ABSTRACT
In Manufacturing the Employee: Management Knowledge from the 19th to 21st Centuries (1996), Roy Jacques outlines what he describes as a discursive history of the emergence of the category of the employee. Drawing on poststructural theory and particularly on the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques provides an innovative account of the meaning of the employee, and outlines the potential redundancy of certain conceptions of management and organization as we move into a postindustrial or knowledge-based economy. Here, in an effort to extend and refine a number of themes emerging from his work, Jacques engages directly in dialogue with Campbell Jones and Shayne Grice. His two interlocutors press him to clarify his position and to defend it from charges from a number of angles. Spurred on by Jacques' suggestion about the prohibitions of mainstream management theory which forbid certain questions, Jones and Grice here make an effort to test the limits and prohibitions of Jacques' work. In the resulting conversation, the three discuss and debate a wide range of issues beginning with Jacques personal background, the emergence of his intellectual interests and his conception of knowledge, management and postindustrialism. The discussion opens on to questions relating to the potential contribution of poststructuralist histories in relation to alternative critical accounts of management, and pose central challenges to issues relating to strategies of critical engagement and the choices made in those engagements.
