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      Inhabiting the Self-Work Romantic Utopia: Positive Psychology, Life Coaching, and the Challenge of Self-Fulfillment at Work

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      Work and Occupations
      SAGE Publications

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          Abstract

          Much has been said about the rise of work as a central identity marker in modern society. With the recent popularization of self-help and positive psychology, this identity marker broadened its signification to include new emotional needs such as love and passion, creating a new cultural imaginary: the “self-work romantic utopia.” Sociological studies have criticized this utopia as a myth that serves capitalist neoliberal structures, leading to frustration and self-blame. However, little is known about how workers themselves confront this myth and the strategies they employ when attempting to inhabit it in today’s precarious job market. Based on 60 in-depth interviews with upper-middle class Israeli workers who hired life coaches to improve their work experience, the author identifies five strategies used to inhabit this romantic utopia: starting over, healing, idealization, polygamy, and vision. Through the analysis of these strategies, the author illustrates how even the relatively privileged workers need to adapt the self-work romantic utopia to their life circumstances, inhabiting the myth in partial degrees. Such flexible implementation turns the “myth” into a cultural tool that directs workers’ lives and actions even in a precarious, unstable job market, maintaining subjective experiences of agency in a sphere characterized by growing structural constraints. Yet paradoxically, these strategies eventually strengthen the precarious, noncommitted, and individual-oriented structure of the job market, yielding flexible, individualistic solutions that replace workplace responsibility.

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          Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony

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            Governing economic life

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              Precarious Work, Insecure Workers: Employment Relations in Transition

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Work and Occupations
                Work and Occupations
                SAGE Publications
                0730-8884
                1552-8464
                February 2021
                March 22 2020
                February 2021
                : 48
                : 1
                : 40-69
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
                Article
                10.1177/0730888420911683
                b9149869-35e5-4115-a21d-e1486a42415e
                © 2021

                http://journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license

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