O mal-estar no trabalho: um estudo sobre suas formas de expressão no contexto do individualismo contemporâneo

Abstract

This survey falls within the field of collective health, more specifically of mental health, and focuses the relations between work and production of subjectivity. It takes for granted the cultural centrality of work, highlighting two forms in which it appears in the contemporary imaginary: duty and self-realization. It takes into account that the practices of work management, including the speeches and actions of agents that determine the modes of social organization of work, such as government agencies, educational and research institutions, corporations and organizations, shall produce effects as they are instances that regulate the subject s social inclusion. Therefore, this theoretical and exploratory research aims to contribute to the understanding of the ways in which work promotes subjective structuring (or de-structuring) within the contemporary social context, which highlights the imperative of individual happiness, based on values that deviate from the common good and maintain a relationship of poor legibility with the dimension of transcendence. It takes the malaise as inherent to human condition, associated to what remains unsatisfied of man s interaction with the world. The forms of expression of the malaise object of interest of this study are those produced by the subject in face of the demands raised by the liturgies of productivity and vitality, elements of the contemporary capitalist and individualist ideologies, respectively, which capture the dimensions of duty and self-realization in work. The analysis of the malaise is organized around four categories designed as phenomenological types of insertion of the subject at work. They are: (1st) the excesses, which cover the responses that go beyond the demands made; (2nd) the inhibitions, which cover the responses that fall short of what is expected of individuals in the positions they occupy; (3rd) the incongruities, which cover the displaced responses in relation to the raised demands; and at last, (4rth) the splits, which include the subject s disruptions in his relation with such demands. Therefore the research does not aim specific diseases, but modes of the subject's experiences at work. With the identification and analysis of these forms of subjectivity, it is defined a field of study that can be explored in field research, with interviews and application of questionnaires, case studies and other methodological procedures