The book on Capitalism and personality. Transformations on the identity within the contemporary business, by Luis Enrique Alonso and Carlos J. Fernández has been published.
Business discourses on management have become contemporary capitalism’s ideological stronghold, legitimizing its more individualistic, deregularized version. Challenging the rigid bureaucratic control of old management, new business managing methods give each person’s personality a new protagonism within organizations (and over them), based on the alleged unlimited capabilities of adaptability and flexibility, and under a logic of never-ending self improvement and competition. The constant use of terms such as “talent”, “personal branding”, “coaching” or “self improvement” shows the growing psichologization of human resources, a trend that has grown over the business world and arrived to the political, social and cultural sphere. Using a broad and detailed analysis of the general forms of discourse in all its forms and contexts–from the business reality in the world market to the managerial fiction, and touching the rise of managerial populism in politics–this book sheds some light on its effects on labour, production and consumption, and in a more general way reflects on the creation of contemporary identities and subjectivities. Thus, it shows how this appraisal of individual virtues is hiding (and legitimizing) new hierarchical, unequal and socially exclusionary structures, and the erosion of collective identities.
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