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.

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.

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This paper explores the intersection between pursuits of improving organizational flexibility and pursuits of improving employees' health. It is argued that health promotion programmes have the potential of operating as mechanisms of power, which assist organizations in making up self-governing employees who flexibly adapt their lifestyles to the criteria of health and professional success. The paper shows how the fact that health promotion programmes are handled by 'independent' and legitimate health experts, and are provided to employees in the name of their health and well-being, obscures the forces of power in them, making them seem merely as informed ways of helping employees help themselves towards healthier and more successful lives. The paper concludes that health promotion programmes help to establish a new work ethic that challenges the boundary between work and private life. Furthermore, they make a healthy lifestyle part of the competencies that employees are responsible for developing and nurturing.

This paper accounts for a study of the largest employer in Scandinavia of jobseekers with designated impairments. Like many similar organizations, this organization has undergone a transformation from a provider of ‘sheltered work programs’, which remove this category of jobseekers from the labour market, to a provider of ‘individual placement programs’, which instead integrates them in the labour market. I use Foucauldian governmentality studies to show how this transformation problematizes basic assumptions underlying organizational disability studies. While these studies are variegated, they have generally found that jobseekers with designated impairments are often treated as disabled, as less employable than non-impaired individuals and in need of care and rehabilitation. The study presented below points in another direction. It shows that jobseekers’ designated impairments are treated as signs of their special abilities for particular jobs, rather than as signs of their disabilities. These findings, I argue, are illustrative of how a neoliberal governmentality tends towards replacing the distinction between the able and the disable with a bio-medical structuring of different qualities of human capital. While it leads to that individuals with impairments are integrated in the labour market, I argue that it also leads to that they are treated as having an exclusive, medically designated fit for simple and often dirty labour.