The Fetish of Personal Growth: Corporate Narratives and Career Development in the Business Services Sector

Abstract While multinationals have gradually located low-end office work in Eastern Europe, it is uncertain whether they can sustain career progression for large cohorts. Nevertheless, the promise of ‘growth’ is gaining currency. Based on more than 130 face-to-face interviews with young employees, HR staff, and managers in Romania, the article asks how these actors conceptualise such growth. It appears that despite its pervasiveness, companies and young employees alike rarely define the concept. When prompted, young people tend to offer rather diffuse projections and rely on corporate tropes. HR staff and managers associate growth with the labour market in general, referring to ‘personal growth’ as a strategic way to avoid making promises about ‘in-house’ advancement. We suggest that the ‘fetishisation’ of personal growth in corporate narratives is a rhetorical device used to increase adherence to routine tasks in a sector that remains unpredictable, prone to automation, and on the move. Deliberately underdefined and difficult to contradict, individual(ised), and able to incorporate crises, ‘personal growth’ fits well the capitalist need for legitimising accumulation in places where work can hardly provide meaning and self-worth.