© : Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science Vol 3 (4) 2005 7 Defacing the Corporate Body, or: Why HRM Deserves a Kick in the Teeth by Bent Meier Sørensen Copenhagen Business School, Denmark A horror story. The face is a horror story. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus INTENSITY, EVERYWHERE INTENSITY In a late text titled ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Gilles Deleuze performs an imaginative reading of Michel Foucault’s account of disciplinary societies (Deleuze, 1992). According to Deleuze, modernity, conceived as a form of society based on disciplinary power, is currently being intensified in the direction of control, a mode of ordering central to capitalism. Control is manifest in integrated and infinite expanding circuits of flows and constitutes the development of the immanent rules of capitalism, its axiomatic. The passage towards societies of control is a proliferation of the disciplinary biopower Foucault epitomizes as characteristic of modernity; now power is exercised directly upon the molecular materiality of being, through communications systems and surveillance technology, as well as directly on the body in the production of various, but programmed, subjectivities, sensing inclusion and exclusion on an ever deeper and less perceptible level: retina recognition, DNA archives, and GPS monitoring. Foucault’s work on discipline, the production of docile bodies and subjugated subjects, has had a considerable impact on organization theory, not least on the varied discourses of human resource management (see especially Townley, 1994; Legge, 1995; Hjorth, 2003). The present paper, however, takes Deleuze’s construction of passage towards the societies of control as its point of departure, and asks how such a premise might enrich our perception of ‘the human’ as a resource: how is the human integrated and deployed within labour market practices in control societies? The paper sets out to problematize a common construction of the human that happens to be isomorphic with the way industrialism conceived of the natural resources it deployed in production: a layered sedimentation of material, with finite characteristics befitted for programmed exploitation (one of the images of the human identified by Legge, 1999). As will be argued, control societies do anything but annul the logic of industrialism: they further implement the rules of this logic, yet transgress its boundaries. Industrialism, on its side, incorporated a notion of human capital unproblematically into the motley assemblage of exploitable resources: land, capital and material. This was