Theorising neoliberal anti-work politics through career negotiations in Singapore

Abstract

In Singapore, an increasing number of millennials are choosing to take up work as self-employed insurance and real estate agents (IAs and REAs). In this thesis, I critically examine their reasons for doing so, situating their motivations within larger developments in the world of work, including a rise in ‘anti-work’ sentiment. Like ‘quiet quitting’ and other popular anti-work practices emergent in recent times, I argue that IAs and REAs’ decisions to take up entrepreneurial self-employment are shaped by a broader crisis of work. More than an exploration of what constitutes a ‘good’ job when these are increasingly hard to come by, I critically analyse how entry into these professions can be read as strategies of resistance against a failing system of waged work. Yet, when measured against the utopian politics of alternatives at the heart of ‘post-work’ thought, the nature of such resistance is called into question, particularly with regard to how they reproduce rather than challenge the structural conditions responsible for the crisis of work in the first place. Through qualitative interviews with thirty millennial IAs and REAs, I explore how the appeal of these professions is underpinned by neoliberal rational logics that locate desires for autonomy, meaning, and freedom in market-based and financialised modes of recourse. Accordingly, this thesis makes the case that their career negotiations could meaningfully be theorised as a neoliberal form of anti-work politics that runs counter to the collective and emancipatory visions of radical post-work thought.