'What (more) do you want from me?': An analysis of Employee Engagement

Stringer, Mark (2025) 'What (more) do you want from me?': An analysis of Employee Engagement. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis attends to the unconscious within organizations that place a particular emphasis on the practice of Employee Engagement (EE) as a Master signifier. Since its emergence through Kahn’s (1990) foundational text within organization studies, EE has lacked an agreed upon signification – arguably thus sous rature - whilst a body of ‘knowledge’ of it has been gleaned via research that has been undertaken, in the main, via a quantitative lens. In a return to Kahn’s (ibid.) work in relation to issues of meaningfulness, safety and availability, the aim has been to provide a different reading of EE from a qualitative, psychoanalytic, Lacanian position to both add and subtract from discourses surrounding EE, embracing a sense of ‘traumatic’ knowledge (Nobus & Quinn, 2014). Encounters with the unconscious at work, at work, in relation to the function, construction and situating of workers responding to organizational demands to perform as ‘Engaged Employees’ are foregrounded. In doing so, I ask: ‘How can taking a Lacanian perspective contribute to providing an alternative reading of EE within contemporary organizational spaces?’ Method Primary data was collected via a mixture of 20, 1:1 interviews of workers working within organizations that belong to the Engage For Success (EFS) network within the UK alongside a focus group consisting of EE consultants who also form part of the same network. Secondary and observational / textual material from attendance at two EFS conferences are also spoken to. Alongside this, a focussed literature review selecting previous qualitative EE research work in relation to providing an a priori conceptual coding was undertaken. The analysis throughout has utilised Lacanian psychoanalytic theorization to probe the unconscious at work for subjects in relation to the organizational demand - that of being an ‘engaged worker’- this demand from the Other received by the subject as ‘What (more) do you want from me?’. Results In responding to Kahn’s foundational tri-partite model of EE (Meaningfulness, Safety and Availability), the application of Lacanian theorization offers us reading of worker’s struggling with engaged performances. These speak to a functional form of pathological wish fulfilment at an organizational level, the constructions of working environments through the utilization of unconscious desire and the performance of EE, via its role as an ideological discourse. Albeit one based on fantasy, that is endlessly replayed and repeated in attempting to gloss over a structural lack through interpellating the working subject’s own lack, desire and jouissance to that of the organization placed as Other. Implications This research provides plausible insights on the performance of EE as a ‘win/win’ process within the highlighted organizations which has eluded both the subjects qua workers and within much previous EE scholarship. Rather than taking what has been an approach to EE that has been based within an ego-psychological stance, in using a Lacanian approach, in utilising the desire of the analyst, an appreciation of absolute difference may begin to provide different views on a variety of issues. This speaks but is not limited to those of meaning, identity, anxiety, burnout, wellbeing and productivity. And that, in taking such an approach, this foregrounds both the costs borne by the unconscious by working subjects within contemporary workspace EE discourse and to begin to work in ways that speaks to the ethics of desire at work, at work.

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