Antti Saari & Jan Varpanen, Critical ambiguities – ambiguities of critique: Technologies of the self in entrepreneurial activism, Ephemera. Theory and Politics in Organization, 2024
Open access
Keywords
critical theories, social movements, power, entrepreneurial activism, Foucault, subjectivity Theory U, Ambiguity
Extract from introduction
In Foucauldian organization studies, a shift of emphasis has taken place from the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur, 2008) – uncovering modes of subjugation behind the smokescreen of individual freedom – towards the task of discovering potentials of agency, change and resistance (Raffnsøe et al., 2022; Randall and Munro, 2010; McKinlay and Taylor, 2014; Paulsson, 2011). Such positive registers of subjectivity have been sought by drawing on Foucault’s work on care of the self (souci de soi). This work sees ethics as practical work of self on the self in relation to aims, techniques, and substance to be worked on and a way of attending to one’s self as a certain kind of subject (Foucault, 1997a). A key theoretical effort in this line of inquiry has been the attempt to transcend the rigid opposition between conduct and counter-conduct – that is, conducts either sustaining or challenging the status quo (Brewis, 2019; Michaeli, 2017; Munro, 2014; Raffnsøe et al., 2019).
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