Foucault, Management and Organization Theory

From Panopticon to Technologies of Self

Alan McKinlay, Ken Starkey, Alan McKinlay, Ken Starkey

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1997
• Print ISBN: 9780803975477, 9780803975460
• eBook ISBN: 9781446232521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

This volume draws together critical assessments of Michel Foucault?s contribution to our understanding of the making and remaking of the modern organization.

The volume provides a valuable summary of Foucault?s contribution to organization theory, which also challenges the conventions of traditional organizational analysis. By applying Foucauldian concepts such as discipline, surveillance and power/knowledge, the authors shed new light on the genesis of the modern organization and raise fresh questions about organization theory. The bureaucratic career is, for example, analyzed as a disciplinary device, a mechanism that seeks to alter rational choice rather than constrain bodies. This raises questions about Foucault?s linking of the modern organization?s birth with the enlightenment. Other contributions review the impact of totalizing managerial discourses and the limits and possiblities of resistance, and question the profound pessimism of Foucault. The volume concludes by examining the implications of Foucault?s later work in which he suggests that people are much freer than they feel.

I

FOUCAULT AND ORGANIZATION THEORY

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2

Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: The Contribution of Michel Foucault

Gibson Burrell

Michel Foucault’s untimely death in 1984, at the age of 57, put to an end a steady stream of scholarship which has a direct, though poorly recognized, relevance for the study of organizations. In this paper, an attempt will be made to briefly explicate the role played by Foucault’s work in the postmodernism debate and, in the light of this contribution, to show its possible beneficial impact upon contemporary organizational analysis.

As we have seen (Cooper and Burrell, 1988), the modernism-postmodernism debate is multi-faceted, but in some ways it is characterized by Habermas’s defence of the modernist position against a line of French thinkers leading ‘from Bataille via Foucault to Derrida’ (Habermas, 1981: 13). Foucault and Habermas met in 1983 and 1984, but this merely continued a debate in which they had been engaged for several years. It was unlikely that this exchange ever would have led to a dialogue, because the protagonists defined ‘modernity’ in incompatible ways (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: 109), and perceived the Enlightenment in particular (and Kant’s role within it) in very different lights. As a result, Habermas saw Foucault as producing a failed critique of modernism because the latter supposedly provided outdated and well-worn attacks on the development of human rationality, no explanation of why the present should be condemned, and a reactionary political message. Foucault, for his part, was reluctant to accept the epithet of postmodernism as a description of his work – although, as we shall see, he rejected most labels that critics attempted to attach to his books. Nevertheless, Foucault’s critique of modernism is important but is open to a wide variety of interpretation, and so what follows is but one path through his oeuvres.

Michel Foucault was Professor of the History of Systems of Thought in Paris from 1970, publishing a series of texts (Foucault, 1973, 1975, 1977a, 1977b, 1977c, 1979) in which a number of common themes are discernible, but which were not designed to produce, in any programmatic way, a grand theoretical edifice. Rather, through the medium of a mass of detailed analysis, Foucault was often keen to confront and reject received opinion. In the place of widely held views, he substituted tentative hypotheses which invite, indeed beg for, heated discussion and debate. He was an iconoclast who suggested alternative modes of thinking. His style is ornate and like a thicket, often impenetrable – but deliberately and consciously so. It should not be assumed that Foucault’s writings are fully coherent to the Anglo-American eye. They are the product of a long European tradition in which philosophical idealism is strongly represented, the epistemology of empiricism is seen as suspect and where a complex, convoluted writing style is self-consciously adopted to escape from what is seen as the limitations and constraints of ‘clear prose’. Since his work does not contain a fixed set of theoretical propositions in the conventional sense, it is merely suggestive of alternative ways of approaching problems and ordering material. Furthermore, it is important to note that Foucault’s iconoclasm takes him into positions which are not readily defensible, and his refusal to retain one position for longer than the period between his last book and the next is certainly problematic. For the sake of exposition, however, let us assume a wide three-fold periodization in his work.

The archaeological period

Foucault’s earlier work (published in English, 1975, 1977a, 1977b) deals provocatively with psychiatry, medicine and the human sciences and the ways in which respectively ‘sanity’, ‘health’ and ‘knowledge’ are perceived, classified and distributed with Western culture.

In Madness and Civilization (1977a), which is based upon Foucault’s doctoral dissertation, the author presents a ‘history of madness in the Age of Reason’ in which before – and after – snapshots are presented to demonstrate the presence of a ‘target divide’ in Western thought. In the mid-seventeenth century ‘the great exclusion’ had taken place in which deviants had been incarcerated in the newly built lunatic asylums, there to look after themselves. However, psychiatric knowledge developed at the end of the eighteenth century as a new way to deal with the insane. The brain came to be seen as a different ‘organ’ over a brief 25-year period, as a new brand of experts came to the fore, who saw madness as their object of study. The history of ‘madness’ then, is a history with a great break or rupture in it between 1780 and the tum of that century.

Similarly, the development in this period of ‘la clinique’ – both the clinical lecture and the institution – is the topic of Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (1975). This book is also about a self-constituted class of experts who, through their talk, can establish truth or falsehood. The method of analysis used in writing this kind of history is termed ‘archaeology’ by Foucault, who develops it much more as a methodology in The Order of Things (1973). The project in this text was to write a history of the ‘immature sciences’, in which the rules of formation common to the (apparently unrelated) sciences of natural history, economics and grammar were shown to exist and were described. These anonymous rules of formation concern the discursive practices through which statements are formed and produced. They differ markedly in each period of thought (or episteme) and do not map onto each other. By the nineteenth century, the key concepts have become life, labour and language and are the provinces of biology, economics and linguistics, respectively. These form new objects for thought, new discourses which have to be seen as independent of the speaker. The autonomy of discourse is maintained by Foucault at this point to such an extent that the knowing subject disappears and is replaced by a concern for discourse alone.

The Archaeology of Knowledge (1977b) represents the long and cryptic methodological summation of this early period. Rather than accept the ‘History of Ideas’ in which truth is taken to be the accurate representation of reality in an ever-expanding body of statements made by great figures in science, archaeology sees truth as the production of sets of statements and their regulation within discrete systems of discourse independent of the conscious speaker. Thus the archaeological method presupposes discontinuities in the forms of discourse adopted; its key aim is to constitute discursive series and to see where they begin and end. It seeks primarily to understand the ‘archive’ – the diversity of autonomous and sometimes amorphous discourses.

The early works, then, consist of an overriding concern with the literary and the discursive as they relate to the human sciences, particularly those concerned with discourses on madness and disease. The human sciences are not seen as developing after the Enlightenment unilinearly but are held to be fragmented into discrete periods which need to be understood through the notions of ‘episteme’ and ‘archive’. The subject is decentred in this early work since it is not a question of who speaks a discourse, but of what discourse is spoken. In Foucault, there is no unity of history, no unity of the subject, no sense of progress, no acceptance of the History of Ideas.

On the basis of this work, the early Foucault is often assumed to be a ‘structuralist’, although he explicitly rejected such a label himself (White, 1979; Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982). Nevertheless Foucault is structuralist enough to wish to displace the subject and consciousness from the centre of theoretical concern, and, because of this process of ‘decentring the subject’ (Lemert, 1979), human beings appear in his writings as mere objects. Moreover, the search for common features in a variety of discourses suggests a concern for ‘the same in the different’, a desire to point to underlying commonalities in a wide range of discursive practices; discourses, whether scientific or not, must be analysed with literary tools and concepts. White, in his discussion of Foucault’s structuralism (White, 1979) goes so far as to maintain that underpinning ‘the archaeological method’ of Foucault’s early work is a theory of tropes (Morgan, 1980; Bourgeois and Pinder, 1982) in which analogies and differences are the key focus of attention.

One does not find other features associated with structuralist thought, however. For example, there is no easy acceptance of the geological metaphor (Clegg, 1981), nor of a realist ontology nor of Marxian analytical categories (Sheridan, 1980; Smart, 1983). Indeed, the differences between Foucault and his one-time structuralist colleague and teacher, Althusser (Althusser, 1969), are somewhat fundamental and are located in precisely this kind of terrain. Certainly, Foucault’s early advocacy of an ‘archaeological analysis’ stands against Althusser’s views on both history and scientific practice. Nevertheless, the archaeological period in the late 1960s can be characterized with some validity as being quasi-structuralist (Hoy, 1986: 4) and therefore as not at all in sympathy with the modernist projects of Habermas and other humanists. Interestingly, Foucault himself lost sympathy with this quasi-structuralism, as a whole series of interviews demonstrates (Rabinow, 1984). In place of the archaeological method with its emphasis on discourse, Foucault turned to the non-discursive realm, and particularly to the issue of power as understood from the point of view of genealogy.

Genealogical period

For a while, Foucault attempted to supplement this archaeological theory with genealogy, but, in the later works, the separation between these approaches grows and archaeology assumes a very minor role. The genealogist is a diagnostician who is interested in power, knowledge and the body and how these interrelate. In relation to archaeology, practice now becomes much more important than theory (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982); moreover, practices become viewed from the inside rather than from the viewpoint of the detached observer. In developing this new stance, Foucault was greatly influenced by his understanding of Nietzsche. For both, the claim of objectivity masks subjective motivations, high-sounding stories hide the lowest of motives, accidents and lies lie behind the march of history. Thus, genealogy is opposed to traditional history and the search for underlying laws and finalities. Like archaeology, it stands against continuity and for discontinuities, but inverts the earlier position in that it seeks to avoid the search for depth. Genealogy is interested in the superficial and the unexpected. Reality does not cover up some hidden underlying essences. It is as it appears. Our knowledge of reality, however, is enmeshed in a power field. Indeed, the petty malices of those who seek to dominate mean that knowledge itself is increasingly part of the play of domination. Thus, the issues of power, knowledge and the body are intertwined as the focus of the genealogist.

Whilst little attention has been paid here to the substance of Foucault’s earlier texts, in this section I wish to consider in some detail the work of the genealogical period, for it is here that Foucault’s relevance to organization studies is most important. Thus, it is Discipline and Punish (1977c) and The History of Sexuality, Volume I (1979) to which attention will now be given. Throughout all of Foucault’s writing there is a stress on the importance of an historical understanding, stemming not from an interest in the past, but from a deep commitment to understanding the present. He maintains that he is concerned with genealogy and with locating traces of the present in the past, not with the reconstruction of the past (Foucault, 1979; Weeks, 1981). Historically, two modes of domination are recognized by Foucault as characterizing the Western world; these are the ‘traditional’ and the ‘disciplinary’ and are to be sharply contrasted. Discipline and Punish begins with a horrific description of the execution of the regicide, Damiens, on 2 March 1757. His death was to take the following form.

The flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he commited the said parricide, burnt with sulphur and on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire . . . (Foucault, 1977c: 3)

Some 80 years later rules ‘for the House of Young Prisoners in Paris’ were drawn up. These include

at half past seven in summer, half past eight in winter, the prisoners must be back in their cells after the washing of hands and the inspection of clothes in the courtyard; at the first drum-roll they must undress and at the second get into bed. (Foucault, 1977c: 7)

In these two contrasting descriptions – one of an execution, the other of a timetable – we see the contrast between traditional and disciplinary modes of domination. The disciplinary mode replaced the traditional in less than a century as public taste for physical punishment and ‘the spectacle’ declined. Punishment began, slowly and in one or two isolated places at first, to become directed towards the ‘soul’, the mind, the will. Extremes of violence inflicted on the body speedily diminished and, in some cases, even disappeared, but were replaced, according to Foucault, by complex, subtle forms of correction and training. It is his belief that our own contemporary society is not maintained by a visible state apparatus of national guards and state police, less still by shared value systems, but by the hidden techniques of discipline always at work in ‘carceral’ institutions.

The development of such ‘complete and austere’ organizations is well described by Foucault. For him, the techniques of discipline and close observation incorporated in the new prisons of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania and Tuscany, France and Prussia derived from three centuries of practices in other spheres, notably education and the military (Sunesson, 1985). But there is an astonishing resemblance between the new prisons and other organizations of the disciplinary age: hospitals, factories, housing estates, schools and barracks. Jeremy Bentham’s design for the Panopticon – a circular building with central observation tower from which inmates (or workers or prisoners) could be surveyed at work or sleep without being able to observe their observers – becomes for Foucault the metaphor for the disciplinary mode of domination. The implication is that, built into the architecture and geometry of disciplinary organizations is the distinctive arrangement of observation and close surveillance.

The eighteenth century also witnessed great attention being paid to the body as an object or target for manipulation and training. Once the human body became conceptualized as a machine, it was thereafter opened up to mechanical rearrangement and tuning. This discovery allows the development of ‘political anatomy’ where ‘power seeps into the very grain of individuals, reaches right into their bodies, permeates their gestures, their posture, what they say, how they learn to live and work with other people’ (Foucault, 1977c: 28). The minutest features of life become subject to detailed analysis and investigation: regulations become meticulous, inspections fussy, supervision extremely close. Great attention is paid to the posture of school children and the marching steps of soldiers. Whatever the organization, discipline revolves around the minute details of the lives of those...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Part 1 Foucault and Organization Theory
• Part 3 (Re)Constructing the Modern Organization
• Index