Intimacy at Work? Non-Formal in-Work Forms of Resistance Underlining Human Dignity and Recognition

One of the persistent forms of resistance to the low quality of jobs in the new economy is the Anti-Work movement. As Kathy Weeks explains in hers “The problem with work”, it became impossible for young adults to accept their position as instrumental in someone else’s endless appetite for more profit. Next to the anti-work movement, other in-work forms of resistance emerged following the Covid “Great resignation” including organizational communication in the sense of intimate gestures between employees indicating recognition of out of work sources of sorrow and uncertainty. However, up until recently scholarship on Job quality has not updated its understanding of intrinsic dimensions of job quality leaving the increased need for inter-personal intimate connection at work, outside its accounts. Without a more thorough systematic understanding of the inter-personal form of resistance to workplace alienation and exploitation, employers’ responsibility for enabling this expression of human dignity, remains unexplored. Thus, I propose the need to extend the emphasis on intrinsic dimensions and begin shed light on employees’ longing for a sense of meaning in their work raising, already since long, the question of whether the search of intimacy at work. I ask, how can the discussion of the ‘great resignation’ be connected then to a revision of existing conceptualizations of job quality? As a first step towards an exploration of this issue I chose to focus on employees of ideological workplaces in which market principles of employment, primarily skill evaluation, are allegedly marginalized. Analyzing 20 semi-structured interviews I elicited a longing for intimacy at work that I propose to conceptualize in three ways: as an update on intrinsic dimensions of job quality; as a form of in-work resistance to existing over-emphasis on skills and productivity; and, as a response to the current poly-crises and the persistently increasing levels of uncertainty.