Cruel promises and change in work-related self-help books

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on work-related self-help books and asks what kinds of promises self-help books make as a reward for change. In work-related self-help guides, the employee is advised not only to change their affects and relation to work but also to inspire others. Thus, the employee is presented as a potential reformer of the work organisation who is not dependent on other people or the structures of working life. The ‘cruel optimism’ promise of a reward for this is constant change and self-improvement, which becomes the goal in itself. This article adds to the relatively limited research in the field of work-related self-help literature.

KEYWORDS:

• self-help books
• self-improvement
• change
• cruel optimism
• subjectification of work

Introduction

Reading self-help books has been regarded, on the one hand, as a form of ‘public pedagogy’ through which adults learn without the involvement of educational institutions (McLean & Kapell, 2015, p. 56). In addition, reading self-help books is a form of self-directed and informal lifelong learning as well as market-based public education (McLean & Vermeylen, 2014). Marketisation of education, often considered in the context of school choice and its consequences in research, also involves adult education in its formal and informal forms (Frejes et al., 2018), with self-help books and programmes being very profitable parts of it. On the other hand, self-help books are likewise considered as a form of ‘cultural pedagogy’, contributing to educating people on how to behave and what to – or not to – think, feel, believe, fear and desire (Kellner, 2003, p. 9; Neville, 2012, p. 362). Despite the fact that self-help books are mass-produced public or cultural pedagogy, they tend to be experienced in a very personalised and individualised way (Neville, 2012, p. 362).

This article focuses on self-help books that concentrate on giving readers advice on achieving success in their working life. Here, these books are termed ‘work-related self-help guides’. Similar to self-help books in general, these guides have become increasingly meaningful, visible and economically substantial products. In the US alone, the growth in sales of self-help books has reportedly been shoring up profits in an era when publishing otherwise faces declining sales; somewhere between one-third and half of all Americans have purchased a self-help book in their lifetime (McGee, 2005; Neville, 2012). These books likewise play an inevitable role in telling the story of contemporary working life in terms of how it is depicted and what kinds of expectations are placed on employees. This function not only makes the guides relevant subjects for literature research but also allows social scientists, in a very large sense, the opportunity to study how social understandings assume political forms in popular books. Moreover, work-related self-help books are both an indicator of what employees perceive as their opportunities for fulfilment and evidence of the techniques by which they believe occupational success may be achieved (Biggart, 1983).

In working life today, it is common to improve one’s skills continuously, especially if one is working as an expert (Jensen, 2012). In expert work, employees may find self-improvement and prerequisites for a new kind of work ethic, job satisfaction and constant change as ways to improve their future employability (Bovbjerg, 2010; Martin et al., 1998). However, work-related self-help books do not focus on the actual content and required skills of any occupation but rather on developing the employee’s work role, attitude and approach. Employees are expected to control their attitudes and affects and develop themselves, and this can even extend to working on their personality. This goal has its root in one of the great changes in working life, namely the rise of the subjectification of work, which implies that work is dependent on the employee and their subjectivity (Closs Traugot, 2010; Rose, 1989). Consequently, the employee is continuously developing and undergoes constant change (Bovbjerg, 2010).

Even though business culture is rapidly becoming uniform internationally, national differences remain in everyday work practices. Thus, self-help discourses form a ‘travelling library’ and, at the same time, seek to answer national working life cultures. Accordingly, in what follows, both work-related guides written in English that are available to a large, global audience and those written in Finnish, a language spoken by only about 5 million people, are reviewed, though the detailed analysis is focused on the latter. Guides that focus merely on management or the relationship between the employee and their superior and guides that concentrate on the improvement of interaction in the work community are excluded. Instead, the included literature concentrates on developing the characteristics, attitudes and skills of employees. Here, skills refer not to the know-how related to the contents of the employee’s work – such as the nurse’s skill in giving an injection – rather, it refers to the skills of doing one’s work in the right way, having the right kind of attitude at work and managing one’s work as expected.

The purpose of this article is to understand what kinds of rewards self-help books promise to the reader for following the tenets of the book. The context of the article is Finland, but the same kinds of trends are emerging in other Western, neoliberal societies as well. The article asks how the guides present their reader, that is, the employee who develops their sense of being an employee and work-related know-how. Furthermore, it asks how the reader should change according to the instructions given by the guides in order to manage and even succeed in working life.

Although self-help guides are dealt with as a distinct genre in this article, with work-related self-help books a sub-genre, the purpose of this article is not to conduct a genre study or take a literary study approach. Instead, the aim is to analyse these guides as part of the wider discussion on working life. Like other textual genres, self-help guides have their own organisation, tone and rhetoric (Devitt, 2008). However, this article does not analyse how these books create the picture and acts of employees; rather, it analyses what kind of picture it is that they draw. Seeing the guides as their own genre helps scholars perceive the ways in which they construct working life and the employees’ actions and, at the same time, their way of textualising social reality (Devitt, 2008). Rather than merely concentrating on the advice the guides give, this article interprets the guides as texts that construct a picture of working life and, implicitly, the guides’ readers.

The next two sections comprise a review of self-help literature, its background and the area of work-related self-help books of this genre. The section that follows briefly presents Lauren Berlant’s discussion of cruel optimism in the context of work and self-help techniques. The next section describes the research material and methodology utilised in this article. Afterwards, the central points of the imaginary audience and the key to success, that is, constant change – particularly the change of one’s own mindset in self-help books – are bought into discussion. The article concludes with a consideration of the significance of the results in general and the implications of these findings for the field of adult education.

Life management and self-help

Work-related self-help books belong to the larger genre of self-help literature. The genre of self-help books – or success books, as Biggart (1983) calls them – has a history going back to the 18th century in the US, where Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac first appeared in 1732. Since the Almanac’s publication, the messages and images of self-help books have changed considerably. An analysis of the books reveals three chronologically overlapping success models (Biggart, 1983). The first model is the Protestant ethic that dominated cultural ideas up until the early 19th century. Success meant status, virtue and wealth, and the route to this achievement was economic restraint and piety. Worldly success and religious practice were inseparable.

The second success model is the character ethic, which was first articulated in the early 19th century and became dominant by 1900. In a transformation of the Protestant ethic, it suggested that getting ahead was a matter of cultivating one’s self and developing character traits conducive to entrepreneurship, such as foresight, integrity and good judgment. Success was more narrowly defined to mean wealth, while the achievement of social status and salvation was a secondary goal. Success was no longer a signal from God; rather, wealth was viewed as the reward for individual accomplishment and industry, not as an inherited capability or a heavenly favour (Biggart, 1983).

The third success model, the personality ethic, also evolved from its predecessors and took hold in the 1930s. Similar to the character ethic, it defined success as wealth, but it developed further formulas for achievement in large-scale corporate and government workplaces. While the character ethic stressed effort and initiative, the personality ethic promoted the selling of the self. During the Depression in the 1930s, it became apparent that hard work, while important, was not enough. Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936, was the first important book to espouse the personality ethic; it offered formulas to make people likable and charmingly persuasive. Carnegie’s book is also the most famous work-related self-help book and one of the most successful books in the history of the US.

Despite its long history and popularity, the self-help industry and its literature have also been criticised. The guides are seen as ineffective products of quack doctors on which credulous people waste their money (e.g. Tiede, 2001). It has also been suggested that these books are based on hyper-individualism and overlook sociability, resulting in the individual taking responsibility only for themself and their self-development but not for others (Rimke, 2000). Moreover, self-help books paradoxically do not help adult learners as neoliberal subjects, yet persistent and unresolved ‘anxiety’ about employment, productivity and performance – rooted in neoliberal subjects – continuously expands the self-help industry (Lee, 2017). In spite of such criticism, new self-help books are published continuously, and they gain visibility not only in sales and quotation statistics but also in the media.

The academic debate on self-help books has, according to Neville (2012), crystallised around two dichotomous viewpoints. On the one hand, self-help books are regarded as tools of ideological manipulation of the ‘passive’ and ‘vulnerable’ masses. On the other hand, they are also seen as sites for creative self-expression through the work of audience reception studies. She argues that upholding this binary opposition has restricted our understanding of how and in what ways self-help books are implicated in, and negotiate, the relationships between agency and structure as well as power and knowledge debates.

According to McGee (2012), the analyses of self-help culture tend to consider the makeover reader or consumer as shaped by or subjected to media cultures rather than actively participating in the production of culture. Consequently, McGee proposes new avenues and opportunities for researchers to enlarge their scope, a proposal that has been responded to by some researchers (e.g. Adamson & Salmenniemi, 2017; Tiaynen-Quadir & Salmenniemi, 2017; Troman, 2003). This article is one answer to McGee’s proposition.

McGee (2012) likewise points out that self-help culture and media mostly focus on the makeover cultures of so-called Western and largely global northern countries. Furthermore, a significant number of the analyses of self-help culture have set aside the question about the on-going importance of religious discourses within self-help culture and instead focused on the secularised world and psychological approach. Moreover, self-help books seldom recognise gender or other socially constructed differences between people. This is despite men and women reading self-help books for different reasons and with different outcomes (McLean & Kapell, 2015; McLean & Vermeylen, 2014). According to McLean and Kapell (2015), men are more likely to read books relating to careers, while women are more likely to read books about interpersonal relationships.

Self-help and working life

The sub-genre of work-related self-help books, on the one hand, is a reaction to people’s willingness to govern and change their lives, and, on the other hand, self-help literature takes part in creating that willingness to change and the idea of governing one’s life. Self-help literature can be defined as a sub-genre of literature that is widely related to the self-development and self-help industry, the aims of which vary from different metamorphoses to life management (McGee, 2005). At the same time, instead of the whole work community or organisation, the individual employee, that is, the imaginary reading employee, is the target and actor of work-related self-help literature that concentrates on success in working life. The employees’ actions can certainly affect the practices of the work organisation, but work-related self-help books are written for the individual employee who tries to adapt themself to the challenges of working life by changing their thinking, attitude or actions.

The style of work-related self-help books includes the use of saleable and promising book titles, for example, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (Ressler & Thompson, 2008). It is common for the books to not only promise change but rapid and permanent change. Another characteristic of such books is the promise of the ease of change and the reader being offered down-to-earth advice to achieve it. For example, the book Rework: Change the Way You Work Forever (Fried & Heinemeier Hansson, 2010) promises not just change but lifelong change. These books may promise to help one cope with one’s work without changing the actual work; an example of such a book is How to Be Happier in the Job You Sometimes Can’t Stand: Twelve Keys to Being Happier in Your Job (West, 1998).

The writers of self-help books position themselves as authorities who tell the reader how to become a better employee – or rather, to become an employee who feels better. In the North American tradition, the authority of the writers is often indicated by their titles and education (Dolby, 2008). In other words, the guides are promoted not only by their content but also by the education and success of the authors.

In Finland, authors of self-help books are often presented as professionals in work research, psychology, media, a commercial field or management. Depending on their background, the authors establish their views either in their own work career, their management experience, the customers’ experiences or all of these. In Finland, the history of work-related self-help books is substantially shorter than that in the US. Finnish production has increased since 2000 in tandem with the growing popularity of other self-help literature. Quite a wide selection of self-help literature has been published in Finland, as in many other countries, and there are also many work-related self-help books. It is possible that work-related self-help books are relatively popular in Finland because salaried work has a long history between both men and women and because people in general value working.

Cruel optimism and promises of change

In her book of the same name, Lauren Berlant (2011) describes cruel optimism as a particular relation between the human subject and the social world they inhabit. A relation of cruel optimism exists, she writes, when something people desire is actually an obstacle to them flourishing. The relation may involve almost all kinds of things, and these kinds of optimistic relations are not inherently cruel. Instead, they become cruel only when the object that draws a person’s attachment actively impedes the aim that brought them to it initially. Thus, a relationship of cruel optimism involves situations of attachments to hopes and aspirations, in which not only are the latter likely to remain unfulfilled, but the very sustaining of the attachment itself has negative, constraining effects in relation to the life, well-being and development of the individual (Moore & Clarke, 2016).

Mario Di Paolantonio (2016) considers Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism from the educational point of view. He argues that cruel optimism invites people to constantly innovate and improve themselves through learning. In other words, there is cruel optimism in education that drives people to constantly work at improving themselves when they optimistically attach to things that promise fulfilment but actually perpetually defer any such fulfilment and instead end up impoverishing them. He argues that the discourse of ‘lifelong learning’ is an apt example of how people are told that in today’s constantly changing circumstances, they need to learn how to constantly learn in order to succeed. Di Paolantonio (2016) very clearly points out that the cruel paradox in this is that under neoliberalism this optimism in education quite literally indebts people to an impossible normative narrative of success. All such optimistic gesticulations and solicitations ultimately wear people down and lock them within the private, personal sense that it is all up to the individual to keep innovating and improving themselves optimally and persistently through an education. To this call of constant education, the present article argues that self-help books are one flourishing market-based answer. With self-help books, people cannot change their working life or their own work organisation, but they may feel empowered while doing at least something and trying to change themselves or their relationship with their work.

As a consequence of the numerous changes in the neoliberal era, work has become the individual employee’s personal project to be accomplished successfully. The consequence of the individualisation of the public sphere has been the increasing emphasis on self-reliance and the responsibility of each individual for their own well-being. For example, trade unions are having difficulties sustaining their relevance in contemporary society, because they are now representing a smaller portion of the workforce and younger workers do not realise or care about the importance of collective representation. Thus, every employee is responsible for their own welfare and can no longer rely upon institutions to represent their needs and stakes. Employees have less control over their workplace and work conditions as well (Bal & Lub, 2015, pp. 13–14).

The employee is not only controlled externally; the employee’s mind – or even soul – is set as the target of control, and the one who must control it is the employee (Bovbjerg, 2010; Rose, 1989). In other words, the employer does not tell the employee directly what the latter should be like and how they should act, but the employee must understand these themself and act accordingly. Work has been subjectified, so the employee is asked to use their know-how, skills, feelings and motivation to participate in decision making and the division of responsibility and do all of these while communicating with others (De Keere, 2014; Thrift, 2005). Moreover, these expectations have become quite general in contemporary working life, and often they are not just organisation-specific expectations.

In the Netherlands, it is not only the employee who is controlled and shaped but citizens. Precarisation entails particular pedagogies, and citizens are taught how to feel about being insecure through the techniques of accepting, controlling and imagining. Welfare activation thus focuses on teaching citizens to accept their precarious position, embrace it and prepare for its continuation while remaining optimistic about its discontinuation. Thus, it is cruel that the state teaches citizens to develop optimism towards certain imagined futures while at the same time acknowledging the unattainability of these futures (Arts & Van den Berg, 2018).

The shaping of the new employee subject has been discussed in theorisations of the new economy and neoliberalism. The new neoliberal self is claimed to be an entrepreneurial self, who manages oneself as an enterprise, disavows vulnerability and manifests intensified individualism (Scharff, 2016). This perspective has resulted in employees needing to continuously develop their skills and personality, see themselves as their own leaders in order to succeed and make their jobs enjoyable and more entrepreneurial (Lee, 2017). This article tracks the imaginary employee and their characteristics and skills in the work-related guides, which offer a picture of contemporary, but at the same time future-oriented, working life.

Materials and methods

The research material under analysis consists of four Finnish work-related self-help guides. The guides are chosen as examples of the variety of self-help books in which the subject of development is the employee’s person, feelings and work organisation. The authors of the guides are quite well-known personalities (a television presenter, a therapist, journalists, bloggers and producers) from Finnish media, and so their self-help guides have drawn a considerable amount of public attention and readers. Restricting the material to three guides enables the analysis to concentrate in detail on the central themes of the guides and their similarities and differences.

The selected guides are analysed as examples of the self-help genre, with work-related self-help books a sub-genre, not as a comprehensive sample that offers the basis for generalisation. The purpose is neither to conduct a genre study nor take a literary study approach. Instead, the aim is to analyse these guides as part of the wider discussion on working life. Similar to other textual genres, self-help guides have their own organisation, tone and rhetoric (Devitt, 2008). However, the current article does not analyse how these books create the promise for their readers; rather, it analyses what kind of promise they present.

The first guide analysed is Ilona Rauhala’s (2011) Dare! A Woman in Working Life (hereafter Dare!), which is aimed, as its name suggests, at women. In this respect, Dare! is an exceptional work-related guide. It concentrates on different stages in women’s working careers, from the building of the career through to time management and the identification and development of the reader’s own strengths. In the book, Rauhala is presented as a psychologist and coach. The second guide is Pauli Aalto-Setälä and Mikael Saarinen’s (Aalto-Setälä & Saarinen, 2014) Enthusiasm: The Alphabet of Favourable Manipulation (hereafter Enthusiasm), which concentrates mainly on popular psychology. The starting point of the book is the thought that enthusiasm is a central power that sets working life in motion and enhances work welfare. The book also contains ‘exercises for favourable manipulation’, in other words, small practical tasks intended to increase enthusiasm – or the preconditions for it – with the help of laughter yoga and different consciousness training. The third guide is Saku Tuominen and Pekka Pohjakallio’s (Tuominen & Pohjakallio, 2012) The Work Book: The Grounds of the Working Life Revolution (hereafter The Work Book). This guide concentrates on improving the organisation of work and, consequently, increasing the sensibility of work. The book is based on a project that focused on dismantling the traditional way of thinking about working time and the division between working time and leisure time. It also aims to improve the welfare and life management of the reader. The guide furthermore contains an exercise book, which suggests that its objective is to be a down-to-earth guide. The last guide is Satu Rämö and Hanne Valtari’s (Rämö & Valtari, 2017) book Dream Job. Make Yourself a Job of What You Like (hereafter Dream Job), which guides readers to make a personal passion, for example, a hobby, into a job. It pinpoints work as a source of income and states that combining what people are passionate to do with making a living is an excellent solution. The authors utilise their own experiences as examples more than offer advice and tell what readers should do.

As there is no absolute method in the interpretation of the textual materials, they can be interpreted in different contexts. However, the analysis should always be based on the conditions of the materials. Seeing the guides as their own genre helps perceive the ways in which they construct working life and the employees’ actions and, at the same time, their way of textualising social reality (Devitt, 2008). Rather than merely concentrating on the advice the guides give, the present article interprets the guides as texts that construct a picture of working life and – implicitly – the guides’ readers. The method of analysis is loosely based on text-driven thematic analysis (Eriksson & Kovalainen, 2008), which is motivated by the existence of the texts and involves seeking common denominators or themes from the research material as well as searching for differences between the guides. The common themes are the readers’ potential and need to change, the never-ending nature of change and the change of one’s mindset. These themes are considered in the larger frame of cruel optimism.

Imaginary audience of the self-help books

Self-help books are all about guiding the readers, but guides rarely or ever state directly what kind of employee the book is aimed at or what kind of people their advice is intended for. However, the advice is not general or intended for all. One can conclude from the work-related self-help books that they suppose their readers are interested in their work, are employees who feel happy at work at least to some extent and, according to the basic idea of work-related guides, are ready, willing and able to develop themselves and change their way of working. In other words, the readers are seen as relatively autonomous employees who have the potential required for change. At the same time, the books propose that there is something disturbing, uncontrolled and in need of development in the reader’s approach to work and that that something needs to be taken into the employee’s possession through the methods of self-management. Thus, the need for some sort of change or self-development is supposed to be a motive for reading the work-related guides.

The guide Dare! is directed to women, and it requests female readers to turn their back on unpleasant matters and keep in mind their own loveliness, which helps the readers in their working life. By contrast, it states that power-hungry and aggressive women create repulsiveness in their environment (p. 146). It is noteworthy then that according to this book, it is possible to regard working life as a wonderful trip, not just as a problem. ‘If you leave for this endurance trip with your own loveliness in mind, the trip will become wonderful, beautiful, playful, and pleasant’ (p. 19). However, this advice disregards the problems that are based on gender. It is blind to the fact that there are people who are discriminated against, bullied or ignored at work because of their gender, and more often than not, they are women ((Koivunen et al., 2017). Thus, while Dare! admits that there are problems in working life, it suggests that readers keep other things in mind.

The guides’ readers are defined as potential achievers for whom it is possible to be promoted in working life. At the same time, they are similarly seen as employees who have lost most of their enthusiasm. The quest for and discovery of enthusiasm are considered the employee’s duty; it is not the employer’s responsibility to organise work assignments to ensure the employee gets excited about them. The employee must act as a subject who controls themself and perceives their own state as lacking enthusiasm. Furthermore, the employee must try to change before that change is requested by their superiors. Thus, the book requires readers to be enthusiastic without any particular reason other than being better, happier employees and possibly ensuring their jobs.

According to the book Enthusiasm, people are usually proud of what the company they work for does but can nevertheless regard their own work as meaningless and insignificant. The production and realisation of the significance of work are the guide’s objectives, and feelings of the insignificance of one’s work are framed as the catalyst for reading the book. The book Dream Job goes even further and suggests that the reader should create for themselves a job of what they do passionately and with enthusiasm in their life in any case. In other words, the book suggests the reader take a leap towards their dreams and turn these into paid work assignments, which could be insecure and precarious.

The change presented in the other self-help books requires that the employee has a job independent enough to carry out the change. Having said that, it needs to be pointed out that most of the changes are about the employee’s own mindset, affects and relation with their job rather than the work content itself, and so those changes can be carried out in any job. Thus, the more fundamental requirement is that the employee has noticed a need for change and is ready and willing to act accordingly. The change of one’s mindset includes being enthusiastic without any reason from outside and finding the significance of work. This is very simple advice to give, but it is possibly difficult to successfully put into practice. Consequently, being successful in carrying out the change may become a means to an end in itself.

Key to success is change

The basic idea in the work-related guides analysed here is to offer the reader advice on how to succeed in a constantly changing working life. Every guide has one fairly simple change as its starting point. By achieving or at least aiming for this change, the reader can become more courageous and enthusiastic or react to the whole of working life in a fresh, new way. Time management is clearly one theme that is often present in contemporary guides (Lee, 2017). Attitudes towards time and problems of time management are brought up in the guides as the central area of change, and the argument is that employees should not concentrate on time management but on controlling their mindset instead. ‘Being busy is part of the old world. The rectilinear and self-purposeful pursuit of money is part of the old world. Control of the mind and energy is today!’ (Dare! p. 42).

The book Enthusiasm does not present any reasons for work’s hurriedness, although it often is a consequence of too large a workload or the structures or organisation of work. Regardless of the reason behind the hurriedness, the given solution is to react to time pressures and the amount of work in a new way. According to the guide, this involves conducting and commanding the internal energy of the human being in a new manner. The guide divides internal energy into physical and mental energy and the energy of thinking and feelings. Thus, the employee must manage their own energy level and the division of energy in these different areas. However, the book does not give practical advice on how this should be done. The guide’s contribution is the identification of different energies, but the employee is left with the responsibility to maintain and use the energy. Thus, the employee must utilise their entrepreneurial self (Scharff, 2016) when commanding their own energies and organising work.

Enthusiasm proposes that enthusiasm is a characteristic of energetic people and that it generates energy. Enthusiasm makes for the better use of time by intensifying work. The energy mentioned in the guides is not derived from the natural sciences’ idea of energy or an objectively observable measure of vigour but rather some kind of internal energy that one can feel. In addition, the secret to success in working life is immersing oneself in their identity as an employee, which must be developed according to the self-help techniques offered by the guide.

Unlike the guides Enthusiasm and Dare!, The Work Book does not focus on changing the reader’s feelings as the target of self-development. Instead, its objective is to manage one’s working hours in a new way, which involves removing the division between working hours and leisure time. Working time and its management are not considered a question in terms of the organisation of work but of the employee’s personal self-development – in other words, in terms of one’s skills as an employee. Dream Job, on the other hand, promotes working whenever and wherever the reader chooses by being self-employed. ‘When your own interests and work are intertwined, it may make it easier to solve problems with time management.’ (p. 110). The Work Book’s (p. 209) promise for the readers is included in how the book presents itself: ‘The key to a better work week for people who do brainwork. It aims to make us more productive, but at the same time, less exhausted’. Some of the books offer guidance on how one can live with time pressures and manage the increase in working time. Being busy is accepted as the inevitable starting point: ‘Being busy is nobody’s fault. Nothing can be done about it. It’s just how things are’ (Work Book, p. 48). The guides also overlook the fact that being busy at work often means different things for women and men. Being busy is also seen as a force of nature that cannot be changed, and the employee’s problem is how to manage it. An alternative way to manage being busy could be to suggest re-organising the employee’s duties, but this approach has not been applied in the guides.

The employee should refine their own skill of getting excited. Enthusiasm contends that the ability to get excited cannot be demanded by managers as it is a matter of the employee’s self-development. The employee has to find a way to be enthusiastic, possess the ability to get excited and be able to inspire others. In other words, the readers should take responsibility of not only their own feelings but of others too. Enthusiasm also concentrates on feeding the enthusiasm of both the self and others through interaction that inspires members of the work community. The authors demonstrate ‘the positive pyramid model of favourable manipulation’, which includes, for example, ways of dismantling tensions, the significance of gestures in interaction and methods of showing humour and joy in work. The book also gives guidance on practicing these skills. ‘The skill of getting excited involves doing it repeatedly’ (Enthusiasm, p. 52). In all, the book offers a comprehensive description of the problem, namely a lack of enthusiasm, and the tools to resolve it. At the same time, it states that the solution is nonetheless not easy, simple or quick; on the contrary, it requires a purposeful struggle from the employee.

To conclude, the new ideal employee includes subjectivity and the speed, vigilance, enthusiasm, flexibility and agility of the employee. With the help of these qualities, a distinction is made in the guides between the old employee type – supposedly change-resistant and somehow stuck to one workplace – and the new, controlled employee. Part of this control is the understanding that one ‘is not ready’ as an employee and that one’s own employee skills are still deficient. In other words, the employee must identify the significance of the change and see that the change has to be made right now. Thus, the aim is constant, never-ending and self-rewarding change.

Discussion

In the work-related self-help guides analysed in this article, the employee is advised to not only change their affects and relation to work but also to inspire others. Thus, the employee is presented as a potential reformer of work organisation who is not dependent on other people or the structures of working life. It is obvious that work organisations do not follow the logic of the work-related self-help guides. Thus, the promises of change and lifelong learning the guides offer and support are not delivered. This is not surprising in the light of the fact that the promise and hope are the driving forces behind the sales numbers of the self-help industry.

The ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) promise of a reward is self-improvement and constant change. If the promise of cruel optimism, offered also by the work-related self-help guides, has been taken seriously for too long a time, then it eats out all self-confidence and hope because ceaseless trying and self-improving do not lead to any positive outcomes. In the instance of work, one stays in precarious, insecure positions without any significant sign of a better future; all one has is hope and constant trying. If this leads the person to blame themself instead of understanding that precarious positions are built up in their current working life, then even in a Nordic country such as Finland, which has a relatively strong welfare state, they may end up in a difficult situation with quite hopeless thoughts. That is the cruellest side of this optimism: the ultimately self-defeating pursuit of what is hoped for or desired (Moore & Clarke, 2016). Giving up the hope and promise of cruel optimism is a hard choice, but it may be the only means to ease the pressure and stress of contemporary working life. It is also the only way to start living in the present moment instead of imagined futures, which more probably will never come into reality.

In the four work-related self-help guides analysed here, working life is seen as a personal project that must be designed and managed for it to operate effectively in the midst of constant change. Self-development through the use of work-related self-help books can also be perceived as a part of the neoliberal working life in which the employee develops their know-how throughout their whole working career (Jensen, 2012). The employee is seen as an autonomous subject, or even as an entrepreneurial subject (Scharff, 2016), and as a potential reformer of working life who is not dependent on other people or the structures of working life or jobs. The guides do not address the central question of what one should do if it is not possible to carry out the changes presented either in one’s own workplace or at the societal level. In this sense, the reader is presented as an almost omnipotent subject.

The expectation of being an autonomous, entrepreneurial subject does not concern men and women in a similar way (Scharff, 2016). However, gendered expectations are not usually as clearly articulated as they are in a self-help book directed to female readers, which suggests that women disregard problems and not aim for the high posts at organisations. As members of a gendered work culture, we recognise and are able to follow subtle gendered expectations. The sense of autonomy, leadership and entrepreneurial spirit may also be felt more strongly by many men than women, a sense that is not essentially derived from gender but from the different positions in working life of men and women.

Even though work-related self-help books may help individual readers feel better with their jobs, this is not the sole reason for the books’ existence. Instead, market-based adult education appeals to readers’ feelings of insecurity and suggests to them that they change since that is the means to sell even more self-help books. While education should be delivered at all times and in forms adapted to the life circumstances and needs of adults (Frejes et al., 2018), work-related self-help books seem to increase or even awake those needs. However, the purpose of lifelong education is not to cause endless feelings of insufficiency and demand for change, which self-help guides do. With the current process of global marketisation shaped within a neoliberal notion of education, adult education has become a commodity in a market, where students are customers whose willingness to improve and develop themselves are fed by a false promise of cruel optimism.

Work-related self-help books draw a problematic picture in which the employee is the only one responsible for adapting to working life. Improving the quality of working life is the task of society in general and individual jobs and work communities in particular, but in the books, the only subject of change is the individual employee. Of course, this is in accordance with the subjectification of work in the neoliberal era, but it is at the same time quite a narrow perspective of the employee’s subjectivity, which also entails professional skills, professional pride, know-how, lived experiences, affirmative and negative feelings and social relations.

Acknowledgments

I thank the Journal’s anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and Tiina Saari for her valuable help with the paper.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Tuija Koivunen

Koivunen has her background in social sciences and gender studies. She is especially interested in marginals and social intersections in working life.