Part-time Work as Practising Resistance: The Power of Counter-arguments

Contributing to a Foucauldian perspective on ‘discursive resistance’, this paper theorizes how part‐time workers struggle to construct a valid position in the rhetorical interplay between norm‐strengthening arguments and norm‐contesting counter‐arguments. It is thereby suggested that both the reproductive and the subversive forces of resistance may very well coexist within the everyday manoeuvres of world‐making. The analysis of these rhetorical interplays in 21 interviews shows how arguments and counter‐arguments produce full‐time work as the dominant discourse versus part‐time work as a legitimate alternative to it. Analysing in detail the effects of four rhetorical interplays, this study shows that, while two of them leave unchallenged the basic assumptions of the dominant full‐time discourse and hence tend instead to reify the dominant discourse, two other interplays succeed in contesting the dominant discourse and establishing part‐time work as a valid alternative. The authors argue that the two competing dynamics of challenging and reifying the dominant are not mutually exclusive, but do in fact coexist.