While corporate performance cultures involve us in extensive systems of lofty stretch goals, continuous feedback and elaborate support schemes, they are nothing without dreams and desire. They promise us that the future is wide open; that there are no limits; that, as long as you do what it takes, the impossible is possible. In this talk, I will draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in the medium-sized 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. As this framing and exploitation of lust and dreams and the future comes to replace and co-exist with conventional notions of duty and responsibility, I conclude by asking what this may hold for the future of work and capitalism.

Those interested may want to take a look at the following article before the seminar:
https://hbr.org/2018/03/the-swedish-ceo-who-runs-his-company-like-a-crossfit-gym

About the Presenter:
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.

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