Self-management in organisations is often presented as a utopia of total autonomy—a fantasy that reveals deep misconceptions about the nature of freedom itself. In truth, self-management emerges through what Norbert Elias termed a “civilizing process”: the gradual internalisation of external constraint into socialized discipline. Far from dissolving power, self-management refines it, producing subjects who govern themselves as a kind of liberation—and it’s critical to explore how far their liberation really goes.

Organisational self-management—in the NER or Corporate Rebel tradition—often unfolds through carefully orchestrated practices: selective recruitment privileging culture over skill, intensive onboarding, enforcement of norms via peer feedback systems, conflict management trainings, shared government and decision-making protocols. None of this comes without risk. As Bourdieu observed, such arrangements may appear to flatten hierarchies, but can just as easily reproduce existing distributions of capital by more sophisticated means. “Peer-to-peer reviews” ostensibly equalise, but often function as technologies of distinction—cloaking hierarchy in egalitarian garb while quietly preserving the very inequalities they claim to redress. Shared constitutions may scaffold democracy, yet at the same time delimit possibility. Joan Acker’s analysis of gendered organisations offers a further warning: our so-called “neutral” norms of autonomy frequently encode distinctly masculine, Western values of competition, individuation, and control—naturalizing exclusion in the very name of inclusion.

So what, then, is freedom within this architecture? As organisations shift from sovereign command to forms of governmental self-steering, “freedom” becomes ever more structurally determined. Mats Alvesson’s “templated authenticity” captures this paradox: organisations do not merely encourage autonomy, they begin to script our very uniqueness. Autonomy can become a managerial imperative—a hollow authenticity manufactured for organisational ends. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s New Spirit of Capitalism shows how authenticity and creativity, once external to the economic sphere, have now been commodified as engines of accumulation. Freedom thus becomes a choreography where the injunction to “be yourself” or “take ownership” extracts productivity as efficiently as any Taylorist regime, making emancipation virtually indistinguishable from compliance. In this sense, we end up collabourating in our own management—a condition that Kafka anticipated with sarcastic clarity.

Genuine autonomy—what Gert Biesta terms “subjectification”—follows a different logic: it arises through encounters with radical alterity, where individuals develop not by merely internalizing norms, but through their capacity to be decentered by difference. Yet, organisations often systematically foreclose such encounters, favouring predictable self-optimisation of human resources over the unpredictable—and not always productive—flourishing of human beings. In practice, the organisational subject remains fundamentally divided, a truth management theory is keen to disavow. Autonomy is perpetually haunted by unconscious lack and desire, while managerial discourse—through what Lacan called the “University discourse”—continually structures the field of possible subjectivities: sometimes enabling, more often delimiting, genuine individuation.  Management often exploits these psychic energies, recruiting unconscious anxiety for endless self-optimisation, scripting subjects as both entrepreneur and product.

This brings us to a fundamental political conundrum, often equally glossed over in mainstream management discourse: the intricate, fraught relationship between freedom and responsibility. Philip Pettit’s “Cheshire Cat fallacy” powerfully exposes the convenient illusion that rights can exist without the ballast of corresponding obligations. In organisational governance, representation is never unconditional; it is always contingent upon qualifications, accountability, performativity, and alignment with shared goals. Self-management is no anarchic free-for-all—it seeks to realize a difficult Rousseauian compact, distributing sovereignty while upholding “freedom within a frame.” But who imposes the framework? In Rousseau’s Social Contract, collective sovereignty is grounded by the “general will”, but—as Jonathan Wolff shows—the general will sharply delimits personal liberty and pluralism, anchored in a “civil religion”—engineered and institutionalized by the “Legislateur”, the system’s founding architect. This reveals the subtle violence of the autonomy/control dialectic: self-management flatters subjects as sovereigns, but power is rarely dismantled or truly shared; more often, it is dispersed and subtly manifest as an extension of the founder’s moral and political vision. Members are recruited in strict coherence with an organisational “religion”. Thus, “ownership,” “inclusion,” and “empowerment” quickly become refined techniques of discipline.

Against this, Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic democracy reminds us that authentic participation is born from disagreement and contestation, not the suppression of difference or the neutralisation of dissent through constructed harmony. Nancy Fraser’s framework of justice as participation, emerging from feminist theory, equally insists that autonomy is not a static state but a process: embedded in structures of accountability and perpetual contestation. Mature organisations must work to dismantle barriers not only to participation, but also recognition and redistribution—acknowledging that organisational “justice” is always a negotiated, dynamic achievement. True autonomy, then, requires institutional spaces where dissent, conflict, and difference are not managed away, but constitutive of collective intelligence. And this is very difficult at scale.

Of course, all these dynamics are anything but static; they evolve in lockstep with capitalism’s own restless mutations. Elias’s civilizing process, when viewed through the economic logic of organisations, reveals how the shift from Fordist to post-Fordist capitalism replaced the certainty of hierarchical discipline with the anxious precarity of flexible autonomy. Where industrial-era workers could at least acknowledge—and collectively contest—their constraints, today’s postmodern employees are consigned to perpetual self-reinvention: markets promise opportunity, but typically deliver atomisation and precarity. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, this very individuation is not merely a psychological or cultural transformation—it becomes a political strategy. By dissolving the collective organs of contestation—unions, class solidarity, the shared front of workers—capitalism fragments the possibility of antagonism itself. Politics is not only emptied of content, but of its very possibility: the space of democratic discourse, of public struggle, is replaced by individualized negotiation, private resilience, and micro-tactics of adaptation.

Self-managing teams may thus stand as the apotheosis of neoliberal governance: the “conduct of conduct,” where subjects “freely” regulate themselves according to market rationality, all the while experiencing this as the very substance of liberation. Happy slaves—as Ebner-Eschenbach warned—are the greatest enemies of freedom. The real challenge, then, is not merely to assert autonomy, but to reclaim it as a contested space—a site of struggle where subjectification is forged through ongoing dialectics of other, self, and justice. Only then will we avoid what Richard Sennett called the “corrosion of character” endemic to this era of flexible capitalism.

Am I against self-management? Not at all. But I fear it offers no easy solution. In our rush to turn self-management into a replicable template for better business results, we risk letting the desire to succeed eclipse the deeper imperative—the desire to become.

Perhaps the deeper truth is this: the anxiety accompanying organisational freedom is not a glitch, but the very engine of transformation. The freer we become, the heavier weighs our responsibility for self-regulation, risk, and potential complicity. In the twenty-first century, where anxiety is stitched into the very fabric of society, true autonomy—if it is possible at all—may not be achieved by yet another version of self-management, but by a more radical reimagining: not as an individual quest, but as a collective project. Where emancipation is inseparable from our shared vulnerability and interdependence, freedom must be anchored in solidarity and struggle—not in the seductive cult of self-optimisation, nor in the false promise of control.

Takeaways:

#OrganisationalChange #SelfManagement #Leadership #JusticeAsParticipation #OrganisationalSociology