Talking About Job Burnout in Germany: The Disappearance and Reemergence of Conflicts in Subjective Narrations

Abstract

Since the end of the last century, new types of work, employment and management have caused substantial changes in contemporary subjectivity. In the meantime, an increasing social consciousness may be observed with regard to psychosocial problems caused by working stress. At the same time, the “psychomedicalization of the social” is gaining in significance in almost every area of social reality. In a German context, the chapter proposes (a) a perspective to theorise the complex relation between these socio-discursive interpretation schemes and the subjective knowledge of psychosocial working stress developed under contemporary working conditions and (b) an exemplary analysis of two interviews from a qualitative narrative-based study with persons from different working areas who severely suffered from psychosocial working stress (e.g. burnout, depression). The analysis shows how and to what extent stressful working experiences are framed by medicalized interpretation schemes, but also how these are used in multifaceted and often creative ways, in order to re-establish and/or maintain personal and biographical agency.