Accepting and Resisting Overwork: Illusio in the Accounting Field

This article contributes to the literature on resistance and compliance in the workplace. By drawing on illusio and its connections with habitus and field, this paper explores how professionals comply or resist pressures to overwork by drawing on individuals’ personal circumstances and background. Excessive working hours are widespread in accounting firms, thereby making this occupation a particularly rich setting for studying these phenomena. Based on 36 semi-structured interviews with professional accountants in France, I aim to answer the question: How can we explain the acceptance of and resistance to long working hours in a professional setting? By exploring this issue, this research focuses on understanding why some professionals are more susceptible than others to accepting or resisting organizational pressures to overwork. The findings suggest that a difficult personal background, family disengagement and taking on the role of breadwinner are facilitators for overwork and work absorption, as is adherence to the stakes of the accounting field. Absorbed professionals are more likely to present a visceral, non-reflective commitment to work, and not to oppose resistance even to the most unreasonable demands on work time. Competing devotions, events that break the routine such as maternity and divorce, and disillusionment with the stakes of the accounting field break the illusio, are likely to increase awareness and reflection, and thus facilitate resistance to absorption in work. Findings from this investigation suggest that women with children experience less work absorption than women without children or men.