ABSTRACT
That considerable interpretative antagonism continues to permeate contemporary discussions of the status of 'Enterprise' and 'Entrepreneurialism' in discourses and programmes of organizational reform is evident from a cursory glance at some of the recent literature (Fournier and Grey, 1999; Courpasson, 2000; du Gay, 2000b; Armstrong, 2001). This article seeks to take some of the heat out of these debates by endeavouring to indicate the extent to which different understandings and conceptions of enterprise are non-reducible. This being the case, attempting to analyse and critique one conception of enterprise through the prism or cluster of
Organization 11 (1) Articles
concerns of another in pursuit of 'the conception' of enterprise is unlikely to aid understanding. The article seeks, first, to clarify a particular conception of 'enterprise' that has underpinned, and continues to underpin, an abstract political critique of 'bureaucracy' most especially, but not exclusively, in the public sectar, and which has also been translated into a variety of specific strategies far, inter aha, restructuring the arganization of hospitals, local government, universities and social services. This conception, it is argued, is very different from that informing much of the prescriptive and descriptive literature on 'entrepreneurship' within management studies, far instance. Second, the article attempts to problematize the opposition between 'bureaucracy' and 'enterprise' that frames this self-styled 'entrepreneurial' approach to organizational reform. This epochal 'bureaucracy/enterprise' dualism, it is suggested, is best viewed as a rhetarical move in a political polemic, but one with very real effects. In the final part of the article, some of these effects are charted through an examination of certain 'entrepreneurial' organizational reforms in the British public sectar, most notably the 'agencification' of the Civil Service initiated under the last Conservative administration of Margaret Thatcher. The dangers here, it is argued, are clear and present. In having many of the key terms through which it has traditionally been understood and conducted redefined through the prism of 'entrepreneurial principles' the public administration as an institution of government has begun to lose the distinctiveness of its purpose. Depending on one's political values this may ar may not be a good thing; that it is happening, though, and that it has definite if frequently underarticulated political and constitutional consequences, is clear enough.
