Individual identity and organisational control: empowerment and modernisation in a primary care trust

The notion of empowerment has been increasingly used within management discourses in recent years. Enthusiastic supporters conceive it as an acknowledgement of the individual employee as a talented, creative being, and hence a productive resource for contributing to organisational goals. Alternatively, more critical commentators have interpreted it as another means of exercising control over employees and their identities. Although various commentators have speculated on the management of identity as a means of organizational control, there is very little empirical work from which to draw conclusions. This paper, using participant observation and interview data, represents a contribution to the small body of empirical research in the area. It focuses on an initiative aimed ostensibly at 'empowering' staff in an English Primary Care Trust, which may be seen as an attempt at increasing organisational control by shaping employee identities. As such, these processes can be understood more readily in terms of ethics rather than empowerment. The term ethics is used here in a Foucauldian sense and is linked to the processes of self-definition and self-constraint by which individuals train themselves to become ethical persons. The paper suggests that the outcome of attempts to manufacture particular forms of subjectivity by such methods as 'empowerment' programmes may be very different from those intended.