Liberal Technologies of Regulation

Conceptual Overview

Most theories of organizations agree that the exercise of power in modern organizations has a psychological dimension, depending on the formation of suitably disciplined forms of organizational subjectivity. The roots of the analysis of liberal technologies of regulation lie in the linkage of this idea with the observation that this takes place outside the organization, in the realm of culture and society, as well as inside it. Organizational theory has had an ambivalent relation to this linkage. On the one hand, Max Weber, for example, saw religion as playing an important role in the formation of a psychology suited to modern organizations in his analysis of the “spirit of capitalism.” On the other hand, he also ended up seeing social life being taken over by formal-legal rationality and virtually swallowed up by the bureaucratic organizational form. In this sense, he seemed to see the psychological dimension of organizational power as determined entirely within the organization.

Key examples of this kind of attentiveness to the human dimensions of organizational power, what David Courpasson has called soft constraint, are the move away from Taylorism and Fordism toward human relations theory and the study of the informal dimensions of organizations. The French philosopher Michel Foucault used the term techniques of the self to refer to the ways in which individual psychology is shaped and acted upon in order to encourage particular kinds of behavior within organizations and society. What is specifically liberal about them is that they combine the exercise of power with the facilitation of what is usually regarded simply as the primary source of resistance against power, autonomous subjectivity. In his discussion of Chicago School economics and the neoliberalism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Foucault himself spoke of liberal governmentality—that is, a range of liberal rationalities of government.

Such an approach to the operation of power within contemporary organizations does not see it as based [Page 815]on the issuing of commands that are obeyed to a greater or lesser extent, but as constituting a more subtle and supple mode of shaping individual and group conduct. The liberal governance of conduct presumes that individuals act and make choices and that the aim of organizational regulation is to set a particular framework for action and attach greater or lesser risks to different possible choices to make some pathways easier or more difficult.

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