Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Performing And Agential Selves: Employees As Targets Of Control, And How We, As Academics, Theorise About Them, Karin H. Garrety, Simon Down

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Critical management scholars have noted how contemporary management practices encourage and sometimes require workers to adopt multiple identities, and that cynicism, irony and resistance are often manifested in those identities. In this paper, we explore some attributes of modern selfhood that make these positions possible. We concentrate on two related aspects: (1) the capacity of people to reflect on, and manipulate, the selves that they present to the world, and (2) different forms of agency that actors can effect. We argue that closer attention to these attributes can sharpen our analyses of organisational control and its impacts on the self.