Embodying the Market: The Emergence of the Body Entrepreneur

Abstract

When organizations take radically new forms, employees’ minds and bodies can also take radically new forms, but prior organizational research has lacked the concepts and data to understand such qualitative changes in persons. For 17 years, I studied a profound societal change, the market turn, inside organizations at their center, investment banks on Wall Street. The banks took a new, market-like form that facilitated the emergence of a cultural–historical new form of personhood, the body entrepreneur. Unlike traditional organizations, which predictably reward employee effort, the banks gradually decoupled rewards from effort, paying bankers for winning first internal and then external competitions and increasingly exposing them to market risk. Bankers internalized this entrepreneurial positioning by transforming their minds and bodies into resources for competitive success regardless of health consequences. As rewards became more elusive, bankers invested more resources, first the mind and then the body, and controlled them in progressively more powerful ways, first through cognitive techniques, then through self-experimentation with drugs. Bankers thus intervened more radically in their minds and bodies than organizations legitimately can, resulting in two qualitative person changes. One, bankers constructed personhood in cultural–historical new ways, changing from the traditional psychological self, which locates processes such as emotions and motivation in the mind, toward a somatic self, the body entrepreneur, which locates them in the body as brain states that bankers could self-design. Two, the body functioned in new ways: not inside–out as a biological imperative but outside–in, fluidly adjusting to changing situations. Whereas prior organizational theories have assumed what the body is, I problematize it, empirically studying the self-technologies through which people construct the culturally situated biologies that compel them to unproblematically reproduce new, market-like organizations.