From Bureaucratic Discipline to Self-Actualization: Using Marx and Foucault to Critique the Demand for Better Work Rather Than Less Work

This essay brings together Karl Marx’s alienation critique with Michel Foucault’s theoretical work on technologies of power to examine the demand for self-actualizing work. I argue that many of the themes in Marx’s writings appear frequently in the human relations management literature and are later incorporated by New Public Management. However, Foucault’s work is shown to complement and extend Marx’s initial alienation analysis, and then to highlight the reliance of human relations management on disciplinary technologies. Lost in the demand for better work is a more radical vision of harnessing machinery to bring about a post-work society.