Foucault, Management and Organization Theory

From Panopticon to Technologies of Self

Foucault, Management, and Organization Theory draws together critical assessments of the contribution of Michel Foucault to our understanding of the making and remaking of the modern organization. By applying Foucauldion concepts such as discipline, surveillance, and power/knowledge, the authors shed new light on the genesis of the modern organization and raise fresh questions for organization theory. The bureaucratic career is, for example, analyzed as a disciplinary device that superseded corporal forms of control, mechanisms that sought to alter rational choices rather than constrain bodies. In turn, historical investigation raises questions about FoucaultÆs identification of the birth of the modern organization with the enlightenment. Other contributions review the impact of totalizing managerial discourses and the limits and possibilities of resistance. Here empirical research questions the profound pessimism of Foucault whose projects rely exclusively on, for instance, the designers of prisons and completely neglect the forgotten voices of inmates. Foucault, Management, and Organization Theory will provide students and lecturers with a valuable summary of FoucaultÆs contribution to organization theory while challenging some of the convention of traditional organizational analysis.