The book "Somatic capitalism: The body and power in corporate culture" attempts to trace and analyze how the transformations in modes of production and the development of management knowledge throughout the twentieth century affected the...
moreThe book "Somatic capitalism: The body and power in corporate culture" attempts to trace and analyze how the transformations in modes of production and the development of management knowledge throughout the twentieth century affected the forms and understandings of human labor under capitalism, and how these processes reflected back on the working bodies. The underlying theme is of the advancing colonization of life by capital. Contrary to the proclamations of creative economy as unrestricted liberation of creativity, innovation and communication, the book argues that at the turn of twenty-first century work still leaves a demonstrable, albeit less traceable, mark on the human body.
The introduction attempts to map the area of study that extends between the concepts of “corporate culture” and “management discourses,” and to outline the main features of the employed approach, i.e. cultural analysis.
The first chapter, "Modes of control over body and the labor process," elaborates the theoretical infrastructure of the book based on the writings of Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, as well as subsequent developments of their oeuvre within the tradition of cultural studies, critical theory, and contemporary postmodern left. The theoretical concepts inform the periodization of capitalism into three hegemonic constellations comprised of management discourses and corresponding practices of regulating the human body. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution factory discipline and direct supervision are employed in order to regulate actions and constitute the docile body of the worker as a primary object of control. After the second world war the emphasis shifts on the professional body of the manager, normalized through self-governance in respect to image. Finally, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, corporate governance is extended onto the social body of the corporation by directly affecting organizational culture.
The second chapter, "Somatic engineering," comprises an in-depth description and analysis of Taylorism as a mode of disciplinary control in which the working body is disassembled and reduced to quantitative correlates and their combinations. These practices are labeled as somatic engineering, i.e. the employment of technical and scientific knowledge in order to produce, modify and maintain cost-effective working bodies. The subsequent argument demonstrates that Taylorism does not boil down to ideological discourse, but constitutes a complex apparatus of governance that operates simultaneously at multiple levels: from the ways of performing work, to the procedures of selection and training of workers, to the structures and internal logic of the organization. Similar results were accomplished by Henry Ford who relied, on the one hand, on technological control of the assembly line that structured the mode of production in such way as to produce docile bodies, and, on the other hand, on innovative social policy that was supposed to tamper with human souls. What ultimately connects both modes of corporate control is a conjunction of rationalization in regard to the movements of body parts with biopolitical management that manifested itself — in case of Taylor — in the attempts to convert embodied knowledge of the workers into abstracted knowledge of expert systems, and in case of Ford — in the attempt to interfere with the private lives of his employees.
The third chapter, "The political anatomy of the manager," examines the growing importance of management work in corporate culture after the second world war. Elaborating the concept of managerial implosion, it demonstrates how a mobile location within organizational structure and the immaterial nature of work has rendered the manager as a figure existing simultaneously in the sphere of production and the sphere of consumption. This double articulation necessitated new mode of corporate control based on self-control and seduction, most fully expressed in the concept of management by objectives developed by Peter Drucker. The commodification of the working body was, therefore, no more dependent on use-value, but rather on symbolic value — if the body of the physical worker was constituted through its alignment with the industrial mode of production, the body of the manager was construed by the marketing gaze and conceptualized primarily in visual terms of self-presentation, appearance, image and gender.
The fourth chapter, "The culturalization of the working body," takes up the issue of transformations in the relationship between the body and work in the final two decades of the twentieth century, when the concept of “organizational culture” has gained its momentum. The causes of increased interest in culture by management theorists and practitioners were related to, on the one hand, the countercultural legacy that problematized success in terms of community and self-fulfillment, rather than just profit, and, on the other hand, the extraordinary achievements of Japanese companies allegedly conditioned by their distinct management style. These beliefs furthered the colonization of the working body by market forces, as the control was extended to encompass not only the behavior and appearance, but also “internalized” mental and affective states as well as their embodied expressions. The new mode of control was most fully expressed in the fetishism of nonverbal communication and the growing importance of emotional labor that together constituted biopolitical corporate governance. It operates by subjecting life to business calculation and employing acquired knowledge to transform and regulate the very being of workers.
The concluding remarks point to the development of a new form of therapeutic capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century that attempts to respond to the growing problems generated by biopolitical management — depression and burnout as emerging embodiments of affective and cognitive alienation — by proliferating practices associated with psychological counseling, such as coaching, mentoring or wellness. Paradoxically it results in extending the corporate governance over the entirety of life. In the new culture of work every fiber of an organism has to be active 24/7 and its performance is unceasingly monitored and accounted for by ubiquitous and dispersed audit systems.
