this week is foucault week
I am re-reading Foucault’s “The Order of Things” and I have a few posts summarizing my thoughts in the pipeline. So if you want a Foucault/Order post on a particular topic, just comment/email/tweet me about it. Two posts in mind: one on how sociologists absorb Foucault and another on evaluating the main claim of Order. Other ideas are welcome.
As far as I am concerned, I would love a post on the Foucaldian concept of “apparatus” (dispositif) and the way it has not been absorbed by sociologists yet (while used by philosophers even before Foucault, under several names: Apparat, Gestell, Positivités etc.). The relation with the Order of Things is only indirect though: the concept of “discourse” is further included in the concept of “apparatus”.
Apparatus, as defined by Foucault (in “Histoire de la Sexualité – La volonté de savoir” in particular) appears to me as a potentially powerful concept for org theory: as a tool to help us apprehend complexity, power dynamics, rationality conflicts and conciliations at the organization level, that means: a meso level between the strategic and/or embedded actor and overarching institutional logics.
So, why not forget about discipline and panopticon for a while ?…
NathalieLallemand
July 4, 2011 at 3:23 pm
How about Fabio’s choice of the most absurdly badly written sentence of the book? There are plenty of strong contenders.
Henri
July 4, 2011 at 9:16 pm