Foucault,subjectivity and ethics: towards a self-forming subject

Abstract

In this article, I examine self-formation through the activity of organic farming in a self-managing community. How do producing and consuming subjects organize their selves around the ‘false natural object’ (Veyne, 1997) that is organic? To inform this ethnographic account of self-formation, I draw on the work of Michel Foucault. A study is made of technologies of the self in the contemporary setting of a self-managing organic farming community without compromising the self-forming, self-regulating activity of the ethical subject presented by Foucault in his studies of Antiquity. I contend that the self is formed by the subject as a thinking and acting being through the modes of subjectivation and objectivation (Foucault, 2000a). The article contributes empirical support to theoretical studies that consider how Foucault’s texts account for the intervention of human subjects alongside sociological factors when exploring organizational issues (Bardon and Josserand, 2011; McKinlay and Pezet, 2010). It is recommended that a wider range of responses could be opened up in Foucault-inspired studies at other organizational sites, including the workplace, by exploring the self-formation of the subject as a starting point for understanding the importance of the individual alongside sociological factors.

I just don’t understand it. How come you can have a slug pellet in an organic tent? … I mean we use frogs and toads … It is this play on this word organic. (Personal interview with organic producer, 29 July 2002)

The producer quoted above raises an interesting conundrum about the use of slug pellets in organic food production. She refers to a play on the word ‘organic’, suggesting the possibility of further ambiguities arising from the human construction of the concept of organic. In the following study, and informed by Foucault, I investigate these ambiguities further by exploring the formation of the self around the notion of organic.

The 1947 Agriculture Act established the intensification of food production in England and Wales, objectifying the ‘good farmer’ as someone who attains the maximum efficiency to sustain high yields. This objectification produced new subjectivities of what practices to engage in to be the ‘good farmer’: applying manufactured pesticides and fertilisers; rearing animals in intensive factory units and feeding growth hormones to animals who can be culled and sold on for food within a smaller timeframe. Maximum production continues to be an imperative for the farming industry, as can be witnessed by regular references to ‘efficiency’ in Farmers Weekly. ¹

Organic farming ² offers an alternative means of producing food through practices that favour the environment, animal welfare and human health, thereby producing different subjectivities of what it means to be the ‘good farmer’. Nevertheless, the organic/non-organic binary presented on the shelves of the multiple retailers masks a diverse historical and contemporary context. In Britain, the organic protagonists of the first half of the 20th century comprised right-wing fascist aristocrats preoccupied with maintaining the integrity of the soil (Reed, 2001). Following the 1947 Agriculture Act, pesticides provided a new focus for organic farming. During the 1970s/1980s, organic growing attracted a wider political spectrum to include urban dwellers, experimenting with self-sufficiency in gardens and allotments, and environmentalists. Today, multiple regulatory bodies with differing organic standards exist worldwide; the UK alone has nine certification bodies including the Soil Association. English organic farmers agree about what organic farming excludes, but diverge over what organic farming practices to employ (Lobley et al., 2005) whilst, in the United States, the boundaries between organic and conventional farming are ‘poorly demarcated, contested, and in flux’ (Goodman, 2000: 215).

In the context of multiple specifications attached to organic farming, I raise the following question: how do organic producers form their selves around the notion of organic? To investigate this question, I conduct an ethnography at a self-managing organic farming community. Commercial organic farmers, who often farm alone, are inspected annually to check that they are producing food according to the standards provided by their chosen certification body. In contrast, a group of community residents farming for self-sufficiency without specific rules to follow, who have joined at various times and from different contexts, offers the tantalising prospect of multiple plays on the word organic, producing paradoxes and thereby injecting a richness into the investigation. More specifically, then, how is organic grounded in the subjectivities of individuals who have chosen to live together and farm collectively but not for profit? From what sources do residents draw in forming their organic selves?

To inform this ethnographic account of self-formation, I draw on the work of Michel Foucault. It is not my intent in this article to defend Foucault from his critics; a comprehensive defence of Foucault and his work is provided by Bardon and Josserand (2011). For critiques of Foucauldian work on organizations and subjectivity, refer to Newton (1998) and Thompson and Ackroyd (1995). Neither do I attempt to align the investigation with previous Foucauldian organizational case studies, many of which are dominated by power and governmentality. Accordingly, this article sits uncomfortably with much of the Foucauldian management literature on subjectivity and may disrupt orthodox perceptions of how to apply Foucault’s work to organizational life.

Self-formation ‘is the experience of how one experiences oneself’ and ‘presupposes an active participation, engagement and construction’ (Townley, 1995: 284). Accordingly, I turn to Dorinne Kondo and Judith Butler, both of whom consider the fragility of subjectivities that are constantly shifting and fragmented. Kondo (1990) asks ‘how selfhood is constructed’ (p. 9) and how do people craft themselves (p. 10). Similarly to Kondo, I take an ‘active involvement and interest in the lives of others’ (p. 20) in examining community life. I am drawn to a softening of the boundaries between selves and society (p. 22), experience and theory (p. 24) and identity and context (p. 29). Like Judith Butler, I use ‘Foucault as a starting point rather than a theory to be defended’ (McKinlay, 2010: 232). For Butler, largely ignored by Foucauldian research in the workplace (McKinlay, 2010: 232), identity is always a process, a becoming: ‘a journey of the self with neither a point of departure nor arrival’ (p. 235). Butler offers a different approach to accounts that present power as something totally external to the subject, imposed against the subject’s will: ‘Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent’ (Butler: 1997: 20).

The article is structured as follows. First, I present an overview of Foucault-inspired studies of subjectivity in management and organization studies. Next, I develop a framework for accommodating technologies of the self in a contemporary setting without compromising the self-forming, self-regulating activity of the self, as presented by Foucault in his later studies of Antiquity. ³ I extend the framework by introducing the modes of subjectivation and objectivation engaged in by all individuals as thinking and acting human beings. After introducing the community as a research site, I apply Foucault’s three modes of objectification to organic farming. An empirical investigation into how community members form their selves around the construct of organic is split into four parts: introductions to organic; objectification of self through subjecting to external sources of organic; ethical dilemmas relating to organic consumption; and objectification of other community members in terms of organic-ness. A discussion and conclusion follow.

Self-formation in management and organization studies

As Fournier and Grey (1999) contend, much of the work carried out by Foucauldian scholars is deterministic. Thompson and Ackroyd comment: ‘even when employees are not entirely subjugated, seduced or self-disciplined, they are prisoners of their own identity projects’ (1995: 628). Commonly, the workplace is analysed as a site for the imposition of corporate control via management on those positioned lower in the corporate hierarchy. Subjectivities are manipulated through invoking a desire to change one’s self and to become something that one was not before. Employees surrender their selves to the demands of their work organizations.

First, the panopticon studies present organizations as harnessing the surveillance mechanism of the panopticon to ensure effective self-management on the part of employees (Sewell, 1998; Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992). By means of the panoptic gaze, which ‘penetrates right to the very core of each member’s subjectivity’, employees incorporate ‘the controlling function of middle management’ into their consciousnesses (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992: 284). Second, culture management studies depict the manipulation of employee subjectivities into identifying with the corporate culture. The aim of culture management is ‘to win the “hearts and minds” of employees: to define their purposes by managing what they think and feel, and not just how they behave’ (Willmott, 1993: 516) so that ‘a process of subjugation has occurred’ (p. 536). New cultures are shown to be assimilated into employee subjectivities via the circulation of discourses focused on, for example, family and team (Casey, 1999), the corporate athlete (Kelly et al., 2007) and the enterprising employee and consumer (du Gay, 1996). Third, in governmentality studies, technologies of power are exercised by governing institutions as powerful intervention tools, operating through the subjectivities of human beings both inside and outside work. Such technologies ‘increasingly seek to act upon and instrumentalize the self-regulating propensities of individuals in order to ally them with socio-political objectives’ (Miller and Rose, 1990: 28). Fourth, technologies of power are conflated with Foucault’s later work on technologies of the self (1988b) in attempts to induce employees to work on their selves: ‘to change themselves by acting on themselves’ (Covaleski et al., 1998: 298), in order to facilitate the ‘internalisation of corporate goals and the constitution of organisational identities’ (p. 322). Technologies of the self are instrumental in ‘capturing the individual within a form of visibility, a gaze, rendering the individuals’ actions and thoughts knowable’ (Townley, 1998: 203). An ethics of the self provides a means to manipulate employees’ subjectivities in the interests of optimizing employee work performance (Styhre, 2001).

Can Foucault be read differently, enabling a departure from the engineering of individual subjugation enacted on passive victims and a move towards a more active subject? Knights and McCabe propose that individuals are less docile in the process of subject formation than other studies would suggest; hence, employee subjectivity is a ‘self-formation process’ (2000: 422): ‘subjectivity, then, is not something that is done to individuals; they participate in the constitution of their own subjectivity as they reflect on, and reproduce the social world’ (p. 424). Moreover, individuals respond in various ways ‘to the contradictory demands management place upon them and their different responses only make sense in a context of differing subjectivities’ (pp. 432–433). More recently, Westwood and Johnston (forthcoming) call for the self to be reclaimed, contesting that people at work ‘are not dupes … unwittingly made to playact a self and an identity simply to comply with an organizational view of the world’ (p. 17).

In Foucault’s studies of Antiquity, the subject who engages in technologies of the self is an autonomous, reflective and self-forming being. Foucault proposes that a personal form of ethics is something that we are looking for today ‘since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal, private life’ (2000d: 255–256). How can technologies of the self be integrated into a contemporary setting without losing that autonomy of the self?

Towards a contemporary self-forming subject

Foucault’s studies of technologies of the self centre on Antiquity, ‘when the effect of scientific knowledges and the complexity of normative systems were less’ (Foucault, 2000b: 204). Today, ‘we live in the era of a “governmentality” first discovered in the eighteenth century’ (1991a: 103). Governmentality ‘marks the threshold of the modern state’ (2009: 165) and is defined as a meeting point for technologies of the self and technologies of power, also referred to as technologies of domination (1988b: 19; 1993: 203).

Technologies of power ‘determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination’ (1988b: 18). Discipline and Punish, Foucault’s most commonly referenced work, contains frequent subjection-laden phrases including ‘disciplinary mechanisms’, ‘disciplinary institutions’, ‘mechanisms of power’ and ‘state-control’. Within the panopticon, a human being ‘becomes the principle of his own subjection’ (1977: 203; emphasis added). Understandably, management studies of the workplace, in drawing on Discipline and Punish, present employees as passive recipients of technologies of power employed to discipline them and harness their subjectivities. As these studies circulate around the business school, the bias towards subjection is reproduced by further studies. Foucault ‘is often transformed to an impoverished deterministic version of his former self’ (Knights, 2002: 581). In similar fashion, Volume 1 of History of Sexuality refers to ‘polymorphous techniques of power’ (1988a: 11); ‘techniques of power exercised over sex’ (p. 12) and ‘the subjugation of the urban proletariat’ (p. 122).

Volume 2 of History of Sexuality undertakes a theoretical shift (Foucault, 1984a: 6) to technologies of the self, as practised during Antiquity and early Christianity. Technologies of the self are engaged in by active subjects who ‘effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (1988b: 18). Technologies of the self are based on the principle of care of self; they involve engaging in a personal ethics of the self, something ‘that one performs on oneself … to attempt to transform oneself into the ethical subject of one’s behavior’ (1984a: 27). One examines one’s own soul: ‘In this divine contemplation, the soul will be able to discover rules to serve as a basis for just behavior and political action’ (1988b: 25). Hence, Seneca’s evening self-examination encompasses a process of self-reflection in which he retraces all his deeds and words during the day (Seneca, 1928: 338–341 cited in Foucault, 2001: 146). For Seneca, the self is both the judge and the accused. Identifying the faults on a daily basis enables him to make adjustments to his future conduct (Foucault, 1988b: 34).

In a contemporary setting, technologies of the self operate through interaction with the technologies of power of modern-day governmentality to provide a platform for a subject to be active within the strategies adopted for managing others: ‘It is exactly the interplay between these technologies, between the guidance of others and the forms of self-guidance that is at the heart of an analytics of government’ (Lemke, 2010: 37). Furthermore, ‘liberal freedom is established and maintained by “mechanisms of security” that are the flip-side and the pre-condition of liberalism’ (p. 35). Governmentality ‘defines a novel thought-space across the domains of ethics and politics, of what might be called “practices of the self” and “practices of government”, that weaves them together without a reduction of one to the other’ (Dean, 1994: 174). A prerequisite of being capable of governing others is to be able to govern oneself. Care of self allows one to achieve a mastery over oneself that enables one to care for others in the community; as long as you take care of yourself, ‘you cannot abuse your power over others’ (Foucault, 2000c: 288). Governmentality refers therefore to ‘the whole range of practices that constitute, define, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other’ (2000c: 300).

Underlying both technologies of power and technologies of the self are the modes of subjectivation and objectivation.

Self-formation through subjectivation and objectivation

Despite claims that Foucault fails to provide mechanisms for subject formation and human agency (Butler, 1997; Newton, 1998), I tend to agree with Bardon and Josserand’s contention that Foucault’s project ‘provides a sound conceptualisation of human agency’ (2011: 503). So, while Butler turns to psychoanalysis and linguistics, I seek clarification in a translation (Foucault, 2000a) ⁴ of a little-referenced dictionary entry that provides a retrospective of Foucault’s work. I refer also to a first version of the preface to Volume 2 of History of Sexuality (2000b). ⁵

Foucault identifies his life’s project as a ‘critical history of thought’, where ‘thought’ is ‘the act that posits a subject and an object, along with their various possible relations’ (2000a: 459). To undertake a critical history of thought, one analyses ‘the conditions under which certain relations of subject to object are formed or modified, insofar as those relations constitute a possible knowledge’ (2000a: 459). To this end, Foucault examines the modes of subjectivation and objectivation as interdependent dynamic processes engaged in by human beings in establishing knowledge. ⁶

The mode of subjectivation, translating to ‘subjectification’, encompasses ‘what the subject must be, to what condition he is subject, what status he must have, what position he must occupy in reality or in the imaginary, in order to become a legitimate subject of this or that type of knowledge’ (2000a: 459). ⁷ Subjectivation is a process of internalization that involves taking a decision about being a particular type of subject or, as McNay (1994: 134) puts it: ‘how individuals come to understand themselves as subjects’. It is an activity carried out by a human being as a subject who knows; for example, a subject who makes her or himself subject to truths circulating about organic farming. Subjectifying organic is a way of personalizing organic that involves engaging with organic as a subject and reformulating one’s personal experience of what it is to be organic. This requires a constant decision-making about what sort of organic farming subject to be.

The mode of objectivation, translating to ‘objectification’, refers to ‘under what conditions something can become an object for a possible knowledge … how it may have been problematised as an object to be known, to what selective procedure … it may have been subjected, the part of it that is regarded as pertinent’ (Foucault, 2000a: 460). Objectivation is a process of externalization through which something or someone is made concrete or object. Objectivation produces ideal-types such as the ‘good farmer’ and the ‘good organic farmer’. Since an object is constituted subjectively and not given objectively, Foucault is critical of historians who engage in ‘the objectification of objectivities’ (1991b: 86). As Veyne (1997: 159) puts it, an object is a ‘false natural object … an object only for a practice that objectivizes it’, prior to which it does not exist. Within management studies, Knights and Morgan (1991) provide a clear example of denaturalizing a false natural object in contending that corporate strategy ⁸ has been constructed arbitrarily as one particular way of solving business problems:

This discourse has its own historical conditions of possibility; it embodies particular ways of seeing organizations, subjects and societies. It is embedded in particular sets of social relations. It has particular truth effects which are disciplinary on subjects and organizations. It is reproduced in specific sets of power-knowledge relations and it meets resistances at particular points. (1991: 255)

Business schools and practitioners tend ‘to treat the discourse of corporate strategy as a ‘natural’ rather than problematic feature of organization life’ (p. 252). Nonetheless, strategy is formulated by human beings to constitute or redefine problems ‘in advance of offering itself as a solution to them’ (p. 270), thereby providing a means of making the organization appear rational and in control of its own destiny to outsiders. Corporate strategy comprises particular truths that ‘define for the individual what it is to be human—to constitute or re-constitute their subjectivity’ (p. 260). Viewed in this light, the concept of organic is a ‘false natural object’ that is constructed, comprising truths around which organic producers and consumers form their subjectivities. As Lemke (2011: 31) puts it: ‘Foucault’s historical investigations expose the singularity and contingency of what came to be known as universal and natural’.

The subject is a reflexive human being who, through thinking, constitutes both the objectifying and subjectifying modes of acting, and is constituted by them. Thought ‘constitutes the human being as a knowing subject … thought is understood as the very form of action—as action insofar as it implies the play of true and false, the acceptance or refusal of rules, the relation to oneself and others’ (Foucault, 2000b: 200–201). Thinking is carried out in the space between seeing and speaking: ‘To think is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive inside’ (Deleuze, 1999: 118). Thought is an everyday activity engaged in by human beings: ‘it can and must be analyzed in every manner of speaking, doing, or behaving in which the individual appears and acts as knowing subject … , as subject conscious of himself and others’ (Foucault, 2000b: 201). To illustrate the everyday nature of subjectivation-objectivation interplay, I quote James Delingpole during a BBC Radio 4 interview:

We chaps are all very competitive … We go into a room … We assess every man in the room: Is he more successful or less successful than me? Richer than me or poorer than me? Better looking than me or uglier than me? (BBC, 2009)

I continue by exploring self-formation and the construction of organic selves through everyday subjectivation-objectivation experiences at a self-managing organic farming community.

Greenfields community: self-formation and the construction of organic subjects

To research how individuals think and act as they construct themselves as organic subjects, I carried out an ethnography at a self-managing non-commercial organic farming community. Ethnography has the potential to allow the researcher to produce a ‘thick description’ from one particular site (Geertz, 1973). Because of the historical context of his investigations, much of Foucault’s empirical work is sourced from document archives whereas, since I was studying a contemporary setting, I could employ ethnography to interface with the people I studied. Participant observation, as an integral part of ethnographic research, enabled me to assume the role of an organizational member (Czarniawska, 1998), which proved helpful in softening the inevitable power differential between the researcher and those researched (Wray-Bliss, 2003).

Greenfields ⁹ comprises a wide age range of singles, couples and families living in individual units to varying degrees of self-sufficiency and managing the communal buildings and farm collectively. Adults are engaged in a mix of full-time or part-time paid employment, retirement or semi-retirement and raising families. Each adult contributes a number of hours weekly to communal work including farming activities; a ring-binder containing membership information recommends 16 hours weekly as a guideline. At regular meetings, residents debate issues and propose changes relating to the community and farm.

I had been introduced previously to a Greenfields resident and his wife at my partner’s work Christmas dinner. To initiate the research, I liaised by phone and email with the resident and his partner, who became my key contacts, and forwarded a two-page research plan which they circulated to other members. The proposal for me to carry out research at the community went forward to a meeting and was accepted. I began by conducting a pilot study over one week, the first day of which I spent with a co-founder who provided a history of the start-up and a guided tour of the house and farm. I spent three more days at the community, familiarizing myself with the breadth of information displayed in the Buttery (minutes of meetings, rotas, messages chalked up about what fruit or vegetables were ready for picking, etc), talking informally with residents and interviewing five people. My findings from the pilot study indicated that the site provided sufficient scope for addressing the research question of how subjects form their selves around the ‘false natural object’ that is organic.

In all, the ethnography comprised interviews, participant observation, observation of the Farm meeting and document analysis of Farm meeting minutes and artefacts including noticeboards, whiteboards, books, leaflets and handwritten notes in ring-binders stored on shelves. I conducted 15 semi-structured recorded interviews with approximately half the adult residents, between one and two hours in length, and I interviewed several newcomers and a co-founder twice at ten-month intervals. Participant observation involved joining in discussions in communal areas, taking part in work-gangs involving a morning or day working on the farm, social events and communal meals. At one point, I lived, worked and slept at the community as a short-term resident through the World Wide Opportunities On Organic Farms (WWOOF) ¹⁰ scheme. Participating in the life and work of the community provided invaluable opportunities for informal encounters in communal areas with potential interviewees and also for interacting with community members who did not put themselves forward for interview.

Prelude: Foucault’s modes of objectivation

Before continuing with the empirical investigation, I engage with the various modes of objectification and how these translate into the conduct of organic farming.

Foucault identifies ‘three modes of objectification that transform human beings into subjects’ (2002a: 326), referred to elsewhere as three ways in which a subject becomes an object of knowledge (2000a: 460–461), three axes of experience (2000b: 202–204) and three interlinked elements (2010: 3–5). Firstly, Foucault analyses ‘the appearance and insertion of the question of the speaking, laboring, and living subject, in domains and according to the form of a scientific type of knowledge’ in the formation of the human sciences (2000a: 460). These are the ‘forms of a possible knowledge’ (2010: 3) presented in The Order of Things (1970). Secondly, he examines ‘the formation of the subject as he may appear on the other side of a normative distribution’ (2000a: 461) by studying a ‘more practical understanding’ formed in institutions ‘where certain subjects became objects of knowledge and at the same time objects of domination’ (1993: 203). He analyses ‘techniques for “governing” individuals—that is, for “guiding their conduct”—in domains as different as the school, the army, and the workshop’ (2000b: 203). These are the technologies of power and normative frameworks identified in Madness and Civilization, Birth of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1971, 1973, 1977). The third mode of objectification corresponds to technologies of the self, ‘the constitution of the subject as an object for himself’, by studying how ‘the subject is led to observe himself, analyse himself, interpret himself, recognize himself as a domain of possible knowledge’ (2000a: 461). Foucault investigates how ‘a human being turns him- or herself into a subject’ (2002a: 327).

With organic farming in mind, these three modes of objectification correspond approximately to: 1) knowledge accumulated about how to farm in an organic and sustainable manner, for example, how to deter pests and weeds; 2) technologies of power encompassing norms such as the standards of the organic certification bodies that guide the conduct of organic farmers and provide rules for deciding who is, and who is not, farming organically; 3) technologies of the self: the way in which the subject constitutes the self in relation to truths about organic circulating through both domains of knowledge, albeit less profuse than domains on madness and sexuality, and the normative systems provided by the organic certification bodies.

In establishing how the subject constructs an organic self with reference to organic knowledge domains and normative frameworks, the next few sections explore the interplay of subjectivation and objectivation through these three modes.

Joining an organic farming community

To find out to what extent individuals had engaged with, or become subject to, knowledge forms and normative frameworks associated with organic farming prior to joining Greenfields, I asked ‘How did you hear about the community?’ and ‘How did you get into organic?’.

Members were introduced to Greenfields through advertisements in a variety of sources, including: the Henry Doubleday Research Association ¹¹ (HDRA) membership magazine The Organic Way; a WWOOF newsletter; a book of organic places to stay; a paperback directory of communities in Great Britain named Diggers and Dreamers (Bunker et al., 2008); Sanity, a one-time monthly magazine for Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and Country Smallholding, advertised as ‘the UK’s practical magazine for smallholders’. Clearly, not all adverts are sourced in specifically organic or even farming journals. Since potential community members subjectify, that is make themselves subject to and internalize in a personal way, one advert from a range of sources, different objectifications of Greenfields in terms of organic-ness must be produced, suggesting that people are not always drawn to living at Greenfields for the organic farming. One newcomer told me ‘because the advert to come and live here was in The Organic Way … I think most people are fairly interested in organic’. In contrast, another resident reflected back on being a newcomer quite differently:

We were rather surprised at how ‘non-organic’ it felt to us. And I think that the reason for that is because a lot of people are coming just here for the farm. The organic is not of interest to them.

It became apparent that trajectories towards organic in community members’ life histories varied considerably. Four couples had, between them, acquired previous experience of organic farming through a mixture of working on organic farms through the WWOOF and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes, farming a Soil Association-certified smallholding, and living at another organic community. The co-founder of the community was introduced to organic farming by the other co-founders who have since left. One person, as a student, had written a dissertation on energy inputs to organic farming. Another lived in London and consumed organically, but did not farm or grow produce until moving to Greenfields. Working overseas on VSO before having children was a source of organic inspiration for at least two couples. An ex-VSO interviewee elaborates on a gradual shift in the relation between food production techniques and himself:

I don’t think it was just one moment. It was over a period of time. I think it was when we went to Africa and we were living in a subsistence level community. We saw them growing their own food and they didn’t have artificial fertilisers and pesticides. They were just cutting a bit of woodland down and then going in and ploughing it by hand. Digging it by hand and then planting rice and stuff. And it was a very natural thing to do. And then maybe coming back here to the west and seeing farming and the sprays and all that rubbish. It was that I think that got us into looking at the way we produce food.

Whilst engaging with, and being subject to, African subsistence farming practices, this community member objectifies such practices as ‘a very natural thing to do’. He establishes a form of self-understanding about the relation of himself and his partner to food production that he, as subject, creates about himself (Foucault, 1993: 203). The farming practices experienced in Africa establish an important part of the way in which he and his partner want to live. The closest equivalent, on returning to Britain, is to farm organically.

Although a number of other residents had prior experience of farming or gardening, this was not always carried out organically. Two responses to the question ‘How did you get into organic?’ were ‘I think by living here’ and ‘Moving here, I think’, indicating that some community members had no prior commitment to organic farming or consumption. Clearly, organic had been more significant in the past lives of some residents than in others. In the next section, I investigate further the external sources on which Greenfields individuals draw in forming their organic selves through the enactment of subjectivation-objectivation interplay in which the subject is constituted ‘as an object for himself’ (Foucault, 2000a: 461).

Organic practices, organic selves

To recap, Foucault-inspired case studies of the workplace tend to portray the subjugation of individuals in work organizations to specific discourses, practices and technologies engineered to obtain their cooperation. At Greenfields, explicit devices for integrating community members into an appropriate state of organic-ness are noticeably absent. As a collective, Greenfields community claims to farm organically as far as possible. The lack of specificity leaves potential openings for different individual objectifications of organic to flourish. Community members can attempt to change a farming practice by submitting a proposal to the monthly Farm meeting, where subsequent debate may ensue before a decision is made via consensus (Skinner, 2011). But, as shall be seen, frustrations arise from the ambiguities circulating around the ‘false natural object’ that is organic, especially when applied to practices in areas outside the farmed land.

The Soil Association provides a normative framework for residents in establishing how to be organic farmers. The Soil Association is the UK’s largest organic certification body, being responsible for certifying most of the home-grown and imported organic produce sold commercially. Although not certified to sell organic food, I discovered that the community supports the Soil Association through membership. Accordingly, the communal bookshelves in the Buttery hold Soil Association literature, namely the organic standards and information booklets on various farm animals, organic fertilisers, and so on, all providing potential sources for the interplay of subjectivation and objectivation in the formation of specific truths about what practices are organic. During the research period, the community debated whether to re-acquire organic certification through the Soil Association after a lapse of some ten years, thereby disrupting my prior assumption that Greenfields community is exempt from the formal codification of organic. My presence turned out to be timely, for the research study fed into community members’ preoccupations with the question of how organic they wanted to be and how they as individuals felt about the proposal to join the Soil Association. When residents met me in communal areas, some would think out loud on the pros and cons of joining. Accordingly, I found that most community members used the Soil Association as a yardstick for assessing their own organic-ness and that of the community. Different interviewees elaborated:

I think even a lot of things that are approved by the Soil Association I probably still wouldn’t use, depending on what’s on their list … I must say I have probably a gut feeling and my gut feelings would be based on growing up and looking at chemicals. You know, in terms of the toxicity of chemicals and things like that, which is definitely a part of organic farming, you know, what you’re allowed to use and what not, I would want to make my own decisions and not just look at the Soil Association and see what they said … I would never OK something that the Soil Association or some other organic certification thing disallowed. But it’s quite likely I wouldn’t use something that they permitted.

Well, I have a few reservations about the Soil Association … they’re definitely not radical enough … And I think that they should be much tougher about allowing additives in food. I think it would be much better if you couldn’t buy organic hot-dogs and organic processed food and suchlike … And people would associate organic food more, for instance, with wholefood. I think it would be a tactically good thing for them to do this. But also I think on principle they ought to do it as well.

We recently bought the standards from them … And I just thought that there are various points in the guidelines like that that go too far … There’s an element to this regulation or regulatory business that is not such a good thing in a way. But it does make you think about what organic means. (emphasis added)

Foucault defines subjectivity as ‘the way in which the subject experiences himself in a game of truth where he relates to himself’ (2000a: 461). In identifying with the codified Soil Association standards, the first interviewee above makes herself subject to, and simultaneously objectifies herself as more organic than, the Soil Association. Through subjectivation to, and internalization of, the codified standards, she compares her own thoughts and actions regarding organic farming with the Soil Association’s template for organic-ness and thereby formulates her own organic-ness, objectifying herself in terms of the standards. Through self-reflection, the first and second interviewees objectify the Soil Association as not being organic enough and the third interviewee is kick-started into thinking about what organic means. Instead of conceiving of the subject as a passive being regulated by a set of rules, Foucault focuses on how the subject responds actively to rules through self-regulating: ‘the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it into practice’ (1984a: 27). Community members do not internalize the Soil Association dictums in a passive way; instead, they make individual decisions about how much they want the Soil Association to be part of their organic selves. Also, to be organic according to the ever-changing rules of the Soil Association requires subjectifying the updated standards on a continual basis, producing new objectifications of how to be the ‘good organic farmer’:

They’re amending them all the time, they’re continually changing. And there are things that come in and out of standards … It’s something like copper sulphate. It’s got copper in it so it’s a heavy metal, heavy mineral. And it used to be within organic standards to control potato blight. But then they decided it wasn’t such a great thing after all because copper is a persistent heavy metal and it doesn’t break down and it’s not great if you get massive amounts of copper inside you. So it’s gone out of the standards since 2000 … They’re doing a lot of research and work.

Another major source of subjectivation-objectivation interplay is the notion of self-sufficiency, which may or may not be organic. Approximately half the residents had grown vegetables in gardens or allotments prior to joining Greenfields. In many cases, parents had been an influencing factor on attempts at self-sufficiency:

I suppose I view organic as growing the way my father grew. He couldn’t afford chemicals and insecticides and pesticides and all the rest of it. He used to have compost heaps and manure and I learnt, without realising, from him an awful lot. Companion planting. So you keep away onion fly, carrot fly by planting two things together because they hate the smell. And little gadgets that you roll over the top to get flea beetle off and it sticks onto a bit of sticky tape. All these little tricks that my father used to do I carried on.

During some interviews, self-sufficiency was used synonymously with organic as if the one implied the other. In these cases, the self was constituted in terms of organic-ness through reference to HDRA, self-sufficiency books, gardening practices engaged in by parents and farmers’ markets. HDRA is a national charity for organic horticulture that provides an online shopping catalogue where slug pellets containing ferric phosphate, not normally approved by the Soil Association, ¹² can be purchased. Several people referred to the HDRA as an influence and one resident commented on preferring HDRA to the Soil Association for being more ‘practical’. Books on self-sufficiency are another source of ambiguity for constructing organic. I was informed by one resident that John Seymour, who popularized the notion of self-sufficiency on a smallish plot in an urban area, ‘is the kind of father of organic growing’, his book The Complete Book Of Self Sufficiency (1976) ‘was a real inspiration’ and ‘I’d have thought probably half the people here are here because of that book’.

Although organic farming practices are normalized and formalized via codification by the certification bodies, they are also handed down less formally through the generations in an oral tradition that has strong associations with self-sufficiency but not always with growing organically. Of those who remembered their parents growing vegetables during their childhood, all but one suspected that sprays had been used. When asked what they meant by organic, there was a tendency for several respondents to blur the boundaries between organic and self-sufficiency and organic and local. In doing so, some of the characteristics of organic farming such as not using pesticides became lost. Foucault explains:

It is sometimes the case that these rules and values are plainly set forth in a coherent doctrine and an explicit teaching. But it also happens that they are transmitted in a diffuse manner, so that, far from constituting a systematic ensemble, they form a complex interplay of elements that counterbalance and correct one another, and cancel each other out on certain points, thus providing for compromises or loopholes. (1984a: 25; emphases added)

The Soil Association’s organic standards are disseminated systematically as ‘a coherent doctrine and an explicit teaching’ whereas practices of self-sufficiency are ‘transmitted in a diffuse manner’ through a tradition inherited from friends, family, books and other places. Nevertheless, it is clear that boundaries are blurred. Individuals respond to, and internalize, the standards of the Soil Association in different ways, while a number of residents conflate organic with self-sufficiency.

Whilst objectifications of the ‘good organic farmer’ are both codified by different certification bodies and transmitted loosely and informally in various ways, the ‘good organic consumer’ objectification turned out to have complexities of its own.

The ‘good organic consumer’

Early on, my prior assumption that producers who farm organically also consume organically, was undermined, thereby challenging my own objectifications of the ‘good organic farmer’. Prior to a communal evening meal at Greenfields as part of an introductory visit, I observed a resident pour a bottle of non-organic Hellmann’s® Mayonnaise over a salad dish before taking the dish down to the communal dining area. This finding raised the unprecedented issue of how personal consumption habits impinge upon other organic selves. When eating at a communal supper, food is brought down from individual housing units and one has limited knowledge of the ingredients, which may have been picked from the farm or purchased from outside. In contrast, if I ate out at an organic café or restaurant, I would expect the ingredients to be organic. Clearly, this might be of concern to those who want to be near 100 percent organic.

As it turned out, not all community members are organic consumers. One resident is almost totally self-sufficient, claiming ‘I don’t do much shopping at all. And when I do, if I need to buy some cheese for example, I almost always buy organic’ whilst, for another, price is also a factor: ‘I would buy everything organic if I could afford it’. As I questioned residents about their consumption habits, subjectivation-objectivation interplays with the notion of organic clashed with similar interplays with the concepts of Fair Trade and local produce. Everyone I interviewed prioritised Fair Trade over organic. Nevertheless, attempting to align the self with objectivations of Fair Trade, organic and local produces ethical dilemmas for subjects in deciding what to consume. As Kondo elaborates, the self is a potential site for the play of multiple discourses and shifting, multiple subject-positions (Kondo, 1990: 44).

I think there’s a dilemma that I would like to buy things that have been fairly produced, fairly traded, I’d like to support that as well … Should I buy stuff that’s been fairly traded but is non-organic? Should I buy things that are organic but don’t necessarily have the Fair Trade label on? And then, to that, add produced in this country as well. And local … It depends on the different product that you’re buying.

I buy Fair Trade because at least a man who is working in a field is getting a fair price—if you believe the propaganda that’s put out by the organization. Well, you know, who do you believe? At the end of the day, you’ve just got to be happy with yourself. (emphasis added)

Foucault’s ethical subject is subject not only to external moral prescriptions, but also to her/his own actions: ‘Given a code of actions, and with regard to a specific type of actions … there are different ways to “conduct oneself” morally, different ways for the acting individual to operate, not just as an agent, but as an ethical subject of this action’ (1984a: 26). Subjectivation occurs through the subject locating her/himself within a field of commonly accepted moral conduct, as a subject of that moral conduct, whilst objectivation occurs concurrently through assessing one’s performance as an ethical subject in the light of one’s actions through ‘self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination … for the transformations that one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object’ (1984a: 29). As Butler (1997: 22) puts it: ‘Conscience is the means by which a subject becomes an object for itself, reflecting on itself, establishing itself as reflective and reflexive’.

The ethical subject is the agent of her or his own ethics, treating her/himself simultaneously as object and as subject through technologies of the self. In the next section, I consider how individuals objectify other community members.

Objectifying others

Being located in a community setting situates each resident in a space in which engaging with the self-constructions of other members is inevitable. In this section, I explore how community members objectify each other in terms of organic-ness. To this end, I asked: ‘How organic are you, do you think, compared with other community members?’, producing responses such as:

Yes, definitely there are people who are more organic than others.

I don’t know if we’re the most organic people. But I would guess possibly we are.

I think there are probably four people here who are more organic. And the rest of us fit into a similar category.

I think we’re probably somewhere in the middle in relation to other people here.

Through technologies of power, community members attempt to guide the conduct of their colleagues. Subjectivations towards, and objectivations of, the term organic extend beyond food production and consumption to practices involving the use of chemicals in housing units and shared communal areas. One resident told me, while painting the woodwork of a window in her unit: ‘you know, if Jane was here she would probably be complaining about the paint that I’m using’. Other community members expressed frustration with fellow residents for being either too organic or not organic enough concerning the application of weedkiller, paint and wood treatments:

I worry about some of the things that we use on this farm like treated wood or various things that we do. You know, we use treated bedposts for instance. And then the arsenic and such-like goes into the ground. It can end up on the bonfire if you’re not careful … But even if you just use it on the farm, if it accidentally gets burned in somebody’s wood-burning stove—well, it will give off fumes big-time—but also if they use that ash to fertilise the garden or something. There’s all sorts of issues that people never really think through.

Another resident, in contrast, expressed frustration at not being allowed to use treated timber to repair farm buildings ‘I’m not going to waste my time building something that’s going to rot!’.

By living in a community, one is presented with different ways of thinking and acting regarding how to be organic, confronting the way one feels about oneself in relation to organic practices. Words such as organic are continually up for debate, as are individual and collective practices involved in managing land organically. On a suburban housing estate, I doubt whether your neighbour would mind what sort of paint you use indoors or how you treat your garden fence. At Greenfields, confrontation is potentially just around the corner. The organic reality of becoming a short-term resident required a more prolonged and intense involvement on my part with the different truths circulating at Greenfields community around the notion of organic and, accordingly, I found that my own organic self was not immune from disruption. I assumed that I would be eating organic food and was surprised to be provided with Tesco Best Value Butter® to keep in the visitor fridge. As a temporary resident, I objectified myself as more organic than some of the other residents and thereby situated my self within the organic hierarchy. The ambiguities surrounding organic had implications for how I carried out the tasks assigned to me. I worked from a rota on the blackboard, on which individual residents chalked up tasks in available slots. In the midst of a context of conflicting definitions of what organic is, I had no idea whether everyone was agreeable to each assigned task. One morning, when tasked to saw down an elder tree that was impeding access to the dustbins, I was confronted by a holiday visitor who, it later transpired, used to live at the community. I quote from my research diary:

A visitor came over to me and let rip. Said that it was very different when she lived here and they used Roundup® ¹³ on those sort of things. I said ‘That’s not very organic!’ She implied that the place had gone to the dogs since she lived here. Said it looked like a New Age Travellers’ site. (I quite like it myself—not too much like suburbia.) She said that letting these things grow can cause problems to buildings. And that if you cut them down, you have to keep cutting them down.

Through encounters like the one above, I refreshed my objectifications of the collective organic-ness of the community, past and present. In turn, over the research period, I confronted my own organic self as I became increasingly aware of issues such as treated wood that I had not considered before when subjectifying organic. As researcher, I was caught up in a web of shifting internalizations and externalizations of organic that disrupted the subjective understanding of how to be an organic food producer of each and every one of us.

Discussion and conclusion

Following Foucault’s later work, this article analyses self-formation in the non-corporate environment of a self-managing community where organic is centre-stage. Community members engage with representations of organic from various sources outside the self in establishing the relation of the self to organic. These sources include the codified standards of the Soil Association together with more diffuse transmissions centred mainly around the notion of self-sufficiency, often acquired through family and parents, but also internalized from other sources.

Community living has long been idealized as a utopian locale for escapism from mainstream life (Hardy, 2000). Commercial organic producers, farming in relative isolation, are subject to objectification through yearly inspection according to a relatively straightforward set of codified standards. In contrast, farming at Greenfields involves living in close proximity at a single site where the ‘false natural object’ that is organic has a much looser form and is individually constructed in different ways, providing prolific opportunities for intense surveillance of farming and other practices by community members over each other and prompting community members to constantly evaluate their individual and collective organic-ness.

The Ancient Greeks were obsessed with food as part of care of self: ‘About what the Greeks had to eat in order to be in good health, we have thousands of pages’ (Foucault, 2000d: 259). Subjectivation to producing and eating good food is something that Greenfields community members share too as a collective self-forming activity. In a contemporary setting, complexities are injected into collective self-formation through the domains of knowledge and normative frameworks established around organic farming that provide a whole range of possibilities for establishing one’s self as organic or not-so-organic. Organic farming and consumption practices are constantly up for discussion, although this is something one resident embraces for the opportunities provided to pool together knowledge.

Technologies of power and technologies of the self are explained through the concept of governmentality as a product of Foucault’s attempt at ‘a history of the organization of knowledge with respect to both domination and the self’ (1988b: 18). The word ‘subject’ implies not only ‘subject to someone else by control and dependence’ through subjugation but also ‘tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’ (Foucault, 2002a: 331). Accordingly, whilst technologies of power embody ‘an objectivizing of the subject’ (1988b: 18), it is through technologies of the self that the subject thinks and acts upon and makes decisions about what sort of subject to be, how to fit the self around the objectifications that are confronted by the self. Technologies of the self provide an intervention mechanism on the part of active subjects, injecting an element of contingency to everyday encounters and alleviating the determinist effect that technologies of power would have otherwise.

The article contributes to understandings of the organizing of subjectivity by centring attention on the individual as a thinking and acting being, thereby adding empirical support to theoretical studies that consider how Foucault’s texts account for the intervention of human subjects alongside sociological factors when exploring organizational issues (Bardon and Josserand, 2011; McKinlay and Pezet, 2010). Counter to many Foucault-inspired accounts in management and organization studies, I argue that subject formation is not an entirely social process. People internalize particular ways of being which then become part of the individual. As Kondo (1990) claims, human beings are active in crafting their selves. I contend that the formation of selves is a two-way process through which individuals interface with the social world to make choices as to how they act, thereby avoiding an over-deterministic notion of subjugation in a Foucault-inspired study. Foucault’s subject is neither a passive being nor a dupe but, instead, someone ‘capable of knowing, analysing, and ultimately altering reality’ (Foucault, 2000a: 463). For Foucault, power is not exerted directly by a person on another person; instead, a relationship of power is a mode of action that acts upon the actions of others: ‘an action upon an action, on possible or actual future or present actions’ (2002a: 340). Foucault’s concept of the self is located within a philosophy of the subject whereby an active self acts on an objectified world and interacts with other subjects who are defined as objects (McNay, 1994: 153). Through the interplay of subjectivation and objectivation, individuals decide on how they wish to define their selves in relation to organic and, correspondingly, what practices or ways of thinking and doing organic farming to prioritize and what to discard. The subjectivation-objectivation dynamic, through which an individual self is formed as it interacts with the external world outside the self, is something that each of us participates in from an early age in defining our selves. Since subjectivation-objectivation is exercised by every individual on a daily basis, it is not restricted to a privileged elite. The only prerequisites are to be capable of thinking and acting.

Self-formation is an ongoing activity. Regarding temporality, Butler posits (1977: 18), the subject oscillates ‘between the already-there and the yet-to-come’. For Deleuze:

Time as subject, or rather subjectivation, is called memory. Not that brief memory that comes afterwards and is the opposite of forgetting, but the ‘absolute memory’ which doubles the present and the outside and is one with forgetting, since it is itself endlessly forgotten and reconstituted. (1999: 107)

To elaborate, the construction of one’s self by oneself is a dynamic process that takes place over a series of temporal snapshots, thereby generating a succession of subjectivation-objectivation interplays whenever a community member reads a book, talks to a fellow resident, takes part in a farming practice, attends a Farm meeting, and so on. Additionally, the rules of the Soil Association are subject to constant revision and lurk in the background as an absent presence. During a period when the community is debating whether to acquire organic certification, community members consider the Soil Association’s rules in relation to what organic means to them and how organic they want to be both as individuals and collectively. An individual’s feelings on how to be organic are confronted by external representations of organic that challenge the way the subject feels she or he should think and act in order to be organic. An individual may decide not to adapt her/his own way of being organic in the light of an external representation, but that external representation is still internalized in an active way. It is this process of continual response to external representations that makes the process of self-formation dynamic. In addition, defining the community’s collective organic subjectivity is an ongoing process. From the archived minutes, I found evidence of a special meeting held ten years previously to discuss ‘How organic are we? How organic do we want to be?’, resulting in a community-wide organic audit.

Collective living constitutes a series of synchronic moments to which residents, myself included, contribute their individual diachronic histories to the diachronic history of the community, producing a series of synchronic-diachronic interplays. Through being located in a community, each individual is subject not only to constructions of organic circulating in the wider world but also to more localized constructions of organic internalized by fellow residents. The community comprises individuals from different backgrounds who join Greenfields with varying interests in, and prior experiences of, organic farming. Organic selves interplay intersubjectively in deciding upon a common way to farm and, as people join Greenfields, new organic subjectivities are drawn into the melting pot. How one’s organic self fits in with the organic selves of other community members varies according to the current make-up of community members, which can have a significant impact on organic farming practices. The present, therefore, changes over time as community members move out and new people join. Newcomers join the community within a particular time-slice and not only engage with remnants of the community past including traces of ex-residents but also bring in their own organic selves, interfacing with the practices for farming organically that have been established in the past and contributing to constructing the community present.

The article departs from the majority of Foucault-inspired studies in management and organization studies and follows instead the direction pointed to by Bardon and Josserand to ‘show that individuals are not only reactive agents who can display resistance against management practices but are also active agents’ (2011: 511). Unlike Foucault-inspired studies that analyse responses to the ideal-types promoted and imposed in the workplace in terms of acceptance or resistance, the current study takes a more nuanced stance by investigating the formation of the self around objectifications such as organic, taking into account how the past experiences of community members interleave with current exposure to ideal-types such as the ‘good organic farmer’. As Foucault voices: ‘“The other” (the one over whom power is exercised) is recognized and maintained to the very end as a subject who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible interventions may open up’ (2002a: 340). It is recommended that a wider range of responses could be opened up in Foucault-inspired studies at other organizational sites, including the workplace, by exploring the self-formation of the subject as a starting point for understanding the importance of the individual alongside sociological factors.