Enterprise Discourse Research Articles

Enterprise Discourse, Professional Identity and the Organizational Control of Hospital Clinicians

Recent reform of the healthcare sector in New Zealand involved the corporatization of public hospitals, and the contractualization of social relations between and within institutions. Various attempts were made to incorporate hospital clinicians within some system of organizational control in order to make them accountable for the resources consumed as a consequence of their treatment decisions. This paper considers how the general intention of government to control, curtail or influence the professional autonomy of hospital clinicians was played out in the context of a single New Zealand hospital. It considers the possibility that power effects of discourses associated with such neo-liberal programmes of reform could influence the subjectivity of hospital clinicians, aligning their clinical behaviour with the broader goals of the governmental programme. It explores how individuals manoeuvre in relation to these discourses of management and enterprise, whether in acceptance, resistance or compromise. The resulting outcomes are complex and varied, as individuals negotiate dominant discourses in the construction of identity and self.

Exploring Citizenship and Enterprise in a Global Context

This paper is in three parts. The first part looks in fairly broad terms at national and international trends that help to explain the current interest in citizenship and enterprise. Here reference is made to globalization, social capital theory and the knowledge economy. It is argued that these trends can be interpreted both positively and negatively. Similar ambivalences are evident in the second part of the analysis which examines the discourses of citizenship and enterprise in their applications to education. Both terms are shown to be subject to various interpretations and this malleability is an important part of their attraction to policy makers. Examples of different approaches to the promotion of economic literacy, as one aspect of enterprise, are discussed. In the third part, consideration is given to the overlapping concerns of groups variously involved in citizenship education, enterprise education, education for personal and social development, civics education and values education. It is suggested that the policy agendas of these various groups, while complicating the work of teachers in the short term, contain the possibility of opening up discursive territory that has been closed off in recent years. Exploring this territory leads to encounters with fundamental questions of meaning and purpose in education. This can serve as a starting point for a challenge to the narrow instrumental approaches to educational policy, which have dominated since the 1980s.

Entrepreneurial Identities: Reflections from Two Case Studies

The central focus of this paper is an analysis of the enterprise discourse and how it is articulated by individuals working in small business environments, to construct and reconstruct material practices and psychological identities. The core argument is that, even if people do not take the enterprise culture seriously, even if they feel unaffected by its values and claims, they are inevitably reproducing it through their involvement with the daily practices which are imbued with the notion of enterprise (du Gay and Salaman, 1992). As such, the paper takes a social constructionist perspective which seeks to illustrate how individuals are constituted by the discourse of enterprise, and to provide some empirical evidence of the processes and practices which both reflect and construct that experience.

CONNECTING ACCOUNTING AND EDUCATION IN THE UK: DISCOURSES AND RATIONALITIES OF EDUCATION REFORM

In this paper we analyze the processes which have structured the emphasis upon budgeting and accounting in the Local Management of Schools initiative by outlining the inter-relations between the discourses of neo-liberal government and economics, and the apparent “need” for the expansion of accounting and budgeting systems in the public sector and particularly education in the UK during the past six years.At the heart of our analysis is the contention that accounting and budgeting systems have been promoted throughout the UK public sector by connections to a discourse of managerial enterprise and economic rationality. The intersections between accounting techniques, and economic and managerial notions of decision making, responsibility and market organization have provided the complex discursive formation within which the accounting and budgeting innovations introduced under LMS have been presented and represented as “necessary” elements of proper public sector organization. The colonization of accounting into the education sector has been made possible by a series of seemingly unquestioned linkages, associations and reductions, upon which we offer a commentary, between the discourse of economic rationality and the techniques of accounting.

Enterprise Discourse and Executive Talk: Stories that Destabilize the Company

In this paper, we are interested in dissolving the dominant representation of the enterprise as a singularity and a site of rational, reproductive and progressive imperatives. It is this discursive figuring that, in our view, stands in the way of the development of more innovative forms of politics involving claims on corporate wealth. We offer a discussion of enterprise discourse that highlights contradictory narratives of the corporation and the multiplicity of logics seen to determine its dynamics. Taking the Australian‐based multinational BHP, in particular its steel division, as our object of analysis, we use excerpts from interviews conducted with two ex‐general managers of the Newcastle steel plant to deconstruct the dominant monopoly capitalist representation of the company. Drawing upon existing enterprise discourses and fragments of executive talk, we produce a decentred, ‘disorganized’ representation of the enterprise, and point to the ways in which it might invigorate a new form of politics in and around the corporation.

Too Much, Too Little and Too Often: A Critique of du Gay's Analysis of Enterprise

In recent years, organizational and political debates have accorded a privileged position to enterprise as holding the promise for both corporate and individual development. In several publications, Paul du Gay has articulated a persuasive analysis and critique of the enterprise discourse; he and a number of collaborators have analysed the various managerial discourses and techniques through which employees are reimagined as entrepreneurs, and organizations are to move from dysfunctional bureaucracies to models of excellence. Whilst we share du Gay's critical position towards enterprise and the Foucauldian tradition upon which he draws, we feel that his analysis suffers from several flaws which we articulate around three themes. Firstly, we argue that du Gay's analysis claims too much for enterprise, and relies on a flawed dualism between enterprise and bureaucracy; secondly, we feel that his analysis is over-deterministic and makes too little space for resistance and alternative discourses to enterprise; finally, we suggest that du Gay has presented the same arguments too often and that his work is implicated in the constitution of the enterprise discourse as an accomplished fact within the academic community.

REDISCOVERING HEGEL: THE ‘NEW HISTORICISM’ IN ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT STUDIES

This paper advances the argument that a particular form of culturally, rather than materialistically, based historicism dominated organization and management studies in the 1980s. the 1970s were dominated by a materialistically based form of historicism in which economic, technological and organizational imperatives were deemed to drive the evolutionary dynamics, trajectories and outcomes of institutional and organizational transformation. In sharp contrast, the 1980s witnessed the rise of culturally or ideationally based forms of historicist thought and analysis in which the explanatory and political significance of factors located in a society's or organization's ‘material base’ were substantially downgraded in favour of variables embedded in their ‘ideological superstructures’. the paper traces the emergence, progress and implications of this cultural historicism in relation to four distinct, but interrelated discourses ‐ enterprise, flexibility, quality and human resource management. It also suggests that this analysis raises a number of fundamental theoretical and methodological issues concerned with three different approaches to the study of the interconnections between intellectual and institutional change in ‘late’ or ‘post’‐modern societies ‐ that is, the history of ideas, the sociology of knowledge, and technologies of government. the paper concludes with the argument that each of these broad approaches needs to be brought into clearer theoretical and methodological alignment in order to develop a more subtle and sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of, and elective affinity between, intellectual and institutional change. It also suggests that this need for a clearer theoretical alignment between these three approaches will become particularly pressing in the 1990s as an alternative discourse of citizenship emerges to challenge the ideological hegemony of the discourse of enterprise with its roots in cultural historicism.

McKinsey, Hilmer and the BCA: The 'New Management' Model of Labour Market Reform

This paper will discuss the origins and development of the labour market reform agenda pursued by the Business Council of Australia (the council). This agenda found its initial expression in the attempt to apply the McKinsey 'new manage ment' model of employment relations to the regulation of the labour market in Australia. The 'popular' management works of Fred Hilrner are discussed, as is their relationship to the various reports issued by the council from 1989 to 1993 on the development of enterprise-based employment relations. The paper will assess the extent to which the McKinsey-Hilmer-council discourse influenced the terms of the enterprise bargaining debate in the later 1980s and 1990s. In turn, there will be consideration of tlte extent to which the developments in the council's discourse were influenced by changes to the industrial relations system in the same period and the adoption of the enterprise discourse by other contributors to the labour market debate. The paper concludes that the council was able to take a leading role in establishing the hegemony of the enterprise discourse without necessarily achieving a regulatory regime that matched its 'new management' model of employment relations.

THE CULT[URE] OF THE CUSTOMER

ABSTRACTMuch organizational restructuring, at least in the UK and USA, seeks to replace organizational regulation by that of the market. These developments centre around an emphasis on relations with customers ‐ the ‘sovereign consumer’‐ as a paradigm for effective forms of organizational relations; they are apparent in, and underpin, a wide variety of organizational developments: just‐in‐time, total quality management, culture change programmes.Understanding these developments requires consideration of the discourse of enterprise of which the culture of the (internal) customer constitutes a key element. Defining internal organizational relations ‘as if’they were customer/supplier relations means replacing bureaucratic regulation and stability with the constant uncertainties of the market, and thus requiring enterprise from employees. This discourse has fundamental implications for management attempts to define working practices and relations and, ultimately, has impact on the conduct and identities of employees.Understanding these developments is not possible if analysis remains at the level of the organization. It requires that organizational restructurings, and the discourse which supports them, be located within the social and political rationality of enterprise. The certainties of management, the conviction that environmental challenge and competitive threat must be met by the cult[ure] of the customer, are due to managements’largely unquestioned acceptance of the normality and perceived good sense of the discourse of enterprise.