Michel Foucault and the Administering of Lives

Abstract

and KeywordsThis chapter suggests that Michel Foucault is a nuisance for scholars of organizations, albeit a productive one. Foucault disavowed the study of organizations, yet his work was fundamentally concerned with the administering of lives, a central concern of scholars of organizations. The chapter explores this tension by examining four displacements that Foucault sought to effect: first, a move from asking 'why' type questions to 'how' type questions; second, a concern with subjectivity that discards the ethical polarization of subject and object in favour of an analysis of the historically varying ways in which the capacities and attributes of subjects are constituted; third, a focus on practices rather than organizations, and a concern to analyse sets or assemblages of practices in terms of how they emerge and how they are stabilized over time; fourth, a focus on rationalities in the plural. It then examines the 'Foucault effect' in organization studies.

Civil society organisations counter conduct about the Agyapa deal of Ghana

“…As our focus is on investigating the Agyapa case to reveal “how certain things happened and the difference they made in relation to what had gone before” (Rose et al , 2006, p. 101), we narrate the case through Miller and Rose’s (2008) three interrelated dimensions of governmentality: rationalities of government; programmes of government; and technologies of government . That way, we show how the Government of Ghana used self-serving technologies of accountability to shape the perspectives and conduct of “objects of government” aimed at a strategic outcome (Dean, 2010; Mennicken and Miller, 2014). At the same time, we demonstrate the reflective and constitutive impacts of CSOs counter-conduct with Dean’s (1999) discussion of government analytics (Death, 2010).…”

“…Technologies are also not indefinite interventions or solutions, as the problematisation process is continuous. A technological solution for one programme may be the problem that starts another (Mennicken and Miller, 2014) because of unexpected effects or changing rationalities and programmes. Accounting, for instance, is both technology and a rationale.…”

Politics of fiscal discipline: counter-conducting the World Bank's public financial management reforms

“…Governmentality depicts institutions, policies, techniques, and tactics for conducting people's conduct collectively and individually. Thus, governing is not only about overly political state apparatuses; it covers all socially legitimate considered and calculated modes of action that deliberately structure possibilities for others' action (Mennicken and Miller 2016).…”