Deserving freedom: Symbolic violence in self-managing organizations

Abstract

In an era of a tight labor market, managers look for ways to empower workers, lower hierarchies, and afford more freedom. Although not new, managerial initiatives aimed at self-managing the workplace are flourishing. While management gurus and top managers generally promise greater enjoyment (or even happiness) at work, empirical studies show contrasting results in terms of workers' experience. To date, little is known about how practices that aim to foster self-management actually transform domination patterns within self-managing organizations. Drawing on Bourdieu's practice-based theory, we use an in-depth extreme case study of a self-proclaimed liberated firm to show how practices aimed to empower workers, over time fueled hidden domination tactics such as silencing, pressuring and threatening, and ultimately even spiraled into entirely new practices of immaturity labelling and sorting people into two organizational entities based on such label. So more than simply spreading a few unintended side effects, the self-management practices became the driving force behind a new series of practices, rife with symbolic violence which ultimately caused (self-)harm and ambivalence , instead of the promised liberation. This study contributes to organizational theory by revealing how self-management practices, intended to empower, can paradoxically become vehicles of symbolic violence, thereby reshaping domination dynamics in subtle yet profound ways.