Better Sorry than Safe: Emotional Discourses and Neo-normative Control in a Workplace Safety Council

Recent organizational theorizing has noted the emergence of a new spirit of normative control; implicit, informal, and internalized, “neonormative” control emphasizes a positive affective disposition toward work, a happy, fun, and inclusive workplace where employees are encouraged to “be themselves”. This emphasis on positivity, however, is often accompanied by diffuse and persistent anxiety, fear, and other forms of subjective suffering often noted in studies of neo-normative control. The relation between purportedly positive neo-normative discourses of engagement and the persistent resurgence of subjective suffering remains under-theorized and holds wider implications for understanding the control regime represented by neo-normative control and its possible modes of contestation. Through a qualitative case study of a changing organizational safety program at a university facilities service, we examine how engagement and fear discourses worked together at different phases of the program to create both ambient anxiety and self-engagement solutions to manage that anxiety. Rather than conceptualizing suffering as the unintended consequence or ignored remainder of neo-normative “positive” messages, we describe how fear appeals explicitly invoke suffering to enrol employees into a self-shifting mode that leads them to be proactive. In our discussion, we theorize the co-constitutive aspects of positive and negative emotional discourses within a control-capturing process, developing the implications of this dual-affective orientation for understanding neo-normative control and its self-fulfilling properties at work in the neoliberal workplace.