To Serve and Inspect: The Tragedy of Employee Well-being in the Age of Foucault's Discipline (original) (raw)
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Culture and Organization, 2016
This paper studies Work Place Health Promotion at two international corporations as an example of an unobtrusive control that targets employees' lifestyles. It uses Michel Foucault's concepts of neoliberal governmentality and post-disciplinary control to show how Work Place Health Promotion breaks with the disciplinary logic of control most commonly associated with studies of unobtrusive controls in organizations. While discipline is centripetal, correcting employees' misconduct so that they freely keep within prescribed norms, Work Place Health Promotion is centrifugal, targeting employees' lifestyles and promoting those existing faculties and inclinations that may increase their activity, performance and their health. It hereby emerges as less restrictive than organizational discipline, but also as more discriminating. For not only does it subject employees' lifestyles to an economic logic of investment and disinvestment, it also contributes to an exclusion of employees that fail in this regard in the name of their lack of health.
Foucault 2.0 Discipline, Governmentality and Ethics Lessons for the 21st Century Organisaton
Mercia Christine de Wet , 2022
The rise of globalisation, along with the proliferation of the internet and the development of groundbreaking technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain technology has, in the twenty-first century, given rise to a complex nexus of mutable relations that lends itself to a continuation and recontextualization of the kind of philosophical explorations and analyses that Michel Foucault started in the previous century. This then is what this thesis sets out to do, with the ultimate goal of seeing what lessons we can learn from Foucault, particularly in the context of the modern organisation and business ethics. This thesis tracks the trajectory of the subject through Foucault’s work on power, governmentality, and ethics. Central to this, is the question of how Foucault’s analysis may be applied to the contemporary networked, high-tech social context today’s subject finds himself in. I contend that today’s subject constitutes itself in a way that is very different from the subject of any preceding epoch. The subject of today is a divided subject, a type of Deleuzian "dividual" who occupies both the physical world as well as the virtual one. In order to understand how the modern subject constitutes itself within the current socio-economic and technological environment, I use a quasi-Foucauldian methodology. However, instead of analysing practices in hospitals, sanitariums, schools or clinics, my focus is on the twenty-first century enterprise - on companies and corporations as microcosms of a larger social, economic and technological macrocosm. This entails a thoroughgoing investigation into the twenty-first century organisation - its discourses, its mechanisms of power, domination, and control, “managementality”, and the care of the self or the self-constitution of the contemporary working subject. Ultimately, this results in an attempt to unearth an entirely new perspective on ethics, particularly in business.
The UK construction industry has long championed changes and developments in work practices that reduce and avoid negative impacts on worker health and wellbeing. More recently however, approaches have shifted to consider the worker beyond the workplace, and now seek to improve health and wellbeing in worker 'associated lifestyles', as crystallised in the UK Department of Health's Responsibility Deal Construction Pledge. Yet such an approach is a fundamental challenge to construction workers' liberty, and questions the status of the individual and their autonomy. It can also be seen as an exercise in paternalistic or pastoral power, and consequently a constraint of personal freedoms. Whether this next step in corporate social responsibility is a purely philanthropic quest, seeking to improve individuals own health and wellbeing, or a step towards the creation of a more perfect workforce, one that does not become ill or operate at any less than maximum performance, such an approach brings benefits not only to the workforce but also to those who benefit from what they produce. As companies become more economically powerful than countries, such governmentalisation of corporate powers must be considered. The exercise of this power should be questioned, and the agendas, issues, conflicts and interests behind such approaches fully illuminated and explored. Grounded in a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the press release of the UK Pledge, a Foucaultian exploration of the power relations in play within this context has been developed. Steven Lukes' three dimensions of power are considered alongside positive liberty, revealing potential concerns for workers health and wellbeing in terms of their fundamental autonomy, and an increasingly controlled relationship between productive activities and power relations.
Organization, 2016
Critical management studies have largely failed to offer a comprehensive understanding of the devising and implementation of workplace-safety policies and of the complex power arrangements these may imply. By primarily studying forms of control in relative isolation, these studies have instead produced various puzzles, namely the persistence of a disciplinary treatment of workplace safety within the current neo-liberal era and the paucity of resistance to this. Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of apparatus and related analytical framework, we propose to remedy this through analysing the successive arrangements governing workplace accidents in the French construction industry during the 20th century. We evidence three successive regimes of control in which distinct apparatuses interact in various ways across different settings. Our study testifies to the composite nature of regimes of control governing workplace safety, and shows how it may impinge upon power relations, ultimately allowing more relevant struggles for a safer workplace to be envisaged. Additionally, by proposing an operationalization of the so-far-overlooked concept of apparatus, our study elaborates on the relevance of the governmentalist tradition for critical management studies.
The Healthcare Sector Employer’s Duty of Care: Implications for Worker Well-Being
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021
Pandemic diseases of this century have differentially targeted healthcare workers globally. These infections include Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome SARS, the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and Ebola. The COVID-19 pandemic has continued this pattern, putting healthcare workers at extreme risk. Just as healthcare workers have historically been committed to the service of their patients, providing needed care, termed their “duty of care”, so too do healthcare employers have a similar ethical duty to provide care toward their employees arising from historical common law requirements. This paper reports on results of a narrative review performed to assess COVID-19 exposure and disease development in healthcare workers as a function of employer duty of care program elements adopted in the workplace. Significant duty of care deficiencies reported early in the pandemic most commonly involved lack of personal protective...
The conditions of our freedom: Foucault, organization and ethics
2008
The paper examines the contribution of the French philosopher Michel Foucault to the subject of ethics in organizations. The paper combines an analysis of Foucault's work on discipline and control, with an examination of his later work on the ethical subject and technologies of the self. By situating ethics as practices of the self, and by demonstrating the conditions under which freedom in organizations can be exercised, Foucault's ethics connects an understanding and critique of power with a personal project of self.