Abstract

On Domination and its Denial This article explains how corporate management and shareholders gradually succeeded in introducing new modes of domination designed to counter the wave of worker insubordination in the post-1968 period. It shows how the systematic individualisation of the management of wage-earners, placed in a situation of mutual competition, the pressures exerted on them through the procedures of individualised objectives and permanent evaluation, and the orchestration of the objective and subjective contingency of workers, transformed the conditions of wage-employment. From a condition which could be inscribed by those subjected to it within a horizon of collective resistance, domination came to be experienced as a plight of personal suffering. Such trends are not however irreversible, insofar as the logic of individualisation and contingency now tends to come into conflict with other factors, such as the attachment of wage-earners to their work