Robert van Krieken
University of Sydney
published in Economy & Society 25(2) 1996: 195-221

Proto-governmentalization and the historical formation of organizational subjectivity

...it seems desirable to promote in every way the feeling that 'the Government' is no entity outside of ourselves, but merely ourselves organised for collective purposes (Webb 1891: 8).

....in analyzing power relations from the standpoint of institutions one lays oneself open to seeking the explanation and the origin of the former in the latter...This does not deny the importance of institutions on the establishment of power relations. Instead I wish to suggest that one must analyze institutions from the standpoint of power relations, rather than vice versa, and that the fundamental point of anchorage of the relationships, even if they are embodied and crystallized in an institution, is to be found outside the institution (Foucault 1982: 222).

Two concerns run through this article. First, the textbook definitional distinction between organizations as entities directed towards the rational attainment of goals, and a realm of society or culture which is not, along with the possibility that this distinction obscures the linkages and connections between organizational life and wider social relations. This is not a restatement of either the 'bureaucratization of the world' (Jacoby 1973) idea or the notion that organizations operate within environments, but an argument for a more precise and nuanced understanding of the relations between organizations and the society and culture within which they are embedded.

Second, the place of subjectivity and the self in the sociology of organizations. My argument will be that the sociology of organizations has an underdeveloped theory of subjectivity, both undersocialized and oversocialized (Wrong 1961). It is undersocialized in the sense that people are assumed to come to organizations as relatively blank slates, and oversocialized because organizational life is presumed to be the primary basis of the formation of subjective identity.

These concerns will be addressed through an encounter between organizational sociology and the work of both Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. In the process I aim to identify both the convergences and differences between the subsequent work on organizations which can be more or less loosely aligned with the conceptual frameworks of either writer. The encounter will be a two-way one: the emphasis will be both on what their conceptual apparatuses can contribute to the sociology of organizations and on what changes, hints, suggestions, an organizational perspective can provide for the development of their ideas. I also focus primarily on Elias and Foucault not because they had ideas nobody else has had, but because we can draw on their work as 'nodal points' around which a variety of analyses, observations and arguments can be organized. This is another way of restating that intellectual work is a collective enterprise, corresponding not to a model of 'invention' but more to one of 'formulation' and 'synthesis'.

I will beg the reader's tolerance for the introduction of one - only one - new concept necessary to grasp the general thrust of the argument: proto-governmentalization: the alignment and coordination of the initiatives, projects and strategies of individuals and groups with those of a complex constellation of administrative and economic organizations. The reason I need the prefix 'proto-' is that I wish to capture the mechanisms and processes of organization from the perspective of the organized or, using Foucault's vocabulary, government from the perspective of the governed. Governmentality thus concerns government emanating from various authorities and organizations, whereas proto-governmentality concerns the approaches to government by the governed. It is Elias's perspective and his concern with identifying possible historical processes of development which in turn leads to the notion of proto-governmentalization, a process of increasing proto-governmentality among members of advanced industrialized nations.

My arguments are partly a variant and extension of the concept of the social embeddedness of economic action (Polanyi 1944; Grabber 1993; Granovetter 1985; Zelizer 1994a, 1994b). The point that 'most behaviour is closely embedded in networks of interpersonal relations' (Granovetter 1983: 504) clearly applies to all organizational action, of which economic action is a part. Networks of social relations and their accompanying 'deep structures' of organizational action also have histories which require examination and understanding if we are to comprehend contemporary organizations. Both the current operation and the historical development of organizational forms can only be properly understood alongside the operation and historical development of more general social modes of constituting human subjectivity, their embeddedness in social relations in the sphere of society and culture. Subjectivity is a crucial medium for the establishment of 'institutional isomorphism' across organizations (DiMaggio and Powell 1983), and for the 'deep structure' of the tacit rules governing organizational action (Drazin and Sandelands 1992). This is particularly significant in a world 'characterized by increasingly dense, extended, and rapidly changing patterns of reciprocal interdependence, and by increasingly frequent, but ephemeral, interactions across all types of pre-established boundaries, intra- and interorganizational, intra- and intersectoral, intra- and international' (Scharpf 1993: 141).

The scene can best be set for these arguments by beginning with the basic opposition in Max Weber's work, between his sociology of bureaucracy and his sociology of modern culture, between his conception of legal-rational bureaucracy as emptied of personal concerns, and his arguments about the significance of Protestantism and the 'spirit of capitalism' in establishing precisely the kind of personality structures required for a rationalized mode of conduct.

Weber, discipline and organizational subjectivity
There are three features of Max Weber's account of the ideal-typical legal-rational bureaucracy which continue to exert a powerful influence on the sociology of organizations. First, Weber emphasised its impersonality as a constituent feature of its rationality and effectiveness. The 'ideal official' performs their duties in 'a spirit of formalistic impersonality...without hatred or passion'. The activities of the bureaucrat are governed by the rules, not by personal considerations such as feelings towards colleagues or clients. The actions are therefore rational rather than affective. Business is conducted 'according to calculable rules and without regard for persons'. Bureaucracy 'segregates official activity as something distinct from the sphere of private life'. The technical superiority of legal-rational bureaucracy stems from the combination of specialist skills subordinated to the goals of the organization, and the exclusion of private, personal emotions and interests which might detract from the attainment of those goals.

In Weber's words, 'precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs - these are raised to the optimum in the strictly bureaucratic organization'. In its ideal form bureaucracy eliminates 'from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation' (in Gerth and Mills 1948: 214, 216). As Robert Merton summed it up, bureaucracy 'approaches the complete elimination of personalized relationships and nonrational considerations (hostility, anxiety, affectual involvements, etc.)', so that 'man is to a very important degree controlled by his social relations to the instruments of production' (Merton 1952: 363).

Second, Weber saw the hierarchical and specialized structure of bureaucracy as a form of domination. The uniform and rational procedures of bureaucratic routine tend to undermine spontaneity, creativity and individual initiative, confining these human capacities within the famous 'iron cage'. The impersonality of official conduct produces 'specialists without spirit' (1930: 182), and it was 'horrible to think that the world would one day be filled with little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards the bigger ones'. To Weber, the primary basis for opposition to bureaucracy's restriction of human freedom lay in the non-bureaucratic realm of values and politics. Weber saw the 'great question' as how we can 'oppose this machinery in order to preserve a vestige of humanity from this fragmentation (Parzellierung) of the soul, from this absolute domination of bureaucratic ideals of life' (Weber 1924: 414).

Third, bureaucracy has a profound disciplinary effect on human subjectivity. As we are increasingly subjected to impersonal routines, exercises, procedures and rules, they become built into our 'psycho-physical apparatus'. Clearly thinking of Taylorism, he said that 'the individual is shorn of his natural rhythm as determined by his organism; in line with the demands of the work procedure. he is attuned to the new rhythm through the functional specialization of muscles and through the creation of an optimal economy of physical effort' (1978: 1156). The disciplinary effects of modern organizations also include the production of a particular emotional orientation; in Merton's words,'Discipline can be effective only if the ideal patterns are buttressed by strong sentiments which entail devotion to one's duties, a keen sense of the limitation of one's authority and competence, and methodical performance of routine activities. The efficacy of social structure depends ultimately upon infusing group participants with appropriate attitudes and sentiments' (Merton 1952: 365). Weber also commented that once it was established, this 'settled orientation of man for observing the accustomed rules and regulations' possesses its own reality and stability, enabling it to outlive the social organization which produced a calculative, disciplined orientation to the world (1978: 988).

These are the arguments in Weber which have had the strongest impact on subsequent organizational sociology. There was, however, a 'second Weber', the Weber of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, who drew attention to a different but equally important aspect of the historical development of discipline. The production of a disciplined orientation to the world within organizations was both preceded and accompanied by the more general ideological development of Christian asceticism's methodical, calculative organization of conduct. Christian asceticism encouraged the rejection of all that was based on emotion, in favour of 'the alert, methodical control of one's own pattern of life and behaviour' (1978: 544). The disciplined orientation to the conduct of everyday life, which could first be found in armies and monasteries, 'strode into the market-place of life, slammed the door of the monastery behind it', and began to permeate the 'naturally spontaneous character of daily life in the world' with its 'methodicalness' (1974: 154).

This in turn meant that capitalist work organizations found at least some workers already possessed of an 'adequate lifestyle' through which it 'gained massive control over life in the manner that it has' (1978b: 1119), so that Protestant asceticism unintentionally prepared the foundations for the development of organizational discipline (van Krieken 1989). The bureaucratic personality was thus formed as much outside organizations as within them. For Weber, the historical trajectory of the development of the methodical, disciplined conduct of life was from two particularly innovative organizations, namely monasteries from the formulation of St. Benedict's Rule in the 6th century (Treiber and Steinert 1980; Kieser 1987; Asad 1987) and Maurice of Orange's reformed army in the 16th century (van Doorn 1956; 1975), via the extra-organizational context of religious belief, and then embodied in the structure of legal-rational bureaucracy.

Weber himself paved the way for the neglect of this social space surrounding organizations when he argued that 'victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs' (Weber 1974: 181-2). Combine this with his remarks about the elimination of personal considerations in bureaucracy, and one gets an almost structuralist picture of an 'organization without a subject', of calculative disciplined conduct constituting organizations either emptied of all subjectivity or possessed primarily of a specifically organizational subjectivity.

Much of the subsequent sociology of organizations has been concerned to correct this image, to emphasise the subjective dimensions of organizational life (Albrow 1992; 1994) and to identity the role of broader social relations on organizational identities. As Adorno put it in 1954, 'a social phenomenon like the modern organization can in any case only be specified in its position in the total societal process, that is, really, with a developed theory of society' (Adorno 1954: 22). Management theorists and industrial psychologists seemed to have a better sense of the relationship between identities formed outside work organizations and human behaviour within organizations. The Hawthorne studies' development of the concept of the 'sentimental worker' (Hollway 1991; Gillespie 1991; Rose 1975) and the subsequent counselling programme at Western Electric's Hawthorne plant (Dickson and Roethlisberger 1966; Wilensky and Wilensky 1951) are good examples. Alvin Gouldner made an attempt in the 1950s to develop the notion of 'latent social identities' (1957; 1959) which appear to be irrelevant to organizations but structure organizational behaviour nonetheless. Using the example of sexuality, he suggested that 'there is usually something occurring between people of opposite sexes, even though this is prescribed neither by the organization's official rules nor by the societal values deemed appropriate for that setting...One does not have to be a Freudian to insist that sex makes a difference, even for organizational behaviour'. However, said Gouldner, 'many sociologists who study factories, offices, schools or mental hospitals take little note of the fact that the organizational role-players invariably have a gender around which is built a latent social identity' (1959: 412).

Since then a variety of writers have identified the significance of the social networks within which organizational elites are located (e.g. Miliband 1969), the growing field of organizational demography (e.g. Wharton 1992) examines the impact of the social construction of race and gender on organizational life, and 'new institutionalists' emphasise the cultural dimensions of organizational identities (Powell and DiMaggio 1991). Rosabeth Kanter (1977) also identified the persistence of the forms of patrimonial bureaucracy in the position of secretaries, and Rosemary Pringle (1989) has recently gone further to argue that the very notion of an organizational realm which excludes personal and subjective concerns is an impossibility. Rationality, argues Pringle, 'requires as a condition of its existence the simultaneous creation of the realm of the personal, the emotional, the sexual, the 'irrational'' (1989: 161). In reality it is impossible to separate public organizational life from private life, because they coexist within the human beings who work in organizations. The meaning of rational human activity within organizations derives largely from its relationship to the nonrational; as Pringle puts it, 'Purposive activity operates not through the denial of pleasure but by its promise: we will become desirable' (1989: 167).

Nonetheless, the distinction between 'organization' (goal-directed) and 'society' (non-goal-directed), the conception of the two realms as operating according to different logics, remains persistent. making it difficult to see the ways in which organizational and extra-organizational life mediate each other, not to mention the historical changes in the forms taken by that mediation. For example, Charles Perrow sees society as having been 'absorbed', 'vacuumed up' by large organizations which have become a 'surrogate' for society (1991: 726). Activities that used to be undertaken either in non-organizational settings such as the family or community, or in small local organizations - small businesses. local government, local church - are increasingly performed, writes Perrow, by large organizations, either directly or indirectly as the 'satellite' or 'branch' of a large organization.

His argument then branches off in two directions; on the one hand Perrow argues that bureaucracies have either replaced or weakened non-organizational social institutions - family, church, neighbourhood and community (1991: 743), so that organizations and society are seen as mutually exclusive. On the other hand, he sees these non-organizational social institutions as having become subservient to large organizations. Non-organizational social settings thus increasingly prepare and socialize individuals for organizational life, implanting an organizational discipline around 'punctuality, obedience, respect, patience in service to another, and patience about moving up, and the necessary literacy and numerical skills'. The disciplinary concerns of 'society that were irrelevant to the workplace, to the organization, such as reciprocity, ethnic and religious culture, and the extended family, withered in importance' (1991: 744). But generally Perrow sees organizations as 'stripping' people of their social identity in order to meet the organizations disciplinary requirements, using all the standard Weberian characteristics of bureaucracies: standardization, hierarchy, impersonality. 'Social citizens' are transformed into 'organizational members of society'; people do inconveniently 'track in the mud of the social identity achieved outside the organization into the organization, but the organization works assiduously to counteract this pollution' (1991:753).

For Perrow the formation of human subjectivity within organizations is an alternative to its general formation in non-organizational settings; the subjective characteristics brought into the organization from society are a form of 'pollution' to be eliminated as thoroughly as possible. Human action thus becomes increasingly subject to an organizational discipline, and 'our choice is less subject to family and kin, neighbours, peer groups, and religious or ethnic ties' (1991: 755). Like Weber, then, Perrow sees organizations as removing or eliminating the effects of extra-organizational life on human beings. He sees life outside the organization as a realm of freedom, and life within as a realm of discipline, and also sees the latter as gradually taking over the former.

Most sociologists studying organizations press on with a similar opposition between 'organization' and 'society', believing with Weber, Etzioni (1964) and Perrow that organizations are oriented towards the rational attainment of goals and non-organizational social life is not, and even the discussions of the subjective dimensions of organizations tend to remain internal to organizations. However, such a view is founded on an underdeveloped theory of the self, because the linkages between organizational and extra-organizational life are only sketchily made, usually seen as opposed to each other, and rarely in posed in historical terms. There is here a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between extra-organizational and organizational subjectivity, related in turn to an underdeveloped understanding of the formation of subjectivity outside organizations.

This problem can usefully be addressed by drawing on the work of Elias and Foucault, the two theorists who have been most utilized in developing more general understandings of the characteristically 'modern', disciplined form of human subjectivity (van Krieken 1990; Wagner 1994).

Foucault, from discipline to government
Throughout his writings Foucault had three concerns: first, the characteristics of various forms of scientific knowledge, their construction of 'truth' about human beings which in turn constitutes a form of power (archaeology of knowledge); second, the strategies and techniques of power which develop a disciplined subjectivity (discipline); third, the 'techniques of the self' characteristic of liberalism which both encourage an autonomous subjectivity and subject us to systems of government (Foucault 1988b: 15). The first two concerns are well-known in organizational sociology (Burrell 1988; Clegg 1989a; 1994; Deetz 1992; Knights 1990; Knights and Willmott 1989) and need no detailed examination here, other than to draw attention briefly to the features relevant to my argument.

Foucault's examination of disciplinary power worked towards seeing power as both productive rather than merely constraining, and traversing all social relations, rather than only located within organizations or institutions like the state. François Ewald characterizes the first argument as the notion of the 'functional inversion' of discipline, from restrictive to productive, so that modern discipline included individual subjectivity in its field of operation. Ewald (1992) describes the second argument as that of the 'emigration' of disciplinary mechanisms. Weber's argument was that Protestantism, capitalist forms of work organization and bureaucracy broke through the walls of the monastery and the army barracks to incorporate all members of society within a methodical conduct of life. Foucault, in contrast, focused on the mobilization of the whole range of disciplinary techniques within particular institutional settings - schools, workhouses, hospitals, factories, the confessional - and the impact of the knowledge developed by the human sciences themselves. 'Disciplinary society', writes Ewald, 'is a society of absolute communication: the diffusion of disciplines makes it possible for everything to communicate with everything else according to an interplay of redundant elements and infinite homologies' (Ewald 1992: 170).

Disciplinary society is not, however, a disciplined society, for Foucault also believed that power was always accompanied by resistance. There is, he wrote, 'something in the social body, in classes, groups and individuals themselves which in some sense escapes relations of power', an active response to power which is 'a centrifugal movement, an inverse energy, a discharge (1980: 138). Foucault varied between seeing resistance as the basis for transformative political action and, more frequently, seeing it as both produced by power itself and finally part of the mechanism of power itself, a 'support' as well as an 'adversary'.
This discipline-resistance model is one of the more problematic aspects of his work (Gane 1986), although it is the one which has received the greatest attention in organizational theory (Burrell 1988; Clegg 1989; 1994). More interesting here is the direction in which Foucault subsequently moved, partly in response to some of the criticisms. Colin Gordon argues that Foucault wanted to achieve some distance from the approach taken in Discipline and Punish, at least to the extent that 'this may have seemed to give an impression of certain uses of power as having an almost absolute capability to tame and subject individuals' (Gordon 1991: 5).
In his lectures at the Collège de France between 1977 and 1980 Foucault changed direction to develop his third concern, that of the relationship between power and the self. Instead of working within an opposition between discipline and repression, he suggested the concepts of government and governmentality as a way of capturing the connections between power and freedom. In this way he linked his previous two concerns together, by arguing that forms of governmental power link together the disciplinary strategies of various organizations, the knowledge produced about human beings by the human sciences, and the active projects and independent strategies of individuals and groups. Foucault roughly equated governmentality with liberal and neo-liberal political thought, and contrasted it with the concept of 'police', 'cameralism' or 'sovereignty', as a central principle for the organization of society.

Foucault's general line of argument is consistent with most of the work done by historians on early-modern Western and Central Europe. Since the 16th century, the distinction between organizations as goal-directed and society as not goal-directed was precisely rejected by clergymen, administrators, and political theorists of all religious orientation. All aspects of society were regarded as relevant to the attainment of overall social objectives - management of poverty, crime, violence, the encouragement of prosperity, moral virtuousness - and the legitimate object of organized intervention both church and state auspices, often through the mechanisms of cultural formation and education (Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Oestreich 1982; Michielse 1990; Raeff 1983; Muchembled 1985; 1988; Hsia 1989; Reinhard 1983).

In contrast to the discipline-resistance model, the workings of governmentality depends both on the recognition of those over whom power is exercised as possessing agency, and the on opening up of 'a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions' (1982: 220). Government takes place 'where the way individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves'. It is 'not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself' (cited in Keenan 1982: 38). It is not simply about the organizational internalisation of self-discipline; it is 'a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action' (1982: 220). Government thus presumes rather than undermines both freedom and resistance, and works through freely chosen human agency, by coordinating, linking, setting frameworks, establishing rules of action. Foucault was not simply arguing that freedom and bureaucracy are linked in the Weberian sense that the rational self-discipline expands our realm of possible action, but made the stronger point that government and social discipline presupposes and works on the basis of free human agency.

Later Foucault made a further distinction between power as 'strategic games' consisting of the perpetual 'conduct of conduct' of 'free individuals', and power as 'states of domination', which is what is usually meant by 'power', with governental technologies lying between the two. There were, then, three levels in Foucault's analysis of power: 'the strategic relationships, the techniques of government, and the levels of domination' (1988c: 19). Foucault's critique of power was thus more precisely a critique of domination, aiming 'to give one's self the rules of law, the techniques of managements, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination' (1988c: 18).

Governmentality and organizations
Organizational sociologists have made the most extensive use of Foucault's ideas up to and including the 'discipline-resistance' period (Jermier, Knight and Nord 1994), but there has been little exploration of the significance of his work on governmentality. A number of writers, including Pasquale Pasquino, Colin Gordon (Burchell, Gordon and Miller 1991), Ian Hunter (1994) and others (e.g. Cruikshank 1993; Greco 1993; Miller 1993), have been working on the extension of the concept of governmentality in a variety of areas. For the purposes of this discussion of the sociology of organizations I would like to focus on the work of Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, who have been working through the development of Foucault's ideas on government in a variety of areas: psychology and psychiatry, law, medicine, accounting, economic regulation, industrial management, since the mid 1980's. It is precisely the breadth of their coverage which contributes to an understanding of the linkages between organizational and extra-organizational life. The features of their discussions of governmentality which are particular consequential for the sociology of organizations are as follows.

First, they take up Foucault's argument that government concerns the 'forging of alignments between the personal projects of citizens and images of the social order' (Miller and Rose 1988: 172). There is a complex set of associations formed between overtly political and public agencies - states, governments, authorities -, various other groupings with their own 'authority' - economic, legal, medical, social, technical -, and individuals and groups themselves, all endeavouring to attain a variety of aims. There is thus no necessarily insurmountable conflict between public and private concerns, or between social classes or interest groups: governmental rationality emerges when and where there appear mechanisms by which 'a child, a family, an economy, a community....can be shaped and guided in order to produce desirable objectives whilst at the same time respecting its autonomy' (Rose 1993: 290). Apart from controlling and managing their members, organizations then also work 'by releasing the psychological strivings of individuals for autonomy and creativity... capitalizing upon the motivations and aspirations of its inhabitants'. Autonomy can thus become 'an ally of economic success and not an obstacle to be controlled and disciplined' (Miller and Rose 1990: 26).

Second, a central feature of this 'alignment' process is the development of shared modes of perception, cognitive orientations, and languages. Common vocabularies, theoretical orientations, normative positions, and forms of explanation help establish flexible forms of coordinated association between a variety of individual, group and organizational actors while each them retains their formal autonomy. Expertise and knowledge consequently has a central place in governmentality, both because of the contribution knowledge makes to the ability to establish such coordinated associations, and because expertise serves as a central nodal point around which perceptions and explanations can be organized. Miller and Rose emphasise 'the constitutive role of knowledge...For something to be manageable it must first be knowable' (Miller and Rose 1988: 174; Foucault 1981a: 245). The theory and research of all the 'human scientists': sociologists, economists, psychologists, medical researchers, historians, philosophers, lawyers and criminologists, 'thus provide a kind of intellectual machinery for government, in the form of procedures for rendering the work thinkable, taming its intractable reality by subjecting it to the disciplined analysis of thought' (Rose and Miller 1992: 182). Rose has developed this line of argument in most detail in relation to psychology (Rose 1990), and Miller in relation to industrial psychology and accounting (Miller 1986; Miller and O'Leary 1987).

The alliance formed by experts is a double one; with political authorities (such as state agencies) and organizations (such as private corporations) on the one hand, and with citizens and subjects on the other. Experts operate as translators between the projects, desires and strategies of individuals and groups, and those of political agencies concerned with government. 'Experts...have acted as powerful translation devices between 'authorities' and 'individuals', shaping conduct not through compulsion but through the power of truth, the potency of rationality and the alluring promises of effectivity' (Miller and Rose 1990: 19). They provide the language, conceptual apparatus and forms of explanation and argument that make social unrest, crime, delinquency, illness, poverty, economic boom and decline, knowable and therefore manageable. At the same time, they translate the apparently 'private troubles' of individuals and groups into 'public issues' (Mills 1959), enabling individuals to more operate more successfully in their power negotiations with 'larger' actors such as organizations.

Third, in addition to governmentality operating through expertise and shared modes of cognition, government occurs 'at a distance' through the establishment of rules and frameworks of action, such as legislation, constitutions, rules of association, etc. The concept of 'audit' is a good example here, where individual and organizational actors are accorded considerable operational autonomy, but then disciplined at regular intervals within rules established to ensure their continued linkage with other apparatuses of government.

Fourth, just as disciplinary society was not necessarily disciplined, governmental society is also not perfectly governed. Living in world of programmes does not, argue Rose and Miller, mean that the world is programmed. 'We do not live in a governed world so much as a world traversed by the 'will to govern', fuelled by the constant registration of 'failure', the discrepancy between ambition and outcome, and the constant injunction to do better next time' (Rose and Miller 1992: 191). Precisely because of the means by which liberalism or governmentality operates, it relies on chance, contingency, conjuncture for the 'alignment' and coordination strategies, projects and desires.

Finally, Rose (1992; 1993) also develops the conception which Foucault began to work through, of a rough historical development within governmental rationality, from a form of liberalism which operates through social forms such as the family, and the community, to a type of neo- or advanced liberalism which works more 'through the regulated choices of individual citizens'. Advanced liberal governmentality 'seeks to detach the substantive authority of expertise from the apparatuses of political rule, relocating experts within a market governed by the rationalities of competition, accountability and consumer demand' (Rose 1993: 285). Rose sees an increasing emphasis on individual self-responsibility and autonomy in contemporary political, social and economic life, generally heading towards the construction of an 'enterprising self' (Rose 1992). We appear to be increasingly constructed as entrepreneurial, self-maximising, and above all individual and independent consumers making responsible 'choices' within an organized but 'loose assemblage of agents, calculations, techniques, images and commodities' (Rose 1992: 155).

Rose gives the example of health care, which has moved beyond being primarily a public concern, defined in terms of social needs, to an organization of that public concern around the consumption choices of individual citizens, so that 'individuals will want to he healthy, experts will instruct them on how to be so, and entrepreneurs will exploit and enhance this market for health. Health will be ensured through a combination of the market, expertise and a regulated autonomy' (Rose 1992: 155). Family life too, Rose sees as increasingly governed through the aspirations of its individual members, again mediated by the rules-of-formation provided by experts in psychology, sociology, family therapy, etc., rather than as a whole unit needing to be kept within particular frameworks of normality. Through the decisive influence of expertise, 'normal' families can be more or less systematically assured, and 'the social field can be governed through an alliance between the powers of expertise and the wishes, hopes and fears of the responsible, autonomous family, committed to maximising its quality of life and to the success of family members' (Rose 1992: 157).

Advanced liberal governmental power is also, to a considerable but not unlimited extent, ' reversible', in that such procedures of alignment often require the adjustment of the more advantaged actors in relations of power. Rose refers specifically to self-help in psychotherapy and social work, where 'what starts off as a norm to be implanted into citizens can be repossessed as a demand which citizens can make of authorities' (Rose 1993: 296).(1)

In relation to organizations, the particular significance of these developments of Foucault's concept of governmentality is that organizational life depends both for its very existence and for any future formation on a complex set of extra-organizational discourses and practices about 'what it means to be human' - in psychology, sociology, medicine, law, history. These discourses and forms of expertise construct and reconstruct certain kinds of organizational subjects, subjects able to coordinate their personal projects with the aims of a variety of organizations, and with whom organizations can co-ordinate their projects and strategies. Particularly through the authoritative language and cognitive frameworks of 'expert knowledge' in the human sciences, human subjectivity is developed in a way that mediates between their private troubles and the public issues of various organizations - state agencies, economic enterprises, etc. - and constructs a social and psychological space between, around and within organizations characterized by a generalised, more or less 'coordinated, mediated autonomy'. Studies of governmentality show that the elective affinity Weber identified between particular cultural developments (Protestantism) and changes in organizational subjectivity (spirit of capitalism) was itself increasingly organized. Governmentality is thus the 'organization of elective affinity'.

Elias, foresight and self-constraint
Norbert Elias also identified a similar set of historical transformations in human psychology and interaction, tending towards a self-disciplined, methodical and calculative mode of conduct, but he had a different explanatory logic. He argued that one can see the development of an increasingly complex web of social interdependencies and networks of competition. As functional differentiation increases, the sheer number of people each individual is interconnected with also increases.

As more and more people must attune their conduct to that of others, the web of actions must be organized more and more strictly and accurately, if each individual action is to fulfil its social function. The individual is compelled to regulate his conduct in an increasingly differentiated, more even and more stable manner....the more complex and stable control of conduct is increasingly instilled in the individual from his earliest years as an automatism, a self-compulsion that he cannot resist even if he consciously wishes to (1994: 445).

The foresight required by this increasing interdependency in turn makes it necessary for every individual to develop increasing constraint of their drives, impulses and affect. Increasing social interdependence thus produces a development from external to internal constraint, or a 'social constraint towards self-restraint' which becomes part of human personality structure: 'The web of actions grows so complex and extensive, the effort required to behave þcorrectly" within it becomes so great, that beside the individual's conscious self-control, an automatic, blindly functioning apparatus of self-control is firmly established' (1994: 445-6). This is especially true for the expression of aggression, which becomes increasingly controlled within the monopolization of violence by the state, but it also applies generally to all expressions of emotion, physicality, and so on.

While Weber and Foucault regarded particular cultural and ideological transformations, the coordinated actions of strategically influential individuals or groups, or the appearance of fundamentally different forms of social organization as historically significant, Elias was concerned to explain such phenomena sociologically as themselves the effects of the changing structure of social relations, as dependent rather than independent variables. For Elias the question of why behaviour and emotions change 'is really the same as the question of why their forms of life change' (1994: 168).

Elias's emphasis was thus on the broadest possible range of networks of interdependent, interweaving plans and actions, the notion of a patterned 'fabric' of social relationships from which arises 'an order sui generis, an order more compelling and stronger than the will and reason of the individual people composing it' (1994: 444). The civilizing process is not to be equated to a process of rationalization; its production of a disciplined personality structure cannot be linked, as Weber did, with the effects of either a particular religious belief system or the impact of a particular structuring of organizations; nor can it be linked to a different forms of knowledge and their embodiment in disciplinary 'techniques of the self' or the workings of governmental rationality as Foucault argued. Civilization, said Elias, 'is not "reasonable"; not "rational", any more than it is "irrational". It is set in motion blindly, and kept in motion by the autonomous dynamics of a web of relationships, by specific changes in the way people are bound to live together' (1994: 445).

Elias's comment on one of the central concerns of the disciplined organization of human capacities - coordinating human activity to a particular temporal rhythm - was that it was 'nothing other than a manifestation of the multitude of intertwining chains of interdependence which run through every single social function people have to perform, and of the competitive pressure permeating this densely populated network and affecting, directly or indirectly, every single act of individuals'. The official or businessman concerned about their appointments, the worker subjected to an exact timing of each movement, express 'the multitude of interdependent actions', 'the length and density of the chains composed by the individual actions', and 'the intensity of struggles that keep this whole interdependent network in motion'. A labour function 'situated as a junction of so many chains of action demands an exact allocation of time; it makes people accustomed to subordinating momentary inclinations to the overriding necessities of interdependence; it trains them to eliminate all irregularities from behaviour and to achieve permanent self-control' (1994: 457).

There is, therefore, little sense of the formation of various parts of this network of interdependent functions into the 'nodal points' of human action that we call 'organizations'; Elias's civilizing process is a much more diffuse phenomenon than Weber's armies, monasteries, church congregations, factories and bureaucracies, or Foucault's prisons, schools and hospitals. Elias's work generally suffers from a neglect of organizations and social institutions, the solidification of networks of human interdependencies into relatively stable, enduring social units which in turn have their own effects as if they were themselves 'actors' within networks of interdependent action (Mouzelis 1993; Breuer 1994). Exceptions would include the French court (Elias 1983) and what he referred to as 'scientific establishments' (Elias 1982), but generally Elias's concern with continual processes of social integration led him to subsume all organizations under the one general category of 'the state', which would in turn become integrated into larger aggolomerations of states, and finally humanity as a whole . As Stefan Breuer argues in his comparison of Elias and Weber, it seems that 'Elias is really interested only in power relationships; Weber, on the other hand, is concerned with the solidified form: domination, realized in the form of adminsitration...Instead of viewing society as an assemblage of orders embodied in particular organizations, we are given a view of a dominating centre constituted by social interactions' (Breuer 1994: 51).

Elias spoke primarily of 'the organization of Western societies in the form of nation states' (1994: xiv), without examing the ways in which Western societies are organized and institutionalized into a variety of units, including unions, diverse state bureaucracies, economic enterprises of various sizes and types, political parties, churches, armies, police forces, established social movements, professions, education systems and schools; 'non-organizational' social institutions would include families, communities, ethnic groupings, linguistic communities, social movements before they become routinized and institutionalized. All of these 'concentrations of human interdependency' operate to sediment or accumulate the web of interdependencies into denser sub-networks of mutual interaction, transforming the competition between individuals which Elias focuses on, into competition between organizations or more or less institutionalised groupings of individual, with the aim of maximising the competitive advantage of the grouping in collective rather than individual strategies.

Elias and organizations
At first glance, then, it seems that Elias actually had little to say about organizations other than the state as a relatively undifferentiated, all-encompassing organizational form. However, it is possible to develop aspects of Elias's general orientation towards an understanding of organizations, especially their historical development, and establish the connections between his analysis and that of both Weber and Foucault. For example, using the concept 'social control' instead of 'discipline', Jacques van Doorn argued that Elias's overall theory of increasing self-discipline 'laid the foundation for our concept of social controllability, also the organizability, of the modern person' (1956: 200). Rather than seeing the effective implantation of organizational discipline as a reason for the withering away of non-organizational discipline (Weber), van Doorn argued that there was a dialectical relationship between the two, so that the production of self-disciplined subjectivity both within and outside organizations enabled new, more flexible forms of organizational discipline.

Van Doorn made two important points which also establish the linkage with Foucault's concept of governmentality. First, organizations relied upon extra-organizational disciplinary formation, both historically, linking with the effects of changes in previous generations and previous stages of individuals' lives, and concurrently:

The basis of military discipline was laid not in the barracks, but in the school - the Prussians already knew this and the National Socialists profited from this knowledge. Even further back one also used the family sphere, the youth movement, the Church and the workers' milieu for this purpose. In this way actual organization was a formalization of existing relationships, a process which seemed less enforced than before, because the enforcement, intended and unintended, had already succeeded in the previous generations and in the early life-phases of the individual (1956: 202).

Second, extra-organizational discipline laid the foundations for an active, 'free' mode of conduct within organizations, so that organizational discipline consisted of the harnessing of human striving rather than its confinement within routinised, regulated patterns.

Actually the democratic form of thought as a whole is strongly directed at the realization of a mode of social control which can be defined as the stimulation of the individual striving towards values and ideals....the realization of this social control is first made properly possible in a societal structure in which it members have learned over centuries - to formulate it in psychoanalytic terms - to shape their instinctual life (1956: 200).

Van Doorn also drew attention to the influence of modern pedagogy, psychology, psychiatry and both social casework and community organization in managing individuals and communities precisely through encouraging their self-expression. Both of Foucault's arguments on governmentality - its 'transverse' nature and its 'acting on action' can be seen here in Van Doorn's application of Elias's ideas to te historical development of forms of organization.

Both van Doorn and Willem Mastenbroek subsequently developed these arguments further by looking more closely, with an Eliasian eye, at the army reforms which Weber regarded as an important stimulus to the developed of the modern disciplined personality - those of Maurice of Orange (1567-1625). In the 16th century the most common type of military formation was the Spanish Brigade, 50 deep and wide. Discipline was provided by the brigade as a whole: when Maurice wanted to change to a shallower formation, it required greater self-discipline and self-confidence among soldiers. This was provided through a thorough training. The use of the musket and pike was subjected to a thorough 'time-and-motion' analysis, breaking them down into 43 different movements for the musket and 23 for the pike (van Doorn 1975: 11). Endless drill mixed a mastery of them all into the soldier's psyche and body. Each movement and position was associated with a short command, but of course this required silence among soldiers, and coordination of movements in formation required utmost control of one's bodily movements. The parallel with Taylor and scientific management in industrial organizations is obvious.

Later, in 1860s, the French Colonel Ardant du Pique (Etude sur le Combat 1868) and the German General Helmuth von Moltke moved towards even smaller formations and autonomous action, developing the concept of 'mission tactics' (Auftragstaktik), a delegation of authority based on the principle of consistency with the presenting requirements of any particular combat situation. Terence Dupuy cites one of Moltke favourite stories which became a guiding principle for German officers:

A major, receiving a tongue-lashing from the Prince for a tactical blunder, offered the excuse that he had been obeying orders, and reminded the Prince that a Prussian office was taught that an order from a superior was tantamount to an order from the King. Frederick Charles promptly responded: "His Majesty made you a major because he believed you would know when not to obey his orders." (Dupuy 1977: 116).

Dupuy argued that the Americans were significantly less effective than the Germans in World War II because they were less advanced in this combination of central command and autonomous action in small groups (Dupuy 1977).

In industrial organizations, as Taylorist discipline became internalised by workers, the closely-meshed systems of control became superfluous, and 'gradually and very slowly - it took generations - there arose a pattern of self discipline that coupled less intense supervision with greater autonomy (Mastenbroek 1993: 62). It was thus the 'more complex and stable control of conduct...instilled in the individual from his earliest years as an automatism' (Elias 1994: 445) established in the early period of factory bureaucracy which paved the way for the emergence of the 'sentimental worker' in the 1930s (Hollway 1991), the decision-making worker (March and Simon) in the 1950s, and the 'just-in-time' worker in the 1980s. As Mastenbroek puts it, 'the skill of self-organisation which has lately been so highly recommended thus seems to have a long prehistory. Apparently over the centuries we have steadily become more able to combine versatile forms of bondage with greater possibilities for independent functioning' (Mastenbroek 1993: 65).

Wilbert van Vree has also highlighted the role of meetings in embodying the 'social constraint to self-constraint', and thus indicates some different linkages with the concerns of both Weber and Foucault. As well as developed general behavioural prescriptions, for example, the Protestant churches also organized their members behaviour through a stricter set of meeting rules, which were 'aimed at the development of more comprising and stricter discipline during meetings than most people of the middle and lower classes were used to until that time'. Everyday life outside the church might be turbulent, but 'the Protestant church bound its members to act, talk or think in a less violent manner during meetings' (van Vree 1994: 288). The historical development of meetings as a central aspect of interaction within and between organizations can thus be regarded as 'an aspect of the long-term process of social interdependency'.

Meetings in which people talk with each other about changes in their mutual relations and decide what they are to do are 'nodal points' of plans and intentions of individual people. The development of meeting can be considered and further investigated as a process in which people, via orientation to ever-longer, stable and more differentiated chains of action, constrain each other towards control of their mutual relations and thus also of their selves (1994: 281).

The human sciences also played a key role in the development of the 'foresight' which Elias regarded as integral to the civilizing process, because it was the knowledge about 'longer chains of interdependency', how they operated and what their effects were, which formed the conceptual framework for the internalisation of constraint (van Vree 1994: 283). The work of van Doorn, Mastenbroek and van Vree thus partially solves the problem of Elias's relative neglect of the concentration of 'webs of interdependency' into the tighter frames of organizations, and identifies the organizational forms and settings in which the 'pressure towards foresight and self-constraint' actually exerts its effects on people. Their studies also indicates the possible points of linkage between Elias's understanding of the civilizing process, Weber's account of bureaucratic discipline, and Foucault's concept of governmentality. The next section will develop these linkages.

Proto-governmentalization and organizational selves - power as effect rather than cause
In a discussion of what he calls the 'medical regime', Abram de Swaan makes two important points concerning the workings of power relations which can usefully identify the points of contact between the perspectives of studies influenced by Elias and Foucault, and draw the various threads of this discussion together. First, like Miller and Rose, he argues that organizational power can best be understood as the alignment of different projects or concerns, of both organized groups and individuals. He gives the example of the development of a 'medical regime', in which our everyday lives are increasingly organized in terms of a concern for 'health' and well-being defined in medical terms. De Swaan points out that this medical regime can not be attributed to the colonizing efforts of the medical profession, a ruling class or state apparatus. Rather, it 'comes from a collusion, a hidden complicity between the parties to the conflict, with one another and with the doctor'. De Swaan develops a three-corned model for the operation of power in the relationship between individuals, doctors and the state, all of whom gain some advance through a particular configuration of the relationship:

The weakest party in the conflict gains from having its wants re-defined as medical necessities; the strongest party gains by the 'individualization' thus realized, by the social isolation of the conflict. Medicalization automatically creates a state of exception, even if it applies to many millions as in the case of disability to work. The gain for the third party in this alliance, the doctor, comes from the chances of prestige, income, and the realization of occupational ideals. However, all these triangular collusions are incidental, occur in separate episodes, without the parties involved being aware of what the effect of their strategies of conflict control will be in the longer term and in a wider context (de Swaan 1990: 69).

De Swaan thus provides a translation of Elias's conception of networks of interdependency, consisting of the mutual interaction of a variety of individuals and group, into a specific organizational and extra-organizational context - here the 'medical regime', both within hospitals and doctor's consulting rooms and in everyday life.

Second, again like Miller and Rose, de Swaan also examines the importance of widely-shared forms of knowledge in the operation of power relationships. The development of a medical regime is related to what he calls 'proto-professionalization', in which non-professionals adopt the conceptual frameworks and cognitive orientations of particular professionals, thus becoming what he calls 'proto-professionals' (de Swaan 1990: 100).(2> Through their education, conversations, programs on television, people develop frameworks of perceiving and knowing about themselves that shapes their experiences in such a way that they become 'proto-clients' of therapy, welfare, medical treatment, psychiatric treatment. This process of proto-professionalization, writes de Swaan, 'involves alterations in the everyday orientation patterns and daily habits of laymen as an external effect of a professionalization process'; it occurs in a non-organised, 'informal, spontaneous, and diffuse way' (de Swaan 1990: 106).

This line of argument from an Eliasian perspective can be developed in connection with Foucault's notion of governmentality and applied more generally to the historical development of organizational subjectivity. The formation of human subjectivity in liberal democratic market societies can be seen to be characterized by two historical processes; first, it is increasingly organized within particular disciplinary frameworks to align with the concerns of the organizations in our lives - in state, economy, and civil society - and at the same time, secondly, we are increasingly encouraged, indeed required, to be as autonomous, self-realizing, and self-managing as possible. Rather than organizations vacuuming up society, as Perrow sees it, organizations throughout the whole process of European state formation have come to integrally linked with an ever-shifting governmentalization of social and subjective life.As Elias put it, individuals 'can decide far more for themselves. But they also must decide far more for themselves. They not only can but must be more self-sufficient. On this point they have no choice' (1991: 121).

However, just as de Swaan examined proto-professionalization in addition to professionalization, we similarly need to go beyond Foucault's concept of governmentality and start to unravel what proto-governmentality looks like - that is, the workings of governmentality among the governed. Two principles of organizational analysis then emerge. First, once the governed are included in the workings of governmentality it becomes clear that more attention needs to be paid to the possibility of contradiction and conflict within modern, 'governmentalized' and 'civilized' societies, between the aspirations and projects of various social, political and economic groupings, and between the differing 'logics' governing the projects which both 'governmentality' and 'the civilizing process' are supposed to align. For example, in his critique of Elias's understanding of the development of modern, market societies, Stefan Breuer points out that his focus on 'socal integration as synthesis' prevented him from grasping the essentially paradoxical and contradictory character of capitalist societies. The market, Breuer reminds us, 'not only aggregates, it also disaggregates; it creates not only integration, it also negates the integration it has itself created' (1991: 405- 6). The organization of society around market relations means both the increase in interdependency which Elias analysed and an increasing atomization and individualization;

It encourages differentiation and at the same time, through the universal comparabiltiy of all labour in exchange value, it disrupts the possibilities of difference. It produces an ever-denser integration of society, while also preventing the development of a social subject. Integration always takes place behind the backs of acting individuals, and takes a form which appears as the contradiction of all integration. Through its one-sided fixation on synthesis, the theory of civilization blocks the insight that the logic of societalization is also a 'logic of distintegration' (Adorno) (Breuer 1991: 407).

For Elias the conflict between the invidualization demanded by modern market societies and more communal bases of identity - nation, tribe, family, ethnic group - does not arise from a 'logic of disintegration' (Adorno 1973: 145) at all, but is the product of what he calls the 'drag effect' (cultural lag). By this he meant the persistence of a form of subjectivity or 'social habitus' appropriate to earlier stages of social integration well into entirely different and more broadly integrated social figurations. In his words,

....we repeatedly come across a constellation in which the dynamic of unplanned social processes is tending to advance beyond a given stage towards another....while the people affected by this change cling to the earlier stage in their personality structure, their social habitus. It depends entirely on....whether - and how quickly - the dynamic of the unplanned social process brings about a more or less radical restructuring of this habitus, or whether the social habitus of individuals successfully opposes the social dynamic, either by slowing it down or blocking it entirely (1991: 211).

Although Elias commented on the problems which can arise from such a 'fossilization of the social habitus' (1991: 212), there appeared to be no difficulties attached to the increasing structuring of identity around individualized state citizenship, other than that he also found nation-states too narrowly defined, and regarded larger entities such as 'Europe' or 'Latin America' as being better 'survival units'. What remains unexplored is precisely the opposite possibility, which writers such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Beck and Breuer focus on: instead of older forms of social solidarity and types of social habitus - family, community, ethnic group - outliving the social figuration which gave rise to them and remaining fossilized, what capitalist market societies often do is undermine and dissolve the social relations embedded in those types of social habitus well before the emergence of the objective social foundations for supposedly more 'developed' types of social habitus.

Rather than a shift from a balance between collective and individual forms of identity - in Elias's words, a 'We-I' balance - weighted towards stronger collective ('We') identities, to one weighted towards stronger individual ('I') identities, what Elias was really talking about was a the development of different types of collective ('We') identities', moving from smaller-scale communal units such as kin groups or tribes, to nation-states and ultimately to humanity as a whole, with individualization constituting the corresponding changes in the related types of individual ('I') identities. However, what seems to have happened in the development of market societies is the dissolution of the bases of collective identities without there being sufficient social foundation for their replacements. As Peter Wagner puts it summarizing the discussion of the 'disembedding' of individual identity, 'the very notion of selfhood is dissolved in concept of social relations' (1994: 169; see also Gergen 1991; Lash and Friedman 1992). The result is either simply greater individualization organized around market-defined consumption patterns and life-styles without the corresponding stable collective, communal identities required to sustain it, or the various divisive forms of ethno-nationalisms which seem increasingly powerful, whether based on a real or imagined history, or in the 'long- distance' form analyzed by Benedict Anderson (1992). Hence the continuing social disintegration in contemporary social life, which Elias explained in terms the possible 'reversal' of the civilizing process or in terms of an opposing 'decivilizing process' (Elias 1988), without regarding such disintegration as built into 'the civilizing process' itself.

The same issue emerges in relation to the concept of governmentality, to the extent that there is an emphasis on the overall coherence of liberal and neo-liberal government at the expense of a perception of possible internal contradictions and paradoxes. Foucault did refer to the multiplicity of forms of government: 'they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another' (1982: 224). Nonetheless, the force of his analysis comes primarily from his argument that liberal and neo-liberal forms of government produced precisely a relatively integrated and stable 'ensemble' of diverse political projects and strategies, social institutions and movements, based on the disciplined organization of the action of 'free' human subjects. As Colin Gordon formulates it, although 'it is in fact vain to look for the hand of the state overwhere pulling the strings of micro-disciplinary power in nineteenth- century societies....these largely privatized micro-power structures none the less participate, in a coherent general policy of order' (Gordon 1991: 27). Similarly, Alan Hunt and Gary Wickham point out that governmentality concerns primarily social integration, arguing that 'governance....always works to bind societies together (1994: 92), producing divisions and conflicts only in the sense of the excluded 'other'. Hunt and Wickham also correctly point out the correspondence between Foucault's and Durkheim's understanding of society and social relations as a more or less integrated 'bound community', rather than being characterized by inherent internal contradictions, as one would argue from a Hegelian Marxist perspective.

When questions of contradiction, instability, uncertainty or conflict arise, they are dealt with in two ways by Foucault and those who have subsequently built on his arguments. On the one hand, the notion of the 'imperfectability' or 'incompleteness' of governmentality; the argument is that there is always a slippage between the aims of governmental rationality and its actual operation in the real world, that a governmentalized world is not yet a perfectly governed world (Rose and Miller 1992: 191; Hunt and Wickham 1994: 79-80). Graham Burchell gives the examples of, first, ambiguity and disagreement over the criteria by which effective government is to be judged, and second, the problems of the unforseen consequences and 'failures' of political action. However, to say that the aims of governmental rationality cannot always be achieved is a weaker point that the one made by those working from a more 'dialectical' perspective, which would be that those aims are inherently contradictory, that achieving optimum capitalist economic performance will always incur 'too high' a socio-political cost, or that the logic of the market will always contradict that of family and community relations. Any disruption of governmentality, in other words, was seen by Foucault as originating outside the system of governance rather than as emerging from within it.

On the other hand, Foucault retained the notion of an inherent opposition between, to formulate it in precisely the terms he devoted so much effort vehemently objecting to, between the individual and society. There seems no escaping the conclusion that this can only be what he meant when he spoke of the 'restiveness' of critique (Foucault 1982b), the 'recalcitrance of the will', 'freedom's refusal to submit', the 'intransitivity of freedom' and the 'agonism' between power and freedom (1982: 221-3). Running almost directly counter to the overall anti-humanist thrust of his work, the argument that individuality, subjectivity and freedom itself are socially produced, he still held on to the possibility of, in Alessandro Pizzorno's words, a 'recalcitrant, resistant, unyielding material that normalising power may fail to reduce', the hope that 'contestation, unruliness, indocility, intractability are not yet abolished, when the recalcitrant is not yet transformed into the dutiful' (1992: 207). It was, of course, precisely to this possible recalcitrance that Foucault's own life, activities and writings were addressed. One of the central problems in his discipline-resistance writings, the sources of resistance, thus remained unresolved in the later formulations on governmentality, and the more importants sources of instability or disorder in a given network of power relations is located more in this 'intransigence' than in contradictions integral to the operation of power itself.

This leads on to the second point which usefully expands on both the concept of governmentality and the notion of the civilizing process: the importance of human agency (action, freedom) and the seriousness with which we take the notion of the 'reversiblity' of power relations (Rose 1993: 296) in liberal democracies. It is one thing to pull the formation of subjectivity into our picture of state formation, as, say, Corrigan and Sayer do when they write that 'the enormous power of 'the State' is not only external and objective; it is in equal part internal and subjective, it works through us. It works above all through the myriad ways it collectively and individually (mis)represents us and variously 'encourages', cajoles, and in the final analysis forces us to (mis)represent ourselves' (1985: 180). It is quite another thing, however, to draw out the full implications of Foucault's conception of governmentality as 'action on action' and the conduct of essentially free subjects, to go beyond speaking of the co-ordination of human desires, projects and aspirations and conceive of the realization of those aspirations. For this means granting an effectivity, a 'power' to the subjects of organizational power which few social theorists seem willing to grant, being more attached to a view of human beings as the oversocialized objects of organizational control. Elias's formulation cited above, for example, paints a picture of individuals being forced towards autonomy.

In a critique of prevailing understandings of power which still remains to be properly digested in social theory, Bruno Latour (1986) argued that the dominant model of power in social theory is a 'diffusion' model, in which persons, groups or organizations are regarded as 'containing' power which they diffuse through the surrounding social space, and the objects of that power act only to distribute or resist it. However, argues Latour, the supposed objects of power - for Corrigan and Sayer, 'us' - are not objects at all, but 'shape it according to their different projects' (1986: 268). More importantly, those projects constitute the actual substance of the operation of power. In his words:

'Power' is always the illusion people get when they are obeyed; thinking in terms of the diffusion model, they imagine that others behave because of the master's clout without ever suspecting the many different reasons others have for obeying and doing something else; more exactly, people who are 'obeyed' discover what their power is really made of when they start to lose it. They realise, but too late, that it was 'made of the wills of all the others' (Latour 1986:. 268-8).

Power in institutions and organizations is thus not the cause of human actions and subjective identities, but its consequence. Power is more than a 'structural characteristic' of all social relations, as Elias described it (Elias 1978: 74), it is also their effect. The important shift in perspective which Latour's formulation leads to is that it forces us to look for the actions pursued by human beings in generating this effect, rather than simply assuming it 'is' there 'in' social structures, figurations, organizations and institutions.

For Foucault, we only act in the name of 'liberty', 'desire' or, indeed, 'enlightenment', when we disrupt relations of domination. 'It is through revolt', wrote Foucault in 1979, commenting on the Iranian revolution, 'that subjectivity (not that of great men but that of whomever) introduces itself into history and gives it the breath of life' (1981d: 8). When their uncoerced conduct aligns with the concerns of states, authorities and organizations, their status suddenly reverts to that of the objects of power and it is seen as an example of the 'conduct of conduct'. What remains unthinkable in both his formulations on governmentality and, to a lesser extent, Elias's on the civilizing process, is precisely the realization of human desire in governmentality and the stabilisation of relations of domination. This is, of course, an uncomfortable thought when one is committed to a critical perspective on power and domination, but a critique of power-as-domination will only properly grasp both the stability of existing social relations and the precise directions in which they are and might be moving, if we see proto-governmentalization as a process which will at times, and obviously in contradictory and paradoxical ways, realize the aspirations and desires - dare we say 'liberty'? - of the governed and the organized, either alongside or in opposition to those of the governing and organizing.

The danger is that we remain trapped within a Hobbesian opposition between 'nature' - Foucault's indocility - and 'society' - Foucault's domination -, assuming that we never get what we really want, that desire can only be authentic when it is oppositional and recalcitrant. The effect of this is precisely to make us permanently discontented, perpetual critics constantly and principally engaged in a search for liberation from domination, effectively undermining precisely the assurances of writers like Foucault and Elias that liberation is itself a chimera. Just as Walt Kelly had one of his characters say 'We have met the enemy and he is us', it may be that the critique of organizational power needs to see its object not only as external to us, but as occasionally residing within ourselves.

References

Copyright ©Robert van Krieken 1996