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Article Excerpt
We have to create ourselves as a work of art ... we should not have to refer the creative activity of somebody to the kind of relation he has to himself, but should relate the kind of relation one has to oneself as a creative activity (Foucault, 1984, p. 351).
This paper is about the artistic creation of a human subject and the complicity of stress in this process; it is about the power of the aesthetics of self; it is about the multifaceted nature of our self-images; it is, we could say, about the art of stress.
Our aim in this paper is to explore and demonstrate the continuing relevance to organizational and occupational psychology of Foucault's later work by applying it to work stress. Having discussed the limitations of 'mainstream' stress research, as well as Foucault's notion of the 'art of self', we progress to consider the appropriateness of applying this notion to stress. At this point, we are able to establish our empirical research question which is to investigate, through the scrutiny of accounts of stress provided in interview by a number of client-service workers, the role and nature of 'stress' in Foucauldian self-creative projects. Our analysis illustrates not only the complicity of stress in self-creation, but also its heterogeneous nature. We draw together our views on the utility of Foucault's later work in a final section.
Although there are some excellent Foucauldian studies of organizations and occupational concerns (see, for example, Barratt, 2003; Carter, McKinlay, & Rowlinson, 2002; Knights, 2002; or McKinlay & Starkey, 1998, who each review different aspects of the literature), they are relatively few in number. Furthermore, even these tend to focus on Foucault's earlier work. This is surprising given Foucault's training in and writing about psychology. Part of the reason may be the wilfully obtuse and opaque (Burrell, 1998) nature of his work or the long detour (Starkey & Hatchuel, 2002) that he seems to have taken in his work. There might also be a 'fear' of taking writing about 'sexuality' into the workplace or a reluctance to 'write Foucault into organizational analysis' (Knights, 2002). We, however, believe Foucault has a natural and informative role in our field and hope to demonstrate this in our paper.
Despite the relative absence, there have been Foucauldian studies of stress (see below) and, since others have already started us on this path, this paper does not aim to present a full Foucauldian discourse analysis of stress in the sense that we are not attempting to trace the subjectifying development of the 'stress discourse'. Our aim is more modest in the sense that we seek to show how attending to Foucault's concept of the care of the self and problematization of pleasure--an aspect that has been neglected in organizational studies--can add further insight to the work already undertaken by allowing accounts to be read differently. Having completed this study, we firmly believe in the validity of attending to late-Foucauldian notions--not just for stress but also more widely within organizational studies. Doing so may help sustain the freshness of the Foucauldian challenge to positivism.
Allowing a voice to the stress-related aspects of self-creation has for us provided a way of ensuring that we continue to 'think the unthought' (Knights, 2002, p. 575) and to achieve the 'wondrous inversions' (Newton, 1998, p. 441) that Foucault's work can facilitate. It also allows us to 'change the subject' of stress research in line with the exhortations of Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn, and Walkerdine (1998).
Why rescrutinize stress research?
We begin our development by looking at the relevance of stress as a research topic, the pervasiveness of lay discourses on stress, and briefly review the critical investigation of stress. We should begin by noting that we concentrate on the psychological not physiological aspects of stress. Without wishing to dismiss bodily phenomena (Foucault himself recognized the body as a site of power) we bracket these off, for it is the apperception of them by what Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception (2002) refers to as the body-subject that is our greater concern.
We should also briefly explain our conceptualization of stress, since the term is used in a number of different ways in both lay and academic writing. We see stress as a psychological disharmony that arises through psychological (and potentially physical) interactions with the environment. The way that disharmony is constructed and accounted for by individual subjects is, however, mediated through discourse. In this article, we will generally use stress in its discursive sense.
That said, stress at work has been extensively studied by a number of different disciplines ranging from epidemiology (Xie & Schaubroeck, 2001) to Lacanian psychoanalysis (Vanheule & Verhaeghe, 2004). Studies within the field of organizational and occupational psychology have largely, but not exclusively, been from a positivist perspective. As there are a number of comprehensive surveys (for example, Cooper & Dewe, 2004 or Sulsky & Smith, 2005) of the stress literature, it is not our intention to provide another. It suffices to say that reviews emphasize the dominance of positivist methods, yet even so do not present a homogeneous picture. Even in terms of the extent and severity of stress, there is disagreement. Reviews by Cooper, Liukkonen, and Cartwright (1996), Watts and Cooper (1998) and Briner and Reynolds (1999) may be contrasted against each other in terms of the organizational and individual outcomes described, and against Wainwright and Calnan (2002) who even question whether stress is a 'modern epidemic'. The literature has, over time, articulated many debates on theory, method and practice. Many of these remain unresolved. Within organizational psychology, for example, transactional approaches (Cooper, Dewe, & O'Driscoll, 2001) are widely supported but even so have not been without critics (Brief & George, 1991; Harris, 1991); the centrality of emotion is debated (Lazarus, 1999); and arguments around subjective vs. objective assessment come into sharp focus when applied to stress (Perrewe & Zellars, 1999; Schaubroeck, 1999).
Important too, is the continuing debate, which is particularly pertinent to stress research, as to whether society is better served by considering the general (e.g. Brief & George, 1991), or whether stress is so complex that we must investigate intra-individual processes (e.g. Lazarus, 1999). We believe that the intra-individual approach has much to offer. Furthermore, Newton, Handy, and Fineman (1995) set out how the stressed subject in the mainstream literature has often been divorced from context and depoliticized. Intra-individual approaches must therefore reflect context.
As a result of these various limitations, we argue that our ability to understand some fundamental concerns about stress has been seriously weakened and, because of this, we are still unable to say why, despite Wainwright and Calnan's (2002) doubts, stress is so often portrayed in lay accounts as a modern epidemic.
Indeed, these lay accounts reveal further social and political controversies. UK employers are told they must increasingly protect their workers against unreasonable pressure (HSE, 2005) while case law is beginning to define a 'duty of care' (House of Lords, 2004) towards stressed workers. Unions (Unison, 2005) and professional bodies (Law Care, 2005) offer support and advice against one of the 'biggest health problems' (Unison, 2005) arising from work.
Others, however, claim stress is a matter of individual responsibility. Training courses are sold to help us 'handle' stress, lawyers are given 'ten essential tips to manage stress' (P.S., 2003, p. 20), and, as shown by Newton's analysis of lay accounts, we are exhorted to become 'stress-fit' individuals (Newton et al., 1995). Indeed, some stress is good for you:
Not all stress is bad. Without some stress we would not bother to get out of bed in the morning (P.S., 2003, p. 18).
Or even,
According to the new research, 77% of the UK's workers believe stress at work leads to greater job satisfaction (Sky News, 2003).
Stress, according to such accounts, is natural and necessary. It is linked strongly to images of success and commitment in many work contexts.
So what is going on? Is stress an avoidable scourge of today's models of work? Is it the precursor to better performance, and if so how? Is it inevitable, and if so why? What is it?
Reviews of the literature reveal few answers to such questions. Since normative studies--the bulk of the literature--have sought answers to different questions, we must turn to the critical tradition. We note immediately a relative lack of such approaches within the literature. There are notable exceptions and there are also relevant articles from outside organizational and occupational psychology, for example, health psychology where Young (1980, quoted in Brown, 1999, p. 24) concluded that 'the very vagueness of the term "stress" serves to mask a political economy entirely centred on the vicissitudes of the liberal-humanist subject'. Brown goes on to critique the serfhelp literature, the 'regimens' they proscribe and the 'power' behind these discourses. Newton et al. (1995) apply the work of Foucault, Elias and the labour process theory writers such as Braverman and Burawoy to develop, inter alia, a notion of 'stressfitness'. Hepburn and Brown consider stress in the teaching profession from a critical vein and argue that the current approach (2001, p. 691) 'encourages both teachers and their employers to offer token measures to manage it [stress] at a psychological level, rather than engaging in proper debate about the state...
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