Dilara Baysal - The Making of the Autonomous Creative Worker: Managerial Labour in Tech Startups

How do managers organize workers whose jobs depend on creativity, collaboration, and autonomy?

Drawing on interviews with managers working in technology startups across Canada, Dr. Dilara Baysal examines how managerial labour shapes the social, emotional, and subjective dimensions of work. While traditional management focused on efficiency, standardization, and coordination, modern workplaces increasingly require managers to foster motivation, engagement, and strong interpersonal relationships.

This talk explores how managers cultivate collaboration, navigate workplace tensions, motivate employees, and align personal aspirations with organizational goals. Situating these contemporary practices within the historical relationship between management and psychology, Baysal shows how managing work has come to involve the production and management of subjectivity itself.

By examining the everyday realities of startup workplaces, the presentation sheds light on how the figure of the "autonomous creative worker" is not simply discovered, but actively produced and sustained through managerial practices.

About the Speaker

Dr. Dilara Baysal is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Bishop's University specializing in artificial intelligence, the future of work, and labour policy. Her research focuses on work and labour, technology, worker agency and resistance, subjectivity, and the social and institutional transformations reshaping contemporary workplaces.

Her current research examines knowledge workers' experiences with generative AI, including issues related to layoffs, reskilling, and organizational change. More broadly, she investigates how workers navigate technological change and how institutions and public policy influence these processes.