Workplace control shifted from obedience to demands for self-directed flexibility.

Evidence

In business,” explains Alain Ehrenberg: the (Taylorian or Fordist) disciplinary models of human resources management are on the decline, in favor of norms that encourage autonomous behavior, even for personnel at the bottom of the hierarchy… . Modes of regulation and domination of the workforce are now based less on mechanical obedience than on initiative: responsibility, the capacity to evolve, to form projects, motivations, flexibility, etc… . The model imposed on the worker is no longer that of the man-machine of repetitive labor, but that of the entrepreneur of flexible labor. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 166

Categorization

• XREF: This is the exact language of flexibility-as-docility the reader wants to spot: workers recast as entrepreneurs must adapt without resisting. — connects to: Mandated self-expression makes affective demands on Control-society workers — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 84; Flexibility rhetoric seduced workers out of identifying as a class — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1649