Representing enterprise: The texts of recruitment and change in the UK banking sector

Particularly from the early 1990s onwards, the UK banking sector has seen dramatic and rapid transformation. The logic of enterprise (Du Gay, 1996) with all its various contradictory connotations—the drive for more entrepreneurial forms of work performance particularly from managers, the valorisation of the market leading to tighter cost control, job loss—captures much of the logic of what has been taking place. Work influenced by the thought of Michel Foucault has helped to shed fresh light on recent changes in the management of the employment relationship. A particular achievement has been to highlight and to call into question, as techniques of power (Townley, 1994), an array of everyday human resource practices—from the selection interview to the performance review—and to demonstrate the part these play in sustaining the rationalities or regimes of truth which have come to underpin the organisation of work. To date, little consideration has been given to the role of recruitment practices in this connection and the aim of the paper is to begin to address this gap. Paraphrasing Foucault, the discussion elaborates an expertise of the sign associated with recruitment, further exploring the possibilities of variants of post‐structuralist thought for the analysis of a particular aspect of HRM.