From a distance: How the social organisation of labour conditions personal attachment to work

Employees are more often than not personally invested in their work. Such affective investment has been both praised as a potential source of self-fulfilment and condemned as a form of labour extraction. However, we aim to examine how employees in white-collar jobs navigate the multiple work and labour facets of their employment. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a revelatory context, with the unexpected collapse of work-life articulations, we draw upon 50 semi-structured interviews of employees in a French private organisation of higher education. We show how individuals interrogated their investment in their employment as labour, yet not into their work as subjective endeavour. Moreover, we analyse how the material and social context of the social organisation of labour conditions individuals’ personal attachment to work. Finally, we discuss the struggle for a meaningful experience of working in higher education after decades of new public management.