Unpacking ‘Workplace Gaslighting’ as Labour Control in China’s White-Collar Workplace

This article develops the concept of ‘workplace gaslighting’ to illustrate a sophisticated form of despotic control between direct coercion and consent generation, adding a conceptual tool in labour process analysis. Drawing on discussions on social media, it demonstrates how workplace gaslighting combines coercion (managerial authority, close supervision, and vertical bullying) with emotional manipulation (ostensible caring and rewarding from managers) to facilitate labour control and exacerbate overtime work. Following the tradition of connecting labour process with a larger political economy in labour process analysis, this article further demonstrates how workplace gaslighting is enabled by a broader social context that is characterised by the normalisation of overtime work, a historical legacy from the danwei system, and a pervasive neoliberal ideology that emphasises individual efforts and personal growth. It also reveals how workers’ (constrained) agency is largely conditioned by the neoliberal ideology as they connect workplace gaslighting with its structural enablement on the one hand and advocate individualistic solutions such as job-hopping on the other.