Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here to sign up for SAGE Journal Email Alerts today!

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Organization
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via HighWire
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by McCabe, D.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Who's Afraid of Enterprise?: Producing and Repressing the Enterprise Self in a UK Bank

Darren McCabe

Keele University, Keele, UK, d.j.mccabe{at}mngt.keele.ac.uk

This paper explores two discourses that are bound up with `producing' two types of subject in a UK Bank. An enterprise discourse, which stresses responsible, customer focused, team players that use their initiative and a Fordist discourse, which conceives of employees as mechanical beings who repetitively process work. Through attending to the work experiences of back office clerks, the paper considers how the latter discourse `represses' the former. Although distinct, the two discourses share a common bureaucratic rationale and a logic of individualization that represses more collective ways of being or alternative subjectivities that might challenge or question the status quo. Nonetheless, the paper indicates limits to the power that management is able to exercise through enterprise, given the contradictory and flawed approach that was adopted.

Key Words: enterprise • financial services • individualization • power • subjectivity

Organization, Vol. 15, No. 3, 371-387 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1350508408088535
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Human RelationsHome page
A. Mangan
`We're not banks': Exploring self-discipline, subjectivity and co-operative work
Human Relations, January 1, 2009; 62(1): 93 - 117.
[Abstract] [PDF]