This psychoanalytic study of affective labour focuses on its two central elements: human contact and love. It is based on a multi-sited organizational ethnography of the fine-dining sector in Istanbul, Turkey, where new restaurant areas known as ‘show kitchens’ place chefs in face-to-face contact with patrons. To understand the psychosocial processes of affective production, we analyze chefs’ and patrons’ experiences of encounters in and around ‘show kitchens’. We demonstrate that affect is produced through unconscious contact mediated by socio-cultural representations, which are hegemonized by the ethos of love for one’s job. We contribute to the extant literature on affective labour by studying the desirous interplay between producers and consumers of affect. Specifically, we theorize the role of the psyche in affective production, and offer a new, psychoanalytic conceptualization of affective labour. We conclude by discussing our conceptualization’s organizational and political implications.

Psychosocial research, which explores the unconscious and affective dynamics of organizational and social phenomena from critical perspectives, often adopts ethnographic methods. However, its locus, the unconscious, has an obscure, diffuse and dynamic nature that calls into question two central assumptions of conventional organizational ethnography: that an organization is a self-contained physical (research) site, and ethnographic research is best led by participant observation. The unconscious is produced by countless agents dispersed across time and space, making it impossible to readily identify a research site. Furthermore, psychosocial phenomena cannot be physically demarcated because a multitude of discourses, imagery, psyches, bodies, and objects are enmeshed in them. These raise contentious ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions for psychosocial researchers. In this article, we ruminate on “the field” in psychosocial organizational ethnography, seeking a robust epistemological and methodological approach to constructing and dwelling in an unconscious research site. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, we present a conceptual discussion of these issues and translate them into ethnographic methods illustrated by examples from the authors’ research. By critically re-evaluating the question of “the field,” we contribute to ethnographic studies of organizational phenomena with “fuzzy fields” without self-evident boundaries that draw on diverse onto-epistemologies.

No abstract