“Why Not Take All of Me?”: Achievement & Commitment in Larts

In the previous chapter, I outlined the relationships between accountability and achievement, and seduction and commitment. My argument was that being accountable no longer means following the rules, but being the right person, and seduction acts as a new form of discipline over self-identity which involves the manager actively in the construction of their own “iron cage”. As I noted then, our Management in Three Movements model leads us to expect that under postmodern conditions achievement morphoses into the recognition of commitment, a performance appreciated rather than measured, involving the further use of masks as I have already identified, as managers struggle to establish their identities as core to the organization, with all its professional and social advantages, rather than the more temporally vulnerable and potentially throwaway periphery. Seduction and commitment are ultimately inseparable as processes, but having examined the move from rational control to control by enchantment in the previous chapter, I will now turn to look more closely at the commodification processes — where managers move from being the producers of commodities, or the controllers of commodity production, to commodities themselves, to be consumed by the organization — entailed in the movement from achievement to commitment.