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

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February 1998 | 256 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
Foucault, Management, and Organization Theory draws together critical assessments of the contribution of Michel Foucault to our understanding of the making and remaking of the modern organization. By applying Foucauldion concepts such as discipline, surveillance, and power/knowledge, the authors shed new light on the genesis of the modern organization and raise fresh questions for organization theory. The bureaucratic career is, for example, analyzed as a disciplinary device that superseded corporal forms of control, mechanisms that sought to alter rational choices rather than constrain bodies. In turn, historical investigation raises questions about FoucaultÆs identification of the birth of the modern organization with the enlightenment. Other contributions review the impact of totalizing managerial discourses and the limits and possibilities of resistance. Here empirical research questions the profound pessimism of Foucault whose projects rely exclusively on, for instance, the designers of prisons and completely neglect the forgotten voices of inmates. Foucault, Management, and Organization Theory will provide students and lecturers with a valuable summary of FoucaultÆs contribution to organization theory while challenging some of the convention of traditional organizational analysis.

Alan McKinlay and Ken Starkey
Managing Foucault
Foucault, Management and Organization Theory

 
 
PART ONE: FOUCAULT AND ORGANIZATION THEORY
Gibson Burrell
Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis
The Contribution of Michel Foucault

 
Stewart Clegg
Foucault, Power and Organizations
Norman Jackson and Pippa Carter
Labour as Dressage
 
PART TWO: CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN ORGANIZATION
Mike Savage
Discipline, Surveillance and the `Career'
Employment on the Great Western Railway 1833-1914

 
Keith Hoskin
Examining Accounts and Accounting for Management
Inverting Understandings of `the Economic'

 
Alan McKinlay and Ken Starkey
The `Velvet Grip'
Managing Managers in the Modern Corporation

 
Trevor Hopper and Norman McIntosh
Management Accounting Numbers
Freedom or Prison - Geneen vs Foucault

 
 
PART THREE: (RE)CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN ORGANIZATION
Stanley Deetz
Discursive Formations, Strategized Subordination and Self-Surveillance
Alan McKinlay and Phil Taylor
Through the Looking Glass
Foucault and the Politics of Production

 
Barbara Townley
Beyond Good and Evil
Depth and Division in the Management of Human Resources

 
Patricia Findlay and Tim Newton
Re-Framing Foucault
The Case of Performance Appraisal

 
Ken Starkey and Alan McKinlay
Afterword
Deconstructing Organization - Discipline and Desire

 

`This book is likely to be of great interest to Foucault scholars concerned with organisations and also of interest to organization experts with some familiarity with Foucault' - Sociology

`In these days of overwhelming 'labour flexibility', this book is timely and offers new critical understandings. The majority of the 14 authors are based in Management Schools across the UK, USA, Australia and Canada. They all display in-depth scholarly understanding of Foucault's intellectual enterprise.... The strength of this collection - apart from filling an obvious gap - derives from a two-directional approach: from Foucault to managment organisation theory and vice versa.' - Modern and Contemporary France

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