Disciplinary and Biopolitical Power as Practices of Labor Management in Contemporary Russian Companies of Immaterial Production

Abstract

The article provides an attempt to analyze management practices in market companies based on a Foucauldian approach and the theory of cognitive capitalism. The analysis answers three research questions: what kinds of labor management regimes can be distinguished in the production sector based on "immaterial" labor? What is the relationship between the type of management regime in a company and the degree of creativity of its employees? What are the limits to the effectiveness of these different regimes? Based on the theoretical apparatus of Foucault and existing empirical studies within the Foucauldian framework, the author identifies the signs of the two main modes of labor management (disciplinary and biopolitical) in the aspects of space and time regulation, hierarchical relations, rules of conduct in the office, employee identity and encouragement practices. Similarly, relying on the resources of post-operaismo and the theory of cognitive capitalism, a list of strategies for resisting these regulations is formulated: opportunism, ignoring, fixing contradictions in identity, cynicism, idle talk and exit. During the empirical analysis of selected cases of Russian companies engaged in the production of intangible assets, the author identifies five key management practices: panoptic control, normalization, employee management through the expansion of the area of responsibility (implemented through the practice of building task-oriented labor), encouragement practices and the construction of employee identity through the values of involvement, development and effectiveness. At the conceptual level, it is demonstrated that less standardized and more creative labor combines better with biopolitical management; more standardized and less creative labor, in turn, combines with the disciplinary mode; the distribution of empirical cases, in general, confirms this conclusion. The limits of effectiveness of each of the control modes are demonstrated through an analysis of how their functioning provokes opposing resistance practices. The final paragraph of the paper outlines ways to build a more complex classification of four labor management regimes.