To be me or not to be me: About alienation

This article is about the experiential side of the concept of alienation and its relations to the stress process in the context of work and organization. We distinguish two kinds of alienation: primary alienation, the experience or feeling that something is different from normal, and secondary alienation, the absence of an experience of or feeling about something abnormal. After having gone into everyday reality and how it can be so disturbed that alienation ensues, we go further into the experiences involved in both kinds of alienation and their positive and negative consequences. Secondary alienation is described as a common final path in the second stage of a human stress process. In the discussion, we pay attention to the social scientific tradition of alienation as result of an evil societal influence, which has turned out to be an unfortunate approach. Instead, we advocate an approach that conceives alienation as the outcome of a personal choice. Lastly we indicate shortly what can be done about secondary alienation.