How do people living in a company town come to desire to work for the firm that controls it? Based on an in-depth case study of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany, we make two principal contributions. First, drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality we investigate the mechanisms of power within which desired identities are shaped. Desired identities, we argue, are one means by which organizations exercise control over local populations. Second, we examine the multiple interlocking discourses by which Volkswagen sought to regulate the life of Wolfsburgers and to form their desired identities. In doing so, we contribute to identity research by demonstrating how biopower and discipline work in combination in neoliberal societies to make the governmentality of employee identity possible. Our research underlines the importance of studying company towns for understanding the relations of power that shape the lives and the identities of employees.
AlawattageCWickramasingheD (2018) Strategizing Management Accounting: Liberal Origins and Neoliberal Trends. Abingdon: Routledge.
2.
AlvessonMKarremanD (2000) Varieties of discourse: On the study of organizations through discourse analysis. Human Relations53(9): 1125–1149.
3.
AlvessonMSköldbergK (2000) Reflexive Methodology: New Vistas for Qualitative Research. London: SAGE.
4.
AlvessonMWillmottH (2002) Identity regulation as organizational control: Producing the appropriate individual. Journal of Management Studies39(5): 619–644.
5.
BardonTBrownADPezeS (2017) Identity regulation, identity work and phronesis. Human Relations70(8): 940–965.
6.
BarkerJR (1993) Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive control in self-managing teams. Administrative Science Quarterly38(3): 408–437.
7.
BeckUBeck-GernsheimE (2002) Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences, Volume 13. London: SAGE.
8.
BorgesMJTorresSB (2012) Company towns: Concepts, historiography, and approaches. In: BorgesMJTorresSB (eds) Company Towns: Labor, Space and Power Relations across Time and Continents. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–40.
9.
BrownAD (2015) Identities and identity work in organizations. International Journal of Management Reviews17(1): 20–40.
10.
BurawoyM (1979) Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
11.
CleggS (1989) Frameworks of Power. London: Routledge.
12.
CleggSCourpassonDPhillipsN (2006) Power and Organizations. London: SAGE.
13.
CollinsonD (2003) Identities and insecurities: Selves at work. Organization10(3): 527–547.
14.
CovaleskiMADirsmithMWHeianJB, et al. (1998) The calculated and the avowed: Techniques of discipline and struggles over identity in big six public accounting firms. Administrative Science Quarterly43(2): 293–327.
15.
DomanskiB (1992) Social control over the milltown: Industrial paternalism under socialism and capitalism. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie83(5): 353–360.
16.
EhsaniK (2003) Social engineering and the contradictions of modernization in Khuzestan’s company towns: A look at Abadan and Masjed-Soleyman. International Review of Social History48: 361–399.
FaircloughN (1989) Language and Power. London: Langman.
19.
FlemingP (2014) Review article: When ‘life itself’ goes to work: Reviewing shifts in organizational life through the lens of biopower. Human Relations67(7): 875–901.
20.
FlemingPSpicerA (2003) Working at a cynical distance: Implications for power, subjectivity and resistance. Organization10(1): 157–179.
21.
FlewT (2015) Foucault, Weber, neoliberalism and the politics of governmentality. Theory, Culture and Society32(7–8): 317–326.
22.
FoucaultM (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books.
23.
FoucaultM (1978) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. London: Penguin Books.
24.
FoucaultM (1980) Power and strategies. In: GordonC (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972/1977. New York: Harvester Press, 134–145.
25.
FoucaultM (2000) Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. London: The New Press.
26.
FoucaultM (2003) Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975–76. New York: Picador.
27.
FoucaultM (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–78. London: Penguin Books.
28.
FoucaultM (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
29.
GaneN (2012) The governmentalities of neoliberalism: Panopticism, post-panopticism and beyond. Sociological Review60(4): 611–634.
30.
GarnerJS (1992) Introduction. In: GarnerJS (ed.) The Company Town: Architecture and Society in the Early Industrial Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 3–14.
31.
GergenK (1972) Multiple identity: The healthy happy human being wears many masks. Psychology Today5(12): 31–35, 64–66.
32.
GiddensA (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
33.
GreenH (2012) The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy. New York: Basic Books.
34.
GreyC (1994) Career as a project of the self and labour process discipline. Sociology28(2): 479–497.
IbarraH (1999) Provisional selves: Experimenting with image and identity in professional adaptation. Administrative Science Quarterly44(4): 764–791.
40.
JelinekMSmircichLHirschP (1983) Introduction: A code of many colors. Administrative Science Quarterly28(3): 331–338.
41.
KnightsDMcCabeD (2003) Governing through teamwork: Reconstituting subjectivity in a call centre. Journal of Management Studies40(7): 1587–1619.
42.
KnightsDVurdubakisT (1994) Foucault, power, resistance and all that. In: JermierMJKnightsDNordW (eds) Resistance and Power in Organizations. London: Routledge, 167–198.
43.
KondoDK (2009) Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
KuhnT (2006) A ‘demented work ethic’ and a ‘lifestyle firm’: Discourse, identity, and workplace time commitments. Organization Studies27(9): 1339–1358.
46.
KuhnTNelsonN (2002) Reengineering identity. Management Communication Quarterly16(1): 5–38.
47.
LamA (2019) Hybrids, identity and knowledge boundaries: Creative artists between academic and practitioner communities. Human Relations. Epub ahead of print 2May2019. DOI: 0.1177/0018726719846259.
48.
LearmonthMHumphreysM (2012) Autoethnography and academic identity: Glimpsing business school doppelgängers. Organization19(1): 99–117.
49.
LoreyI (2006) Governmentality and self-precarization: On the normalization of cultural producers. In: SheikhS (ed.) Capital: It Fails Us Now. Berlin: Bbooks Verlag, 117–139.
50.
McKinalyA (2008) Foucauldian turn. In: CleggSBaileyR (eds) International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies. London: SAGE, 522–523.
51.
MacleanMHarveyCChiaR (2011) Sensemaking, storytelling and the legitimization of elite business careers. Human Relations65(1): 17–40.
52.
MarcuseH (1964) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
53.
MarkusHNuriusP (1986) Possible selves. American Psychologist41(9): 954–969.
54.
MeriläinenSTienariJThomasR, et al. (2008) Hegemonic academic practices: Experiences of publishing from the periphery. Organization15: 584–597.
55.
MillerPRoseN (1990) Governing economic life. Economy and Society19(1): 1–31.
56.
MorrisJ (2015) Notes on the ‘worthless dowry’ of soviet industrial modernity: Making working-class Russia habitable. Laboratorium7(3): 25–48.
57.
MorrisJHinzS (2017) Free automotive unions, industrial work and precariousness in provincial Russia. Post-Communist Economies29(3): 282–296.
58.
MunroI (2012) The management of circulations: Biopolitical variations after Foucault. International Journal of Management Reviews14(3): 345–362.
PorteousJD (1970) The nature of the company town. Royal Geographical Society51: 127–142.
62.
PorteousJD (1974) Social class in Atacama company towns. Annals of the Association of American Geographers64(3): 409–417.
63.
PotterJ (1997) Discourse analysis as a way of analysing naturally occuring talk. In: SilvermanD (ed.) Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice. London: SAGE, 200–221.
64.
RasmussenJ (2010) Enabling selves to conduct themselves safely: Safety committee discourse as governmentality in practice. Human Relations64(3): 459–478.
RoseNS (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
67.
SanchezA (2010) Capitalism, violence and the state: Crime, corruption and entrepreneurship in an Indian company town. Journal of Legal Anthropology1(2): 165–188.
68.
SanchezA (2012) Deadwood and paternalism: Rationalizing casual labour in an Indian company town. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute18(4): 808–827.
69.
SennettR (1980) Authority. London: Secker and Warburg.
70.
SiegfriedKJ (1987) Rüstungsproduktion und Zwangsarbeit im Volkswagenwerk, 1939–1945: Eine Dokumentation [Armament Production and Forced Labour in the Volkswagen Plant, 1939–1945: A Documentation]. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag.
71.
SmithCChildJRowlinsonM (1990) Reshaping Work: The Cadbury Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
72.
StakeRE (2003) Case studies. In: DenzinNKLincolnYS (eds) Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry. London: SAGE, 86–109.
73.
StarkeyKMcKinlayA (1998) Afterword: Deconstructing organization-discipline and desire. In: McKinlayAStarkeyK (eds) Foucault, Management and Organization Theory, from Panopticon to Technologies of Self. London: SAGE, 230–241.
74.
SteyaertCJanssensM (2013) Multilingual scholarship and the paradox of translation and language in management and organization studies. Organization20(1): 131–142.
75.
SveningssonSAlvessonM (2003) Managing managerial identities: Organizational fragmentation, discourse and identity struggle. Human Relations56(10): 1163–1193.
76.
ThomasRHardyCCutcherL, et al. (2014) What’s age got to do with it? On the critical analysis of age and organizations. Organization Studies35(11): 1569–1584.
77.
ThornborrowTBrownAD (2009) ‘Being regimented’: Aspiration, discipline and identity work in the British parachute regiment. Organization Studies30(4): 355–376.
78.
Van MaanenJScheinEG (1979) Toward a theory of organizational socialization. In: StawBMCummingsLL (eds) Research in Organizational Behavior. Greenwich: JAI Press, 209–264.
