The organising principles of the society of Jesus - from the pastorate to governmentality

Abstract

Foucault’s concepts of Pastoral power and “governmentality” have led to the development of the London school of “governmentalists” (McKinlay and Pezet 2010). However, extant literature on governmentality drawn from this school of thought has undertaken an analytics of power centred on the deployment of governmental forms of power at the State level, not taking into consideration another entity that emerged after modernity, the modern enterprise, and not going beyond the 19th century, thereby trapping “governmentality” studies inside their own modern discourse. Following Foucault’s established relation between Pastoral power and “governmentality”, this thesis analyses the form of organising deployed by an organisation that emerged in the 16th century, apparently being able to survive into modernity without adopting modern managerial business categories. This organisation is the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits. The first part of this thesis will analyse the relevance of the Society of Jesus for organisational studies and will show how modern business categories fail to explain its structural resilience. The second part of the thesis introduces Pastoral power as a possible explanation for the apparent structural resilience of the Society of Jesus. Following this line of reasoning, and after having established an analytics of power as a possible methodological framework, the Society of Jesus’ “organising practices” will be presented, leading to the conclusion that this entity, having emerged at the cornerstone of modernity, deployed practices that represent a significant shift when compared with previous Pastoral forms of organising. The fact that the Society of Jesus clearly intended to deploy practices for the conduction of geographicallydispersed individuals leads to the conclusion that it deployed a “protogovernmental” form of power, and that the rationality underpinning its practices, although not entirely modern, is clearly at the cornerstone of modernity and can therefore be enlightening to an understanding of how modern managerial categories might have emerged