Foucault, Management and Organization Theory : From Panopticon to Technologies of Self

by Alan McKinlay

• ISBN13: 9780803975460
• ISBN10: 0803975465
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-02-17
• Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd

Summary

This volume draws together critical assessments of Michel Foucault's contribution to our understanding of the making and remaking of the modern organization.The volume provides a valuable summary of Foucault's contribution to organization theory, which also challenges the conventions of traditional organizational analysis. By applying Foucauldian concepts such as discipline, surveillance and power/knowledge, the authors shed new light on the genesis of the modern organization and raise fresh questions about organization theory. The bureaucratic career is, for example, analyzed as a disciplinary device, a mechanism that seeks to alter rational choice rather than constrain bodies. This raises questions about Foucault's linking of the modern organization's birth with the enlightenment. Other contributions review the impact of totalizing managerial discourses and the limits and possiblities of resistance, and question the profound pessimism of Foucault. The volume concludes by examining the implications of Foucault's later work in which he suggests that people are much freer than they feel.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors	vii
Managing Foucault: Foucault, Management and Organization Theory	1	(13)
Alan McKinlay
Ken Starkey
Part 1 Foucault and Organization Theory	14	(51)
Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: The Contribution of Michel Foucault	14	(15)
Gibson Burrell
Foucault, Power and Organizations	29	(20)
Stewart Clegg
Labour as Dressage	49	(16)
Norman Jackson
Pippa Carter
Part 2 Constructing the Modern Organization	65	(86)
Discipline, Surveillance and the `Career': Employment on the Great Western Railway 1833--1914	65	(28)
Mike Savage
Examining Accounts and Accounting for Management: Inverting Understandings of `the Economic'	93	(18)
Keith Hoskin
The `Velvety Grip': Managing Managers in the Modern Corporation	111	(15)
Alan McKinlay
Ken Starkey
Management Accounting Numbers: Freedom or Prison - Geneen versus Foucault	126	(25)
Trevor Hopper
Norman Macintosh
Part 3 (Re)Constructing the Modern Organization	151	(91)
Discursive Formations, Strategized Subordination and Self-surveillance	151	(22)
Stanley Deetz
Through the Looking Glass: Foucault and the Politics of Production	173	(18)
Alan McKinlay
Phil Taylor
Beyond Good and Evil: Depth and Division in the Management of Human Resources	191	(20)
Barbara Townley
Re-framing Foucault: The Case of Performance Appraisal	211	(19)
Patricia Findlay
Tim Newton
Afterword: Deconstructing Organization - Discipline and Desire	230	(12)
Ken Starkey
Alan McKinlay
Index	242