Entrepreneurs of the self: The development of management control since 1976

Abstract

This review article considers some of the key management control articles published in AOS through the theoretical lens of Foucault's 1978/9 lectures on neo-liberalism and biopolitics. In these lectures Foucault analyses the shift from classical liberalism to what he describes as American neo-liberalism, the birth of biopolitics and the understanding of humans as entrepreneurs of the self. Foucault set out in the late 1970s what is now strikingly apparent in 2015-the spread of neo-liberalism universally to domains which were previously thought to be "non-economic", specifically, and for the purposes of this paper, to human-beings.

The Construction of the Efficient Office: Scientific Management, Accountability, and the Neo‐Liberal State

“…Accounting metrics facilitate such governance by targeting the conduct of individuals and encouraging the pursuit of individual and collective goals (Carter and McKinlay ). By contrast, scholars such as Armstrong () and Cooper () view neo‐liberalism as a form of capitalism and accounting a technology that enables human capital to be valued, monitored, measured, and ranked. In this paper, our visual analysis of the office witnesses the dawn of a new management control regime based on micro‐measurement in which accounting technologies increasingly came to play a key role.…”

Neoliberalism, accounting, and the transformation of subjectivities in social work: A study on the implementation of personal budgets

“…Although individuals are free from some of the more carceral aspects under a disciplinary mode of governing, centrifugal accounting mechanisms still facilitate the regulation of behavior through evolving forms of control that can exploit human capital. As Cooper () makes clear, accounting's role and power can be observed “in both individualizing people and at the same time animating them to ‘unwittingly collude with power’” (p. 18).…”

“…This fixation significantly alters the meaning of the state's responsibilities for their citizens’ welfare and how such services should be delivered for core public services such as adult social care (Cummins, 2018). Such an outcome has the potential to leave many citizens without the social support they need, and/or presume that individuals are always capable of making the most appropriate choices for themselves (Cooper, ; Cummins, ). The move to a system of public services based on autonomous choice has been highlighted by Foucault to constitute individuals as being “equally unequal” in society (cited in Hamann, , p. 43).…”

“…For instance, freedom of choice is predicated upon conformance with economic and self‐interested rationalities, coupled with the acceptance of individualized responsibilities for decisions taken. The instillation of such values is being driven by the creation of an alternate subjectivity in the form of “homo economicus” (Cooper, ; Hamann, ). Neoliberal reforms therefore seek to transform individuals by reconstituting them as entrepreneurs of the self through the “autonomization” and “responsibilization” of their citizenship (Cooper, ).…”

“…More specifically, how does an accounting control system manage the balance between enabling entrepreneurial freedoms to choose and the controls or audits of the choices made? To this end, Cooper (, p. 19) calls for future research to examine the extent to which accounting can and does reshape the subjectivities of individuals is a neoliberal context. This study heeds her call by examining the role of an accounting‐based neoliberal reform in transforming subjectivities in an adult social care setting in England.…”