Learning and Insurgency in Creative Organisations

Theorists of learning organisations argue that learning calls for the emancipation of workers. Yet many critical analyses of contemporary control systems argue that this freedom implies a deeper slavery. This paper seeks to resolve this paradox through a theoretical analysis of the effects of control systems on workers. We argue that in its standard formulation, the paradox of control implies an inadequate conception of the nature of workers in contemporary organisations. Workers are perceived as passive, malleable, individuals. But as Gilles Deleuze claims, creative labourers in the controlled environments of the present day are not only (or even primarily) individuals - they are dividuals, that is, bearers of cognitive states and affective traits that are shared in common with others. As dividuals, workers participate in insurgent "becomings", collectively constituting modes of "minor" biopolitics that break with norms established by "major" regimes of biopolitical control. In our view, it is not the creative individual, but the generative dynamic between major and minor biopolitics that drives organisational learning as a complex bio-technological event