A ‘Demented Work Ethic’ and a ‘Lifestyle Firm’: Discourse, Identity, and Workplace Time Commitments

Abstract

One key to understanding the contours of late modernity is to examine workers’ allocations of time to their organizations. In this article, I frame workplace time commitments as the outcome of two forces: individuals’ efforts to portray a positive and distinctive identity (identity work) and the organizational and social discourses shaping those identities (identity regulation). Analysis of interviews with 53 employees from two distinct organizations shows that identity work and identity regulation related to workplace time commitments are not the result of totalizing managerial discourses, but are influenced by the arrays of discursive resources proffered by both locales and organizational practices. Importantly, these arrays tend to ‘tilt’ toward agency or structure in the conceptions of the individual–organization relationship they afford. Based on this finding, I argue that studies of workplace control and resistance should examine the features of such arrays of discursive resources, that understanding these assemblies of discursive resources can provide insight on the institutionalization of workplace practices, and that claims about modernity's totalizing influences on identity must be tempered by considering locale-specific discourses.