FoB Business Administration Departmental Seminars: Liberating Alienation and Workers Consent at Amazon

Date: January 21, 2025 - Tuesday

Time: 14:00

Place: santralistanbul Campus, E1-301

Speaker: Patrizia Zanoni – School of Social Sciences, Hasselt University, BE

This talk examines how alienation fosters workers' consent to highly exploitative working conditions in an Amazon warehouse, often seen as a prefiguration of the 'future of work.’ We show that, differently from common understandings, alienation is double and contradictory. It mortifies workers by separating them from their work, the commodities they handle, their social relations with others, and their identities. Yet it also positively redefines them as sellers of labor, consumers, individuals worthy of respect, and rights holders. These latter roles give workers a novel sense of agency and self-development that elicits their consent and entangles them in capitalism.

Patrizia Zanoni is a Full Professor of Organization Studies at the School of Social Sciences, Hasselt University (Belgium). She draws on critical theories to investigate diversity, control and resistance, and alternative economies. She has recently published on racial capitalism and philanthropy and post-diversity digital workplaces.