Whether one finds employment as a bank clerk, a caregiver, a part-timer in an uncertain position, or as a 'free' creative, work stress, exhaustion, burnout, and depression have long since become a mass phenomenon. Explanations for the wave of fatigue are many; pharmacological promise of a cure and therapeutic offers related to stress management are booming. Their common denominator: work-related exhaustion is indeed a mass phenomenon, but it must be overcome on a case-by-case basis. By way of contrast, Stefanie Graefe undertakes a perspective shift: according to her central thesis, burnout is a willful disruption of the boundary-dissolving (self-)economization demand under a flexible capitalism, and therefore is also a form of societal criticism.

Stefanie Graefe (Dr. phil.) ist Soziologin und arbeitet an der Universität Jena. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Governmentality Studies, Bio- und Gesundheitspolitiken, Soziologie des Alter(n)s sowie qualitative Sozialforschung.