The Foucault Effect in Organization Studies

Abstract

Since the establishment of Organization Studies in 1980, Michel Foucault's oeuvre has had a remarkable and continuing influence on its field. This article traces the different ways in which organizational scholars have engaged with Foucault's writings over the past thirty years or so. We identify four overlapping waves of influence. Drawing on Foucault's Discipline and Punish, the first wave focused on the impact of discipline, and techniques of surveillance and subjugation, on organizational practices and power relations. Part of a much wider 'linguistic' turn in the second half of the twentieth century, the second wave led to a focus on discourses as intermediaries that condition ways of viewing and acting. This wave drew mainly on Foucault's early writings on language and discourse. The third wave was inspired by Foucault's seminal lectures on governmentality towards the end of the 1970s. Here, an important body of international research investigating governmental technologies operating on subjects as free persons in sites such as education, accounting, medicine and psychiatry, emerged. The fourth and last wave arose out of a critical engagement with earlier Foucauldian organizational scholarship and sought to develop a more positive conception of subjectivity. This wave draws in particular on Foucault's work on ascetism and techniques of the self towards the end of his life. Drawing on Deleuze and Butler, the article conceives the Foucault effect in organization studies as an immanent cause and a performative effect. We argue for the need to move beyond the tired dichotomies between discipline and autonomy, compliance and resistance, power and freedom that, at least to some extent, still hamper organization studies. We seek to overcome such dichotomies by further pursuing newly emerging lines of Foucauldian research that investigate processes of organizing, calculating and economizing characterized by a differential structuring of freedom, performative and indirect agency.

The other side of compliance systems and codes of ethics: A Foucauldian perspective on rule-based ethics and corruption control

“…For Foucault, in the condition of total domination of subjects, it is not possible to speak of liberties; these can only exist in opposition to the powers that are exerted in a dynamic and discursive way in society (Engels, 2019;Gamez, 2018;Raffnsøe, Mennicken, & Miller, 2019). In order to do so, Foucault set out to elaborate an actual history of thought composed of three main elements: (i) the venues of experience, which make up the matrices of knowledge, are the history or genealogy of the knowledge that constitutes our conviction; (ii) the normative matrices of behavior, which refer to the devices used for the exercise of power and the normalization of behaviors; and (ii) the modes of virtual existence for possible subjects, which constitute the experience and the production of subjectivity as they go interacting with the "real world" as presented (Figueiredo, 1995;Fonseca, 2003).…”

“…Every human being must take care of itself to prevent others from taking for themselves the task of thinking. Along these lines, Foucault postulates that the true ethical relation of the subject is the care with oneself; to be ethical is to be able to resist and think of one's own freedom through one's own clarification (Angels, 2019;Raffnsøe et al, 2019). Clarification, in this sense, is the action of questioning about one's own reality, of causing a revolution in oneself by not accepting discourses as given and natural.…”

“…Departing from the notion of care of the self, researchers have later sought to establish a theoretical framework concerning what a theory of ethics would be, by resorting to Foucault's concept of techniques of the self (Gamez, 2018;Gomes, 2014;Raffnsøe et al, 2019). According to these authors, the theory is grounded on the argument that people are ethical in caring for themselves and explore and respond autonomously to the real games to which they are exposed.…”

“…The true way to emancipate from such discourses and the path for independent thinking pervades the activities of knowing and criticizing them (Raffnsøe et al, 2019). Taking care of oneself has become an imperative for those who wish to expose modes of knowledge and erudition that bring to the individual the supreme value, as well as ways to find his or her own dimension of well-being; however, self-care should not be supported by modern narcissism fueled by the capitalist system.…”

Coercion, Cognitive Capital, Value: On the Question of Principles of Knowledge Management

“…В цитате Мерло-Понти, которую очень точно приводит Горц, содержится неявная отсылка к процессу, который Мишель Фуко называл субъективацией [Фуко 2006: 161-190] 1 . Далее через обращение к работам Фуко я постараюсь реконструировать схему организации процесса валоризации, которая могла бы работать в «постструктуралистском» сценарии и при этом имела прямое отношение к уже существующим эмпирическим исследованиям в духе фукольдианских исследований организаций [Raffnsøe et al 2019;Barratt 2008]. Если попытаться вслед за Делезом выстроить аргумент Фуко в последовательной исторической логике, то необходимо говорить о переходе практик власти и организации от дисциплинарных режимов изоляции к контролю [Делез 2004], который стал ответом на кризис управления институтов модерна, опиравшихся на систему уголовного права и полицейскую 2 регламентацию индивидуальных траекторий и эпизодов девиации [Фуко 2002: 319-323].…”