Eric Pezet

Enterprising Selves: How Governmentality Meets Agency

The project of the special issue came about as a result of an ESRC seminar series based around Alvesson and Willmott’s (2002) discussion regarding the regulation of identity. Subsequently, we were involved in organizing in 2006 an EGOS sub-theme group in Bergen, Norway concerned with enterprising selves, which generated a set of debates that Graeme Salaman and John Storey review in the fi rst part of this special issue. To date, there has been relatively little work exploring the impact of enterprise initiatives on individuals’ identities (Storey et al., 2005) so this special issue aims to help address this gap. Further, emerging from these developments is a suggestion of a new orientation to the study of governmentality. Salaman and Storey argue that many scholars have approached enterprise from the perspective of bureaucracy and discipline. However, they contend that much of such research has involved a ‘misuse’ of discourse, in over-emphasizing its role to the exclusion of all else. In its place, Salaman and Storey argue for more nuanced and empirically based work exploring the ways enterprise is understood, valued, interpreted and deployed within organizations which are committed to achieving enterprise. Tara Fenwick responds in this debate and reinforces this idea, concurring that there is a need for ‘careful empirical tracings of complex everyday interactions of people, objects, spaces and meanings, analysing specifi c movements and moments of enterprise and its multiple potential effects’ (p. 331).

CFTC/CFDT Attitudes towards Immigration in the Parisian Region: Making Immigrant Workers’ Condition a Cause

This paper, which is based on the detailed analysis of the post-war archives of the French Christian union Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens (CFTC), which became the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) in 1964, highlights the difficulties, both from a practical and ideological point of view, for a militant organisation to embrace the cause of immigrant workers and to give them a voice. The CFDT had to ‘construct’ immigrant workers as a group they could represent, which means as a group that relates to French workers, despite possible xenophobia. A key moment was the denunciation of their housing conditions that make immigrant workers not competitors in the job market but victims of injustice. The union had to reinvent its engagement frames in order to include the specific problems faced by the immigrant workforce. The study shows that the urban dimension was essential in this process as Paris slums made visible an important plight of migrants and provided the opportunity to change public opinion.

Afterword: segmentation, reorientation and new exclusions

There are a number of ideas that have emerged across the papers within this special issue, which can provide the basis for our conclusions, albeit tentative. We have considered governmentality by focusing on an aspect rarely dealt with in management: that of the population (Foucault, 1991). Additionally, we contend that across the whole population, it appears that the role of segmentation has risen in importance, necessitating exploration of the rationality of ‘management’ of populations, in both the managerial and political senses. In the empirical papers in the special issue, a recurrent theme consists of how both organizations and the state engage with how best to segment the population. We argue that that this creates a need to revisit both theoretically and empirically the way in which populations are organized, considered and managed. Additionally, there arises an interesting need by those who govern: the need to wait and assess the response of the citizen. In a traditional welfarist position, the population has been regarded as an object with which it is unnecessary to interact, albeit the population needs to be understood with regards to demographic outcomes, say, of the ‘good’ done on their behalf (e.g. how many are healthy or ill). However, we argue that within ‘new governmentality’, there is a need to understand

Foucault and Managerial Governmentality: Rethinking the Management of Populations, Organizations and Individuals

‘Governmentality’ refers to the ways that the social is imagined and governed. The term originated with Michel Foucault who provided only glimpses of what he meant. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller are central figures to the ‘London governmentalists’ who have used this approach to mapping the social by various accounting and psychological techniques. Following Foucault, Miller and Rose have examined the ways that accounting numbers and psychological metrics have simultaneously created a social and individuals that are knowable and manageable. Above all, they insist that ‘governmentalisation’ is a type of process that is not monopolised by the state but has become increasingly ubiquitous. We begin by assessing the important contribution of the ‘London governmentalists’, especially Rose’s contributions about the history of psychology. Here the governmentalists entreat us to trace the activities of those ‘little engineers of the soul’, who translate broad philosophies of governing into local measurable practices. We take this seriously and look beyond the programmatic level to examine the practice and experience of one group of ‘everyday Einsteins.’ Second, we consider the case of ‘Psyche’, a multinational consultancy who provide, among other things, psychometric testing and counselling. Finally, we consider one of Psyche’s products, a psychometric test and its associated counselling for individuals, as a ‘technology of the self’. Psyche is a multinational consultancy organisation. The firm has grown from a small regional operation to a highly profitable multinational in less than twenty years. It concentrates on blue chip clients and provides them with a range of psychological, mentoring and teambuilding services. Psyche’s mainstay is psychometric testing. Psyche’s history is bound up with its founder’s lengthy and worldwide search for personal enlightenment. This ended with his encounter with the psychology and philosophy of Jung. This personal encounter was transformed into Psyche’s ‘USP’, infusing psychometric testing techniques with Jung. There are two paradoxes that I’d like to explore. First, there is a clear tension between the technical, statistical expertise that underpins and validates psychometric testing and the important undercurrent of Jungian mysticism evident in the organisation and management, its building and its techniques. Second, key members of Psyche’s staff were attracted to the organisation by a combination of its charismatic founder and by the possibilities for self-improvement that their work offered. In practice, the dominance of the statistical has squeezed out much of the space for applying Jungian psychology to their own working – or personal lives. Finally, we consider how Psyche deploys psychometric testing as a ‘technology of the self’. Every test generates a lengthy report on the individual’s preferences, separated into four domains, each denoted by a colour. In turn, this report can be further refined into more specific sub-categories. Through reflecting on her or his report, the individual’s initial response is to confirm its accuracy and to identify those surprises whose truth is revealed by reflection. The end of the report identifies how each personality trait is actually deployed in one’s work role; and proceeds to compare this everyday use of the self with the ‘real’ self identified by the test. Inevitably, this comparison demonstrates degrees of harmony and dissonance. For instance, the analytical ‘cool blue’ personality who is most comfortable at the margins of organisational life but whose work role compels her or him to – uncomfortably – accentuate the supportive, collegial aspects of their personality; that is their ‘sunshine yellow’. The comparison between the ‘real’ self and the workaday self provides space – perhaps shock – of identification of dissonance. Counselling – a form of one-to-one facilitation – deepens the individual’s awareness and allows them to become more skilled, more disciplined in the use of Psyche’s analytical tools. In this way, Psyche contends, the individual can become a more effective therapist of the self. Psyche is careful to refute any suggestion that it provides therapy. However, the post-test counselling sessions are a form of therapeutic intervention. Psyche does not attempt to repair damage – real or imagined – or to reduce abject misery to commonplace unease, but to prepare the self for work. Psyche’s intervention does require the individual to become her or his own therapist. Or, rather, the individual has first to pathologise himself, then to analyse this condition, and finally to intervene. Individual salvation is always a work in progress. An important part of the counselling process is to return the individual to their organisation’s objectives and how to maximise their individual effectiveness, any shift in the relationship between the individual and the organisation must be infinitesimally small: self-awareness provides only a temporary balm for the distressed soul.

Salespeople’s unethical behavior during a sales contest: The mediation effect of the perceived ethical climate of the game

This article aims to improve Murphy’s explanation of the consequences of sales contests by underlying the relationships that exist between the psychographic variables of salespeople (competitiveness and status aspiration), the perceived ethical climate of the contest, and unethical behaviors observed during the contest. Data were gathered via a survey questionnaire that targeted salespersons selling financial products in four different French banks. A total of 747 completed questionnaires were collected and their data analyzed using Partial Least Squares techniques. Results show that sales contests can create a specific ethical climate that mediates the relation between salespeople’s status aspiration and competitiveness and their unethical behavior during a sales contest.

Le comportement non-éthique des vendeurs durant un concours de vente : L’effet médiateur du climat éthique perçu du concours

L’objet de cet article est d’approfondir les travaux de Murphy (2004) des conséquences des concours de vente en montrant qu’il existe une relation entre les variables psychographiques (esprit de compétition et ambition des commerciaux), le climat éthique perçu du concours et les comportements non-éthiques observés pendant celui-ci. Les données ont été collectées par un questionnaire adressé à des conseillers commerciaux vendant des produits financiers dans quatre banques françaises. 747 questionnaires complets ont été collectés et les données ont été analysées par l’approche PLS (Partial Least Square). Les résultats montrent que les concours de vente peuvent créer un climat éthique spécifique qui est médiateur de la relation entre l’esprit de compétition, l’ambition des commerciaux et leur comportement non-éthique durant le concours.

Innovation managériale et négociation collective. Le cas de l'accord A. Cap 2000

Innovation in human resources management is often negotiated. A. Cap2000, the collective agreement that as been negotiated at Usinor company illustrates this idea. A longitudinal study of this agreement shows that it has initialised a process of negotiated innovation.