Work and dreams: desires and nightmares of professors and health workers in the age of organizational capitalism

Abstract

This paper is a report of the preliminary results of a research, part of an international research on organizational capitalism (KO) as a psychosocial risk factor, which aimed at identifying and understanding theoretically the aspects of work changes related to KO that appear in the workers (professors, physicians and nurses) dreams and fantasies, and which psychosocial impact factors (in terms of risk factors and collateral effects) can be seen therein. Data was collected through a question in a questionary and in semi-structured interviews answered by 301 participants, in Spain, and analysed through the content analysis technique and an adaptation of Jungian hermeneutics. A brief discussion of the roles of work and the unconscious in the new capitalism is proposed. Results show that dreams, as manifestations of the unconscious, bring about the risks, problems and impact on labor subjectivation of the KO, appearing as antipodes of the conscious labor desires. As a conclusion, it is posited that the unconscious can be regarded as a field of resistance against the colonization of minds and bodies by the capital.