Abstract
‘Mobbing’ is concerted workplace harassment undertaken by managers and co-workers. Still something of a neologism in workplace discourse, Noelle Molé’s project in Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy provides an ethnography of it as both a word and set of practices. As a relatively recent phenomenon though, it is important to distinguish mobbing from more traditional understandings of workplace harassment or bullying. Much of the writing on these concepts is often based on psychodynamic principles, with the result that practical advice to victims or HR and legal practitioners is often simplistic and one-dimensional. Molé is a medical anthropologist and she does an excellent job explaining mobbing as a sociological concern emerging from larger cultural and political ‘turns’, whilst demonstrating the impact that these have on the health and well-being of mobbees.
Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to be the victim of a bully will have noticed the almost effortless way in which they degrade and dehumanize. Mobbing, as Molé demonstrates, is far from effortless. It involves a huge amount or work on the part of a group of workers to develop and execute strategies which isolate and exclude colleagues. The ‘ABC of what to do when you are being bullied at work’ will prove pretty useless against large-scale bullying-by-stealth underpinned by a global neoliberal turn.
It is difficult to provide a typology of mobbing, because as Molé makes clear, it involves an array of practices and states (emotional, embodied identifications) that are enacted in various ways. Examples of women, in particular, being isolated by their employers and co-workers on the basis of being too old, young, slow, pregnant, aggressive, passive, social, anti-social, committed etc. are peppered throughout the text. Molé employs a useful device in the form of discussions about the Italian film I like to Work: Mobbing, where a middle-aged, single parent who enjoys her job suddenly finds her tools and workspace unexpectedly appropriated without explanation. She is given less interesting non-jobs to do until eventually dumped into a hostile all-male silo, leading to a subsequent breakdown, which even then is policed by her employer’s corporate doctor. The isolation and disorientation experienced by the mobbed worker in I Like to Work: Mobbing is something of a touchstone throughout Labor Disorders for Molé’s interviewees, many of whom went through similar experiences.
Mobbing in Italy began at the point when that country began to seriously engage with neoliberal policies, and divisions began to emerge between those who had benefited from the solid employment protections of the past and new entrants to precarious, unprotected labour markets. The inhabitants of workplaces adapting to employment practices which disregard the ethics of providing individuals with a sense of ontological security articulate this disdain through new everyday practices. One of these is mobbing, which Molé describes as ‘a form of abjection in that it is produced by labor’s rapid devaluation in proximity to lived safeguards and allows actors to name the injustices and human costs of neoliberal orders’ (p. 9). Neoliberalism’s lionization of individual agency has contributed to the gradual, tacit emergence of new forms of worker subjectivity which have gestated in an unpolicy of ‘capitalism-above-all’.
Workers make sense of mobbing as a way to downsize in the face of stringent employee protectionism. Molé, however, shows that there is much more to this. Such economic rationalizations are perhaps not surprising, seeing as this is what neoliberalism is all about, but mobbing is ageist (Italian workers are most at risk in their 40s) and sector-specific (the private sector). Most importantly, mobbing is gendered, with women most at risk. The discourse around mobbing as a problem has been medicalized. In other words it is discussed as an issue related to individual psychological health, ultimately producing its own sub-industry in the form of clinics, counselling practices, legal practices, education etc. The medicalization of mobbing diverts attention away from the politically seeded roots of the problem.
The ways in which people make sense of ideas about behaviour at work are often the best indicators to the doxa which have come to underpin our subjectivities at this stage of late or ‘millennial’ capitalism. As stated at the outset of this review, Molé has conducted an ethnographic study of the ‘idea’ of mobbing. As such she is not anchored to studying one group. In examining how the idea has been circulated and understood, she explores how various groups of professionals experience and make sense of the concept.
The book begins with something of a pre-history of mobbing. The first chapter provides the context through a neatly executed economic history of labour and the recent taste for neoliberal labour reforms resulting in the significant social trope of precariousness. This is why mobbing, although particularly salient to the Italian labour situation, is specifically a problem of neoliberalism. The idea of precariousness is unpacked further in examining cultural and legal understandings of work and mobbing before examining how workers (particularly female workers) deal with the practice. The final three chapters examine how the health concerns attached to mobbing are understood, demonstrating the manifold ways in which cultural understandings and political technologies are written onto workers bodies.
Any set of accounts that are concerned with practices like mobbing (workplace bullying, sexual harassment etc.) will frequently make for upsetting reading. Labor Disorders is no different in this regard. However, alongside Karen Ho’s Liquidated (2009), it is one of the most engaging ethnographies of the contemporary workplace and of what is happening to the people who navigate it. Molé teaches on Princeton University’s Writing Programme and her students obviously learn from a talented written communicator who skilfully blends evocative accounts with theoretical rigour throughout. Labor Disorders is essential research for anyone interested in what happens to worker subjectivities under the neoliberal hegemony.