Emotions 167 Communication 171 Choice 174 Groups 177 Communication and Control in the Third Industrial Revolution 181

ACTA UNIVERSITATIS STOCKHOLMIENSIS Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology N.S. 9 The Therapeutization of Work The Psychological Toolbox as Rationalization Device during the Third Industrial Revolution in Sweden Hans Tunestad ©Hans Tunestad and Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis 2014 ISBN 978-91-87235-78-8 Printed in Sweden by US-AB, Stockholm 2014 Distributor: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis Cover photo by Hans Tunestad Who gives you work, and why should you do it? The Clash The soul is the prison of the body. Michel Foucault I can’t go on. I’ll go on. Samuel Beckett Contents Acknowledgements..............................................................9 Introduction …………………………………………………………… 11 The problem: an intertwinement of the ‘managerial’ and the ‘psychotherapeutic’ 12 The preliminary answer: a new spirit of capitalism 14 The research perspective: rationalization efforts 17 Some notes on method 24 The outline of the thesis 29 1. A Vision of the Productive Citizen…………………………… 31 A new concept 32 Performing emotional intelligence 34 Tools and values 39 A framework for involvement 47 Towards the internal work 53 Realizing the psychological answer 63 Conclusion 68 2. Striving for Synergy……………………………………………. 70 Teambuilding 71 UGL 79 Interpretation in action 90 Versions of feedback 96 The mediation of managerial know-how 101 Synchronizing the individual and the collective 110 Conclusion 115 3. Coping Strategies ………………………………………………… 118 A rehabilitation project 119 The healing of stress-related illnesses 123 Psychotherapy and the ethos of enterprise 130 Public therapy 137 From the age of nerves to psychoculture 145 Self-help as a collective enterprise 153 Conclusion 157 4. The Anatomy of Work-Enabling Self-Help Psychology.. 160 The self 162 Emotions 167 Communication 171 Choice 174 Groups 177 Communication and control in the third industrial revolution 181 Conclusion: Exploitation as Liberation………………………… 196 The psychological toolbox as rationalization device 197 A part of the third industrial revolution in Sweden 199 From construction to commitment 202 The intertwinement of the ‘managerial’ and the ‘psychotherapeutic’ 210 Exploitation as an existential condition 216 Sammanfattning på svenska……………………………………………………… 220 References…………………………………………………………………………………… 223 Index…………………………………………………………………………………………… 242 Acknowledgements This research project has been carried out at the Department of Social An- thropology at Stockholm University. A substantial part of the work has also been funded by the department. I am of course indebted to a lot of people at the department who have provided me with both moral and intellectual support during the time of this study. Some of them need to be mentioned spe- cifically. First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisor Christina Garsten who helped me reconstruct an apparently too vast amount of text into a dissertation. Christina’s attentive style of reading and criticizing, her deep and wide knowledge that she shared generously, as well as our many construc- tive discussions, is what enabled me to mould the text into a finished piece of work. My assistant supervisor Johan Lindqvist also read the text several times and provided many useful comments that brought me new insights and made it possible for me to envision and rewrite different parts of the text in new ways. I would also like to thank my former supervisor Gudrun Dahl, who initi- ated this project, and who put a lot of time and effort into reading and com- menting on numerous drafts of the different chapters, as well as the whole text. My former assistant supervisor Karin Norman also read the whole text several times and provided useful comments that helped me structure the text in efficient ways. My fellow participants at the Stockholm Vasa Seminar – Urban Larssen, Philip Malmgren, and Mattias Viktorin – during the years read and commented on numerous drafts of the different chapters, as well as the whole thesis. They provided me with a stimulating intellectual environment where sharp criticism always was turned into encouragement, which kept me going though the road often seemed both slippery and uphill. Åsa Bartholdsson and Lotta Björklund Larssen both read and commented on different chapters in the thesis, for which I am grateful. Lina Lorentz and Susann Ullberg guided me through the rite of passage of getting the text from the final discussion to the printing works, that is, through a territory difficult to venture into alone. Peter Skoglund solved any kind of administra- tive business I anxiously needed help with. Many thanks also to the opponent at the final discussion, Torbjörn Friberg from Malmö Högskola, who did a great job in summarizing and criticizing the thesis. Not least impressive was the drawing of the dissertation that cap- tured the whole thesis in a single image – and which made the whole work appear so coherent that even the author of the thesis was a bit overwhelmed. I would also like to thank Handelsbankens Stipendiefonder for providing me with a grant without which I would not have managed to finish the thesis. Thora and Lennart Tunestad also provided me with financial – and an even more valued moral – support which helped me get this text, as well as my life, together. Catharina Burström Tunestad during the process of this work supported me in all possible ways – including financially, when I towards the end of this work had to become ‘man enough to let my wife support me’. Last but not least my thanks goes out to all informants, that is, all the people who were not bothered by having an anthropologist snooping around in their business, but gladly answered all my questions. Thank you all! Hans Introduction As I was in a hurry, I so hastily pulled the door open that everybody in the room turned their heads and stared at me. For a moment I hesitated; the chairs had been arranged in the form of a horseshoe, and I could sense what was coming. All the same, I entered the room and sat down on the last available of the ten chairs – and the seminar started. The two speakers presented themselves as psychotherapy students who had just finished a project on how to dimin- ish sick leave among the teachers in a school in a small town in southern Sweden. And then – as I had foreseen – before they told us more about their project, they wanted to hear about us and why we had come to their seminar! I immediately started sweating. It was the first days of May and while pondering how I should present myself to this very specific audience, I kept thinking that I should not have walked so fast when getting there. I was at a gathering called the Psychotherapy Fair, which takes place every second year in Stockholm, and though I certainly had an interest in psychotherapy, this interest was of a rather indirect character. For some time I had been pur- suing a research project about management consultancy, which had taken some unforeseen turns, including my appearance at this seminar. Through these unforeseen turns I had, however, started to sense that I could take my project in a more both challenging and rewarding direction. This promise, however, was still just a promise. I had not yet been able to conceive exactly where this challenging and rewarding direction would lead, and was not really sure if this was it. But now I unexpectedly had to lay out my plans in the open although they were still in an experimental stage and, moreover, to an audience of non-anthropologists – who would probably view them from perspectives different from my own, perhaps even misunderstand what I was about to say. Suddenly feeling trapped in a professional gathering of this kind, I felt I knew nothing about psychotherapy and would probably be seen as an intruder in the group. As I sat in the middle, four people presented themselves before me. I heard mentions of ‘teacher’, ‘counsellor’ – all persons involved in some kind of therapeutic or pedagogical work – as I tried to think about what I was going to say and, above all, how this would make the others react. However, the importance of some kind of personal development for efficient interac- tion was often stressed in management discourse. That sounded therapeutic enough. Suddenly it was my turn, and I heard myself saying that I was a PhD stu- dent in social anthropology involved in a research project that was at least 11 partly about how efficiency and personal development can be joined together. I had hardly shut my mouth before one of the speakers pointed her finger at me, smiled, and said: ‘That’s right! That’s right!’ She wrote my words on the whiteboard and said that it is not only about personal development, but also about health. ‘And’, her colleague added, ‘well-being!’ I suddenly realized that we had moved on to the next person who was now presenting herself and that what I had said did not appear strange at all – that is, not even in this context. On the contrary: I had obviously managed to say something very important! An hour later we had heard all about this project, which dealt with a school in southern Sweden that, like many other schools, had had a problem with stress-related illness among the teachers. The aim of the project had been to give the personnel the relevant knowledge and skills to cope with their own stress reactions. The sick leave was in this way diminished by 30 per cent in a year. The whole project had thus been an economic success, since the cost had already been earned. While the statistics showing this were displayed, I once again found a finger pointing at me, and then at the statistics: ‘There you have it!’ Afterwards, while pondering this experience, what I found most fascinat- ing was that my words, which had been so ‘right’ in describing this therapeutic project, had been inspired by the books I had read and the courses I had taken part in about the management of groups and teams.

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