Review of Economic Philosophy

Tag: Management

  • Politics and Managerial Governmentality: an Arendtian Perspective

    Abstract

    To what extent is the current policy “crisis” (high abstention rates, challenging politicians, etc.) linked to the implementation of macroeconomic policies ? To answer this question, we first present what we call managerial governementality. Then, based on the work of Hannah Arendt on the hope politics brings, we build an analytical framework to study political action. At last, thanks to this framework, we suggest that, by reducing the diversity of viewpoints and by developing dependency relationships, managerial governmentality could be one of the factors of the crisis.

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    [Read the paper on Cairn]

  • Foucault, Power and the Company: Toward a Theory of Managerial Governmentality

    Abstract

    From the beginning of the 1970s, Michel Foucault studied power. Repressive, ruling, and dominating, discipline, his first developed concept of power, is an essentially negative mechanism. Foucault seems to strive to escape the binary and overbearing idea of power he inherited from the theories of sovereignty. By the mid-’70s, he balances and nuances this understanding. Power is no longer likened to a prison panopticon, but to the government—in the narrow sense, and in the broad sense to a behavioral technology applied to free individuals. But again, Foucault is encumbered by this regal rationality which influences the contemporary understandings of power he continues to criticize. He makes three exceptions: the first is Christian pastoral care, the second is the Ancients’ formulation of self-government, and the third is managerial governmentality, which Foucault sketches very briefly and incompletely, and which we will discuss here.

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  • Labor as exchange in Saint-Exupéry: Thinking about how the three dimensions of labor are linked

    Abstract

    This article focuses on the contributions to management of the conception of labor in Saint-Exupéry’s Citadelle. Having presented the “hermeneutic schema” (Sabot 2002), which establishes the methodological framework, labor as exchange in management is briefly presented so that Saint-Exupéry’s vision of work as exchange then appears in all its originality. Here, the worker exchanges his or her life with eternity, to tear away from the grips of time that lead to death, by moving to the empire, through the work accomplished. The paper shows how, thanks to Saint-Exupéry’s thought, the three dimensions of work can be linked, using the Gomez (2013) model. By carrying out work for money in order to consume, the worker gives him or herself to the empire. This gift makes him or her a better being. This connection is appropriate for questioning three elements of the managerial context: the link between work and success in life, the difficulties of short employment cycles, and the consideration of the stakeholders.

    JEL classification: A12

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