Flexibility at Work: Values, Productivity, and Care in a Consulting Company in Beirut

Abstract

In this thesis, I explore how flexible capitalism manifests itself in the workplace in a consulting company in Lebanon during a time of crises. Having conducted ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with workers, I argue that work becomes a total social fact at Consulting for Development (CD) as it creates and transforms a social configuration including social, affective, ethical, political, and economic dimensions.

I first attend to the ethical dimension of work and show that the organizational culture’s value of partnership clashes with the market’s set of ethical values. I document the meritocracy that emerges to resolve this tension but then finds itself in conflict with more traditional hierarchies, namely those based on the ownership of the means of production and aristocratic logics. I thus argue that these hierarchies prevented workers from enacting the value of partnership, and countered the flexibility in managing the workplace.

I then turn my attention to the value of work and explore the sense of importance workers ascribed to their work activities. I show that workers at CD valued their work as a means of securing their livelihood and developing their professional skills and networks within a precarious labor market. They also valued work as affective and ethical engagements towards their colleagues, the workplace as a collective, and the world. I argue that the different means of valuing work coincided within the workplace and bolstered the sense of importance that workers ascribed to their work, thus inciting them to overwork.

Finally, I document CD’s institutional practices of sociality encouraging workers to bring their hearts to work, by sharing feelings and personal updates, empathizing with others, and offering them support. I show that workers tried to integrate, through these institutionalized socialities, the realm of economic obligations and that of social and moral commitments, which they saw as distinct but interconnected. I argue that the workplace’s institutionalized socialities oriented workers towards increased productivity, supported mechanisms for flexible labor distribution, and reproduced power relations within the workplace.