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Over the last two decades, managerialism (Enteman, 1993) has become consolidated on multiple fronts. As a formula of governance, it has elaborated various vocabularies: the `audit society' (Power, 1997, 2007) has become entrenched in all types of organizations; surveillance methods (Lyon, 2001) have become increasingly dispersed and insidious; and — alongside —`new' concepts of subjectivity and the`self' are used to frame more intense regimes of self-discipline or what Tipton (1984) called `self-work'. These moves have been captured by Heelas (2002), Thrift (1997) and others in the term `soft capitalism'. In this article, we reflect upon this phenomenon by analysing some examples: `culture', `performativity', `knowledge' and `wellness'. Although they belong to a group often described as `fads' and `fashions' and dismissed as managerial `mumbo-jumbo', we suggest that their proliferation indicates a more stable cultural tendency of management discourses to capture subjectivity in its general agenda. We attempt to offer an historical-cultural interpretation from which this range of managerial concepts might be viewed. Our argument suggests that they have a certain cultural coherence that can be perhaps better glimpsed within a wider historical context. As a particular way in which managerialism frames its logic, analysing `soft capitalism' historically offers a reasonable basis for understanding the strength of its hard disciplinary edge as a regime of governance.

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This paper examines new managerial discourses and practices in which the dialectic of labour is reconstructed as a series of acts of self-understanding, self-examination and 'self-work', and through which the 'self qua self' is constituted as the central object of management technologies. We interrogate concepts such as 'excellence', 'total quality', 'performance', 'knowledge', 'play at work' and 'wellness' in order to decipher the ways in which managerialism deploys what we term therapeutic habitus, and projects a new horizon of 'human resourcefulness' as a store of unlimited potentialities. We invoke management's wider historical-cultural context to situate managerialism within the framework of modernity as a cultural epoch whose main characteristic is what we term 'derecognition of finitude'. It is the modern synthesiswith the 'self' at the centre of its system of values-that provides the ground for current elaborations of subjectivity by managerialism. The paper examines how current vocabularies and practices in organisations use 'work' to rearticulate discursively the human subject as an endless source of performativity by configuring work as the site of complex and continuous self-expression. Management itself thus acquires a new discursive outline: instead of appearing as an authoritarian instance forcing upon workers a series of limitations, it now presents itself as a therapeutic formula mediating self-expression by empowering individuals to work upon themselves to release their fully realised identity.

This article introduces key elements of ‘conceptual history’ from the work of Reinhart Koselleck (1985, 2002).We argue that his combination of an existential conception of his toricity with the notion of ‘concept’ as a mediator of existence and culture opens up unex plored avenues for interpreting management ideologies.We illustrate conceptual history with the example of ‘play’ in recent managerial literature. On the one hand, if we situate the analysis in the 20th century, ‘play’ seems to have changed its conceptual place in rela tion to ‘work’ from a ‘destructive’, to a ‘recreational’, and – recently – to a ‘creative’ force in work organizations. On the other hand, if we change the horizon of periodization to the last five centuries (as approximating modernity), the managerial concept of ‘play’ continues and intensifies certain central themes of modern culture: self-assertion, world alienation, and ethical inarticulacy. Conceptual history, we argue, can be used as a pro ductive analytical strategy for historical material whose dynamic is otherwise hard to grasp and ‘stabilize’ in a coherent account.