Biopolitical construction of work life in neoliberalism: A socio-psychological analysis

Neoliberalism is a whole of policies that make a rebuildable liberal capitalist governmentality a way of life and socialize the market mind. Governmentality, which aims at norm and normalization through law, discipline, control and supervision, is an art of management that carries company management to the state structure and working life. Biopolitics, which subjects individuals, states and societies by generating consent through body and population, re-establishes social reality and way of life through selfhood and the game of truth. Neoliberal policies such as flexibility, minimal state, privatization, free trade and low wages, formed by the concern for self of capital, produce neo-subjects that market while providing freedom and security to the working life. This study focuses on the theoretical context of the biopolitical processes that transform working life in neoliberalism that emerged from the 1970s, and the applications it implements in the triangle of state, society and individuals, and its analysis from a socio-psychological perspective. From here, neoliberal policies and biopolitical stages focus on the capacity and effects of self-entrepreneurial neo-subjects. The neo-subject, who is expected to govern himself with his own techniques and adapt to neoliberal biological processes, gains an identity that assumes infinite risk and responsibility and adopts company ethics with the desire for continuous development, success and competition. Working neo-subjects who fear failure, inadequacy and loss in the delusion of freedom, are subjected to a shift in character, identity and value, along with the flow of time and space, and lose their reassurance and autonomy on the brink of depression and symbolization.