NEOLIBERAL MANAGERIAL STYLES IN A POSTSOCIALIST ENVIRONMENT
NEOLIBERAL MANAGERIAL STYLES IN A POSTSOCIALIST ENVIRONMENT

Summary/Abstract: Based on a three years’ ethnographic investigation in a sizeable Romanian owned company, offering construction services to multinationals, I follow the organizational discourses and practices used to sustain an active employee enrolment and the subsequent role assigned to leaders. Using insights from the managerial literature, which described the self-developing, inspiring neoliberal managers that should develop the right ‘virtues’ within themselves and also among their subordinates, I counter the assertion that capitalist enterprise needs positive justifications sustained by a new mobilizing generation of managers meant to ensure productive enrolment. Instead, I found that duress can still offer compliance, anti-socialist pervasive discourse can still offer a basis to normalize pressure for extra-hours, and managers translate neoliberal discourse into local adaptations to force submission. Compliance is obtained through informal sanctioning, repressing resistance or stifling discontent. A neoliberal interpretation of freedom, i.e. to move to another firm if discontent, contributes to a perpetuation of a threatening work environment. Coupled with a powerful imprint of socialist inefficiencies, it helps produce conformity for managers, as well as employees. Therefore, the model of manager resulting from this mixture is an authoritarian, self-made person, while autonomy impaired and readily relaying superior’s imperatives.

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