Disciplinary and Biopolitical Regulation in Contemporary Russian Companies

The study provides an attempt to analyze some practices of management of labor in market companies through the foucauldian analytical framework to identify latent mechanics of power, their variety and limits of their efficacy. The object of the research is contemporary Russian companies from the sector of the intangible production. At the first stage of the analysis, ten companies were selected according to the principle of maximum variation: a consulting firm, a creative startup, an analytical agency, a fashion magazine, etc. At the second stage of the analysis, the comparative case study was conducted on the base of a large Russian IT-company and a large Russian bank. The empirical base of work was 21 interviews with employees of these companies. The author shows how the practices of employee management are implemented through the mechanisms of panoptic control, hierarchical control, time control, normalization, as well as through the practices of care and construction of employee identities. Specific combinations of practices (regimes of practices) are interrelated with the level of creativity of production. Finally, the author demonstrates that biopolitical regimes of practices are more effective because they do not cause resistance strategies from subordinates (cynicism, irony, opportunism, exit).