Governmentality, power and organization

Abstract

Michel Foucault has moved from being marginal to organization studies to perhaps the most important authority in critical management studies. Yet his methods, historiography and the theoretical value of his work remain obscure, contested or, even worse, simply taken for granted. Governmentality, Foucault’s term for how institutions are imagined, offers a way of understanding how specific forms of knowledge and power emerge, develop and decline. Governmentality brings Foucault very close to Max Weber’s concern with rationalization and the ways that individuals come to govern themselves. Governmentality looks at administrative powers and knowledges that shape our everyday lives. For Foucault, as for Weber, administrative power is not of secondary importance but essential to the ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ of disciplinary institutions and societies.

The Impotence of Accountability: The Relationship Between Greater Transparency and Corporate Reform

“…This reflexive approach is consistent with the methodological parameters of rigorous Foucauldian archival work: “texts and practices are so loaded with various meanings, ambiguities and contradictions that any adequate reading must locate them in the conditions of their existence, the categories and practices that are their necessary preconditions” (McKinlay et al. , 4).…”

“…Foucault himself was “adamant that the genealogical historian must be relentlessly empirical and attend to the specificity of events” (McKinlay, Carter, and Pezet , 4). This is what we seek to do here: employ Foucault's concepts in order to understand the workings of administrative power in a way that is informed by rigorous historical detail (Foucault ).…”

Obesity in organizational context

“…It is increasingly deployed and discussed in organization studies (Gleadle et al, 2008;McKinlay et al, 2012). It has inspired investigations of diverse phenomena, such as how accounting concepts and calculations constitute organizations and governable persons (e.g.…”

Notions of subject and power in Foucaultian readings and their influence in organization and people management studies

“…The freedom proposed in the govenmentality allows the subject to perceive himself fully responsible for his career in the organization, as inferred by Cappelle and Melo (2010), in studies about women police officers graduation. Although, the career is a way that the company sees the workers, allowing, yet, the building of a stable bureaucratic virtue (MCKINLAY, CARTER and PEZET, 2012). The career requires that the company implement a tasks measurement system, establish a clear path in the job ladder, provide a record file to measure personal performance and progression, and develop strategies to evaluate the performance and the worker path regarding the population (MCKINLAY CARTER and PEZET, 2012) and/or the group, in the long term.…”

“…According to foucauldian reflections, it is necessary, in the organizations, to examine the ethics in a practical way, in order to comprehend what managers and workers really do in their daily tasks (STARKEY and HATCHUEL, 2002). It is not about saying that the subject is a result of a symbolic system (MCKINLAY CARTER and PEZET, 2012); but about comprehending that the subject is a creation of real social practices; practices historically analyzable (CANDIOTTO, 2013).…”