Managing the Will: Managerial Normativity from the Wage Society to the Platform Age

Abstract

At different times in the history of industrial capitalism, the firm has replaced the State, or anticipated it, by constructing regulatory models which were then legally sanctioned by State legislation, or generalised within public policies concerning, for example, education systems. This is what Pollman and Barry call “regulatory entrepreneurship”. Alongside this legal normativity, management practices have always entailed a psychological normative production aiming to shape the workforce as a subject, also according to the political instances of current forms of State governmentality. Indeed, the very birth of modern management is to be conceived in relation to these practices of production of forms of subjectivity in the workplace.