Workplace empowerment and the issues surrounding it have been well documented in the
organizational literature on the topic, with critiques centered on the question of
whether it is possible to craft an 'empowered' workplace where
employees who are embedded within capitalist relations of production are actually
able to exercise meaningful control over the environment in which they labor. Our
contention in this paper is that workplace empowerment cannot be analyzed in
isolation, but must be seen as a part of a broader managerial discourse that
attempts to serve the organizational project. Following on from Foucault's
delineation of the concept of governmentality and Gramsci's notes on
hegemony, we read empowerment as a part of the modern operation of power, and as an
integral component of a system of signification that is employed in order to produce
a governable, organizational subject.
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