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Bernhard Resch
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Dr.
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Resch
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Bernhard
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PublicationUNBOSS! On paradox, passion, and power in decentralized work( 2019-09-16)By examining a management trend that promotes the decentralization of authoritative hierarchies, this study comprises an exploration of the paradox, passion, and power in «bossless» organizing. In this dissertation, I show how discourses and everyday practices collude to produce affective mechanisms of control, and discuss their contradictory impacts. Departing from a discursive investigation that is based on the analysis of qualitative interviews, observational event visits, and practitioner-oriented management literature, the empirical research leads into a praxiographic field study to inquire into the practical adaptation of the discursive claims. I present a three-part analysis of the aftermath of «unbossing» and its power implications on a societal, organizational, and relational level. First, the management trend is divided into four discursive articulations, their different signifying strategies, and privileged subject positions. In order to assess the broader social relevance of these articulations, I discuss their conditions of production, circulation, and reception against the sociological framework of the «spirit of capitalism».Secondly, I conduct a psychoanalytically inspired, discursive reading of exuberant promises around a «hierarchy-less flatland».The analysis illustrates how excessive claims evoke three subconscious fantasies and delineates the development of unequal power relations if people become too passionately involved in these projections of ideal futures. Thirdly, I report on a praxiographic case study of a bossless organization and its everyday relational practices. I find an ambiguous affectivity that kept turning these affirmative practices around, and discuss a precarious «ethico-politics of incompleteness», the aim of which is to mitigate adverse effects. Methodologically, I draw from onto-epistemological studies of discourse, practice, and affect. I acknowledge their contingent entanglement and performative enactment in multiple becomings of worlds. With «post-foundational discourse analysis», «practice-based studies», and «agencement», I therefore mobilize conceptual frameworks that are situated between socio-constructionist and neo-materialist assumptions. By employing different theoretical angles and sources for data creation, I was able to trace reciprocal effects between large socio-economic and small everyday phenomena.