The promotion of quality of life for workers: discourse, power and discipline

Author(s)

Sergio Paes de Barros

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Psicologia (IP/SBD)
• Defense date: 2010-03-26

Examining board members

Leny Sato; Marcelo Afonso Ribeiro; Peter Kevin Spink

• Advisor: Leny Sato

Abstract

This research was started on issues raised during the observation of events and trainings related to the promotion of quality of life for workers. Our goal is to reflect upon discourses about QWL and how it aims to create subjects, which disciplinary mechanisms it uses and how workers reinterpret these discourses. Based in Foucault\'s archaeological method, we scrutinize several national publications about Quality of Life at Work. We did incursions in the daily business of a large company, experiences with a group of HR professionals and interviews with professionals involved in QWL programs. The interviews and the areas surveyed showed multiple dimensions of the phenomenon of promoting quality of life for people, forming a bricolage of methods of control, organization and work management. Discourses analyzed referred to a lifestyle presented as healthy and are not related to working conditions or working organization. The primacy of style, attitude and behavior on the concrete conditions of work in organizational discourses that seek to shape the subjectivity of workers, forms what Gorz (2005) has called world of immaterial labor. We have concluded that the training and events to make workers adhere to this lifestyle are characterized as disciplinary mechanisms of control and exercise of power through the use of the discourse of QWL. We have also concluded, in addition to the disciplinary power noted, that the discourse of quality of life is used to promote the dissemination of values and norms not only for workers, but also focusing on the whole society, on varied subjects that traditionally do not relate to organizations, sending us to the notions of biopower and governmentability, such as developed by Foucault (2005). (AU)