Volume 15(3): 307–313

ISSN 1350–5084
Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi
and Singapore)

Enterprising Selves:
How Governmentality Meets Agency
Pauline Gleadle
The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Nelarine Cornelius
Brunel Business School, Brunel University, UK

Eric Pezet
University of Valenciennes and Center for Management Science—Ecole des
Mines de Paris, Paris, France

The project of the special issue came about as a result of an ESRC seminar
series based around Alvesson and Willmott’s (2002) discussion regarding
the regulation of identity. Subsequently, we were involved in organizing
in 2006 an EGOS sub-theme group in Bergen, Norway concerned with
enterprising selves, which generated a set of debates that Graeme Salaman
and John Storey review in the first part of this special issue. To date, there
has been relatively little work exploring the impact of enterprise initiatives
on individuals’ identities (Storey et al., 2005) so this special issue aims
to help address this gap. Further, emerging from these developments is a
suggestion of a new orientation to the study of governmentality.
Salaman and Storey argue that many scholars have approached enter-
prise from the perspective of bureaucracy and discipline. However, they
contend that much of such research has involved a ‘misuse’ of discourse, in
over-emphasizing its role to the exclusion of all else. In its place, Salaman
and Storey argue for more nuanced and empirically based work exploring
the ways enterprise is understood, valued, interpreted and deployed within
organizations which are committed to achieving enterprise. Tara Fenwick
responds in this debate and reinforces this idea, concurring that there is a
need for ‘careful empirical tracings of complex everyday interactions
of people, objects, spaces and meanings, analysing specific movements
and moments of enterprise and its multiple potential effects’ (p. 331).

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Organization 15(3)
Introduction
Importantly, however, she also argues for careful consideration of the
issues around the academic manufacture of knowledge and subjectivities
occurring in the research processes stimulated by these objects.
The papers of this special issue address these appeals by presenting
field studies. They are developed around the general question of enter-
prising selves in different contexts, including healthcare and banking, and
at different political domains relating to the organization. Together, they
suggest a shift in regimes of governmentality. A regime of governmentality
is defined as:
the ensemble formed by the institutions procedures, analyses and reflections,
the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit
complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal
form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means
apparatuses of security. (Foucault, 1978: 102)
Although many researchers have observed governmentality in terms of
macro-economic policy (e.g. Miller and Rose, 1990), the present research
focuses on emerging forms of agency of the citizen, which political and
managerial discourse promote as enterprising.
Indeed, we stress the importance of focusing upon the issue of the
target population in discussions of governmentality. Why do we choose
to do this? Gordon (1991: 23) argues that the emergence of civil society
can be understood as a 19th century construction arising from notions of
social government. However, Mitchell (1999), proposes that the social is
no longer inscribed within a coordinating state. Instead, the social has
been reconfigured as a set of constructed markets in service provision and
expertise, made operable through a variety of techniques of agency, such
service provision being rendered calculable by technologies of perform-
ance. Further, the technologies of government regularly seek to enhance
the citizen’s possibilities for agency.
Thus, an effect of the change of social government in our view is that
since the 1980s political government has been progressively reconstructed
around what we term the ‘clientelization’ of the population. Clientelization
represents a philosophical and political shift on the part of governments
and corporations. This shift is enacted through the adoption of tougher
commercialized mores and ethical realignments, and more marketized
and less civic transactions and arrangements between institutions and
the citizen.
For example, in the UK, within the National Health Service and a uni-
versal entitlement of care traditionally, the citizen would have been the
recipient of a paternalistic, institutional service as a ‘patient’ (residing
within statutory, civic entitlement of, say, universal dental care) from a
state designated practitioner. Along with changes to a ‘mixed market’ for
dental provision, the citizen became a ‘client’, signalling the rhetoric of
direct interaction between the citizen and a choice of practitioner, with
a reduced role for the state and the option to pay more for better quality
provision. More recently, the citizen now occupies the more corporatist

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 Enterprising Selves
Pauline Gleadle et al.
role of ‘customer’: a potential consumer of a wide range of medical and
cosmetic dental service ‘options’. Basic services only are now funded by the
state, and comparable services of better quality may be purchased privately.
However, such clientelization may lead to increasing inequalities within
the population, a large proportion of whom may be unable to afford basic
dental care. At the other end of the spectrum, the better off are not only more
than able to pay for their basic needs but also may enjoy the benefits of ex-
pensive cosmetic treatments. Indeed, many dental practitioners now limit
their provision of cost-restricted, state funded dental services, and some
have withdrawn national health service dentistry services altogether.
Attempts at the ‘clientelization’ of the population may be justified on the
basis that so-called liberal government stresses the importance of fostering
the self-organizing capacities of natural spheres of market, civil society and
the private life of the individual (Rose, 1999). Thus, for government, the
clientelization of the citizen is not merely an analogy, or managerial device
adopted from the commercial world, as clientelization is a phenomenon
within the business world also. In the latter, clientelization comprises
the shift from more traditional, often paternalistic transactions between
institutions and the citizen towards a much more overtly commercial
engagement in which the economic capacity and potential of the citizen
centrally determines the nature of the relationship.
So, what are the consequences for the citizen of this ‘new’ governmen-
tality on the agency and identity work that flows from it? In our view,
empirical investigations of ‘new’ governmentality, the core of this special
issue, provide a vehicle for exploring how and where ‘governmentality
meets agency’.
Thus taken together, the papers of this special issue highlight at least
three aspects of new governmentality:
• Clientelization of populations, at the root of new public management,
has emergent consequences on designated agents of the state, such as
civil servants and health professionals.
• Clientelization of the population is common to both political govern-
ment and managerial government and there is a connection between
the commercial and statutory sectors regarding the segmentation
of populations into the economically able and the economically
burdensome.
• This shift in governmentality, which is based on changes in organ-
ization, is also based on enterprising selves whose cooperation is ideally,
clientelized.

‘Clientelization’, and ‘New’ Civil Duties

One way in which the state attempts what we might call the redesign of
the population is by means of redefining the role of civil servants in the
UK and in the US as argued by Paul Du Gay in his invited essay. Gov-
ernmentality has been exercised by UK politicians in two ways with
regard to the civil service. Firstly, civil servants are now expected to be
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 Organization 15(3)
Introduction
‘responsive’ to the needs of their clients rather than being ‘responsible’ as
previously. Secondly, civil servants are enjoined to display ‘ownership’
of particular policies, with the resultant erosion of the old distinction
between public office and the person who occupies it. Paul Du Gay quotes
Wilding in this regard who comments that there is a danger of the civil
servant becoming indistinguishable from the politician or the entrepreneur.
However, such attempts at governmentality by the state are not confined
to the civil service but extend to other sectors such as health. Ruth
McDonald, Stephen Harrison and Kath Checkland show in their paper
that in the NHS patients are now deemed to exercise choice in their new
capacity as consumers of healthcare. Under the new GP’s contract the
workload of doctors and nurses has become increasingly target focused
as patients are constructed in terms of their contribution to performance
measures. Mitchell (1999) explains such developments in terms of
the advent of new technologies of performance being employed which
are designed to penetrate the enclosures of expertise fostered under
the welfare state in order to subsume such domains of expertise to new
formal calculative regimes.
In Darren McCabe’s paper, the rhetoric of enterprise is used by bank senior
management who want back office staff to go beyond basic data proces-
sing to a position where they are generating wealth through cost reduction
effected through routinization of work. So in this case, senior managers
try to exercise governmentality by promoting certain enterprise skills such
as business awareness, customer focus and initiative. Such governmen-
tality is put into effect through measuring individual error rates and
efficiency, targets which form the basis of monthly reviews and annual
appraisals.

‘Clientelization’ as Revealing Commonalities and Distinctions Between

State and Firms about Ways of Thinking About the Population
The individual takes her place within the population as far as her conduct
‘interconnect(s) with issue of national policies’ (Gordon, 1991: 5). However,
governmentality is not just the business of the state: corporations under-
take powerful political and economic, national and global transactions
with citizens, and thus provide an important institutional arrangement
for governmentality. It could be argued that in the commercial world,
more traditionally oriented transactions between the customer and the
corporation are moving towards ‘hard’ clientelization, located within a
ubiquitous marketization of the traditionally paternalistic and civic re-
sponsibility elements of commercial citizen-corporation transactions.
Whilst the means of governmentality exercised by the state and firms may
be similar (statistical methodologies, various communication techniques,
training of key individuals in the organization, to name but a few), they
are used to different ends. Typically, the firm is interested in specific seg-
mentation of the population whilst the state will tend to be concerned with

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 Enterprising Selves
Pauline Gleadle et al.
the population as a whole, perhaps as regards a particular behaviour, such
as that exhibited by citizens in their capacity as healthcare users.
A further example of attempts at governing by the state is discussed
by Ainsworth and Hardy in their study. Here the Australian state uses
a commission of inquiry in an attempt to familiarize itself better with a
particular segment of the population that is the target of government, the
older worker. Private sector firms are known to be unwilling to employ
older workers, a phenomenon that the government is keen to understand.
Ainsworth and Hardy trace how an enterprise discourse is used to con-
struct identity categories, often less favourably, of older people trying to
re-enter work or start small businesses after unemployment.
In Nayak and Beckett’s paper based on research undertaken in the banking
industry, clientelization impacts on the individual in two ways. Firstly,
the bank manager, no longer viewed in the traditional role of a pillar of
the community but rather as a sales manager selling financial products,
mediates new enterprising orientations required of bank customers. These
customers are expected to become the new confident consumers in place
of their forebears who years ago had to ‘sell’ themselves to bank managers
operating within a framework of social obligation. Secondly, clientelization
is also present in the economic segmentation by the banks of the popu-
lation in terms of financial attractiveness, such information being based on
much more dynamic data than their equivalents in even the recent past,
with the banks’ focus now being on knowing the customer at a distance.
Nayak and Beckett argue that the banks have played an important role
in empowering individuals to be the new free and sovereign consumers
through the provision of credit, the decline in the role of the bank manager
and the increasing use of technologies to represent the customer. In this
regard, there is a resonance with those groups that are seen by the bank
as less able to manage their finances, in other words, who are less able to
take up the role of competent client (as opposed to bank account holder),
with Ainsworth and Hardy’s findings of the older worker being perceived
as lacking the capacity to be truly entrepreneurial. However, even among
those perceived as the commercially desirable constituency among the
banks’ customers, such attempts at clientelization may engender novel
forms of resistance not envisaged in this new order.

Enterprising Selves and New Resistances

Government at a distance explains how public policies influence behav-
iours (Miller and Rose, 1990). This distance is largely explained by
bureaucracy and discipline.
Nevertheless, governmentality does not meet agency exclusively via
bureaucracy and discipline. Instead, governmentality also meets agency
by the means of the managerial ‘ascesis of performance,’ a set of practices
of the self that individuals freely accept, so that through their practices
they come to embody the organization (Pezet, 2007: 3–13). Practices of

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 Organization 15(3)
Introduction
the self constitute one of the principal means by which governmentality
meets free agency. Such ascesis is not new in the corporation but rather is
now more widely practiced, enterprising selves being based on this type
of mechanism.
The archetype of the enterprising self is perhaps the management
consultant, because of two factors. Firstly, consultants typically promote
organizational change; secondly, they are more able to move freely on
the job market than many other workers. As they are often involved
in their own enterprise of the self in actively managing their own
careers, they tend to be regarded as intrinsically enterprising. What is
interesting, however, is that while firms employ such consultants usu-
ally with the aim of embedding enterprise, the employees concerned
often subvert such attempts by instead focusing on their own enterprise
of the self. So perhaps perversely at first sight, these ex-consultants
draw on enterprise in rejecting long-term commitment to a single organ-
ization. Many see moving back into consultancy as an option, so reinforcing
their erstwhile identity rather than embracing their new role. Indeed, core
to the article by Sturdy and Wright is that consultants view themselves
more as belonging to a diaspora rather than to a corporation. The article
by Whittle and Mueller shows that aspects of consultants’ behaviour are
due to existential insecurities experienced by the internal change agents/
consultants acting as mediators searching for the entrepreneurial within
organizations.
Having extracted what we see as key themes across the various papers,
the special issue starts with Graeme Salaman’s and John Storey’s positioning
of the debates around enterprise and identity in their wider academic
context.

References
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(eds) The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality, pp. 87–104. Chicago, IL:
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C. Gordon and P.Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality,
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19(1): 1–31.
Mitchell, D. (1999) Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London:
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 Enterprising Selves
Pauline Gleadle et al.
Storey, J., Salaman, G. and Platman, K. (2005) ‘Living with Enterprise in an
Enterprise Economy: Freelance and Contract Workers in the Media’, Human
Relations 58(8): 1033–54.

Pauline Gleadle is Lecturer in Management at the Open University in the UK. Her research
interests include financialization, debates around enterprise and the management
of knowledge workers. Address: The Open University Business School, The Open
University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK.
[email: m.p.r.gleadle@open.ac.uk]

Nelarine Cornelius is a Reader in Human Resource Management and Organization

Studies at Brunel Business School (BBS), Brunel University. She is Director of
the Centre for Research into Emotion Work (CREW) Brunel University and Head
of the Organizational Studies Group, BBS. Her research interests include identity
and identity work, social justice and emotion work and emotional labour. She
is currently Co-Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council seminar
series (with Professor Miguel Martinez Lucio, University of Manchester, UK),
Ethnicity, Networks and Voice Mechanisms in Established and Hard to Reach BME
Communities: Capacity Building and Beyond, and is leading (with Professor Eric
Pezet, Ecole des Mines, Paris) and Anglo-French project on formal and informal
mentoring. Address: Brunel Business School, Brunel University, Uxbridge,
Middlesex, UB8 3PH, UK.
[email: nelarine@googlemail.com]

Eric Pezet is Professor of Management at the University of Valenciennes and Researcher at

the Center for Management Science—Ecole des Mines de Paris. Address: 26 Rue din
Genesol Lechinc, Charenten Le Pont, 94220, France. [email: eric.pezet@ensmp.fr]

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