Tangled Up in ‘Life’: A qualitative study of enterprise, power and bio-resistance

It has been argued that managing employees is changing from discipline towards bio-power that targets life abilities and extra-work qualities. Drawing on qualitative research into an organizational transformation programme in a local government authority, this article identifies a more entangled situation. First, it explores how change agents sought to enrol employee support for transformation through employing a discourse that included enterprise and mutuality. Second, it analyses how bio-power is entangled with discursive and disciplinary power. Third, it introduces the term bio-resistance that refers to the capacity to utilize ‘life itself’ in multifaceted, ambivalent and illimitable ways, to resist.