Oral Presentation by Wolfgang Weber¹
¹ Universität Innsbruck, Austria
TIME: Wednesday, 15 July, 14:30 – 16:00
Location: Room 1
Session: 13
Abstract
Applied psychology is increasingly called upon to contribute, through its own research, to the analysis of the psychological and social consequences of economic, political, and ecological crises. For this reason, it will find it difficult to avoid incorporating social science conceptualizations of the relationship between economic structural conditions, associated social ideologemes, and their effects on the behavioral orientations of actors in the context of work and consumption into its theoretical development and empirical research. The prevailing fields of work, organizational, and economic (W-O-E) psychology have, however, scarcely drawn upon conceptual alternatives from the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory. In our view, this abstinence is responsible for the fact that the question of the extent to which capitalist principles can intrude into employees’ behavioural orientations and contribute to widespread dehumanization processes which induce repercussions on democratic societies remains both a theoretical and empirical desideratum within W-O-E psychology. This shortcoming continues even though conceptualizing a societal mediation of psychological and social processes and resulting socialization effects has been one of the main foci of the Frankfurt School. Thus, we will present a conceptualization of social alienation in the economic context. Despite certain conceptual differences, representative works by authors of the Frankfurt School (T. W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, H. Marcuse, E. Fromm) and their theoretical environment (J. Israel, A. Sohn-Rethel) that we have examined reveal a—more or less—shared conceptualization of social alienation. It’s core describes dehumanizing thought forms and perspectives of interaction that reduce one’s own person or other people to an imagined economic utility and reject universally applicable human dignity. Five interrelated dimensions can be classified at least: 1) Marketing Orientation ,2) Commodity Fetishism, 3) Economistic Reification of Humans, 4) Reification of Societal Conditions, 5) Impairment of Universal Perspective Taking. According to Critical Theory, these thought forms can result from organizational or consumption-related socialization processes in the workplace and the consumer sphere—and the more severe they are—the more strongly radical capitalist principles of economic activity and management are implemented in those contexts. On this critical-theoretical basis, we have constructed the Social Alienation in the Economy Questionnaire encompassing those five dimensions of alienation. Using the conceptualization and the questionnaire as examples, we would like to discuss the extent to which concepts from Critical Theory can also be applied to emancipatory research within the framework of quantitative data analysis methods, thereby helping to address fundamental research gaps in traditional W-O-E psychology.