DOI: 10.1177/1744935908098859

The Foucauldian genre of governmentality studies has provided a number of insight-ful, historically informed analyses of relevance to organization and management stud-ies. Yet sympathetic criticism has highlighted a number of significant blindpsots and silences that at times characterize the genre. Illustrating what is at stake in this debate, the discussion returns to and seeks to reframe a critical event in the 19th-century reforms to the government of public servants – the Northcote–Trevelyan report – seeking to extend the insights of relevant Foucauldian scholarship. Envisaged – after Foucault – as a contribution to the ‘history of the present’, criticism in this instance has the aim of unsettling certain influential liberal orthodoxies that presently inform thinking about the government of public servants. The significance of concrete processes of struggle and resistance surrounding the events in question are high-lighted. We seek also to offer an account that transcends the ‘textualist ’ emphasis – a focus on formal programmes and texts – that at times characterizes the genre. Key words • British Civil Service • critical management studies • genealogy • governmentality • Social Democratic Federatio