James Reveley

Generational Encounters and the Social Formation of Entrepreneurial Identity – 'Young Guns' and 'Old Farts'

Generational relations and entrepreneurialism in organizations are attracting increasing attention from organizational scholars. This article bridges these areas of interest, by examining how entrepreneurial identity is shaped by generational encounters within a small organization context. In so doing, it contributes to ongoing challenges to the scientistic orthodoxy regarding the formation of entrepreneurial persons. Evidence from an ethnographic study of two joint ownermanagers in the port fendering industry is presented. Wenger’s ‘community of practice’ framework is used to show that generational encounters, through their influence on self-identity, are an important social context of the decision to embark on an entrepreneurial career. By emphasizing micro-socially situated aspects of identity formation, this article provides an interactionist complement to recent accounts of entrepreneurs and identities as being (re)produced by discourses that have hegemonic effects.

Enhancing industry association theory: a comparative business history contribution

Our comparative business historical examination of industry associations aims to enrich the under-theorized study of this distinctive type of meta-organization. We compare two New Zealand industry associations operating in the same supply chain but with differing degrees of associative capacity and types of external architecture. Our analysis of these associations builds on two strands of theory that rarely communicate with each other: New Institutional Economics (NIE) and Organizational–Institutional Theory (OIT). We demonstrate how NIE describes the structural potentialities for associational strength, while OIT addresses the relational context within associations. In turn, NIEs examination of external influences reinforces OIT suggestions that associations which are rich in social capital can become developmental in orientation. Our historical analysis supplies fresh theoretical insights into industry associations, thereby addressing conceptual issues of interest to management scholars who study bridging-type organizations. On this basis, we argue that business history and organization studies complement each other.

School-Based Mindfulness Training and the Economisation of Attention: A Stieglerian View.

Abstract Educational theorists may be right to suggest that providing mindfulness training in schools can challenge oppressive pedagogies and overcome Western dualism. Before concluding that this training is liberatory, however, one must go beyond pedagogy and consider schooling’s role in enacting the educational neurofuture envisioned by mindfulness discourse. Mindfulness training, this article argues, is a biopolitical human enhancement strategy. Its goal is to insulate youth from pathologies that stem from digital capitalism’s economisation of attention. I use Bernard Stiegler’s Platonic depiction of the ambiguousness of all attention channelling mechanisms as pharmaka—containing both poison and cure—to suggest that this training is a double-edged sword. Does the inculcation of mindfulness in schoolchildren empower them; or is it merely an exercise in pathology-proofing them in their capacity as the next generation of unpaid digital labourers? The answer, I maintain, depends on whether young people can use the Internet’s political potentialities to mitigate the exploitation of their unpaid online labour time. That is, on whether the exploitative ‘digital pharmakon’—the capitalistic Web—can at the same time be socio-politically curative.

Stigmatization and Self-Presentation in Australian Entrepreneurial Identity Formation

Public narratives concerning indigenous economic development are increasingly being colonized by enterprise discourse. As du Gay (1996, 2000) amply demonstrates, in another connection, discursive colonization is a multi-faceted phenomenon that intertwines with political and economic institutions to incorporate a wide range of actors. This effect is evident as political re-orientations towards – and within – indigenous communities, and welfare spending cuts due to neo-conservative state governance, have piqued public interest in indigenous enterprise as a form of economic development that can redress chronic social inequality (Peredo, et al., 2004). Australia is a case in point, as significant academic (Hindle and Rushworth, 2002), state-political (Hockey, 2002), and Aboriginal activist voices (Pearson, 2004) have called for policies to encourage more Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to set up their own businesses. The dominant view is that supporting indigenous enterprise start-ups will help to alleviate the socio-economic disadvantage currently experienced by indigenous Australians, thereby improving their life-chances and decreasing their dependence on the state.

From ‘Supplementary Seagulls’ to ‘Cut Price Casuals’: Changing Patterns of Casual Employment on the New Zealand Waterfront 1951–1997

Abstract By focusing on waterfront casualism in New Zealand, this article contributes an historically grounded, industry-level case study to the literature that has documented the growth of contingent forms of employment in Australasia. Although recent developments on the waterfront are often viewed as part of a general trend towards casualisation, the industry has a number of distinctive features that render it a special case. Historically, the waterfront possesses characteristics which make it an ‘extreme’ form of casual labour market, such that the regulation of casual employment by securing control of the labour supply has always been a central organisational goal and power resource of unions. With respect to New Zealand, the current employer-initiated process of casualisation cuts to the core of remaining union influence on the waterfront. This article situates recent conflict over this process in the context of changing patterns of casual employment since the 1951 waterfront dispute. These patterns ...

Neoliberal meditations: How mindfulness training medicalizes education and responsibilizes young people

Teaching mindfulness meditation at school has been advocated by educational researchers and practitioners in order to proactively target the well-being of young people. By conceptualizing mindfulness meditation as a technology of the self, in Foucauldian terms, this article considers the ideological implications of implementing mindfulness programs within schools. Recent work by Kristin Barker, it is argued, provides insight into how mindfulness meditation functions as a forceful vector for medicalization. It does so by broadening the scope of illness to encompass the emotional ups and downs inherent to daily life. My thesis is that mindfulness trainings medicalizing effect is what transforms this otherwise health-beneficial meditative technique into a non-obvious means for reconstructing the educational subject in line with neoliberalisms ideological dictates. Learning to become mindful is one way members of the younger generation become charged with a moral responsibility to augment their own emotional well-being. The capacity for personal prevention and self-surveillance that school-based mindfulness training inculcates in the young, in turn, is central to the self-managing figure that neoliberalism prizes. When institutionalized as a form of therapeutic education, therefore, mindfulness meditation is not ideologically neutral but rather morphs into a neoliberal self-technology.

Foucauldian Critique of Positive Education and Related Self-technologies: Some problems and new directions

Abstract By focusing on positive education, this article draws out the educational implications of Binkleys Foucauldian critique of neoliberal subjects being pressured to learn how to manage their emotions. From the latter authors perspective, positive education self-technologies such as school-based mindfulness training can be construed as functioning to relay systemic neoliberal imperatives down to individuals. What this interpretation overlooks, however, is that young people are not automatically and unambiguously disempowered by the emotion management strategies they are taught at school. Arguably, positive education contributes to the formation of resistant educational subjects with an emotional toolkit that equips them to mount oppositional action against neoliberalism. Foucaults work can be interpreted in a way that is not inconsistent with seeing positive education as having such liberatory potential.

Retrofitting Drucker: Knowledge work under cognitive capitalism

This article uses Peter Druckers work vector-like, to carry the thesis of cognitive capitalism into the management field. Druckers prophetic insights into the knowledge society are juxtaposed with recent, Italian autonomist Marxist-inspired analyses of capitalisms cognitive phase. If the capacity to create knowledge – or what autonomists call the ‘general intellect’ – is becoming the key productive force, arguably there is a need for a full-blown social form of knowledge management. Our reading of Drucker thus retrieves the one worthwhile thing from the rubble of normative knowledge management. It is the idea of society-level knowledge management premised on a universal and unconditional guaranteed basic income (GBI; or social wage). Basic income represents not just a social investment in knowledge, which Drucker himself called for, but also compensation for biolabours augmented social productivity. With Drucker as the steppingstone, we conclude, the autonomist tradition merits greater attention from critical management and organisational scholars interested in factoring class and gender back into the knowledge management equation.

Contradictory Rights and Unintended Consequences: The Early Impact of the Employment Relations Act on the New Zealand Waterfront

New Zealand’s Employment Contracts Act 1991 consigned to history almost 100 years of pervasive state regulation of collective employment relations. Many unions experienced a sharp decline in influence after the introduction of this piece of legislation. The traditional wharfies’ union, the Waterfront Workers’ Union, is a case in point. Following a decade of neo-liberal industrial relations deregulation, a centre-left Labour/Alliance Coalition repealed the Employment Contracts Act by introducing an Employment Relations Act 2000 designed to redress an ‘inherent inequality’ in power though the promotion of unionisation and collective bargaining. This article assesses whether this piece of nominally ‘union friendly’ legislation might forestall attenuation of union influence and casualisation of waterfront employment at New Zealand’s ports. We argue that the new legislation contains contradictory union rights that have produced unintended consequences, with the emergence of new forms of employee representation designed specifically to further erode the power of the waterfront industry’s established unions.

Producers, Processors and Unions: The Meat Producers Board and Labour Relations in the New Zealand Meat Industry, 1952–1971

In New Zealand, the historical trend towards the rational-capitalistic transformation of agriculture was forestalled in part by producer boards, institutions that were intended to operate in the collective interests of farmers. Recently, there has been renewed interest both in the economic effects of the boards and in the role of farmers themselves within New Zealands unique arbitral system of industrial relations. This paper bridges these areas of research by examining the influence of the Meat Producers Board on management–labour relations within the export meat industry. Whereas the Board is generally regarded as having empowered family-labour farmers, we argue that its interventions also empowered meatworkers and simultaneously weakened meat-processing companies as employers. The power resources indirectly supplied to meatworkers by the Board were an important external source of union power in the industry. By examining these resources, we identify the neglected effects of a key institution that shaped New Zealands path of development by preventing the subsumption of ‘independent’ farming.