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Tangled Up in ‘Life’: A qualitative study of enterprise, power and bio-resistance

2025/02/13 by Darren McCabe · 1 voice
Business, Management and Accounting · #Management and Organizational Studies

paper · doi:10.1177/01708406251323366

openalex publication_date 2025/02/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21

Abstract

It has been argued that managing employees is changing from discipline towards bio-power that targets life abilities and extra-work qualities. Drawing on qualitative research into an organizational transformation programme in a local government authority, this article identifies a more entangled situation. First, it explores how change agents sought to enrol employee support for transformation through employing a discourse that included enterprise and mutuality. Second, it analyses how bio-power is entangled with discursive and disciplinary power. Third, it introduces the term bio-resistance that refers to the capacity to utilize ‘life itself’ in multifaceted, ambivalent and illimitable ways, to resist.

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