Drawing on Marxism and engaging with theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj A izek, John Michael Roberts argues that a new expressive ideology has coalesced within the contemporary workplace around the theme of 'competence'. The 'competence' agenda encourages management and workers to build networks of trust, cooperation and dialogue between one another. By examining the competent public sphere as it appears in the global economy, the author takes to task the competence agenda, relates this agenda to the hegemony of global finance and to the fetishism of the new economy, exposes the dilemmas and contradictions of the competence agenda, and through everyday examples from the UK and USA illustrates how competence is played out and resisted in the contemporary workplace. This book provides a fascinating critical account of how the way we work today is debated and discussed by management and workers.