Become the best version of yourself: Corporate performance culture in a Swedish sportswear company
Professor Torkild Thanem discusses one of his current lines of research—studying fitness and wellness in corporate performance cultures.
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Description
While corporate performance cultures involve extensive systems of lofty stretch goals, continuous feedback and elaborate support schemes—they are nothing without dreams and desire. These cultures promise that the future is wide open; that there are no limits; that, as long as you do what it takes, the impossible is possible.
Professor Torkild Thanem will draw on his ethnographic fieldwork in the Swedish sportswear company, Björn Borg, to discuss how performance cultures thrive on a libidinal economy of dreams and desires to maximize employee commitment and performance. In such work regimes, task-specific goal achievement is framed as a mere partial ingredient of the job. Increasing emphasis is put on personal goals set to help employees realise their dream and become the best version of themselves—not just more productive, but smarter, fitter, stronger, better, and more likeable. The talk concludes by asking what this may hold for the future of work and capitalism.
Those interested in attending may want to take a look at the article written about Henrik Bunge, CEO of Björn Borg, before the seminar.
Speaker Bios
Torkild Thanem is Professor of Management & Organization Studies at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University, Sweden. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Organization and a former Associate Editor of Gender, Work & Organization (2009-2018). Torkild currently pursues two lines of research: one project studying fitness and wellness in corporate performance cultures, and one project focusing on the lived practices, experiences and politics of trans people. His most recent work has been published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, and Organization. His forthcoming book (co-authored with David Knights) is titled Embodied Research Methods and will be published by Sage in April 2019.