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social movements

Critical ambiguities - ambiguities of critique: Technologies of the self in entrepreneurial activism

Introduction

In Foucauldian organization studies, a shift of emphasis has taken place from the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur, 2008) – uncovering modes of subjugation behind the smokescreen of individual freedom – towards the task of discovering potentials of agency, change and resistance (Raffnsøe et al., 2022; Randall and Munro, 2010; McKinlay and Taylor, 2014; Paulsson, 2011).

A bequest from the barricades

I was gripped by this book. I enjoyed it partly because it tells my own story – and who can resist their own story? Or rather (because only I can tell my own story), it tells the author’s story of a series of events and of a movement that I was part of. Namely: that wave of North American and European counter-summit protests that emerged with the mobilisation against the WTO in Seattle in November 1999 (or possibly with the ‘Carnival Against Capital’ in London a few months earlier), and then waxed and waned over the course of the following eight years or so.

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