39 research outputs found
The impact of workaholism on day-level workload and emotional exhaustion, and on longer-term job performance
Work as the contemporary limit of life: Capitalism, the death drive, and the lethal fantasy of āwork-life balanceā
This article introduces contemporary discourses of āworkālife balanceā as a cultural fantasy revolving self-hood around employment and organizations. To do so, it draws on the Lacanian interpretation of the Freudian ādeath driveā to highlight the importance of ādisequilibriumā for the construction of the subject and individual identification therein. More precisely, it reflects on the ways this structuring of self-hood associated with the impossible pursuit of āequilibriumā maps out onto present desires for āworkālife balanceā and its subsequent production of a regulated āimbalancedā subject. It argues that individuals are maintained as subjects through their identification with and paradoxical enjoyment, or jouissance, from being āimbalancedā. Consequently, capitalist work and organizations stand as the contemporary limit of ālifeā through their fundamental role in producing and sustaining this āimbalancedā subject in search of ābalanceā. It is ironically in this longing to overcome this āimbalanceā, to āwork to liveā, that individuals remain even more strongly a capitalist and organizational āsubject of desireā. They literally cannot go on subjectively ālivingā without capitalist work