Agency and Change: Re-evaluating Foucault's Legacy

Abstract

Michel Foucault's work marks an important break with conventional ontological dualism, epistemological realism and rationalist and intentional notions of individual action and human agency. In these respects his ideas have had an enormous influence on postmodern organization theory and analysis, as well as related forms of social constructionism. In particular, Foucault's ideas have led to a rejection of agency-structure dichotomies and a move towards process-based ontologies of `organizing/changing', that create new problematics of agency as discourse, talk, text or conversation. While this ontological shift toward nominalism has often provoked a counter-reaction against the `death of the subject' and the corrosive influence of postmodernism, there have been few attempts to explore how Foucault's decentring of agency is related to new, more positive and potentially emancipatory discourses that redefine the relationship between agency and change, resistance and power in organizations and society. Here it will be argued that Foucault's legacy can be re-conceptualized as a theorization of the decentring of agency consisting of four key components: discourse, power/ knowledge, embodiment and self-reflexivity. Redefined within Foucauldian organizational discourses, decentred agency can lead to new possibilities for the exploration of agency as discourse and the broader dispersal of agency in organizations. It will be concluded, however, that Foucault's concept of agency fails as a theorization of change: it breaks the link between the voluntary choice or desire to `act otherwise' and the moral, political and practical possibilities of `making a difference'.

Dispositivo de Potterheads: Organização Pautada na Ordem do Cânone

“…Apenas na década de 1980, os estudos organizacionais brasileiros investiram com mais força nas análises críticas focadas no poder e nas mudanças organizacionais (Marshak & Grant, 2008), interesse que abriu espaço para o apoio de pesquisadores na obra de Michel Foucault, que, por sua vez, fortaleceu pesquisas centradas em práticas e processos organizativos (Caldwell, 2007). Essa linha de pensamento pós-estruturalista (vide Souza, 2012) entende as organizações como espaços políticos de lutas, em que os jogos de poder assumem uma importância central (Marshak & Grant, 2008).…”

“…Embasada na epistemologia pós-estruturalista foucaultiana, uma das vertentes críticas nos estudos organizacionais explora o processo organizativo (organizing) (Caldwell, 2007), assumindo uma postura ontológica politicamente oposta à visão metateórica de organização (Duarte & Alcadipani, 2016). Entendendo-as como espaços políticos (Marshak & Grant, 2008) resultantes de um contínuo organizar (Duarte & Alcadipani, 2016), assumem a gestão como um espaço de disputas ininterruptas (Carrieri, Perdigão, & Aguiar, 2014).…”

From Divine Instruction to Human Invention: The Constitution of Indonesian Christian Young People’s Sexual Subjectivities through the Dominant Discourse of Sexual Morality

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Realising governmentality: Pastoral power, governmental discourse and the (re)constitution of subjectivities

“…We offer two examples from our own work with a view to articulating how such a view might extend the analytical scope of governmentality, and in the process begin to answer the criticisms that scholars such as Caldwell (2005Caldwell ( , 2007, Newton (1998) and Bevir (2011). Our principal ambition here is to re-state our previously presented model (Waring and Martin 2016), demonstrate its operation through these worked empirical examples, and show how it starts to take seriously the process whereby governmentality is realised and reproduced socially, through the power relationships of an array of actors on the ground.…”