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Managing Subjectivity and the

Dialectic of Self-consciousness:
Hegel and Organization Theory
Philip Hancock and Melissa Tyler
Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland
Abstract. This article presents the work and ideas of the German philo-
sopher G.W.F. Hegel as a means of addressing recent debates concerning
the management of employee subjectivity within contemporary work
organizations. Drawing primarily upon his writings on the phenomeno-
logical development of self-consciousness and the concept of ethical
life as a state of realized subjectivity, the authors argue that they provide
a meta-theoretical framework within which the processual ontology of
organizational (inter)subjectivity can be both addressed and critically
appraised. This is then illustrated by a discussion of the role corporate
culturalism plays in the mediation of this process, with particular atten-
tion being paid to its impact on the embodied dimension of the subject.
Key words. culture; dialectics; embodiment; Hegel; subjectivity
Introduction
Related to the emergence of new regimes of international competition,
technologies of production and the restructuring of labour markets, the
management of employee subjectivity has come to be recognized as
fundamental to the pursuit of those essentially managerial imperatives of
functional exibility and the pursuit of cultural homogeneity often
associated with so-called exible or post-Fordist modes of workplace
organization (Flecker and Hofbauer, 1998). The question of subjectivity
has, consequently, consolidated itself over the last decade or so as a key
problematic for the critical analysis of contemporary work organizations.
Volume 8(4): 565585
Copyright 2001 SAGE
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
1350-5084[200111]8:4;565585;020396
articles
At the heart of this sits a concern with how a sense of self-identity is,
and indeed can be, constituted and reconstituted through relations of
power, knowledge and identity within the organizational environment
(Burawoy, 1985; Knights and Willmott, 1989; Gabriel, 1995; Casey,
1996).
Notably, much of the work carried in relation to such questions is to be
found within the UK-dominated Labour Process tradition where a num-
ber of meta-theoretical disputes have arisen between what is, in essence,
an essentialist (modern?) Marxian understanding of species being and a
radical post-structuralist (postmodern?) de-centring of the unied subject
(see Parker, 1999). The former position views the status of the subject as
something which, while facing an assault by the alienating imperatives of
capitalist economic and social relations, is essentially stable and self-
interested. As such, the primary concern is to establish those conditions
under which the subject is able to assert such self-interests, usually in the
form of resistance to managerial initiatives, and therefore to facilitate
greater self-understanding among employees to the potential of their own
agency. Alternatively, the latter position tends to place a greater emphasis
on the analysis and critique of various technologies of power within the
workplace that serve to constitute the subject as an outcome of organiza-
tional discourses of instrumentalism and perfomativity. Consequently,
while it maintains the critical intent evident within the essentialist
position, it calls into question the possibility that one can ever simply
reveal the authentic subjectivity of the individual as a means towards an
emancipatory transformation of repressive modes of workplace organ-
ization.
While both perspectives are illuminating in their own right, the differ-
ing ontological assumptions which underpin them have tended to result
in a state of incommensurability which seems to have hindered the
possibility of any meaningful dialogue between them and, as such,
limited the potential for intellectual progress. This article represents an
albeit tentative attempt to advocate a third position which may go some
way towards transcending this increasingly polarized debate. It does so
by addressing the signicance of the organizational management of
subjectivity along one possible alternative route, namely that which can
be elicited from the work of G.W.F. Hegel and his philosophical account
of the phenomenological emergence of reexive self-consciousness. In
doing so, it aims to argue for the relevance of such a theoretical frame-
work to a critical understanding of managerial interventions into organ-
izationally embedded inter-subjectivity as what we shall term strategic
mediations of process; that is, instrumental interventions into what is
considered to be the dynamic and perpetual constitution of subjectivity.
The article proceeds via a brief review of recent debates on subjectivity
as these have taken place within critical analyses of the management of
the subject in work organizations (Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995;
Thompson and Findlay, 1996; Willmott, 1990, 1994, 1995; Knights, 1990,
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1995, 1997), to an exploration of the central tenets of the Hegelian
dialectic of self-consciousness. We then examine briey the idea of
corporate culture as a broad illustration of what we term a site of
strategic mediation, or loci of managerial intervention into the process
of subjectivity, before focusing in more depth on one particular example;
namely, the management of human corporeity. That is, we focus on
managerial interventions into the inter-subjective processes of becoming
a subject, which are mediated through the materiality of the human
body. We conclude by emphasizing what we believe to be the possible
value of a critical perspective based on a Hegelian phenomenology of
subjectivity and his derivative conception of ethical life, to contempor-
ary debates within organization theory.
The Subject in Organizational Analysis
As noted in the introduction, the interrelationship between labour and
subjectivity represents a major concern of contemporary organization
theory. In the UK at least, this concern stems largely from ongoing
debates within labour process theory and a number of responses to the
perceived need for it to establish a paradigmatic theory of the subject.
While it is not the aim of this article to conduct an extensive review of
these ongoing debates, a brief and critical summary of the positions held
by the main protagonists is useful in providing a context for the later
concerns of the paper.
Perhaps the most appropriate starting place is with the work of
Thompson (Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995; Thompson and Findlay,
1996) and, in particular, his case for a core labour process theory
(Thompson, 1989). From this approach, any analysis of the management
of the labour process within work organizations must be embedded
within a presuppositional model of hierarchical structures and asym-
metric relations of power between labour and capital. However, while
acknowledging that under capitalism the management of workplace
relations requires the mobilization of labour subjectivity, he appears
reluctant to incorporate the question of subjectivity into his model of a
core theory. Yet, this is clearly problematic; for while on the one hand
processes of subjective resistance by employees to managerial initiatives
are vaunted as integral to the core theory approach (Thompson and
Ackroyd, 1995), any attempt to theorize the nature or ontology of this
subjectivity is dismissed as a distraction which falls outside the remit of
this core. The paradox that arises, then, is that, while employee sub-
jectivity, grounded in an essentially humanist model, remains a possible
site of resistance to structural forces, there appears to be no clear
explanation of how or why this should be the case. Yet, even if sub-
jectivity as resistance were to be entertained in this core theory, its role
would appear to be highly limited. As Knights has noted, reducing the
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subjective dimension to an analysis of labour resistance, however valu-
able in its own right, has the unintended effect of replacing Bravermans
determinism with a control-resistance dualism or paradigm (Knights,
1990: 305) which itself is highly mechanistic and theoretically unso-
phisticated.
It is such a line of critique which has led Knights (1990, 1997; Knights
and Morgan, 1991) to develop an alternative position, drawing on the
anti-humanist insights of various post-structuralist theorists such as
Foucault and Derrida in an attempt to avoid the dualistic pitfalls of
polarizing a voluntaristic subject against a determining structure or
object. From this line of thinking, power emerges as the prime mover of
subjectivity whereby the subject itself becomes little more than a ctional
construct, determined yet devoid of substance. However, in his analysis,
it is recognized that a conception of the subject as the passive product of
technologies of power is also reductionist (Ezzy, 1997: 428) and, in so
doing, Knights acknowledges the need to develop a conception of sub-
jectivity more adequate to an analysis of contemporary work organiza-
tions, and beyond the control resistance dualism. He argues that both
phenomenological reections on the social construction of self and
existential perceptions of the fear or anxiety of social isolation should be
invoked in the development of a theory of subjectivity at work, in so far
as both approaches examine the way in which individuals make use of
material and symbolic resources (Knights, 1990: 329) to construct a
stable sense of subjectivity. However, this appears to be as far as Knights
gets in the terms of this analysis and, as Ezzy (1997) has noted, he does
not examine the potential application of this theoretical framework to the
actual analysis of subjectivity within the contemporary workplace.
A second alternative to the perspective advanced by Thompson is that
belonging to Willmott (1990, 1994, 1995), who has drawn upon a number
of radical traditions within contemporary social theory in an attempt to
develop a serious project to restore the missing subject to labour process
theory and, more broadly, organizational analysis. Subjectivity has come
to be understood by Willmott, at least in part, as the outcome of the
individualizing discourses embedded within the cultural formations of
capitalist modernity. These discourses offer up a reied process of
identity formation through the propagation of an instrumental sub-
jectivity that is determined by this commodied identity rather than
constitutive of it. Thus, the link between subjectivity and capitalism is
maintained but on a much wider stage than Thompson seems to allow,
with the workplace itself as one site among many where processes of
subjectivization take place.
Willmott (1994) has taken this idea considerably further, however,
most notably in his call for the need to develop a post-humanist model of
the subject that opposes all processes that constitute the illusion of the
sovereignty of the subject. This is presented as a critical attempt to
undermine the existential anxieties upon which forces of domination and
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repression thrive. While we acknowledge that this represents an
improvement on the analysis offered by Thompson, especially in terms of
its recognition of the ideological nature of the bourgeois model of the
sovereign subject, we fear that a post-humanist approach that implicitly
undermines the possibility of human autonomy runs the risk of descend-
ing into a nihilistic form of anti-humanism which inevitably denies the
emancipatory possibilities Willmott has consistently sought to champion.
Alternative attempts by the likes of, say, Grey (1994) and Newton (1996)
to theorize the shaping of subjectivity at work, drawing on the ideas of
Foucault and Elias respectively, while interesting, have themselves been
unable to transcend the problems of duality versus the virtual eradication
of the subject that haunts the debate as a whole. As Ezzy has noted, a less
mechanical conception of subjectivity still needs to be elaborated (Ezzy
1997: 431), one which, in our opinion, understands subjectivity both as
an outcome of externalized phenomena while, at the same time, continu-
ing to posit its faith in the possibility, if not the inevitability, of a
historical reconciliation of the constitutive subject with itself and the
world.
It seems to us, therefore, that the challenge remains to develop a
processual as opposed to a mechanical understanding of subjectivity in
the analysis of contemporary work organizations and their management
and, in doing so, to begin to understand contemporary managerial
projects as strategic interventions into the perpetual process of becoming
a subject at work. It is to this end, that is, grasping the potential
theoretical signicance of the dynamism of the dialectical phenomenol-
ogy of subjectivity within organizations, that this article turns to Hegels
ontology of self-consciousness and a belief that his phenomenological
account of the process of subjectivity potentially offers both a possible
means of addressing the theoretical lacuna identied above as well as a
critical lens through which to view the management of workplace sub-
jectivity.
Hegel and Organization Theory
While it would be a gross exaggeration to suggest that Hegelian philo-
sophy has had any great direct impact upon contemporary organization
studies, its inuence is occasionally felt in the pages of related journals
and conference presentations, and perhaps more so by implication than
by explication.
1
Willmotts (1990) previously mentioned writings on
subjectivity, for example, proceed from an engagement with the methodo-
logical implications of Hegels dialectical approach while eventually
jettisoning it in favour of Marxs later, more materialist revision. Addi-
tionally, Reed (1996) has invoked Hegels cultural historicism to provide
an explanatory framework for the study of recent shifts in managerial
activity and its analysis (Reed, 1996: 141). That is, managerial discourses
of enterprise, exibility, quality and human resource management
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are posited as exemplifying a shift away from a materialist historicism,
whereby organizational evolution is driven by technological develop-
ment, to a new regime of historical change premised upon the centrality
of the ideological superstructure (Reed, 1996: 143). He concludes that
managerial and organizational theory must become sensitized to this shift
by embracing a reinvigorated sociology of organizational and managerial
knowledge which, in his own words, must steer a middle-way analyt-
ical course between cultural voluntarism and structural determinism
(Reed, 1996: 154). As such, it expresses a common concern with ques-
tions of structure and agency as expressed by Willmott (1990) and which
remain central to any understanding of Hegelian philosophy.
In the sections that follow we do not, it must be stressed, seek to
present an exegesis on the Hegelian system in its entirety, nor do we
claim to offer a denitive interpretation of the ideas under consideration.
Furthermore, we do not take Marx as our starting point and seek to work
backwards. While this approach to understanding Hegel may have its
merits, it also presents great risks of misunderstanding. Marxs inter-
pretation of Hegel was itself situated at a specic socio-historical junc-
ture, which was expressed clearly in Marxs own political and
interpretative priorities. Rather, it is our aim to utilize specically our
own understanding of Hegels ontology of the subject; that is, the phe-
nomenological process through which subjectivity evolves and to exam-
ine managerial interventions into the process of subjectivization,
focusing in particular on the management of the body as a contemporary
illustration. Finally, we recognize that, despite recent attempts to counter
the pervasive inuence of the ontological and epistemological imper-
atives of postmodernism (see for example Reed, 1997, Willmott, 2000) for
many, the idea of resurrecting the spirit of German idealist philosophy in
a postmodern age is deeply unfashionable. Nevertheless, it is perhaps in
the spirit of the postmodern celebration of pluralism that this particular
tradition is offered for open-minded consideration.
Hegel and (Ethical) Subjectivity
Hegels theory of the evolution of human subjectivity or, as he terms it,
self-consciousness, can be found in his 1807 treatise The Phenomenology
of Spirit (Hegel, 1977) and, to a lesser extent, in the 1817 Philosophy of
Mind (Hegel, 1971). Here, self-consciousness refers, or so it would seem
to us, to a full or perfect state of self-reexive subjectivity; that is, one
that is able to embrace the holistic truth of the totality or interrelatedness
of all things within the social universe. As such, it transcends the
individualistic and systematically modernist idea of subjectivity be-
queathed by the likes of Kant and rmly views it as something only
obtainable as an outcome of an evolving unity between the subject and
their social and cultural environment. Central to the possibility of such
an ontology is Hegels assertion that human beings have a particular need
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that is denitive of the species; that is, the need to both desire and be
desired. By desire, he refers specically to the human need to be
recognized by other self-conscious subjects as a self-conscious subject in
him/herself. It is the phenomenological process, that is, the process by
which we give meaning to subject/objects in this world as a process of
constant misrecognition and renement of understanding, of mutual self-
recognition between people and their mutual acknowledgment of each
other as part of the social totality which provides the motor of subjective
development. Consequently, the subject seeks continually his/her sense
of self in an Other, an Other, however, who is posited by the subject as
an object of their own phenomenological (mis)recognition. To put this
more simply, we all desire to be recognized, to be valued as autonomous
subjects by others that we deem worthy of making this judgment; that is,
other autonomous subjects. Our sense of self-worth is deeply embedded
in the approval of others. However, our understanding of the Other is
never complete or accurate and, as such, neither is our sense of subjectivity.
Rather, our understanding and valuation of the Other exists in a state of
historical ux, impacted upon by the mediating effect of historically
contingent modes of economic and socio-cultural organization.
The possibility of autonomy is, therefore, to reiterate the point, a
relational and historically contingent inter-subjective condition. As
such, it is only through such recognition that full self-consciousness is
attainable. We can only become fully aware of our realized subjectivity
through the recognition of the Other, for, when we see and understand
the Other as a self-conscious subject, we lose our sense of individual
uniqueness which can only be returned by their recognizing gaze. It
must, that is, be a mutual and equal exchange of recognition between two
equally self-conscious subjects, who can only achieve such a state of
being through partaking in this very process. As such:
Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so
exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged. (Hegel,
1977: 111)
Subjectivity is, therefore, not simply given in a singular event, but exists
as a potentiality that may only be achieved through what is a pheno-
menological journey of inter-subjective recognition, misrecognition and
potential understanding.
Hegel recognized, however, that such a process is based upon far from
a freely given exchange of mutual recognition. Rather, it is one that is
characterized by what he terms a life and death struggle. This is due to
the fact that in the process of social interaction human consciousness is
initially determined to assert and maintain its own uniqueness in the face
of something that is both at one and the same time its Other and its
Self. This process is, therefore, one that develops through the inter-
relationship between conscious beings who simultaneously view the
Other as both different and same. The consequence of this is a state of
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conict whereby each consciousness seeks to destroy the other so as to
assert the sovereignty of their own selfhood (a process perhaps most
commonly recognized by parents of teenage children struggling to assert
their own sense of self within the previously peaceful household). Yet,
the point is that this is a conict doomed to failure as, for each indi-
vidual, the truth of their consciousness can only lie in their mutual self-
recognition as self-conscious subjects. Both must be accorded the status
of self-consciousness if either is to achieve it.
While the subject is directive in its own evolution it is not, then, an
isolated and sovereign being but is, as noted above, dependent upon both
the status of the Other and the wider socio-cultural environment that is,
in itself, dialectically dependent on the level of subjective development
of its members. The condition of self-consciousness is, therefore, for
Hegel, something that must eventually be achieved at both the (onto-
genetic) level of the individual and the (phylogenetic) social totality, for
the conditions for both are mutually inclusive. This is expressed in
Hegels historical philosophy by the proposition that the struggle for
recognition becomes institutionalized in social and political structures,
as well as expressing itself in the phenomenology of everyday experi-
ences. The truly self-conscious subject emerges, therefore, as one that
recognizes the necessary inter-dependence of self and other, subject and
object and subject and subject. Subjectivity, in Hegelian phenomenology,
is, therefore, the embodiment of the material, spiritual and psychological
reconciliation of duality in all its forms. This is not, then, the indi-
vidualized, bourgeois subject that Willmott (1990) rejects. Rather, it exists
as an autonomous subject that, at one and the same time, neither desires
nor needs to stand apart from the social totality. Nor does it seek to
dominate any aspect of it. As Gadamer observed:
When Hegel says that in reaching self-consciousness we have now entered
the homeland of truth, he means that truth is no longer like the foreign
country of otherness into which consciousness seeks to penetrate . . . Now,
in contrast, consciousness as self-consciousness is a native of the land of
truth and is at home in it . . . it nds all truth in itself . . . it knows that it
embraces the entire profusion of life within itself. (Gadamer, 1971: 59)
Such realized subjectivity is not an essential quality, however. With its
roots in desire, it exists in the realm of a potentiality, the realization of
which is dependent wholly upon the historical and socio-cultural condi-
tions within which it is embedded. It is this realization that is important
in terms of the possibility for a critical theorization of the condition of the
subject within modernity; for it is the socio-economic demands of mod-
ernity which mitigate against this process of mutual self-recognition and,
as such, result in the crisis of subjectivity with which so many of the
aforementioned authors nd themselves struggling. The imperatives
associated with capitalist modernity, such as a rationalized mode of
production and consumption, the collapse of mechanical forms of human
solidarity associated with urbanization and the pervasive inuence of the
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culture industry are all implicated in the constitution of human beings as
little more than the carriers of legal rational obligations and as the
subject/objects of commodication. This in turn has increasingly resulted
in the closure of the available space for mutual self-recognition resulting,
in turn, in a frequent process of misrecognition. By this we mean, rather
than the mutual self-recognition between evolving subjectivities, what
has come to dominate the modern experience is the misrecognition of
objectied carriers of instrumentalized social relations. Such misrecogni-
tion is the outcome of alienated inter-subjective relations which are
intrinsic to the development of modernity and which must be trans-
cended for the dialectical development of the subject and, following this
line of reasoning, of history, to continue. Hegelian critical theory repre-
sents, therefore, a form of critical humanism in which the arresting of the
process of human subjectivity by objective forces, which are themselves
misrecognized in their reied form, is viewed as the arresting of histor-
ical development in toto.
Yet, despite what Hegel saw as the difculties inherent within the
struggle for such self-consciousness, the ultimate realization of this
potentiality, he believed, would result in what he understood as the
human condition of ethical life (Hegel, 1967). Employed in what is
generally considered to be his most important political work, Philosophy
of Right (1821), ethical life refers to the ideal set of social relations in
which the conditions for mutual self-recognition have become a reality
and misrecognition is expunged. This is exemplied (somewhat con-
tentiously) for Hegel in the form of the nation-state in which laws and
institutions are the transparent expression of the freedom of its subjects,
where each is free in their mutual duty to respect the freedom of the
other. As such, the state is the manifestation of the general will whereby
each individual concurs with shared cultural values and institutional
practices, not as subjects of authority but as free, rational agents. Ethical
life, therefore, constitutes a way of life within which individuals are
bound together as a community through their shared commitment to each
other. For Hegel, this had, in past history, been illustrated best by the
commitment of the Ancient Greeks to the idea of the community as the
place in which the individual was free to develop and ourish; a freedom
which was premised upon the principle of universal reason and its
reconciliation with human need. Ethical life represents, therefore, a nal
reconciliation of the universal and the particular, of subject and object
and, indeed, of subjects themselves. Hegel himself perhaps best sums up
the inescapable romanticism of this idea when he reects on such a
future state of affairs:
. . . the eye of the spirit [reason] and the loving eye coincide: according to
nature man sees the esh of his esh in woman, according to ethical life he
sees the spirit of his spirit in the ethical being and through the same. (Cited
in Rose, 1981: 69)
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Yet, what has such romantic utopian imagery to do with the domain
of the contemporary work organization and what, if anything, can it
tell us about managerial intervention into the structuring of workplace
subjectivity?
Organization, Subjectivity and Ethical Life
As noted in the opening of this article, the question of how various
modes of employee subjectivity are constituted in and through a range of
strategies of organizational governance appears to represent a major
concern for many contemporary organization theorists. Townley (1994)
for example has argued that human resource management (HRM) com-
prises a constellation of techniques, particularly staff appraisal systems,
which are primarily designed to manifest a form of employee subjectivity
that identies with the aims and aspirations of the employing organiza-
tion. Casey (1995), in a similar vein, discusses the emergence in one
organization of a programme of acculturation, which she claims is
designed to result in a corporate colonization of the self (Casey, 1995:
138, original emphasis). Not that such processes or concerns are partic-
ularly new or novel. Taska (1992), for example, has argued that it was the
intent of Taylor not simply to reduce people to unthinking productive
automatons, but to instil into employees new subjectively held values
that led them to identify with the overall aim of the company and all its
members. Both human relations and Marxist writings in the 1920s and
1930s were also acutely aware of the central role human subjectivity was
to play in the expansion of mid-20th-century industrial capitalism.
Gramsci, for example, referred to the productive techniques and asso-
ciated regimes of social engineering associated with the work of Henry
Ford as setting out to establish a new kind of worker (Gramsci, 1971:
297), while Luk acs saw the emergence of psychological modes of
employee assessment and human relations strategies during the 1920s as
representing an attempt to ensure the rational mechanisms of Taylorism
and Fordism were extended right into the workers soul (Luk acs, 1971:
88). In all these accounts, however, what is implicit, if not explicit, is the
idea that the successful management of contemporary work organizations
is, in large part, dependent upon the structuring not only of the sub-
jectivity of individual employees, but also of the inter-subjective relations
between employees, both managerial and non-managerial.
Organizing Inter-subjectivity
The signicance of inter-subjectivity within the work organization, is, we
would suggest, inexorably linked with a range of developments within
contemporary accounts of management strategy and organization theory.
Perhaps the most obvious of these is the emphasis placed upon the
management of organizational culture and its transmutation into the idea
of corporate culture. That is, the idea that cultural variables can be
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consciously and purposefully manipulated so as to establish an organiza-
tional environment conducive to the maximization of levels of employee
output while, at the same time, minimizing levels of what is viewed as
dysfunctional employee resistance as the outcome of what, in most basic
terms, can be described as subjective alienation. Yet, on examination, it is
clear that there is no single consensus on the most appropriate means by
which such strategies should be pursued. One common approach is to
utilize corporate cultural strategies in an effort to colonize the process of
inter-subjectivity through stressing the value of individual autonomy.
This approach is most clearly visible in the popularist writings of the
likes of Peters and Waterman (1982) who stress the utility of encouraging
a greater (albeit illusory) sense of individuality and autonomy among
organizational employees. This approach is often materialized in the use
of highly individualizing reward strategies such as performance-related
pay schemes and the use of performance appraisals to emphasize the
unique contribution each individual is able to make to the successful
operation of the organization. Such strategies, however, from the per-
spective employed here remain awed, as is so amply illustrated in the
perceived failure of the Taylorist project, in that, while emphasizing the
value of individual autonomy, they inevitably result in a hypertrophy of
the inner life of the subject which eventually mitigates against their
ability to engage in the kinds of social cooperation which remains central
to any successful organizational project.
However, a second strand of thought has not only recognized this
potential deciency within this variant of corporate culturalism, but has
also attempted to address it at its very roots. This approach, with its
human relations foundations clear for all to see, views the nurturing of
inter-subjective relations as an essential prerequisite for the efcient and
effective management of an organizations cultural lifeworld. Here, ideas
of mutuality and organizational community take centre stage as exempli-
ed in Ouchis (1981) model of the clan organization or in the all too
common language of the corporate mission statements and documents
declaring shared values, which, as the likes of Swales and Rogers (1995)
have noted, attempt to promote identication among all members of the
organization. While such developments and the techniques deployed to
promote them have already come under much critical scrutiny (see
Willmott, 1993; Parker, 1997; Hancock, 1997), what we are concerned
with here is the idea that such cultural interventions into what one can
term the everyday lifeworlds of organizations represent further strategies
for the (mis)management of this phenomenological process through
which subjective self-consciousness may develop.
That is, those concerned with management of corporate culture act so
as to impose various strategically driven modes of mediation upon the
dialectical interrelationship between self and Other(s) outlined above.
They do this in such a way as to attempt to promote limited levels of
mutual self-recognition, as exemplied in the discourses of corporate
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community, so as to mitigate against the worst excesses of individual
alienation; while, at one and the same time, ensuring that the self-
reexivity which is associated with emerging self-consciousness is kept
at a manageable and therefore productive level. In this sense, they rely
upon a contrived process of misrecognition and in doing so ensure that
the emergence of the subject through time and space is recongured so as
to result in a sense of self-consciousness, the attainment of which appears
only possible through an institutionally mediated relationship. That is,
one whose phenomenology is arrested by meanings which are imposed
rather than mutually arrived at.
2
The result can, therefore, be seen as a
reied form of ethical life whereby the identity of self and Other is
empirically evident, yet the mechanisms by which it has come into
being are not transparent but are the outcome of the strategic planning of
individuals (managers, planners and so forth) who exercise power and
authority that lie outside of the ethical sphere they themselves have
sought to constitute. As a consequence, we would argue, the critique of
corporate culturalism becomes inescapably intertwined with a critical
humanist understanding of modernity, one seeking to explore the restric-
tions that our age places upon the emergence of humanity through the
colonization of the process of inter-subjectivity.
In the following section, we try to develop this idea in an attempt to
contribute to the critical theorization of the organizational management
of subjectivity, understood as a series of mediation processes designed to
guide and shape the character of inter-subjective relations. We do so with
particular reference to the management of embodiment; that is, the
process of becoming a subject in and through the body.
The Management of Human Corporeality
We should perhaps note here that our choice of the body as a particular
site of strategic mediation is driven by three main considerations. First,
the rationalization and regulation of bodies, especially womens bodies,
have clearly been fundamental to both the development of human
civilization in general (Elias, 1991; Turner, 1992; Shilling, 1993) and the
development of industrial capitalism and the organizational process
which has been so central to it (Hancock and Tyler, 2000a). As Casey
(1995: 194) notes, the instrumental control of the body can be seen as a
fundamental part of the integration of human being and human doing for
production, and a . . . triumph for instrumental rationality. The rational-
ization of labour has been achieved, at least in part, through practices of
discipline, diet, training and body regulation (Foucault, 1979; Mauss,
1934/1973) which focus on the mutual shaping of the body and sub-
jectivity, or the process embodiment. This, albeit sometimes implicit,
concern with the body can be observed in the work of management
theorists from a range of traditions who have documented ways in which
the performance of the human subject might be increased through a focus
Organization 8(4)
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on the body, using for example organizational structures (Gilbreth, 1911),
ergonomic adjustment (Taylor, 1911) or cultural manipulation and emo-
tional control (Mayo, 1933; Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939). Each of
these approaches shared in common a concern with the reproduction and
regulation of the human body as an instrument of work. More recently,
radical organizational theorists have explored how organizational forms
and practices have appropriated and diminished the body (Townley,
1993; Barry and Hazen, 1996), with a similar critique emerging from
recent feminist analyses which have focused on gender differences in the
role and management of the body at work (Cockburn, 1991; Acker, 1990,
1992). In short, that human bodies have to be trained, manipulated,
cajoled, coaxed, organized and in general disciplined (Turner, 1992: 15)
has emerged as an issue of analytical concern to organization theorists.
However, much of this emergent analysis remains rmly embedded
within the idea that the body exists as a pre-social (see Shilling, 1997) or
pre-organizational given. The mutual shaping of the body and sub-
jectivity, central to the phenomenological tradition, has yet to emerge as a
major concern for critical organizational analysis. Second, research car-
ried out by the authors (Hancock and Tyler, 2000b; Tyler and Hancock,
2001) has indicated the particular signicance of the management of the
aesthetic dimension of the body as a medium through which employee
(inter-)subjectivity is constituted as congruent with organizational goals
and imperatives. Finally, within Hegels own writings, there is a clear and
accessible understanding of the importance of the body as the primary
medium through which inter-subjective recognition occurs. It is with this
understanding in mind that this nal section explores one avenue by
which management is able to intervene in the perpetual process of
subjectivization, either arresting it or diverting it into instrumentally
determined forms; namely, the management of the body.
Hegel, Subjectivity and the Body
Hegels account of the relationship between subjectivity and human
corporeity is developed most clearly in Philosophy of Mind (1971:
1407). Here, the body is portrayed as signicant to subjectivity in two
ways. First, the body is the most basic and immediate sign of human
consciousness, operating as the medium of inter-subjectivity through
which the dialectic of self-consciousness proceeds. In other words, when
human beings interact, and construct their sense of identity in relation to
each other, they do so in and through their bodies. Within the dialectic of
self-consciousness the body acts not merely as a vessel, however. A
precondition of inter-subjective recognition is the reshaping of our per-
ception of embodiment so that the physical differences between self and
other are transcended. In essence, therefore, the body as the immediate
sign of the self must be manipulated and managed so that it becomes a
signier of the subjective I:
Managing Subjectivity
Philip Hancock and Melissa Tyler
577
Body is the middle term by which I come together with the external world
as such. Consequently, if I want to realize my aims, I must make my body
capable of carrying over this subjectivity into the external world. (Hegel,
1971: 146)
Thus, the body must be shaped as an external expression of the level of
subjective development achieved. This expression does not, however,
reect simply the state of individual development. As the point was
made earlier, the state of subjective self-development is inexorably inter-
twined with the social development of human culture. Therefore, it also
expresses symbolically the shared values of the community and, as such,
serves as a measure of the ethical nature of that community. In represent-
ing these shared values, the body becomes more than itself it takes on a
signicance that is greater than its own materiality and the immediacy of
its own embodiment. In this respect, for the individual body to reect the
ideal condition of ethical life it must transcend the empirical representa-
tion of its own individuality. The body becomes the material signier of
the nal and ideal reconciliation of self and other.
Corporate Culture and the Body
With this phenomenological understanding of embodiment in mind, we
can begin to comprehend the signicance of various attempts made to
organize workers bodies as part of a range of managerial interventions
into the inter-subjective dimension of work. That is, the organizational
bodies of employees may be understood as constituting, at least poten-
tially, material signiers of the organization by which they are employed
and which, in turn, can redene the state of self-consciousness that is
presented and, re-presented, to fellow organizational members. Clear and
obvious examples of this can be discerned in the increasingly important
idea of organizational dress codes. While smartness or appropriateness of
attire has traditionally been central to workplace life, this aspect of
managerial intervention has increased in signicance with the emergence
of various models of corporate culturalism. Often, this can be based upon
a uniformity of dress as exemplied in various workwear strategies
whereby the interaction of organizational bodies can be seen to be
mediated by and through the colours and designs of the corporate image
(Rolls Royce, 1995: 29) which, in the words of another major automotive
manufacturer, helps to develop a common sense of identity (Toyota,
1997: 28). Hence, while the empirical nature of the inter-subjective
encounter between individuals appears (quite literally) to be shorn of
managerial intervention, the subjective appreciation of this process
remains within the realms of an externalized cultural environment.
Mediation between subjects, therefore, remains alienated, while
undoubtedly providing scope for greater and, therefore, (in the minds of
management) more instrumentally efcient modes of mutual (mis)recog-
nition. Such strategies do not necessarily require such direct attention to
Organization 8(4)
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578
the attire or even appearance of the body, however. The locating of bodies
within time and space can be utilized to similar ends; for example, the
use of open-plan ofces, and regulations (or lack of them) regarding time
keeping, clocking on and off and suchlike serve to establish or decon-
struct hierarchies in how subjects recognize each other within the organ-
ization. In all such instances, the temporal and spatial regulation of
bodies can be conceptualized as modes of managerial intervention by
which organizational employees are, at the very least, guided in their
inter-subjective relations and, as such, in how they (mis)recognize them-
selves in relation to other(s).
What we are again suggesting, therefore, is that a Hegelian-inspired
approach enables us to focus critically on the ways in which it is in and
through the cultivation of organizational bodies, as one particular
strategy, that organizations seek to mediate inter-subjective relations at all
levels through a technique that may be understood as intercorporation.
That is, a (strategically managed) process whereby organizational bodies
are structured to interact and recognize each other as embodying the
same organization and thus come to assume a collective, corporate
(corporeal) identity.
From this critical perspective, we would suggest that the embodied
process of mutual inter-subjective recognition envisaged by Hegel is
reversed, or at least arrested, in that, rather than the state of self-
consciousness or subjectivity determining the presentation of the embod-
ied self, it is mediated by an instrumentally imposed state of embodiment
which constitutes the subject of mutual recognition. This mutually self-
recognizing subject no longer encounters other emerging subjects but, in
this example at least, misrecognizes subjects which project a state of
embodiment which has already been colonized. Employee subjectivity is,
therefore, neither repressed nor constituted as such, but is directed, and
in effect arrested, by the denial of the opportunity for free and consensual
engagement with other self-determining subjectivities, in this instance
due to the colonization of the body by management discourses and
practices. At worst, this results in a homogenized state which seeks to
deny the difference between subjects, the very motor of inter-subjective
exchange and development, as exemplied in the idea of the manage-
ment of difference. Of course, it is rare that such closure to difference is
ever total. As suggested above, the submersion of difference would
undoubtedly be seen as dysfunctional from an organizational perspec-
tive, denying as it would the potential for creativity and dynamism
through employee relations. However, its management does, we would
argue, inevitably stagnate the process, failing to recognize, as it does, the
requirement of transparency of process and the need for the mutual
freedom of the individual to desire and be desired if the potential for full
mutual recognition, and therefore a realized condition of subjectivity, is
to be pursued.
Managing Subjectivity
Philip Hancock and Melissa Tyler
579
Towards a Conclusion
Within this article, we have attempted to outline what we see as the key
components of the Hegelian model of subjectivity as process, and have
attempted to apply this to the development of a critical understanding of
the management of subjectivity within work organizations. At its heart is
the argument that subjectivity, as the outcome of inter-subjectivity, while
remaining a fragile quality, is neither a passive reection of social
structures or discourses of power/knowledge, nor an autonomous crea-
tion that transcends its external environment. On the contrary, sub-
jectivity can be understood as the outcome of a process of mediation
between various forces including, for instance, pre-existing cultural
discourses, the structuring effect of a persons social location, and the
individuals creative use of these resources (Ezzy, 1997: 440) into which
contemporary managerial projects intervene strategically, focusing on
various sites of mediation such as corporeity.
It would seem to us, then, that the Hegelian dialectic of inter-
subjectivity and its attempted mediation (management) might provide a
useful framework for analysing the logic of contemporary managerial
projects within the work organization. That is, we have suggested that
Hegels phenomenological conception of subjectivity as developed
through a phenomenologically driven dialectic of self-consciousness, and
in particular his account of the signicance of corporeity within this
dialectic, provides the potential for a non-reductionist, meta-theoretical
perspective from which to examine the management of the process of
subjectivity within contemporary work organizations. This is reected in
the proposition that what we are witnessing in contemporary managerial
strategies associated most notably with corporate culturalism can, poten-
tially, be understood as an organizational attempt to realize a Hegelian
vision of ethical life within the domain of the organization through the
mediation of the mutual self-recognition of employees. Yet, insofar as this
merely serves to perpetuate a state of misrecognition through the partial
colonization of the subject by instrumentalist discourses of performativ-
ity and managerialism, such an undertaking is viewed as essentially
repressive. As such, whilst we recognize that this ethical project within
contemporary managerialism coincides with a traditionally conservative
Hegelian philosophy in which the goal of history becomes the nal unity
within Hegels ethical state, we also believe in the possibility of an
equally critical perspective on this ethical project as it is articulated and
embodied within the management of organizations
This more critical perspective is based on a recognition of the central-
ity of the necessity of process as the ontological principle upon which
reexively aware self-consciousness may be achieved. This phenomeno-
logical, processual conceptualization of the subject is neither imper-
meable nor is it decentred to the point of being so overwhelmed by
organizational discourses that it is incapable of critical reection. Yet, it
Organization 8(4)
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580
is this process of subjectivity, dependent upon free and unfettered inter-
subjectivity, which modes of organizing principled upon the imperatives
of the organization of work seek to distort or colonize. That is, they have
increasingly come to depend upon the goal of an imposed unity a false
reconciliation of corporate identity through the suppression or com-
modication of Otherness and its concomitant regimes of conict
through the management of, among other things, an ontology of inter-
corporation. Difference is thus conated into an inauthentic and alien-
ated subjectivity. It is one that denies the values that may lead to the
possibility of a genuinely just and therefore ethical community, that is,
one that, as Rose (1981: 69) noted:
. . . is not dominated by an imposed unity which makes real relations
invisible, and which prevents empirical consciousness of the isolated
individual from coinciding with universal consciousness (everyones con-
sciousness and consciousness of everyone) because so many others and so
many aspects of oneself are suppressed . . . [but rather one where] . . . the
other is seen as different and as the same as oneself, as spirit not as person,
as a living totality not as a formal unity.
The ethical life of the contemporary organization is, therefore, a false one,
strewn with the contradictions not only of capitalism but also of modern-
ity itself. However, managerial attempts to unify the subject as a corpor-
ate subject/object represent both an obstacle to the possibility of
subjectivity as we understand it here and an opportunity. The opportun-
ity lies in the continued attempt to develop a reasoned understanding of
the processes taking place and the continued power of rational critique to
expose and challenge the irrationality of them. This critical humanist
project, which nds voice not only in Hegel but in the tradition of
Hegelian critical theory more generally, does not, therefore, abandon the
subject but stands against attempts to mould and direct the emergence of
human subjectivity in the name of narrow instrumentalism. It does not,
though, we would stress, offer a particular or crude teleology. There is no
single path of correct development. What it does do, nevertheless, is
allow for the freedom of development, be it within the organization or the
wider social sphere, a freedom which is closely associated with the
continued importance of the faculty of critical rationality and the unfet-
tered dialectical process of inter-subjectivity. It is this perspective, which
can be arrived at through a critical reading of Hegel, which, we suggest,
may continue to offer up a radical yet non-essentialist understanding of
the restrictions contemporary modes of workplace organization place
upon the dialectical process of becoming a subject and, as such, a basis
for further research and critique.
Notes
A version of this paper was originally presented to the 1st International Organiza-
tion Conference Modes of Organizing: Power/Knowledge Shifts, April 1997,
Managing Subjectivity
Philip Hancock and Melissa Tyler
581
University of Warwick, UK. Much of this work has subsequently been developed
in Hancock and Tyler (2001).
1 We would like to acknowledge here the contribution of Carr and Zanetti
(1999), whose work on the relationship between Hegel and organization
theory has only come to our attention since this paper was written.
2 One notable exception is Pascales (1990: 161) Managing on the Edge in which
he outlines, with particular reference to changes in management style at Ford,
how resolving the Hegelian dialectic facilitates ones ability to manage effec-
tively. He notes how fostering a system of collegiality rather than individu-
ality means that contention is channelled to the benet, rather than the
detriment, of the corporation.
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Philip Hancock is Lecturer in Sociology and Philosophy at Glasgow Caledonian Uni-
versity. He has authored and co-authored a number of journal articles, book
chapters and books around subjects such as organizational citizenship, motiva-
tion and the body and organizational theory. His more recent works include: The
Body, Culture and Society: An Introduction (2000, co-edited) and Work,
Postmodernism and Organization: A Critical Introduction (2001, co-authored).
Currently, he is undertaking research into organizational aesthetics and is work-
ing on a forthcoming co-edited collection on the subject entitled Art and
Aesthetics at Work. Address: School of Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian
University, City Campus, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA, Scotland. [email:
p.hancock@gcal.ac.uk]
Melissa Tyler is Lecturer in Sociology at Glasgow Caledonian University. She has
published in various journals, co-authored books and edited collections on
gender, aesthetics, organization and the body. Her current research focuses on the
management of sexuality in everyday life. Recent publications include The Body,
Culture and Society: An Introduction (2000, co-edited) and Work, Postmodernism
and Organization: A Critical Introduction (2001, co-authored). Address: School
of Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University, City Campus, Cowcaddens
Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA, Scotland. [email: m.tyler@gcal.ac.uk]
Managing Subjectivity
Philip Hancock and Melissa Tyler
585

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