Power and Management According to Agamben. Some Implications of Agamben's Thoughts to Management Scholarship (original) (raw)
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JMH 2,1 60 Contemporary management college textbooks typically review the progression from scientific management to management sciences. In doing so, they grant attention to the works of classical theorists from the early part of this century. Such theorists usually include: Frederick (scientific management)[6], Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (motion studies)[7], Henry Gantt (scheduling of tasks)[8], Henri Fayol (principles of management)[9] and Mary Parker Follett (law of the situation)[10]. Weber's contribution is invariably cited as his characterization of the elements of bureaucracy[11], as the most efficient organizational form. Important later approaches to management are discussed, including the human relations school and quantitative management. Human relations theorists present the theme of motivation most clearly. These discussions usually begin with Mayo's work, including the seminal Hawthorne studies[12], which highlighted the role of informal groups in organizations. Other theorists mentioned frequently include: Maslow (hierarchy of human needs)[13], Hertzberg (job satisfaction and hygiene factors)[14], McGregor (theory X and theory Y) , and Argyris (inevitable conflict between bureaucratic organization and adult personality) . Chester Barnard[17] is another central figure in management theory, although he is somewhat less likely to be included in introductory textbooks. His important work made major contributions, including the consent theory of authority and the moral responsibility of managers to provide for subordinates.
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Office and Agamben's Genealogy of Economy and Government
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2017
This paper locates Giorgio Agamben’s book Opus Dei in his larger Homo Sacer project and particularly a series of genealogical and archaeological studies within it. It argues for a disenchanted and dispersed reading of Agamben’s approach to office as a resource for concerns that are germane to cultural and political sociology and that are irreducible to Heideggerian metaphysics. This reading foregrounds methodological questions of genealogy and archaeology (and hence Agamben’s relation to Foucault), religious liturgy and political practice, and the theory of the priesthood as a paradigm for office. More broadly, Agamben’s work on office is shown to bear upon questions of the constitution of sovereignty and government as forms of power, on different forms of rationalisation, and themes of secularisation and modernity found in classical sociology and intellectual history. In part, it is a response to Ian Hunter's paper in the same issue of the journal.
Power's Two Bodies: A Critique of Agamben's Theory of Sovereignty
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This article seeks to problematize Agamben’s interpretation of sovereignty in light of the “archaeological method” he uses in his Homo Sacer project. In contrast to Agamben’s exposition, which treats biopolitics as the original and ontological paradigm of Western politics, the essay discusses how, historically, sovereign power has been conceived as a “double body”—transcendent and immanent, sacred and sacrificial, absolute and perpetual—from whose tension conceptual and political metamorphoses of sovereignty arise. The first attribute of sovereignty—absoluteness, on which Agamben has often focused—should be seen as an ordering and essentially modern function of its second “body”: the perpetuity of power. The article illustrates, then, how the retrospective projections through which the Italian philosopher constructs his ontological reading of sovereignty depend on some logical and epistemological lacunae that characterise his “archaeological method,” which is based, essentially, on an arbitrary use of historical analogies.