Entrepreneurs of the self: the development of management control since 1976

This review article considers some of the key management control articles published in AOS through the theoretical lens of Foucault's 1978/9 lectures on neo-liberalism and biopolitics. In these lectures Foucault analyses the shift from classical liberalism to what he describes as American neo-liberalism, the birth of biopolitics and the understanding of humans as entrepreneurs of the self. Foucault set out in the late 1970s what is now strikingly apparent in 2015 – the spread of neo-liberalism universally to domains which were previously thought to be “non-economic”, specifically, and for the purposes of this paper, to human-beings.