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1 – 2 of 2Christian Kazuo Fuzyama, Ana Heloisa Lemos and Marcelo Almeida de Carvalho Silva
This study aims to understand the production of consent to precarious working conditions in administration students' internship experiences.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to understand the production of consent to precarious working conditions in administration students' internship experiences.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 13 students of an undergraduate program in Business Administration in a private university were interviewed. The students' perceptions about the dynamics of the internship and their engagement in this experience were explored through thematic analysis.
Findings
Internships became more than spaces to learn about the world of work. They are also the locus of professional socialization toward precarious work. The detachment of internships from their educational scope is mediated by neonormative control mechanisms that subjectively mobilize the interns, producing the institutionalization and appreciation of the precarious experience, resignified as something that leads to autonomy, learning and a job position.
Practical implications
The article can help students, universities and companies to assess the role of internships in training future professionals.
Social implications
The research problematizes the internship as a form of professional socialization toward precarious work and its detachment from the original educational purpose. The article critically contributes to the debate about the current professional socialization process of young students.
Originality/value
The article highlights the subjective dimension that supports students' consent to dysfunctional internships, discussing both the experience of work precariousness and exploitation, and the terms of the students' engagement in such dynamics, bridging consent to neonormative controls.
Details
Keywords
Sara Louise Muhr, Michael Pedersen and Mats Alvesson
Contemporary working life highlights the challenge between exploitation and exploration both on a general and a more individual level. Here, we focus on the latter, and connect…
Abstract
Contemporary working life highlights the challenge between exploitation and exploration both on a general and a more individual level. Here, we focus on the latter, and connect the critical debate regarding self-management to March's exploitation/exploration trade-off, as this forms a useful theoretical frame to understand how employees make sense of their self-management efforts. The employee is subjected to an individual responsibility to understand and manage an exploration of the self while handling the norms of self-exploitation that a self-management culture creates. Through an empirical study of a large group of management consultants, we explore how they perform and make sense of self-exploitation and self-exploration through three specific discourses: the discourse of workload, the discourse of aspiration, and the discourse of fun. Through these, the consultants try to identify optimal amounts of work, play, and ambition, all while handling the trade-off between self-exploitation and self-exploration. We show how this keeps failing, but how it reappears as a necessary condition for avoiding future failures. In all three discourses, the trade-off therefore presents itself as the problem of as well as the solution to self-management.
Details