able to take time to think (Platform, p. 162–163) | |||
| Passing the time | Passing the time is “repressed” by oneself | Oneself as repressed procrastinator | When he can, a Westerner works; he often finds his work frustrating or boring, but he pretends to find it interesting: this is much obvious (Platform, p. 112) |
| Bruno would be at his office without a doubt, he didn’t remember ever having seen Bruno take a vacation, but he would have no appointments, no need for him, he would be alone with his files, he would be happy. Work diverts, Paul thought. (Annihilate, p. 141) | |||
| It was hard for me to detach myself from my work on Huysmans, which had preoccupied me, more or less secretly, for years. It was the entire purpose of my life, I thought with some melancholy (Submission, p. 242) | |||
| Passing the time is “repressed” by the organization | Prescribed work | After a couple of weeks, just as she was about to rent a studio flat, she realised : the trap was sprung; from now, she was in the world of work (Platform, p. 141) | |
| Passing the time is “repressed” by the environment | Social norms and customs (and the wider environment) | The irresponsible and fascistic diktat of product line managers, who of course know better than anyone else what the customer wants, who claim to capture an expectation of novelty in the consumer, and who in reality just turns his life into one exhausting and desperate quest, an endless wandering between eternally modified product lines (The Map and the Territory, p. 110). | |
| What could possibly incite human beings to undertake tedious, tiresome tasks? This seemed to me the only political question worth posing. The old factory worker’s evidence was damming; in his opinion, only the need for money; in any case, the revolution had obviously failed to create the new man, driven by more altruistic motives. And so, like all societies, Cuba was nothing more than a system painstakingly rigged so as to allow some people to avoid tedious and tiresome tasks. Except that the system has failed, no one was fooled any longer, no one was sustained any more by the hope of 1 day rejoicing in communal labour. (Platform, p. 239) | |||
| Relation to the horizon of time | Not being released from our time as being held in limbo to time in its standing | Oneself realizing afterwards time was wasted at work | Her professional life could thus be summarised as teaching contradictory absurdities to social-climbing cretins (The Map and the Territory, p. 220) |
| Being cut off from our own having-been and our own future | Work is not a succession of nows | My workload wasn’t excessive (. . .) adulthood and a career are only a slow and progressive process of ending up in a rut (Serotonin, p. 127). | |
| In his 15 years of professional experience, Desplechin was the one person with whom Michel would’ve liked to have a relationship beyond the utilitarian, infinitely irritating chance juxtapositions of office life (The Elementary Particles, p. 220) | |||
| Being | Self-forming emptiness is this “I know not what” | Vague feeling or a posteriori judgement of a meaningless job | Each person does as he likes in his little corner without considering the others, there’s no agreement, there’s no general project, there’s no harmony. Paris is a horrible city, people don’t meet, they’re not even interested in their work, it’s all too superficial, they all go home at six, work done or not, nobody gives a damn (Whatever, p. 25) |
| To tell the truth, I felt increasingly uneasy in my job. There was no clear proof of the dangers of GMOs (. . .) but there was no proof of their harmless either, and my superiors within the company were quite simply pathological liars. The truth is that we know nothing or practically nothing about the long-term consequences of genetic plant manipulations (Serotonin p. 92) | |||
| Obstructive casualness | Withdraw oneself as a worker | As so often in the past, he thought of all the people who coexist in the heart of a city without any particular reason, without no common interests or preoccupations following incommensurate and separate trajectories, sometimes joined (more and more rarely) by sex or (more and more often) by crime. But for the first time this thought - and which fascinated him at the start of his career as a policeman, and which made him want to dig further, to know more, to go right to the heart of human relations - now aroused in him just an obscure weariness (The Map and the Territory, p. 238–239) | |
| Pushing on with his argument, he contrives to implicitly suggest that in these conditions my own presence is itself just as useless, or at very least of limited use. Which is precisely what I’m thinking (Whatever, p. 36) | |||
| Categories | Profound boredom (It is boring for one) | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Conceptual description | Codes | Examples of empirical evidences | |
| Sources of boredom | It, the call of Dasein (Unknown, and uncertain) | Deep boredom, profound feeling of loneliness and finitude | One feels content, happy; there are no people. Something seems possible, here. One has the impression of being present at a new departure (Whatever, p. 154) |
| “Nothing can halt the ever-increasing recurrence of those moments when your total isolation, the sensation of an all-consuming emptiness, the foreboding that your existence is nearing a painful and definitive end all combine to plunge you into a state of real suffering” (Whatever, p. 11). | |||
| Passing the time | No longer permitting any passing the time | Powerlessness of any task, activity or mission to avoid deep boredom and indifference | I was busy resigning myself to abandoning the apricot producers of the Roussillon as they began their descent towards annihilation. Today my indifference at the time towards the apricot producers of the Roussillon seems a warning sign of the indifference that I showed towards the milk producers of Calvados and Manche at the crucial moment, and also of the more fundamental indifference that I would go on to develop towards my own fate (Serotonin p. 23–24) |
| And sources of pleasure were hard to come by. In the end, my cock was all I had. My interest in the life of the mind had greatly diminished; my social life was hardly more satisfying than the life of my body; it, too, presented itself as a series of pesty annoyances - clogged sink, slow Wi-Fi, points on my licence, dishonest cleaning woman, mistakes in my tax return - and these, followed one after another without interruption, and almost never left me in peace. In the monastery, I imagined, one left most of these worries behind. One laid down the burden of one’s individual existence. One renounced pleasure, too, but there was a case to be made for that. It was a shame, I thought while I read, that Huysmans spent so much of En route insisting on his disgust at the debauches in his past. Here, perhaps, he hadn’t been completely honest. What attracted him about the monastery, I suspected, wasn’t so much that one escaped from the quest after carnal pleasures; it was more that one could be freed from the exhausting and dreary succession of aggravations that made up daily life (Submission, p. 81) | |||
| Relation to the horizon of time | Feeling timeless, removed from the flow of time | Being removed from time and accepting its repetition | In my life, I had known suffering, oppression, anxiety; I had never known boredom. I could see no objection to the endless, imbecile repetition of sameness. Of course, I harbored no illusions about being capable of getting to that point: I knew that misery is robust, it is resourceful and tenacious; but it was not a prospect that caused me the least concern. As a child, I could spend hours counting sprigs of clover in a meadow: in all the years of searching I had never found a four-leafed clover; I never felt any disappointment or any bitterness; to tell the truth, I could just as well counting blades of grass - all of those sprigs of clover, with their three leaves, seemed endlessly splendid to me. 1 day, when I was twelve, I had climbed to the top of an electricity pylon high in the mountains. When I reached the platform of the top, the descent seemed complicated and dangerous. The mountain ranges stretched as far as the eye could see, crowned with eternal snows. It would have been much simpler to stay there, or to jump. I was stopped, in extremis, by the thought of being crushed; but otherwise, I think I could have rejoiced endlessly in my flight (Platform, p. 321–322) There were a few seconds of paradoxical balance and absolute peace, certainly less than five, during which I felt as if I had stepped out of time (Serotonin, p. 19) To cross at 300 km/h an ocean of opaque fog as far as the eye could see, which let nothing of the surrounding landscapes be guessed, was no longer exactly a journey. Rather, he had the impression of a numbness, of an immobile fall in an abstract space. (Annihilate, p. 254) |
| Being | Emptiness as lack, deprivation, need | Sudden feeling of a profound emptiness and an urgency of doing otherwise | I [the father of the hero] remember one evening at the Porte de Bagnolet, I was coming back from my work in my Mercedes, it was already nine o’clock but there were still traffic jams. I don’t know what triggered it, maybe the Mercuriale Towers because I was working on a very similar project, which I found ugly and uninteresting, but I saw myself in my car in the middle of these fast-entry slip roads, in front of those appalling buildings, and all of suffen I told myself I couldn’t go on. I was nearly forty, my professional life was a success, but I couldn’t go on. In a few minutes, I decided to start my own business, to try and practise architecture as I undertsood it. I knew it would be difficult, but I didn’t want to die without at least trying (The Map and the Territory, p.146–147) |
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and associate editor of the special issue for their constructive and insightful suggestions in reviewing the article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
