Experiencing the everyday busyness of the ‘achievement-subject’: An organisational ethnographic study of third sector workers

Third sector organisations are facing the dilemma of remaining operational by adapting to more entrepreneurial approaches and competing for government contracts. In this environment, I contended that third sector studies have focused mainly on the conceptualisation of the organisational process of becoming business-like through technologies of control and managerial governance. However, there is less attention on how professionalised third sector actors are managing the performative pressures of change through technologies of self-control. Therefore, I present a novel theoretical lens to understand a new form of neoliberal subjectivities that affect the lives of those who work in the third sector. Drawing on philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s concepts of the achievement society (2015) and psychopolitics (2017), I offer an enriched empirical account of a new leadership style that is encouraging workers to develop an everlasting production line of accountable results and converting workers into ‘achievement-subjects’. This study highlights how the third sector workers' identities are formed in an organisational culture of maximising achievements and in a workplace, which is characterised by a continuous and exhausting neoliberal busyness.

The research setting is a well-established charity in the UK that is in the process of opening a social enterprise to create a more sustainable future. The thesis contributes a deeper interpretation of neoliberal smart power to the small number of organisational ethnographic studies of professionalised third sector organisations. This project includes 10 months of ethnographical experience that is enriched by the views of paid-staff, volunteers, trustees and beneficiaries, and includes one organisation workshop, twenty-two semi-structured interviews, participant observations, team observations, photographic records, a short film, one campaign event, and a pilot Photovoice project. Whilst this project is based on UK third sector workers, it is equally applicable to third sector organisations elsewhere that are looking into more commercial strategies of financial sustainability.