Enterprise Discourse and Executive Talk: Stories that Destabilize the Company

In this paper, we are interested in dissolving the dominant representation of the enterprise as a singularity and a site of rational, reproductive and progressive imperatives. It is this discursive figuring that, in our view, stands in the way of the development of more innovative forms of politics involving claims on corporate wealth. We offer a discussion of enterprise discourse that highlights contradictory narratives of the corporation and the multiplicity of logics seen to determine its dynamics. Taking the Australian-based multinational BHP, in particular its steel division, as our object of analysis, we use excerpts from interviews conducted with two ex-general managers of the Newcastle steel plant to deconstruct the dominant monopoly capitalist representation of the company. Drawing upon existing enterprise discourses and fragments of executive talk, we produce a decentred, 'disorganized' representation of the enterprise, and point to the ways in which it might invigorate a new form of politics in and around the corporation.