HOMO ECONOMICUS OR HOMO SUBVERSIVE? – A FOUCALTIAN ANALYSIS OF DECLARATIONS FROM TECH WORKERS IN FRONT OF THE LAYOFF ON LINKEDIN

Abstract

In recent years, around 600,000 (six hundred thousand) technology professionals around the world have been affected by layoffs. After being laid off, these workers published statements on their professional social network, LinkedIn. In view of this, this research aimed to analyze a corpus of 100 (one hundred) statements, to understand their rationale. To this end, a qualitative investigation was carried out, with the data being submitted to a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA), based on Camargo, Souza-Leão and Moura (2020). The results indicated two discursive formations: Homo Economicus and Homo Subversive. The first, which encompasses most of the statements, is based on a neoliberal rationality. The second demonstrated that the workers stopped to reflect, suffer and live the post-layoff process. In this way, this study contributed to the identification of the rationality to which the statements of workers affected by the layoff are linked and, furthermore, to the problematization of the historical and theoretical establishment of this subjectivity, aiming to highlight them so that it is possible to subvert them.