Contemporary French Storytelling and Workplace Bullying: Narratives of Suffering

This thesis contextualises and analyses the wave of fictional storytelling on workplace bullying in France since the year 2000, in novels as well as films and stage plays. It critically analyses more than a dozen such stories with a view to determining how they reflect the lived experiences of workers. It argues that storytelling provides a counterweight to the tightly controlled internal messaging of organisations, through human resources’ practices that tend to subvert the actions, language and, sometimes, the very thoughts of employees, so as to promote a sense of common interest. It asserts that these practices also have a propensity to treat workers as commodities and necessarily disregard their individuality, through the use of pervasive performance standards and competencies, to further business objectives. Each story is analysed from the perspectives of critical commentaries and research from France and elsewhere, focussing on the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, medicine, anthropology, sociology, literary analysis, economics, law and business management. In addition, this thesis examines how fiction reflects changes in the nature of the French economy, organisations and work itself since the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s, especially the increasing importance of digitally enabled working environments where work performance can be continually controlled and measured at a distance. Through these stories, the thesis also explores the shift in the nature of workplace bullying over the last 40 years from largely physical coercion to situations in which psychological pressure has now become dominant. In this context, in particular, it examines how fiction illustrates the psychological pressures on knowledge workers, in-house clinical specialists and witnesses to bullying.