Work Alienation in Emerging Countries: An Analysis of Practices and Mechanisms in Peruvian Companies

Neoliberal policies have disrupted work relationships across the world, intensifying their subordination to productivity and profit imperatives, turning them increasingly uncertain. Although companies have developed a rhetoric of concern for workers' integration and sa2tisfaction, many workers experience the workplace as an alienating environment. Research on work alienation has been given limited scholarly attention in the management sciences. Drawing on the perspectives of critical theory, organization studies, and business ethics, we analyzed the dynamics of alienation in large and medium companies in Peru, based on information coming from 53 in-depth interviews with workers in different industries. We examined practices of alienation along four dimensions (powerlessness, meaninglessness, self-estrangement, and social isolation), and elucidated the variety of reproduction, feedback, and resistance mechanisms through which alienating relationships are reinforced and contested. In the neoliberal world of work, alienation has become an increasingly sophisticated feature, which makes it particularly difficult to identify and criticize.