Reshaping the logics of office work. Work related subjectivity and discourse in environments implementing so-called new ways of working

The world of work has undergone significant changes under the influence of digitalization and a multiplicity of socio-economic reforms in recent decades. Online and offline spaces for office work have been restructured as worker’s relationships to the time/space of work have come to be mediated through various information technologies and re-organizations of office spaces and routines. The discourse pushing and legitimating such changes is usually shaped and distributed in the managerial centres of public and private organizations where mission statements, strategic plans, workshops and seminars concerning digitalization and new ways of working get conceptualized. The associated documents provide the discursive building blocks for a preferred decoding of managerial change related to so-called new ways of working. This paper presents the results of a critical discourse analysis of documents and in-depth interviews (N=29) about the digital reorganization of office work collected in five public and private organizations. We offer an analysis of the processes through which managerial discourses about new ways of working get reproduced and/or contested at the centres and peripheries of public and private organizations. The norms, values, identities and contexts articulated in these data have been qualitatively coded with the help of the software package NVIVO. The resulting codes allow us to identify the discursive building blocks actors in public and private organizations draw upon when making sense of themselves, their colleagues, their practices and the contexts through which they move. We focus specifically on the way(s) norms, values, identities, power-infused social relationships and contexts of digital change acquire meaning in the discourse of different categories of office workers such as Change Managers, IT personnel, union representatives, Team Leaders and/or Team members. Doing so, we provide an empirically grounded analysis of the ways in which institutional discourses travel and meet with resistance and get transformed by different social actors along the way. We will show how official managerial discourse(s) meet with resistance and critique across different levels of organizational structure resulting in hybrid discourses that testify to internal organizational conflicts and struggles over meaning. Our analyses show that office workers articulate the way they make sense of new ways of doing office work in rather different - and sometimes conflicting - ways. They all make use of shared signifiers such as ‘autonomy’, but the meanings of these signifiers shift along with the values, identities and contexts they are being articulated with. There are also strong indications that the different understandings of changes in office culture are indicative of ideological and power-related tensions in the organization and in society at large. This project is funded by BELSPO (Belgian Science Policy Office).