“My Boss is a Pick-Up Artist”: Constructing Overwork Regime Through Mental Manipulation Among Chinese White-Collar Employees

• In Event: 50220 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14: Work-Life

Abstract

Overwork is a defining feature of Chinese white-collar workplaces, reinforced through Pick-Up Artist (PUA)-style managerial control, which blends coercion, mental manipulation, and ideological conditioning. Drawing on 85 qualitative interviews, this study examines how PUA management functions as a labor control mechanism, ensuring employees internalize overwork as an expectation rather than a choice. Unlike traditional labor control, which relies on material incentives or direct coercion, PUA tactics operate through guilt, self-doubt, and compliance testing, trapping workers in cycles of relentless striving. PUA represents a hybrid of normative and coercive control, adapting to economic conditions. During economic growth, overwork is framed as a path to success, but as wages stagnate and job insecurity rises, PUA shifts toward despotic enforcement, relying on fear and dependency to sustain compliance. Furthermore, PUA managerial control builds on China’s test-driven education system, where self-worth is tied to external evaluation. This “good student mindset” conditions workers to equate excessive labor with personal value, making them particularly vulnerable to PUA control even when rewards diminish. By examining its self-sustaining nature through corporate hierarchies, recruitment, and managerial training, this study also demonstrates how PUA-style control has become institutionalized, sustaining overwork even in the absence of financial incentives.

Author

• Rose Xueqing Zhang, University of British Columbia