Job crafting jako przykład ideologii nowego zarządzania – krytyczna analiza w optyce nowego ducha kapitalizmu Boltanskiego i Chiapello
Job Crafting as an Example of the Ideology of New Management: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Boltanski and Chiapello’s New Spirit of Capitalism

Summary/Abstract: The article offers a critical analysis of contemporary management discourse, with particular emphasis on publications on job crafting, that is, the reshaping of work. Its aim is to situate the idea of job crafting within a broader cultural and political context and to demonstrate that it fits seamlessly into the ideology of the new management paradigm described by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. Job crafting itself is examined primarily through the lens of the (in)effectiveness of this method in addressing burnout and the experience of meaningless work – phenomena that may be interpreted as symptoms of the gradual exhaustion of the new management paradigm, a fact already signalled by the very need to develop job-crafting theory. Following Boltanski and Chiapello, the methodology applied in the article is a discourse analysis of contemporary management, limited to selected publications on job crafting, especially those aimed at practitioners and individuals responsible for work organization in companies. The concepts, phenomena and processes discussed in the text are interpreted through frameworks drawn from contemporary social philosophy. They serve as a point of departure for an in-depth reflection on the status and condition of workers in contemporary capitalism, which – in line with post-operaismo thinkers – are framed primarily in terms of cognitive capitalism and immaterial labour. The author proposes a hypothesis that job crafting may serve as a tool for privatising and depoliticising problems of the world of work. A review of the history of management studies suggests that their primary goal has long been to produce organisational patterns that keep employees’ conduct aligned with the imperative of efficiency, even when management theories officially claim to “humanise” the work environment. A useful interpretive framework for this phenomenon is provided by the theory of the “civilising of objectification,” which presents the development of management studies as a continuous effort to integrate the humanities into the process of subordinating worker subjectivity to the paradigm of productivity and profit maximisation.

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