Power and Management According to Agamben
* Article: Power and Management According to Agamben: Some implications of Agamben’s thoughts to management scholarship. Enrico Beltramini. Ephemera, volume 20(4), 2020 . Special issue: Work, reconfigured.
Abstract:
"This review discusses some of the most prominent contributions of Giorgio Agamben to philosophy and political theories that are relevant to management scholars. By addressing Agamben’s theological genealogy of economy and government included in The Kingdom and the Glory, I introduce management scholars to innovative significations and understandings of power and management, including the notion that power is a form of management. I also offer some reflections on the ramifications for management scholarship of Agamben’s engagement with management as a praxis."
Contents:
“This article is divided into three parts: first, I briefly introduce Agamben and his work; second, I address Agamben’s work on power; third, I explore the implications of Agamben’s work for management scholars. In the first part, as indispensable background, I introduce briefly Agamben’s overall project and the related notions of state of exception and bare life. I then turn to Agamben’s general assumptions about secularization, his interpretation of Foucault’s work on power, and Agamben’s study of two theological paradigms, one political and the other economic-driven. My central interest does not concern the accuracies or inaccuracies of Agamben’s readings of Foucault’s corpus of political texts. Instead, the intention is to tease out the main features of Agamben’s theoretical and philosophical conceptions of power and management. Then, Government comes to the fore and occupies my focus. Finally, as follow and take further Agamben’s argument, I invite readers to recognize the ramifications of Agamben’s ideas for management scholarship.”
Excerpts
For an extensive excerpt, see: Agamben's Theory of Power
From the conclusion:
"This article is primarily a review of some of Agamben’s most prominent contributions to philosophy and political theories that seem relevant to management scholars. By addressing Agamben’s theological genealogy of economy and government, management scholars engage primarily with the overarching ‘problem of management’ – that is, the what of management: what is management, what is the relation with power and norm and finally, what is the relation of management with itself, the process by which management gradually becomes managerialized. I dealt briefly with these topics. In summary, one of the key features of Agamben’s thought on management is the way he leaves management unthought. Rather than leave management unthought, modern scholarship has thought management most rigorously as a transcendent body of knowledge. I argue that Agamben’s account of management opens a way of deactivating the transcendent tendency of contemporary management and return it to an immanent order of things."