Paul Du Gay
Biographic Data
| ID | 77907 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Du Gay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Du Gay |
| SIGNATURE | DU GAY P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Copenhagen Business School |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9182-6830 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1981 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
La production du Walkman Sony
Cultural revolutions: Interview with Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke
Editor’s note : This interview forms part of the special issue What Was Cultural Economy? The issue has its origins in a January 2020 symposium, held at City, University of London, marking two decades since Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke convened a ‘Workshop on Cultural Economy’ at the Open University in Milton Keynes. That earlier event culminated in the publication of the edited collection Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life …
Speaking truth to power? Anti-bureaucratic romanticism from critical organizational theorizing to the White House
In spite of their distinctive normative and political differences, critical organizational scholars use a vocabulary which in several respects resembles that adopted by right-wing populists. This vocabulary, we argue, consists of components that can be deployed in the pursuit of radically conflicting goals. At its heart lies a profoundly antithetical stance toward bureaucracy and the state. In this article, we explore the components of this vocab…
Discretion and Bureaucracy
This chapter argues that discretion should be seen not only as an inevitable but also a potentially highly beneficial feature of bureaucratic organization. Taking a Weberian view of bureaucracy, we make two case-based arguments. First, we suggest that discretion is an invaluable characteristic of administrative office-holding to such an extent that, for example, the senior civil servant’s instituted purpose can best be described as ‘administrativ…
The Bureaucratic Vocation: State/Office/Ethics
This paper seeks to indicate how and why public bureaucracy has been and remains a cornerstone of the modern state and of representative democratic governmental regimes. It does so by highlighting both the constitutive role bureaucratic practices and ethics play in securing civil peace and security, and individual and collective rights and freedoms, for example, and how attempts to transcend, negate, or otherwise 'disappear' bureaucracy can have …
Disappearing 'formal organization: How organization studies dissolved its 'core object', and what follows from this
This article addresses itself to accounting for how and why the situation has arisen whereby much, though by no means all, of what self-identifies as organizational analysis - whether in sociology or organization studies - isn't actually organizational, and to exploring what follows from this. The article argues that the specificity of 'organizational analysis' - which requires its proponents to think (and, indeed, act) 'organizationally' - has b…
Disappearing organization? Reshaping the sociology of organizations
This monograph showcases some recent developments in the sociology of organizations, mapping out the most productive relationships between current social scientific work on organizations and core theoretical and empirical concerns in the discipline of sociology
Character and organization
In recent years, questions of ‘character’ have become increasingly prominent in a range of policy contexts, from education to social welfare and from business to healthcare. What unites these various contemporary paens is an assumption that building ‘character’ is a crucial component of ethics and that it holds the key to establishing and maintaining virtuous conduct; moreover, that the cultivation of ‘character’ is at best under-valued and at wo…
What is the ‘Neo-Weberian State’ as a Regime of Public Administration?
The “Neo-Weberian State” (NWS) has been a much-discussed concept in public administration studies since Pollitt and Bouckaert introduced it in their Public Management Reform book. This chapter takes a closer look at the concept and compares NWS with its much longer pedigree of Neo-Weberian State Theory in sociology. The chapter examines ‘administrative statesmanship’ in relation to the NWS framework. The chapter finally illustrates what NWS mean …
The sun also rises
Introduction: Office as a vocation
Fear of the formal
Over recent decades, ‘formal’ organisations have come in for severe criticism. Not only is formal organisation represented as ill suited to the realities of the contemporary organisational world, but as a key source from which organisational dysfunctions themselves emerge. For that reason informal and spontaneous modes of organising have emerged, or better re-emerged, as preferable substitutes, because they, in contrast to the formal, allegedly a…
Organization (Theory) As A Way Of Life
To the extent that 'classical organization theory' is seen to possess any enduring interest it is mainly as a historic artefact. The idea that the principles, axioms, adages and devices elaborated by its proponents any longer possess traction in the present is rarely countenanced. In contrast to this customary view, the present article seeks to indicate the continuing significance of classical organization theory, for both analysing and interveni…
The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory, and Organization Studies: Contemporary Currents
This article reviews the intersection of scholarship concerned with two types of collective action: social movements and formal organizations. Theories of social movements originated in research on crowd behavior while organization theory was founded on theories of rational bureaucracy. Social movement researchers began importing ideas from organization theory in the 1970s to account for the role of formal organizations, resources and strategic b…
Michel Foucault and the Administering of Lives
This chapter suggests that Michel Foucault is a nuisance for scholars of organizations, albeit a productive one. Foucault disavowed the study of organizations, yet his work was fundamentally concerned with the administering of lives, a central concern of scholars of organizations. The chapter explores this tension by examining four displacements that Foucault sought to effect: first, a move from asking ‘why’ type questions to ‘how’ type questions…
Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory and Organization Studies: Contemporary Currents
Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology
Doing Cultural Studies The Story Of The Sony Walkman
Understanding Capitalism: Crises, Legitimacy, and Change Through the Prism of The New Spirit of Capitalism
This chapter places The New Spirit of Capitalism in the context of the development of capitalism over the last twenty years, up to and including the 200-7-8 financial crisis and the ongoing economic crisis which has developed out of this and is now focused on the relationship between state expenditures, political legitimacy and financial markets. Boltanski and Chiapello's analysis of the projective city and connexionist logic captures important e…
New Spirits of Capitalism?: Crises, Justifications, and Dynamics
After many years in which it appeared to be losing the pre-eminent position it once occupied in the lexicon of the social and human sciences, the term 'capitalism' has once again become a matter of critical concern both theoretically and substantively in a range of disciplinary fields. The global financial and environmental crises, and the shifting economic power geometry associated with the rise of the BRICS and the sovereign debt contagion in t…
New Spirits of Capitalism: Crises, Justifications, and Dynamics
1. Understanding Capitalism: Crises, Legitimacy and Change through the Prism of The New Spirit of Capitalism SECTION 1: NEW SPIRITS OF CAPITALISM: DEVELOPMENTS AND CRITIQUE 2. A Journey through French-style Critique 3. Capitalism and its Criticisms 4. Notes on Aspects of the Conceptual Architecture of the New Spirit : Weber and Hirschman 5. Spirited Away: When Political Economy becomes Culturalized 6. Beyond Justification: Dietrologic and the Soc…
Leviathan calling: Some notes on sociological anti-statism and its consequences
A spectre has haunted many forms of 'social' explanation over the course of the last century - the spectre of anti-statism. For not a few sociologists and social theorists, the state has long been regarded as the medium of enslavement, the very antithesis of what they take to be 'civil society'. Here the state is viewed as a cold monster whose conducts (impersonalism, coercion, indifference, authority - the list is potentially endless) need to be…
Organizing Identity: Entrepreneurial Governance and Public Management
Questions of Cultural Identity
Introduction - Stuart Hall Who Needs 'Identity'? From Pilgrim to Tourist - or a Short History of Identity - Zygmunt Bauman Enabling Identity? - Marilyn Strathern Biology, Choice and the New Reproductive Technologies Culture's In-Between - Homi K Bhabha Interrupting Identities - Kevin Robins Turkey/Europe Identity and Cultural Studies - Is That All There Is? - Lawrence Grossberg Music and Identity - Simon Frith Identity, Genealogy, History - Nikol…
Transformation de l'État ou changement de régime ? De quelques confusions en théorie et sociologie de l'État
Cet article a pour objet la question de la définition de l'État afin de rendre compte de ses transformations contemporaines. Fermement inscrits dans la tradition wébérienne, les auteurs développent une critique des travaux, qu'ils soient néomarxistes ou néowébériens, mesurant le changement de l'État contemporain par rapport à l'État tel qu'il a été défini pendant les Trente Glorieuses. La critique porte à la fois sur la périodisation et sur la co…
Questions of Cultural Identity
Introduction - Stuart Hall Who Needs 'Identity'? From Pilgrim to Tourist - or a Short History of Identity - Zygmunt Bauman Enabling Identity? - Marilyn Strathern Biology, Choice and the New Reproductive Technologies Culture's In-Between - Homi K Bhabha Interrupting Identities - Kevin Robins Turkey/Europe Identity and Cultural Studies - Is That All There Is? - Lawrence Grossberg Music and Identity - Simon Frith Identity, Genealogy, History - Nikol…
Doing Cultural Studies The Story Of The Sony Walkman
In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber, Organization, Ethics
In this provocative and critical new study of institutions management, ethics and contemporary society, Paul Du Gay reassesses management as a definitive phenomenon of the modern era, reinstating its relevance and exploring its future
Take an issue: Cultural Economy and Finance
Present-day capitalism is increasingly financial in character. At nearly every turn, finance and practices of financialization have begun to work their way into most areas of everyday life. The papers gathered together in this special section under the umbrella term 'cultural economy of finance' seek to explore the preparation of key areas of modern finance. In doing so, they demonstrate the productiveness of opening finance to a range of interdi…
Who Needs Cultural Intermediaries
Making up Managers: Bureaucracy, Enterprise and the Liberal Art of Separation
Self-Service: Retail, Shopping and Personhood
This paper seeks to explore the development of “self‐service” shopping technologies in British retailing from the period directly after the second world war (roughly, from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s). Despite the crucial role in revolutionising the conduct of shopping and practices of consumption routinely allotted to self‐service by industry commentators and social scientists, there remains a dearth of empirical evidence concerning how, pra…
Without Affection or Enthusiasm' Problems of Involvement and Attachment in `Responsive' Public Management
The paper focuses on the changing ethical template that programmes of `responsive' or `entrepreneurial' managerial reform require of civil servants. Contemporary demands for responsive public management contain two emotional injunctions to public bureaucrats. The first, derived from populist doctrines of political right, requires bureaucrats to be responsive to the needs of their `clients'. In the name of `recognition' and the `politics of care',…
Max Weber and the Moral Economy of Office
This article focuses upon a crucial aspect of Max Weber's work, one that has been largely neglected by scholars of organization, in cultural economy as much as in economic sociology more generally. That is Lebensführung, the conduct of life. The article argues that Weber's approach to questions of Lebensführung locates him as a late but prodigious practitioner in a tradition of the ethics of office, particularly as the latter becomes a defensive …
Industry and the Rest: The Economic Identity of Services
Performativities: Butler, Callon and the Moment of Theory
Guest Editor's Introduction: Devices and Dispositions: Promoting Consumption
The Sociology of Organizations: Themes, Perspectives and Prospects
This text focuses on recent debates about the contribution which complex organizations have made to the transition from traditional to modern society, locating these debates in the historical context provided by recurring themes concerning the relationship between the individual and society. Building on this thematic and historical basis, the author moves on to examine contemporary theoretical schools of thought and the research programmes which …
Numbers and Souls: Retailing and the De-Differentiation of Economy and Culture
Consumption and Identity at Work
Paul du Gay shows how the capacities and predispositions required of consumers and those required of employees are increasingly difficult to distinguish. Both consumers and employees are represented as autonomous, responsible, calculating individuals. They are constituted as such in the language of consumer cultures and the all-pervasive discourses of enterprise whereby persons are required to be entrepreneurs of the self, at work, at play and in…
Entrepreneurial Management in the Public Sector
In defence of Mandarins: Recovering the ‘core business’ of public management
The article explores the office of counsel, indicating, in particular the historical centrality of such an office to the conduct of governing, as well as highlighting the relational uncertainties of that office, forever disputed in its workings. It then proceeds to describe the persona of the British career senior civil servant or ‘Mandarin’, as a particular elaboration of this office of governmental counsel. In so doing, it notes that the Mandar…
The Changing Sites of Sound: Music Retailing and the Composition of Consumers
The Bureaucratic Vocation: State/Office/Ethics
This paper seeks to indicate how and why public bureaucracy has been and remains a cornerstone of the modern state and of representative democratic governmental regimes. It does so by highlighting both the constitutive role bureaucratic practices and ethics play in securing civil peace and security, and individual and collective rights and freedoms, for example, and how attempts to transcend, negate, or otherwise 'disappear' bureaucracy can have …
Fear of the formal
Over recent decades, ‘formal’ organisations have come in for severe criticism. Not only is formal organisation represented as ill suited to the realities of the contemporary organisational world, but as a key source from which organisational dysfunctions themselves emerge. For that reason informal and spontaneous modes of organising have emerged, or better re-emerged, as preferable substitutes, because they, in contrast to the formal, allegedly a…
Machinery of government and standards in public service: Teaching new dogs old tricks
For much of the last thirty years the main leitmotif animating Civil Service reform in the UK has been that efficiency and effectiveness in public services can be achieved by adapting management methods and practices derived from commercial enterprise. In the process of making the dreams and schemes of that plural singularity we have come to call ‘managerialism’ operational though, something valuable appears to have been lost, and that something …
Representing the Enterprising Self: Thirtysomething and Contemporary Consumer Culture
Disappearing organization? Reshaping the sociology of organizations
This monograph showcases some recent developments in the sociology of organizations, mapping out the most productive relationships between current social scientific work on organizations and core theoretical and empirical concerns in the discipline of sociology
Keyser Süze Elites: Market Populism and the Politics of Institutional Change
Is Bauman's bureau Weber's bureau: A Comment
In his highly regarded and influential Modernity and the Holocaust Zygmunt Bauman launched one of the most passionate and sustained critiques of ‘bureaucratic rationality’ seen within social theory for some time. In so doing he drew heavily upon the work of Max Weber for support. In this brief paper I am interested in exploring the extent to which Weber really is the anti‐bureaucratic ally Bauman claims him to be. In the first part of the paper I…
Representing the Enterprising Self: Thirtysomething and Contemporary Consumer Culture
Numbers and Souls: Retailing and the De-Differentiation of Economy and Culture
Entrepreneurial Management in the Public Sector
Colossal Immodesties and Hopeful Monsters: Pluralism and Organizational Conduct
This paper problematizes a particular story of organizational transformation currently circulating within organization studies. In this story a chain of equivalences emerges in which the vicissitudes of contemporary 'environmental change' make certain forms of organizational conduct redundant while at the same time bringing novel forms into being. The old and the new can even be named. The former is represented by the hierarchicallyordered bureau…
The Changing Sites of Sound: Music Retailing and the Composition of Consumers
The Sociology of Organizations: Themes, Perspectives and Prospects
This text focuses on recent debates about the contribution which complex organizations have made to the transition from traditional to modern society, locating these debates in the historical context provided by recurring themes concerning the relationship between the individual and society. Building on this thematic and historical basis, the author moves on to examine contemporary theoretical schools of thought and the research programmes which …
Making up Managers: Bureaucracy, Enterprise and the Liberal Art of Separation
Industry and the Rest: The Economic Identity of Services
Consumption and Identity at Work
Paul du Gay shows how the capacities and predispositions required of consumers and those required of employees are increasingly difficult to distinguish. Both consumers and employees are represented as autonomous, responsible, calculating individuals. They are constituted as such in the language of consumer cultures and the all-pervasive discourses of enterprise whereby persons are required to be entrepreneurs of the self, at work, at play and in…
Setting Limits to Enterprise
Is Bauman's bureau Weber's bureau: A Comment
In his highly regarded and influential Modernity and the Holocaust Zygmunt Bauman launched one of the most passionate and sustained critiques of ‘bureaucratic rationality’ seen within social theory for some time. In so doing he drew heavily upon the work of Max Weber for support. In this brief paper I am interested in exploring the extent to which Weber really is the anti‐bureaucratic ally Bauman claims him to be. In the first part of the paper I…
Enterprise and its Futures: A Response to Fournier and Grey
In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber, Organization, Ethics
In this provocative and critical new study of institutions management, ethics and contemporary society, Paul Du Gay reassesses management as a definitive phenomenon of the modern era, reinstating its relevance and exploring its future
Cultural Economy: An Introduction
The sets of processes and relations we have come to know as ‘the economy’ appear no longer as taken for granted as perhaps once they were. Many of the old certainties ‐ both practical and academic ‐ concerning what makes firms hold together or markets work seem less clear-cut and our knowledge of them feels less secure. Yet among these proliferating uncertainties has emerged ‐ or, better, re-emerged ‐ a belief that something called ‘culture’ is b…
Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life
Who Needs Cultural Intermediaries
The Tyranny of the Epochal: Change, Epochalism and Organizational Reform
The paper focuses upon a particular discourse of organizational ‘change’ as it has appeared in a specific context—the contemporary field of public administration—and seeks to explore its role as a rhetorical device in reshaping the identity of public service. It does so first by seeking to indicate the epochalist bent of much theorizing about contemporary economic and organizational change—in both its academic and its more managerial manifestatio…
Cuestiones de identidad
Los capítulos que forman este volumen tuvieron su origen en una serie de seminarios organizados por el Sociology Research Group de la Open University como parte de «Identidades culturales», su tema de investigación de 1993-1994. El objetivo de los seminarios era analizar por qué en los últimos años las cuestiones de identidad cultural adquirieron una visibilidad y prominencia crecientes en la teoría social y cultural, así como en diferentes campo…
Against ‘Enterprise’ (but not against ‘enterprise’, for that would make no sense)
This article explores different conceptions of ‘enterprise’ and seeks to indicate the extent to which they are non-reducible. Its main focus is on one particular conception of enterprise that has underpinned a powerful critique of public sector organizations and which has been translated into a variety of specific organizational strategies for restructuring or modernizing the public services. This conception, it is argued, is very different from …
Self-Service: Retail, Shopping and Personhood
This paper seeks to explore the development of “self‐service” shopping technologies in British retailing from the period directly after the second world war (roughly, from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s). Despite the crucial role in revolutionising the conduct of shopping and practices of consumption routinely allotted to self‐service by industry commentators and social scientists, there remains a dearth of empirical evidence concerning how, pra…
Guest Editor's Introduction: Devices and Dispositions: Promoting Consumption
Bureaucracy and Liberty: State, Authority, and Freedom
Opposition to the idea of ‘the state’, and to ‘bureaucracy’, has long been a feature of a wide variety of political discourses. Over the last thirty years or so, however, it has enjoyed a remarkable resurgence in popularity. One of the most prominent of the many recent criticisms directed at the ‘cold monsters’ of state and bureaucracy concerns their presumed negative consequences for personal liberty.1 Whether couched in predominantly economisti…
The values of bureaucracy
"This book describes and analyzes the impact of contemporary programmes of organizational reform in the public and private sectors on bureaucratic structures. It aims to show how and why bureaucratic forms of organization have a vital role in ordering our political, social, economic, and cultural existence"--Provided by publisher
Le libre-service: La distribution, les courses et les personnes
Machinery of government and standards in public service: Teaching new dogs old tricks
For much of the last thirty years the main leitmotif animating Civil Service reform in the UK has been that efficiency and effectiveness in public services can be achieved by adapting management methods and practices derived from commercial enterprise. In the process of making the dreams and schemes of that plural singularity we have come to call ‘managerialism’ operational though, something valuable appears to have been lost, and that something …
Sociology (41 works) · Political science (31 works) · Law (25 works) · Politics (16 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Bureaucracy (13 works) · Social science (13 works) · Business (11 works) · Economics (11 works)