Review of Passionate Work: Endurance After the Good Life by Renyi Hong (Duke University Press)

In Passionate Work, Hong argues that passion at work is an affective structure perpetuated by capitalism to maintain its injustices and discipline workers. Examining historical managerial texts and ideology, career guides, social scientific work on unemployment, networking advice, software protocol, and office furniture, Hong shows how these are sites where discourses of passion are embedded, used to sustain and discipline bodies for work. The book draws attention to how the demand to be “passionate about work” is naturalized and internalized, calling attention to the ways that passion serves to obscure inequalities.