A Fantasy of the “Ambitious Young Girl” as Flexible Knowledge-worker Subject

Abstract

One of the paradoxes of the so-called flexible work environments of late capitalism is that, at the same time as tribute is paid to organizational and work-force flexibility in terms of increased empowerment and freedom for workers to make their own decisions, there is also a strong emphasis on controlling their work. These ways of governing and controlling work have been problematized within critical organizational studies and analysed and conceptualized as audit regimes and audit cultures. Furthermore, feminist research highlights how the hegemonization of flexible work ideologies may result in declining health for employees and increased gender inequalities in the labour market.

This article contributes to these critical strands of research by examining some of the gendered aspects of the ideological forces that work to install everyday work practices of “flexible subjects”. The analysis is done by studying the means of knowledge-work fantasies, and especially the ideological forces behind the fantasy of the “ambitious young girl”.

I draw on feminist critiques of neo-liberalism and neo-liberal practices and, more specifically, theories of the professional investment that is supposedly common in neo-liberal discourses. The source material that laid the foundations for this article was gathered from within a more extensive ethnographic study where I followed the relocation of a knowledge-intensive civil service agency from the capital of Sweden to a smaller town northwest of the capital.

The analysis shows that, in the process of moving work-place, employees became invested in a fantasy of “ambitious girls”, a fantasy that entailed certain expectations of flexible and mouldable civil service workers in neo-liberal times.

Notes

¹ The word “girl” has been discussed in a Swedish context within the emergent field of Girlhood Studies (see Frih & Söderberg 2010). As a concept, “girl” is described as difficult to define and charged with multiple meanings. In the case of this study, “girl” is translated from the Swedish word tjej, which is synonymous with the word flicka, although flicka may be more commonly used for describing children. Frih and Söderberg (2010: 11) note, however, that neither tjej nor flicka is necessarily associated with a particular age or phase in life, but is dependent on the context in which it is articulated.

² In 2005 Sweden's then Social Democratic government decided that the agency should be relocated from Stockholm to Östersund (see also Lokaliseringsutredningen, 2004). The travel time between the locations is approximately one hour by plane or six hours by train and closer to eight by car. Between 2005 and 2009 I conducted some 40 interviews and participant observations on almost 30 occasions. The field-work required that I spend time with agency employees in both locations. Throughout the course of the agency's relocation I stayed in regular contact with employees by email and telephone.

³ The Swedish National Audit Office wrote in its economic assessment of the agency's relocation that 100% of the analysts were new employees recruited at the time of the move. Only one person moved from Stockholm to Östersund (Riksrevisionen 2009).

⁴ When the offices were in Stockholm, 75% of employees were women (agency's documentation). This figure did not change when the new employees were recruited to Östersund. The average age of the work-force was 44 in 2004, when the agency was still based in Stockholm, and 45 in 2008, when the agency had completed its relocation to the new offices (Riksrevisionen 2009).