Cultural Discourses and Discursive Resources for Meaning/ful Work: Constructing and Disrupting Identities in Contemporary Capitalism

摘要

In their landmark The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) show how, over time, capitalism has generated differing ideologies, or "spirits," to justify the system's existence. To defend capitalism against criticisms of its harms for individuals, its present version frames work as a key source of personal meaningfulness and identity creation. Tracing the contours of this capitalist spirit, Boltanski and Chiapello show that finding meaning in work increasingly requires that people blur distinctions between private and professional lives, become free agents who identify with their career over any given organization, and display continual flexibility, self-control, and creativity. Discourses that apply most clearly to economic concerns are embedded in determinations of meaning and significance well beyond corporate settings, as concerns for accountability, sus-tainability, and efficiency are now common across social domains. Although there is no shortage of proclamations of such dramatic changes, Boltanski and Chiapello usefully highlight the need to understand the social and institutional forces that shape people's orientation to work and, in so doing, draw attention to how personal identities and work commitments are formed well beyond participation in specific organizations. Following this reasoning, our aim in this article is not to define meaning or to delineate the organizational practices that make work meaningful (e.g., Brief & Nord, 1990; Driver, 2007; Loher, Noe, Moeller, & Fitzgerald, 1985). Rather, we examine how the capitalist spirit's conception of meaningfulness is discursively constructed (as well as disrupted) and how these constructions shape personal identities.