‘Developmental talk’ as confession : The role of trade unions in workplace governance

With increasing market deregulation, workplace relationships, identities, and functions are gradually transforming. This study problematizes the role of trade union organizations, looking at the phenomenon of performance appraisal interviews or so-called ‘developmental talks’ in the Swedish context. The critical tradition in organizational research and Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘technologies of governance’ (examination and confession) are utilized to scrutinize discourses produced by a trade union’s training video on developmental talk. As I will demonstrate, the trade union appears in the educational materials as an expert-therapist, assisting the worker in the development of a specific identity type — a ‘disciplined entrepreneurial self’ — that fits neoliberal demands addressed to labour. The paper emphasizes the legitimation of normalizing power by means of the video narration and it’s special concern for a particular category of employees, namely workers with non-Swedish background. The study ends with a discussion on a possibility of resistance to the regularity and normalizing effects of the video discourse.CC BY-NC-ND 3.0