When friendship becomes a must: Exploring workplace friendship in a culture of fun

While friendship at the workplace is often idealized, both in the literature as well as in practice, this paper problematizes the uncritical endorsement of the phenomenon by drawing attention to another (possibly darker) side of workplace friendship. Empirically, the paper is based on a three months ethnography in an organization which embraces a ‘culture of fun and freedom’ where friendship is almost prescribed. While indicating a range of positive experiences associated with the celebration of friendship, fun and freedom, the study also documents how inviting the ‘whole’ self to work can come with (unintended) implications of conflicting roles, social exclusion and heightened insecurity. Theoretically, we discuss these findings along Foucault’s notion of biopower, which points at the broader individual but also organizational and societal implications of these new forms of organizing. Furthermore, we propose and conceptually develop the concept of ‘performative friendship’, which draws attention to the pitfalls of workplace friendship, especially in those cases where organizational members do not ‘perform’ well on this dimension.