Stories of Development and Exploitation: Militant Voices in an Enterprise Culture

Abstract

This article illustrates the disciplinary effects of the `new career' discourse by contrasting the voices of two groups of graduates starting their careers in a large service sector organization. One group bought into the dominant `careering' discourse of the organization and adopted the `authorized' subject position of the entrepreneur; the other group resisted this discourse by drawing on a more militant register. The article explores the disciplinary effects of career in terms of the constitution of subjectivity, and spatial ordering. It is argued that the `new career' discourse enrols graduates as subjects whose desires are intimately implicated with organizational excellence. However, the career discourse does not only constitute subject positions (such as the entrepreneur, or the militant other), it also performs some social ordering by mapping subjects onto a hierarchized space where entrepreneurs occupy a central position and the militant `others' are pushed to the margins. The final sections of the paper draw upon a Foucauldian analysis of power and resistance to suggest that militant voices serve to both reproduce and subvert the dominant enterprise culture they seek to oppose. The notion of consumption deployed in cultural studies is used to argue that, through their `tactics of consumption', `militant' graduates re-appropriate and rearticulate the position created for them in and by enterprise.