On the psycho-emotional deficitisation of workers in the age of cognitive enhancement

Despite being the subject of public and scholarly debates for some time, the topic of cognitive enhancement remains theoretically under-developed in organisation studies. This is because the ‘dots’ still have to be ‘connected’ between macro-level phenomena (here, the therapeutic ethos and cognitive capitalism), and micro-level phenomena (in this case, cognitive abilities). In this essay, we use Fromm’s notion of social character to theorise dialectally about the interaction between these macro and micro-level phenomena. Doing so enables us to examine how the macro/micro interaction fosters to adoption of cognitive enhancement in the context of work, and what kinds of consequences might emerge from this. We propose the psycho-emotional deficitisation of workers as a central consequence of the aforementioned interaction, and define it as an internalised version of external ideals of what it means to be a productive worker under cognitive capitalism, which over time generates and reinforces the affective experience of being deficient. Our theorising around socially patterned defects of a cognitive kind has crucial ramification for our understanding of technology-mediated affective control at work and how human–technology interactions shape the subjectivities of workers towards greater self-inferiorisation vis-à-vis the perceived superiority of technology. We close by foreshadowing avenues for future research.