“Work Hard, Play Hard”: The Moral Economy of Company Celebrations in Post-Socialist Bulgaria

Abstract

This article explores shifts in workplace festivities in Bulgaria as part of the transition from socialism to post-socialism and analyses how work celebrations are used to express and uphold the moral economies informing them. During the socialist period, labour was glorified and work celebrations were a key instrument in the ideological and cultural engineering efforts of the state. Since the 1990s, private business owners have been reinterpreting and (re-)inventing festive traditions to stage their identities and moral orientations in discursive and performative ways. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation in industrial production and high-tech companies from 2017 to 2019, I argue that highly mediated company celebrations are, in the wake of promotional cultures, an opportunity for employers to brand themselves as “good.” Such events also model the expectations of a “good employee,” for example, to be competitive not only regarding one’s work but also in having fun, as part of work, which is a reflection of the general insistence on happiness in the neoliberal workplace.