Description: This book presents a new account of the significance and the human costs of work. A collaboration between experts in philosophy, social theory, and clinical psychology, it brings together empirical research with incisive analysis of work's political stakes to present a diagnosis of the pathologies of contemporary work and propose powerful remedies.
Brief description: Christophe Dejours (MD, Paris V-Sorbonne) is Chair and Professor of Psychoanalysis, Health, and Work at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. He is the author of many books on psychoanalysis, psychosomatics, pathologies of modern work, and the social impact of work, including Travail: Usure Mentale (Bayard, 2015), (with Isabelle Gernet) Psychopathologie du Travail (Elsevier, 2016), and Travail Vivant (Payot, 2013). He is founding editor of the journal Travailler: Revue internationale de Psychopathologie et de Psychodynamique du Travail.
Review Quotes: This is a unique book jointly written by an interdisciplinary group of four international scholars. Making the most of decades of research that speak for the long-forgotten centrality of work in the everyday production of subjectivity, it is a crucial contribution to the critical theory of the twenty-first century. If you wonder why capitalism has not managed to make people 'happy' in the workplace, or why the most successful managers today argue that firms need to put 'people first, ' this book leads you to the root cause. People at work have high expectations with regard to their own conceptions of justice and autonomy, and the current model of capitalist management cannot do with their critique of work. At a turning point in history, this book presses us to see that without addressing the critique of work formulated by workers themselves, firms will lack the cooperation they so desperately seek, and democracy as we know it, segregated from the economy, simply cannot be a viable project.--Isabelle Ferreras, author of Firms as Political Entities: Saving Democracy Through Economic Bicameralism