What is actualised then, when competence is invited into organisations? The key argument has been that there is an intricate relation between processes of competence and the subjectivity produced in these processes. And this relation can only be studied by analysing the specific incidents or events in which competence is actualised. How are we to study this relation between competence and subjectivity? As we saw in chapter V, in my analysis drawing on Althusser, Lacan and Foucault, the subject is interpellated, identified and subjectivated through specific processes of competence. Let me explain the consequences of this by way of an experience from one of the action learning meetings in the Centre for Higher Education (CHE).
”By now I have reached the age and life experience where I am capable of distinguishing private life from working life, thank you!” The voice cuts through the room like a buzz saw and everything turns quiet. I have just pointed to the agenda for the action learning meeting suggesting that we proceed by discussing personal development objectives. “Oh no!” I think, have I now, once again, violated one of the unwritten rules of behaviour in the CHE? Even though, according to the plan, we are well into the implementation phase of the competence development project, I know very well how easy it is to step off – I have already tried it several times. Carrie, the knowledge centre consultant, whom I “interrupted”,
glowers at me and after a long period of silence and an even soothing discussion we decide to close the meeting as we do not seem to get any closer to a definition of evidence today. After the meeting Lucy approaches me saying softly, “I think that you did it quite well, today”.
But since that day with this team I keep a low profile in terms of airing proposals for competence development such as the one about personal development objectives, even though they had already been decided on according to the project plan.
This incident from my fieldwork goes to show the disciplinary effects of working with competence. My well-intentioned idea of performing action learning, suggesting that the employees in the CHE worked with personal development objectives encountered resistance. But just as competence can produce guilt and a sense of incompleteness for those being exposed to it, in this and many other cases it also immediately produced a sense of doubt and guilt in me, making me posing all kinds of questions to my own enterprise: What can I demand of those I ask to work with competence? Had I gone too far in suggesting personal development objectives? How much facilitating power can I ask of myself?
The point is, that being engaged in competence processes, knowing the competence is not merely an innocent business of for example setting up “a personal development goal”, I do not know when the reaction that I get is due to me overstepping their subjectivity or whether they are using their subjectivity strategically to make me feel uncertain, thereby producing an unresolved space of interpretation and doubt.
There was no way that I could predict how the knowledge centre consultants would receive the idea of action learning. And though the consultants and I tried to manage and “control” the process the best we could, by setting up pre-analysis, doing interviews, testing ideas and themes on the steering committee, we had to accept the uncontrollable nature of competence. As my encounter with the knowledge centre consultants revealed disciplinary effects, it also reflected how competence becomes performative. Concepts of theory, empirics and method intersected and were rolled into one practice. At the time of the action learning meeting in the CHE I believed myself to be one of them. I thought I could speak open and freely, without caution and deliver a straightforward suggestion, theory-based of course, as to what I thought was the next step. But I was reminded of the
fundamental difference between the knowledge centre consultants as participators and myself as coordinator. To work with competence processes is not an innocent business, theoretically elaborated, practical and well-intended as it may seem. They had to live with the consequences of the competence development processes afterwards, whereas I did not. And it was not until much later that I found out how knowledge centre consultants balance the key indicators they are measured by, i.e.
striking the balance between managing oneself and being willing to sacrifice oneself for the benefit of the community. If I, as an outsider, perhaps unknowingly, attempted to shift this balance, resistance would occur. Further, these processes of competence development create uncertainty and make the participants doubt on themselves and their possible worth. And if they resist, the doubt and guilt is not removed, but displaced. Indeed, it is one of the prime effects of competence. It installs a legitimate space of search and doubt, which also affect those facilitating the development, as we saw in the example from the CHE above. I began to doubt on my role and position as consultant and facilitator in the process of asking the knowledge center consultants to search for new senses of selves.
My development as a subject working with competence, learning little by little how to manoeuvre the institutional settings was bound to the topic we worked with, competence, and so was the subjectivity of those I wished to influence. And more importantly, since the nature of this topic, competence, is highly profiled and prestigious, it also contains potential individual and social conflicts and hence becomes extremely sensitive to the way it is managed.
By searching for actualisations I suggest that we need to see how new wholes arise from the fragments of the hole (i.e. how the competent subjects in the projectified organisation are given time and resources to create profit in order to gain access and be connected to the next project). In my view, describing how movements of competence multiply and disperse the human subject does not suffice. We should also account for how unities, temporary and fragile as they may be, arise from multiplicities. This is what I have shown throughout the text (i.e. by analysing the use of works councils, action learning, teams etc.) and here again by way of the CHE example. One of the time-places where whole and hole, unity and multiplicity meet and intersect is the event (Böhm 2003;Sørensen 2004). This should come as no surprise at this stage in the text after all I did “eventalise” my diagnosis in chapter IV. Yet we might recall how Foucault in his “questions of
method” (1994a:226f) quite clearly says that the singularity of the event and the multiplicity of causes hang together:
eventalization means rediscovering the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies and so on, that a given moment establishes what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal and necessary. In this sense, one is indeed effecting a sort of multiplication or pluralization of causes.
Competence and subjectivity then are an explosive cocktail. They intensify one another. To be a competent working human being today is as Bauman (2000:32) formulates it a basic characteristic of the present: “Needing to become what one is, is the feature of modern living.” The role of the consultant in these processes of self-search and self-doubt is first and foremost to promote possible selves and possible futures and deliver the technologies needed for individuals to become competent selves in these futures. But as we saw in the stories from the CHE and the NERI the introduction of social technologies releases profound emotions and struggles. As a consequence the consultant becomes not only a “vendor of technologies” but also a “manager of human resistances”.