ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the complex tensions of personal power within institutional contexts by teasing out the relationships between the ontological, categorical and relational levels of experience. It develops the notion of relational identification as a way of understanding governing subjects negotiate and translate multiple categorical and ontological commitments; professional, organisational, personal and sociocultural in order to become a good governing subject within the working context, and this relates to ideas of equality in new managerial contexts. However, within institutional contexts where diversity and difference are ostensibly lauded, promoted as institutional goods, such as the new managerial ones considered in Power, Politics and the Emotions, categorical positioning are recognised as multiple, intersecting and, potentially, competing and contradictory. The idea of relational identity draws attention to this interdependence and to an examination of the way governing subjects understand themselves through a network of social as well as institutional relations. Governing subjects relational multiplicity is experienced as ontological coherence through a relational choreography.
