The Teleworker Subject and Neoliberal Rationality

Abstract

The study of telework has expanded in the various areas of knowledge, motivated, in large part, by the expansion of the activity around the world, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. By identifying in the literature on the subject the predominance of prescriptions to adaptations of the modality and the focus on its advantages and disadvantages, we suggest an extension of the approach to the telework phenomenon for these aspects. This essay has argued that telecommuting expands in the context of neoliberalism and that legitimate practices and discourses correspond to the emergence of a neoliberal subject. Its objective is to discuss the evidence of neoliberal practices and discourses empirically analyzed by two studies on telework and rescued specific moments of the relationship between non-capitalist modes of production of work and their corresponding subjective elaborations on the part of workers. Finally, it is suggested that the proper understanding of telework consider the contextual, historical and cultural determinations in which the phenomenon is inserted.