David Fryer and Rose Stambe, “Work and ‘the crafting of individual identities’ from a critical standpoint”, The Australian Community Psychologist, Volume 26, No 1, June 2014.
Abstract
In this paper we start by critically problematising the argument that employment is important to the crafting of individual identities by drawing on the work of Michel Foucault to trouble taken-for-granted assumptions in psychological research on unemployment and modernist understanding of the ‘individual’ as a unitary and stable subject. We then elaborate our theoretical position and demonstrate how a Foucauldian standpoint can help to rethink how we think about, act upon, and experience unemployment. We then argue that, rather than describing the effect of unemployment, psy power-knowledge has contributed to the production of neoliberal subjectivity, including neoliberal unemployed subjectivity. More particularly we argue that ‘unemployment’ and ‘mental ill-health’ are not independent phenomena in a cause effect relationship but are, rather, two facets of socially constituted violence which functions to maximise the working of the neoliberal labour market in the interests of employers and shareholders.
“Foucault himself favours the dissolution of identity, rather than its creation or maintenance. He sees identity as a form of subjugation and a way of exercising power over people and preventing them from moving outside fixed boundaries.” (O’Farrell, 2014)
Foucault News 