Week 9 — Resistance and Discipline

Speaking of critical approaches…you have some Foucault to read this week. I understand his writing can be tough upon first encounter, and that’s part of why I’ve paired this article with Office Space. Rather than try to understand what Foucault’s arguing just by reading the article, I find it helps to instead figure out why would I assign this essay and this movie in the same week? What am I trying to get you to think about? I would love to read Medium stories about your reactions to that question. First, though, let me remind you that

The most important point of studying organizations through critical approaches is that these approaches raise questions and make us think about aspects of communication, power, and relationships in ways that other perspectives have often overlooked. (from my instructors’ Handbook)

Just like the approaches to communication we learned about earlier in term each have their advantages and disadvantages, and just like all theories, critical approaches are also partial, partisan, and problematic. Try to focus on what critical approaches do for you — what do they enable you to see or understand that you didn’t or couldn’t before? As we’ll see in a couple paragraphs, power for Foucault is about action, and something similar is true about the power of a theory — the power of critical approaches lie in the actions they enable.

Here are a few notes on Foucault’s essay The subject and power.

First, Foucault opens with a clarification that may surprise you if you’ve read Foucault elsewhere. He claims that his work is about how humans become subjects, not specifically about power. At the bottom of 778 and top of 779, he introduces the question of why we talk about power. As I mentioned last week, critical approaches pay special attention to power, and now we’re getting to some of the reasoning behind that attention.

Foucault argues that we should study power by studying resistance. He thinks that we will understand power better (more usefully) by explaining types of struggles against it. The meat of this argument happens on pp. 780–781. He uses accessible examples of resistance — gender relations, government, healthcare — to outline characteristics of resistance he thinks are important. Namely, that they oppose power effects linked to knowledge and revolve around questions of identity. These struggles also share an internal tension between asserting individuals’ rights to be different while also asserting their rights to be connect with others. Identity operates here as both affirmation and constraint.

How does constraint happen? This is again a question about power’s effects — the effect of the power healthcare providers have results in their control over our bodies and from their knowledge of bodies. Foucault argues that the “how” of power lies in its effects — not how the power happens but what happens when it gets used. The three types of struggles (against domination, exploitation, and subjection) are different ways of responding to different effects of power. For instance, exploitation separates individuals from what they are able to produce (think child labor separating children from clothing they sew). The effect of power in this scenario is the separation. He reminds us on 788 that “Power exists only when it is put into action.”

The textbook discusses some of Foucault’s work on discourse and the panopticon during its sections on discipline and surveillance. Power, subjection, and knowledge connect the additional Foucault reading and the part in your book and connect his work to organizational communication for our purposes. Essentially, through discourse and various systems of knowledge, those in power are able to constrain the behaviors of their subjects. The book highlights the struggles over what constitutes “truth” and “knowledge” in an arena as central to our understandings of organizations. We use discourse to “produce” individuals who are either in line with or not in line with preferred ideologies — we make people “one of us” or “not who we are”.

Questions to Address in Your Medium Posts

• Why would I assign Foucault and Office Space in the same week? What can Office Space teach us about resistance, discipline, and power?
• Explain the difference between myths, metaphors, and stories. How are they important sources of power and ideology?
• What is manufactured consent? Why is this concept so powerful?
• What is discourse, and what relationship does it have to power and control?