Christian Maravelias

Post-Bureaucracy - control through professional freedom

This article develops a framework for understanding autonomy and control in post‐bureaucratic organizations. It reviews two dominant discourses on post‐bureaucracy – the managerial discourse and the critical management discourse. Whereas the one pictures post‐bureaucracy as an emancipating regime based on the personalities and social networks of individuals, the other pictures it as a totalitarian regime, which subordinates individuals’ thoughts, emotions and identities to its instrumental schemes. Both discourses are criticized for being grounded in a view of post‐bureaucracy as a “total” organization. An alternative conceptualization is developed, which shows that post‐bureaucracy neither emancipates individuals from control, nor captures them in totalitarian control. A distinguishing characteristic of post‐bureaucracy is that it displaces the responsibility for setting limits between professional and non‐professional concerns from the organization to the individual. Via a case study it is shown how this implies a specific form of control that does not restrict individual freedom, but uses it as its prime vehicle.

Identity regulation in neo-liberal societies: constructing the ‘occupationally disabled’ individual

This article studies the formation and regulation of individual identities among a group of people who after long periods of unemployment are put in a specialized work program for so called ‘occupationally disabled’ individuals. In contrast to its official aim to activate and rehabilitate participants back to the labour market, the study suggests that the work program constitutes the participants as passive and unable to meet the criteria of employability on the labour market. The term ‘occupationally disabled’ emerges not as a medical label referring to already existing, inner characteristic of the individuals concerned, but as an identity that they take on as they pass through the work program. The article contributes to existing research of the formation and regulation of individual identities in organizations in two regards: first, by showing how medicine participates in the formation and regulation of individual identities in organizations, and second, by relating the formation and regulation of individual identities to broader societal issues concerning neoliberal government. Our study suggests that there is a tendency in neo-liberal societies to combine medical and economic expertise into a ‘medico-economic discourse’ within which issues concerning individuals’ activity and agency are transformed into matters of illness and disability. That is, whereas active and self-governing individuals are governed as parts of a high-performing segment of the working population, our study suggests that passive and dependent individuals tend to be governed not just as parts of a low performing segment of the working population, but also as a disabled segment.

March Meets Marx: The Politics of Exploitation and Exploration in the Management of Life and Labour

In contrast to the largely functionalist and apolitical literature which dominates organisational scholarship on exploitation and exploration after March, this paper seeks to complement this view of exploitation and exploration with a Marxist reading which is unwittingly implied by these terms. More specifically, we combine neo-Marxist and paleo-Marxist arguments to more fully understand the conflictual relations that underpin exploitation and exploration in the management of firms. This enables us to address both the objective and subjective dimensions of exploitation and exploration which firms and workers are involved in through the contemporary capitalist labour process. We illustrate this by drawing on a case study of a large Swedish manufacturing firm which sought to improve lean production by systematically helping employees to explore their own lifestyles and possibilities for a healthier and happier life.

Faster, harder, longer, stronger – management at the threshold between work and private life: The case of work place health promotion

This paper studies Work Place Health Promotion at two international corporations as an example of an unobtrusive control that targets employees’ lifestyles. It uses Michel Foucaults concepts of neoliberal governmentality and post-disciplinary control to show how Work Place Health Promotion breaks with the disciplinary logic of control most commonly associated with studies of unobtrusive controls in organizations. While discipline is centripetal, correcting employees’ misconduct so that they freely keep within prescribed norms, Work Place Health Promotion is centrifugal, targeting employees’ lifestyles and promoting those existing faculties and inclinations that may increase their activity, performance and their health. It hereby emerges as less restrictive than organizational discipline, but also as more discriminating. For not only does it subject employees’ lifestyles to an economic logic of investment and disinvestment, it also contributes to an exclusion of employees that fail in this regard in the name of their lack of health.

Identity Regulation in Neo-liberal Societies : Learning to Behave as an ‘Occupationally Disabled’ Individual in Sweden

This article studies the formation and regulation of individual identities among a group of people who after long periods of unemployment are put in a specialized work program for so called ‘occupationally disabled’ individuals. In contrast to its official aim to activate and rehabilitate participants back to the labour market, the study suggests that the work program constitutes the participants as passive and unable to meet the criteria of employability on the labour market. The term ‘occupationally disabled’ emerges not as a medical label referring to already existing, inner characteristic of the individuals concerned, but as an identity that they take on as they pass through the work program. The article contributes to existing research of the formation and regulation of individual identities in organizations in two regards: first, by showing how medicine participates in the formation and regulation of individual identities in organizations, and second, by relating the formation and regulation of individual identities to broader societal issues concerning neoliberal government. Our study suggests that there is a tendency in neo-liberal societies to combine medical and economic expertise into a ‘medico-economic discourse’ within which issues concerning individuals’ activity and agency are transformed into matters of illness and disability. That is, whereas active and self-governing individuals are governed as parts of a high-performing segment of the working population, our study suggests that passive and dependent individuals tend to be governed not just as parts of a low performing segment of the working population, but also as a disabled segment.

Identity regulation in neo-liberal societies

This article studies the formation and regulation of individual identities among a group of people who after long periods of unemployment are put in a specialized work program for so called ‘occupationally disabled’ individuals. In contrast to its official aim to activate and rehabilitate participants back to the labour market, the study suggests that the work program constitutes the participants as passive and unable to meet the criteria of employability on the labour market. The term ‘occupationally disabled’ emerges not as a medical label referring to already existing, inner characteristic of the individuals concerned, but as an identity that they take on as they pass through the work program. The article contributes to existing research of the formation and regulation of individual identities in organizations in two regards: first, by showing how medicine participates in the formation and regulation of individual identities in organizations, and second, by relating the formation and regulation of individual identities to broader societal issues concerning neoliberal government. Our study suggests that there is a tendency in neo-liberal societies to combine medical and economic expertise into a ‘medico-economic discourse’ within which issues concerning individuals’ activity and agency are transformed into matters of illness and disability. That is, whereas active and self-governing individuals are governed as parts of a high-performing segment of the working population, our study suggests that passive and dependent individuals tend to be governed not just as parts of a low performing segment of the working population, but also as a disabled segment.