Lussier, Kira (Author)
Murphy, Michelle (Advisor)
Brown, Elspeth H. (Advisor)
University of Toronto
Murphy, Michelle
Brown, Elspeth H.
Physical Details: 309 pp.
Language: English
Personality, Incorporated traces the history of personality testing in American corporate management from 1960 to 1995. Through three case studies, this dissertation takes up the twinned history of psychological techniques, as deployed by a cadre of “consulting psychologists,” and the psychological capacities conjured by these techniques. Personality, Incorporated make two core arguments. First, it argues that personality tests aimed to incite and channel employees’ psychological capacities as forms of economic value. Psychological tests did not simply measure static traits, but they also actively elicited and mobilized affects, subjectivities, and differences, that they then harnessed for corporate value production. Second, this dissertation argues that late twentieth-century corporations were not just sites for the application and circulation of psychological knowledge, but they also served as important experimental laboratories for investigating human’s interpersonal, emotional, and cognitive capacities. A core contribution of this dissertation is to identify, investigate, and interrogate the specific form of value mobilized at this intersection of personality tests and management practices: “psychological capital. As an analytic category, psychological capital names how human beings’ psychological capacities are enlisted into circuits of economic value, with the aid of psychological techniques that can measure and incite these capacities. Psychological capital circulates as an intangible yet nonetheless measurable form of capital that was made visible, measurable, and valuable through psychological techniques of personality testing and training amidst economic, social, and cultural changes of the knowledge economy. This dissertation offers a new way to think about psychological tests: as tools designed to mobilize and channel psychological capacities, to elicit and cultivate the very characteristics that they purported to measure. In weaving together histories of psychology, science and corporate capitalism with critical scholarship on affect and value, this dissertation excavates how psychological tests have become corporate techniques that shape contemporary selfhood.
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