Management and management of the self

Management denotes strategies and tactics employed in order to keep workers productive to make sure companies make a profit. Management of the self unfolds when workers have interiorised the principles that keep them productive and act according to them.

“The history of ‘management’ can in fact be conceived as involving constant refinement of methods for controlling what occurs in the firm and its environment. For Taylor and Fayol, regarded as the founders of management as a discipline, human beings are the main focus for the implementation of controls.”


Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2005), 79.
 

An “aspect of neo-management is the proposal that everyone should develop themselves personally. The new organizations are supposed to appeal to all the capacities of human beings, who will thus be in a position fully to blossom. ‘Coaches’ will support people in this endeavour, and everything will be done to ensure that they attain a better knowledge of themselves, and discover what they are capable of. The new model proposes, so we are told, ‘genuine autonomy’, based on self-knowledge and personal fulfilment, not the false autonomy, framed by the career paths, job descriptions, and systems of sanctions—rewards, proposed by the 1960s.”

Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2005), 90.