Search for New Technologies to Ensure the Manageability of Personnel: Corporality, Emotions and Labor Discipline
Annual Conference of the International Society for Cultural History Umeå, Sweden 26-29 June 2017, Forthcoming
Posted: 18 Mar 2017
Date Written: March 15, 2017
Abstract
A definite difference between modern theories of personnel management consists in a repeated appeal to corporality and body practices that were excluded from the concept of personnel management after abandoning the classical "theory of labor movements" created for physical labor. In the NOL (new organization of labor) movement, the theory of labor movements was immediately focused on the nature of the movement in the workplace. For example, a specialist in NOL taught a bricklayer as a clearer worker when laying bricks. The Russian NOL, based on the Marxist critique of capitalism for turning the worker into an appendage of the machine, began to impart a broader cultural sound to this theory. After abandoning the classical theory of management, the Western concepts of personnel management also focused more on the economic and psychological factors of labor productivity, temporarily excluding the "discipline of the body" from its analysis. In the middle of the twentieth century, the concept of corporeality began in philosophy. Some authors (for example, Foucault) drew attention to the disciplinary dimension of management, in which the discipline of labor and the discipline of the body of the worker are equally the mechanisms of oppression. Personnel management theories through the prism of these critically-minded concepts, began rethinking the role of emotions and corporality in personnel management.
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