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.

No abstract

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.

ABSTRACT:This article explores how the idea of tragedy can highlight some of the complex and paradoxical aspects of the relationship between ethics and leadership. First, it offers a comparative analysis of the way in which questions of leadership are addressed as a practical and theoretical concern when leaders are confronted with situations of moral crisis. The context is provided by a critical reading of the MBA oath, a student-led pledge that tries to establish a higher moral standard for leaders, and by Norman Bowie’s attempt to develop a Kantian theory of leadership. Second, it introduces a novel philosophical approach based upon Hegel’s interpretation of tragedy and ethical life developed in his theory of aesthetics. Through the idea of tragedy, the concept of ethical leadership could also encompass those ambiguous situations when good conflicts with good and when a possible reconciliation of a moral conflict might require the sacrifice of otherwise legitimate ends.

No abstract