Keeping a Foot in the Door: Neoliberal Ideology in Subjects Who Opt Out of a Corporate Career

Lost in Context? Critical Perspectives on Individualization

People in contemporary society are increasingly being addressed as agentic individuals who are held responsible for personal aspects of their life and beyond. These personal aspects contain the design and organization of one’s life path in terms of, e.g., (lifelong) education, work and retirement planning, health care, work-life balance, and happiness; or with regard to more abstract concepts like sustainability, individual subjects become responsible for the future of the ecosystem on a planetary scale. This individualization includes on the one hand potential empowerment of the subject to actively shape one’s own life, and on the other hand, it tends to ignore relevant socio-economic processes, scope, and power relations, which unfold as implicit and explicit social restrictions and potential pressure. Subjects navigate through such contexts with a compulsion to control faith and course of life by their decision-making, behavior, and an overall urge to optimize the self. This special section on individualization contains (a) an editorial frame of individualization within contemporary developments in a neoliberal context and (b) empirical contributions around the processes of individualization in various conditions such as the housing crisis in Berlin, career trajectories, and incorporated neoliberal ideology when opting out of a corporate career, pseudo individualization in Indian television commercials, and leisure activities alongside the example of soccer and related fan-group dynamics interpreted as an escape from the pressure to singularize.

Holding Up a Democratic Facade: How ‘New Work Organizations’ Avoid Resistance and Litigation When Dismissing Their Managers

New work is used as a general term to summarize professional developments in contemporary work style, structure and modus of organizations and society—this means collaborative work and flexible working hours on individual levels, and flat hierarchies and participatory decision-making on organizational levels. Contemporary corporations strive to orient toward the concept of new work to keep up with stakeholder demands, for instance in their branding strategies as an employer. However, studies on organizational practices indicate that alongside explicit values and agendas, organizations tend to slyly exert power to secure their (economic) interests. Constructive dismissal is one such instance where contractually protected employees are made to resign their positions because the work environment is altered to become increasingly unbearable. This research analyzes two case studies to explicate routine dismissal procedures at the managerial level in two internationally operating German corporations. Both corporations explicitly profile as new work environments and are structured according to democratic principles including flat hierarchies, feature institutionalized diversity management including control committees for equal opportunities, and emphasize values such as workplace dignity, employee agency, and equality. The data contain long-term participatory observation collected over a 6-month period from two managers of 5 and 8 years of experience in managerial duties. The content analysis of data reveals characteristics of everyday processes in these organizations especially in terminating managers. The findings are presented as the ‘model of the silent dismissal,’ containing seven types of managerial termination carried out by implicit power and symbolic conventions that circumvent subject participation and litigation in an effortless manner. After exposing the model’s mechanisms, we turn to discuss its meaning for both terminated and surviving subjects against a critical theoretical framework of neoliberalism, democracy, and power.