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Organizational discourse and subjectivity

Subjectification during processes of recruitment

University of Göteborg, Sweden; ola.bergstrom{at}handels.gu.se

David Knights

Keele University, UK; david.knights{at}exeter.ac.uk

This article seeks to contribute to the debate on the relationship between organizational discourses and subjectivity, revolving around whether organizational discourses determine individual subjectivity and the extent to which there is room for human agency. It does so by providing empirical illustrations of how organizational discourses constitute subjectivity during processes of recruitment in a large American consultancy firm operating in Sweden. The analysis illustrates how interviewers, by various discursive moves, initiate, support, control and follow up candidates’ decision to join the company, as if it was an independent choice to join. Findings suggest that to the extent that subjectification takes place during the recruitment process it is dependent on the candidate’s use and acceptance of organizational discourses as expressions of their own motives for working at the company. These findings have implications for the understanding of the relationship between organizational discourses and individual subjectivity and how subjectification processes may be studied in other practices and organizations. It argues that subjectification is an effect of the interaction between human agency and organizational discourses rather than in the determination of one to the other. Any attempt to analyse the impact of organizational discourse on individual subjectivity must take into account the possibility that subjects actively take part in their own self-construction and that this construction is produced in social interaction.

Key Words: organizational discourse • recruitment • subjectification • subjectivity

Human Relations, Vol. 59, No. 3, 351-377 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0018726706064179


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