Sverre Raffnsøe

Foucault’s dispositive: The perspicacity of dispositive analytics in organizational research:

While Foucault’s work has had a crucial impact on organizational research, the analytical potential of the dispositive has not been sufficiently developed. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the notion of the dispositive as a key conception in Foucault’s thought, particularly in his lectures at the Collège de France, and to develop dispositional analytics with specific reference to matters of organization. Foucault’s dispositional analysis articulates a history of interrelated social technologies that have been constructed to organize how we relate to each other. The article distinguishes various dispositional prototypes. It shows how dispositional analytics leads the way beyond general periodizations and established dichotomies such as the either-or of the discursive and non-discursive, power and freedom, determinism, and agency; and it demonstrates how dispositional analytics can contribute to a more complex understanding of organizational dynamics, power, strategy, resistance, and critique. Dispositional analytics allows for a new interpretation and use of Foucault in relation to organization studies.

Learning to Stay Ahead of Time: Moving Leadership Experiences Experimentally

In the context of an ongoing change, management is required to take the form of a leadership that must be reignited over and over again. The article examines a new art of leadership that may be viewed as an attempt to keep up with these challenges and stay ahead of time. It emerges from a pilgrimage leadership learning laboratory on the road to Santiago de la Compostela. This moving lab creates situations of extraordinary intensity that border on hyperreality and force the leader to find him/herself anew on the verge of him/herself. Conceived as pilgrimage, leadership moves ahead of time as it reaches into and anticipates a future still unknown. In this setting, anticipatory affects and the virtual take up a predominant role. As it emerges here, leadership distinguishes itself not only from leadership in the traditional sense, but also from management and governmentality.

Beyond rule; trust and power as capacities

Taking an approach that avoids comprehending power and trust as entities to be studied apart, the article insists on elucidating trust and power as they are enacted in their intimate and delicate relationship to each other and to other human and social phenomena of similar importance, such as knowledge and experience, gift-giving, hope, freedom and agency. To permit us to understand power and trust as interdependent dimensions, the article confronts the notions of power as command, coercion, control and calculation and develops a conception of power as a capacity. This permits us to consider trusting as an exercise of power and an anticipatory affect. Trust is a resolve to bear an experienced risk by confiding in the new and unknown.

The Foucault Effect in Organization Studies

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 asceticism 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.

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault

“What I am attempting to do and what I have always attempted ever since my first real book Histoire de la folie a l’âge classique,” Foucault explains in a conversation dating from 1978, “is, through intellectual labor, to dispute and question various aspects of society by drawing attention towards their weaknesses and boundaries. My books are, nonetheless, not prophetic, nor do they encourage anyone to take up arms. It annoys me intensely for them to be seen in such a light. The challenge put forth by the books is, in the most explicit manner — and although the vocabulary is difficult — to elucidate the areas of bourgeois culture and institutions that have direct influence upon man’s everyday activities and thoughts.”1

Man at the Centre: The Legacy of the Humanities

Under the present circumstances, the received form and the historical heritage of the human sciences poses a special challenge.

The Turn within and of the Human

This investigation begins by looking at how the turn towards the human as a decisive factor in the Anthropocene world also entails a new turn of the human. Even as the human factor manifests itself as decisive, it becomes clear how humans are situated beings. Not only are they affected by the world, they are also characterized by a certain way of being in the world, and of relating to it.

The Opening of a New Chapter in the World’s History

This initial chapter describes how the Anthropocene gives rise to a still unfamiliar landscape that is distinct and overarching. It is characterized by the fact that the human being holds a new position and a new role. Humankind has acquired a central role as the single most decisive factor on Earth, not only for humans themselves but also in a wide range of contexts that stretch far beyond humanity. In the Anthropocene, humankind has come to play a more decisive part, locally and for the planet as a whole, than ever before. Through a lengthy and gradual process, stretching back to and including even the Neolithic, an originally humble and inferior creature living on the ground has re-organized its earth-bound space, so that the human has now become and will probably continue to be an absolutely key factor in the development of its home planet. This turn towards the human presents a number of challenges that call for further exploration.

A Prominent Role in a Landscape Lush with Mutual Mediation

This chapter clarifies how the turn towards humanity as a decisive factor can be understood as a result of increasing human empowerment, which has meant that the human being can seem to have assumed a position at the core of its own universe. Such an anthropocentric conception is, however, inadequate if we are to understand the wider implications of the human turn.

Discipline, Penitentiary, and Delinquency

The intolerable. A pamphlet with the title L’intolerable was published in the early spring of 1971. Written and signed by Foucault along with two others, it presented a critique of insufferable conditions among the courts, police, health sector, school, military, and media. The immediate aim of the flyer was a critique of circumstances in the prisons, which had come into focus because a Maoist group had begun a hunger strike to protest against prison conditions. The manifesto marked the establishment of GIP: Groupe d’information sur les prisons, which had participation from judges, lawyers, journalists, doctors, and psychologists who met at Foucault’s home address and sought to generate and distribute information about the prison, its role and its conditions.1 The movement resulted in the inmates of French prisons getting access to the press and the ability to establish relations with other groups. They therefore came to understand that others were interested in their plight and supported them. This engagement indirectly paved the way for a number of extensive prison riots in France in the years after the Attica revolt.