Works
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1975
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Disciplinary power and panopticism. Foucault describes a shift from punishment as public spectacle to discipline, a form of power that works through observation, normalizing judgment, and examination. Using Bentham's design for a prison in which inmates can always be seen but never know when they are watched, he argued that power which is visible and unverifiable leads people to regulate themselves, so enforcement is rarely needed.
What it explains
Foucault explains why visible surveillance and the occasional public example can make a whole population comply in advance. Records, audits, and reviews discipline people less by what they find than by everyone knowing they could be used.
Tactics that draw on Michel Foucault (27)
- Ask-Forgiveness Trap
- Calculated Silence
- Catch-22 Policy
- Chilling Effect
- Constructive Criticism Trap
- Exception Anxiety
- Hostile Office Architecture
- Humiliating Exit
- Insider Threat Pretext
- Internal Investigation Chill
- Loyalist Enforcer Cohort
- Making an Example
- Mandatory Fun
- Martyrdom Tax
- Message Dossier
- Middle Management Squeeze
- Off-Channel Coordination
- Open Door Invitation
- Public Dressing-Down
- Reciprocal Disclosure Demand
- Selective Enforcement
- Selective Scrutiny
- Standardizing Work in Software
- Sword of Damocles
- Veto Shadow
- Wellness Surveillance
- Workaround Reclassification