STORIES OF DEVELOPMENT AND EXPLOITATION - MILITANT VOICES IN AN ENTERPRISE CULTURE

This article illustrates the disciplinary effects of the ''new career' ' discourse by contrasting the voices of two groups of graduates start ing their careers in a large service sector organization. One group bo ught into the dominant ''careering'' discourse of the organization and adopted the ''authorized'' subject position of the entrepreneur; the other group resisted this discourse by drawing on a more militant regi ster. The article explores the disciplinary effects of career in terms of the constitution of subjectivity, and spatial ordering. it is argu ed that the ''new career'' discourse enrols graduates as subjects whos e desires are intimately implicated with organizational excellence. Ho wever, the career discourse does not only constitute subject positions (such as the entrepreneur or the militant other), it also performs so me social ordering by mapping subjects onto a hierarchized space where entrepreneurs occupy a central position and the militant ''others'' a re pushed to the margins. The final sections of the paper draw upon a Foucauldian analysis of power and resistance to suggest that militant voices serve to both reproduce and subvert the dominant enterprise cul ture they seek to oppose. The notion of consumption deployed in cultur al studies is used to argue that, through their ''tactics of consumpti on'', ''militant'' graduates re-appropriate and re-articulate the posi tion created for them in and by enterprise.