A good example of this is supplied by the notion of ‘enterprise’. Enterprise is central to many of the most important forms of organizational change (and is significant as a rationalizing authority in a number of chapters in this collection). It is central to the assault on bureaucracy; it legitimizes de-regulation and privatization of public services and it underpins policies of empowerment and teamwork. Enterprise is an idea which operates on three levels: economic/political, organizational/institutional, and technologies of the self or individual (Rose, 1990a; b). Originally a term applied to economies and to organizations, it emerged as a dominant theme of Conservative Government ideology in the 1980s and 1990s as a key component of the advo-cacy of economic liberalism and the advocacy of market forces, and remains fundamental to the Labour Government of today (Keat and Abercrombie, 1991). It is one of the attractions of the notion of enterprise that it allows connections between these individual, institutional and political levels: ‘enterprise links up a seductive ethics of the self, a powerful critique of con-temporary institutional and political reality and an apparently coherent design for the radical transformation of contemporary social arrangements’ (Rose, 1990a: 6).
So, enterprise exemplifies a number of key features of SHRM thinking and practice. First, it shows how ideas that are dominant at a societal/political level are also highly influential at the organizational and ultimately individ-ual levels. For example, the chapter by Storey (in this volume) reveals how notions of ‘enterprise’ (and neo-liberal conceptions of market forces) are powerful determinants of organizational restructuring. And the chapters by du Gay et al. and Townley show how the notion of enterprise as an organiza-tional value impacts on the individual.