Foucault, governmentality, strategy: From the ear of the sovereign to the multitude

The idea of 'strategy' has a peculiar place in Michel Foucault's work. On the one hand, he rarely discussed strategy directly, although it was an important element of his work, especially through the 1970s. We trace this development in Foucault's thinking, and the specific place his changing conception of strategy played. Machiavelli, represented a shift towards governmentality, an infinitely more complex and open-ended notion of power than he had used before. We then turn to Tom Peters as a key figure in the emergence of new management thinking in the last three decades. If Peters initially spoke strategy to strategists, then over the two decades, he spoke to a constituency of subaltern strategists of how to transform the experience of organised working lives, an objective far beyond competitive advantage.