The culture of American beauties: managing people, discourse, and subject

• Autor(a) principal: Meira, Fabio Bittencourt
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Outros Autores: Meira, Monica Birchler Vanzella
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Cadernos EBAPE.BR
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.fgv.br/cadernosebape/article/view/9617

Organizational discourse seems unable to incite behaviors in line with the company’s requirements and needs. The literature on people management points out this dissociation between discourse and practice as a paradox. This article proposes to go further, by regarding it, actually, as the sign of a constitutive contradiction of the field in which managerial actions are produced. The mismatch between discourse and practice is the rule that enables the ceaseless renewal and reiteration of what is communicated. Renewed training techniques show that the integration of individuals is seen as a learning issue, which depends on teaching ways of feeling and noticing their sensations and experiences, something which goes far beyond the discourse boundary, pointing out other thresholds and antagonists. It is expected that the individuals are subjects of their own subjection. From this perspective, operation and the issue of people management lie on the need to simultaneously produce complete subjection and a full individual. The theoretical frameworks of organizational discourse and linguistic theory ground the criticism to innovative practices in people management. A character from the movie American Beauty helps rearranging the previous reflection, enabling us to resume the problem according to the new key, moving from the discourse to the subject.