Business

which people construct the culturally situated biologies that compel them to unproblematically reproduce new, market-like organizations.

Keywords: market, body, overwork, competition

When society changes radically, so do people’s minds and bodies in ways we are just beginning to understand. Organizations play an important but underexplored role in promoting such radical changes in persons. During the first Industrial Revolution, America transformed from an agricultural society, in which Americans worked on about 6 million farms, to a ‘‘society of organizations’’ (Perrow, 1998: 265), in which a few large organizations monopo- lized the country’s assets and employment (Berle and Means, 1932). Organizations became ‘‘the key to understanding our society,’’ including persons; organizational practices were the ‘‘independent variable,’’ and other social processes, including biological and psychological ones, were the ‘‘depen- dent variables’’ (Perrow, 1998: 265). For example, in prior societies and other cultures, people inherited their social position, but, beginning with the first Industrial Revolution, organizations determined social positions through their hierarchies. Thus, mediated by social psychological processes, organizations shaped biological processes, including health and mortality (Singh-Manoux, Adler, and Marmot, 2003). Because lower-ranking individuals have less auton- omy (Kraus, Piff, and Keltner, 2009), for example, they have a higher mortality rate and prevalence of coronary, lung, and gastrointestinal disease, some cancers, depression, and back pain (Marmot et al., 1991; Marmot, Bobak, and Smith, 1995; Lachman and Weaver, 1998), compared to higher-ranking peers. Since the 1980s (Kotz, 2015), another ‘‘industrial revolution’’ (Davis and McAdam, 2000: 195–196) has been occurring: a market turn, which involves market processes that radically transform society, including organizations (Davis, 2009), such as by replacing hierarchies with market-like competition (Shamir, 2008). When organizations take such radically different form, so can minds and bodies, but organizational research has lacked concepts and data to understand this discontinuity. To generate the needed tools, I study this con- temporary societal discontinuity, the market turn, with the following research question: how do market-like organizational practices transform participants, including their bodies?

A cultural–historical perspective illuminates how organizations have consti- tuted their participants’ psychology and biology, creating employees who unproblematically enact the organizational order. Fordist organizations engaged in ‘‘the production of a new kind of laboring body’’ (Harvey, 2000: 104), thereby influencing how seemingly biological categories manifest, including health and age. Medical tests, for instance, use age categories to judge whether results are in a healthy range, on the assumption that specific biological processes occur naturally in a given age category. But, far from being natural categories, childhood, adulthood, and old age—and the linear progression among them— were created by and for organizations, involving preparation for, membership in, and retirement from work. Each age category comprises different culturally structured resources, relations, and practices that influence what it looks and feels like, including psychologically and biologically (Aries, 1962, 1982;

Michel 45

Phillipson, 1982). Old age’s supposed natural frailty, for instance, is facilitated by removing individuals from the labor market, which influences their health by depriving them of consumer power and status (Gilleard and Higgs, 1998). Because people misinterpret cultural understandings of things like retirement age as biological imperatives, they are more likely to perpetuate the organiza- tional order. This example shows how organizations have promoted self- technologies (Foucault, 1988), defined as understandings (e.g., the idea that aging is a biological, linear process), practices (e.g., retirement ages), and tools (e.g., tests that judge health by age) that society uses to understand and act on persons and that persons use to understand and act on themselves. To study how persons change at new cultural–historical moments, including the market turn, one has to study how self-technologies are changing.

Especially consequential is a changing set of organizationally promoted self- technologies that construct personhood as consisting of the body and psycho- logical self. The first Industrial Revolution’s machines (Bauman, 2002) helped society to imagine the body as a bounded, biological machine–entity that runs on depletable energy rather than on will and moral purpose, as prior understandings had posited (Rabinach, 1990). This new understanding changed how organizations acted on employees. For example, the diagnosis of resis- tance to work changed from idleness, which was a managerial problem, to depleted energy, which became a widespread medical problem, first diagnosed as neurasthenia (Beard, 1869) and later as chronic fatigue and burnout (Neckel, Schaffner, and Wagner, 2017). Because energy was believed to constrain pro- ductivity, organizations used the ‘‘body as an accumulation strategy’’ (Harvey, 2000: 97), developing new ‘‘sciences for engineering [it] . as a productive machine’’ (Harvey, 2000: 104) and ‘‘mobilis[ing] strategies to extract the maxi- mum effort from employees in the name of productivity’’ (May, 1999: 768). The body supposedly had imperative biological limits, so organizations focused on establishing and working within these limits, for example by scientifically devising optimal working hours, which had previously been subject to ideologi- cal conflict between management and workers (Rabinach, 1990). For purposes of control, the mind could be molded to a greater extent than the body.

Organizations elaborated the mind as the psychological self (Fiske and Taylor, 1991). It consists of cognitive concepts, including identities, which are self-concepts, attitudes, and beliefs that are separate from biological processes (Simon, 1992); these concepts guide what persons think, feel, and do, as self- regulatory theory explains (Carver and Scheier, 1990; Higgins, 1996). Scholars take this self for granted, but it emerged from organizational control practices that were guided by social science (Rose, 1999). Control theories and practice focused on this self because it helped organizations avoid the reactance (Worchel and Brehm, 1971) that employees exhibit to overt controls, which involves opposing directives and reducing effort. Because people experience action based on their self-concepts as autonomous, organizations aimed to generate self-chosen effort on behalf of the employer by changing the content of employees’ self-concept from an individual focus, such as ‘‘I am smart,’’ to an organizational one, such as ‘‘I am a Goldman banker,’’ thereby promoting organizational identification (Ashforth, Harrison, and Corley, 2008). Laypeople maintained this personhood model by using it to act on themselves.

This model informed how people seized opportunity as well as diagnosed and fixed their problems. For example, it generated a middle-class health

46 Administrative Science Quarterly 68 (2023)

culture, in which individuals used health practices to seize professional opportunities. People promoted themselves and judged others by the extent to which they adopted such practices, including psychological counseling, fitness, and heeding doctors’ diet advice, because these practices signaled agency and responsibility (Crawford, 1985). Taking for granted the idea of body as machine, individuals diagnosed work-related health problems as burnout (Schaufeli, Leiter, and Maslach, 2009), which organizations caused through demands that exceeded biological limits. To fix these problems, people aimed to restore energy through a proper diet, which they conceptualized as the right fuel, and rest, which they conceptualized as recharging, enabled by a society in which organizations protected employees from risk, including through paid sick leave (Neckel, Schaffner, and Wagner, 2017). People took care of the body under- stood in this way, heeding its limits, but they identified with an individualizing psychological self. Life was considered ‘‘meaningful’’ (and thus good) to the extent that one could understand and live according to this self; answering the question ‘‘Who am I?’’ became a fundamental life task (Rose, 1999). People also diagnosed such problems as anxiety, depletion, and depression in terms of the mental realm, for example as caused by unhelpful self-beliefs (Higgins, 1989), and used cognitive techniques as fixes, such as introspection, mindful- ness, cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, learning, and seeking meaning (Fritz, Lam, and Spreitzer, 2011). By illuminating how organizations have constituted persons, this historical perspective invites us to consider that as the market turn radically changes organizations, employees’ minds and bodies may be changing profoundly, too. Before I elaborate the market turn, I outline how the current study developed from my prior research on changes in persons.

THE EMPIRICAL PUZZLE

In prior research, I also observed a radical change in persons for which organi- zational studies lacked research tools. To fix ongoing body breakdowns, for many years the bankers I studied had been trying to use cognitive techniques, such as repressing the body through willpower or listening to and negotiating with it (Michel, 2012). Steeped in organizational research, I took this psycholog- ical self for granted, so I asked questions only about the kinds of cognitive techniques that bankers used to engage the body. New questions emerged around the ninth year of bankers’ tenure with the banks, when they took on new positions; at this point, the banks exposed them to market competition and bankers constructed self, mind, and body in new and puzzling ways. For example, the bankers reconceptualized the mind and its processes (e.g., emotions) in bodily terms (e.g., brain states) because they believed doing so improved control. As one director I interviewed told me, ‘‘My anxiety was a neurotransmitter problem, which I figured out because I could finally fix it with drugs, where years of therapy were useless’’ (B1).1 When they acted on their breakdowns in this way, they discovered new ways in which minds and bodies

1 I label interviewees (starting with B1 for Banker 1) based not on the order of my data collection,

as doing so might reveal the size of the cohorts I studied, but on the order in which I quote them in

this article. The title (e.g., director) after a given quotation indicates the position the banker held

when they made the comment. Because I interviewed each banker repeatedly, in different

positions, the same banker (e.g., B1) can have different position labels (e.g., director, vice presi-

dent, and associate).

Michel 47

could function. For example, using biomedical tests that measure biological (rather than chronological) age, they argued that age was fluid: one day, when they were under stress, a test indicated they were 50; the next day, with the right drugs, they were 45. Chronological age indicates years since birth; biologi- cal age is the level at which one’s biology functions, which a person can influ- ence through behavior. Bankers thus construed age as a design choice they could exploit for competitive success and the body as a ‘‘chemical soup’’ (direc- tor, B1) that they could run outside–in with drugs, rather than a bounded entity that works inside–out through biological imperatives. The bankers are not an isolated case.

Like the banks’ competitive work practices, bankers’ new self-technologies can be observed more widely. For example, the Harvard genetics professor David Sinclair (2021) has also argued that aging is not a biological imperative— ‘‘there is no biological law that says we must age’’—but something that one can influence through drugs. Like the bankers, the entrepreneur Dave Asprey (2016: ix–4) stemmed overwork-related breakdowns by using ‘‘pharmaceuticals, hormones, and every possible supplement,’’ with the goal of running biological functions from the outside (to take ‘‘control of my nervous system . . . and the very energy production in my cells’’). Consistent with bankers’ conceptualization of the body as an open system, the anthropologist Martin (1992: 121) wrote that

we are undergoing fundamental changes in how our bodies are organized and experi- enced . . . the body as a bounded entity is in fact ending . . . We are seeing . . . the end of one kind of body and the beginning of another kind of body.

But Martin does not study what these changes are and how organizations pro- duce them, which are my research tasks. Also consistent with bankers’ narra- tive of why they intervened in their bodies, such interventions are prevalent in competitive work environments, when participants are judged not based on absolute results but in comparison to others. These types of workers include lawyers, who are paid on relative billable hours (Zimmerman, 2017); academics, who are promoted on relative research impact (Sahakian and Morein-Zamir, 2007); and medical students, who participate in a competitive ‘‘Darwinian envi- ronment’’ (Kunzmann, 2018). These behaviors are striking in historical perspec- tive. While traditional employees relied on doctors’ advice, using diet and exercise to be healthy, these workers experiment on themselves with risky tools to win competitions, regardless of the health effects. These observations prompted this study’s questions about the cultural–historical changing practices through which organizations shape persons and the new forms that selves, minds, and bodies can take at new historic moments. These questions aim to meet various challenges.

The Problem of Person Emergence: Research Challenges

Because organizations have shaped the biologies and psychologies needed for workers to enact organizational practices, studying the emergence of new types of persons is an essential but underexplored part of understanding orga- nizational functioning, including control, which is management’s ‘‘most funda- mental problem’’ (Van Maanen and Barley, 1984: 290). Because the market

48 Administrative Science Quarterly 68 (2023)

disappearing because they are too rigid for a rapidly changing context (Albert, Ashforth, and Dutton, 2000; Pongratz and Voss, 2003). Yet surprisingly, some employees work more, not less; they voluntarily work much longer than organizations can require, over 100 hours per week (Perlow and Porter, 2009; Michel, 2012; Lupu and Empson, 2015). Analyzing this overwork helps scholars understand new controls and demands on workers.

Because organizational scholars bracket the cultural–historical context, vari- ous oversights and puzzles have emerged. Scholars locate causes of overwork either inside the person, including personality (Porter and Kadabadse, 2006), or inside the organization, including culture (Padavic, Ely, and Reid, 2020) and work processes (Perlow, 1995; Michel, 2012), thereby overlooking market influences. Mazmanian and Erickson’s (2014: 767) informants, who stated that they overworked to obtain a ‘‘competitive edge’’ in the market, indicate this oversight but do not explain why they oriented toward the market rather than managerial directives. According to one influential account, cultural controls, mostly organizational identification, replaced formal controls (Albert, Ashforth, and Dutton, 2000). In this view, employees overwork to benefit the organiza- tion. But identification cannot explain why other employees overworked even when it did not benefit the organization (Perlow and Porter, 2009), including by creating unnecessary work (Padavic, Ely, and Reid, 2020). In addition, Alvesson and Robertson’s (2015) overworking bankers did not identify with their bank and said that they acted on self-interest. By including the changing context in the analysis, market turn research helps me to resolve these puzzles.

Ecologically embedded study of control. Market turn research offers guid- ance on how to study control in a changing cultural–historical context. I use market turn as an umbrella term to build on various approaches to this change, including organizational research on financialization (Davis, 2009; Davis and Kim, 2015) as well as anthropological and sociological research on neoliberal- ism, governmentality (Foucault, 1977; Harvey, 2005; Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde, 2006; Ganti, 2014), and reflexive modernity (Beck and Beck- Gernsheim, 2002), in which a unifying theme is that a market society is replacing the society of organizations. Consistent with my ecologically embed- ded study of the person, ethnographers are challenging the traditional study of the organization as a closed setting; they argue that it must be studied together with its changing macro-context, questioning the assumption that this context is unknowable to behavioral scholars (Geertz, 1995; Burawoy, 2003). They also warn against conceptualizing the market turn as an omnipresent entity that surrounds and causes action in settings (Ganti, 2014). Heeding this advice, I examine the market turn through sociomaterial practices that people take up in action (Ong, 2007). I analyze how they replace traditional practices through which organizations act on persons and persons act on themselves. I did not enter this study with a market turn lens but inductively chose it because it helped me to analyze key themes in my data, including the banks’ market-like controls, the new demands that these controls placed on persons, and the new biomedical self-technologies that bankers used to cope.

New market-like controls. Market turn research helped me explore the banks’ competitive work practices not merely as a management tool but as

52 Administrative Science Quarterly 68 (2023)

potentially involving a more profound, market-like reshaping of organizations. This exploration required cultural–historical comparison. A central insight of market turn research is that the market is restructuring other societal domains by replacing traditional modes of structuring action with competition (Shamir, 2008). Since the first Industrial Revolution, organizations have been different and separate from the market (Knorr Cetina and Preda, 2006). Traditionally, competition structured action outside of organizational boundaries. Within those boundaries, organizations functioned as groups that suppressed competi- tion to promote collaboration (Simon, 1991a). Managerial authority structured action; rewards, such as positions and income, were based on role perfor- mance or seniority (March and Simon, 1958). The market turn reverses this separation: competition has become the taken-for-granted model of how organizations should work inside and out (Harvey, 2005). Theoretical research has posited that organizations now promote, rather than suppress, competition among employees and use it to allocate rewards (Neckel and Wagner, 2013). Universities, for example, have substituted competition for collegial processes (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004) and, indicating a more profound restructuring, have reframed identities in market-like ways, including students as consumers of a private good and professors as service providers (Mumper et al., 2011). But we lack empirical research inside of organizations on how competition is replacing traditional processes—research that we need in order to understand changing demands on employees.

New demands on workers: Transfer of collective responsibilities. Competition exists across cultures (Thorbjørnsen, 2020), but the market turn influences how organizations structure it; different structures, in turn, pose dif- ferent demands on workers. Another central insight from market turn research that helped me to understand my data is that contemporary, market-like forms of competition involve organizations offloading responsibilities that had previ- ously defined them onto employees, namely setting managerial goals, predict- ably rewarding work time, and protecting employees from risk. For example, in professions in which overwork is prevalent, competitive goals are not set by management in advance but emerge through competition, and thus workers know them only retrospectively. Bankers (Ho, 2009), lawyers (Galanter and Henderson, 2008), academics (Musselin, 2018), and accountants (Alvehus and Spicer, 2012) are not rewarded based on absolute, preexisting standards (such as role-based reviews) but competitively on relative financial contribution (such as billable hours) or relative research impact. This change involves transferring responsibilities and risk onto employees because, as opposed to following management directives, they have to bet on which activity will succeed and carry the consequences. Moreover, market-like competition does not reward work time and involves chance (Rubinstein, 1988). Professionals and academics are held responsible and rewarded for results they do not fully con- trol, such as publications or closed deals, regardless of how much they work. A closed deal is an investment banking transaction, such as the sale of a com- pany, that is completed as the contractual parties have previously agreed (e.g., the company has changed ownership) and in which the funds have been trans- ferred. Because firms rotate business, bankers get deals because it was a par- ticular bank’s turn, signifying chance, not merit (Eccles and Crane, 1988). Deals

Michel 53

can fail to close for reasons outside of a banker’s control, such as changing market conditions, failure to obtain regulatory approval, and changing financial conditions of the seller or buyer.

This perspective helps scholars resolve puzzles in control research and fits better with bankers’ own accounts. While prior research assumes that organizations must counteract employees’ self-interest, market-like competi- tion promotes it; employees overwork to benefit themselves, not the organiza- tion, said this Goldman Sachs partner, who overworked to outcompete others:

You need to work really hard and to convince the client that you are there for them all the time. . . . I didn’t have a lot of [work–life balance] . . . until I made partner and even for a period of time after that. . . . it is . . . a very competitive world and if you are not there for the client . . . someone else is going to be there for them and there is plenty of people who are willing to pick up the phone at 2 or 3 in the morning if you are not. (Donovan, 2015)

Similarly, professionals view billable hour competition as a career investment (Alvehus and Spicer, 2012). While people associate competition with agency, Donovan’s quote suggests that competition is a form of control: people must be free in socially prescribed ways (Rose, 1999). They can choose any means for competitive success but cannot choose other goals or to opt out. Competition can explain puzzling indiscriminate overwork because it invites wasteful production (Rosa, 2006). Employees overwork because they carry risk and because their competitors are doing the same. To understand radical per- son change, one also has to understand the new technologies that people bring to these new demands, and these technologies, too, are influenced by the mar- ket turn.

New biomedical technologies. By changing how research is financed, the market turn has promoted biomedicine (Clarke et al., 2003), which has gener- ated a new understanding of the body and has afforded new interventions, goals, and tools that I observed in my informants. Traditional medicine probed the body-as-machine as a closed biological entity, visualized at the level of limbs and organs. The goal was to arrest abnormality (Rose, 2013). In con- trast, biomedicine understands and acts on the body at the level of neurotransmitters, neurons, and genes. It construes the body as an open system that combines heterogeneous elements, including pharmaceuticals (Rose, 2003). By supplementing the body’s own functioning with such pros- theses (Callon, 2008), more-profound interventions are immediately possible, unconstrained by biology, posited Wilmut, one of the creators of Dolly the cloned sheep: ‘‘we can no longer assume that the biological ‘itself’ will impose limits on human ambitions’’ (cited in Rose, 2007: 7). Repositioned by the market turn as consumers and made responsible for their own health (Callon and Rabeharisoa, 2004), patients’ goal is to obtain not cures from doctors but services, thereby asserting the obligation to design their lives, including moods and intelligence (Clarke et al., 2003). Biomedicine does not render the body less but more biological, since biomedicine mines biology to control it. I do not evaluate whether these claims are accurate, but I explore their effect on people who act as if they were true. Prior research analyzed what the new tools and concepts are, but to understand how they transform

54 Administrative Science Quarterly 68 (2023)

recognizing that they were also training each other to function in the competi- tive ways that their future work required. The students’ comparability further facilitated the banks’ market-like selection process.

The banks selected students through a bidding process that competitively priced students. When a candidate had an offer from another respected firm, the person was advanced to a final interview with the goal of selling the job to the candidate: ‘‘We compete in a market for personnel, and markets get value right,’’ said a director (B7). Here, too, the banks transferred organizational responsibilities, namely candidate evaluation, onto participants. They also relocated a process that typically takes place inside the bounded organization to outside of it, repositioning it in the market for personnel. This form of selec- tion also kept different students in the same process, even when they applied to firms in different industries (e.g., banking, consulting) because an offer from one firm could yield an offer from another firm across industries. Moreover, it kept them focused on others’ competitive progress, thus further contributing to the competitive socialization: ‘‘All we talked about is where everyone was in the process: Who had been invited for the next round? Who had an offer?’’ (associate, B8). Thus while organizations traditionally socialize employees on the job, an important aspect of banking socialization occurred before entry: the situational repression of the psychological self. Students no longer thought about what they wanted but focused outside of themselves, responding to the competitive situation. The first years on the job elaborated this tendency.

Entry: Bankers Cognitively Repress Psychological Self

Incoming bankers found harsh working conditions that differed radically from what friends at other organizations encountered, but framed them as a desirable investment in their future: ‘‘My friends are being told how important they are. Their firms make work ‘engaging.’ Here people tell you that you are the ‘lowest on the totem pole’ and that life will be hell. If you don’t like it, we’ll just get someone else’’ (associate, B9). This associate noted that it is traditionally the organization’s responsibility to motivate employees by individualizing them and enriching work. In contrast, the banks held employees responsible for motivat- ing themselves to do aversive work. Despite the apparent autonomy, this situa- tion merely entailed a different, market-like form of control. Because the cohort system rendered members fungible, resistant bankers could easily be replaced. Yet bankers concluded that they were better off than traditional employees, who supposedly live in an untenable dependency and, by doing so, forgo the high rewards that self-reliance and tolerance of uncertainty could yield:

. . . the ‘‘we are a family’’ is deception that firms use to get people to work for them. Sooner or later it’s oops, you have to fire your family because all organizations have to stay competitive to survive. Then, you’ll be blindsided by a layoff. Here you learn how things really work. No one owes you anything. We are not a welfare state. We are a meritocracy. You work hard for yourself, to be positioned for extraordinary rewards down the road, not because someone tells you to. You’ll need luck because others are talented and work hard, too. (Associate, B10)

The new bankers adopted this market logic as a self-technology, coding harsh working conditions as their chosen investment in their future (cf. Costas and Grey, 2014).

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Unlike prior studies’ portrayal of the market actor (Callon, 2008), bankers did not use rational cost–benefit calculations but acted as risk-taking entrepreneurs. For example, they passed around a version of the spreadsheet shown in Figure 1. The McDonald’s logo, featured in lieu of a bank’s logo, compared bankers to McDonald’s employees, which was a frequent self- deprecating joke among bankers (‘‘On an hourly basis, you’d be better off flip- ping burgers’’). While traditional employees get a fixed reward for their time, the spreadsheet shows that for the bankers, the reward was uncertain: it depended on their hours worked and the yearly bonus, both of which could vary drastically based on factors outside of a banker’s control. Blackstone Group CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman’s photo in the ‘‘message box,’’ which summarizes the takeaway, symbolizes why bankers accepted this situation: a multi-billionaire, Schwarzman started his career as a banker. Bankers thus were not working for the traditional specified effort–reward ratio shown within the spreadsheet, which their self-deprecating jokes mocked; instead, like entrepreneurs, they invested personal resources to chase an elusive upside.

Nor did bankers work to benefit their bank, which is the explanation that an organizational identification perspective proposes when autonomous professionals work hard. Indicating their lack of commitment to the banks, bankers often talked about their ‘‘fuck-you number,’’ defined as ‘‘the money you need to stop killing yourself at work,’’ which means being able to leave (VP, B6). ‘‘I calculate that compulsively to remind myself why I am taking all this shit’’ (VP, B2). The bankers said they intended to quit as soon as they had the money to say ‘‘fuck you to this toxic place so that I can do what I really want to do’’ (associate, B5). The most frequent reason they gave for working at their bank was ‘‘I work here for the money . . . as an investment in my future’’ (associate, B3).

Figure 1. Why Do Bankers Work So Hard? Not Calculation, But Entrepreneurial Risk-Taking*

$0 $15,000 $30,000 $45,000 $60,000 $75,000 $90,000

70 $16.48 $20.60 $24.73 $28.85 $32.97 $37.09 $41.21

80 $14.42 $18.03 $21.63 $25.24 $28.85 $32.45 $36.06

90 $12.82 $16.03 $19.23 $22.44 $25.64 $28.85 $32.05

100 $11.54 $14.42 $17.31 $20.19 $23.08 $25.96 $28.85

110 $10.49 $13.11 $15.73 $18.36 $20.98 $23.60 $26.22

120 $9.62 $12.02 $14.42 $16.83 $19.23 $21.63 $24.04

130 $8.88 $11.09 $13.31 $15.53 $17.75 $19.97 $22.19

140 $8.24 $10.30 $12.36 $14.42 $16.48 $18.54 $20.60

H o

u rs

p e r

W e e k

Investment Banking Analyst Bonus (Base Salary: $60,000)

14

000)

* The table calculates the hourly pay of a junior banker at different levels of yearly bonus payments and different working hours per week. Bonuses are paid in addition to a $60,000 base salary. For example, if the bonus were $0 and the banker worked 140 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, the hourly pay would be $8.24. If the bonus were $90,000 and the banker worked 140 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, the hourly pay would be $20.60.

66 Administrative Science Quarterly 68 (2023)

Bankers adopted the banks’ transfer of responsibility by splitting the self: the cognitive part assumed managerial responsibilities by controlling the psy- chological and biological part, mostly by cognitively suppressing the negative emotions and countervailing physiological responses to punitive working conditions and, instead, self-regulating based on outside, situational needs. The bankers thus adopted a technique they had encountered on a social plane dur- ing recruiting, when a strong situation had overridden inner cues, illustrating how the different stages in the bankers’ tenure built on each other. For exam- ple, bankers concluded narratives about clients who berated them, nights with- out sleep, and grunt work with statements like, ‘‘You have to learn to switch off any kind of emotionality. Nothing is ever personal’’ (associate, B5) and ‘‘You have to constantly remind yourself why you are doing this because it will pay off in the long run. . . . you can just ignore this pain for a few years’’ (associate, B7). The next sections illustrate how bankers learned more-complex controls for their minds and bodies.

Years 1–3: Cognitive Design of Psychological Self

Managers traditionally plan subordinates’ work, but the banks transferred this responsibility onto bankers, which entailed market reembedding because bankers believed that the market determined the flow of deals. Each banker participated in different deal teams, with conflicting deadlines, which the indi- vidual had to reconcile. Bankers were thus autonomous from managerial con- trol but subject to the harsher market control:

In consulting firms, you can negotiate: ‘‘I’ll work all night, but I have more work than I can handle. Help me prioritize.’’ But here, if you cannot do what a senior banker wants because all of your other deals have become active, the problem is you. . . . It must be because you are not competent and so the senior banker, who is your inter- nal client, gives the next deal to the person next to you who seems to be able to organize himself better. Yet . . . work here is driven by the market, and the market doesn’t care about your workload. (Associate, B11)

Bankers were autonomous in name only, as this frequent joke among them illustrates: ‘‘I have autonomy. I can decide which 24 hours of the day to work.’’ They competed in a market for internal clients, in which they were held respon- sible for results not entirely under their control.

This internal competition escalated work pace and standards. Because bankers were rewarded based on winning internal competitions rather than against predefined task criteria, they tried to outwork others: ‘‘The senior bankers . . . compare you to other associates they work with. . . . So everyone does extra work to stand out. But then this becomes the new normal for every- one, and now, if you want to stand out, you have to do even more’’ (associate, B12). This dynamic explained why banks could not stop overwork: ‘‘When someone died from overwork, they closed the office at midnight, but people worked secretively from home to look better than others or to keep up because others are going to do the same’’ (associate, B13). Working against bank directives shows that bankers believed they were pursuing their own goals. Yet perceptions of autonomy and lack of choice coexisted: bankers felt that they had to go all out because others were doing the same.

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Bankers were also responsible for managing personal resources. While tradi- tionally, managers influenced workers’ motivation (March and Simon, 1958) and emotions, for example through leadership (Gooty et al., 2010), the banks held bankers responsible for managing their own emotions and motivation. For example, a director relayed how a client executive tried to motivate an employee who complained about uninteresting tasks: ‘‘The entitlement! I have done grunt work 24/7 for my first few years with a good attitude. Can you imagine Jerry [head of investment banking] trying to ‘motivate’ you? If you are not on like a tiger all the fucking time, it is ‘good-bye and next’’’ (B1). Bankers thus were held responsible for being upbeat, regardless of working conditions. If they failed to generate the right attitude, they would be replaced, which fur- ther indicates that freedom from managerial control was not autonomy but merely a different form of control.

Bankers adopted the transferred responsibility as a self-technology, investing and designing psychology as capital for competitive success:

Banker (B14): In my last performance review people docked me because my attitude was not as good as that of others. What a wakeup call! You can work as hard as you want, but if you don’t have your emotion under control, others will beat you. Researcher: Have you changed anything since then? Banker: A lot actually. First it became clear to me that this is not only about having a good attitude, but being strategic with your emotions. I observed that when Derek is in different situations, he is a completely different person. When he is at entertain- ment events with clients, he laughs and is charming, in pitches, he is completely calm and almost Spock-like rational, and when he is with lawyers in negotiations, he constantly seems pissed off. So now, when I am in a situation, I simply ask myself: What emotions will be most successful? Researcher: And how do you generate that emotion? Banker: Mostly on command. Willpower. Self-control.

Other associates gave similar answers to how they generate emotion, includ- ing ‘‘choice’’ (associate, B15), ‘‘mind over matter’’ (associate, B16), and ‘‘men- tal strength and will’’ (associate, B1). While research on emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983; Grandey, Diefendorff, and Rupp, 2013) describes how organizations socialize employees through rules about emotional display, the extended quotation above indicates bankers’ belief that they discovered psycho- logical design as an ingenious competitive tool. This design, built on their prior self-repression strategy, further evidences the continuity among the stages in a banker’s tenure: ‘‘When I started, it was all about repressing things, like pain, fatigue, anger; it is about fighting with yourself. Once that comes naturally, it is all about designing what you feel for success, choosing the emotion that will get the best results in a situation,’’ said associate B5. Soon, however, mental control was no longer sufficient to achieve increasingly elusive outcomes.

Years 4–8: Cognitive Control Over Somatic Self

Rewards based on internal and external competition. When bankers were promoted to VP, they worked more because they were rewarded differ- ently: ‘‘It is a dramatic switch. . . . there are announcements to the entire department about deals done away from you, which are deals that you

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competed for [against bankers from other banks], but lost’’ (VP, B17). Another VP (B18) elaborated:

You have to work harder to get results because there is more competition. Before, competition was only internal, against your cohort. Now, I am also being rewarded on bringing in clients. So my competition is bankers from the inside and in the out- side market.

Market competition had different laws from those of internal competition, explained this VP (B7):

Banker: The standards are unknowable, and much of it is luck. As an associate, you know the standards: quality work delivered on time with a good attitude. But when it comes to bringing in clients, there is no recipe for competitive success. . . . the big- gest clients are spreading business around. Whether you get business depends on luck: Are you knocking on their door at the same time that your bank is in line. Researcher: If the effort no longer gets rewarded predictably, why work harder? Banker: Because now it becomes a pure numbers game. To bring in one client, you have to knock on maybe 100 doors. Working harder increases your odds.

Another VP (B19) said, ‘‘Now you can work endlessly and never be rewarded for it because you didn’t get the deal,’’ indicating that the relation between effort and reward was more tenuous than previously.

The body breakdowns that resulted from this increased competition prompted bankers to recognize the body as capital, while continuing to enact a psychological self. Whereas bankers had previously believed that their mind was the key to success, they now recognized the body’s contribution, believing that physical ailments were thwarting their success: ‘‘Whether I succeed or fail depends on whether my body lets me work or shuts me down’’ (VP, B2). ‘‘I can depend on my mind, on my expertise and motivation. But my body is the capricious one, throwing me one curveball with health issues after another’’ (director, B11). Continuing their identification with the mind, a defining feature of a psychological self, they controlled the body cognitively by repressing it as an antagonist (e.g., ‘‘I am bludgeoning my body into submission,’’ VP, B20) or by engaging it as a subject (e.g., ‘‘When I feel something in my body, I see it as a helpful message and talk to it,’’ director, B10) (see Michel, 2012). Consistent with existing management and psychological research, bankers thus differed in being more or less aware of the body, which neither these literatures nor my informants problematized. This perspective changed in about Year 9, when bankers exhibited a different type of self in which the body manifested in new ways.

Year 9 Onward: The Emergence of the Somatic Self

When they became senior vice presidents and directors, bankers’ organiza- tional disembedding was complete. Consistent with how markets work, rewards depended mostly on chance (Rubinstein, 1988). In contrast to tradi- tional organizations, the banks no longer rewarded effort or skill; bankers were paid and promoted on deal revenues, over which they had limited control:

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So many things can go wrong in a deal, even if you do everything right. Markets can decline, business results for the buyer or seller can tank, conflict between deal parties can be unresolvable, regulations change, key personnel can leave, unethical behavior can come out, a competitor can swoop in, or people simply change their minds. (VP, B19)

The quotation indicates how the uncertainty about rewards that bankers started to experience in Year 4 intensified from Year 9 onward, thus illustrating the gradual process through which the banks disembedded bankers from the predictable effort–reward relation characterizing traditional organizations. Because this process spread out over a number of years, it allowed the devel- opmental processes that I describe to unfold. Yet even though results depended on chance, the banks held bankers responsible. Evidencing this con- tradiction, bankers accepted responsibility while simultaneously recognizing the role of chance:

Your revenues depend on macroeconomic conditions out of your control. Still, suc- cessful bankers are winners, the rest are losers. Every year, they prune the lowest 10 percent, all brilliant people. You are only as good as your last deal. It is hard to not see yourself as a loser when others did better than you, even though it really is luck. (Director, B21)

Bankers also assumed formerly organizational responsibilities and risks, said a director (B2):

At my level, they call you an employee, but you are an entrepreneur; you are your own business. You have much more upside. But you need to create this upside, which is extraordinarily risky. Geographic, product, and industry markets can shut down on a dime. So you have to keep finding new markets and innovate, and do so better and faster than your competition. This is different from a salesperson in an organization, who just needs to meet revenue targets but doesn’t create the product or locate the market; all that is management.

Like entrepreneurs and unlike employees, bankers thus located market oppor- tunity (Kirzner, 2008), innovated (Schumpeter, 1994), and carried market risk (Knight, 1964).

Because existing market turn research takes for granted that bodies react inside–out based on biological imperatives, it has documented the types of illnesses that occur under market-like conditions (e.g., Verhaeghe, 2014); per- haps due to this assumption, this research overlooks that these conditions also shape how people respond to illnesses, which in turn can act on biology. The senior bankers experienced both continuity and change, compared to the ear- lier years described in Michel (2012). The continuity involved body breakdowns that intensified over the years, manifesting through diffuse, difficult-to-diagnose clusters of symptoms, including insomnia, brain fog, chronic pain, depression, anger, extreme mood swings, infertility, headaches, digestive problems, addictions, heart problems, blood sugar problems, high blood pressure, endo- crine problems, and increased susceptibility to illnesses such as flu, bronchitis, and sinus problems. The change involved bankers’ new positioning as entrepreneurs, prompting them to respond to breakdowns in new ways that characterized the market turn and that built on earlier learning. Starting in about

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recollection of recruiting experiences and Year 1 may have been limited. Because I interviewed many different bankers about these earlier times and because I was interested in social aspects they had in common, different accounts provided cross-validation and, together, were likely to offer a relatively complete picture. I also triangulated bankers’ accounts with my own field notes from Year 1, from various on-campus recruiting events, and with other research accounts about this time span at comparable banks (Ho, 2009; Rivera, 2015). Moreover, because of my long-term relations with the bankers and the detailed, intimate information they conveyed, I believe they were open and can- did. Yet especially from Year 8 onward, bankers often jokingly said things like, ‘‘Don’t give away my competitive secrets.’’ As a result, I believe that the bankers’ accounts of body entrepreneurship are conservative and systemati- cally left out interventions that achieved the greatest plasticity and fluidity.

Ethical Implications

Given our market society’s valorization of entrepreneurs, it is possible to mis- read the body entrepreneur label as an endorsement of the bankers’ practices, when in fact these practices raise various ethical concerns (see Farah et al., 2004 for a review). In a society in which resources are allocated based on per- formance, when some individuals use performance enhancers, others may feel forced to do so to keep up, even when they do not want to and regardless of whether such enhancements work. Such pressure could affect vulnerable populations, such as young adults or even children. For example, 33 percent of parents in one study indicated that they would feel pressure to give performance-enhancing drugs to their children if other children at school were taking them (Maher, 2008). In addition, because effectively intervening in one’s body requires substantial amounts of education, connection, and resources, which are distributed unequally in society, such interventions might further exacerbate inequality in society. Because much is at stake, organizations could formulate and enforce policies about the acceptability of such interventions.

Contributions

A cultural–historic perspective on control and overwork. To the research on control and overwork, which takes the organization as the unit of analysis, I contribute a cultural–historical perspective by studying the organization in the context of societal change. This perspective provides new insight into what facilitates contemporary overwork, which helps to resolve existing puzzles by identifying a qualitatively new form of control. I show that underlying the bankers’ overwork are not cultural controls, such as organizational identifica- tion, which embed persons more deeply into the organization, but the opposite: a more fundamental, market-like restructuring of the organization–employee relationship that disembeds persons from organizations while retaining the employee label. This restructuring controls persons not through traditional orga- nizational processes of managerial directives or cultural concepts but by using competition to allocate rewards, which is a market process that collectives are adopting more widely under the market turn (Shamir, 2008). Market-like control helps explain the previously puzzling findings that employees overwork even when it does not benefit the organization, that overworking employees do not

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identify with their organization (Alvesson and Robertson, 2015), and that they explain their overwork by referring to market competition (Mazmanian and Erickson, 2014). Market-like control functions in qualitatively different ways, compared to organizational control.

One difference between market and organizational control involves the locus. Prior research has located control in powerful persons, such as managers, who control others. In contrast, my data depict market control as something that persons inflict on themselves through their competitive actions, without intending to do so and without being able to stop; bankers could not opt out of competition. This finding redirects control research from analyzing how organizations control employees through socialization and supervision to how people control themselves through self-technologies. While analyzing organizational controls takes the organization as the unit of analysis, the self- technology construct broadens the scope, inviting analysis of how people act by means of cultural–historical resources, including medical understandings and tools as well as economic understandings of entrepreneurship and risk.

Another difference is that competition entails a new relationship among key control research concepts, which existing research considers opposites: con- trol, on the one hand, and autonomy and self-interest, on the other hand. Since the inception of the management field, scholars assumed that control should counteract employees’ self-interest (Barnard, 1938). In contrast, this study’s data suggest that competition as control works through—not against or in con- trast to—autonomy and self-interest. Moreover, my historically situated, longitudinal–developmental account revealed that freedom and constraint were not static but evolved in complex, historically new ways that opened up new forms of action. For example, much prior research on overwork and burnout assumes that one has to redesign collectives because the body’s overwhelmed constraints are fixed. The bankers initially experienced such biological constraints, but over time, they believed the opposite: they viewed competition as inflexible but believed that they had found ways to free themselves partially from biological constraints, even though, paradoxically, this freedom resulted from the perceived imperative to extract ever more from their personal resources. My research thus paints a different picture of these elite actors: not as more autonomous than other types of employees (Davenport, 2005) and as competing in order to live the kinds of lives they want but as more governed— and more governable—from the outside, adopting the kind of self, lives, and bodies that are needed to succeed in competitions.

An ontological perspective on the person. My ontological perspective opens up a new research agenda for organizational research on the self and body, including control research. The basic psychological research on which organizational scholars (including but not limited to control researchers) build takes the psychological self for granted. As a result, scholars merely study how collective contexts can facilitate different types of mental concepts (e.g., collec- tivistic or individualistic). In contrast, my research shows how under new cultural–historical conditions, people conceptualize the self in new ways, not as consisting of a deep inner mental space but in biomedical, somatic terms. This broadens the research agenda to the different forms that selves, rather than merely their content, can take in different contexts and the processes through

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