The Fold of Commitment – Rereading McGregor and Corporate Community Representation Through Deleuze

Abstract

There are two purposes of this paper. First, to show how Douglas McGregor’s conceptualization of commitment as a question of integrating personal goals with organizational purpose is part of founding the modern understanding of corporate community representation. Second, show how the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of fold, desire and interests can come into use to understand this modern form of corporate representation. In our reading of McGregor we suggest that one fruitful way of understanding this integration of individual subjectivity with organizational purpose is the Deleuzian concepts of a folding. Employees are to enfold the corporate world in their subjectivity and unfold this world in their expressions of belongingness to the corporation. We demonstrate how this conceptualization of the fold can be found in the work of McGregor, and especially in his work on performance appraisal.