Accounting for Consent: Exploring the Reproduction of the Labour Process

Abstract

This article draws on the case of a UK bank to consider why branch employees tolerated conditions that impoverished their working lives. The article explores how we are defined as particular types of subject and how we turn ourselves into subjects. The particular focus is on how we simultaneously understand ourselves as economic, cultural and autonomous subjects and how this contributes to the production of consent. It is argued that our propensity to adopt complex and shifting identities, in relation to a variety of discourses, engages and constitutes us as consenting subjects.