ABSTRACT
Governmentality as developed in the work of Miller and Rose and others such as Power has been criticised for its failure to pay attention to history. This chapter looks at different phases of Foucault's approach, with a particular focus on his later work as developed in his focus on pastoral power. For Foucault, governmentality was a way of moving from the 'microphysics' of power that constituted his earlier studies to a macrophysics. Governmentality was to do with the 'conduct of conduct' in the context of the shift to examining techniques of the self. The aim of fostering a historical turn in organizational analysis is a laudable one, but the suggestion that this be done by a turn to genealogy in the Foucauldian sense is only a partial solution. The relentless focus on self-examination in order to ascertain the marks of grace would give some assurance about salvation manifested itself in practices of diary-keeping which then became secularised.
