Politics of production? : working, learning and organizing in a new media company

• Main Author: Contu, Alessia
• Published: University of Manchester 2004
• Subjects: 658
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.540364

This thesis developed from various concerns and debates I have been following in the past few years in social and political theory, in particular the work of Ernesto Laclau with Chantal Mouffe, and that of Slavoj Zizek, and what I call the social theory of hegemony. It also concerns the debates in the academic arena that go under the term of critical organisation and management studies (COMS); in particular the questioning of traditional epistemology, ontology and politics, for example, with the discursive turn, and the critical realist "answer" to this questioning. And it also concerns research I have conducted for three years in a digital multimedia company in the north of England. In this thesis I articulate all these terms in a way that engages with, and contributes to, the discussion on new forms of working (project-based teamwork) and organising (fluid, heterarchical and anarchic nature of work) in the knowledge societies; subjectivity at work (including managerial subjectivity) of highly committed professionals who are entrepreneurial, cool, creative and egalitarian but show how this is "not-all" by elaborating and unravelling on issues of resistance and consent at work. I articulate a position that by addressing politics of production as a question and recuperating its most radical political inspiration, illustrates "what does not fit" - senseless signifiers that show the negativity and limit of social relations, signifiers that return to us the trauma and violence constituting the workplace of our liberal capitalist democracies. More broadly, I argue for the im/possible place of the critique of ideology and the recuperation of illusion and fantasy as political categories.